Economists have analyzed offshore outsourcing mainly from the perspective of transaction costs and procurement decisions. In the current phase of globalization offshoring practice increasingly involves high value added activities such as design and R&D. Today’s globalized R&D system embraces increasingly capable emerging economies that offer firms new options in terms the offshoring not just development but also research functions. However the offshoring of R&D to emerging economies entails higher levels of risk and uncertainty. The literature review shows that problems associated with this kind of R&D offshoring have seen few studies and are not well understood – especially in a comparative perspective of the practices of companies based in different countries with distinctive business philosophies. Some evidence points to differences in the offshoring practices of US companies – as “globalization leaders”– with those of German companies as “reluctant globalizers”. The paper reports the preliminary results of an ongoing study of offshoring of pharmaceutical and biotechnology R&D to emerging economies. In this study we compare clinical trials destinations chosen by US and German companies – using the American government clinical trials database. We find interesting differences which however do not support the hypothesis that German companies are less aggressive about offshoring clinical trials than US based ones. We also look at the position of Poland as a site for offshored R&D and make recommendations about how the country could improve its competitiveness in this domain in the future.

This article aims at investigating the impact of the level of the Fed funds rate in the United States in the period 2000-2007 on the emergence of the asset price bubble on the US real estate market, burst of which triggered the financial crisis in the US and globally. Rather than constructing a single theoretical or empirical model of this potential influence, a more eclectic approach is taken. The argument is structured around three fundamental questions (1) whether the Fed funds rate had been low compared to benchmarks in the given period; (2) whether low short-term rate itself had been able inflate a real estate bubble; (3) whether alternative explanations of the bubble causes were sufficient. For each of the issues a number of qualitative explanations and quantitative models is provided and analysed. Based on the gathered data, models, and arguments, the paper concludes that the influence of the Fed funds rate on the bubble’s emergence is not to be underestimated. This conclusion should be kept in mind in the context of future directions for monetary policy in the US and globally, as the extremely low interest rates applied by central banks to date might be inflating the next bubble.

The purpose of this paper is to asses the weight of human capital and gender equality in explaining the bilateral FDI inflows to 11 Central European economies. The group comprises the ten countries that acceded to the EU in 2004 or 2007 and Croatia which is a candidate country since 2004. The focus on the region is justified by the fact that the European Commission acknowledged that fostering human capital development and gender equality is a condition of economic development. The period under investigation encompasses 2000-2009 and includes both the global FDI flows peak achieved in 2007 as well as the two years of sharp declines in 2008 and 2009. If FDI is mostly low-cost seeking oriented, however, gender inequality in health and access to education may create a pool of low-pay workers that can be profitably exploited unless the level of productivity is not seriously hindered by gender disparities. In this paper I argue that women’s representation in parliaments is another aspect of the gender gap that may shape foreign investors decisions. These hypotheses are verified in the framework of a standard gravity model using System Generalized Method of Moments technique.