Research initiatives of the European Union in the areas of sustainability,entrepreneurship, and poverty alleviation

In an effort to combat poverty and sustain growth, the European Union launched initiatives and invested funds to research the area of sustainable development and social cohesion. This article reviews funded projects of the European Union established over the last decade in the areas of entrepreneurship, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility. The analysis reveals that in Europe the issue of poverty is seen more as an issue of inequality and as lack of integration rather than an issue of wealth. This has an effect in the way policymakers and public authorities adopt new measures to achieve social cohesion, thereby ignoring the contribution of the individual as an entrepreneur with social consciousness that could lead the efforts to alleviate poverty. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Union power,entrepreneurial risk,and entrepreneurship

The paper proposes that a trade-off can be identified between the union power and the entry rate of new enterprises. It suggests that union power increases the entrepreneurial failure risk, thereby discouraging entrepreneurship and reducing the employment opportunities. In addition, we show that high price uncertainty and a union-controlled labour market is a harmful combination for entrepreneurship.     

The Competitiveness of Mobile Telephony across the European Union

This paper analyses the competitiveness of the mobile telecommunications industry across the European Union. A structural model of demand and supply has been estimated for annual data on 15 EU countries from 1998 to 2002. Estimates of country‐specific conjectural variations allow us to compare the competitiveness of mobile telephony across the EU, and can offer an alternative to the evaluation of competition based on direct cross‐country price comparisons. Average industry conjectural variations decrease over time as a result of regulation. The liberalization of fixed telephone lines and the introduction of number portability for mobiles increase the competitiveness of the mobile industry.     

Foreign direct investment and entrepreneurship: gender differences across international economic freedom and taxation

Using recent cross-national data, this paper examines the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on entrepreneurship activity. The impact of FDI on entrepreneurship is not clear a priori, with possibilities of both a negative effect (crowding out) and a positive effect (synergy or complementarity via spillovers). Results find support for the crowding out effect; however, this effect varies across nations with different prevalence of entrepreneurship. Another focus of this work is on gender differences. The crowding out effect is stronger for the full sample rather than the subsample of female entrepreneurship. This finding stands up to a battery of robustness checks. Policy implications are discussed.     

Faculty entrepreneurship and economic development: The case of the University of Calgary

The common perception of universities as merely institutions of higher learning is giving way to one where universities are viewed as engines of economic growth and development. This study documents the entrepreneurial activities of the faculty of the University of Calgary, as well as the impact the University has had and the impact its recent budgetary problems might have on such activities. Results indicate that nearly 100 new ventures with at least one full-time employee were started by faculty or were started as a consequence of significant faculty inputs. These ventures, in turn, have generated at least 723 new jobs in Alberta. Furthermore, our projections suggest that faculty entrepreneurs will create approximately 14 ventures per year in the near future. Implications for the role universities and governments should play to encourage faculty entrepreneurship are discussed.     

Scope and patterns of tourist injuries in the European Union

European Union (EU) countries are among the leading tourist destinations in the world. Despite growing consumer demands on the safety of travelling, injuries amongst tourists remain an essentially invisible problem. Unique national and regional data sources are the only means by which the important negative impact of injuries on the health of non-domestic tourists in the EU-15 is underlined. With an estimated number of 3800 tourists dying each year, injuries account for up to 30% of fatalities during vacation. This toll reflects an increased risk of mortality in tourists compared to the domestic population. Amendments to national and EU health and injury monitoring are suggested in order to enable authorities to examine personal risks to travellers in more detail.     

Scope and patterns of tourist injuries in the European Union

European Union (EU) countries are among the leading tourist destinations in the world. Despite growing consumer demands on the safety of travelling, injuries amongst tourists remain an essentially invisible problem. Unique national and regional data sources are the only means by which the important negative impact of injuries on the health of non-domestic tourists in the EU-15 is underlined. With an estimated number of 3800 tourists dying each year, injuries account for up to 30% of fatalities during vacation. This toll reflects an increased risk of mortality in tourists compared to the domestic population. Amendments to national and EU health and injury monitoring are suggested in order to enable authorities to examine personal risks to travellers in more detail.     

National culture, networks and ethnic entrepreneurship: A comparison of the Indian and Chinese immigrants in the US

This paper uses a combination of national cultural frameworks and social capital theory to explain the formation and management of entrepreneurial ventures among immigrant communities. The varying rates of venture formation and performance among different ethnic groups points to the role that the different dimensions of culture play in how immigrants use their social networks to start such firms. We use the specific example of the Indian and Chinese communities in the US to demonstrate this effect and explain how businesses created by members of these communities could have potentially different ways of starting and operating that can be directly traced to the differences in cultural orientation of their owners. What emerges can be summarized as: (a) different immigrant communities have different ways of accumulating and using social capital in starting and managing their ethnic ventures; (b) these dissimilarities manifest themselves in variations in the motives for forming these ventures, human resource practices and termination rates; and (c) that these variations can partly be explained by the differences in their respective national cultures.     

Indigenous land rights,entrepreneurship, and economic development in Canada: “Opting-in” to the global economy

Indigenous people are struggling to reassert their nationhood within the post-colonial states in which they find themselves. Claims to their traditional lands and the right to use the resources of these lands are central to their drive to nationhood. Traditional lands are the ‘place’ of the nation and are inseparable from the people, their culture, and their identity as a nation. Traditional lands and resources are the foundation upon which indigenous people intend to rebuild the economies of their nations and so improve the socioeconomic circumstance of their people—individuals, families, communities, and nations. This paper explores business development activities that flow from the later aspect of indigenous land rights in a Canadian context, suggesting that the process is a particular and important instance of social entrepreneurship.     

Institutions,entrepreneurship, and economic growth in Europe

Institutions have a decisive impact on the prevalence and nature of entrepreneurship. To date, the impact of institutions on (productive) entrepreneurship and the effects of entrepreneurship on economic growth have largely been investigated in isolation. In this paper, we bring together institutions, entrepreneurship, and economic growth using a parsimonious growth model in a 3SLS specification. In our first stage, we regress multiple measures of entrepreneurial activity on institutional proxies that are known to correlate with more productive forms of entrepreneurial activity. Using the fitted values of this first-stage regression as our proxy for productive entrepreneurship, we can then estimate a panel growth regression following Islam (1995) in a second stage. The third stage then optimizes the estimation of the two equations simultaneously. Our results show that productive entrepreneurship contributes to economic growth. In our set of proxies for institutional quality, financial stability, small government, and perceived start-up skills are the most important predictors of such productive entrepreneurship.     

Employment,entrepreneurship and 1992: Microeconomic policy and European problems

Policy conclusions This essay has covered several areas which are not usually regarded as closely interrelated. Policy conclusions have been discussed briefly at various points, and will now be developed more fully in this final section. As evidence for the interrelatedness of such disparate fields as corporate finance and employment policy, we start from the observation that many large firms are relatively inefficient, particularly at product innovation and flexible organization and employment policies, in part because top managerial compensation depends mainly on size. This creates an incentive for excessive growth and empire building, rather than payment to shareholders of the free cash flow which cannot be profitably invested internally. More appropriate incentives for top management would increase dividend payments, and hence the flow of funds into the capital market available for financing new start-ups and small firms as venture capital. Even in the U.S. the cost of obtaining external capital often constrains small firms to invest only their internal cash flow (Fazzari et al., 1988).Increased entry of new firms would also be encouraged by labour market flexibility and deregulation, as well as reduction of excessive state subsidies and other support for large existing corporations. Enlargement of the small firm sector, in turn, would enhance competition, increase the overall rate of return on capital, and above all expand employment, following experience in the U.S. An exclusive focus of employment policy on aggregate demand or on wages and the labour market will thus miss important avenues through which welfare, competitivity and employment can all be influenced simultaneously without additional public expenditure (FitzRoy, 1989).The integrated view espoused here is also important in assessing the consequences of removing direct barriers to trade within the EC by 1992. Much official thought assumes that competitiveness and efficiency will automatically be increased by these developments, with consequent employment gains to follow. However, as usual in economics, there are countervailing tendencies which deserve emphasis (Kay, 1989). In particular, liberalization of capital markets without improvement of the incentives provided to top management of large corporations is likely to generate a substantial increase of takeover activity. The experience in the U.S. in recent years summarized above casts doubt on the efficiency-enhancing effects of unrestricted takeovers. Pursuit of speculative capital gains, insider trading, which is scarcely sanctioned in many contexts in Europe, and excessive growth by the manager of free cash flows are likely results. The LBO operations which are most likely to increase efficiency are inhibited in Europe by the risk-aversion of senior managers. Top-heavy conglomerates, ultimately increased market power, and negative effects on employment, and consumer welfare are by no means implausible unless policy makers abandon their cherished but unrealistic faith in economies of scale, and institute a throughoing reversal of current policy towards large firms, preferably coupled with support for venture capital for new start-ups and small firms.Tax policy is a traditional method for achieving specific allocative goals, but one which is currently providing perverse rather than positive incentives for employment growth. The rapid increase of non-wage labour costs in the form of payroll and other related taxes, largely to fund a pay-as-you-go system of social security benefits, represents a tax on employment which accelerates the substitution of labour by capital equipment. The major obstacle to replacing these perverse taxes by less distorting consumption or value-added taxes (VAT) is the distributive consequence of such change. Similar arguments are advanced against abolition of the double taxation of dividends, which encourages wasteful investment by large corporations, and against introduction of urgently needed environmental taxes on energy use and toxic emissions. A simplified negative income tax or support for low income recipients would in fact remove the hardship from the redistributive consequences of tax reform, but the political obstacles seem to be currently insurmountable. At the very least, however, these problems deserve much more intensive discussion and wider recognition than they have hitherto received.A major extension of adult retraining schemes following the example of Sweden seems to be the policy measure with the highest chances of realization, in part because the direct costs in the short run are relatively small, and also involve job creation. Removal of tax penalties for part-time work should also be feasible without substantial distributive effects, and would represent a first step towards general flexibility of working according to individual preferences. Clearly the state sector, still a major employer, could usefully lead the way instead of generally lagging behind the private sector. Overcoming ideological and sectarian opposition by organized labour leaders offers a challenge to public authorities and educational channels.A move to more flexible, decentralized wage bargaining and deregulation of the more archaic institutions of labour markets to facilitate entry by the self-employed and new firms should arguably be the ultimate goal for policy towards noninflationary full employment. While benefits from centralized or corporatist bargaining structures are sometimes claimed, the importance of new firm entry for employment and competition would appear to shift the weight of the evidence in favour of decentralization. However the political obstacles in most European countries are formidable, and promise only glacially slow progress.In view of evidence for failure of the capital market for small business in the U.S. noted above, a case could be made for state support and extension of the much less developed European venture capital market. Existing state grants and other systems, designed to encourage new investment and employment, are usually too cumbersome and bureaucratic. The paperwork involved often represents a major deterrent for small enterprises or new start-ups, and the time lags involved are particularly damaging to high-tech prospects where new ideas can quickly become obsolescent. It is quite conceivable that state funded venture capital suppliers, efficiently organized as independent local units, could develop into profitable going concerns able to repay their loan capital in the long run. To maximize the employment impact it is important to go beyond high tech, and offer funds in any promising service or manufacturing area, according to the available expertise of specialized personnel and institutions. A precondition for success is that staff should be profit sharing professionals rather than salaried civil servants. Similarly, employees should be encouraged to accept shares in future profits rather than initially high wages, to reduce the liquidity constraints on new businesses.It has been argued here that employment and industrial policy are closely interrelated, and should thus be coordinated in the light of recent research in these fields. This requires both academics and policy makers to cross conventional boundaries and take a broader view of the economy than is customary under the specialization that severely restricts much of the relevant debate. Current piecemeal policies, even with the help of the longest postwar boom, have hardly dented the problem of long run unemployment to date, and are unlikely to do so after 1992 without fundamental reorientation.     

Knowledge spillovers, collective entrepreneurship, and economic growth: the role of universities

To improve our understanding of the role that universities play in facilitating the transmission of knowledge to private-sector business enterprises so as to generate economic growth, this article builds on the Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship to develop a formal model of university-with-business enterprise collaborative research partnerships in which the outcome is both mutually desirable and feasible. This model shows that if a university seeks to act as a complement to private-sector collaborative R&D so that it will be attractive to both incumbent firms and startup entrepreneurs, it needs to structure its program so that business enterprise revenues increase and business enterprise R&D costs rise by a smaller proportion than revenues increase, if they rise at all (and a fall would be better). Such a structure is consistent with both business enterprise and university interests, but is only likely to be feasible if the university is subsidized to cover the cost of such public-private collaborative research partnerships. In the absence of such support, the university will have to cover its costs through a fee charged to participating business enterprises and that will result in the university being seen as a substitute rather than a complement to private-sector collaborative R&D, and thus the university will be seen as an unattractive partner for many business enterprises.     

Non-profit organizations,entrepreneurship, social capital and economic growth

Traditional economic growth literature focuses mainly on the neoclassical approach. According to this view, firms try to maximize their benefits so that there is no place for non-profit organizations (NPOs). However, the activity of NPOs has a higher relevance in society, and it is necessary to analyze its effects on economic growth. These effects are not direct, but occur through other variables that directly promote economic growth, such as entrepreneurship activity and human capital, and through the improvement of education. We engage in an empirical analysis of these issues using data from 11 countries.     

WTO全球贸易治理中的中国与欧盟

中欧参与世贸组织全球贸易治理是双方全面战略伙伴关系的重要组成部分。中国入世以来,中欧双方共同参与多哈回合谈判、善用争端解决机制解决争端、积极审议对方贸易政策,促进双边贸易快速增长和贸易关系健康发展,共同为多边贸易体系的良好运行作出了贡献。2008年以前,双方在世贸组织中的互动明显不对称,欧盟处于攻势,中国处于守势;2008年之后,双方朝对等方向发展,整体形势趋于良性互动。不过中国的能力与欧盟仍有不小差距,双方互动远未到成熟阶段。当前及未来一段时间,双方在世贸组织的互动面临挑战。     

National branding strategies and economic development: Implications for NIEs and LDCs

As the four newly industrialized economies (NIEs), Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, continue to improve their economic development, there is an increasing realization of the need to create world class brands for global competition. This is because these four NIEs, largely dependent on manufactured products for highly export-oriented strategies, are facing threats from lower cost semi-NIEs and LDCs (less developing countries) that are adopting similar strategies. This article examines the important roles played by brands in securing market share. In particular, it highlights the experiences of Japan in the development of international brands. Lessons are then drawn for the NIEs and LDCs, especially with regard to the need to consciously develop world class brands as part of the overall economic growth and development. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Institutional and economic drivers of entrepreneurship: An international perspective

Entrepreneurial activity varies significantly across countries and over time. The economic and institutional context is a determining factor that can drive and lend shape to entrepreneurial activity. The search for a deeper understanding of the role of this factor constitutes a promising and important research stream. A thorough review of the specialist literature identifies groups of countries with similar economic and institutional environments. Subsequent analysis highlights differences in entrepreneurial activity and innovation outcomes between these homogeneous groups. Results indicate significant differences, not only in entrepreneurial activity, but also in the type of entrepreneurship and innovation results. These findings mark a relevant step forward in the identification of different environment types, and the effects of environment on entrepreneurial activity and innovation results.     

How entrepreneurship ecosystem influences the development of frugal innovation and informal entrepreneurship

This article critically analyses how the entrepreneurial ecosystem and institutional environment influences the development of frugal innovation and informal entrepreneurship. There is a dearth of empirical research on African entrepreneurship ecosystems and complementors that produce innovations in the informal sector. We address this gap, by examining why and how informal businesses operate and evolve. Based on a qualitative approach, interviewing 20 business owners in Nigeria, two focus groups meeting with 5 and 7 business associations leaders, respectively, we examine the role of institutional environments, how entrepreneurs operate and overcome the barriers to entrepreneurship. The results reveal a model of determinants of frugal innovation and informal entrepreneurship ecosystem comprising formal/informal rules, access to market, and family as important elements that act as a means to effective knowledge flows, networking, capital, and resources sharing.