Investment climate,outward orientation and manufacturing firm productivity: new empirical evidence

Drawing on the World Bank Enterprise Surveys, we revisit the link between firm-level investment climate and productive performance for a panel of enterprises surveyed twice in time in 70 developing countries and 11 manufacturing industries. We take advantage of the time dimension available for an increasing number of countries to tackle the endogeneity issue stressed in previous studies. We also use pertinent econometric techniques to address other biases inherent in the data (e.g.measurement errors, missing observations and multicollinearity). Our results reinforce previous findings by validating, with a larger than usual sample of countries and industries, the importance of a larger set of environment variables. We show that infrastructure quality, information & communication technologies, skills and experience of the labour force, cost of and access to financing, security and political stability, competition and government relation contribute to firms’ and countries’ performances gap. The empirical analysis also illustrates that firms which choose an outward orientation have higher productivity level. Nevertheless, outward oriented enterprises are more sensitive to investment climate limitations. These findings have important policy implications by showing which dimensions of the business environment, in which industry, could help manufacturing firms to be more competitive in the present context of increasing globalization.     

Distribution of responsibility in socio-technical networks: the Promest case

The aim of the present paper is to show how (informal) responsibility issues within the context of a network are essentially related with the way networks are organised in order to pursue their objectives. We conceive of organisations as having at least three relevant dimensions: power, coordination and control. The case of the Dutch manure processing factory Promest is analysed in terms of these three dimensions. The analysis provides an illustration of how the dimensions enable actors to discharge their responsibilities, thereby offering insight in responsibility issues within a group of actors and contributing to the prevention of the problem of many hands.     

Commercialisation de la microfinance: impact sur les plus pauvres en Afrique

Nous cherchons à déterminer si la commercialisation des IMF est associée à la « dérive de mission ». Plus précisément, en considérant que la commercialisation se caractérise par la viabilité, la concurrence, et la réglementation des IMF, nous évaluons son effet sur la taille moyenne des prêts accordés. L'étude empirique est basée sur les données en panel de 96 IMF ?uvrant dans 22 pays africains durant la période 2005–2008, et aussi sur la méthode des MCO afin d'étudier l'impact de la commercialisation des IMF sur la taille moyenne des prêts par groupe de clientèle servie. Les résultats indiquent que les IMF africaines ont une plus faible portée sociale lorsqu'elles sont autonomes financièrement, mais la réglementation et la concurrence peuvent favoriser l'inclusion des plus pauvres. Nous constatons également que l'augmentation de la taille moyenne des prêts est associée à des niveaux inférieurs de remboursement du prêt par les plus pauvres, à la baisse de pourcentage de femmes emprunteuses, au pourcentage de population rurale et à la forme juridique d'ONG, et aussi à la prédominance du crédit individuel. Ceci caractérise la dérive de mission.     

Social evaluations when populations differ in size

Assessments of “social welfare” do not usually take into account population sizes. This can lead to serious social evaluation flaws, particularly in contexts in which policies can affect demographic growth. We develop in this paper a little‐known though ethically attractive approach to correcting the flaws of traditional social evaluations, an approach that is sensitive to population sizes and that is based on critical‐level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU). Traditional CLGU is extended by considering arbitrary orders of welfare dominance and ranges of “poverty lines,” as well as values for the “critical level” of how much a life must be minimally worth to contribute to social welfare. We apply these social evaluation methods to rank Canada across 1976, 1986, 1996 and 2006 and to estimate normatively and statistically robust lower and upper bounds of critical levels over which these rankings can be made.     

Building logistic models by means of a non parametric goodness of fit test: a case study

A sequence of logistic models is fitted to data from a Dutch follow-up study on preterm infants (POPS). To examine the adequacy of the model, a recently developed non parametric method to check goodness of fit is applied (le Cessie and Van Houwelingen (1991)). This method uses a test statistic based upon kernel regression methods.
In this paper the problem of choosing a "best" bandwidth, corresponding to the greatest power of the test statistic, is avoided by computing the test statistic for a range of different bandwidths. Testing is then based upon the asymptotic distribution of the maximum of the test statistics.
The testing method is used as a goodness of fit criterion, and the contribution of each individual observation to the test statistic is used as a diagnostic tool to localize deviations of the model, and to determine directions in which the model can be improved.     

Subsidiary roles,vertical linkages and economic development: Lessons from transition economies

Vertical supply chain linkages between foreign subsidiaries and domestic firms are important mechanisms for knowledge spillovers, contributing to the economic development of host economies. This paper argues that subsidiary roles and technological competences affect the extent of vertical linkages as such as well as their potential for technological spillovers. Using survey evidence from 424 foreign subsidiaries based in transition economies, we tested for the effect of subsidiaries’ autonomy, initiative, technological capability, internal and external technological embeddedness on the extent and intensity of forward and backward vertical linkages. The evidence supports our main argument that the potential of technology diffusion via vertical linkages depends on the nature of subsidiary roles. We discuss the implications for transition as well as other developing countries.     

Consumers’ preference modeling to price bundle offers in the telecommunications industry: a game with competition among operators

Network operators are merging their services, such as fixed or wireless telephony, internet or television, into single offers, called bundles. It is essential to understand consumers’ preferences to define the most profitable bundles, with their associated prices, especially in the fierce competitive current market. We start by defining a random linear utility model and then, analyze the competition between an integrated operator and new entrants proposing substitutable services. Each operator ignores the consumers’ reservation prices for his offers and has to deal with uncertainties about the marketing strategies of competitors, due to potential different size and cost structure. A two-level game is introduced and solved by backward induction. In the second level, the operators determine their optimal offer prices for each possible combination of marketing strategies while the consumers select their most profitable purchasing processes; the natural framework is that of Bayesian game theory. Finally at the top level, knowing the outcome of the other level, the operators identify which marketing strategy to use between market share expansion, segment targeting or multi-level price discrimination, to maximize their expected utilities conditionally to their private informations.     

The Practice of Networking: An Ethical Approach

Focusing on the virtue-ethics tradition, this article analyzes the practice of networking within the business context. First, it distinguishes three types of networking: utilitarian, emotional, and virtuous. Virtuous networking does not exclude utilitarian and emotional networking, but these latter forms should be practiced with reciprocity. It is argued that virtuous networking requires (1) acting with good faith, sharing honest goals, and participating in licit activities; (2) sharing information, knowledge, and resources with reciprocity and even with gratuity; (3) serving with justice in asymmetrical power relationships; and (4) exercising a positive ethical influence within the network. Specific forms of unethical behavior in the practice of networking include (1) bad faith or abuse of trust, (2) opportunism, (3) abuse and misuse of power, (4) network cronyism, (5) networking as disguised bribery, and (6) cooperating in the wrongdoing of other actors of the network. The article concludes with some remarks about the role of ethics in social networks.