Review of the economics of climate change (RECC) in the Caribbean project: Phase I climate change profiles in select Caribbean countries

These reports are the result of consultations which were conducted in 2008 in Aruba, Barbados, Netherlands Antilles, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago. The objective was to obtain relevant information that would inform a Stern-type report where the economics of climate change would be examined for the Caribbean subregion. These reports will be complimented by future assessments of the costs of the “business as usual”, adaptation and mitigation responses to the potential impacts of climate change. It is anticipated that the information contained in each country report would provide a detailed account of the environmental profile and would, therefore, provide an easy point of reference for policymakers in adapting existing policy or in formulating new ones. ECLAC continues to be available to the CDCC countries to provide technical support in the area of sustainable development.

Two and a Half Cheers for the Midwestern Bourgeoisie: Role of the Virtues in Tempering Business Decisions

A recent book (The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, D. N. McCloskey), raises the matter of the role of the virtues in business and economic choice, arguing that capitalism can indeed, be virtuous or at least better than the alternative(s). This argument is especially timely in light of the apparent excesses on Wall Street and in some banking/financial institutions. Excessive greed and often the lack of business ethics contributed in substantive ways to the financial crisis and near economic meltdown we have been experiencing. As McCloskey, (2006, pp. 1-2) argues (in setting the stage for the complex argument made in this 616-page book!): “The book … is directed toward you who are suspicious of the phrase ‘bourgeois virtues,’ pretty sure that it is a contradiction in terms. And the book is directed, with less optimism about changing their minds, toward you who think the phrase is worse: a lie. ‘Bourgeois virtues’ is neither. The claim here is that modern capitalism does not need to be offset to be good. Capitalism can on the contrary be virtuous. In a fallen world bourgeois life is not perfect. But it’s better than any available alternative. American capitalism needs to be inspirited, moralized, completed. Two and a half cheers for the Midwestern bourgeoisie (middle-class, small business owners…. yet)… Many a businessman is an ethical shell or worse. Even the virtues of the bourgeoisie, … do not lead straight to heaven.”

Business Clusters in Eastern Europe: Policy Analysis and Cluster Performance

Clusters have increasingly become an essential part of policy discourses at all levels, EU, national, regional, dealing with regional development, competitiveness, innovation, entrepreneurship, SMEs. These impressive efforts in promoting the concept of clusters on the policy-making arena have been accompanied by much less academic and scientific research work investigating the actual economic performance of firms in clusters, the design and execution of cluster policies and going beyond singular case studies to a more methodologically integrated and comparative approach to the study of clusters and their real-world impact. The theoretical background is far from being consolidated and there is a variety of methodologies and approaches for studying and interpreting this phenomenon while at the same time little comparability among studies on actual cluster performances. The conceptual framework of clustering suggests that they affect performance but theory makes little prediction as to the ultimate distribution of the value being created by clusters. This thesis takes the case of Eastern European countries for two reasons. One is that clusters, as coopetitive environments, are a new phenomenon as the previous centrally-based system did not allow for such types of firm organizations. The other is that, as new EU member states, they have been subject to the increased popularization of the cluster policy approach by the European Commission, especially in the framework of the National Reform Programmes related to the Lisbon objectives. The originality of the work lays in the fact that starting from an overview of theoretical contributions on clustering, it offers a comparative empirical study of clusters in transition countries. There have been very few examples in the literature that attempt to examine cluster performance in a comparative cross-country perspective. It adds to this an analysis of cluster policies and their implementation or lack of such as a way to analyse the way the cluster concept has been introduced to transition economies. Our findings show that the implementation of cluster policies does vary across countries with some countries which have embraced it more than others. The specific modes of implementation, however, are very similar, based mostly on soft measures such as funding for cluster initiatives, usually directed towards the creation of cluster management structures or cluster facilitators. They are essentially founded on a common assumption that the added values of clusters is in the creation of linkages among firms, human capital, skills and knowledge at the local level, most often perceived as the regional level. Often times geographical proximity is not a necessary element in the application process and cluster application are very similar to network membership. Cluster mapping is rarely a factor in the selection of cluster initiatives for funding and the relative question about critical mass and expected outcomes is not considered. In fact, monitoring and evaluation are not elements of the cluster policy cycle which have received a lot of attention. Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are the countries which have implemented cluster policies most decisively, Hungary and Poland have made significant efforts, while Slovakia and Romania have only sporadically and not systematically used cluster initiatives. When examining whether, in fact, firms located within regional clusters perform better and are more efficient than similar firms outside clusters, we do find positive results across countries and across sectors. The only country with negative impact from being located in a cluster is the Czech Republic.

Three Essays in Spatial Economics

This work contributes to the field of spatial economics by embracing three distinct modelling approaches, belonging to different strands of the theoretical literature. In the first chapter I present a theoretical model in which the changes in urban system’s degree of functional specialisation are linked to (i) firms’ organisational choices and firms’ location decisions. The interplay between firms’ internal communication/managing costs (between headquarters and production plants) and the cost of communicating with distant business services providers leads the transition process from an “integrated” urban system where each city hosts every different functions to a “functionally specialised” urban system where each city is either a primary business center (hosting advanced business services providers, a secondary business center or a pure manufacturing city and all this city-types coexist in equilibrium.The second chapter investigates the impact of free trade on welfare in a two-country world modelled as an international Hotelling duopoly with quadratic transport costs and asymmetric countries, where a negative environmental externality is associated with the consumption of the good produced in the smaller country. Countries’ relative sizes as well as the intensity of negative environmental externality affect potential welfare gains of trade liberalisation. The third chapter focuses on the paradox, by which, contrary to theoretical predictions, empirical evidence shows that a decrease in international transport costs causes an increase in foreign direct investments (FDIs). Here we propose an explanation to this apparent puzzle by exploiting an approach which delivers a continuum of Bertrand- Nash equilibria ranging above marginal cost pricing. In our setting, two Bertrand firms, supplying a homogeneous good with a convex cost function, enter the market of a foreign country. We show that allowing for a softer price competition may indeed more than offset the standard effect generated by a decrease in trade costs, thereby restoring FDI incentives.

Excellence in business teaching: A quick start guide. Book Review

The article reviews the book "Excellence in Business Teaching: A Quick Start Guide," by Ellen Auster, Tina Grant, and Krista Wylie.

The German business and information technologies project

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project strives to reveal new insights into how modern IT impacts organizational structures and business practices using empirical methods. Due to its international scope, it allows for inter-country comparison of empirical results. Germany — represented by the European School of Management and Technologies (ESMT) and the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — joined the BIT project in 2006. This report presents the result of the first survey conducted in Germany during November–December 2006. The key results are as follows: • The most widely adopted technologies and systems in Germany are websites, wireless hardware and software, groupware/productivity tools, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The biggest potential for growth exists for collaboration and portal tools, content management systems, business process modelling, and business intelligence applications. A number of technological solutions have not yet been adopted by many organizations but also bear some potential, in particular identity management solutions, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), biometrics, and third-party authentication and verification. • IT security remains on the top of the agenda for most enterprises: budget spending was increasing in the last 3 years. • The workplace and work requirements are changing. IT is used to monitor employees' performance in Germany, but less heavily compared to the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007).1 The demand for IT skills is increasing at all corporate levels. Executives are asking for more and better structured information and this, in turn, triggers the appearance of new decision-making tools and online technologies on the market. • The internal organization of companies in Germany is underway: organizations are becoming flatter, even though the trend is not as pronounced as in the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007), and the geographical scope of their operations is increasing. Modern IT plays an important role in enabling this development, e.g. telecommuting, teleconferencing, and other web-based collaboration formats are becoming increasingly popular in the corporate context. • The degree to which outsourcing is being pursued is quite limited with little change expected. IT services, payroll, and market research are the most widely outsourced business functions. This corresponds to the results from other countries. • Up to now, the adoption of e-business technologies has had a rather limited effect on marketing functions. Companies tend to extract synergies from traditional printed media and on-line advertising. • The adoption of e-business has not had a major impact on marketing capabilities and strategy yet. Traditional methods of customer segmentation are still dominating. The corporate identity of most organizations does not change significantly when going online. • Online sales channel are mainly viewed as a complement to the traditional distribution means. • Technology adoption has caused production and organizational costs to decrease. However, the costs of technology acquisition and maintenance as well as consultancy and internal communication costs have increased.

Enterprise software adoption and perceived business performance — an empirical investigation in Germany and the U.S.

This work contributes to the ongoing debate on the productivity paradox by considering CIOs’ perceptions of IT business value. Applying regression analysis to data from an international survey, we study how the adoption of certain types of enterprise software affects the CIOs’ perception of the impact of IT on the firm’s business activities and vice versa. Other potentially important factors such as country, sector and size of the firms are also taken into account. Our results indicate a more significant support for the impact of perceived IT benefits on adoption of enterprise software than vice versa. CIOs based in the US perceive IT benefits more strongly than their German counterparts. Furthermore, certain types of enterprise software seem to be more prevalent in the US.

Knowledge in software-maintenance outsourcing projects: beyond integration of business and technical knowledge

Knowledge processes are critical to outsourced software projects. According to outsourcing research, outsourced software projects succeed if they manage to integrate the client’s business knowledge and the vendor’s technical knowledge. In this paper, we submit that this view may not be wrong, but incomplete in a significant part of outsourced software work, which is software maintenance. Data from six software-maintenance outsourcing transitions indicate that more important than business or technical knowledge can be application knowledge, which vendor engineers acquire over time during practice. Application knowledge was the dominant knowledge during knowledge transfer activities and its acquisition enabled vendor staff to solve maintenance tasks. We discuss implications for widespread assumptions in outsourcing research.

Information Technology Outsourcing: Towards Sustainable Business Value

This book attempts to synthesize research that contributes to a better understanding of how to reach sustainable business value through information systems (IS) outsourcing. Important topics in this realm are how IS outsourcing can contribute to innovation, how it can be dynamically governed, how to cope with its increasing complexity through multi-vendor arrangements, how service quality standards can be met, how corporate social responsibility can be upheld, and how to cope with increasing demands of internationalization and new sourcing models, such as crowdsourcing and platform-based cooperation. These issues are viewed from either the client or vendor perspective, or both. The book should be of interest to all academics and students in the fields of Information Systems, Management, and Organization as well as corporate executives and professionals who seek a more profound analysis and understanding of the underlying factors and mechanisms of outsourcing.