This book opens a fresh chapter in the debate on local enterprise clusters and their strategies for upgrading in the global economy. The authors employ a novel conceptual framework in their research on industrial clusters in Europe, Latin America and Asia and provide new perspectives and insights for researchers and policymakers alike. The debate on local upgrading capacity is torn between two lines of thinking: those who believe that local relationships between enterprises and institutions are key to upgrading, and those who argue that the spaces for upgrading are defined by the sourcing strategies of global buyers. From this debate a number of important questions arise: how feasible is it to develop local upgrading strategies? Can local policy networks make a difference, or do global forces undermine them? Do global quality and labour standards marginalise developing country producers or do they help them to upgrade? To answer these questions, the book brings together theoretical and empirical research on local and regional clusters, global value chains and global standards, using case studies from developed and developing countries. The authors provide a new understanding of how global and local governance interact, highlighting power and inequality in global chains but also identifying scope for local action. By showing how and why insertion in global value chains can accelerate or inhibit local upgrading, this book represents a significant contribution to the academic and political debate on globalization. It will be essential reading for all students, academics and researchers interested in global political economy, global and local governance structures, economic geography and innovation studies.

The 2008 credit crisis started with the failure of one large bank: Lehman Brothers. Since then the focus of both politicians and regulators has been on stabilising the economy and preventing future financial instability. At this juncture, we are at the last stage of future-proofing the financial sector by raising capital requirements and tightening financial regulation. Now the policy agenda needs to concentrate on transforming the banking sector into an engine for growth. Reviving competition in the banking sector after the state interventions of the past years is a key step in this process. This book introduces and explains a relatively new concept in competition measurement: the performance-conduct-structure (PCS) indicator. The key idea behind this measure is that a firm's efficiency is more highly rewarded in terms of market share and profit, the stronger competitive pressure is. The book begins by explaining the financial market's fundamental obstacles to competition presenting a brief survey of the complex relationship between financial stability and competition. The theoretical contributions of Hay and Liu and Boone provide the theoretical underpinning for the PCS indicator, while its application to banking and insurance illustrates its empirical qualities. Finally, this book presents a systematic comparison between the results of this approach and (all) existing methods as applied to 46 countries, over the same sample period. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the knowns and unknowns of financial sector competition for commercial and central bankers, policy-makers, supervisors and academics alike.

Enterprise Level Security 2: Advanced Topics in an Uncertain World follows on from the authors' first book on Enterprise Level Security (ELS), which covered the basic concepts of ELS and the discoveries made during the first eight years of its development. This book follows on from this to give a discussion of advanced topics and solutions, derived from 16 years of research, pilots, and operational trials in putting an enterprise system together. The chapters cover specific advanced topics derived from painful mistakes and numerous revisions of processes. This book covers many of the topics omitted from the first book including multi-factor authentication, cloud key management, enterprise change management, entity veracity, homomorphic computing, device management, mobile ad hoc, big data, mediation, and several other topics. The ELS model of enterprise security is endorsed by the Secretary of the Air Force for Air Force computing systems and is a candidate for DoD systems under the Joint Information Environment Program. The book is intended for enterprise IT architecture developers, application developers, and IT security professionals. This is a unique approach to end-to-end security and fills a niche in the market.

Avoiding prejudice will be critical to economic success in the fourth industrial revolution. It is not the new and innovative technology that will matter in the next decade, but what we do with it. Using technology properly, with diverse decision making, is the difference between success and failure in a changing world. This will require putting the right person in the right job at the right time. Prejudice stops that happening. Profit and Prejudice takes us through the relationship between economic success and prejudice in labour markets. It starts with the major changes that occur in periods of economic upheaval. These changes tend to be unpopular and complex - and complexity encourages people to turn to the simplistic arguments of 'scapegoat economics' and prejudice. Some of the changes of the fourth industrial revolution will help fight prejudice, but some will make it far worse. The more prejudice there is, the harder it will be for companies and countries to profit from the changes ahead. Profit is not the main argument against prejudice, but can certainly help fight it. This book tells a story of the damage that prejudice can do. Using economics without jargon, students, investors and the public will be able to follow the narrative and see how prejudice can be opposed. Prejudice is bad for business and the economy. Profit and Prejudice explains why.

First published in 1955, this book offers a detailed history from the past to the mid-20th century on economic control. The book examines economic competition, particularly regarding the British economic system, and Fogarty looks at its scope, as well as its limits. This analysis considers working conditions in the mid-20th century, examining the impacts of industry on the life and work of the British agricultural population. The book first examines production decisions, arguing that a systematic and periodic overhaul of control mechanisms are required. Fogarty goes to give a detailed analysis on decisions about industry objectives. Ultimately, a broader look is given on the wider economic setting, and the definition of the economist is itself examined, taking into account the wider role that economics played in 20th century society.

In recent years the continuity of many firms has been achieved by restructuring, a task which takes up a great deal of senior management's time. Written for busy managers and executives, this book is a practical guide to the process of restructuring, covering both debt and operational restructures.

This book applies cutting-edge economic analysis and social science to unpack the rich complexities and paradoxes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The book takes the reader on a bold, refreshing, and informative tour through its technological drivers, its profound impact on human ecosystems, and its potential for sustainable human development. The overarching message to the reader is that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is not merely something to be feared or survived; rather, this dramatic collision of technologies, disciplines, and ideas presents a magnificent opportunity for a generation of new pioneers to rewrite "accepted rules" and find new avenues to empower billions of people to thrive. This book will help readers to discern the difference between disruption and transformation. The reader will come away from this book with a deeply intuitive and highly contextual understanding of the core technological advances transforming the world as we know it. Beyond this, the reader will clearly appreciate the future impacts on our economies and social structures. Most importantly, the reader will receive an insightful and actionable set of guidelines to assist them in harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution so that both they and their communities may flourish. The authors do not primarily seek to make prescriptions for government policy, but rather to speak directly to people about what they can do for themselves, their families, and their communities to be future-proofed and ready to adapt to life in a rapidly evolving world ecosystem.

This book applies cutting-edge economic analysis and social science to unpack the rich complexities and paradoxes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The book takes the reader on a bold, refreshing, and informative tour through its technological drivers, its profound impact on human ecosystems, and its potential for sustainable human development. The overarching message to the reader is that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is not merely something to be feared or survived; rather, this dramatic collision of technologies, disciplines, and ideas presents a magnificent opportunity for a generation of new pioneers to rewrite "accepted rules" and find new avenues to empower billions of people to thrive. This book will help readers to discern the difference between disruption and transformation. The reader will come away from this book with a deeply intuitive and highly contextual understanding of the core technological advances transforming the world as we know it. Beyond this, the reader will clearly appreciate the future impacts on our economies and social structures. Most importantly, the reader will receive an insightful and actionable set of guidelines to assist them in harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution so that both they and their communities may flourish. The authors do not primarily seek to make prescriptions for government policy, but rather to speak directly to people about what they can do for themselves, their families, and their communities to be future-proofed and ready to adapt to life in a rapidly evolving world ecosystem.

The air transport industry has high economic impact; it supports more than 60 million jobs worldwide. Since the early years of commercial air travel, passenger numbers have grown tremendously. However, for decades airlines' financial results have been swinging between profits and losses. The airline industry's aggregate net average profit between 1970 and 2010 was close to zero, which implies bankruptcies and layoffs in downturns. The profit cycle's amplitude has been rising over time, which means that problems have become increasingly severe and also shows that the industry may not have learned from the past. More stable financial results could not only facilitate airline management decisions and improve investors' confidence but also preserve employment. This book offers a thorough understanding of the airline profit cycle's causes and drivers, and it presents measures to achieve a higher and more stable profitability level. This is the first in-depth examination of the airline profit cycle. The airline industry is modelled as a complex dynamic system, which is used for quantitative simulations of 'what if' scenarios. These experiments reveal that the general economic environment, such as GDP or fuel price developments, influence the airline industry's profitability pattern as well as certain regulations or aircraft manufactures' policies. Yet despite all circumstances, simulations show that airlines' own management decisions are sufficient to generate higher and more stable profits in the industry. This book is useful for aviation industry decision makers, investors, policy makers, and researchers because it explains why the airline industry earns or loses money. This knowledge will advance forecasting and market intelligence. Furthermore, the book offers practitioners different suggestions to sustainably improve the airline industry's profitability. The book is also recommended as a case study for system analysis as well as industry cyclicality at graduate or postgraduate level for courses such as engineering, economics, or management.

Having been state-owned for decades, the railway reform in China confused many people, particularly in terms of its ownership and property rights arrangements. Western literature always prescribes that the best model for railway reform is privatization. China's leadership has also enunciated the state's determination to re-arrange property rights and rejuvenate corporate governance. But is China's railway reform really a story of convergence and will the Chinese government follow the western model of railway reform? Addressing these questions, this book provides a positive explanation of the reform in China's railway sector between 1978 and the dissolution of the Ministry of Railways. It bridges the socialist reform and transport policy literature, and studies the empirical changes of the property rights arrangements in China's railway system. Refuting the convergence theory, it concludes that the cyclical reform policies of decentralization and re-centralization were actually an exploratory and interactive mechanism of "assets discovery" and "assets recovery". This in-depth study is based on 21 face-to-face interviews with railway cadres as well as field trips to collect first-hand information in Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Wuhan. As one of the only empirical studies on the reform of the railway sector in China, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of China studies, Transport studies and Political Economy.

As the fourth largest military spender in the world, India has a huge defence economy supported by a budget amounting to nearly $67 billion in 2020-21. This book examines how well India's defence economy is managed, through a detailed statistical exposition of five key themes - defence planning, expenditure, arms production, procurement and offsets. This book is based on hard-core evidence collected from multiple government and other credible sources including the ministries of Defence, Finance, and Commerce and Industry, Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the Reserve Bank of India. It discusses key issues such as the evolution of India's defence plan; the feasibility of increasing defence spending; India's defence acquisition system; and the recent reform measures taken under the rubric of the 'Make in India' initiative. Well supplemented with original tables and figures, India's Defence Economy will be indispensable to students and researchers of defence and security studies, politics and international relations, finance, development studies, economics, strategic studies, South Asian politics, foreign policy and peace studies. It will also be of interest to defence ministry officials, senior armed forces personnel, military attaches, defence training institutes and strategic think tanks.

As the fourth largest military spender in the world, India has a huge defence economy supported by a budget amounting to nearly $67 billion in 2020-21. This book examines how well India's defence economy is managed, through a detailed statistical exposition of five key themes - defence planning, expenditure, arms production, procurement and offsets. This book is based on hard-core evidence collected from multiple government and other credible sources including the ministries of Defence, Finance, and Commerce and Industry, Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the Reserve Bank of India. It discusses key issues such as the evolution of India's defence plan; the feasibility of increasing defence spending; India's defence acquisition system; and the recent reform measures taken under the rubric of the 'Make in India' initiative. Well supplemented with original tables and figures, India's Defence Economy will be indispensable to students and researchers of defence and security studies, politics and international relations, finance, development studies, economics, strategic studies, South Asian politics, foreign policy and peace studies. It will also be of interest to defence ministry officials, senior armed forces personnel, military attaches, defence training institutes and strategic think tanks.

Marx claims that unselfishness is a child of (workplace) culture, whereas the gene is selfish. If Marx is right then the prerequisite for overthrowing capitalism is a system which both leverages selfishness and creates solidarity between workers. This book illustrates and discusses the major points of the economic theory of producer cooperatives, its evolution since the 1950s, and links with Marxian theory. Labour Managed Firms and Post-Capitalism, most importantly, demonstrates that a system of producer cooperatives offers a wealth of advantages compared to capitalism. There is general agreement that the main benefit of this form of economic democracy is that people who are allowed to freely pursue their interests are happier than those acting on somebody else's instruction. The author argues that a system of democratic firms would eradicate classical (high-wage) unemployment and scale down both Keynesian and structural unemployment levels. He also shows that a system of producer cooperatives literally reverses the capital-labour relationship typical of capitalism and that its establishment can consequently be looked upon as a revolution. This volume is of great interest to academics, lecturers and researchers with an interest in Marxism, political economy and industrial economics, as well as economic theory and philosophy.

This is a comprehensive book on infrastructure development and construction management. It is written keeping in mind the curricula of construction management programmes in India and abroad. It covers infrastructure development, the construction industry in India, financial analysis of the real estate industry in India, economic analysis of projects, tendering and bidding, contracts and contract management, FIDIC conditions of contract, construction disputes and claims, arbitration, conciliation and dispute resolution, international construction project exports and identifying, analysing and managing construction project risk. Thus, this book covers most of the construction management activities that are carried out at different stages of a construction project. This is an essential book for students of construction management, construction professionals, academicians and researchers.

'Jane Holgate is a brilliant thinker' - Jane McAlevey In Arise, Jane Holgate argues that unions must revisit their understanding of power in order to regain influence and confront capital. Drawing on two decades of research and organising experience, Holgate examines the structural inertia of today's unions from a range of perspectives: from strategic choice, leadership and union democracy to politics, tactics and the agency afforded to rank-and-file members. In the midst of a neoliberal era of economic crisis and political upheaval, the labour movement stands at a crossroads. Union membership is on the rise, but the 'turn to organising' has largely failed to translate into meaningful gains for workers. There is considerable discussion about the lack of collectivism among workers due to casualisation, gig work and precarity, yet these conditions were standard in the UK when workers built the foundations of the 19th-century trade union movement. Drawing on history and case studies of unions developing and using power effectively, this book offers strategies for moving beyond the pessimism that prevails in much of today's union movement. By placing power analysis back at the heart of workers' struggle, Holgate shows us that transformational change is not only possible, but within reach.

Accomplishing sustainability in the agribusiness sector is a significant, yet time-sensitive, challenge, especially when balanced with the need to grow sufficient quantity and quality of food to keep the growing global population healthy. Through both quantitative and qualitative methods, this book explores the extent to which the agribusiness sector is already evolving to become sustainable and the ways in which innovation in the industry can help address sustainable development goals, particularly around zero hunger, gender equality, decent work, responsible consumption and production, and climate action. The contributors to this volume address the following key questions: What are the drivers and barriers for the agribusiness sector to become sustainable? Which business models best facilitate the implementation of sustainable goals? How can we measure the extent to which the agribusiness sector is becoming more sustainable? How can the agribusiness sector leverage recent technological advancements to achieve its sustainability goals? The analysis of the sustainability challenges for the sector ranges across various facets of the industry including employment, pre-production industries, agriculture, food processing, distribution, and trade. This book will be of significant interest to readers in agribusiness, innovation management, and sustainability.

Originally published in 1995 this volume examines and analyzes the factors that have made the township-village enterprise (TVE) such a driver of growth in the Chinese economy in recent years. The book analyzes the background of the TVE and discusses regional differences in TVE efficiency as well as examining the apparent contradiction of the success of the TVE despite the lack of well-defined property rights. Issues of rural-rural and rural-urban migration phenomena are discussed and the differences discussed between the Chinese economy and those of other developing nations.

Originally published in 1994 this book concerns successful implementation of radical, technological innovations within business organizations. It extends and unifies paradigms for understanding implementation of radical innovations by modeling roles and interactions between key vending and buying firm players. It focuses on how interaction between certain players in buying and vending organizations affects successful implementation of the innovation and investigates the relationships between the user, buying change agent and vending change agent.

Originally published in 1994 this book undertakes a comprehensive study dealing with the effects of machine flexibility, tool magazine capacity, varying production demands and different oeprating policies on the production planning problems. Performance measures such as FMS flexibility, makespan and inventory are used in evaluating the effects. Three measures of FMS flexibility - actual routing flexibility, potential routing flexibility and capacity flexibility are defined and operationalized.

Originally published in 1995, this book explores a number of subjects of significance for labor and economic policy, especially the role of U. S. tax policy in the relocation of jobs from the contintental USA to Puerto Rico. The book demonstrates the problems for the USA because of inadequate adjustment policies to protect the interests of communities and workers when plants close and production is relocated. It disproves the myth that markets will take fcare of workers and communities, showing that basic economics is concerned with market forces and not with equity, environmental and worker protections. The Whitehall plant closing case is documented and the economic and political context analyzed which caused that case to be instructive for broader economic and labor policy purposes. In a new age of American Protectionism, this book has enduring relevance.

Appropriate laws and regulations are an essential tool to direct the action of procurers toward the public good and avoid corruption and misallocation of resources. Common laws and regulations across regions, nations and continents potentially allow for the further opening of markets and ventures to newcomers and new ideas to satisfy public demand. This book collects original contributions, from both economists and lawyers, related to the new European Union Directives just approved in 2014 by the EU Parliament. Uniquely, this book combines juridical and technical expertise so as to find a common terrain and language to debate the specific issues that a Public Administration in need of advancing and modernizing has to face. This format features, for each section, an introductory exchange between two experts of different disciplines, made of a series of sequential interactions between an economist and a lawyer that write and follow-up on one another. This is to enrich the liveliness of the debate and improve the mutual understanding between the two professions. There are four sections characterized in this book: supporting social considerations via public procurement; green public procurement; innovation through innovative partnerships; and Lots - the Economic and Legal Challenges of Centralized Procurement. This book will be of interest to policy-makers, practitioners working in the field of EU public procurement as well as academics.

The economics literature on industry dynamics contains a wide array of empirical works identifying a set of stylized facts. There have been several attempts at constructing analytical models to explain some of these regularities. These attempts are highly stylized and limited in scope to keep the analyses tractable. A general model of industry evolution capable of generating firm and industry behaviour that can match the data is needed. This book endeavours to explain many well-documented aspects of the evolution of industries over time. It uses an agent-based computational model in which artificial industries are created and grown to maturity in silico. While the firms in the model are assumed to have bounded rationality, they are nevertheless adaptive in the sense that their experience-based R&D efforts allow them to search for improved technologies. Given a technological environment subject to persistent and unexpected external shocks, the computationally generated industry remains in a perennial state of flux. The main objective of this study is to identify patterns that exist in the movements of firms as the industry evolves over time along the steady state in which the measured behaviour of the firms and the industry stochastically fluctuate around steady means. The computational model developed in this book is able to replicate many of the stylized facts from the empirical industrial organization literature, particularly as the facts pertain to the dynamics of firm entry and exit. Furthermore, the model allows examination of cross-industry variations in entry and exit patterns by systematically varying the characteristics of the market and the technological environment within which the computationally generated industry evolves. The model demonstrates that the computational approach based on boundedly rational agents in a dynamic setting can be useful and effective in carrying out both positive and normative economic analysis.

The natural gas business consists of two major aspects, sourcing and transportation, and distribution has been a growing area of interest to industry, government and academia. With the emphasis on promoting natural gas sector, there is an increasing need to have a well documented book that deals with the business issues, particularly the transportation and distribution of this sector, specifically aimed at petroleum engineers and professionals. This book fills this gap to provide structured material that deals with managerial and regulatory aspects with an applied technical perspective wherever needed.

Pepall's Industrial Organization: Contemporary Theory and Empirical Applications, 5th Edition offers an accessible text in which topics are organized in a manner that motivates and facilitates progression from one chapter to the next. It serves as a complete, but concise, introduction to modern industrial economics. The text uniquely uses the tools of game theory, information economics, contracting issues, and practical examples to examine multiple facets of industrial organization. The fifth edition is more broadly accessible, balancing the tension between making modern industrial analysis accessible while also presenting the formal abstract modeling that gives the analysis its power. The more overtly mathematical content is presented in the Contemporary Industrial Organization text (aimed at the top tier universities) while this Fifth Edition will less mathematical (aimed at a wider range of four-year colleges and state universities.

Now in its third edition, Cost-Benefit Analysis has been updated, offering readers the perfect introduction to project, programme and policy appraisal using basic tools of financial and economic analysis. The key economic questions of any social cost-benefit analysis are: do the benefits of the project or policy exceed the costs, no matter how widely costs and benefits are spread, and irrespective of whether or not project impacts, such as environmental effects, are reflected in market prices? And which group or groups of individuals receive the benefits and which bear the costs? This book addresses these questions with an emphasis on putting the theory presented in the book into practice. This third edition has several attractive features: Readers are encouraged to develop their own skills by applying the tools and techniques of cost-benefit analysis to case studies and examples, including an analysis of a project which is developed throughout the book. The book emphasizes the use of spreadsheets which are invaluable in providing a framework for the cost-benefit analysis. A dedicated chapter provides guidance for writing up a report which summarises the analysis which has been undertaken. New pedagogical features, including Technical Notes and Examples, have been added as an aid to readers throughout the text. An appendix provides 14 additional case studies which can be developed in class or as assignment projects. Additional material for instructors and students is provided through Support Material maintained by Routledge. This updated edition is an ideal text for a course on cost-benefit analysis where the emphasis is on practical application of principles and equipping students to conduct appraisals. It is also a useful handbook for professionals looking for a logical framework in which to undertake their cost-benefit analysis work.