This 2005 book is a comparative history of the economic organisation of energy, telecommunications and transport in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the role that private ...and public enterprise have played in the construction and operation of the railways, electricity, gas and water supply, tramways, coal, oil and natural gas industries, telegraph, telephone, computer networks and other modern telecommunications. The book begins with the arrival of the railways in the 1830s, charts the development of arms' length regulation, municipalisation and nationalisation, and ends on the eve of privatisation in the 1980s. Robert Millward argues that the role of ideology, especially in the form of debates about socialism and capitalism, has been exaggerated. Instead the driving forces in changes in economic organisation were economic and technological factors and the book traces their influence in shaping the pattern of regulation and ownership of these key sectors of modern economies.
This book provides an essential historical framework for understanding global business. The author shows how entrepreneurs built a global economy in the nineteenth century by creating firms that ...pursued resources and markets across borders. It demonstrates how firms shifted strategies as the first global economy disintegrated in the political and economic chaos between the two world wars, and how they have driven the creation of the contemporary global economy. Many of the issues of the global economy have been encountered in the past. This book reveals how entrepreneurs and managers met the political, ethical, cultural, and organizational challenges of operating across borders at different times and in different environments. The role of multinationals is placed within their wider political and economic context. There are chapters on the impact of multinationals, and on relations with governments. The focus on the shifting roles of firms and industries over time provides compelling evidence on the diversity and discontinuities of the globalization process. The book explores the history of multinationals across a wide spectrum of manufacturing, service and natural resource industries. By providing an accessible survey of the history of international business worldwide, this book will be key reading for students taking courses in International Business, Business History, and Entrepreneurship; and of interest to academics and researchers working in these areas. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0199272093/toc.html
Thirteen million people in the United States--roughly one in ten workers--own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so throughout the ...twentieth century. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend to have lower sales, fewer employees and smaller payrolls, lower profits, and higher closure rates. In contrast, Asian American-owned businesses tend to be more successful. In Race and Entrepreneurial Success, minority entrepreneurship authorities Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb examine racial disparities in business performance. Drawing on the rarely used, restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Fairlie and Robb examine in particular why Asian-owned firms perform well in comparison to white-owned businesses and black-owned firms typically do not. They also explore the broader question of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others are not.. After providing new comprehensive estimates of recent trends in minority business ownership and performance, the authors examine the importance of human capital, financial capital, and family business background in successful business ownership. They find that a high level of startup capital is the most important factor contributing to the success of Asian-owned businesses, and that the lack of startup money for black businesses (attributable to the fact that nearly half of all black families have less than $6,000 in total wealth) contributes to their relative lack of success. In addition, higher education levels among Asian business owners explain much of their success relative to both white- and African American-owned businesses. Finally, Fairlie and Robb find that black entrepreneurs have fewer opportunities than white entrepreneurs to acquire valuable pre-business work experience through working in family businesses.
Private equity firms have long been at the center of public debates on the impact of the financial sector on Main Street companies. Are these firms financial innovators that save failing businesses ...or financial predators that bankrupt otherwise healthy companies and destroy jobs? The first comprehensive examination of this topic,Private Equity at Workprovides a detailed yet accessible guide to this controversial business model. Economist Eileen Appelbaum and Professor Rosemary Batt carefully evaluate the evidence-including original case studies and interviews, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings, media coverage, and existing academic scholarship-to demonstrate the effects of private equity on American businesses and workers. They document that while private equity firms have had positive effects on the operations and growth of small and mid-sized companies and in turning around failing companies, the interventions of private equity more often than not lead to significant negative consequences for many businesses and workers.
Prior research on private equity has focused almost exclusively on the financial performance of private equity funds and the returns to their investors.Private Equity at Workprovides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers. In the 1980s, leveraged buyouts by private equity firms saw high returns and were widely considered the solution to corporate wastefulness and mismanagement. And since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies-representing almost 8 million employees-have been purchased by private equity firms. As their role in the economy has increased, they have come under fire from labor unions and community advocates who argue that the proliferation of leveraged buyouts destroys jobs, causes wages to stagnate, saddles otherwise healthy companies with debt, and leads to subsidies from taxpayers.
Appelbaum and Batt show that private equity firms' financial strategies are designed to extract maximum value from the companies they buy and sell, often to the detriment of those companies and their employees and suppliers. Their risky decisions include buying companies and extracting dividends by loading them with high levels of debt and selling assets. These actions often lead to financial distress and a disproportionate focus on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and wage and benefit losses for workers, especially if they are unionized.
Because the law views private equity firms as investors rather than employers, private equity owners are not held accountable for their actions in ways that public corporations are. And their actions are not transparent because private equity owned companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thus, any debts or costs of bankruptcy incurred fall on businesses owned by private equity and their workers, not the private equity firms that govern them. For employees this often means loss of jobs, health and pension benefits, and retirement income. Appelbaum and Batt conclude with a set of policy recommendations intended to curb the negative effects of private equity while preserving its constructive role in the economy. These include policies to improve transparency and accountability, as well as changes that would reduce the excessive use of financial engineering strategies by firms.
A groundbreaking analysis of a hotly contested business model,Private Equity at Workprovides an unprecedented analysis of the little-understood inner workings of private equity and of the effects of leveraged buyouts on American companies and workers. This important new work will be a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and the informed public alike.
We provide a firm-level analysis of the relation between corruption and growth for private firms and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Vietnam. We obtain three different measures of the perceived ...corruption severity from a 2005 survey among 741 private firms and 133 SOEs. We find that corruption hampers the growth of Vietnam’s private sector, but is not detrimental for growth in the state sector. We document significant differences in the corruption severity across 24 provinces in Vietnam that can be explained by the quality of provincial public governance (such as the costs of new business entry, land access, and private sector development policies). Our results suggest that corruption may harm economic growth because it favors the state sector at the expense of the private sector and that improving the quality of local public governance can help to mitigate corruption and stimulate economic growth.
The information and digital age is shaped by a small number of multinational enterprises from a limited number of countries. This volume covers the latest insight from the International Business ...discipline on prevailing trends in business model evolution. It also discusses critical issues of regulation in the new information and digital space.
Hayek (1945) argues that local information is key to understanding the efficiency of alternative economic systems and whether production should be centralized or decentralized. The Chinese experience ...of decentralizing SOEs confirms this insight: when the distance to the government is farther, the SOE is more likely to be decentralized, and this distance-decentralization link is more pronounced with higher communication costs and greater firm-performance heterogeneity. However, when the Chinese central government oversees SOEs in strategic industries, the distance-decentralization link is muted. We also consider alternative agency-cost-based explanations, and do not find much support.
This article evaluates the international location decisions made by public listed Chinese firms during the period 2006–2008, using a Poisson count data regression model. Further, we categorize the ...firms into state-controlled and privately owned according to majority ownership. We find that the determinants of internationalization differ based on ownership. State-controlled firms are attracted to countries with large sources of natural resources and risky political environments. Private firms are more market seekers. Although all firms have strategic intent, the attraction is commercially viable technology rather than core research content. Our findings also show that existing theories can sufficiently explain the actions of private Chinese firms, but adjustments are needed to understand the behavior of state-controlled multinationals.
While it is obvious that America's state and local governments were consistently active during the nineteenth century, a period dominated by laissez-faire, political historians of twentieth-century ...America have assumed that the national government did very little during this period. A Government Out of Sight challenges this premise, chronicling the ways in which the national government intervened powerfully in the lives of nineteenth-century Americans through the law, subsidies, and the use of third parties (including state and local governments), while avoiding bureaucracy. Americans have always turned to the national government - especially for economic development and expansion - and in the nineteenth century even those who argued for a small, nonintrusive central government demanded that the national government expand its authority to meet the nation's challenges. In revising our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout this period, this study fundamentally alters our perspective on American political development in the twentieth century, shedding light on contemporary debates between progressives and conservatives about the proper size of government and government programs and subsidies that even today remain 'out of sight'.
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