Growth of the Firm and Economic Backwardness: A Case Study and Analysis of China's Mobile Handset Industry

Economic backwardness often influences the growth of firms in developing countries. In this paper, we investigate the growth conditions and paths available for latecomers competing with first movers. Employing the concepts of boundaries of the firm and the disadvantage of backwardness, we present a case study of China's mobile handset industry and proceed to develop a simple model. We find that although significant disadvantage does not allow latecomers to grow, there are possibilities for changing the conditions of growth if latecomers can utilize outside resources and/or indigenous advantages.

Restoration of micro data of John Lossing Buck's survey and analysis of the inverse relationship between yield and farm size in rural China in the 1930's

A large scale Chinese agricultural survey was conducted at the direction of John Lossing Buck from 1929 through 1933. At the end of the 1990’s, some parts of the original micro data of Buck’s survey were discovered at Nanjing Agricultural University. An international joint study was begun to restore micro data of Buck’s survey and construct parts of the micro database on both the crop yield survey and special expenditure survey. This paper includes a summary of the characteristics of farmlands and cropping patterns in crop yield micro data that covered 2,102 farmers in 20 counties of 9 provinces. In order to test the classical hypothesis of whether or not an inverse relationship between land productivity and cultivated area may be observed in developing countries, a Box-Cox transformation test was conducted for functional forms on five main crops of Buck’s crop yield survey. The result of the test shows that the relationship between land productivity and cultivated areas of wheat and barley is linear and somewhat negative; those of rice, rapeseed, and seed cotton appear to be slightly positive. It can be tentatively concluded that the relationship between cultivated area and land productivity are not the same among crops, and the difference of labor intensity and the level of commercialization of each crop may be strongly related to the existence or non-existence of inverse relationships.

Broadband Channel Long Delay Cluster Measurements and Analysis at 2.4GHz in Subway Tunnels

The delay caused by the reflected ray in broadband communication has a great influence on the communications in subway tunnel. This paper presents measurements taken in subway tunnels at 2.4 GHz, with 5 MHz bandwidth. According to propagation characteristics of tunnel, the measurements were carried out with a frequency domain channel sounding technique, in three typical scenarios: line of sight (LOS), Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) and far line of sight (FLOS), which lead to different delay distributions. Firstly IFFT was chosen to get channel impulse response (CIR) h(t) from measured three-dimensional transfer functions. Power delay profile (PDP) was investigated to give an overview of broadband channel model. Thereafter, a long delay caused by the obturation of tunnel is observed and investigated in all the scenarios. The measurements show that the reflection can be greatly remained by the tunnel, which leads to long delay cluster where the reflection, but direct ray, makes the main contribution for radio wave propagation. Four important parameters: distribution of whole PDP power, first peak arriving time, reflection cluster duration and PDP power distribution of reflection cluster were studied to give a detailed description of long delay characteristic in tunnel. This can be used to ensure high capacity communication in tunnels