This book provides a detailed description of Japan's telecommunications policies. It discusses how Japan has addressed a variety of policy challenges ranging from traditional regulatory issues, such as the provision of a universal service, to the latest tasks, including the promotion of cutting-edge technologies. Japan is a global leader in information and communication technologies (ICT). In addition to technological advances, an impressive nationwide optical-fiber and advanced mobile network infrastructure has been developed, which has boosted the economy and benefited society. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has played an important role in ICT deployment. Japan has a unique ICT policy framework that does not separate regulation and promotion, unlike many other countries, which have an independent regulator. However, since relatively little information has been provided in English, it has been difficult to learn much about Japan's policies. Written by specialists from MIC, industry and academia, this is the first collaborative work to provide a comprehensive discussion of Japan's ICT policies, allowing readers to gain an understanding of the topic.

The book examines the various aspects of non-financial central public sector enterprises (PSEs) in India, for a period from 1986-87 to 2010-11. The analysis is based on all the key financial ratios; namely, profitability, efficiency, liquidity, leverage and productivity. Liberalization and globalization have caused competition in India and have lowered the profit margins. At the same time, Indian government has reduced subsidies and budgetary support for PSEs to curtail their own fiscal deficit. Strategic and economic reforms were also introduced in PSEs to make their operations commercially profitable so that they are not dependent on the government to meet their financial requirements on the one hand, and have their own earnings to finance their expansion/modernization requirements as well as their social obligations, on the other. To what extent, the PSEs have succeeded in this objective constitutes one major aspect of the present research work. The other equally important aspect examined is financial performance of the PSEs which have opted for disinvestment and have signed memorandum of understanding (MoU)/ self obligations. The Indian Government has desired the central PSEs to be profitable in their operations in post-liberation era of 1990s. For this purpose, two major instruments, namely, disinvestment and MoUs, were introduced. This book examines, in detail, financial performance of PSEs which had opted for disinvestment and have signed MoU. Based on analysis/ findings and literature on the subject, the book contains some concrete suggestions that would prove extremely helpful to Indian Government to further improve their financial performance. "

This volume is the second book based on comparative and comprehensive data from the 2003 representative European Union Company survey of Operating hours, Working times and Employment (EUCOWE) in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. The EUCOWE project is the first representative and standardised European company survey which covers all categories of firm sizes and all sectors of the economy. This volume complements and builds on the first book published in 2007, in which the methodology and the descriptive national findings as well as some first comparative analytical results were presented. In this second book the EUCOWE research team presents in-depth cross-country analyses of the relationship between operating hours, working times and employment in the European Union. Six empirical chapters of this volume provide detailed comparative analyses of the determinants and consequences of the duration and flexibility of opening hours and operating times.

This text blends a coherent overview of the most important theories and insights in the field of business ethics with a range of practical contexts to explore the important issue of corporate responsibility and accountability. It should be be widely used on courses and training programmes in corporate social responsibility and business ethics. The book is supported by a website containing further information about the cases and questions for discussion.

This tells the story of the development of the private equity industry in Germany. It is the first comprehensive history of the private equity industry for any country, revealing the vicissitudes of private equity investing, warts and all. It is an engaging chronicle for anyone interested in the industry or the modern German economy.

The theory of path dependence continues to attract great interest in a range of disciplines. An increasing number of scholars have started to explicitly use this theory for studying organizational inertia and institutional rigidities. This volume presents a collection of papers from various international conferences that address these issues.

Productive transformation requires seizing the opportunities available and opening new ones in a competitive world. Rethinking Productive Development examines the market failures impeding transformation and the government failures that may make the policy remedies worse than the market illness. To address market failures, the authors propose a simple conceptual framework based on the scope and nature of the policy approach. They then systematically analyze country policies through this lens in key areas such as innovation, new firms, financing, human capital, and internationalization to show the power of this way of thinking. Still, the book warns that policymakers cannot be sure what the right policy interventions are and must set up a process to discover them that calls for public-private collaboration. Recognizing that the risk of capture needs to be checked and that even the best policies will fail without the technical, organizational, and political capacity to implement them, the book concludes with ideas on how to design institutions fostering the right incentives and how to grow public sector capabilities over time.

'Jha is the right scholar and economist to take readers through the development of the Indian economy. Readers will be in good hands.' -Edmund Phelps, Columbia University, USA, and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics 'This is perhaps the best and most scholarly contribution to understanding the Indian Economy and Society. Its rich historical perspective and a profound understanding of how India has evolved into a major economic power set standards of scholarship and analytical rigour that will be hard to surpass". -Raghav Gaiha, University of Manchester, UK 'Linking of economy and society is increasingly recognised as essential for addressing policy challenges by the current phase of globalisation. As such this study should be valuable not just for those studying India, but also for those interested in global developments.' -Mukul Asher, National University of Singapore, Singapore 'This book is a tour-de-force review of the fundamental topics on the Indian political economy and society that are relevant for any committed social scientist to be aware of.' -Sumit K. Majumdar, University of Texas at Dallas, USA 'Over the years, I have benefited from reading the works of Professor Jha, and from teaching from them. I enthusiastically recommend these two volumes.' -Raaj Kumar Sah, University of Chicago, USA This two-volume work provides an account of how India has been meeting its myriad of economic, political and social challenges and how things are expected to evolve in the future. Despite enormous challenges at the time of independence, India chose to address them within a secular, liberal, democratic framework, which guaranteed several fundamental rights. Challenges included intense mass poverty and hunger, very poor literacy and educational abilities of the population, the task of uniting a country with scores of languages and ethnicities ruled by different entities for decades and persistent threats of external aggression, to name just a few. Over time, incomes and opportunities have expanded enormously and India has regained her self-confidence as a nation. In this second volume, Jha examines the performance and prospects for India's agriculture, manufacturing and services sectors. In addition, India's links with the external world through international trade, investment, migration and remittances are discussed, as well as gender issues, inter-community relations and India's future prospects.

In this day and age, it is unfortunate that the economic prosperity and development leads to disruption of the dynamic balance of the environment. The philosophy of sustainable development has been presented for a long period of time but it has not been able to bring about a substantial change in our society. The transformation of this philosophy into a practical reality seems to be far away - at least in the foreseeable future. In my opinion, the only way I see the revolution taking place is for us to incorporate 'sustainability' in our daily living and to keep pushing for a sustainable society. Meanwhile, we also need scientists to work on technologies that would lead us to that goal at a faster pace. Technologies that are 'completely' environmentally friendly are needed urgently. And if such technologies or ideas of one exists, a platform is required that showcases such ideas to the scientific and non-scientific audience. Through this book, I am happy to present the thoughts of seven different research groups whose work may lead us to the doorsteps of sustainable society. As scientists, most of us specialize in a sub-topic that may be related to one of the three environmental components - air, land, or water. Over a period of time, we become so engrossed with the sub-discipline of our specialization that we only have glimpses of what is happening in other disciplines.

This book addresses major issues facing postal and delivery services throughout the world. Worldwide, there is currently a considerable amount of interest in postal and delivery economics. The industry is reacting to a state of near crisis and is implementing different drastic changes. The European Commission and member States are still wrestling with the problem of how to implement entry liberalization into postal markets, how to address digital competition, and how to maintain the universal service obligation (USO). The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 in the U.S. has perhaps created and exacerbated the problems faced by USPS. Digitalisation, technological development and online platforms are strongly affecting both the way postal and delivery operators are managing their services as well as their role on the market. Strong emphasis was attributed to the assets of Postal Operators (POs) and their added value in the digital age as well as on new business strategies. This volume presents original essays by prominent researchers in the field, selected and edited from papers presented at this year's 26th Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics held in Split, Croatia, from May 30- June 2, 2018.Topics addressed by this volume include quality of service, last mile solutions, and competition in the liberalized market. This book will be a useful tool not only for graduate students and professors, but also for postal administrations, consulting firms, and federal government departments.

Although IT outsourcing is nothing new, it remains surprisingly challenging for professionals. This book assists the IT professional in several areas of the outsourcing process: establishing outsourcing relationships, maintaining and managing the relationship, and finally governing outsourcing projects successfully.

This book presents a systematic overview on partition function form games: a game form in cooperative game theory to integrate externalities for various applications. Cooperative game theory has been immensely useful to study a wide range of issues, but the standard approaches ignore the side effects of cooperation. Recently interest shifted to problems where externalities play the main roles such as models of cooperation in market competition or the shared use of public resources. Such problems require richer models that can explicitly evaluate the side-effects of cooperation. In partition function form games the value of cooperation depends on the outsiders' actions. A recent surge of interest driven by applications has made results very fragmented. This book offers an accessible, yet comprehensive and systematic study of properties, solutions and applications of partition function games surveying both theoretical results and their applications. It assembles a survey of existing research and smaller original results as well as original interpretations and comparisons. The book is self-contained and accessible for readers with little or no knowledge of cooperative game theory.

Acquisitions and joint ventures can be difficult, costly, and risky, but if a company uses the right teams and processes and is adequately prepared, the chance of success can be significantly increased. Dr. Triantis, a practitioner with extensive experience in M&A planning and implementation and business strategizing, discusses the resources and preparation that are needed before an acquisition or joint venture should even be started, and the various roles and responsibilities of project participants once it is underway. His book examines the sequence of steps, and the events involved in conducting an acquisition or joint venture and shows how the screening and opportunity assessment process, along with proper planning and transfer of responsibilities, can go a long way toward creating the conditions necessary for success.

The book provides guidelines, advice, and recommendations that project teams in key areas must focus on, and by doing so it introduces much needed discipline into the M&A decision making process. It treats important issues and ingredients in project financial analysis, valuation, risk management, negotiations, due diligence and legal agreements. In addition, by examining M&A and joint venture project financing, implementation, the creation and harnessing of synergies, and the need for monitoring and control, the book gives readers greater confidence in their own M&A decision making. Readers will find instruction on how to obtain corporate approvals, deal with project impediments, assess the performance of project teams, distill lessons learned in conducting acquisitions and joint ventures, and how to institutionalize their knowledge after the project is completed. Highly detailed, with a unique viewpoint that challenges prevailing orthodoxies of M&A management, Dr. Triantis's step-by-step approach will be valuable not only for corporate M&A staffers but also for college-level teachers and students.

This book presents an empirical investigation into the relationship between companies' short-term response to capital and labor market frictions and performance. Two different kinds of performance measures are considered, namely innovation performance and firm performance. The author focuses on two major topics: first, on the relation between innovation performance and the use of trade credit. Second, on the relation between firm performance and the use of temporary employment. The use of in-depth firm-level data and state-of-the-art microeconometric methods provide the scientific rigor to this important investigation to answer the questions currently being confronted by many companies in different economies.

Organizational restructuring and corporate downsizing can have a significant impact on the perceived social responsibility and responsiveness of any firm. This book analyzes the phenomenon by identifying the nature and types of structural or functional relationships that exist between downsizing and organizational performance variables, on the one hand, and organizational social responsiveness on the other. It looks at changes in the use of various restructuring techniques to improve efficiency and effectiveness and the effects of these changes on the organizational citizenship standing in the community. It goes on to add to the understanding of the general phenomenon of downsizing by examining its relationship to the level and pervasiveness of corporate social responsibility.

Karake-Shalhoub addresses three questions. First, is corporate downsizing related to improvement in organizational financial performance? Second, is there any relationship between downsizing and corporate social responsibility? Third, what is the nature of this relationship? The book will be attractive to management theory scholars, social responsibility and ethics researchers and practitioners, organizational development researchers and practitioners, and human resource scholars.

This book addresses some of the major issues facing postal and delivery services throughout the world. Postal operators worldwide have been slow to address the threats from and opportunities created by electronic competition. The European Commission and member states are wrestling with these issues, while at the same time continuing to deal with the interrelated issues of implementing entry into postal markets and maintaining the universal service obligation. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 in the U.S. exacerbated financial and managerial problems faced by USPS that result in part from electronic substitution for letter delivery. Comprised of original essays by prominent researchers in the field, this book addresses the new reality of the postal industry and proposes ways in which postal operators might reinvent themselves. Issues discussed include cross-border parcel delivery, e-commerce, the transformation of postal networks, and the effects of postal liberalization. This book will be of interest to postal operators, regulatory commissions, consulting firms, competitors and customers, experts in the postal economics, law, and business, and those charged with the responsibility for designing and implementing postal sector policies. Researchers in regulatory economics, transportation technology, and industrial organization will also find useful information in this volume.

Quality control is a constant priority in electrical, mechanical, aeronautical, and nuclear engineering - as well as in the vast domain of electronics, from home appliances to computers and telecommunications. Quality Control Applications provides guidance and valuable insight into quality control policies; their methods, their implementation, constant observation and associated technical audits. What has previously been a mostly mathematical topic is translated here for engineers concerned with the practical implementation of quality control. Once the fundamentals of quality control are established, Quality Control Applications goes on to develop this knowledge and explain how to apply it in the most effective way. Techniques are described and supported using relevant, real-life, case studies to provide detail and clarity for those without a mathematical background. Among the many practical examples, two case studies dramatize the importance of quality assurance: A shot-by-shot analysis of the errors made in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster; and the engineering failure with new technology due to the absence of quality control in an alternative energy project. This clear and comprehensive approach makes Quality Control Applications an essential reference for those studying engineering as well industry professionals involved in quality control across product and system design.

This book is an exploration into the ways in which friendships, isolation and enemy-ships influence and affect our experience of work. The theme of the research volume is 'Alienation to Suffocation'; canvassing issues from loneliness and isolation through to the positive aspects of a friendly workplace.

Far too many companies have developed outsourcing agreements that were created for a bygone century. Or worse, they are buying strategic services using an overly simplified commodity approach. Today's companies must build deep collaborative relationships with their suppliers that can accelerate the pace of innovation and competitive advantage amidst a new era of continual change and transformational shifts. This requires adopting a new methodology that has the inherent framework to design new levels of collaboration to drive business value. This new methodology is Vested Outsourcing. "The Vested Outsourcing Manual" is the companion guide to the ground-breaking book, "Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules That Will Transform Outsourcing." The break-out book introduced the research study conducted by The University of Tennessee and challenged the conventional approach to how companies outsource. In "The Vested Outsourcing Manual," Kate Vitasek and her co-authors have taken the Five Rules of Vested Outsourcing and developed the roadmap to creating a Vested Agreement through which each party has a vested interest in mutually-defined and desired outcomes. Vested Outsourcing methodology is built on a flexible framework that lays the foundational structure for the parties to come together and create a shared vision, foster an anticipatory lens, share evolving expertise, manage change and drive the required behavior for both parties to drive innovation and mitigate risk. These flexible - vested - agreements will allow the creation of value systems that have the ability to transform every industry and society. Shared vision, desired outcomes, transparency, trust, and win-win are not simply buzz words - they are the principals and values of Vested Outsourcing, being embraced by innovative giants like Microsoft, Intel, and P&G. Now companies and their suppliers have the manual to create a business model for a new century of constant change.

"This book is indispensable to anyone involved in competition and regulation policy of network industries, as it provides an impressive review of the state of our knowledge in applied industrial organisation. Each chapter draws policy schemes from the most advanced progress in the analysis of competition on and for the market, with the objective of properly accounting for the network effects and vertical relations between infrastructure and operations that characterise these industries. Considered jointly, all of these chapters also delineate the research agenda in the field." Marc Ivaldi, IDEI Researcher and Research Director, Aecole des Hautes Aetudes en Sciences Sociales, Toulouse; CEPR Industrial Organisation Programme Director "Excellent book, not to be missed! It offers most comprehensive analyses and policy prescriptions. It will prove most useful for scholars, policy makers and students. I was particularly impressed by how the book captures the essence of the new thinking on the interface between regulation and competition; dealing with a wide range of critical issues such as collusion, mergers, regulatory capture, governance, institutionality, procurement and oversight, and always emphasising actionable policy options. The authors have done an excellent job of making this complex subject highly accessible." Jose Luis Guasch, Professor, University of California, San Diego; Former Head of the World Bank Global Expert Team on Public Private Partnerships and Senior Adviser on Regulation and Competition, World Bank "Emerging Issues in Competition, Collusion, and Regulation of Network Industries is a timely collection of the 'new generation' issues of network regulation, such as institutional diversity, regulatory capture, and governance. The volume marries up-to-date sectoral studies with more conceptually-targeted papers, and thus provides new answers to old questions. Thanks to the high quality of the authors, the volume should become a reference work in the new regulatory literature." Professor Christian von Hirschhausen, TU Berlin and DIW Berlin (German Institute for Economic Research)

The theme of this book is moral leadership in action as it manifests itself implicitly and explicitly in European business organizations. We understand leadership as interplay among people at all levels within organizations and also within the economic system by which people are bound together through particular forms of interaction. The contributions collected in this volume mirror the plurality of approaches we find in the theoretical writings of academics in different European countries. The additional business cases from six different nations show how leaders actually have adopted and integrated working with values in their own organizations, i.e. how they put moral leadership into action. While the selected papers are not meant to be representative of each country, particular economic and cultural traditions are apparent in both thinking and managing moral leadership. The contributors, by presenting this emerging multicultural pattern of Europe, contribute to a better and more knowledgeable understanding of how European business leaders pursue their goals. Managers, students and teachers in business, ethics and leadership studies will find this volume an indispensable guide to the unique contributions of European leadership scholars.

Major theoretical approaches stress the superiority of privately-owned over state-owned companies without addressing how corporate performance should best be measured. This book investigates performance of both private and state-owned, applying factor analysis to compare the two states.

This major book provides a new understanding of systems of corporate governance, notably in the USA, Japan and the EU. It discusses how governance influences corporate cultures and strategies, particularly in response to the effects of deepening integration in the world economy. These effects present challenges for governments, obliging them to focus increasingly on problems of the management of structural and foreign trade policies. Challenges in international financial markets also have to be confronted by policymakers as industries are funded more and more through cross-border investments, which reflect the responses of systems of corporate governance to globalization. The book links studies of corporate governance with surveys of efficiencies and failures in international financial markets, as well as examining aspects of corporate governance systems that have special significance for the management of economic policies as globalization continues. The contributors advocate increased international cooperation to promote more structural complementarities in the world economy.

Scenario planning is the principles, methods, and techniques for looking forward into the future and trying to anticipate and influence what is to come next. This book provides students and line managers in organizations with the means to create better scenarios and to use them to create winning business strategies. The purpose is to shed new light on scenarios and scenario-like thinking in organizations for managers at every level within a company. The book covers scenarios such as: economic outlooks; political environments; acquisitions; downsizing, and more.