The social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of ...people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, John Padgett and Walter Powell develop a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. They demonstrate that novelty arises from spillovers across intertwined networks in different domains. In the short run actors make relations, but in the long run relations make actors.
This theory of novelty emerging from intersecting production and biographical flows is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of original historical case studies. Padgett and Powell build on the biochemical concept of autocatalysis--the chemical definition of life--and then extend this autocatalytic reasoning to social processes of production and communication. Padgett and Powell, along with other colleagues, analyze a very wide range of cases of emergence. They look at the emergence of organizational novelty in early capitalism and state formation; they examine the transformation of communism; and they analyze with detailed network data contemporary science-based capitalism: the biotechnology industry, regional high-tech clusters, and the open source community.
In recent years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has re-emerged as a central actor in global economic governance. Its rhetoric and policies suggest that the organization has radically changed ...the ways in which it offers financial assistance to countries in economic trouble. We revisit two long-standing controversies: Has the policy content of IMF programmes evolved to allow for more policy space? Do these programmes now allow for the protection of labour and social policies? We collected relevant archival material on the IMF's lending operations and identified all policy conditionality in IMF loan agreements between 1985 and 2014, extracting 55,465 individual conditions across 131 countries in total. We find little evidence of a fundamental transformation of IMF conditionality. The organization's post-2008 programmes reincorporated many of the mandated reforms that the organization claims to no longer advocate and the number of conditions has been increasing. We also find that policies introduced to ameliorate the social consequences of IMF macroeconomic advice have been inadequately incorporated into programme design. Drawing on this evidence, we argue that multiple layers of rhetoric and ceremonial reforms have been designed to obscure the actual practice of adjustment programmes, revealing an escalating commitment to hypocrisy.
One of the biggest challenges parties in multiparty governments face is making policies together and overcoming the risk of a policy stalemate. Scholars have devoted much attention to the study of ...how various institutions in cabinet and parliament help coalition parties with conflicting policy preferences to be efficient in the policy-making process. Coalition agreements are one of many instruments coalition partners can use to facilitate policy making. However, many scholars describe such agreements' actual role as cheap talk, due to their legally non-enforceable nature. Do coalition agreements make a difference in the policy-making productivity of multiparty governments? To address this question, this article focuses on governments' policy output and investigates whether coalition agreements increase the policy-making productivity of multiparty cabinets. Its central argument is that written agreements between coalition partners strengthen the capacity of coalition governments to make policy reforms, even when there is a high degree of ideological conflict among partners. To evaluate this argument, the article analyzes data on economic reform measures adopted by national governments in 11 Western European countries over a 40-year period (1978-2017), based on a coding of more than 1000 periodical country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The results show that while coalition agreements foster policy productivity in minimal winning cabinets, they play a weaker role in minority and surplus governments. Coalition agreements limit the negative effect of intra-cabinet ideological conflict on reform productivity, suggesting that such contracts help parties overcome the risk of policy stalemate.
Received internationalization theory argues that firms occupy domestic space before going abroad; in other words, large, oligopolistic firms are most likely to internationalize. The experience of ...China, whose economy is fragmented and whose firms are small by global standards, suggests otherwise. We construct a model of small firm internationalization driven by the relative transaction costs of crossing domestic (in the case of China, provincial) and international borders. When the costs of crossing domestic borders exceed the costs of crossing international borders, firms will internationalize at a relatively early stage of development. In the case of China, local protectionism and inefficient domestic logistics increase the costs of doing business domestically; moreover, protection of property rights in the West and the advantages afforded Chinese owned firms reconstituted as foreign entities operating in China decrease the costs of ‘going out’. We coin the term ‘institutional arbitrage’ to capture Chinese firms' pursuit of efficient institutions outside of China. We argue that strategic exit from the home country rather than strategic entry into foreign markets may explain the internationalization of many Chinese firms.
This paper reviews the economic policies adopted by the Indian government under different policy regimes, provides a political economy perspective of economic growth in the country during 1950–2020 ...and examines the inclusiveness of the rapid economic growth in recent decades. The growth performance of the economy improved as the economy moved from inward-looking policy regime to the regimes of pro-business and pro-market policies. India’s political economy was supportive of the changes in policy regime. After growing at a sluggish rate during the first three decades after 1950–1951, the gross domestic product (GDP) growth accelerated significantly after the pro-business reforms in the 1980s, and there was further acceleration after the pro-market reforms since 1991–1992. It has, however, slowed down in recent years. Nevertheless, it has not been inclusive, as the benefits of growth have not reached all sections of the population and all regions of the country equally. On the contrary, disparities in income across regions and inequalities in income, wealth and consumption among individuals have exacerbated, and the problems of unemployment and poverty have been persisting in the economy.
Purpose
The study explores the evolution of Indian domestic electronics manufacturing post-economic reforms and also investigates the lack of natural growth stages among Indian start-up/SME ...electronics manufactures.
Design/methodology/approach
The theoretical framework is inspired by Dawar and Frost's survival strategy theory that local companies may follow to overcome competitive threats from MNCs. The study adopts a qualitative methodology, more precisely, a phenomenological approach to walking through policy/regulatory reforms amid market distortions, technological gaps and colonial mindset from the perspective of Indian domestic electronics manufacturers. The study has adopted Gioia method of data analysis to inductively suggest a few research propositions.
Findings
The phenomenological approach revealed eight essential structure (essence) narratives to explore the complex issue that plague the industry: make in India, made in India, preferential market access strategy, equitable market access strategy, blue ocean strategy, competitive positioning strategy, technical capability and importance of policy/regulatory arbitrage.
Practical implications
The situation of Indian electronics manufacturing units is comparable to the bonsai tree situation, where natural evolution in business stages does not exist; they are born and die as start-ups/MSMEs. The study advocates for equitable market access by removing market distortions. The long-term solution may lie in making available locally manufactured products as a dependable alternative to the imported products or produced locally by MNC OEMs in terms of cost, quality, technology, volume, after-sale service and integrated supply chain.
Originality/value
While the favorable FDI policies, digital India and make-in India initiatives have strengthened domestic electronics production, it is yet to significantly impact India's position in global trade, including manufacturing and exports.
International trade and capital flows are the key macroeconomic indicators of a country’s balance of payment, and they impact the real economy. This study estimates the long-run association between ...exports, imports, foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth since India’s economic reform in 1991 until 2019. Johansen multivariate cointegration method has been adopted to study this association and to develop long-run cointegration model. The augmented Dickey–Fuller test results show that variables are non-stationary at level and stationary at first difference. The cointegration model suggests a long-run relationship among GDP per person employed (GDPPE), exports, imports and FDI. The result shows that exports are the major determinant and positively influences the GDPPE whereas imports and FDI negatively influence GDPPE. The imports affect GDPPE more negatively than FDI. The vector error correction model finds long-run causality from GDPPE, exports and imports towards FDI and short-run causality from GDPPE towards FDI, imports towards FDI and GDPPE towards exports. The policy focus should be on export promotion and to closely watch the causal effect of labour productivity on FDI and exports, and imports on FDI.
Western democracies have become neoliberal with all the disproportions of economic and political power that have emerged in capitalist society. The power acquired in the free market not only deforms ...the integrity of society and economic and political balance, but also it has become virtually impossible for democracy as a form of government to exist. As the scale of the free market became global, the economic entity has also gone global creating disproportions that have led Western democracies to be ruled by economic entities rather than political ones. However, proper education, the use of new economic decentralisation trends, changing the role of politicians and the activity of citizens, and emerging new possibilities of digital democracy give us a glimpse of how to use the opportunities of the free market for strengthening democracies. At the same time, the reforms that have taken place in China in recent years have paradoxically shown that neoliberalism can also have positive aspects for society, which, as a new balance of economic and political capital, can be applied in the West as well.
Employing data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), the paper empirically examines the relation between husband’s dominance in family affairs and wife’s marital satisfaction. While applying ...the ordinal probit model and ordinary least squares (OLS) method, the paper finds that wife’s reported marital satisfaction is positively associated with her husband’s dominant role in family affairs. This conclusion remains valid after using an instrumental variable to deal with endogeneity and performing some robustness tests. Some heterogeneities exist: the association is particularly prominent among those women who have traditional gender norms and are living in rural areas. These women tend to embrace the traditional gender ideology which stipulates that men are the masters of the family.
How do leaders use external events or pressures as political levers to facilitate domestic reforms? In this article, we build a theory of aspirational politics to address this question. We show that ...aspirations to improve a country's international status can help leaders justify the implementation of their preferred domestic policies. For instance, the aspiration of wanting to join prestigious international organizations or agreements creates focal narratives that reformers can use to highlight the need to catch up and rhetorically constrain domestic actors who oppose reforms. We illustrate this mechanism through the Chinese leaders' counterintuitively positive statements towards the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) from 2013 to 2016. By framing the TPP as an aspiration through which China can enhance its international status, Chinese leaders were able to justify domestic economic reforms. Unlike conventional explanations, this was done without the onset of crises or actually signing the TPP. We substantiate this claim using evidence from computer-assisted text analysis of Chinese news coverage of the TPP from 2008-2018 (N = 10189) and process-tracing of the establishment of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone.
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