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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > General
The phenomenon of collusive international agreements (cartels) became widespread in the 1930s. At that time, attempts to control production and prices were mainly the prerogative of multinational firms operating in the developing (then colonized) world. The "modern era" of cartels began in the 1960s, when the governments of developing nations began to participate in commodity agreements to achieve increases and stability in the world price of their commodities. This book is principally concerned with the modern era of cartels. It goes beyond the singular example of petroleum and OPEC to examine the structure of international commodity markets for bauxite (aluminum ore), cocoa, coffee, rubber, sugar, and tin, and the conditions that led to the formation of cartels in those markets during the latter half of the twentieth century. Specifically, the work focuses on four major aspects of international commodity markets: patterns of production and consumption; economic dislocations to both importers and exporters due to price fluctuations; the formation of cartels as a solution to weak and variable commodity prices; and the likely effects arising from tightening raw material markets. The book concludes with a detailed examination of what the future holds for each of the cartels, and what role technology, 24-hour market trading, and decreasing foreign direct investment in producing countries will have on the management of commodity markets.
This title was first published in 1979.
In the time it takes to read this sentence, about fifteen people will be added to the world's population. Read the sentence again, and there will be thirty. Tomorrow, each of these people will be demanding greater prosperity. Production and consumption are increasing fast but will have to grow even faster in the future to keep up with population growth and a world increasingly divided by inequality. How should we react to these trends? Certainly, many use growth figures to forecast disaster. But there is an alternative vision: one of a sustainable future, in which growth is seen not as a threat, but as the driving force behind innovation. This is the scenario worked out in the Netherlands by Sustainable Technology Development (STD), a five-year programme of research and "learning-by-doing" based on setting up new innovation networks and working with new methods to search for sustainable technological solutions. In order to make sustainability tangible, STD made a leap in time. What human needs will have to be satisfied fifty years from now? Taking a sustainable future vision as a starting point, STD demonstrated what steps we should take today for new technologies and systems to be in place in time. These results are now available for the first time in a comprehensive, specifically written English-language book, together with a description of the unique working method of STD and the results and key lessons from a set of the programme's illustrative case studies. This book serves as a manual for industry, governments and social leaders wanting to prepare themselves for a sustainable future. Sustainable Technology Development sets out the programme's underpinning philosophy and describes its approach, methods and findings. Delivering sustainability means finding ways to meet human needs using a fraction of the natural resources we use today. The world's richer nations would be wise to target at least ten-fold improvements by 2050 in the productivity with which conventional natural resources and environmental services are used. And they need to bring new, sustainable resources on-stream to augment the resource base and replace the use of unsustainable alternatives. Sustainable Technology Development marks a significant contribution to our understanding of innovation processes and how these might be influenced in favour of sustainable technology development. In principle, technology could play a pivotal role in sustainable development. Whether it does or not depends on whether innovators can be encouraged to make this an explicit goal, adopt long-term time-horizons and search for renewable technologies. Given the long lead-times involved, there is no time to waste in beginning the search. The STD programme has begun to make inroads into one of the most urgent of all needs concerning sustainable development: that for innovation in the innovation process itself.
First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Over the past several years, productivity improvement has become an increasingly vital economic issue for economies and individual firms. This book, first published in 1996, examines empirically relationships between changes in catalyst financial commitments (ie, research and development projects and capital improvements) and productivity/profitability changes, and relationships between productivity changes and profitability changes in selected manufacturing industries and companies.
Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) are an important feature of contemporary development, yet they are often evaluated in the terms set out by lenders themselves, ignoring the wider implications of SAPs. This volume attempts to situate SAPs in a wider development context featuring case material from the UK, the USA, Ghana, Mexico, India, Jamaica, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Mali, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone. The book addresses SAPs in the lenders' terms, before addressing macro-economic issues, the impacts on social groups, and the impact upon welfare policies such as education and health. Beyond economic analysis, the role of the state in the process, the impact of these programmes on services and the environment are also analyzed.
Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) are an important feature of
contemporary development, yet they are often evaluated in the terms
set out by lenders themselves, ignoring the wider implications of
SAPs.
"Region and Strategy in Britain and Japan" is a long-term comparison of industrial development in Manchester and Osaka, together making a substantial contribution to our understanding of the continuing importance of national and regional differences. This book is written jointly by British and Japanese scholars who are recognized authorities in their field, providing an innovative and unique perspective. Chapters focus on big business, electronics, shipbuilding and textiles. The resulting study sheds a welcome new light on world economic history.
The North of England has claimed more inward investment form East
Asia than any other region in Britain, or indeed any region in the
other member states of the European Union. Specialists from
business organization and managment join with political economists
and geographers to consider how this Foreign Direct Investment
(FDI) has influenced change in the region, and plot the dynamics of
this particularly British phenomenon.
After a decade or more of deregulation and the retreat of the state there is a growing consensus that government can make a positive contribution to industrial growth. This volume explores both the theoretical basis for industrial policy in Europe and practical proposals for making industrial development happen. The volume is divided into five parts: the rationale for industrial policy and the argument for making it local and participative; creating meaningful local and regional economies - making localised learning a reality; nurturing small firms; creating adequate access to venture capital, especially for new small firms; and creating the infrastructure and environment for a dynamic, diffuse economy. The contributors include some of Europe's leading industrial economists, and they approach the subject on a micro, macro and meso level.
After a decade or more of deregulation and the retreat of the state there is a growing consensus that government can make a positive contribution to industrial growth. This volume explores both the theoretical basis for industrial policy in Europe and practical proposals for making industrial development happen. The volume is divided into five parts: the rationale for industrial policy and the argument for making it local and participative; creating meaningful local and regional economies - making localised learning a reality; nurturing small firms; creating adequate access to venture capital, especially for new small firms; and creating the infrastructure and environment for a dynamic, diffuse economy. The contributors include some of Europe's leading industrial economists, and they approach the subject on a micro, macro and meso level.
This volume examines the nature of interfirm networks and their
role in promoting industrial competitiveness. Where previous work
in this area has tended to be descriptive, the distinguished
contributors to this volume present a balanced theoretical and
empirical approach to interfirm networking drawing on a variety of
international case studies. Issues covered include:
Neo-Industrial Organising explores an emerging area of importance in management and organisation studies, namely the trend towards a projectization of the economy as a whole and the inter- and intra-organisational relations of renewal projects. By reporting on the experiences of twenty-five renewal projects from a wide variety of both local and international organisations, the authors develop a theoretical framework based on action and knowledge, in order to answer such key questions as: What is neo-industrial management? What does the future hold for organisations? How will institutions be formed? What effects will neo-industrial organising have on the individual and his/her work situation? Topics covered include: * industrial renewal, organisation and management * project management and temporary organisation * personnel recruitment, selection and training * societal infrastructure Distinctive, relevant and accessibly written, this book will interest researchers and students in the field of organisational behaviour.
This updated and expanded 1985 edition of the classic 1974 work covers deindustrialisation, industrial and competition policy, the public enterprise sector, regional and urban policy, and privatisation, as well as focussing on the firm and the industrial sector in all its facets. It remains the key work on industrial economics.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, Malaysia's remarkable economic performance has attracted attention around the world and been subject to much study and enthusiastic acclaim. However, in the wake of the late-1990s financial crisis, the debate has centred on whether this impressive growth rate can be sustained. As the economy moves beyond growth based on low labour costs and other factor-endowed advantages, industrial technology development becomes increasingly critical to continued growth. This volume, and its companion, "Industrial Technology Development in Malaysia", examine and evaluate Malaysian industrialization in terms of its experience of and prospects for industrial technology development. The focus is on the role played by state-sponsored innovation in the process economic development and in the context of national development strategies. The work provides an analysis of the technological development of a newly industrializing country and reflects on whether existing development strategies can be maintained in the wake of the financial crises sweeping the East Asian economies
Since 1988, Malaysia's remarkable economic performance has attracted attention around the world and been subject to much study and enthusiastic acclaim. However, in the wake of the financial crisis of 1998, the debate has centred on whether this impressive growth rate can be sustained. As the economy moves beyond growth based on low labour costs and other factor-endowed advantages, industrial technology development becomes increasingly critical to continued growth. This volume, and its companion, "Technology, Competitiveness and the State", examine and evaluate Malaysian industrialization in terms of its experience of and prospects for industrial technology development. The focus is on the development of Malaysia's technological-industrial base from a sector and firm-specific perspective, including the role of foreign multinationals in this process. The text reflects on whether existing development strategies can be maintained in the wake of the financial crises sweeping the East Asian economies.
This study focuses on how Chinese business organization, practice, and success have been interpreted in the historical literature. By introducing various interpretations of China's economic development (including the impact of the West, modernization, and Marxist, Weberian, and revisionist approaches), as well as Western business history theory, the book establishes a basis for constructing an appropriate framework for future research.
This work examines the governance of large technical systems (LTS)
at firm, imdustry and state levels and the interactions between the
systems and society. In particular, international contributors
explore the implications of major technological, economic and
social changes during the last twenty years for traditional forms
of LTS governance. Their research is centred around the following
themes:
This book, originally published in 1990, provides a comprehensive and detailed assessment of the Dutch economy since the war, discussing the changes which have been brought about by the restructuring of the economic base. The book employs case studies to analyse in particular the impact of regional policy, the position of the country in the international industrial network and the impact of large industrial concerns, foreign and domestic, on the Dutch economy.
The decline of British Industry in the late Victorian and early
Edwardian period is the subject of major concern to economic and
modern British historians. This book sets out the present state of
the discussion and introduces new directions in which the debate
about the British decline is now proceeding:
When Chinese women bound their daughters' feet, many consequences ensued, some beyond the imagination of the binders and the bound. The most obvious of these consequences was to impress upon a small child's body and mind that girls differed from boys, thus reproducing gender hierarchy. What is not obvious is why Chinese society should have evolved such a radical method of gender-marking. Gendering is not simply preparation for reproduction, rather its primary significance lies in preparing children for their places in the division of labor of a particular political economy. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with almost 5,000 women, this book examines footbinding as Sichuan women remember it from the final years of the empire and the troubled times before the 1949 revolution. It focuses on two key questions: what motivated parents to maintain this custom, and how significant was girls' work in China's final pre-industrial century? In answering these questions, Hill Gates shows how footbinding was a form of labor discipline in the first half of the twentieth century in China, when it was a key institution in a now much-altered political economy. Countering the widely held views surrounding the sexual attractiveness of bound feet to Chinese men, footbinding as an ethnic boundary marker, its role in female hypergamy, and its connection to state imperatives, this book instead presents a compelling argument that footbinding was in fact a crucial means of disciplining of little girls to lives of early and unremitting labor. This vivid and fascinating study will be of huge interest to students and scholars working across a wide range of fields including Chinese history, oral history, anthropology and gender studies. |
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