Building National Competitive Advantage: Rwanda's Lessons from Singapore

Despite its recent tragic history of genocide and continuing threats to political stability, Rwanda has made significant strides in improving its competitive position compared to its African neighbors and to other countries at an equivalent economic level. The Rwandan business and political leadership have explicitly taken Singapore as a model for rapid economic growth, with the aim of positioning Rwanda as a regional hub for transportation and advanced services. This article, based in part on fieldwork conducted in Rwanda by the lead author, ¹ analyzes Rwanda's development strategy using the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness framework and evaluates its potential for success in emulating Singapore's development pathway. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The Yen Exchange Rate and the Hollowing Out of the Japanese Industry

Open Economies Review - Since the demise of the Bretton Woods system, the yen has seen several episodes of strong appreciation, including in the late 1970s, after the 1985 Plaza Agreement, the...     

Absorptive capacity and firm performance: an integrative framework of benefits and downsides

Research underscores the important role a firm's absorptive capacity plays in developing knowledge, promoting open innovation, managing alliances, facilitating organisational learning, creating strategic variety, and enhancing financial performance. However, prior research often overlooks how absorptive capacity could increase a firm's costs associated with building this capacity, perpetuate and even increase inertia because of reduced variety and limited organisational search, handicap internal knowledge development, and complicate knowledge sharing. Research also ignores the growing complexity of absorptive capacity, a factor that could reduce a firm's gains from exploiting external knowledge. Our discussion builds on the knowledge-based view to provide an integrative framework for the performance effects of absorptive capacity. Based on different benefits and downsides of absorptive capacity at multiple levels of analysis, it points to an inverted U-shaped relationship between absorptive capacity and a firm's financial performance, highlighting several promising avenues for future research.     

EU Agricultural Policy Reform: Evaluating the EU’s New Methodology for Direct Payments

The Common Agricultural Policy has changed significantly over time. Major changes are now introduced every seven years, with the last fundamental change agreed upon in 2013 for the period 2014-2020. Policymakers also agreed to a mid-term review in order to evaluate the performance of numerous new regulations. The Commission has elaborated a methodology for the evaluation and has already published some documents with initial results for past periods. This article reviews whether the methodology and database used by the Commission are in line with the highest standards for policy evaluation.     

Default contagion and systemic risk in loan guarantee networks

This paper studies systemic risk in the Chinese debt market stemming from inter‐corporate loan guarantees using field data from Zhejiang Province. We apply a weighted and directed network model to analyse the implications for default contagion and systemic risk under different stress testing scenarios. The empirical results indicate that the topology of the loan guarantee network is close to a ‘scale‐free’ structure, which is known to be robust against accidental failures but vulnerable to coordinated attacks. Hence, the network is able to cope with idiosyncratic shocks resulting from single company failures, but can easily suffer from more widespread contagion if a group of systemically important companies are hit by a targeted shock. We further demonstrate that within our sample of small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) companies, increasing leverage reduces network stability and exacerbates the effects of contagion. More lenient bank lending policies increase the survival rate of sample companies and thereby reduce the losses from default contagion.     

The Effectiveness of Unconventional Monetary Policy in Japan

Since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, central bankers around the world have been forced to abandon conventional monetary policy tools in favor of unconventional policies such as quantitative easing, forward guidance, and even lowering the interest rate paid on bank reserves into negative territory. Japan, which faced a crisis in its banking sector and came up against the theoretical zero lower bound on interest rates nearly a decade earlier, was a pioneer in the use of many of these unconventional policy tools. This article analyzes the effectiveness of Japan’s bold experiment with unconventional monetary policy. Using a panel of bi-annual bank data covering the full universe of Japanese commercial banks over a fifteen-year period, this study analyzes the effectiveness of quantitative easing policy on the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission. Our findings suggest that Japan’s unconventional monetary policy worked: there is a bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission in Japan. These results are robust to the inclusion of time fixed effects and generalized method of moments analysis.     

The impact of the introduction of the Euro on firms' expectations

Firms' expectations regarding their ability to enter new markets and to develop new products, and concerning the foreign competition they will face in future, are strongly affected by the introduction of the euro. The following article analyzes these expectations using panel data taken from a quarterly business survey in the service sector. Helpful comments from our colleagues Friedrich Heinemann, Georg Licht and Herbert S. Buscher on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged. We are also indebted to Enrico Steeb and Rolf Kempkes for their helping hand in setting up the data set and to Christina Kaiser for research assistence. We also wish to thank Semka Thorvaldsen for proof-reading.