National Determinants of Family Firm Development? Family Firms in Britain, Spain, and Italy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

We provide here a complement to recent work on family business,which has demonstrated the need to go beyond the generic definitionof the family firm to place personal capitalism in an appropriateinstitutional, historical, and cultural framework. By focusingon the nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiences in Britain,Spain, and Italy, we challenge the notion that in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries there was anything so simple as a Mediterraneanmodel for family business. Rather, we demonstrate the need toconsider family businesses in national and regional contextsif we are to understand their various capabilities and characteristics.We use similarities and differences in the experiences and responsesof families and firms in the three countries to support thisclaim.     

Marked recovery in the world economy

With expansion accelerating strongly since last summer, the world economy has overcome an extended period of weakness. The USA, driven by highly expansive fiscal policies, is once again proving to be an important locomotive for global economic development. The strong fiscal stimulus will diminish sharply this year, however. Can the recovery continue nonetheless? This is of importance for the euro area in particular, where exports have so far been the primary foundation of economic resurgence. Is the substantial appreciation of the euro jeopardising prospects of catching up with the rest of the world?     

A minimum corporate tax rate would be harmful for both high and low tax countries

Conclusion  The corporate tax policy of the new EU member states does create pressures for some of the old member states to reduce their corporate taxes, in particular statutory corporate tax rates. But reacting to this pressure by enforcing mimimum tax rates in the EU would be counterproductive. It would slow down the economic catching up process in eastern Europe and question the competitiveness of the entire EU as a location for investment compared to other countries and regions in the world economy. There are potential benefits from more coordination in the field of corporate taxation, but this coordination should aim at removing tax obstacles to border-crossing investment and at reducing the compliance costs of the tax system. This requires targeted measures in the area of tax base coordination. Introducing minimum corporate tax rates, in contrast, would be harmful for both high and low tax countries in the EU.     

New ways of achieving debt sustainability beyond the enhanced HIPC Initiative

In 1996 the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative was launched by the Bretton Woods institutions to reduce the external debt burden of low-income countries (LICs) to sustainable levels in a reasonably short period of time because debt constitutes an obstacle to sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction. In some HIPCs, however, debt sustainability has been in danger despite debt relief under the HIPC Initiative. Debt relief is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for development. It can do no more than play a catalytic role. The question, then, is how to achieve debt sustainability beyond the HIPC Initiative.     

Global economy gathering strength

Encouraged by a highly expansionary economic policy, the global economy is enjoying a rapid upturn. Utilisation of capacity is high in many sectors, particularly in the growth centres of the USA and East Asia, where China leads the field. With inflationary risks on the increase, most countries are now shifting the focus of economic policy. Fiscal policy in particular can be expected to provide little in the way of further stimulus. In addition, there has been a turnaround in interest rates in many countries. Yet how quickly can the monetary reins be tightened without jeopardising growth or endangering price stability?     

Management Information System – A Tool for Corporate Sustainability

This paper represents the attempt to define a methodology that can evaluate the degree to which companies' information systems correspond to needs determined by the objectives of sustainability the firm imposes on itself. The result is the creation of a general model which define the correct approach to evaluating information systems – a model which should be adapted to the specificity of each single company which intends to adopt it. In the chart indicated, we obviously have not considered activities connected to the implementation of the survey system, which are particular to each company's situation. The first part of the paper consists of an overall introduction to the approach that has been used to assess the (MIS) of Granarolo, one of the Italian companies involved. The case study contains a profile of the company, the analysis of its MIS referred to the three dimensions of sustainability, and an evaluation of the strong points and issues to be developed. This approach to evaluate the gap between desired requirements of an information system for sustainability and current data available in a firm, has proved its consistency and usefulness. It helps to understand where data are, which dimensions, spheres, stakeholders account for and what is the level of integration between different information systems existing in the firm.     

Dynamic supernetworks for the integration of social networks and supply chains with electronic commerce: modeling and analysis of buyer–seller relationships with computations

In this paper, we develop a dynamic supernetwork framework for the modeling and analysis of supply chains with electronic commerce that also includes the role that relationships play. Manufacturers are assumed to produce a homogeneous product and to sell it either through physical or electronic links to retailers and/or directly to consumers through electronic links. Retailers, in turn, can sell the product through physical links to consumers. Increasing relationship levels in our framework are assumed to reduce transaction costs as well as risk and to have some additional value for both sellers and buyers. Establishing those relationship levels incurs some costs that have to be borne by the decision-makers in the supernetwork, which is multilevel in structure and consists of the supply chain and the social network. The decision-makers, who are located at distinct tiers in the supernetwork, try to optimize their objective functions and are faced with multiple criteria including relationship-related ones and weight them according to their preferences. We establish the optimality conditions for the manufacturers, retailers, and consumers, derive the equilibrium conditions, and provide the variational inequality formulation. We then present the projected dynamical system, which describes the disequilibrium dynamics of the product transactions, relationship levels, and prices on the supernetwork, and whose set of stationary points coincides with the set of solutions of the variational inequality problem. We also illustrate the dynamic supernetwork model through several numerical examples, for which the explicit equilibrium patterns are computed.     

Portfolio management without probabilities or statistics

Considered here is on-line portfolio management aimed at maximizing the long-run growth of financial wealth. The portfolio is repeatedly rebalanced in response to observed returns on diverse assets. Suppose statistical information and related methods are not available—or deemed too difficult. On that assumption this paper explores how an adaptive procedure, which totally dispenses with statistics and associated competence, nonetheless may solve the problem over time.