This book is the first of the two volumes featuring selected articles from the 14th Eurasia Business and Economics conference held in Barcelona, Spain, in October 2014. Peer-reviewed articles in this first volume present latest research breakthroughs in the areas of Accounting, Corporate Governance, Finance and Banking, Institutional and International Economics, and Regional Studies. The contributors are both distinguished and young scholars from different parts of the World.

The book offers a detailed introduction to contemporary Chinese culture industry development. It starts with an analysis of the historical aspects and the contextual background rooted in the Reform & Opening-up policy. The second part discusses the development from the perspective of reality and introduces the different production modes for the country's most influential culture industries, since these are a unique feature of culture industry development in China. Lastly, the book clearly shows the strengths and weaknesses of culture industry development in China by comparing it with that of other countries against the backdrop of globalization.

Foreword by Prof. Kaushik Basu This book traces the development experience of one of India's most dynamic and prosperous states, Punjab, which has provided the country with a much-needed degree of food security. The relative regression of Punjab's economy in the post-economic reforms period and slow current economic growth give cause for concern. The contributions in this book address the question of why the structural transformation of Punjab's economy has fallen into the middle-income trap. Each investigates the policy constraints influencing the relative stagnation of the economy and suggests appropriate measures for alleviating them. By integrating theoretical constructs and new evidence, the authoritative contributions diagnose the nature of the current problems and offer practical solutions. They cover important issues such as the crisis of agrarian transition, agrarian markets and distributive justice, employment growth and transition to non-agriculture sectors, fiscal policy, external factors in economic transformation, and perspectives on rejuvenating the state's economy.

Before the interstates, Main Street America was the small town's commercial spine and served as the linchpin for community social solidarity. Yet, during the past three decades, a series of economic downturns has left many of the great small cities barely viable. American Hometown Renewal is the first book to combine administrative, budgetary, and economic analysis to examine the economic and fiscal plight currently facing America's small towns. Featuring a blend of theory, applications, and case studies, it provides a comprehensive, single-source textbook covering the key issues facing small town officials in today's uncertain economy. Written by a former public manager, university professor, and consultant to numerous small towns in the Heartland, this book demonstrates the ways in which contemporary small towns throughout the nation are facing economic challenges brought about by the financial shocks that began in 2008. Each chapter explores a theme related to small town revival and provides a related tool or technique to enable small town officials to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. Encouraging local small town officials to look at the economic orbit of communities in a similar manner as a town's budget or a family's personal wealth, examining its specific competitive advantages in terms of relative assets to those of competing communities, this book provides the reader with step-by-step instructions on how to conduct an asset inventory and apply key asset tools to devise a strategy for overcoming the challenges and constraints imposed upon spatially-fixed communities. American Hometown Renewal is an essential primer for students studying city management, economic community development, and city planning, and will be a trusted handbook for city managers, geographers, city planners, urban or rural sociologists, political scientists, and regional microeconomists.

The future for all the nations of the world, whether diverse- or single-commodity countries, is bound up in effective economic development. In particular, an understanding of the relationship between a government and its private business sector is becoming an increasingly important factor in the management of economic growth. This work presents the results of a study that focuses on efforts to stimulate private industrial investment in the manufacturing sector of the Saudi Arabian economy. The conclusions help to shed light on the interplay of government-business relationships not only in Saudi Arabia, but in other developing countries as well.

The study, conducted in 1986, included a series of interviews with manufacturing executives, government officials, and chamber of commerce members. Wahib Soufi and Richard Mayer begin their analysis with an overview of government and business in Saudi Arabia, assessing the role played by Islamic law and the need for diversification. They follow this by sketching a conceptual framework for examining government-business relationships, and outlining issues relevant to promoting industrial development. A set of three chapters explore the results of the survey data, detailing the perceptions of the Saudi private business sector, comparing business and government perceptions, and finally, evaluating the effect of communications, expectations, and perceptions on the government-business relationship. The concluding chapter reexamines these conclusions on the basis of information available three years after the initial study, and is followed by a selective bibliography. This important study will be a valuable resource for corporate managers and government officials involved in economic planning, and a useful reference tool for college courses in business and economic policy and for public and academic libraries.

International organizations do not always live up to the expectations and mandates of their member countries. One of the best examples of this gap is the environmental performance of multilateral development banks, which are tasked with allocating and managing approximately half of all development assistance worldwide. In the 1980s and 1990s, the multilateral development banks came under severe criticism for financing projects that caused extensive deforestation, polluted large urban areas, displaced millions of people, and destroyed valuable natural resources. In response to significant and public failures, member countries established or strengthened administrative procedures, citizen complaint mechanisms, project evaluation, and strategic planning processes. All of these reforms intended to close the gap between the mandates and performance of the multilateral development banks by shaping the way projects are approved. Giving Aid Effectively provides a systematic examination of whether these efforts have succeeded in aligning allocation decisions with performance. Mark T. Buntaine argues that the most important way to give aid effectively is selectivity - moving towards projects with a record of success and away from projects with a record of failure for individual recipient countries. This book shows that under certain circumstances, the control mechanisms established to close the gap between mandate and performance have achieved selectivity. Member countries prompt the multilateral development banks to give aid more effectively when they generate information about the outcomes of past operations and use that information to make less successful projects harder to approve or more successful projects easier to approve. This argument is substantiated with the most extensive analysis of evaluations across four multilateral development banks ever completed, together with in-depth case studies and dozens of interviews. More generally, Giving Aid Effectively demonstrates that member countries have a number of mechanisms that allow them to manage international organizations for results.

This book uses electricity-sector reforms to question some of the preconceived ideas concerning the MENA region and to provide a broader analysis of related political economy issues. It presents potential further developments of MENA's electricity-sector reforms, taking into consideration the region's unique constraints and opportunities, and discusses the practical limits of reform and deregulation. Specifically, it examines the relationship between reforms and oil prices from a new perspective and presents alternatives to the Single Buyer Model. Complementing existing research on electricity-sector reforms in other emerging markets, the book provides a new analytical framework for assessing reforms that can be easily applied to other markets and sectors.

In recent years much has been made of the sucess of developing countries, particularly in East Asia, which have achieved economic growth by manufacturing goods which are then exported to developing economies.
"Manufacturing for Export in the Developing" "World" looks at a number of countries which have tried to affect a similar transition. It combines case studies of five countries with an introduction that considers the overall contact and conclusions. The book uncovers serious potential difficulties in maintaining the pace of manufacturing for export in the developing countries, and shows that there is no simple relationship between import liberalization and manufacturing for export.

Kofi Abrefa Busia (1914–1978), born a member of the royal house of Wenchi, Ghana was a Ghanaian political leader and sociologist. He was a scholar by inclination and temperament and symbolized the dilemma of the intellectual in politics – the man of thought forced by events to become the man of action. These three volumes, originally published between 1962 and 1967, reissued here together for the first time, each with new introductory material, were all written in exile, and contemplate the continent of Africa undergoing rapid social transformation. Together they act as testimonials to the importance of, and difficulty in, implementing democratic traditions. In these works Busia considered the centrality of traditional African ideologies and practices and the institutions they supported, to comprehend the influence of native institutions and systems of thought on the modern national state and to reflect on their continuing role in creating a healthy democratic environment. The principles he taught continue to live on in the influences he made on African studies in general and Ghanaian politics in particular to the extent that his name had become a shorthand for the establishment of free Democratic traditions in Ghana today.

Why has the United States established a new technology transfer regime, and how does it actually perform? Lee and his contributors see it as a set of new game rules in which government, industry, and the academic community are allowed--authorized, in fact--to interact and collaborate toward the goal of successful technological innovation. Their book--thus far unique in its field--reports on the empirical research that examines how various independent components of the system interact and collaborate. In doing so the authors provide data and information on which policy assumptions are valid and which aren't, which rules are helpful and which are hindrances, and how the various players in this game assess its future. The result is an important contribution to the literature that explores the interface of business, government, and society--essential reading not only for academics, but also for corporate management concerned with business strategy and policy.

Lee and the contributors point out that as technologies grow in complexity, companies often target their internal resources on core competencies and utilize outside sources for supporting knowledge or technology. As universities step into the marketplace, trying to make money through aggressive commercialization of their intellectual property, they face conflict of interest problems within their walls, as well as complex and often unfathomable intellectual property negotiations with the corporations with whom they deal. Their third major point is that with declining R&D budgets but increasingly tough competition, American faculty members are troubled by the collision of two powerful but not necessarily complementary motives: the need for external funding for research and the need to preserve academic freedom and intellectual autonomy. How these issues and problems are dealt with is carefully and readably explored in this volume, which will contribute significantly to the ongoing debate.

Bringing the analysis of Brazil's economic performance up to date, Baer's classic text remains the only book in English to provide a thorough historical, statistical, and institutional description of the Brazilian economy. After touching on such issues as Brazil's exporting economy prior to the 1930s, the impact of external shocks, and the historical struggle to bring inflation under control, the book turns to contemporary issues. The changing nature of Brazil's international trading and investment links, the past role of state enterprises and the process of privatization, the agricultural sector, environmental issues, and the economics of the health delivery system are thoroughly examined.

Offering a full statistical and institutional description of Brazil's economy, this book includes a review of the major controversies surrounding such issues as the high degree of concentration in the country's income distribution, the causes of inflation, the impact of various stabilization programs, and the influences of the state in the economy. Scholars, students, international institutions dealing with development, and corporate officers dealing with Latin America will welcome this up-to-date, definitive book on one of the world's largest economies.

This book discusses the use, economic importance and impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in public and private Sudanese universities. The author provides an in-depth analysis of the economic impact of ICT from the demand perspective as well as from the public-private perspective. This book also examines the status, pattern, structure, trend and determinants of the demand for ICT in public and private Sudanese universities. It investigates the economic impacts of the uses of ICT, the potential opportunities and challenges that ICT is expected to create for public and private Sudanese universities, and explains the role of ICT in facilitating the production, creation and transfer of knowledge in Sudanese universities.

The study presents archival evidence to show how President Kaunda raised political and economic exclusivity in Zambia in the early years of Zambia's independence, and how this retarded capital investment. Despite formal reforms and a new government, this institutional mechanism still dominates and constrains Zambia's political economy today.

The disintegration of the former Soviet Union, the end of the cold war and the trend of economic developmental "miracles" in disparate regions of the globe have brought a vast transformation to the political, economic, and security configurations of the world. Gone is the bipolar world of superpower rivalry, replaced by new international patterns and trends.

Nowhere is the transformation more striking than in East and Southeast Asia, the region which includes China, Japan, the "four tigers" of Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, and the emerging powers of Southeast Asia. The regional transformation in turn has extended beyond the region itself, profoundly affecting global politics and international relations.

"Asia's New World Order" traces the overall political, economic, and security developments of the region. The contributors look beyond the customary fixation on great powers to examine developments in the lesser powers, and to search for unforeseen policy implications and directions for the United States.

As the rural township, village and private enterprises are becoming more significant in the Chinese economy, this text focuses on the comparison of the rural (non-state) and state firms in terms of performance. The analysis is based on the empirical results from estimating various production functions applied to cross-section and panel data. Both aggregate and firm-specific efficiencies are examined in the case studies, exploring potential sources of efficiency differentials such as ownership, scale, factor intensity, location and economic reforms. Special attention is also paid to the regional comparison of industrial development and performance. The implications of the findings in the book for economic and reform policy are thus highlighted.

This volume fills a gap in the literature by analyzing basic issues in development economics as they affect a particular type of Third World nation - small island economies. Using practical examples from the Caribbean Basin and the South Pacific, the authors examine in depth structural and employment issues, demographic and socioeconomic issues, and environmental and natural resource issues. Their aim throughout is to identify and assess the particular and unique development problems faced by small island economies so that effective policies can be derived that will more accurately reflect socioeconomic realities in these areas.

Following an introductory overview, the authors discuss the role of staple exports in the economic well being of small island economies as well as issues relating to manufacturing and service sector activities and the structural and employment impacts of tourism. In Part Two, they turn to an exploration of demographic and socioeconomic issues including the effects of urbanization on the development process, the implications of migration from and between small island nations, the brain drain problem, and the relationship between criminal activity and development. Part Three shifts the focus from people-oriented issues to concerns related to agriculture and resource utilization. Separate chapters address agriculture in the developmental mix, the use of fisheries, forest resources, minerals, and conservation issues. The final section looks at the international considerations raised by the study and outlines the policy implications of the authors' findings. Students of development economics, international trade, and finance will find this an invaluable contribution to the greater understanding of the specific development problems faced by small island economies.

Among several themes in contemporary entrepreneurship, internationalisation generates extensive interest among scholars due to its exploration of dynamic activity within SMEs seeking market development and operational efficiency through foreign alliance and intelligence gathering opportunities. In the context of emerging markets, however, international entrepreneurship scholarship still lags behind first world evidence. With less developed avenues for finance and limited infrastructure support for product development and service delivery, an assessment of internationalisation within emerging contexts is required. International Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets presents insights from Brazil, China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Turkey to enlighten scholars by unearthing the nature, drivers, barriers and determinants of entrepreneurship in emerging markets. It examines structural and environmental impediments to internalisation but demonstrates that these are far surpassed by the market opportunities and business readiness of SMEs in emerging environments. Readers of this tenth volume of the Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research series will find exclusive evidence from emerging countries, evidence that demonstrates the inclination of SMEs to revise products and, when appropriate, dissolve and recreate relationships in the face of market opportunity and uncertainty. Managers will learn that appropriating a range of attributes are more likely to achieve internationalisation. Capturing the true nature of value creation for international consumers and partners in an emerging market backdrop, this volume makes a significant contribution to the literature by mapping out the road to success within this diverse setting.

The rapid development of Asian countries has met with mixed reactions among economists. Most economists understand that a genuine development is underway; but, since the process has been a complex one, each has been able to apply favorite explanations to the situation. In Eastern Asia, regional interdependence has been important to developing countries. This work discusses the interaction between the regional economies through trade and foreign direct investment, relating interaction to economic growth and development.

This unique work treats economic growth and development in terms of a theory which is applicable to an economy in the post-industrial, developing, and emerging stages. The author uses the theory to analyze and study the growth of an economy through these three stages of development within the framework of the business cycle in disequilibrium. This work has taken on special importance in light of the changing world situation, including the changes in the former Soviet Union, the peace process in the Middle East, and renewed concern for developing and emerging countries.

Explores popular economic development strategies in midsize Canadian urban areas. Roads to Prosperity: Economic Development Lessons from Midsize Canadian Cities explores the relative prosperity of midsize Canadian urban areas (population 50,000 to 400,000) over the past two decades. Communities throughout North America have strived for decades to maintain and enhance the prosperity of their residents. In the areas that are the focus of this research, the results of these efforts have been mixed-some communities have been relatively successful while others have fallen further behind the national averages. Midsize cities often lack the resources, both internal and external, to sustain and enhance their prosperity. Policies and strategies that have been successful in larger urban areas may be less effective (or unaffordable) in smaller ones. Roads to Prosperity first examines the economic structure of forty-two Canadian urban regions that fall within the midsize range to determine the economic specializations that characterize these communities and to trace how these specializations have evolved over the time period between 1991 and 2011. While urban areas with an economic base of natural resource or manufacturing industries tend to retain this economic function over the years, communities that rely on the service industries have been much more likely to experience some degree of restructuring in their economies over the past twenty years. The second part of the book looks at a number of currently popular economic development strategies as they have been applied to midsize urban areas and their success and failures. While there appears to be no single economic development strategy that will lead to greater prosperity for every community, Sands and Reese explore the various factors that help explain why some work and others don't.

Africa is at a critical moment in its economic development. With the recent decline of commodity prices, it has become apparent that many African economies, which are resource-based, have suffered greatly. The economies of Africa cannot be lifted up only through programs of aid. Indigenous high-impact entrepreneurs are needed, as they know how to best inspire, act as role models for other Africans and serve their fellow entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial ventures in the financial services sector hold special importance because of the role that they play in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Financial services are an essential element in powering entrepreneurial activity beyond resource extraction, yet in most sub-Saharan African countries, the financial services sector is relatively nascent compared to developed markets. This book highlights how this is beginning to change. With contributions from leading scholars, it provides inspiring success stories of entrepreneurial financial sector ventures that are making a lasting contribution to the economic development of various sub-Saharan African countries as well as helping the reader understand larger macro-trends.

The book provides a detailed analysis of the nature and determinants of finance and trade and their relationship with Africa's competitiveness. Investment is examined in its various forms (financial vs. physical), and sources (private, public, domestic and FDI), as well as its relation to the size of domestic markets and export potential. The dimensions of trade related to financial development, trade costs, development of value chains and regional integration are also studied. The capacity of finance and investment to boost Africa's competitiveness is assessed to inform continent-wide economic policy.