Effects of hiring former employees of multinationals in the absorptive capacity of local firms

The attraction of foreign direct investment seeks, among other things, to increase the productivity of local companies through knowledge spillovers. However, the empirical evidence in this regard is contradictory. One influential factor is the absorptive capacity of the local companies. This article analyzes the effect of the presence of former employees of multinational corporations as employees of local companies, on the absorptive capacity of said companies. The study was done in Costa Rica, a country known for its successful strategy in the subject matter. The data come from a survey applied to 1167 companies by the Observatorio Costarricense de las Pymes in 2011. It was found that the hiring of former employees of multinational corporations by local companies has a positive effect on the index of absorptive capacity of companies in all productive sectors. Specifically, this hiring of former employees increases the index of absorptive capacity by nine percentage points, with differences by sector and the size of the company.     

Ethics in Global Business and in a Plural Society

The contemporary confluence of globalization and ethical pluralism is at the origin of many ethical challenges that confront business nowadays, both in practice and in theory. One of the challenges arising from the development of globalization has to do with respect for cultural diversity. It is often said that the success of economic globalization tends towards social and cultural homogeneity. To the extent that cultural diversity is usually seen as a valuable reality, that global trend seems to contradict our efforts to respect ethical pluralism, both personal and cultural, within society. In this paper I argue that (a) ethical minimalism, despite its emphasis on tolerance and justice, does not take pluralism seriously into account in present-day society, and (b) ethical minimalism is not suited to balancing the homogenizing trend of globalization. Certainly ethical norms are necessary, but by no means are they sufficient in themselves to encourage either justice or tolerance; nor are they sufficient to inspire and encourage good practices and sound regulations. Instead, virtue-based ethics has the capacity of inspiring and encouraging good practices. Particularly, virtue-based ethics is able to inspire a serious dialogue about ethical and legal issues both in the public arena and within organizations.     

Mapping global sustainability report scoring: a detailed analysis of Europe and Asia

This study maps the General Reporting Initiative (GRI) relations for a set of global enterprises. Enterprise interrelationships are built using the Mutual Information (MI) of the data reported by enterprises. From the MI topology, we describe interrelationships among the enterprises using chord diagrams to represent the inter- and intra-connectivity between geographical regions and economic sectors globally, by continent and country. Detailed maps are presented for European and Asian regions/sectors, including the relationship between Europe and Asia’s top reporting countries. Our findings reinforce previous research regarding the role of Europe as a driver of sustainability and its influence worldwide. We also determined that Spain is a major player in Europe and that Northern Europe does not have the assumed leading role mentioned in related studies. Eastern Asia is, by far, the leader of the region, and the GRI maps demonstrate the preponderant role of China in the region and the minimal role of India. MI topology maps outline the behavior of the economic sectors, for all the studied regions. Furthermore, a measure that relates the inter- to intra-connections is presented to describe the internal an external relationships among regions/sectors.     

Risk management and reinsurance strategies in the Spanish insurance market (1880–1940)

Reinsurance allows insurance companies to diversify their risks. However, from this original role, insurance companies have developed various reinsurance strategies in order to expand their market share. From the last decades of the nineteenth century to the 1940s, Spanish insurance companies used reinsurance in a largely unregulated context. This article analyses the reinsurance practices and their adaptation to the singularities of the Spanish market, namely: the difficulties for the consolidation of a core of pure reinsurers; the management of reinsurance in the internationalisation process; and the use of reinsurance by mutual societies to overcome their lack of equity capital.     

Effects on the “self-organization- satisfaction” relationship of changes in the economic context

Noting increasingly independent traveling by tourists, as well as changes on the tourist activity worldwide due to the 2008 economic crisis, this study analyzes the relationships between an economic crisis, tourist’s self-organization in trip planning, and tourist’s trip satisfaction. Data from a panel (2006–2011) on how residents in Spain complete their accommodation and transport bookings are used, including data on their trip satisfaction. The study identifies a negative relationship between the 2008 economic crisis and trip satisfaction, a positive relationship between self-organization and satisfaction, as well as positive moderating effects of the crisis on the relationship between self-organization and satisfaction.     

How do Agricultural Programmes Alter Crop Production? Evidence from Ecuador

Evaluating agricultural programmes requires considering not only the programmes’ influence on input and output indicators, but also considering the relationship between these indicators as embodied in the production technology. This article examines the impact on production of an intervention in the Ecuadorian Sierra designed to improve returns to potato production through training and through linking smallholders to high‐value markets. Critical to identifying the impact of the programme is the careful construction of a counterfactual and meticulous data collection. To assess the impact of the programme on production, a weighted estimation, where weights are constructed through propensity score matching, is employed to estimate a production function within a damage abatement framework. The function incorporates a series of interaction terms to assess the impact of the programme on the production technology. The findings provide evidence that the programme enhances yields both through a general shift in technology as well as increased input use. The results suggest that the use of effective farming techniques that are learned through the programme induce this technological shift.     

Offshoring and employment structure in the EU periphery: the case of Spain

The effects of offshoring of production have received a great deal of interest due to their implications on labour markets. However, the main theoretical predictions related to this issue are not always fulfilled in the empirical analysis; according to the Stolper–Samuelson theorem, there seems to be unanimous support for its effects in advanced countries whose production is relocated but not at all for recipient economies of the same. Additionally, there is a lack of empirical evidence in countries specialized in unskilled-labour tasks which are, at the same time, economies with higher relative wages in a global framework such as the Spanish economy. In this sense, the aim of this article is to analyse the effects of material offshoring in the relative composition of employment in the Spanish manufacturing industry during the period 1990–2007. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of immigrant labour and the temporary employment rate due to its increasing relevance in the Spanish economy during the period analysed. Using a generalized methods of moments (GMM) approach, our results suggest that, as opposed to most developed countries, offshoring in Spain has favoured the demand for blue-collar workers. In addition, we confirm that the increase in immigration and the increasing use of temporary contracts have enlarged the share of low-skilled workers.     

Economic growth and budgetary components: a panel assessment for the EU

In this article, we test to determine whether a reallocation of government budgetary components can enhance long-term GDP growth in a set of 15 EU countries. We apply panel data techniques to the period 1971–2006, and use three alternative dependent variables in a growth regression: economic growth, total factor productivity and labour productivity. Our results also identify the distortions induced by public expenditure in the private factors allocation. In particular, we detect a strong crowding-in effect associated to public investment, which has enhanced economic growth by boosting private investment. We also associate a dependence of productivity on public expenditure on social security.     

Geodemographic and socioeconomic characterization of the retail attraction of leading hypermarket chains in Spain

This paper aims at examining the impact on demand of the competitive positioning strategies developed by the leading hypermarket chains in Spain. Specifically, the purpose is to carry out a geodemographic and socieconomic characterization of the potential consumers of each chain. As retail attraction has traditionally been divided into three components, distance, mass and image, a gravitational model is proposed which distinguishes them and facilitates the evaluation of existing differences across any a priori segmentation base. The empirical test identifies significant geodemographic differences in the retail attraction of hypermarket chains. Chains seem to target the whole market by developing an image balanced against the advantages and disadvantages derived from the spatial coverage strategy. Social class is not as good an indicator of hypermarket choice as expected, although some interesting patterns have been detected.