The Chinese business system and its authoriliberal economic model

China's position as one of the most powerful nations in the world is undisputed. However, in an evolving landscape, China's utilization of a path-dependent business system may hinder the ability of the country's institutions to undergo necessary change, which will have important implications for international business literature. Through business system theory, empirical evidence, and a mixed methods approach, we discuss China's business system explaining how the system may impair sustainable growth and the transformation required by a less dependent industrial society. Our research suggests that the Chinese business system is still very arrested due to its recent past, and the Chinese Communist Party has only partial interest in improving some of the most important bases for the development of modern enterprises, even if fostering a somewhat liberal economic approach. Since similar political (authoritarian) and economic (liberal) approaches are found elsewhere, we theorize on what we called an authoriliberal economic approach.     

Evaluating the impact of virtualization characteristics on SaaS adoption

Software as a service (SaaS) is a service model in which the applications are accessible from various client devices through internet. Several studies report possible factors driving the adoption of SaaS but none have considered the perception of the SaaS features and the organization’s context. We propose an integrated research model that combines the process virtualization theory (PVT), the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework and the institutional theory (INT). PVT seeks to explain whether processes are suitable for migration into virtual environments via an information technology-based mechanism as SaaS. The TOE framework seeks to explain the effects of the intra-organizational factors, while INT seeks to explain the effects of the inter-organizational factors on the technology adoption. This research addresses a gap in the SaaS adoption literature by studying the internal perception of the technical features of SaaS and technology, organization, and environment perspectives. Additionally, the integration of PVT, the TOE framework, and INT contributes to the information system (IS) discipline, deepening the applicability and strengths of these theories.     

OUTPUT CONTINGENT SECURITIES AND EFFICIENT INVESTMENT BY FIRMS

We analyze competitive economies with risky investments. Unlike the classic Arrow–Debreu framing, firms and agents cannot contract upon the exogenous states underlying production risks. They can trade equities and any security written on the endogenous aggregate output. This financial structure is rich enough to promote efficient risk sharing among consumers. However, markets are incomplete from the production perspective, and the absence of prices for each primitive state of nature raises the question about the objective of firms. We show that output‐contingent asset prices convey sufficient information to compute the competitive shareholder value that leads to efficient investment by firms.     

Cost of Equity Capital and Additionality of Brazilian Renewable Energy Projects Under the Clean Development Mechanism

The purpose of this study was to assess additionality and the practice of estimating the cost of equity capital in 70 renewable energy projects in Brazil. Forty projects demonstrated additionality by means of financial analysis. No strong or clear relationships were found between project characteristics and the financial method used to demonstrate additionality. Among projects that used financial analysis, the evaluation often employed the risk-free rate. Failure to add any risk premium to projects of this nature suggests a certain analytical carelessness, perhaps induced by the innovative or experimental nature of these projects.     

Managing complexity： A problem of chaos in fisheries policy

This work intends to present chaos theory （and dynamical systems such as the theories of complexity）, in terms of interpretation of ecological phenomena. The chaos theory applied in the context of ecological systems, especially in the context of fisheries has allowed the recognition of the relevance of this kind of theories to explain fishing phenomena and fisheries policies. It has permitted new advances in the study of marine systems, contributing to the preservation of fish stocks. This paper deals with the way how to manage fisheries taking chaos in account of the problem.     

Government ideology and economic freedom

This paper tests the widespread belief that right-wing governments tend to promote economic freedom while left-wing ones prefer more control over the economy. Using annual data for 106 countries over the period 1975-2015 and a two-step system GMM estimator, this study shows that right-wing governments are indeed more prone to promote economic freedom and to deregulate the economy. It also finds that this effect seems to be stronger in developing/emerging economies than in more developed countries. Moreover, the analysis of the broad dimensions of economic freedom indicates that right-wing governments tend to act by improving monetary soundness and freedom to trade internationally and by easing regulations that restrict entry into markets. Mainstream left-wing governments do not seem to affect economic freedom, however populist left-wing parties, when in office, are found to have a detrimental effect.     

The environmental,social and economic effects of recent technological changes in sugarcane on the State of São Paulo,Brazil

From 2007 to 2017, the Agro‐Environmental Protocol of the Sugar and Energy Sector was in force, an agreement between sugarcane mill owners and the State Government of São Paulo, Brazil, proposing to eliminate sugarcane burning as a method to facilitate the harvest. Simultaneously, the sugarcane harvest was becoming widely mechanized while, under the interests of capital accumulation, the mills were entering the information and communication technology era and providing the agricultural processes with more precise and immediate management and technological controls, similar to those implemented in the mills' administrative and industrial operations in the 1990s. Short‐term factors, including environmental factors, favoured sugarcane technological changes. As a result, there was a mass layoff of rural workers and an increasing number of people/workers in agricultural mechanization, transportation and maintenance of machinery and administrative as well. The whole process highlighted the differences between mills, resulting in small and medium sugarcane farmers and mills to become the most impacted, in operational and financial terms, by the accelerating mechanization of the sugarcane industry as a whole.     

A green Lewis development model

This paper develops an environmental extension of a Lewis dual economy model, in which the interaction between environmental quality and economic growth, in one of its several dimensions, is explicitly modeled to explore long-run effects of a pollution abatement rule in developing economies. The government requires the modern sector to dedicate a fraction of its output to pollution abatement, with such profitability-reducing fraction being endogenous to the level of environmental quality. Meanwhile, the level of environmental quality positively affects labor productivity, profits and, therefore, savings, which has a positive impact on capital accumulation. It is shown that this pollution abatement requirement, by affecting profitability in the modern sector both negatively and positively, makes for the emergence of an ecological development trap from which a developing dual economy, if left to the free play of its structural forces, never escapes. Fortunately, however, this economy can be released from such a trap not only through a standard Big Push, in the spirit of Rosenstein-Rodan, but also by means of what we call an Environmental Big Push.     

A note reconsidering a post-Keynesian model of growth and distribution in the globalization context

We treat an extension of the Metcalfe and Steedman model of growth and distribution in a small open economy with government activity. We show, simultaneously, that certain kinds of taxation and government expenditures will not affect the essential nature of the “Cambridge Equation.” This is important due to the increasing process of Financial Globalization which can be responsible for changing the profit distribution between capitalists and workers. The present note aims at integrating the public sector and the foreign trade together into the model, based on previous literature that, with few exceptions, treats them separately. To do so, a new framework is proposed. Our contribution shows that workers’ income grows when the Current Account in the balance of payments is in surplus, a result not studied by Teixeira and Araújo. The discussion includes recent literature concerning with limits of applicability of such analytical model, dealing with more realistic economies including the process of globalization.     

Product Innovation in Resource‐Poor Environments: Three Research Streams

We explore the role and relevance of resource scarcity in product innovation. The literature tends to assume that the development of new products requires resource sufficiency for the process to be conducted systematically. But we are also taught that necessity is the mother of invention and that resource scarcity may be a trigger of innovation in adverse contexts. In this discussion, we organize the literature on product innovation in resource‐poor contexts in three streams. The paper contributes to a finer‐grained understanding of the role of scarcity in product innovation and suggests that creative approaches to scarcity may contribute to knowledge enrichment of product innovation theory and practice.