International competitiveness: A review article

Michael E. Porter's book, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (Porter, 1990), throws interesting new light on the international competitiveness of national firms. It deserves wide readership but this is likely to be handicapped by its length (855’ pages) and discursive style. Section I of this review article describes the approach of the book, Section II presents a short version of the main thesis, Section III offers a critical review of the argument, and, finally, Section IV examines the implications of the volume for the theory of international trade.     

Concentration history and market power in US manufacturing industries

For a 1963–1992 panel of US manufacturing industries, the relationship between seller concentration and both price-cost margins (PCMs) and prices is investigated for industries divided by whether concentration has recently increased or decreased. Regressions of PCM in levels and first differences, and price equations in first differences, establish that the positive effect of concentration on prices and profits is always weaker in industries where concentration has recently increased and always stronger in industries where concentration has recently decreased. These results are attributed to the different endogeneity biases in the two samples. Increasing concentration industries are more likely the ones where leading firms have lowered prices to gain share, while decreasing concentration industries are more likely the ones where smaller firms have lowered concentration by lowering prices. An additional conclusion is that the cost-reducing effects of changes in concentration are greater for increasing concentration industries, meaning that increasing concentration industries have lower price increases compared to decreasing concentration industries.     

Gambling,Prediction Markets and Public Policy

The recent worldwide increase in gambling and prediction markets, including casinos, sports betting, lotteries, elections, and wagering on financial instruments has stimulated an important debate regarding the public policy implications of these activities. Some critical research questions concern the efficiency of such markets, heterogeneity in risk attitudes among agents engaged in these activities, the factors that influence performance in gambling, and the desirability of using prediction markets. This special issue provides empirical evidence on these issues.     

The Communicative Value of the Auditor's Report

Communicating the results of the audit is a crucial part of the audit process. This potentially enables the users of financial reports to assess the quality of the audit, which will in turn contribute to their assessments of financial reporting quality. This research reports the results of a verbal protocol study of 16 financial analysts to assess how they use an auditor's report as part of a company evaluation. Auditors’ reports perse are found to be important to analysts in that they signal a level of reliability in the financial statements. However, the content of the auditor's report, including the additional content of the recently issued longer form auditor's report (ISA 700, ASA 700), generally was not attended to by the analysts. This suggests the communicative value of the auditor's report is minimal beyond signalling the elevated reliability of the financial statements.     

Antecedents and Effects of Parent Control in International Joint Ventures

Using a sample of 90 US–China manufacturing joint ventures, this study empirically tested a grounded-theory model of the antecedents and the effects of the structure of parent management control in international joint ventures. The results suggest that competitive and cooperative dynamics occur simultaneously between joint venture partners. On one hand, the relative bargaining power between the partners, derived from the negotiation context and from contributing critical resources to the venture, respectively, is a determining factor in management control; and the level of operational control exercised by a partner over the venture has a positive effect on the extent to which this partner's strategic objectives are achieved. On the other hand, the quality of the interpartner working relationship was found to have a strong, positive relationship with the achievement of strategic objectives for both partners.     

The Social and Geopolitical Origins of State Transformation: The Case of South Korea

Recent debates surrounding state transformation in East Asia have tended to examine either how transformations in domestic social relations undermined the efficacy of the developmental state, or how mobilisation of coercion and consent at the international level led to the adoption of neoliberal policies. Through an examination of the case of Korea, however, this article seeks to move beyond this division between ‘domestic’ - and ‘international’ - centred analyses to provide a framework wherby mutually constitutive transformations taking place both at the level of social relations of production and at the level of the international order can be integrated to produce a conjunctural analysis of state transformation. Through deploying Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, an analysis of social and geopolitical underpinnings of korean late development is provided in order to provide an alternative explanation of the causes and nature of transition towards the neoliberal state since the latter part of the twentieth century.     

W(h)ither Ecology? The Triple Bottom Line, the Global Reporting Initiative, and Corporate Sustainability Reporting

This paper offers a critique of sustainability reporting and, in particular, a critique of the modern disconnect between the practice of sustainability reporting and what we consider to be the urgent issue of our era: sustaining the life-supporting ecological systems on which humanity and other species depend. Tracing the history of such reporting developments, we identify and isolate the concept of the ‘triple bottom line’ (TBL) as a core and dominant idea that continues to pervade business reporting, and business engagement with sustainability. Incorporating an entity’s economic, environmental and social performance indicators into its management and reporting processes, we argue, has become synonymous with corporate sustainability; in the process, concern for ecology has become sidelined. Moreover, this process has become reinforced and institutionalised through SustainAbility’s biennial benchmarking reports, KPMG’s triennial surveys of practice, initiatives by the accountancy profession and, particularly, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)’s sustainability reporting guidelines. We argue that the TBL and the GRI are insufficient conditions for organizations contributing to the sustaining of the Earth’s ecology. Paradoxically, they may reinforce business-as-usual and greater levels of un-sustainability.     

Sustainability + Accounting Education: The Elephant in the Classroom

Despite the growing importance of sustainability and the sustainable development agenda, and despite the growing presence of papers recognising the critical interaction between sustainability and accounting and finance (and, indeed, with all social science), there has been a relatively muted response apparent within the accounting education literature itself. This relative lack of literature may well be unexpected but what is not unexpected is the difficulty that accounting and finance teachers have in developing such demanding new ideas with accounting and finance students in the classroom. Without in any sense gainsaying the considerable impediments to innovation, this explicitly polemical essay seeks to address a more fundamental difficulty: that of the way in which sustainability is approached and represented in both the literature and the classroom itself. The contention is that, unless sustainability is ‘keeping you awake at night’, you do not understand it. The paper seeks to support this contention and then offers an example of one undergraduate course that is explicitly designed to stop students sleeping peacefully.