Through a detailed case study of gold mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Disrupted Development in the Congo reveals the fragile foundations on which the African Mining Consensus rests. ...It documents how foreign mining corporations in the Congo have been prone to mismanagement and implicated in fuelling conflict and violence.
This book presents, compares, and develops various techniques for estimating market power - the ability to set price profitably above marginal cost - and strategies - the game-theoretic plans used by ...firms to compete with rivals. The authors start by examining static model approaches to estimating market power. They extend the analysis to dynamic models. Finally, they develop methods to estimate firms' strategies directly and examine how these strategies determine market power. A detailed technical appendix reviews the relevant information-theoretic and other econometric models that are used throughout. Questions and detailed answers for students and researchers are provided in the book for easy use.
While millions in China have been advantaged by three decades of reform, impressive gains have also produced social dislocation. Groups that had been winners under socialism find themselves losers in ...the new order. Based on field research in nine cities across China, this fascinating study considers the fate of one such group - 35 million workers laid off from the state-owned sector. The book explains why these lay-offs occurred, how workers are coping with unemployment, what actions the state is taking to provide them with livelihoods and re-employment, and what happens when workers mobilize collectively to pursue redress of their substantial grievances. What happens to these people, the remnants of the socialist working class, will be critical in shaping post-socialist politics and society in China and beyond.
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.
In Imposing Standards, Martin Hearson shifts the focus of political rhetoric regarding international tax rules from tax havens and the Global North to the damaging impact of this regime on the Global ...South. Even when not exploited by tax dodgers, international tax standards place severe limits on the ability of developing countries to tax businesses, denying the Global South access to much-needed revenue. The international rules that allow tax avoidance by multinational corporations have dominated political debate about international tax in the United States and Europe, especially since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008.Hearson asks how developing countries willingly gave up their right to tax foreign companies, charting their assimilation into an OECD-led regime from the days of early independence to the present day. Based on interviews with treaty negotiators, policymakers and lobbyists, as well as observation at intergovernmental meetings, archival research, and fieldwork in Africa and Asia, Imposing Standards shows that capacity constraints and imperfect negotiation strategies in developing countries were exploited by capital-exporting states, shielding multinationals from taxation and depriving nations in the Global South of revenue they both need and deserve.Thanks to generous funding from the Gates Foundation, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.
Innovation is generally viewed as something inherently good, a source of progress and prosperity in our society. But innovation can also have negative, unintended, and wasteful effects, if policies ...are misdirected and organizations pursue innovation to look good and convey a message, rather than to actually achieve improvements of technologies, services, and products. This book makes the case that innovation has become a buzzword, a political cure-all, and increasingly an empty phrase, and that this has become detrimental to innovation itself. Governmental (and supra-governmental) innovation policy is often unrealistically phrased and shaped, and corporate innovation projects are not seldom meaningless acts of window-dressing. The book describes the problems this presents for society, organizations, and individuals, and seeks explanations for why it has come to be this way. Giving way to a more realistic view of what innovation really is, and how it can be accomplished, the book develops a multifaceted sociological and historical argument where several complementary reasons for the prevalence of “empty innovation” are proposed. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability, and all those with an interest in the failures of current innovation strategies. This is an open access book.
This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Business, ICSOB 2023, which was held in Lahti, Finland, during November 27–29, 2023. The ...special theme of ICSOB 2023 was Digital Agility: Mastering Change in Software Business and Digital Services. The 27 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Requirements; software procurement; platforms, ecosystems and data; artificial intelligence; software startups; software product management; software and business co-development; and emerging digital world.
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