Board Gender Diversity: Challenges and Implications for Corporations in the East African Community

ABSTRACT

East African Community’s (EAC) corporations are required to follow a regional treaty of mainstreaming gender equality. This article discusses challenges encountered by corporate boards of the EAC’s corporations when adding women. Agency and resource dependence theories led the study, while a review of the literature was the methodology. We discuss the benefits of diverse boards and challenges faced when developing this diversity. We show how power distance, masculinity, and certainty avoidance prevent women from corporate boards. Furthermore, we discuss how social orientation and business environment impact women’s participation. The article discusses various strategies to be considered for increasing diversity.     

浅析海牙《协议选择法院公约》对国际商事仲裁的影响

目前我们面临着这样一种境况：尽管是各个国家造就了国际法,各国的法院又代表着国家的主权,但这些法院的判决并未能在国际范围内得到广为承认和执行。相反,只有司法庭,即仲裁庭的裁决才能在执行地国法院的协助下在全球多数国家得到执行。海牙《协议选择法院公约》的出台是否能改变这一境况,公约起草者们设立的与国际商事仲裁体制竞争的目标能否实现,其对国际商事仲裁将产生怎样的影响,将是本文探讨的重心。     

Punishment,counterpunishment and sanction enforcement in a social dilemma experiment

We present the results of an experiment that explores the sanctioning behavior of individuals who experience a social dilemma. In the game we study, players choose contribution levels to a public good and subsequently have multiple opportunities to reduce the earnings of the other members of the group. The treatments vary in terms of individuals’ opportunities to (a) avenge sanctions that have been directed toward themselves, and (b) punish others’ sanctioning behavior with respect to third parties. We find that individuals do avenge sanctions they have received, and this serves to decrease contribution levels. They also punish those who fail to sanction third parties, but the resulting increase in contributions is smaller than the decrease the avenging of sanctions induces. When there are five rounds of unrestricted sanctioning, contributions and welfare are significantly lower than when only one round of sanctioning opportunities exists, and welfare is lower than at a benchmark of zero cooperation. We thank James Andreoni, participants in seminars at Emory University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney, Deakin University, the 2004 North American Regional Meetings of the ESA in Tucson, Arizona, USA, the 2004 IMEBE Meetings in Cordoba, Spain, and the 2005 SAET meetings in Vigo, Spain, for constructive and helpful comments. We thank Elven Priour for programming and organization of the sessions. Instructions for the experiment are available from the authors.     

Firms’ Compliance to Environmental Regulation: Is There Really a Paradox?

It has often been claimed that firms’ compliance to environmental regulations is higher than predicted by standard theory, a result labeled the “Harrington paradox” in the literature. Enforcement data from Norway presented here appears, at first glance, to confirm this “stylized fact”: firms are inspected less than once a year, detected violators are seldom fined, but still, serious violations seem relatively rare. However, at a closer look, the pattern seems less paradoxical: enforcement of minor violations is lax, but such violations do flourish; serious violations, on the other hand, are subject to credible threats of harsh punishment, and such violations are more uncommon. This seems quite consistent with predictions from standard theory. We argue that the empirical existence of the Harrington paradox is not well documented in the international literature. The claim that firms’ compliance with environmental regulations is generally higher than predicted by standard theory should thus be regarded as a hypothesis rather than an established fact.     

Law and credit constraints in transition economies1

Using a survey of over 4,000 firms in 21 transition economies, this paper investigates how legal extensiveness (law on the books) and legal effectiveness (law in practice) affect availability of bank finance. Our findings suggest that both law on the books and law in practice are important, but that they impact firms of different sizes differently. Small firms appear to be the most credit constrained in countries with weak creditor rights and with weak contract enforcement, while large firms are the most credit constrained in countries with weak courts and unclear and inconsistent laws pertaining to firms’ business operations.     

The restructuring of the Spanish integrated steel industry in the European panorama (1971–86): A lost opportunity

Spanish steelmaking policy in the 1970s and early 1980s was not especially different from that of the main European countries. The political transition was a tense experience that heightened the problems and made economic policy decisions harder to reach, but it did not cause a fundamental divergence from the rest of Europe. What made the steel restructuring policy fail and forced a new and costly restructuring in the 1990s, was the decision of the Socialist government, newly elected in 1982, to opt for maintaining the inland steelworks instead of the coastal steelworks. Its motives were related to the locations of these steelworks in socially and politically sensitive areas. The closure of Sagunto marked the end of the only real possibility of Spain having a competitive integrated steelworks in terms of its integration into Europe.     

Reforms,globalization, and endogenous agricultural structures

In this article, I draw lessons from two quasi‐natural experiments (the transition process in former Communist countries and the rapid globalization of food chains) on the optimality of farms and agricultural structures more generally. I argue that (a) the farm structures that have emerged from the transition process are much more diverse than expected ex ante; (b) this diversity is to an important extent determined by economic mechanisms which are influenced by initial conditions and reform policies; (c) non‐traditional farm structures have played an important role during transition because they were optimal to address the specific institutional and structural constraints imposed by the transition process; (d) there is more diversity than often argued in the farms that are integrated in global food chains; (e) endogenous institutional (contracting) innovations in food chains may lock existing farm structures in a long‐run institutional framework; and (f) indicators based on farm structures are not a good measure of welfare effects of the globalization of food chains.     

Designing Ethical Organizations: Avoiding the Long-Term Negative Effects of Rewards and Punishments

Ethics researchers advise managers of organizations to link rewards and punishments to ethical and unethical behavior, respectively. We build on prior research maintaining that organizations operate at Kohlbergs stages of moral reasoning, and explain how the over-reliance on rewards and punishments encourages employees to operate at Kohlbergs lowest stages of moral reasoning. We advocate designing organizations as ethical communities and relying on different assumptions about employees in order to foster ethical reasoning at higher levels. Characteristics associated with ethical communities are identified and AES Corporation and Semco S/A serve as examples of corporations exhibiting the design characteristics and assumptions of ethical organizations.     

论我国城市社区管理中政府的功能定位

转型时期特定的国情和社会背景，决定了我国城市社区管理必须选择“政府主导”的模式。社区管理中曲政府主导，主要体现在政府必须扮演多种角色、行使多样职能，更好地培育和扶持社区的持续发展。但是，政府角色的不当和政府职能的“越位”、“缺位”和“错位”，容易导致社区管理中的“政府失灵”现象。因此，要推进我国城市社区管理的稳步、健康发展，就必须解决政府在社区管理中如何进行功能定位的问题。