Healing wounds institutional strength, peacebuilding, and productive entrepreneurship – exploratory analysis on 23 departments of Colombia

Este estudio presenta un análisis exploratorio sobre la correlación entre la fortaleza institucional, las condiciones de paz, y el emprendimiento en una muestra de 23 departamentos en Colombia usando datos de 2014. Para llevar a cabo este objetivo se propusieron y construyeron tres índices siguiendo definiciones conceptuales seminales o estándares de evaluación internacional, a saber: 1) El Índice de Fortaleza Institucional, 2) El Índice de Construcción de Paz (construido a partir del índice de paz negativa y el índice de paz positiva) y 3) El Índice de Emprendimiento Productivo. Los resultados no muestran una correlación significativa entre todos los tres índices. Por un lado, existe una correlación significativa (p<0.05) entre los índices de fortaleza institucional y emprendimiento productivo. Por otro lado, existen correlaciones negativas no significativas entre los índices de paz positiva y fortaleza institucional, emprendimiento productivo y paz positiva y emprendimiento productivo y construcción de paz. En un segundo acercamiento, la población de los departamentos fue la variable con mayor número de correlaciones significativas (p<0.01) entre variables relacionadas con emprendimiento productivo, empleo, producto interno bruto, sofisticación industrial, innovación (patentes) y crimen. Finalmente, se discuten las conclusiones y las futuras investigaciones.

The impact of long-term brand development strategies on brand value of companies operating in high-technology markets

The objective of the current research is to investigate brand value generation. The study is conducted in the context of high-technology companies. The research aims at finding the impact of long-term brand development strategies, including advertising investments, R&D investments, R&D intensity, new products developed and design. The empirical part of the study incorporated collection of primary and secondary data on 36 companies operating in high-technology sector and being rated as top companies with the most valuable brands by Interbrand consultancy. The data contained information for six consequent years from 2008 to 2013. Obtained data was analyzed using the methods of fixed effect and random effect model (panel data analysis). The analysis showed positive effect of advertising and R&D investments on brand value of high-technology companies in the long run. The impact of remaining three strategies was not approved and further investigation is required.

Contracting Institutions and Development

The quality of contracting institutions has been thought to be of second-order importance next to the impact that good property rights institutions can have on long-run growth. Using a large range of proxies for each type of institution, we find a robust negative link between the quality of contracting institutions and long-run growth when we condition on property rights and a number of additional macroeconomic variables. Although the result remains something of a puzzle, we present evidence which suggests that only when property rights institutions are good do contracting institutions appear also to be good for development. Good contracting institutions can reduce long-run growth when property rights are not secured, presumably because the gains from the (costly) contracting institutions cannot be realised. This suggests that contracting institutions can benefit growth, and that the sequence of institutional change can matter.

Institutions, Property Rights, and Economic Development in Historical Perspective

Institutions, and more speci cally private property rights, have come to be seen as a major determinant of long-run economic development. We evaluate the case for property rights as an explanatory factor of the Industrial Revolution and derive some lessons for the analysis of developing countries today. We pay particular attention to the role of property rights in the accumulation of physical capital and the production of new ideas. The evidence that we review from the economic history literature does not support the institutional thesis.

Development and Consequences of Referendum Campaigns in Switzerland, 1981-1999

Since the early 1990s, new forms of referendum campaigns have emerged in the Swiss political arena. In this paper, we examine how referendum campaigns have transformed in Switzerland, focusing on a number of features: their intensity, duration and inclusiveness (i.e., the variety of actors involved). These features are assumed to change in the long run in response to societal changes and in the short run as a function of variations in elite support. We further argue that public knowledge of ballot issues depends on the characteristics of campaigns. To formally test our hypotheses, we draw on advertisement campaigns in six major Swiss newspapers in the four weeks preceding each ballot from 1981 to 1999 and develop a structural equation model. We indeed find that the duration of referendum campaigns has increased over time, while their inclusiveness has decreased. Most importantly, we find that pub­lic knowledge is strongly related to the characteristics of campaigns

Passive modernization? the new human development index and its components in Italy’s regions (1871-2007)

The article presents and discusses estimates of social and economic indicators for Italy’s regions in benchmark years roughly from Unification to the present day: life expectancy, education, GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, and the new Human Development Index (HDI). A broad interpretative hypothesis, based on the distinction between passive and active modernization, is proposed to account for the evolution of regional imbalances over the long-run. In the lack of active modernization, Southern Italy converged thanks to passive modernization, i.e., State intervention: however, this was more effective in life expectancy, less successful in education, expensive and as a whole ineffective in GDP. As a consequence, convergence in the HDI occurred from the late XIX century to the 1970s, but came to a sudden halt in the last decades of the XX century.

Financial Development, Financial Fragility, and Growth

This paper studies the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private domestic credit and liquid liabilities (e.g., Levine, Loayza, and Beck 2000). On the other hand, the banking and currency crisis literature finds that monetary aggregates, such as domestic credit, are among the best predictors of crises and their related economic downturns (e.g., Kaminski and Reinhart 1999). The paper accounts for these contrasting effects based on the distinction between the short- and long-run impacts of financial intermediation. Working with a panel of cross-country and time-series observations, the paper estimates an encompassing model of short- and long-run effects using the Pooled Mean Group estimator developed by Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (1999). The conclusion from this analysis is that a positive long-run relationship between financial intermediation and output growth co-exists with a, mostly, negative short-run relationship. The paper further develops an explanation for these contrasting effects by relating them to recent theoretical models, by linking the estimated short-run effects to measures of financial fragility (namely, banking crises and financial volatility), and by jointly analyzing the effects of financial depth and fragility in classic panel growth regressions.

Civil conflict and human capital accumulation: The long-term effects of political violence in Perú

This paper provides empirical evidence of the persistent effect of exposure to political violence on humancapital accumulation. I exploit the variation in conflict location and birth cohorts to identify the longandshort-term effects of the civil war on educational attainment. Conditional on being exposed toviolence, the average person accumulates 0.31 less years of education as an adult. In the short-term,the effects are stronger than in the long-run; these results hold when comparing children within thesame household. Further, exposure to violence during early childhood leads to permanent losses. I alsoexplore the potential causal mechanisms.

Financial development, financial fragility and growth

This paper studies the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private domestic credit and liquid liabilities (e.g., Levine, Loayza, and Beck 2000). On the other hand, the banking and currency crisis literature finds that monetary aggregates, such as domestic credit, are among the best predictors of crises and their related economic downturns (e.g., Kaminski and Reinhart 1999). The paper accounts for these contrasting effects based on the distinction between the short- and long-run impacts of financial intermediation. Working with a panel of cross-country and time-series observations, the paper estimates an encompassing model of short- and long-run effects using the Pooled Mean Group estimator developed by Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (1999). The conclusion from this analysis is that a positive long-run relationship between financial intermediation and output growth co-exists with a, mostly, negative short-run relationship. The paper further develops an explanation for these contrasting effects by relating them to recent theoretical models, by linking the estimated short-run effects to measures of financial fragility(namely, banking crises and financial volatility), and by jointly analyzing the effects of financial depth and fragility in classic panel growth regressions.

Complexity Optimization in Product Development with Modularization

A company’s competence to manage its product portfolio complexity is becoming critically important in the rapidly changing business environment. The continuous evolvement of customer needs, the competitive market environment and internal product development lead to increasing complexity in product portfolios. The companies that manage the complexity in product development are more profitable in the long run. The complexity derives from product development and management processes where the new product variant development is not managed efficiently. Complexity is managed with modularization which is a method that divides the product structure into modules. In modularization, it is essential to take into account the trade-off between the perceived customer value and the module or component commonality across the products. Another goal is to enable the product configuration to be more flexible. The benefits are achieved through optimizing complexity in module offering and deriving the new product variants more flexibly and accurately. The developed modularization process includes the process steps for preparation, mapping the current situation, the creation of a modular strategy and implementing the strategy. Also the organization and support systems have to be adapted to follow-up targets and to execute modularization in practice.

Education and development projects in Brazil (1932-2004): political economy perspective

This paper discusses the long-run history of education policies in Brazil. It is suggested that the main reason for the educational backwardness was the existence of strong political interests over education. It is also defended that these interests can be empirically observed in the allocation of public resources between the different levels of education, with political choices favouring specific groups in society. It was not a matter of lack of investment in education, but of inadequate allocation of resources. This pattern of political-based policies created a strong negative path dependence of misallocation of resources in education in Brazil, particularly with significant underinvestment in secondary education.

Development of Total Quality Management System in Seafood (Freezing) Industry in Kerala

Quality related problems have become dominant in the seafood processing industry in Kerala. This has resulted in the rejection of seafood sent from India to many destinations. The latest being the total block listing of seafood companies from India from being exported to Europe and partial block listing by the US. The quality systems prevailed in the seafood industry in India were outdated and no longer in use in the developed world. According to EC Directive discussed above all the seafood factories exporting to European countries have to adopt HACCP. Based on this, EIA has now made HACCP system mandatory in all the seafood processing factories in India. This transformation from a traditional product based inspection system to a process control system requires thorough changes in the various stages of production and quality management. This study is conducted by the author with to study the status of the existing infrastructure and quality control system in the seafood industry in Kerala with reference to the recent developments in the quality concepts in international markets and study the drawbacks, if any, of the existing quality management systems in force in the seafood factories in Kerala for introducing the mandatory HACCP concept. To assess the possibilities of introducing Total Quality Management system in the seafood industry in Kerala in order to effectively adopt the HACCP concept. This is also aimed at improving the quality of the products and productivity of the industry by sustaining the world markets in the long run.

Migration and Spatial Development

This is an empirical study with theoretical interpretation and elaboration simultaneously on the migration process and the related spatial development in contemporary China. In so doing, there is always a combination of series of studies of the modernization of the migrants themselves with accumulation of forms of capital and changes of lebenswelt (life world) as well as the regions of their origins by the effective use of the gained resources from outgoing migration and remigration. With great efforts made to put the issues together for analysis, the author has taken three approaches to the study based on the political and economic institutional arrangements, the field work data and the elaboration of respective findings. First, as the analytical parts of the institutional changes, which have gone through the whole research, many of the policies from state level to townships involved in the migration, remigration and spatial development have been interpreted with Chinese political and cultural insight. The making of these, as the means of understanding the contexts of macro level and micro level cases is served as key linkages between scholarly imagination and social reality. Indeed most of the discussions made to explain the phenomena such as the sudden upsurge of migration flows, the emergence of three generations, the strong and weak trends of remigration as well as the related spatial development planning, etc are mainly due to the domination, at least the impact of governments decision-making in spite of growing market functioning in often operative manners. Secondly, case studies of the effects of migration and remigration are carried out between the years of 1995 and 2005 in the costal urban regions as designations and the interior rural regions as origins. Conducted mainly by the author, the cases drawn in the research focus on the process of migration with an accumulation of forms of capital away from home and the effective use of the resources flowing back to home areas. As a result, ways of accumulation and utilization of the economic, social and cultural capital are described and interpreted in terms of the development and modernization of both the migrants themselves and the regions where they come out from or move to in the future. Thirdly, in accordance with the findings generated from the cases, the author proposes in the final chapter an important argumentation as conclusion that the duel social-economic structure will inevitably be broken up and reformulated with flows of migrants and forms of capital they possess as types of future spatial development that will be put into practice. With scenarios and all the other conclusions worked out in the end, the research concludes that the pluralistic spatial development in the condition of constant space flows between regions can be a decisive line of thinking in the process of urbanization, industrialization and modernization in the long run in the future. Since this is an exploratory study of the past and present, the author has left some space open for academic debates and put forward suggestions on the inclusion of future research before implementing policies necessary for migration associated spatial practice and development.

Conceptual Product Development in Small Corporations

The main objective of the thesis “Conceptual Product Development in Small Corporations” is by the use of a case study test the MFD™-method (Erixon G. , 1998) combined with PMM in a product development project. (Henceforth called MFD™/PMM-method). The MFD™/PMM-method used for documenting and controlling a product development project has since it was introduced been used in several industries and projects. The method has been proved to be a good way of working with the early stages of product development, however, there are almost only projects carried out on large industries which means that there are very few references to how the MFD™/PMM-method works in a small corporation. Therefore, was the case study in the thesis “Conceptual Product Development in Small Corporations” carried out in a small corporation to find out whether the MFD™/PMM-method also can be applied and used in such a corporation.The PMM was proposed in a paper presented at Delft University of Technology in Holland 1998 by the author and Gunnar Erixon. (See appended paper C: The chart of modular function deployment.) The title “The chart of modular function deployment” was later renamed as PMM, Product Management Map. (Sweden PreCAD AB, 2000). The PMM consists of a QFD-matrix linked to MIM (Module Indication Matrix) via a coupling matrix which makes it possible to make an unbroken chain from the customer domain to the designed product/modules. The PMM makes it easy to correct omissions made in creating new products and modules.In the thesis “Conceptual Product Development in Small Corporations” the universal MFD™/PMM-method has been adapted by the author to three models of product development; original-, evolutionary- and incremental development.The evolutionary adapted MFD™/PMM-method was tested as a case study at Atlings AB in the community Ockelbo. Atlings AB is a small corporation with a total number of 50 employees and an annual turnover of 9 million €. The product studied at the corporation was a steady rest for supporting long shafts in turning. The project team consisted of management director, a sales promoter, a production engineer, a design engineer and a workshop technician, the author as team leader and a colleague from Dalarna University as discussion partner. The project team has had six meetings.The project team managed to use MFD™ and to make a complete PMM of the studied product. There were no real problems occurring in the project work, on the contrary the team members worked very well in the group, having ideas how to improve the product. Instead, the challenge for a small company is how to work with the MFD™/PMM-method in the long run! If the MFD™/PMM-method is to be a useful tool for the company it needs to be used continuously and that requires financial and personnel resources. One way for the company to overcome the probable lack of recourses regarding capital and personnel is to establish a good cooperation with a regional university or a development centre.

Modeling and forecasting long-term natural gas (NG) consumption in Iran, using particle swarm optimization (PSO)

The gradual changes in the world development have brought energy issues back into high profile. An ongoing challenge for countries around the world is to balance the development gains against its effects on the environment. The energy management is the key factor of any sustainable development program. All the aspects of development in agriculture, power generation, social welfare and industry in Iran are crucially related to the energy and its revenue. Forecasting end-use natural gas consumption is an important Factor for efficient system operation and a basis for planning decisions. In this thesis, particle swarm optimization (PSO) used to forecast long run natural gas consumption in Iran. Gas consumption data in Iran for the previous 34 years is used to predict the consumption for the coming years. Four linear and nonlinear models proposed and six factors such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Population, National Income (NI), Temperature, Consumer Price Index (CPI) and yearly Natural Gas (NG) demand investigated.