The Borneo company limited: origins of a nineteenth-century networked multinational

The origins of British-based trading companies are to be found in the international mercantile networks which linked together Britain's commercial centres with the rest of the world during the nineteenth century. One such network, drawing together participants with operations in Singapore and Sarawak, was formalized under the title of The Borneo Company Limited (BCL) between 1851 and 1856. To function effectively, these inter-personal networks of merchants required a high degree of trustworthiness among the participants in order to overcome principal/agent problems, since direct supervision from the headquarters in London was not feasible. However, in order to expand, it was necessary to widen the circle of network participants and to incorporate new types of competence. This contribution analyses the early history of BCL with a view to understanding the way in which the process of growth was managed, distinguishing between three different types of expansion: engaging in production as well as trade; extending the geographical scope of the organization; and diversifying into new markets.     

Impulse and diffusion in the study of technical change

A common model of innovation diffusion is extended to incorporate the interaction of demand growth and capacity growth, building in part on work by Kuznets and Burns on industrial growth and retardation. It is shown how price and production cost evolve during a diffusion process, and how Schumpeter's theory of the transient nature of innovator's profits has a natural place within the analysis of diffusion. The framework is intended to assist future analysis of the links between the diffusion and the evolution of a given technology, taking account of, eg, learning by doing, production bottlenecks and the inducement to innovation, and producer/adopter interaction to improve technological performance.     

Competition,Fisher's Principle and increasing returns in the selection process

This paper explores the relationship between increasing returns and structural change in the context of an explicitly evolutionary model. The central theme concerns the behaviour of a population of competing firms which is elaborated in terms of Fisher's Principle, the rate of change of the moments of this population distribution are functionally related to higher order moments of the. distribution. Different kinds of increasing returns are distinguished and it is shown how they influence the dynamics of selection. The basic principles here are those of replicator dynamic, systems, and it is shown how the Fisher Principle interacts with the more familiar Kaldor/Verdoorn principles of endogenous growth.     

U.S. Hog Production and the Influence of State Water Quality Regulation

The U.S. hog industry is experiencing an increase in both the average size and in the geographical concentration of feeding operations. These increases have caused public attention to focus on the environmental consequences of hog production and on the regulations imposed to limit these consequences. This study examines the influence of state water quality regulatory stringency on hog production in the United States. The results of this analysis provide evidence that environmental compliance costs are significant for small hog feeding operations, while production on large operations does not appear to be influenced by the level of state environmental regulatory stringency.
On assiste présentement à une augmentation de la taille des exploitations et à une concentration géographique des établissements d'engraissement dans le secteur américain de l'élevage porcin. Ces changements ont amené la population à s'intéresser aux répercussions de la production porcine sur l'environnement et aux réglements adoptés en vue d'atténuer de telles répercussions. L'auteur détermine de quelle maniére la sévérité des réglements d'État sur la qualité de l'eau influe sur l'élevage des pores aux États-Unis. Les résultats de son analyse prouvent que le respect des règlements sur la protection de l'environnement engendre des coûts appréciables pour les petits éleveurs, alors que les exploitations de plus grande envergure ne sont pas aussi affectées par la rigueur de la réglementation d'État en matiére d'environnement.     

The Stakeholder Corporation

The stakeholder debate continues unabated in Britain in various arenas of public life and activity. "While recognising the societal holism of the stakeholder concept this article concentrates on the debate at a business level, discussing whether stakeholding is ethical, attainable, or even appropriate to business corporations". The author is completing his MBA at London Business School and has a background of consulting in organisational and IT analysis.     

Adaptive economic growth

This paper develops an evolutionary theory of adaptive growth,understood as a product of structural change and economic self-transformation,based upon processes that are closely connected with but notreducible to the growth of knowledge. The dominant connectingtheme is enterprise, the innovative variations it generatesand the multiple connections between investment, innovation,demand and structural transformation in the market process.The paper explores the dependence of macroeconomic productivitygrowth on the diversity of technical progress functions andincome elasticities of demand at the industry level, and theresolution of this diversity into patterns of economic changethrough market processes. It is shown how industry growth ratesare constrained by higher-order processes of emergence thatconvert an ensemble of industry growth rates into an aggregaterate of growth. The growth of productivity, output and employmentare determined mutually and endogenously, and their values dependon the variation in the primary causal influences in the system.