universities as strategic actors in the knowledge economy the university plays a particular role in the global knowledge economy as provider of both public and private goods related to education research and societal impacts at the same time universities in the plural play many different roles and exhibit a rich experimentation in organizational forms and knowledge foci adapting to local and global conditions there is also an aspect of uneven regional development and agglomeration of competencies as the individuals and organizations must also balance local interests and stakeholders with global networks in science technology and innovation thus we can identify empirically that universities are changing their strategies organizational structures and competencies in order to respond to new external demands and internal management practices bonaccorsi and daraio 2007 the question is how to explain this theoretically and identify empirical trends and pathways little previous research has focused upon how universities are learning to compete and why they try to act strategically this article as well as the selected articles in the special issue focus upon how and why this transition is occurring as well as the impacts for understanding universities as strategic actors in the knowledge economy section 2 provides an overview it introduces the three themes and articles collected in this special issue providing a summary of the main contributions section 3 then provides our perspective on how to analyze and understand universities as strategic actors it discusses relevant literature as a way of beginning to provide our perspective of the necessity and elements involved in a more united theoretical and empirical understanding this includes statement of predictions as well as empirical evidence that these trends are occurring section 4 concludes with relevant research themes for the future

of networks and markets the rise and rise of a south indian town the example of tiruppur s cotton knitwear industry abstract tiruppur town is the center of a tightly clustered range of activities related to the cotton knitwear industry the successful and dramatic expansion which has taken place over the last 15 years has meant many more jobs limited technological improvement improved quality in yarn and fabric and an increasingly diverse range of garments for the larger firms in the industry access to export markets has been the driving force to improving their competitiveness wages remain low and working conditions poor however perhaps partly because capital concentration has not on the whole been accompanied by centralized vertically integrated production nevertheless clustering and dense interfirm networks provide advantages for firms of all sizes since process specialization is spatially divisible

an axiomatic characterization of yitzhaki s index of individual deprivation abstract this note presents and discusses a number of properties a measure of individual deprivation should satisfy the axioms we propose are necessary and sufficient to characterize yitzhaki s index of deprivation making the structure of the index more transparent

choosing sides in matching games nash equilibria and comparative statics this paper characterizes equilibria in matching games where the institutional setting allows players to choose whether to become buyers sellers or not to participate in economic activity nash equilibrium consists of a partition of agents into buyers sellers and non participants such that agents in each group do not have an incentive to change their activity given the behaviour of other agents comparative static analysis demonstrates that when participation costs are so high that some agents choose not to participate a further increase in participation costs may increase the number of agents who participate in the matching process

cartoon planet worlds of production and global production networks in the animation industry as more animated films are produced new worlds of production have emerged the animation production system is distinct from film production relying on different technologies and labor skills its globalization therefore has taken place differently although both are structured by the global production networks of the media conglomerates we present a framework for understanding the animation industry its international division of labor and its diverse markets enabled by pools of artistic labor growing demand and the diffusion of production skills copyright 2010 the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

on the economic architecture of the workplace repercussions of social comparisons among heterogeneous workers we analyze the impact on a firm s profits and optimal wage rates and on the distribution of workers earnings when workers compare their earnings with those of coworkers we consider a low productivity worker who receives lower wage earnings than a high productivity worker when the low productivity worker derives dis utility not only from his own effort but also from comparing his earnings with those of the high productivity worker his response to the sensing of relative deprivation is to increase the optimal level of effort consequently the firm s profits are higher its wage rates remain unchanged and the distribution of earnings is compressed

does wto accession matter for the chinese textile and clothing industry based on field surveys conducted in guangdong zhejiang and beijing in 2000 and 2001 this paper argues that accession to the world trade organisation wto by china will create a new competitive arena for different categories of textile and clothing firms located in that country partly dependent on the size and ownership of the firm from the perspectives of reducing import tariffs eliminating export quotas and the regulations on trade disputes wto accession does matter for the majority of chinese firms in this win lose game from the perspective of compliance with international standards this paper argues that accession to the wto does not really matter for some chinese firms as they may not survive the intense competition prior to 2005 when the effects of the agreement on textiles and clothing materialise

optimal anti poverty programmes horizontal equity and the paradox of targeting the paper examines the problem of optimal targeting when households differ in needs additively decomposable poverty measures based on the households deprivation are employed needs are modelled carefully household size and needs are reflected by equivalence scales and weights the paradox of targeting corresponds to a situation in which the benefits given to a household type could decrease if the type s needs measured by the respective scale value are increased i find that poverty programmes are horizontally equitable if and only if the weight attached to each household type equals the respective equivalence scale value the paradox cannot then occur either differences in household size and needs the present paper deals with this topic considering optimal poverty alleviation programmes two questions are investigated first are optimal programmes horizontally equitable this question is related to the second one does an increase in needs lead to an increase in benefits in view of some results in the literature it seems that the answers can be negative for instance ebert 1997 demonstrates that the living standard of different household types may be different in an optimal income distribution given a social welfare function keen 1992 describes what he calls the paradox of targeting it may be that optimal targeting requires that an increase in the needs of some group be met by a reduction in the resources allocated to it thus the answers may be troubling it is obvious that the outcome of the analysis depends on the framework chosen and the researcher s objective there are several ingredients that determine optimal programmes given different needs and sizes a distribution of household income has to be adjusted in order to reflect these differences in practice incomes are often converted to equivalent incomes measured for a reference type and weights are attached furthermore the poverty lines of different groups have to be chosen appropriately an optimal outcome also

upgrading primary production a global commodity chain approach abstract global commodity chain gcc analysis has been concerned mainly with examining power relations in global manufacturing industries although it has been preoccupied increasingly by the question of how developing country dc producers can upgrade this paper extends gcc analysis to traditional primary commodities where international traders exercise the driving role and suggests a new agenda for their upgrading in dcs based upon public action

impacts of grants and contracts on academic researchers interactions with industry abstract based on a representative national sample of 1564 academic researchers we investigate the impacts of research grants and contracts on the nature and extent of faculty research and technology activities with industry a particular focus is on understanding the independent contributions of industry and government grant sources on levels of industrial involvement in addition to examining the source of grants the study controls for a number of independent factors including scientific field research center affiliation tenure status and gender results suggest independent effects of grants and contracts on industrial activities grants and contracts from industry have a significant effect on academic researchers propensity to work with industry as measured by an industrial involvement scale federally sponsored grants also have an impact in increasing work with industry but a more moderate one further those with more grants and contracts of each type have a greater propensity for industrial involvement than those who have such contracts but fewer this holds even when proxies for productivity and career stage are introduced in regression equations the analysis also considers whether provision of grants and contracts is best viewed as a predictor of industrial involvement or just another type of industrial involvement using factor analysis and nested multivariate modeling to compare effects

the agrarian origins of the knitwear industrial cluster in tiruppur india abstract the reorganization of work in tiruppur into small firm networks has propelled it to the center of india s cotton knitwear exports industrial studies explanations remain unresolved in reconciling informalized insecure labor alongside the possibility of an innovative industrial district an analysis of the industrial present reveals that not only are the majority of owners of the agrarian gounder caste but they are also predominantly ex industrial workers this paper investigates the regional and agrarian processes through which gounders of worker peasant origins forged their class mobility through their toil while also remaking the knitwear industrial cluster into dynamic small firm networks

networks of collaboration in oligopoly abstract in an oligopoly prior to competing in the market firms have an opportunity to form pair wise collaborative links with other firms these pair wise links involve a commitment of resources and lead to lower costs of production of the collaborating firms we study the incentives of firms to form links and the architecture of the resulting collaboration network we find that incentives to form links are intimately related to the nature of market competition our analysis also suggests that collaborations are used by firms to generate competitive advantage and that strategically stable networks are often asymmetric with some firms having many links while others have few links or are isolated specifically we show that networks with the dominant group architecture stars and inter linked stars are stable we also present some results on the architecture of socially efficient networks

an index of relative deprivation abstract this paper proposes an index of relative deprivation which unlike the earlier indices assumes that the deprivation of a person is sensitive to income transfers among those who are richer than him the proposed index is quite flexible in accomodating value judgements on the degree of envy felt by individuals in the society

size and distribution of incomes as determinants of social welfare abstract the paper is concerned with the relationship between the inequality of income distributions and the social welfare they imply starting point is an ordering of income distributions in terms of inequality based on explicit value judgments about the trade off between size and distribution of incomes an ordering in terms of social welfare is derived the welfare functions representing this ordering allow a size distribution split up it is shown that the procedure can be reversed this ordinal approach is considerably more flexible and less arbitrary than most methods proposed in the literature

behind intermediary performance in export trade transactions agents and resources integrating transaction cost agency and resource based theories this study extends the work of peng and ilinitch 1998 by undertaking the first empirical efforts to explore the determinants of export intermediary performance we suggest that given the transaction cost constraints and principal agent conflicts export intermediaries performance depends on their possession of valuable unique and hard to imitate resources which help minimize their clients transaction and agency costs survey results from 166 firms largely support our hypotheses

bargaining in a network of buyers and sellers abstract we analyze bargaining between buyers and sellers who are connected by an exogenously given network players can make repeated alternating public offers that may be accepted by any of the responders linked to each specific proposer our purpose is to find the conditions of the network which drive the price distribution in equilibrium this paper uses graph theory tools to provide necessary and sufficient conditions regarding the architecture of networks for the subgame perfect equilibrium of the bargaining game to coincide with the walrasian outcome

the changing global geography of low technology labor intensive industry clothing footwear and furniture summary a basic approach to the geographic investigation of low technology labor intensive industries is sketched out by invoking notions of industrial organization locational agglomeration and spatial divisions of labor the distribution of the clothing footwear and furniture industries across the contemporary world is described on the basis of detailed published statistics special emphasis is accorded to similarities and contrasts in the geography of production between more developed and less developed countries i show that no matter what the level of development agglomeration tends to be a pervasive though not universal feature of these three industries global trading patterns in the three industries are subjected to extended investigation i examine international flows of finished products as well as production sharing activities involving various kinds of subcontracting arrangements between high wage and low wage countries i then attempt to demonstrate in theory how spatial agglomeration and international commodity flows function as mutually reinforcing phenomena via the play of increasing returns effects the significance of low wage low technology industries for processes of economic development is also stressed in the conclusion i suggest that the global geography of production is tending more and more to assume the form of a far flung mosaic of competing and collaborating agglomerations at various levels of productive capability and development

the semiconductor industry in south east asia organization location and the international division of labour 1 scott a j 1987 the semiconductor industry in south east asia organization location and the international division of labour reg studies 21 143 160 the paper deals with the functional and geographical organization of the semiconductor industry in south east asia the discussion opens with a broad description of the growth of us owned assembly plants in the region this is followed by an account of the current geographical distribution in south east asia of 1 us owned assembly plants 2 locally owned diffusion facilities and 3 locally owned subcontract assembly houses the internal functional characteristics of assembly plants are examined it is then shown that there is an emerging international division of labour in the semiconductor industry within south east asia the growth of localized semiconductor production complexes is analysed the theory of the new international division of labour is briefly reconsidered in the light of all this scott a j 1987 l industrie des semi conducte

exports of manufactures by developing countries emerging patterns of trade and location developing countries are rapidly increasing their shares of manufactured trade not just in labour intensive products but also in capital and skill intensive ones their shares are rising particularly rapidly in the high technology area however manufactured exports remain highly concentrated in the developing world with a few countries dominating all forms of export within the successful exporting countries there are significant differences in the technology content of exports these trends are difficult to explain with received trade theory even taking human capital into account or with reference to broad economic policies it is useful to bring in learning along with scale economies increasing returns and agglomeration as determinants of comparative advantage these factors imply market failures and so a role for policy in developing genuine comparative advantages this article suggests that emerging trade and location patterns in the developing work are explained by market imperfections and government policies to overcome them

the psychic distance paradox companies tend to begin their internationalization process in countries that are psychically close researchers describe the sequence of entry that firms follow and the mode of entry they choose they suggest that psychically close countries are more easily understood than distant ones and offer more familiar operating environments although not prescriptive an unstated conclusion can be drawn linking sequence of entry to performance evidence from thirty two canadian retail companies shows that only seven 22 were functioning successfully in the united states the psychic distance paradox is that operations in psychically close countries are not necessarily easy to manage because assumptions of similarity can prevent executives from learning about critical differences moreover empirical evidence from 271 ceos confirms greater cultural differences between canada and the u s than assumed previously modifications are suggested to improve the psychic distance concept

contracting with qualified suppliers in an extension of the laffont tirole model a buyer fully qualifies a set of suppliers ex ante and awards production to the most efficient ex post the buyer s incomplete information about production costs biases ex ante market structure in favor of a greater number of qualified suppliers further extensions that allow product differentiation and learning by doing suggest explanations for split production awards and less than fully qualified suppliers it may be difficult to specify ex ante precisely how the assets will be employed in production grossman and hart 1986 once relationship specific assets are in place the characteristics of the transaction and the gains from trade will be determined by ex post contracting between the buyer and the seller a safeguard for the buyer is to contract with more than one potential supplier to invest in the relationship specific assets required for production then after production require ments become clear the buyer can structure a competition between these suppliers for the right to produce this article analyzes when a second sourcing policy is desirable and how the buyer should structure it asanuma s 1989 description of the two vendor policy of automobile manufac turers in japan provides a context for the analysis japanese automobile manufac turers contract out for various kinds of components for example headlamps brakes or steering columns the common practice is to purchase each component from a small and relatively stable group of qualified suppliers with the purposes of assuring supply and of creating competition moreover for a particular part for a particular model there is a tendency for an automobile manufacturer to purchase from a single supplier in the group for the life of the model my understanding from interviews and the trade press is that u s automobile manufacturers also sole source from a select group of qualified suppliers but with

resource dependency and institutional theory perspectives on direct and indirect export choices this article develops and tests resource dependency and institutional theory arguments to explain two choices facing sme owner managers 1 the decision whether to export or not and 2 if the firm exports the choice between a direct to customers abroad and an indirect using another firm as intermediary export mode binomial logistic regressions on our sample of 871 dutch smes suggest that institutional theory perspectives owner managers perception of the increased international presence of their domestic competitors customers and suppliers and perceptions of increased use of foreign suppliers explain the decision to export while resource dependency theory arguments owner managers perception of the favorability of access to knowledge and technology of production costs and of access to capital in the home market guide the choice between direct and indirect export modes

successful adjustment in indian industry the case of ludhiana s woolen knitwear cluster abstract this paper examines the case of adjustment in a labor intensive export industry woolen knitwear to understand how traditional sectors in developing regions cope with external crises and rise above them india s woolen knitwear industry concentrated in ludhiana recently survived two crises the collapse of its largest export market the former soviet union and the simultaneous opening up of the domestic market to freer trade after an unusually short downturn the cluster not only recovered rapidly but is increasingly diversifying into more demanding and competitive external markets four factors are key to explaining this surprisingly resilient recovery first the best performing firms had a strong and simultaneous presence in dynamic segments of the domestic market alongside exports this generated key organizational learning and built managerial and production capacities that helped firms adapt quickly to more demanding markets later second an important feature of the learning relationship between first time exporters and their foreign buyers was the small scale nature of contracts and a customization of fit between the producer and the feedback giving intermediary third better performing firms paid equal if not greater attention to making organizational changes in their work practices than to the purchase of new equipment fourth the embedded nature of production networks and the government s past programs to assist local firms have indirectly helped create a dynamic middle tier of locally rooted exporters who appear to be leading the cluster s transformation and modernization

the distribution of income in a despotic society a distribution of income between rulers and subjects can be derived as an equilibrium of violence rather than from considerations of marginal products of owned factors of production society is organized in ranks and the occupants of each rank are provided with incomes just sufficient that obedience is preferable to rebellion to incorporate such considerations into a model it is necessary to recognize phenomena that are normally excluded from economic analysis combat the mortality rate from natural causes and from violence as a component of the utility function and a rudimentary technology of control

price formation on the marseille fish market evidence from a network analysis abstract the empirical analysis of fish markets always reveals strong price dispersion for homogeneous or very similar goods the problem is how to explain this price dispersion on a market where there is no evident arbitrage explanations proposed by different authors include differences in organization the characteristics of the good and the influences of social interactions between buyers and sellers in line with the last of these three approaches we consider the fish market of marseille as a seller seller network we start by examining the influence of market interactions through a static and then a dynamic econometric model we then analyze the role of the seller s position in the network we bring to light a surprising paradox in that the sellers who share the most buyers with competitors i e the most central sellers charge the highest prices

a theory of buyer seller networks this paper introduces a new model of exchange networks rather than markets of buyers and sellers it begins with the empirically motivated premise that a buyer and seller must have a relationship a link to exchange goods networks buyers sellers and the pattern of links connecting them are common exchange environments this paper develops a methodology to study network structures and explains why agents may form networks in a model that captures characteristics of a variety of industries the paper shows that buyers and sellers acting strategically in their own self interests can form the network structures that maximize overall welfare

production function with electricity consumption and its applications abstract researchers have tried to track the pattern of economy activities for decades cobb douglas production function has been adopted for almost one hundred years while modern economists tend to analyze the economy via the aspect of individual agents a different perspective of reviewing cobb douglas function is needed this paper finds a closer relationship between electricity consumption and economy which can be represented via a strong similarity between four characteristics of genes a second finding is that countries after post industrialization should enter the phase of up industrialization which largely focuses on technology accumulated value added for the secondary industry case study in this paper illustrates that the u s is entering the up industrialization period countries that deemphasize on technology innovations will sooner or later result in severe economic consequences or financial crisis this paper also initially encourages the wide application of smart meters and integration of smart grid to obtain timely and accurate data of electricity consumption to observe unusual economic activities

an evaluation of does economic inequality breed political conflict studies contradictory findings that economic inequality may have a positive negative or no impact on political conflict are a puzzle for conflict studies three approaches have been used t o explain the inconsistent findings of the ei pc economic inequality political conflict nexus statistical modeling formal modeling and theory building because analysts have tended to possess different research skills these three approaches have been employed in isolation from one another singly however all three approaches have proved deficient and are unlikely to solve the ei pc puzzle the most fruitful approach is to combine the assumptions of the theory builders and the deductive approach of the formal modelers with the various empirical tests of the statistical modelers such an approach to the ei pc puzzle produces a crucial test of the deprived actor and rational actor theories of conflict the approach is also our best hope for solving the other long standing puzzles in conflict studies

deprivation and social exclusion social exclusion manifests itself in the persistent relative lack of an individual s access to functionings compared with other members of society and we model it as being in a state of deprivation over time we view deprivation as having two basic determinants the lack of identification with other members of society and the aggregate alienation experienced by an agent with respect to those having fewer functioning failures using an axiomatic approach we characterize new individual and aggregate measures of deprivation and social exclusion the aggregate measures are then applied to eu data for the period 1994 2001

communication networks externalities and the price of information information goods or information for short play an essential role in modern economies we consider a trading framework where information has some idiosyncratic value for each consumer exerts externalities and can be freely replicated and transmitted through links in a communication network prices paid for information are determined via the asymmetric nash bargaining solution with endogenous disagreement points this decentralized approach leads to unique prices and payoffs in any exogenous network we use these payoffs to find connection structures that emerge under different externality regimes in pre trade network formation stage an application to citation graphs results in eigenvector like measures of intellectual influence

weighting vectors and international inequality changes in environmental indicators an analysis of co2 per capita emissions and kaya factors abstract analyses of international inequality in environmental factors such as the well known co 2 per capita or the kaya factors that is carbon intensity energy intensity and affluence have overlooked the effect that weighting vectors of distance functions and their time variations can have on the evolution of the inequality observed thus for example increases in the relative weight of countries with low emissions tend ceteris paribus to increase the inequality even when the vector of international per capita emissions remains unchanged this effect strictly associated with share variations is assessed in this paper by means of a simple decomposition methodology this methodology allows us to ascertain what part of the time variation of the inequality is attributable to the variations in the shares and or the variations in the environmental variable analysed and in turn suggests extending the analysis to the group components of inequality shorrocks 1980 this proposition is used empirically to assess international inequalities in co 2 per capita and the kaya factors for a variety of sub periods during the 1971 2007 period and for various satisfactory inequality indices

income inequality regime repressiveness and political violence death rate from political violence is postulated to vary cross nationally as a positively accelerated time lagged function of income inequality and as a nonmonotonic inverted u function of regime repressiveness the former hypothesis is consistent with approaches to the explanation of collective political violence that emphasize the general concept of discontent or more specifically relative deprivation the latter hypothesis is consistent with a political process version of the resource mobilization approach in the context of a multivariate model estimated across two decades 1958 67 and 1968 77 support is found for the inequality hypothesis support also is foundfor the regime repressiveness hypothesis in the decade 1968 77 for which the index of regime repressiveness is available the u curve effect of regime repressiveness appears to have stronger impact on variation in rates of deadly political violence than the positively accelerated effect of income inequality

gale nikaido debreu and milgrom shannon communal interactions with endogenous community structures abstract this paper examines nash jurisdictional stability in a model with a continuum of agents whose characteristics are distributed over a unidimensional interval communal benefits and costs of each individual depend on her identity and the composition of the community which she belongs to since the framework is too general to yield an existence of nash equilibrium we introduce the essentiality of membership in one of the communities for all individuals we highlight the border indifference property bip when all individuals located on a border between two adjacent jurisdictions are indifferent about joining either of them and show that bip is a necessary condition for yielding a nash equilibrium we invoke the celebrated gale nikaido debreu lemma to guarantee the existence of a partition that satisfies bip we then proceed to demonstrate that bip is not sufficient to yield a nash equilibrium the equilibrium existence under bip is rescued when we use the milgrom shannon monotone comparative statics conditions

determinants of trust in supplier relations evidence from the automotive industry in japan and the united states abstract this study examines the determinants of inter organizational trust by using survey data from over 1000 suppliers in the automotive industry drawing on transaction cost economics game theory and sociological exchange theory we define trust and derive a model of its determinants regression analysis results indicate that determinants of trust are different from determinants of opportunism us japanese differences are found in three respects i the way trust is conceptualised by suppliers is more complex in japan than in the us ii the level of trust is higher in japan than in the us and iii the factors facilitating trust and those attenuating opportunism differ in the us and japan

buyers strategies entry barriers and competition in markets where sellers have customer specific investments and buyers can make credible but costly commitments to switch suppliers buyers strategies attenuate the market power of sellers furthermore since current prices and a buyer s decision to switch suppliers are related limit pricing becomes an equilibrium limit prices increase with the time it takes a buyer to switch suppliers and with buyers switching costs but fall with the level of sunk investments thus sunk investments may restrain the sellers ability to exert market power the paper questions then the standard inverse relationship between market performance and sunk investments

proximity sensitive individual deprivation measures we characterize a generalization of the linear index of individual deprivation our class allows for an income increase of a higher income individual to have a stronger impact the closer they occur to the income of the person under consideration

the messy reality of agglomeration economies in urban informality evidence from nairobi s handicraft industry summary this paper investigates intermediate input effects and labor pooling in the context of urban informality examining the handicraft industry of nairobi kenya the paper tests if conditions found in informality interfere with transition pathways in production clusters 102 semi structured interviews were conducted with industry participants including 69 production firms findings confirm the existence of important agglomeration economies but those benefits are curtailed due to constraints of informality on firms especially location constraints in urban space at the same time informality also introduces particular diseconomies of agglomeration that undermine the value of proximity of firms to each other particularly within clusters

enlargement and the textiles clothing and footwear industry the textiles clothing and footwear tcf industry is a labour intensive industry strongly determined by globalization and easy relocation to low cost countries hence also in the european union this industry is relatively more important in the low wage regions of the eu southern periphery with the envisaged enlargement however these countries fear a further shift of the sector to central and eastern europe as these countries still have a comparative advantage in terms of low labour costs the present article investigates whether this fear is justified looking at three main aspects first at the position and history of the tcf sector in the european union and its role in the eu periphery second at the sector in the central and eastern accession countries and third at gobalization issues the second aspect is dealt with in great detail as development trends in the central and east european countries are important and telling much has happened during the 15 year and more period between the collapse of communism and the eu membership in this region most important the integration to the eu by the means of trade in particular outward processing trade these developments mainly seem to determine future trends in an enlarged europe overall however future prospects have to be seen in a global context strongly influencing the sector via changes in global trade policies

relative deprivation and economic welfare a statistical investigation with gini based welfare indices the average level of relative deprivation is considered as a measure of the economic welfare or standards of living for a society this approach yields welfare indices that are weighted combinations of the mean income and the gini coefficient there has been no systematic international comparison of these gini based welfare indices in this paper they are applied to compare relative deprivation and economic welfare using data from the luxembourg income study the asymptotic distributions of estimators of gini based welfare indices are provided under weighted sampling

health income and relative deprivation evidence from the bhps it is believed that income affects health directly but it is argued that indirect income effects due to relative deprivation may be equally important this paper investigates these relationships using parametric and semiparametric panel data models which ameliorate problems of misspecification and unobservable heterogeneity by allowing for a flexible functional form of income we ensure that coefficients on relative deprivation variables are not an artefact of a highly non linear relationship between health and income the results provide strong evidence for the impact of income on self reported measures of health for men and women these results are robust across a range of techniques and are resilient to the inclusion of measures of relative deprivation the parametric results for relative deprivation largely reject its influence on health although there is some evidence of an effect in the semiparametric models

from ascribed to earned trust in exporting clusters abstract this paper is concerned with the role of trust in export manufacturing it asks how trust has developed in two industrial clusters which are located in developing countries and export most of their output to north america and europe the main conclusion is that trust was based initially on socio cultural ties between clustered firms and later on conscious investments in inter firm relationships

firm and group dynamics in the small and medium enterprise sector in indonesia this paper discusses the role of clusters and subcontracting as factors in the evolution of small and medium firms in indonesia during the last quarter century it is argued that a number of such firms have become successful exporters of rattan furniture wood furniture and garments on the strength of subcontracting relationships with foreign investors and buyers as well as agglomeration economies achieved by clustering in selected locations examples are provided to show that clustered enterprises are more likely to be in the exports business and to adopt product and process innovations as compared to more dispersed firms public policy support for fostering subcontracting links and cluster formation is also discussed

rulers and the ruled patterned inequality and the onset of mass political violence the theory of patterned inequality between rulers and ruled provides a valuable analytic approach to the relationship between inequality and political violence under conditions of a bifurcated pattern of inequality the probability of political violence is likely to be greater than under a more generalized inequality typically measured by the gini index a strong systematic relationship between patterned inequality in latin american landholdings and deaths from political violence was discovered using the exponential distribution as a model for the lower portion of the land distribution and the log exponential for the upper this degree of association was far stronger than that found between the gini index of land inequality in latin america and deaths from political violence evidence supporting the theory was also found in an analysis of middle eastern landholdings

reference groups and individual deprivation abstract we provide an axiomatization of yitzhaki s index of individual deprivation our result differs from an earlier characterization due to ebert and moyes in the way the reference group of an individual is represented in the model

identifying the big question in international business research buckley 2002 argues that the international business ib research agenda may be running out of steam because no big research question has currently been identified buckley also asks whether the field needs a big question and if so challenges ib scholars to discover it buckley and ghauri 2004 elaborate on the third question of globalization discussed in buckley 2002 as a possible candidate for the big question in response this article is written to take up buckley s challenge and also to comment on buckley and ghauri s more recent work i agree that ib needs a big question the pursuit of which can serve to unite and energize scholars make scientific progress and enhance the status and prestige of the field toward that end i argue that what determines the international success and failure of firms has always served as a fundamental research question which has permeated ib research in the past and present and is likely to propel its progress in the future therefore i am of the opinion that the ib research agenda is not likely to run out of steam because focusing on this question will leverage ib s comparative advantage and keep the field engaged in generating exciting and disciplined theories and findings in the 21st century

anonymous market and group ties in international trade abstract history provides many examples of cohesive groups dispersed over several countries who exploit the ties between their members to gain entry into foreign markets the phenomenon is well established empirically and noteworthy because it suggests the importance of informational barriers in international transactions we present a simple model where output is produced through a joint venture and agents have complete information domestically but are unable to judge the quality of their match abroad a minority of individuals otherwise identical to all others can exploit complete information in international matches between group members if they so choose group ties increase aggregate trade and income but hurt the anonymous market because they deprive it disproportionately of the group s more productive members

hospital competition in hmo networks abstract we develop a framework for analyzing bargaining relationships between hospitals and hmos under selective contracting using a unique dataset on hospitals in the los angeles area from 1990 to 1993 we estimate the determinants of actual negotiated prices paid to hospitals by two major hmos we find that a hospital s bargaining power and thus its price decrease when the hmo can readily turn to alternative networks that exclude the hospital we simulate the effect of hypothetical hospital mergers on bargaining power and find that some hospital mergers even in urban areas with many nearby hospitals can lead to significant price increases

does microfinance reduce income inequality this study addresses the question whether participation of the poor in microfinance contributes to reducing a country s level of income inequality using data from 70 developing countries we show that higher levels of microfinance participation are indeed associated with a reduction of the income gap between rich and poor people we also show however that the effects of microfinance on reducing income inequality are relatively small the results of this study add to the discussion on the impact of microfinance on poverty by showing that although access to microfinance does seem to improve the relative income position of the poor this improvement is modest which is probably because the use of microfinance is generally small as compared to the size of the economy of the countries in our sample microfinance should therefore not be seen as a panacea for bringing down income inequality in a significant way

networks and farsighted stability the main contribution of this paper is to provide a framework in which the notion of farsighted stability for games introduced by chwe 1994 can be applied to directed networks in particular we introduce the notion of a supernetwork a supernetwork is made up of a collection of directed networks the nodes and uniquely represents via the arcs connecting the nodes agent preferences and the rules governing network formation by reformulating chwe s basic result on the nonemptiness of farsightedly stable sets we show that for any supernetwork i e for any collection of directed networks and any collection of rules governing network formation there exists a farsightedly stable directed network we also introduce the notion of a nash network relative to a given supernetwork as well as the notions of symmetric nonsimultaneous and decomposable supernetworks to illustrate the utility of our framework we present several examples of super networks compute the farsightedly stable networks and the nash networks

export intermediation an empirical test of peng and ilinitch this paper provides empirical evidence from france on the role of export intermediary firms using data from 20 000 french firms this paper tests two of the five transaction cost based propositions on the role of export intermediaries by peng and ilinitch 1998 while the empirical evidence only partially supports their first proposition on distance and familiarity their second proposition on product complexity is corroborated

marketing barriers facing developing country manufactured exporters a conceptual note conventional analysis of exporting by ignoring information gaps and transaction costs of various kinds neglects the role of marketing barriers to new entrants the nature of the barriers vary by industry and a variety of institutional mechanisms exists for overcoming them the appropriateness of the mechanism depends on the capabilities and dynamism of the exporter as well as the nature of information required the role of foreign buyers has received some attention in recent research in the export of simple consumer goods this note attempts to develop a more general conceptual framework for marketing barriers

the globalization of product markets and immiserizing growth lessons from the south african furniture industry the central issue addressed in this paper is whether some developing countries will find it difficult to compete effectively in global product markets and will therefore be locked into processes of immiserizing growth it focuses on the role of south african producers in the global furniture value chain analyzing the factors affecting firm upgrading particularly the role of global buyers the paper observes a global industry characterized by increased competition and falling unit prices with local firms dependent on a falling exchange rate it concludes with implications for policy and future research including generalizing the findings to other sectors and countries

inequality and insurgency maldistribution of land in agrarian societies is commonly thought to be an important precondition of mass political violence and revolution others argue that because of the difficulty of mobilizing rural populations for political protest land maldistribution is irrelevant except as part of an inegalitarian distribution of income nationwide these rival inequality hypotheses have significant implications with respect to the kinds of reforms likely to reduce the potential for insurgency in a society they are tested using the most comprehensive cross national compilation of data currently available on land inequality landlessness and income inequality support is found for the argument that attributes the greater causal import to income inequality moreover the effect of income inequality on political violence is found to hold in the context of a causal model that takes into account the repressiveness of the regime governmental acts of coercion intensity of separatism and level of economic development

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

a class of proximity sensitive measures of relative deprivation abstract we introduce a new class of generalized measures of relative deprivation the class takes the form of a power mean of order p a characteristic of the class is that depending on the value of the proximity sensitive parameter p the class is capable of accommodating both a decreasing weight the case of p 1 and an increasing weight the case of p 0 1 accorded to given changes in the incomes of the individuals who are wealthier than the reference individual depending on their proximity in the income distribution to the reference individual

income redistribution going awry the reversal power of the concern for relative deprivation abstract we demonstrate that a rank preserving transfer from a richer individual to a poorer individual can exacerbate income inequality when inequality is measured by the gini coefficient this happens when individuals preferences depend negatively not only on work time effort but also on low relative income it is rigorously shown that the set of preference profiles that gives rise to this perverse effect of a transfer on inequality is a non empty open subset of all preference profiles a robust example illustrates this result

farsighted network formation this paper studies a model of dynamic network formation when individuals are farsighted players evaluate the desirability of a current move in terms of its consequences on the entire discounted stream of payoffs we define a concept of equilibrium which takes into account farsighted behavior of agents and allows for limited cooperation amongst agents we show that an equilibrium process of network formation exists we also show that there are valuation structures in which no equilibrium strategy profile can sustain efficient networks we then provide sufficient conditions under which the equilibrium process will yield efficient outcomes

crossing the rubicon exploring the factors that shape academics perceptions of the barriers to working with industry although academics are under increasing pressure to engage industry in their research they often find it difficult to do so conflicts with industry over the timing of disclosure and the choice of topics are common moreover collaborations with industry may require academics to negotiate formal contracts about the ownership of intellectual property to help understand the factors that might mitigate these conflicts this paper examines how the professional and collaborative experiences of academics shape their perceptions of the barriers to industry collaboration using a rich dataset of uk academics we find that perceived barriers to collaboration are lower for academics with industrial and collaborative experience and for those who trust their industry partners however for the transactional costs of industry engagement we find entrepreneurial experience and the diversity of methods used to collaborate with industry increases the perceived barriers to collaboration

regional differences and the components of growth and inequality change abstract inequality change can be decomposed simply in terms of per capita income and population changes using the gini index an illustration based on u s data for the two intercensus periods 1960 1970 and 1970 1980 is given this decomposition analysis is also applied to the study of changes in a welfare index originally proposed by sen

impacts of business environment changes on global manufacturing in the chinese greater pearl river delta a supply chain perspective business operating conditions have changed substantially in the chinese greater pearl river delta gprd due to the chinese currency appreciation rising labour costs highly volatile oil prices and new processing trade policies such changes have triggered manufacturers to rethink their global operations this article studies potential global manufacturing trends from a supply chain perspective a mixed integer programming model suggests that these changes have negatively affected the region s competitive advantages as its labour intensive production mainly targets at the mass market and competes on low costs three production relocation trends are affirmed i e the relocation to lower cost areas within china lower cost asian countries and areas near end markets however it is also discovered that the gprd region still attracts businesses with its formation of industrial clusters the enhanced comparative advantage against competing regions in inland china or asian lower cost countries under high oil

pathways to impact and the strategic role of universities new evidence on the breadth and depth of university knowledge exchange in the uk and the factors constraining its development there has been an increasing focus on the strategic role of universities in stimulating innovation and economic growth primarily though the transfer of technology this paper interrogates some of the key aspects of much of the conventional wisdom concerning the transfer of technology and the knowledge exchange process in general it analyses the results from two unique surveys a survey of the uk academic community that generated more than 22 000 responses and a stratified survey of businesses that generated more than 2 500 responses the results suggest that much of the conventional wisdom concerning knowledge exchange involving academia is too narrowly confined or is misinformed first there is an excessive focus in much of the academic and policy discourse on commercialisation and technology transfer there are many knowledge exchange mechanisms used by academics these include commercialisation processes but also many other hidden connections second the focus on the science base ignores that knowledge exchange involves academics from all disciplines third the preoccupation with improving innovation and business performance tends to ignore that knowledge exchange involves partners from the public and third not for profit sectors as well as private sector businesses fourth the main constraints that hinder or limit the knowledge exchange process include a lack of time insufficient internal capability to manage relationships and insufficient information to identify partners problems concerning cultural differences between academics and business and disputes concerning intellectual property are not prominent overall the paper suggests that the notion of an academic ivory tower seems to be a myth as far as the uk is concerned it also suggests that a strategic focus on strengthening connections between academia and the rest of society may generate long term benefits but it will also face challenges and should not distort or divert from the wider foundations of scholarship on which the success of universities are built

conflict war and redistribution this article analyzes the circumstances under which conflict leads to the outbreak of war using a formal model which incorporates both the redistribution of resources as an alternative to war and imperfect information countries act as rational agents concerned with both consumption and the public bad of a war in the first period both countries can either consume or build arms whereas in the second period there can be either the threat or the use of force to reallocate resources if both countries are fully informed then there will be no war but rather a voluntary redistribution of resources in a situation of asymmetric information however in which one country is fully informed and the other is not a war can occur if the uninformed country uses a separating equilibrium strategy precommitting itself to a positive probability of war in order to prevent bluffing by the informed country

the impact of operating in multiple value chains for upgrading the case of the brazilian furniture and footwear industries summary exporting has been upheld as the golden standard for industrial upgrading however research using the value chain approach shows that upgrading for developing country firms is often limited to the lowest value added activities based on comparative research carried out in two brazilian clusters furniture and footwear industries this paper shows that domestic and regional value chains can offer greater upgrading opportunities providing space for activities of higher value added better remunerated and difficult to replicate notably design marketing and branding moreover this study highlights that many firms simultaneously serve multiple value chains multichain and that multichain firms have better upgrading prospects than those primarily exporting via global value chains

delocalization and persistence in the european clothing industry the reconfiguration of trade and production networks pickles j and smith a delocalization and persistence in the european clothing industry the reconfiguration of trade and production networks regional studies this paper examines processes of delocalization and the phenomenon of the spectre of china in the european clothing industry following the removal of quota constrained trade in 2005 it examines the changing geographies of trade and production in the european clothing industry with a specific focus on the patterns of delocalization and production resilience in east central europe through an analysis of trade flows to core european union markets it is shown how the articulation of sourcing strategies trade policies and locational decisions are producing distinctions in a more liberalized global trading environment between shifts towards the globalization of production networks alongside an intensification of the regionalization of clothing production in lower cost producing regions of east central europe and north africa that are proximat

communication and coordination in social networks i model people in a coordination game who use a communication network to tell each other their willingness to participate the minimal sufficient networks for coordination can be interpreted as placing people into a hierarchy of social roles or stages initial adopters then followers and so on down to late adopters a communication network helps coordination in exactly two ways by informing each stage about earlier stages and by creating common knowledge within each stage we then consider two examples first we show that low dimensional networks can be better for coordination even though they have far fewer links than high dimensional networks second we show that wide dispersion of insurgents people predisposed toward participation can be good for coordination but too much dispersion can be bad although collective action depends on both social structure and individual incentives these integral aspects have been formalized separately in the fields of social network theory and game theory by considering them together this paper engages the classic question of which structures are conducive to coordination and shows that structure and strategy are related in a mutually interesting way here we consider a coordination game in which each person wants to participate only if others participate social structure is thought of as a communication network by which people tell each other their willingness to participate each person knows whether her neighbours in the network are willing but does not know about anyone else our model is thus a game of incomplete information in which each person given his local knowledge decides whether to participate the main result is a characterization of the minimal sufficient networks for coordination in terms of a hierarchy of social roles or stages initial adopters then followers and so on down to late adopters for example a communication network helps coordination in exactly two ways by informing each stage about earlier stages and by creating common knowledge within each stage we also consider two simple examples first we show that low dimension or strong link networks can be better for coordination even though they have far fewer links than high dimension or weak link networks second we show that wide dispersion of insurgents people predisposed toward participation can be good for coordination but too much dispersion can be bad this paper is built on the assumption that the most basic and common mechanism for coordination is the i ll go if you go mechanism individuals first communicate with each other about their preferences and then each individual chooses whether to participate or not hence a person s participation depends on what he knows about his neighbours it does not depend solely on their participation itself either through learning adaptation or social influence the physical analogies of contagion or diffusion are not

outsourcing in a global economy we study the determinants of the location of subcontracted activity in a general equilibrium model of outsourcing and trade we model outsourcing as an activity that requires search for a partner and relationship specific investments that are governed by incomplete contracts the extent of international outsourcing depends inter alia on the thickness of the domestic and foreign market for input suppliers the relative cost of searching in each market the relative cost of customizing inputs and the nature of the contracting environment in each country

trading companies in taiwan s fashion shoe networks abstract the taiwanese export fashion shoe networks are composed of independent producers suppliers subcontractors and trading companies this paper explores the formation and governance of such networks the underlying social relationships among participants and the transformation of the networks as taiwanese shoe companies moved across the taiwan straits to southern china in the late 1980s the author argues for the key role of the trading companies in the work of the network trading companies function not only as marketing agents but also as information centers and coordinators of the highly decentralized network to achieve collective scale and scope economies among small sized shoe companies

health and population patterns as indicators of income inequality describes an empirically and theoretically based surrogate measure of income inequality resulting from work with existing cross national aggregate data on health income and population patterns discusses the derivation of that measure and its similarity to conventional data on income distribution the analysis put forth is based on the simple notion that the impact of additonal income on individual behavior is different at different income levels this can occur either through a declining marginal impact of expenditures in meeting a particular goal or else when rising incomes cause a shift in goals as previous goals have been met in instances in which the impact of income on individual decisions is nonlinear the average outcome depends on the distribution of income among individuals as well as the mean income level the determinants of health care and of fertility are discussed in the context of their relationship to income distribution and to other control variables the relationships are stated mathematically and the equations manipulated such that income inequality can be predicted by the level of health in a society or by the level of fertility the accuracy of these new measures is discussed and it is concluded that for less developed countries and times where direct measures of income inequality are lacking this provides a good surrogate measure of inequality the limitations of the method are discussed

stable coalition structures with a unidimensional set of alternatives abstract we identify a class of economic and political environments that admit an s equilibrium where both free mobility and free entry are allowed we further study the relationship between the set of s equilibria and the sets of strong and coalition proof nash equilibria in the noncooperative coalition formation game which is closely related to the one originally studied by j von neumann and o morgenstern theory of games and economic behaviour princeton univ press princeton nj 1944 we also show that the set of s equilibria induces a proper subset of the coalition structure core of the corresponding characteristic function form journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72

recovery of a mexican cluster devaluation bonanza or collective efficiency abstract mexico as many other developing countries in latin america and elsewhere has been moving in the 1980s toward a liberalized trade regime after a long period of import substitution this paper analyzes the impact of trade liberalization on the cooperative behavior of shoe firms located in a cluster in guadalajara the empirical evidence shows that cooperation has increased it also suggests that cooperation positively influences firms performance and together with a favorable market environment contributes to the cluster s recovery the study is based on fieldwork carried out in guadalajara in 1996 qualitative information was collected through in depth interviews and quantified responses came from a questionnaire survey covering a sample of 63 shoe manufacturing enterprises

free trade networks abstract the paper examines the formation of free trade agreements ftas as a network formation game we consider an n country model in which possibly asymmetric countries trade differentiated industrial commodities we show that if all countries are symmetric the complete fta network is pairwise stable and it is the unique stable network if industrial commodities are not highly substitutable we also compare ftas and customs unions cus as to which of these two regimes facilitates global trade liberalization noticing that unlike cus each signatory of an fta can have another fta without consent of other member countries

on the formation of interaction networks in social coordination games there are many situations where two interacting individuals can benefit from coordinating their actions we examine the endogenous choice of partners in such social coordination games and the implications for resulting play we model the interaction pattern as a network where individuals periodically have the discretion to add or sever links to other players with such endogenous interaction patterns we see multiple stochastically stable states of play including some that involve play of equilibria in the coordination game that are neither efficient nor risk dominant thus the endogenous network structure not only has implications for the interaction pattern that emerges but it also has a significant impact on the play in the coordination game relative to what would arise if the same interaction network were exogenous

shirking sharing risk and shelving the role of university license contracts abstract in this paper we develop a theoretical model of university licensing to explain why university license contracts often include payment types that differ from the fixed fees and royalties typically examined by economists our findings suggest that milestone payments and annual payments are common because moral hazard risk sharing and adverse selection all play a role when embryonic inventions are licensed milestones address inventor moral hazard without the inefficiency inherent in royalties the potential for a licensee to shelve inventions is an adverse selection problem which can be addressed by annual fees if shelving is unintentional but may require an upfront fee if the firm licenses an invention with the intention to shelve it whether the licensing contract prevents shelving depends in part on the university credibly threatening to take the license back from a shelving firm this supports the rationale for bayh dole march in rights but also shows the need for the exercise of these rights can be obviated by contracts

formation of buyer seller trade networks in a quality differentiated product market we examine the formation of buyer seller links when exchange can take place only if such a link exists sellers produce products of different qualities and multiple sellers can form a sellers association to pool their customers setting uniform prices buyers form trade links with individual sellers or sellers associations we show which buyer seller links will form and find the set of links that are stable and show how these links influence prices we also show that a trade network mismatch may occur where a high quality good remains unsold even without an economy wide excess supply of goods jel classification d40 d51 d82

a comparison of clustered and dispersed firms in the small scale clothing industry of lima abstract this study provides empirical evidence on the strength and type of clustering advantages contrasting the performance of small clustered firms with several control groups of dispersed producers in the garment industry of lima peru repeated measurement facilitates an evaluation of the ability of clustered firms to respond to pressures arising from the swift trade liberalization carried out in peru after 1990 the evidence suggests that clustering advantages have been significant particularly for the smallest firms cost reductions and information spillovers are the dominant type of advantages these are however passive advantages of clustering they largely arise at the level of transactions in goods and services and to a lesser extent in the transformation of inputs into output while significant these advantages are insufficient for sustaining competitiveness in the liberalized markets the garment cluster runs the risk of entropic death if information spillovers remain limited in origin and diversity and if interfirm cooperation does not cross local borders

the relative deprivation curve and its applications this article introduces the relative deprivation curve to represent the size distribution of income and wealth the curve has many useful applications in the measurement of poverty and inequality which are explored the methodology developed is then applied to the data obtained from the australian household expenditure survey 1975 1976