Search Results (23)

The effects of initial institutions and change in institutions on the growth of ex-socialist countries is unsettled in the literature. This is due to difficulties in modeling the effects of institutions and their change. The objective of this paper is to contribute to this area. Ex-socialist countries faced heterogenous initial conditions at transition. Those that joined the EU experienced institutional integration as well as institutional improvement. Using publicly available data from about ten years before and after EU accession and two-way fixed effects differences-in-differences estimation, this paper finds that these countries experienced growth boosts post-EU accession. Achieving institutional integration cum improvement by accepting and implementing EU’s regulations and norms in all details permitted this boost. The initial conditions mattered—the effect was greater in “new” ex-socialist countries (which had the additional burden of creating new administrative structures and economic relationships) than in the “old.” Using the neo-classical growth model, the paper then examines whether this boost in growth was due to a higher contribution of inputs or due to an increase in the efficiency with which inputs were used. It indicates that it was due to increased contribution of human capital rather than an increase in the amount of human capital or other economic or political confounders. These countries’ skilled labor, already high in skills at transition by OECD standards, needed the right institutions to unlock its potential. Full article

This article explores the intersection of gender, entrepreneurship, and sustainability in the context of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The article proposes a comprehensive analytical framework that incorporates multiple levels of analysis and examines the institutional pressures influencing women’s entrepreneurial participation using a systematic literature review. It provides insights into the interconnectedness of individual (micro level), organizational-sectoral (meso Level), and societal and national (macro-level) factors, offering policy recommendations to foster a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem and support women’s contributions to sustainable economic development in the region. Full article

Grounded in, and in dialogue with, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso of 2018, this paper interrogates a particular time and place of coloniality and racial capital’s reproduction of Black fungibility in late twentieth-century Portugal, after formal decolonization in Africa and in the wake of Black migratory waves from the post/neo-colony (Angola in this case) to the former metropolis. Almeida’s novel provides a literary intervention in grappling with the economic and institutional reinvention of anti-Blackness in Europe after settler colonialism, while also imagining and inscribing modes of Black being within and beyond the materialities of white supremacy. Towards this end and against the racial, gendered, and ableist logics of capital, the Black body in Almeida’s novel becomes a site through which the relationships between humans and matter as well as mind and body are decolonially revised. Full article

The era of digitization is revolutionizing traditional humanities research, presenting both novel methodologies and challenges. This field harnesses quantitative techniques to yield groundbreaking insights, contingent upon comprehensive datasets on historical subjects. The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) exemplifies this trend, furnishing researchers with a rich repository of historical, relational, and geographical data about Christianity in China from 1550 to 1950. The study of Christianity in China confronts formidable obstacles, including the mobility of historical agents, fluctuating relational networks, and linguistic disparities among scattered sources. The CHCD addresses these challenges by curating an open-access database built in neo4j that records information about Christian institutions in China and those that worked inside of them. Drawing on historical sources, the CHCD contains temporal, relational, and geographic data. The database currently has over 40,000 nodes and 200,000 relationships, and continues to grow. Beyond its utility for religious studies, the CHCD encompasses broader interdisciplinary inquiries including social network analysis, geospatial visualization, and economic modeling. This article introduces the CHCD’s structure, and explains the data collection and curation process. Full article

Health systems in high-resource countries recognize the importance of making decisions about the services offered to the population based on scientific evidence. Producing this evidence is especially challenging in areas such as newborn care where the frequency of conditions is rare. However, methodological advances in the field of economic evaluation could change how this evidence is used in decision-making. This study aimed to investigate how decision-makers in the Canadian province of Quebec perceive the value of recent advances in economic evaluations for perinatal studies and how these advances might affect the offer of neonatal interventions in the public health care system. A qualitative study was conducted. A total of 10 policymakers were interviewed. A neo-institutional conceptual framework highlighting three dimensions, structure, power, and interpretive schemes, was used for data collection and analyses. Structural factors, interpretative schemes, and power management between the groups concerned concur to ensure that providing services to newborns is not hindered by the difficulty of producing evidence. They also ensure that the decisions regarding which disease to screen for take into consideration the specificity of neonatology, in particular, the social value given to children not captured by available evidence. Full article

The article is a preliminary effort to join neo-positive and historical institutional analysis from comparative politics with insights from discursive and phenomenological analysis. It highlights a message arising from a South Korean film related to moral–ethical dimensions and the implications of development policy. Taken in symbolic as well as empirical terms, the film proffers that economic development policy not attending to political institutional development—including correct institutional practices at the micro-level—is feeding Asia’s demons (e.g., asuras) rather than its forces of stability and (rational, democratic, participatory) political order. The film suggests that institutional atrophy and social decay may emerge from the breakdown of political institutions and participatory politics as a political system moves from rationalized institutions and practices into what the current work calls, “mafia politics.” Political ritual and political theatre are actively employed in the film in ritualized acts of the desecration of political order. The current work suggests that the analysis of symbolic representations relating to ritual politics and performativity (e.g., “political theatre”) located in certain art forms, such as international film, may be useful in studies of religion and politics, and in qualitative comparative political and historical institutional analysis more broadly. Full article

In the context of economic advancement, developing economy firms are witnessing a growing influx of directors with foreign backgrounds who are joining their corporate boards. Giving the significance of this emerging labor market trend for board members and the particular value of women directors in corporate governance, this study delves into the impact of women directors’ foreign backgrounds on a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and performance. Using a dataset of listed firms on Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2010 to 2019, we find that the foreign education and the work experience of women directors improve firm CSR disclosure and performance. Corporate boards with a higher proportion of women directors with foreign education experience tend to disclose more CSR information. And women directors with foreign work experience have a more pronounced impact on enhanced CSR performance. This study provides new insights into integrating stakeholder, social role, and neo-institutional theories to advance the understanding of CSR engagement in emerging economies. Full article

Across institutions and professions, leadership philosophy is considered the driver of organisational culture in achieving the overall objectives. Although individuals’ leadership cultures may vary, intersections and hybridity are present in many spheres, including that of some African Neo-Pentecostal Leaders (ANPLs). To underscore the hybrid leadership of the ANPLs, qualitative research was conducted, with data collected from 20 participants through one-on-one interviews across Africa. The results revealed the hybridisation of African Neo-Pentecostal leadership styles vis-a-vis African monarchical and religious traditions based on four variables: accountability, ownership and succession plan, healing, and gerontocracy. The results also revealed the benefits and challenges of their hybridity. Subsequently, using Jesus’s model of servant leadership to analyse the four variables, the benefits and challenges were critiqued. The analysis identified culture, African spiritual worldview, gerontocracy, and submissive theology as factors influencing such syncretic or hybrid practices. The analysis also delineated the theological, socio-economic, legal, and transgenerational implications of such hybrid leadership. This article concludes with cautionary remarks regarding boundaries, servant leadership, and morality. Full article

This paper offers a critical analysis of how the new regimes in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of China complement its energy diplomacy to ensure economic sustainability driven by an uninterrupted supply of overseas energy. Recognising the centrality of energy in its foreign policy, China’s initiative in the AIIB and the BRI to complement its energy diplomacy is a subject of immense significance requiring extensive research. The present study investigates whether the transformations in China’s energy diplomacy caused primarily by these new regimes in the AIIB and the BRI are a step toward economic internationalisation or consistency of its years-old mercantilist practices. It adopts a well-defined analytical methodology by utilising the “case-based” approach of John Gerring. This article argues that the new global institutions of China successfully complement the country’s energy diplomacy, and its energy diplomacy towards Central Asia is predominantly neo-mercantilist. However, it shows a strong inclination to facilitate economic interdependence towards regions that carry some strategic weight in China’s national interests. In contrast, countries enriched in energy resources but isolated, with little strategic worth, are put under sheer dependency on China. Full article

Contracts represent key governance mechanisms along the supply chain to pursue collective sustainable strategies in line with new citizen-consumers’ preferences for sustainable products. Adopting an embedded multiple case study approach, this paper explores and analyzes 11 cases of contractual relationships between Italian semolina and pasta producers and farmers in order to investigate whether sustainability strategies affect the design of contracts and the related consequences. Findings reveal that different sustainability strategies correspond to different design and combinations of (both monetary and nonmonetary) contractual incentives aimed to centralize property and decision rights. What emerges is that stronger sustainability strategies entail a higher degree of buyers’ control over strategic investments (such as land and seeds) as well as wider provision of technical assistance and knowledge and innovation transfer toward farmers. Therefore, mutual gains seem at stake, even if socio-economic implications of the shift in decisional and control rights from farmers toward buyers shall be neglected, to ensure a better coherence with the farm to fork strategy and sustainable development goals. Full article

This paper uses the transition regime concept in a case study of how the regime in England has been reconstructed since the 1980s. It explains how the former transition regime evolved gradually up to the 1970s. Thereafter the regime proved unable to cope with an acceleration of de-industrialisation and the government’s switch to neo-liberal social and economic policies. These changes destroyed many working-class routes into employment. The resultant push onto academic routes, which had the attraction of continuing to lead to jobs, meant that the enlarged numbers exiting the routes could no longer rely on employment that offered secure middle-class futures. The paper explains how the next 30 years became a period of radical regime reconstruction. Government education, training and welfare policies and changes in the economy and occupational structure, were the context in which schools, colleges and higher education institutions, employers and other training providers, together with young people, ‘negotiated’ new routes from points to entry to exits into different classes of employment. At the beginning of the 2020s, the reconstructed regime was delivering the fastest education-to-work transitions in Europe, with lower than average rates of youth unemployment and NEET. Then came the challenges of COVID-19, lockdowns and Brexit. Full article

The Austrian school economics and neo-Marxist theories both have been reviving in recent years. However, the current academic discussion lacks a debate between two schools of economics with diametrically opposed views. This paper is the first and an initial Austrian challenge to Neo-Marxist scholars Nieto and Mateo’s argumentation that cyber-communism and the Austrian theory of dynamic efficiency are consistent to enhance economic development. Their argument focuses on two issues: (a) the existence of circular reasoning in the Austrian theory of dynamic efficiency, and (b) dynamic efficiency and full economic development could be strongly promoted in a socialist system through new information and communication technologies (ICT) and the democratization of all economic life. While cyber-communism refers to cyber-planning without private property rights through ICT, dynamic efficiency refers to the entrepreneurs’ creative and coordinative natures. In this paper, first, we argue that the hypothesis that dynamic efficiency and cyber-communism is not compatible. Contrary to the above cyber-communist criteria, the Austrian theory of dynamic efficiency argues that to impede private property rights is to remove the most powerful entrepreneurial incentive to create and coordinate profit opportunities. Second, we argue that the cyber-communism system is inconsistent with economic development. In this regard, we explain how the institutional environment can cultivate or stifle dynamic efficiency and economic development. Having briefly outlined the central argument of Nieto and Mateo, we examine the institutional arrangement supporting cyber-communism. After that, we evaluate the implications of cyber-communism in the dynamic efficiency process. It becomes manifest that Nieto and Mateo’s accounts are too general to recognize the complexity of how economic development works. Full article

Forest conversion for agriculture is the most expansive signature of human occupation on the Earth’s surface. This paper develops a conceptual model of factors underlying frontier agricultural expansion—the predominant driver of deforestation worldwide—from the perspective of small farm households—the majority of farmers globally. The framework consists of four causal rubrics: demographic, socioeconomic, political–economic, and ecological. Following this approach, the article explores the current state of knowledge on tropical deforestation in tropical agricultural frontiers with a focus on Latin America, the region of greatest deforestation worldwide during recent decades. Neo-Malthusian arguments notwithstanding, in many tropical nations, deforestation has proceeded unabated in recent years despite declining rural populations. However, evidence from the global-to-household scale suggests that population size and composition are also related to farm forest conversion. Existing particularist or behaviorialist theories sometimes fail to capture key geographical and temporal dimensions, yet studies support the notion that certain cultural, individual, and household characteristics are crucial determinants of forest clearing. Conversely, while institutional arguments sometimes fail to emphasize that the ultimate land use change agents are local resource users, their livelihood decisions are shaped and constrained by policies governing economic subsidies, and market and infrastructure development. Further, although ecological change is usually modeled as an outcome in the deforestation literature, increasingly acute climate change and natural farm endowments form a dynamic tabula rasa on which household land use decisions are enabled. To more fully comprehend frontier forest conversion and to enhance protection and conservation while promoting vital local livelihoods, future research may fruitfully investigate the interaction of demographic, social, political, economic, and ecological factors across spatial scales and academic disciplines. Full article

The modern industry discourse on sustainability is the idea of ‘green growth’, which is described as the paradox of the continuation of increased economic growth, at the same time as increasing sustainability. Policy makers face the challenge of how to encourage and sustain appropriate levels of individual behavioural change to manage consumption in a changing environment. In addressing this challenge, this study seeks to move beyond discrete elements of human consumption behaviour and develop a better understand of the wider inputs including culture, societal norms, institutions and governance. The research methodology adopted uses a systematic literature review approach coupled with thematic analysis. The study presents a new understanding of the interrelatedness of consumption policy, social structures, and the boundary arrangements of governance. What emerges is a focus on the role of governance and societal context in influencing outcomes. A fundamental output of the study is the designation of 27 evidence-based principles of change. These principles represent a new framework: the Governance and Sustainable Policy Development (GSPD) framework or ‘Road Map’, designed to guide decision making and aid the understanding of what motivates individuals and institutions within a wider neo-liberal societal system to manage their consumption from a more sustainable policy and governance perspective. Full article

Skilled birth attendance and institutional delivery have been advocated for reducing maternal, neonatal mortality and infant mortality (NMR and IMR). This paper examines the role of place of delivery with respect to neo-natal and infant mortality in India using four rounds of the Indian National Family Health Survey conducted in 2015–2016. The place of birth has been categorized as “at home” or “public and private institution.” The role of place of delivery on neo-natal and infant mortality was examined by using multivariate hazard regression models adjusted for clus-tering and relevant maternal, socio-economic, pregnancy and new-born characteristics. There were 141,028 deliveries recorded in public institutions and 54,338 in private institutions. The esti-mated neonatal mortality rate in public and private institutions during this period was 27 and 26 per 1000 live births respectively. The study shows that when the mother delivers child at home, the chances of neonatal mortality risks are higher than the mortality among children born at the health facility centers. Regression analysis also indicates that a professionally qualified provider′s antenatal treatment and assistance greatly decreases the risks of neonatal mortality. The results of the study illustrate the importance of the provision of institutional facilities and proper pregnancy in the prevention of neonatal and infant deaths. To improve the quality of care during and imme-diately after delivery in health facilities, particularly in public hospitals and in rural areas, accel-erated strengthening is required. Full article