Sustainable economic development has played a major role in the decline of global poverty in the last two decades. There is no doubt that competitive markets are key drivers of economic growth and productivity. They are also valuable channels for consumer welfare. Competition policy is a powerful tool for complementing efforts to alleviate poverty and bring about shared prosperity. An effective competition policy involves measures that enable contestability and firm entry and rivalry while ensuring the enforcement of antitrust laws and state aid control. Governments from emerging and developing economies are increasingly requesting pragmatic solutions for effective competition policy implementation and recommendations for pro-competitive sectoral policies. This book puts forward a research agenda that advocates the importance of market competition, effective market regulation, and competition policies for achieving inclusive growth and shared prosperity in emerging and developing economies. It is the result of a global partnership and shared commitment between the World Bank Group and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The first half of the book brings together existing empirical evidence on the benefits of competition for household welfare. It covers the elimination of anticompetitive practices and regulations that restrict competition in key markets and highlights the effects of competition on small producers and on employment. In its second half, the book focuses on the distributional effects of competition policies and how enforcement can be better aligned with shared prosperity goals.

The global value chain approach to development looks at trends and lead firms in global industries juxtaposed to firm and industry performance in local economies to identify strategies for value creation and upgrading that increase prosperity and economic growth. The movement to higher-value-added activities and services improves competiveness with other socio-economic multiplier effects such as employment creation, foreign direct investment, rural development, human skills development, and economic growth and resilience. These studies are meant to provide an understanding of Caribbean firms and industries as they operate within the global value chain. They explore the strategies adopted by selected firms and industries to attain competitiveness in the context of global markets, discuss the strategies of leading global firms and analyse the local policy and institutional environment for business and how value is created to identify areas where upgrading at the local firm and industry level can take place to increase local value capture either by firm, industry or country.

Business firms around the world are experimenting with new organizational designs, changing their formal architectures, their routines and processes, and their corporate cultures as they seek to improve their current performance and their growth prospects. In the process they are changing the scope of their business operations, redrawing their organization charts, redefining the allocation of decision-making authority and responsibility, revamping the mechanisms for motivating and rewarding people, reconsidering which activities to conduct in-house and which to out-source, redesigning their information systems, and seeking to alter the shared beliefs, values and norms that their people hold.
In this book, John Roberts argues that there are predictable, necessary relationships among these changes that will improve performance and growth. The organizations that are successful will establish patterns of fit among the elements of their organizational designs, their competitive strategies and the external environment in which they operate and will go about this in a holistic manner.
The Modern Firm develops powerful conceptual frameworks for analyzing the interrelations between organizational design features, competitive strategy and the business environment. Written in a non-technical language, the book is nevertheless based on rigorous modeling and draws on numerous examples from eighteenth century fur trading companies to such modern firms such as BP and Nokia. Finally the book explores why these developments are happening now, pointing to the increase in global competition and changes in technology.
Written by one of the world's leading economists and experts that willimprove performance and growth. The organizations that are successful will establish patterns of fit among the elements of their organizational designs, their competitive strategies and the external environment in which they operate and will go about this in a holistic manner.

For all the turmoil that roiled financial markets during the Great Recession and its aftermath, Wall Street forecasts once again turned bullish and corporate profitability soared to unprecedented heights. How does capitalism consistently generate profits despite its vulnerability to destabilizing events that can plunge the global economy into chaos? The Great Levelerelucidates the crucial but underappreciated role of the law in regulating capitalism's rhythms of accumulation and growth. Brett Christophers argues that capitalism requires a delicate balance between competition and monopoly. When monopolistic forces become dominant, antitrust law steps in to discourage the growth of giant corporations and restore competitiveness. When competitive forces become dominant, intellectual property law steps in to protect corporate assets and encourage investment. These two sets of laws-antitrust and intellectual property-have a pincer effect on corporate profitability, ensuring that markets become neither monopolistic, which would lead to rent-seeking and stagnation, nor overly competitive, which would drive down profits. Christophers pursues these ideas through a close study of the historical development of American and British capitalist economies from the late nineteenth century to the present, tracing the relationship between monopoly and competition in each country and the evolution of legal mechanisms for keeping these forces in check. More than an illuminating study of the economic role of law, The Great Leveler is a bold and fresh dissection of the anatomy of modern capitalism.