Do environmental regulations affect the location decisions of multinational gold mining firms?

This paper empirically analyzes the location decisions of the world's major gold mining …rms using a data set of political, economic, regulatory, infrastructural and investment risk variables observed for a large number of gold producing countries since 1975. The aim of the study is to determine the signi…cance of environmental stringency in forming location decisions while controlling for other potentially important variables that may a¤ect such decisions. Using both a conditional and a mixed logit regression approach, the study …nds consistently strong country location preferences among multinational gold mining …rms. These preferences paint a picture of an industry attracted to countries that are close to their head o¢ ce, provide a business environment characterized by low levels of …nancial risk and high levels of political stability and predictability in mining operations. While mining …rms also appear to be attracted to countries that have a clean environment is less strong and uniformly robust. This preference for a clean environment may itself be reflective of the strong desire to go to countries that are e¢ ciently run, provide clear rules and regulations, and are secure and predictable in their operations. Moreover, while they prefer to go to countries with low levels of corruption, this characteristic seems less important than the desire for security, transparency and stability in government and operations.Taken together, these preferences for a clean, well-run countries may reflect the adoption by mining …rms of a deliberate strategy intended to minimize the risks to their hugely expensive and immobile investments

Development strategies and food and nutrition security in Africa: an assessment

"Momentum is building in and around Africa today for policy action to decisively confront hunger and malnutrition. If we are to succeed, it is vital that food and nutrition security strategies be both sound and able to be implemented. Ultimately, strategies deficient in either of these two areas will be ineffectual. Lessons from past strategies provide a valuable resource in the design of future strategies, yet there is a dearth of programmatic information and rigorous evaluations of the approaches used in the past. With this in mind, the authors of this 2020 discussion paper review the multitude of approaches and strategies for achieving food and nutrition security in Africa within the context of development over the past four decades. They assess the extent to which these plans have been implemented and identify the key constraints and limitations, along with the priority investments needed for more effective design and implementation in the future." Foreword by Joachim von Braun, Director General, IFPRIFood policy, Hunger, Malnutrition Africa, Food security Africa, Development policies, Assessment, Investments,

Asian Multinationals in Africa: Information and strategy guide- Booklet One

CCC_05_africa_booklet1.pdf: 248 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Gender Voice and Correlations with Peace

The statistics regarding violence in today’s society are staggering. A newly released study published by the World Health Organization, making headlines in the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 3, 2002) reports that “Violence Took 1.6 Million Lives in 2000.” Notably, this report considers only the data obtained from the seventy countries that report such statistics to the World Health Organization. It does not include reports from many countries whose violence is also high, such as Burundi, Rwanda, Iraq, Liberia and Afghanistan. This manuscript seeks to address some of these issues of violence by considering issues of gender. We pose the question whether there may be some correlation between violence and the lack meaningful involvement of women in the economy. If the countries that appear more violent are also countries where women are systematically excluded from business opportunities, perhaps one way to curb some of the societal violence would be to improve the opportunities for women in the economy. Multi-national corporations can play an important role in increasing these opportunities. As has been argued elsewhere, a reduction in poverty promotes stability and leads to a more peaceful society. Studies show that in developing countries, involving women in the economy as wage earners can reduce poverty. As the locus of production shifts away from the home, an initial decline in employment opportunities may occur. However, this eventually disappears and both women and men benefit.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39915/3/wp530.pd

The Impact of ISO 9000 Diffusion on Trade and FDI: A New Institutional Analysis

The effects of ISO 9000 diffusion on trade and FDI have gone understudied. We employ panel data reported by OECD nations over the 1995-2002 period to estimate the impact of ISO adoptions on country-pair economic relations. We find ISO diffusion to have no effect in developed nations, but to positively pull FDI (i.e., enhancing inward FDI) and positively push trade (i.e., enhancing exports) in developing nations

Limited access orders in the developing world :a new approach to the problems of development

The upper-income, advanced industrial countries of the world today all have market economies with open competition, competitive multi-party democratic political systems, and a secure government monopoly over violence. Such open access orders, however, are not the only norm and equilibrium type of society. The middle and low-income developing countries today, like all countries before about 1800, can be understood as limited access orders that maintain their equilibrium in a fundamentally different way. In limited access orders, the state does not have a secure monopoly on violence, and society organizes itself to control violence among the elite factions. A common feature of limited access orders is that political elites divide up control of the economy, each getting some share of the rents. Since outbreaks of violence reduce the rents, the elite factions have incentives to be peaceable most of the time. Adequate stability of the rents and thus of the social order requires limiting access and competition-hence a social order with a fundamentally different logic than the open access order. This paper lays out such a framework and explores some of its implications for the problems of development today.Corporate Law,Labor Policies,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,E-Business,Disability

Management Practices Across Firms and Countries

For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across twenty countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best managed. Firms in developing countries, such as Brazil, China and India tend to be poorly managed. American retail firms and hospitals are also well managed by international standards, although American schools are worse managed than those in several other developed countries. We also find substantial variation in management practices across organizations in every country and every sector, mirroring the heterogeneity in the spread of performance in these sectors. One factor linked to this variation is ownership. Government, family, and founder owned firms are usually poorly managed, while multinational, dispersed shareholder and private-equity owned firms are typically well managed. Stronger product market competition and higher worker skills are associated with better management practices. Less regulated labor markets are associated with improvements in incentive management practices such as performance based promotion.management, organization, and productivity

Working with Civil Society in Fragile States

This paper focuses on working with civil society in fragile states, as well as state engagement and capacity building at state levels to deliver development and achieve MDGs

Work-life balance, management practices and productivity.

Do “Anglo-Saxon” management practices generate higher productivity only at the expense of lousy work-life balance (WLB) for workers? Many critics of “neo-libéralisme sauvage” have argued that increased competition from globalisation is damaging employees’ quality of life. Others have argued the opposite that improving work-life balance is actually a competitive tool that companies can use to raise productivity. We try to shed some empirical light on these issues using an innovative survey tool to collect new data on management and work-life balance practices from 732 medium sized manufacturing firms in the US, France, Germany and the UK. First, we show that our measure of work-life balance is a useful summary of a range of policies in the firm – family-friendly policies, flexible working, shorter hours, more holidays, subsidised childcare, etc. We show that this worklife balance measure is significantly associated with better management. Firms in environments that are more competitive and/or who are more productive, however, do not have significantly worse work-life balance for their workers. These findings are inconsistent with the view that competition, globalisation and “Anglo-Saxon” management practices are intrinsically bad for the work-life balance of workers. On the other hand, neither are these findings supportive of the optimistic “winwin” view that work-life balance improves productivity in its own right. Rather we find support for a “hybrid” theory that work-life balance is a choice for managers that is compatible with low or high productivity.

The Role of Private International Financial Capital Flows in Support of Development for Emerging Market Countries

Economic growth and development are critical issues for emerging market economies as they seek increase their standards of living. Financial globalization, innovation and international financial capital flows are prominent factors influencing macroeconomic stability and the pace of growth and development around the globe. This dynamic has become even more pronounced since the Asian Financial Crisis at the end of the 1990s and the Global Financial Crisis starting in 2008. In the wake of these two global economic events, the need for reflection on the drivers of growth and development as well as impediments to these activities is warranted. This thesis explores the perspectives of orthodox and heterodox economists on the impact of international financial capital flows from both a theoretical as well as empirical perspective. The pace of financial globalization and innovation challenges institutions and policymakers in increasingly complex ways. Concepts such as financial capital controls, financial threshold levels and communication take on prominent roles in impacting the speed and effectiveness of financial capital deployment within emerging market economies