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This paper focuses on the impact of vertical knowledge transfer from foreign affiliates of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) to indigenous Polish suppliers. Firm-level data was collected through a survey among foreign affiliates and domestic suppliers in the Polish automotive sector. The study finds that foreign firms contribute to the knowledge base of local firms, and that the knowledge domestic suppliers receive enables them to enhance their performance, but also that it is R&D intensity that is critical for suppliers' new knowledge creation. Inter-firm relationships are shown to play a significant role in the process of knowledge transfer and acquisition between foreign firms and domestic suppliers. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.

This paper provides an overview of the recent extension of social protection in sub-Saharan Africa. It identifies two main " models" of social protection in the region: one based on age-based income transfers in the middle income countries in Southern Africa, and another more diverse and incipient group of programs providing a mix of poverty-based transfers in the low income countries in Eastern, Central, and West Africa. It concludes that for an effective institutional framework for social protection to evolve in sub-Saharan Africa, the present focus on the technical design of programs needs to be accompanied by analyses that contribute to also " getting the politics right." © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.

This paper empirically investigates the economic and political factors that affect a country's likelihood to sign an arrangement with the IMF and the determinants of the financial size of such a program. Arguably the world and the global financial architecture underwent structural changes after the ending of Cold War and so did the role of the IMF. Hence, we update and extend the work of Sturm et al. (2005) by employing a panel model for 165 countries that focuses on the post-Cold War era, i.e., 1990–2009. Our results, based on extreme bounds analysis, suggest that some economic and political variables are robustly related to these two dimensions of IMF program decisions. Furthermore, we show that it is important to distinguish between concessional and non-concessional IMF loans.

The gender and politics literature has long debated how women's proportional strength affects policy formulation within legislatures. Studies on gender and environmental governance have focused mainly on women's limited participation in local institutions. Both bodies of work leave important aspects unexplored. The former neglects the in-between process - the impact of women's numbers on their effective participation, such as attending and speaking up at meetings, and holding office. The latter neglects to ask: what impact would increasing women's proportions have on participation and what proportions are effective? Rigorous empirical analysis is also scarce. Addressing these gaps, this paper, based on primary data for community forestry institutions in India and Nepal, statistically tests if a group's gender composition affects women's effective participation, and if there are any critical mass effects. The results support the popularly emphasized proportions of one-quarter to one-third, but women's economic class also matters, as do some factors other than women's numbers. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A recent concern in the debate on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in developing countries relates to the tension between demands for CSR compliance found in many global value chains (GVCs) and the search for locally appropriate responses to these pressures. In this context, an emerging and relatively understudied area of interest relates to small firm industrial clusters. Local clusters offer the potential for local joint action, and thus a basis for improving local compliance on CSR through collective monitoring and local governance. This article explores the interrelationship between global governance, exercised through GVC ties, and local governance, via cluster institutions, in ensuring compliance with CSR pressures. It undertakes a comparative analysis of two leading export-oriented football manufacturing clusters in South Asia that have both faced common challenges on child labour. The article shows that both forms vertical and horizontal governance have played a part in shaping the response of the two clusters on child labour. Moreover, these two distinct forms of governance have also led to quite differentiated outcomes in terms of forms of work organization and child labour monitoring. This raises broader questions on how global CSR demands can locally be better embedded and the conditions under which football stitchers labour in these new work forms. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

This special section brings together 4 of the 12 studies conducted within a research program analyzing the relationships among social mobilization, governance, and rural development in contemporary Latin America. The introduction gives an overview of the contemporary significance of social movements for rural development dynamics in the region, and of the principal insights of the section papers and the broader research program of which they were a part. This significance varies as an effect of two distinct and uneven geographies: the geography of social movements themselves and the geography of the rural political economy. The effects that movements have on the political economy of rural development also depend significantly on internal characteristics of these movements. The paper identifies several such characteristics. The general pattern is that movements have had far more effect on widening the political inclusiveness of rural development than they have on improving its economic inclusiveness and dynamism. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We discuss the application of gradient methods to calibrate mean reverting stochastic volatility models. For this we use formulas based on Girsanov transformations as well as a modification of the Bismut-Elworthy formula to compute the derivatives of certain option prices with respect to the parameters of the model by applying Monte Carlo methods. The article presents an extension of the ideas to apply Malliavin calculus methods in the computation of Greek's.

"Hier wird davon ausgegangen, daß es bei der Messung ökonomischer Aktivitäten im wesentlichen zwei Arten von Problemen gibt. Die erste besteht aus solchen Fragen, die zumindest prinzipiell dadurch lösbar sind, daß man beobachtete oder abgeleitete Marktpreise verwendet. Der zweite Problemtyp besteht aus Fragen, die nur über die Verwendung geschätzter (oder 'synthetischer') Preise gelöst werden können, weil die beobachteten Preise aus vielerlei Gründen fehlerhaft sind. So könnte z. B. ein fundamentales Marktungleichgewicht vorliegen oder eine nichttolerierbare Abhängigkeit von einer besonderen - möglicherweise willkürlichen - Vermögensverteilung. Oder es könnten Verzerrungen durch Schwankungen der relativen Preise oder auch durch eine allgemeine Inflation oder eine Deflation hervorgerufen worden sein. Derartige Verzerrungen können auch von Zöllen, von festgesetzten Handels- oder Produktionsquoten und unterschiedlichen anderen administrativen Eingriffen in den Markt verursacht werden. Beide Problemtypen werden diskutiert und mit neueren Lösungsversuchen dargestellt. Am Schluß der Arbeit finden sich einige Vorschläge zur weiteren Forschung." (Autorenreferat)

"Understanding why so many people across the world are so poor is one of the central intellectual challenges of our time. What explains a pattern of extreme destitution for billions combined with plutocratic levels of income for a tiny minority? This book offers a novel approach to addressing those issues, not by providing answers, but seeking to provide the tools and data that will enable the student, the researcher and the professional working in this area to investigate the questions for themselves. Empirical Development Economics has been designed as a hands-on teaching tool to investigate the causes of poverty. The book begins by introducing the basics of the quantitative approach to development economics. All the topics are presented through data that addresses some important policy issue. In Part 1 the focus is on the basics of understanding why incomes differ so much. What is the role of education, technology and institutions in ensuring that where you are born is so important in determining whether you are poor? In Part 2 the focus is on techniques that allow us to address questions which include how firms invest, how households decide how much to spend on education of their children, whether microfinance does help the poor, whether food aid works, who gets private schooling and whether property rights enhance investment.A distinctive feature of the book is its presentation of a range of approaches to studying development questions. Development economics has undergone a major change in focus over the last decade with the rise of experimental methods to address development issues. One of our objectives has been to show how such methods relate to more traditional ones. "--

"Im Rahmen eines Gutachtens zur Neuabgrenzung der Fördergebiete ab
dem Jahr 2007 für die Gemeinschaftsaufgabe (GA) "Verbesserung der regionalen
Wirtschaftsstruktur" wurde der derzeit gültige Gebietszuschnitt
der Arbeitsmarktregionen der Länder Berlin und Brandenburg in Kooperation
mit dem Steinbeis-Transferzentrum Angewandte Systemanalyse
(STASA), Stuttgart überprüft und Vorschläge für einen künftigen kreisscharfen
Neuzuschnitt entwickelt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die angewandten
graphentheoretische Methoden und Aggregationsverfahren
über Pendlerverflechtungen sowie die Ergebnisse für einen kreisscharfen
Gebietszuschnitt der Arbeitsmarktregionen der Länder Berlin und Brandenburg
vorgestellt." [Autorenreferat]

The literature on the long-run effects of war has largely neglected the labour market implications of permanent illness or injury from conflict among the civilian population. From 1969 to 1998, Northern Ireland experienced a violent ethnopolitical conflict characterised by terrorist bombing campaigns, sectarian killings and armed forces patrolling the streets. The consequences of this period for current high work disability rates are disputed by the main political parties. We address this question using a new high-quality dataset. Potential endogeneity and reverse causation issues are addressed using the intensity of conflict-related deaths as instruments. We find clear evidence that conflict has increased work disability by 9.0 percentage points. The only doctor-diagnosed medical condition mediating this effect is mental ill-health. It is timely to consider the likely enduring economic consequences of a return to violence in the context of the potentially destabilising effects of Brexit.

open ; This Ph.D. thesis builds on the new empirical industrial organization (NEIO) literature trying to use market data to determine fundamental market drivers such as demand parameters, entry and investment thresholds or the level and development of competition in the market. The thesis addresses two sectors: telecommunications (high-speed internet as well as fixed telephony) and media (newspaper sellers). It is divided in three articles 1) Geographic regulation and cooperative investment in next generation broadband networks A review of recent literature and practical cases This article reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on geographic regulation and co-investments in next generation broadband. Alternative telecom operators have continuously invested in their own infrastructure in recent years. After more than a decade since liberalisation, competitive conditions have substantially changed, especially in urban areas. European regulatory authorities have acknowledged this development by starting regional deregulation. Additionally, different forms of cooperative investments in next generation broadband have appeared on the market. The effects of such schemes on competition, investment and welfare crucially depend on the fine details of implementation. For instance, in the case of joint-ventures, it matters how investment costs are shared and how internal and external access prices are determined. In the case of long-term access agreements, it is essential to consider how access tariffs are structured, whether they can adapt to market developments ex-post and whether contracts are signed before or after the investment takes place. Generally, many of these agreements allow for some extent of risk sharing, offering the possibility to increase investment incentives when firms are not risk neutral. It is suggested that regulators consider introducing regulated co-investment agreements complementing current regulation or in some cases even substituting for it, in addition to considering geographically ...

Traditional models of technology transfer via FDI rely upon technology gap and absorptive capacity arguments to explain host economies' potential to benefit from technological spillovers. This paper emphasizes foreign affiliates' technological heterogeneity. We apply a novel approach differentiating extent and intensity of backward linkages between foreign affiliates and local suppliers. We use survey data on 809 foreign affiliates in five transition economies. Our evidence shows that foreign affiliates' technological capability, embeddedness and autonomy are positively related to knowledge transfer via backward linkages. In contrast to what is widely assumed, we find a non-linear relationship between extent of local sourcing and knowledge transfer to domestic suppliers. © 2012.

The contrast between the service class and the working class is central to much class analysis. This structural distinction, based on differences in the employment relationship, is analytically powerful, has validity, and is not in question here.The working class, however, is not homogeneous in all respects. This paper focuses on a sizeable group within the working class who perceive themselves as having (or having had) a career. As well as having this perception, they exhibit a forward-looking perspective, both in the world of employment and with regard to more general planning. They demonstrate degrees of planning, in work and non-work areas, strikingly comparable to service class respondents, and significantly greater than working class respondents without career perceptions, They believe that they can achieve their plans and indeed some have done so successfully. This exercise of forethought is materially aided by this group's possession of rasher greater resources of various kinds than the rest of the working class. But this is by no means the whole story. The findings suggest strongly that a willingness to exercise or not to exercise forethought sharply distinguishes two groups within the working class, and may indicate a significant ann hitherto unreported cleavage worthy of further investigation.