Scottish Journal of Political Economy

It is shown that the individual fixed‐odds betting market on UK football exhibits the same favourite‐longshot bias as that found in horse‐racing. The bias appears both in betting on results (home win, away win or draw) and in betting on specific scores, and there are certain trading rules which appear to be profitable. Poisson and Negative Binomial regressions are carried out to estimate the mean number of goals scored by a team in a match with given market odds for the various outcomes. Tables of odds for individual scores are derived and these appear to fit the actual outcomes far better than those of the bookmaker.

This paper analyses the impact of India's policy reforms on exchange rate pass‐through into import and export prices, using panel data (at one‐digit SITC level) for pre‐ (1980–90) and post‐reform (1991–2001) periods. While the pass‐through into import prices has declined, the pass‐through into export prices (in USD terms) has increased during the 1990s. The results suggest that, relative to rupee depreciation, Indian exporters increased their USD prices around 20% in the 1980s, but decreased them by around 70% in the 1990s. Moreover, the number of sectors exhibiting some degree of pass‐through increased in the 1990s (six), relative to the 1980s (three). These changes may be attributable to the elimination of currency and trade controls, which increased competition among firms and fostered a concern with market share gains in the 1990s over an attempt to use depreciations to increase profits in the 1980s.

We have started by asking the question: why are there international income inequalities? We have ascribed them to differences in applied productive knowledge. This raised the question: why can productive knowledge be communicated and diffused within an advanced nation but not between nations or within underdeveloped nations? What are the obstacles to the international diffusion of benefits?

We have found these in two areas: obstacles to communication and absence of suitable technologies. The obstacles to communication can again be divided into those due to costs of transfer and those due to intentional restrictions or the exercise of monopoly power. But even perfect communication would not meet the need for quite different technologies from those developed in high‐income countries.

Measures that reduce the Communications Gap might make the Suitability Gap wider and vice versa, but a set of integrated actions attacking both gaps has a chance of success. Technical knowledge cannot be marketed like other products or factors because it possesses peculiar features: (i) indivisibility, (ii) inappropriatability, (iii) embodiment in other factors, (iv) uncertainty and (v) impossibility to know its full value until bought. Policies for closing the two gaps are interdependent, so that the pursuit of any one in isolation might make matters worse. What is needed is a set of integrated actions, attacking both the Communications Gap and the Suitability Gap. Transfer must be supplemented by indigenous capability; adaptation by invention and innovation.