Report of the expert committee for drugs - Bangladesh

On 12 June 1982, the Bangladesh Ministry of Health announced a National Drug Policy based on the recommendation of an Expert Committee appointed by the Ministry to evaluate all drugs presently available and to formulate a draft National Drug Policy in consonance with the health needs of the country. The new policy is expected to save annually considerable amounts in foreign exchange and in domestic drug costs. This will allow the Government and health workers to concentrate on providing the most essential drugs to a much larger section of the population and to extend the coverage of other health activities. The new policy follows closely the recommendations of the World Health Organization for countries to concentrate on the supply of a limited number of essential drugs.     

Trademarks and the Third World

There were about four million trademarks in force throughout the world in 1974. Around one million of them were granted in the developing countries; one half of these were owned by foreigners and most of them for items of consumption for the elites. Advertising expenditures in developing countries, mostly meant to promote these trademarks, amounted to $4 billion in 1973 - twice as much as their expenditure on R & D!This article examines the place of trademarks in developing countries and their functions. It points to the anomaly between the legal framework, national as well as international, giving protection to the owners of trademarks and the interests of development of the Third World. It concludes by drawing attention to initiatives for balancing the grant of such rights, mostly to transnational corporations by considerations of national interest.     

Employee ownership and firm performance: a meta‐analysis

Employee ownership has been an area of significant practitioner and academic interest for the past four decades. Yet, empirical results on the relationship between employee ownership and firm performance remain mixed. To aggregate findings and provide potential direction for future theoretical development, we conducted a meta‐analysis of 102 samples representing 56,984 firms. Employee ownership has a small, but positive and statistically significant relation to firm performance ( = 0.04). The effect is generally positive for studies with different sampling designs (samples assessing change in performance pre‐employee–post‐employee ownership adoption or samples on firms with employee ownership), different performance operationalisation (efficiency or growth) and firm type (publicly held or privately held). Suggesting benefits of employee ownership in a variety of contexts, we found no differences in effects on performance in publicly held versus privately held firms, stock or stock option‐based ownership plans or differences in effects across different firm sizes (i.e. number of employees). We do find that the effect of employee ownership on performance has increased in studies over time and that studies with samples from outside the USA report stronger effects than those within. We also find little to no evidence of publication bias.     

Macroeconomic policy and output comovement: The formal and informal sectors in India

Is the informal sector different from the formal sector? We present an aggregative analysis of the formal and informal sectors in India to investigate the extent to which the two can be viewed as broadly homogeneous. Using a macroeconometric framework, the paper analyzes over past three decades the behavior of the two sectors with respect to each other and several government-related policy variables. It is found that the formal and informal sectors display markedly different attributes in terms of their relationship to policy variables. Furthermore, the informal sector appears to be decoupled from the rest of the economy.     

New Directions: Cambridge–Maastricht Symposium 2001

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics -     

Organizationally-relevant configurations: the value of modeling local dependence

Configurations are important across all levels of organizations. Despite the interest in and importance of configurations in research for organizations, the empirical methods for assessing and classifying configurations has not kept pace with the theoretical advancements. Theory suggests that configurations must include aligned elements that have local dependence. Local dependence is defined as the interrelationships among variables necessary to form an internally consistent configuration. We explain how latent class cluster analysis (LCCA) enables modeling for local dependence and provides theoretical and methodological value for configurations researchers. Using primary data from two samples, we demonstrate that LCCA with local dependence outperforms traditional cluster analysis-based approaches. Our method can be used for detecting configurations at a variety of organizational levels (e.g. nation, industry, firm, and group).     

How information systems help create OM capabilities: Consequents and antecedents of operational absorptive capacity

In contemporary business environments, the ability to manage operational knowledge is an important predictor of organizational competitiveness. Organizations invest large sums in various types of information technologies (ITs) to manage operational knowledge. Because of their superior storage, processing and communication capabilities, ITs offer technical platforms to build knowledge management (KM) capabilities. However, merely acquiring ITs are not sufficient, and organizations must structure information system (IS) designs to leverage ITs for building KM capabilities. We study how technical and strategic IS designs enhance operational absorptive capacity (OAC) – the KM capability of an operations management (OM) department. Specifically, we use a capabilities perspective of absorptive capacity to examine potential absorptive capacity (POAC) and realized absorptive capacity (ROAC) capabilities – the two OAC capabilities that create and utilize knowledge, respectively. Our theory proposes that integrated IS capability, – an aspect of technical IS design – is an antecedent of POAC and ROAC capabilities, and business-IT alignment – an aspect of strategic IS design – moderates the relationship between integrated IS capability and ROAC capability. Combining data gleaned from a multi-respondent survey with archival data from COMPUSTAT, we test our hypotheses using a dataset from 153 manufacturing organizations. By proposing that IS design enables an OM department's KM processes, i.e., the POAC and ROAC capabilities, our interdisciplinary theoretical framework opens the “black box” of OAC and contributes to improved understanding of IS and OM synergies. We offer a detailed discussion of our contributions to the literature at the IS-OM interface and implications for practitioners.