The Maldives, one of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) with great solar potential, is keen to promote renewable energy systems to reduce its heavy reliance on imported diesel for power generation. However, adopting renewable energy systems is still burdensome for the Maldives not only because of its high initial costs and insufficient financial resources but also because of a lack of understanding about whether the deployment of a renewable system is economically feasible. Therefore, the concept of grid parity is explored as an important concept in this paper to examine the possible timeframe for reaching it. A distinctive feature of the paper is that the paper used actual cost and technical information to analyze the levelized cost of energy (LCOEs) of the independent renewable system in a remote island and examined its timeframe for reaching the grid parity condition. Based on economic and technical information from a project for replacing existing diesel generator to photovoltaic (PV) with energy storage system (ESS) in Kuda Bandos Island in the Maldives, the paper considers three different system configurations and evaluates which configuration could result in the most optimal off-grid energy systems in this remote island. With sensitivity analysis on various uncertainties, the paper shows the range of the levelized costs of energy and the periods required for reaching grid parity for deploying solar photovoltaics and ESSs in Kuda Bandos Island, Maldives. The result indicates that the photovoltaic system is an economically feasible option for the resort, and that grid parity can be reached within the project lifetime. However, the result shows that the use of advanced ESSs is still an expensive option and would not be economically reasonable.

This study investigates interaction between firm growth and profitability using panel data on 1633 Japanese manufacturing firms for 1987–2007. Our estimation results generally confirm that firms face a trade-off between growth and profitability and show that, in Japanese manufacturing firms, the link between prior growth and current profits is much stronger than the link between prior profits and current growth. Therefore, the study confirms that current profits are a pre-requisite for future growth while excessive current growth is detrimental to future profits. It is found, however, that in some sectors, such as the automobile industry and the chemical industry, high growth and high profit rates can be achieved at the same time without damaging profitability.

In this study, we examine how differently gasoline prices in 25 regions of Seoul, Korea respond to asymmetric information between retailers and consumers. We estimate the region-specific likelihood that retailers engage in price undercutting under asymmetric information and investigate inter-regional differences. We find that in response to increases in wholesale price, regions with a high likelihood of price undercutting experience intensified gas station price competition while dispersions of price and markups tend to decrease more in response to cost shocks. Understanding the geographical dispersion of retailers’ price responses to information frictions and search intensity is crucial to lowering information barriers across regions and redistributing profit among market participants.

This study aims to develop a productivity index which takes into account the multidimensional characteristics of productivities. Our multidimensional productivity index (MPI) not only measures individual productivities of economic resources but also evaluate productivity enhancing general capacities of economy. Individual productivity indices such as labor productivity are limited because they do not consider the factors, such as the globalization of economies and the market and institutional variables, that could have profound impacts on productivity. The multidimensional Productivity Index (MPI) is measured for 60 countries including 23 OECD countries and 10 Asian countries. Our methodology employs the concept of technical efficiency that allows us to measure the extent to which institutional and market factors contribute to the economic performance. Our findings indicate that standard productivity measures such as labor productivity may overestimate the overall productivity differences across the economies.

This article estimates firm mark-ups to evaluate market competition in Korean manufacturing industries for the period of 1982–2004 and analyzes how the mark-ups differ across industry sectors. For the manufacturing sector as a whole, our results lead us to reject the null hypothesis of a competitive market, although market imperfection varies across industry sectors. Meanwhile, the parameter for union bargaining power over firm profit was much smaller than those found in the previous studies and insignificant in some industry sectors. Our firm-level results indicate that intra-industry variation in mark-ups and returns to scale is greater than inter-industry variation as shown in the sector analysis. Also, we find that mark-ups respond counter-cyclically to aggregate demand shocks and that the magnitudes of responses differ from industry to industry.