Der Leser erhält mit diesem Buch einen Überblick über den Stand der Forschung in der Neuen Wachstumstheorie und die Konvergenzdebatte. Darüber hinaus beinhaltet das Buch eine strukturelle Analyse der langfristigen Wachstumstrends und ihrer Beschäftigungselastizitäten in 51 Industrien der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bis zur Vereinigung. Gleichzeitig wird die aktuelle industriepolitische Diskussion zusammengefaßt. Des weiteren werden die Argumente für eine auf den Ergebnissen der Neuen Wachstumstheorie basierenden beschäftigungsorientierten Industriepolitik unter Berücksichtigung der Debatte über die Beschäftigungswirkungen des technischen Fortschritts diskutiert. Der Leser wird somit sowohl von theoretischer als auch empirischer Seite aus über das Thema informiert.

This paper analyses the development of venture capital financing in the US covering a time period from the beginning of 1995 until 2008 (third quarter). Its focus is the structural changes emerging from reallocation of financial resources over time with special emphasis on regional allocation based on quarterly data collected by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Price WaterhouseCoopers as the MoneyTree dataset. Taking into account the multiple dimensions offered by stages of venture financing cycle, direction of industries, and regional allocation together with the overall business cycle patterns one key finding is a fairly steady concentration process of US venture capital financing in two key destinations as the Silicon Valley and New England. This trend even prevails with a significant shift from ICT related research industry areas towards biotechnology, health and energy over the respective time period. Furthermore after the burst of the new economy bubble in particular start-up/seed early stage financing lost in importance measured by their respective shares in favour of financing for expansion and later stage financing. This indicates an increasing risk averseness in venture capital financing which might be attributed to the high degree of uncertainty of early stages.

There is globally a debate going on about issues of economic development and how to measure it. The system of national accounts with the gross domestic product (GDP) as its core indicator has become criticized because of measuring the wellbeing of peoples in different countries improperly. The central conjecture is: If the GDP is an insufficient indicator for economic development than ranking the success of development by using the GDP growth rates is misleading. The GDP is calculated on components based on money values determined by single markets. It aims to aggregate all kinds of economic activities related to production into a single number. All single elements are always measured by market prices as they occur in the respective market places. Therefore the foundation is the values observable in the respectable market places. What is obvious as a simple empirical fact is the willingness to pay for some good or service. However, these are taking place in a specific institutional setting of particularly designed markets. The idea behind this paper is that current theories of value ignore the subjective valuations of the market outcomes by the member of a society and consider prices as objective values of exogenous pre-determined preferences of individuals. However, behavioral economics has demonstrated by experiments that this often fails to match with the ex-post subjective valuations considered as fair from the perspective of the society. Therefore specific regulations of markets have always been designed to bring the principles of social justice in line with the market outcome. When free markets, i.e. unregulated markets fail, they need regulations to bring them in line with the principles of social justice, i.e. its social values and the happiness of the greatest numbers. Therefore regulating markets in a way to tackle the mismatch between market outcomes and the desired market outcomes according to the principle of fairness and justice could solve the problem of market failures at the micro level. The fairness adjusted GDP would therefore match market valuations in line with the greatest happiness principle, which currently is not the case.

Western economic thinkers in the 19th century rediscovered the principle of greatest happiness (PGH). However, as Eastern philosophical and religious thinking shows it was part of common knowledge in Buddhism and Hinduism over the past millennia. PGH did not have the same agenda as later on utilitarism of John Stanley Jevons, with the utility maximization principle (UMP) of individuals disconnected from the rest of the society. The UMP was more an outcome of a fusion between moral ethical thinking as a social phenomenon with the Newtonian principles of mechanics based on differential calculus. The huge success of natural sciences in the 19th century during the industrial revolution was too tempting not to imitate its methodologies and concepts in the social sciences as social physics (SP). This kind of approach still has many followers unsurprisingly in the natural science community nowadays. The paper studies these interconnections between these different strands of Western thinking which lead after a century to the neoclassical paradigm in economics which took the UMP as its foundation for economic analysis. Richard Layard, an English labour economist, pointed out among others by empirical research that wellbeing or happiness is not significantly correlated with an ever increasing material wealth. Here might emerge a bridge between Buddhist economics and the recent rediscovery of the PGH in modern Western economics. The paper will close with the suggestion of some first possible corrections necessary for UMP to obtain a PGH consistent with the current challenges to the global society.