Research and policy circles often emphasize the importance of social capital in achieving social transformation and economic development. There is also, however, potentially a ‘dark side’ to social ...capital. This study investigates the relationship between two different types of social capital—structural and cognitive—using two different measures of political violence: self-reported support for political violence and self-reported participation in political violence. We theorized that cognitive social capital will facilitate social cohesion within a community, enabling particularized trust between neighbours and a shared identity. On the other hand, structural social capital, or associational membership, potentially facilitates the diffusion of grievances and facilitates collective mobilization. Accordingly, we predict that higher levels of structural social capital will be associated with support for and participation in political violence, whilst higher levels of cognitive social capital will be associated with less support for and participation in political violence. We then test these predictions using Afrobarometer data on 40,455 individuals living in 27 African countries. Multivariate regression analysis confirms that indicators of structural and cognitive social capital have contrasting relationships with support for and participation in political violence. While particularized trust and national identity are negatively associated with political violence, religious and community associational membership are positively associated with political violence. In addition, we find that strength of attachment to a social identity, regardless of whether to an ethnic or national identity, is an important indicator of political violence.
Energy efficiency is a foundation of any good energy policy. The economic, security, and environmental benefits of energy efficiency have been recognized for decades. We explore energy efficiency ...investments derived from survey work in developing countries in 119 projects across nine manufacturing subsectors. The methodology utilizes financial return calculations to highlight gaps and opportunities for meeting the potential of energy efficiency projects in the manufacturing sector. We find a generally very high level of internal rates of return at a project level—with payback periods ranging from 0.9 to 2.9 years; but note that these metrics do not always appropriately influence corporate decision-making for a number of well-understood reasons.
This article contends that industrialization and its associated structural transformation is an engine of economic growth and a major source of employment generation. By reallocating resources to ...more productive manufacturing activities, industrialization accelerates and sustains economies’ rate of growth. By increasing the demand for labour, economic growth in turn generates employment. Manufacturing employment has been growing since 1970 and by 2017 the world should have around 500 million manufacturing jobs, most of them created in the developing world. The observed reduction in manufacturing employment and growth in developed countries is seen as the result from them losing manufacturing and industrial innovation capabilities.
This book highlights the continuous relevance of industrial development and industrial policy in countries' development strategies. In the early post-war years it seemed that the recipe for ...development was a relatively straightforward one. Countries had to achieve structural change, shifting resources from agriculture to industry. Success in manufacturing was considered to be the key to economic development. Some countries have achieved economic success in this fashion. They started out with labour-intensive manufacturing invested heavily in human and physical capital accumulation. In due course they also achieved technological upgrading and succeeded as industrial exporters. In the course of two generations, some countries have transformed themselves from low-income to high-income economies. What about the prospects for the future? The research here implies that manufacturing will continue to be important in the 21st century. This is the case in Brazil, China, and India and in a great variety of countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. There is also a rediscovery of the importance of manufacturing in the advanced service economies. There are many reasons for this: technological progress, economies of scale and scope, learning and industrial innovation in industrial activities. The importance of the many inter-sectoral linkages in industry is crucial in terms of the development of human capital. Industry is characterized by numerous knowledge spillovers both upstream and downstream in terms of research, skills, and the continuous upgrading of inputs ranging from raw materials, equipment to services. Industry will continue to play a key role in most countries' development.
Theories of ethnic conflict predict that between-group inequality should be associated with a greater likelihood of violent conflict, but empirical results have been mixed. One reason might be that ...different types of inequalities have opposing effects on the likelihood of conflict. In this article, we posit that educational inequalities are likely to incentivize collective action by inducing grievances, while economic and demographic inequalities may actually dis-incentivize collective action by limiting opportunities for disadvantaged groups to engage in rebellion. We test these hypotheses on a new ethnic dyad database, incorporating 1,548 dyads formed by 290 ethnic groups living in 29 Sub-Saharan African countries. The analysis reveals that educational inequalities are indeed positively associated with conflict incidence, while this is not the case for economic and demographic inequalities. The association between educational inequality and conflict is stronger if the groups are wealthier. A higher joint educational level of the groups is associated with less conflict, particularly under more autocratic regimes. These findings demonstrate that to better understand the relationship between inequality and conflict, it is important to disaggregate the effects of inequalities according to the underlying mechanisms and the political context with which they are associated.
The literature on political exclusion and conflict tends to treat grievance-based mechanisms with broad-brush strokes and does not differentiate between types of political exclusion. This study ...disaggregates politically-excluded groups into two subgroups: groups that experience political discrimination from the state, and groups without political power that are not explicitly discriminated against. We posit that discriminated groups are more likely to experience grievances and therefore are more prone to conflict than excluded groups that are not actively discriminated against. We further posit that the effect of discrimination on conflict is moderated by interactions with economic inequalities and the share of elites. Using dyadic data for 155 ethnic groups in 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, we find that among politically-excluded groups it is indeed discriminated groups that are responsible for most of the association between political exclusion and conflict. Groups that face active, intentional, and targeted discrimination by the state are significantly more likely to be involved in conflict than excluded groups who do not face this explicit form of discrimination. Additionally, we find that discriminated groups who also experience economic inequalities are less likely to engage in conflict, whilst an increased presence of elites within discriminated groups can precipitate the chances of conflict.
This paper investigates the influence of human resource management practices on the likelihood that a firm performs in-house R&D. R&D is broadly interpreted as learning—a mechanism promoting ...absorptive capacity and supporting technology capability-building. Firms can choose between two learning strategies: they can exploit existing knowledge, or perform more complex explorations and acquire new knowledge. Different knowledge requirements associate with distinct R&D outcomes with varying degrees of novelty for the firm. Findings are supported with evidence from the pharmaceutical industry in Mexico. The analysis reveals positive linkages between human resource management practices and learning at firm level. The relationship is contingent on factors such as expected R&D outcomes, or the novelty of the knowledge required by the firm. The provision of training revealed the more consistent, positive influence on the likelihood that pharmaceuticals firms perform R&D in Mexico.
This paper explores and measures the knowledge generation process through identifying and examining the latent factor structure of the individual, managerial and cognitive dimensions of knowledge ...generation and investigating how these factors may relate to each other and to product innovation in the context of firms in China. We applied exploratory factor analysis and conducted a survey in Jiangsu province which is a main location of manufacturing activity and a large recipient of investment in science and technology in China. We found that individual and managerial factors included individual depth of knowledge, organizational commitment, academic orientation and managerial features, while cognitive factors involved developing a global and local knowledge base and engaging in imitative, embodied and/or minimalist learning strategies. The study also uncovered close associations between the depth of knowledge of individuals and their ability to develop a global knowledge base and between a minimalist learning strategy and the existence of a local knowledge base.
This paper examines the National Systems of Innovation (NSI) of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries and attempts to assess their performances. Although it points out at a number of specific ...successes, overall, the region's NSI have evolved since their inception in the 1950s into weak entities. Science and technology institutions and organisations are not fully performing an enabling role; links and interactions between government support organisations, businesses and academia are tenuous; investment in intangibles and human capital is low; and, public policy is only partially effective. The main result of such weakness is that LAC countries' innovative performance has, as measured by the index of the technological specialisation (ITS) which relates the world's normalised shares of high- to low-tech exports, with the only exception perhaps of Mexico, remained stagnant or has fallen and has lost relatively to many countries that started at similar levels twenty years ago.
This paper argues that both old and new economic regimes in Latin America only partially ensured the successful diffusion of machine tools in the region. Import-substitution policies focused on ...suppliers, with resulting advances in domestic imitative, adaptive and innovating capabilities, but at high cost for users in expensive and technically inferior machine tools. The New Economic Model (NEM) focus on the user has provided wider availability and lower price of technologies, with resulting increases in productivity and efficiency, but domestic suppliers cannot establish themselves nor make the technologically crucial jump into the electronics era. The paper suggests an approach focusing on the joint upgrading of users and suppliers, and proposes policy initiatives aimed at addressing market failure and “systemic” issues.
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