Do Information and Communication Technologies Empower Female Workers? Firm-Level Evidence from Viet Nam

This paper studies the effects of firms’ investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) on their demand for female and skilled workers. Using the gradual liberalization of the broadband Internet sector across provinces from 2006 to 2009 as a source of exogenous variation to identify the causal impacts of ICT, we find evidence from the country’s comprehensive enterprise survey data that firms’ adoption of broadband Internet and other related ICT increased their relative demand for female and college-educated workers. The effect of ICT on firms’ female employment is particularly strong among the college-educated workers, and is stronger in industries that are more dependent on highly manual and physical tasks. These results suggest that ICT can lower gender inequality in the labor market by shifting the labor demand from highly manual, routine tasks in which men have a comparative advantage toward more nonroutine, interactive tasks in which women hold a comparative advantage. However, the effect of ICT is weaker in industries relying more on complex and interactive tasks, suggesting that gender differences in education may have limited female labor supply for the most innovative industries that require highly technical skills to complement ICT

EDOC: meeting the challenges of enterprise computing

An increasing demand for interoperable applications exists, sparking the real-time exchange of data across borders, applications, and IT platforms. To perform these tasks, enterprise computing now encompasses a new class of groundbreaking technologies such as Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA); business process integration and management; and middleware support, like that for utility, grid, peer-to-peer, and autonomic computing. Enterprise computing also influences the processes for business modeling, consulting, and service delivery; it affects the design, development, and deployment of software architecture, as well as the monitoring and management of such architecture. As enterprises demand increasing levels of networked information and services to carry out business processes, IT professionals need conferences like EDOC to discuss emerging technologies and issues in enterprise computing. For these reasons, what started out as the Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC) conference has come to encompass much more than just distributed objects. So this event now used the name International EDOC Enterprise Computing Conference, to recognize this broader scope yet also retain the initial conference's name recognition

Customer Focus Newsletter, May - June, 2011, Vol. 8, no. 3

A bi-monthly bulletin to keep the department/agency management teams of state government better informed. We hope to consolidate most of the service update messages we send throughout the month and keep you updated about the work of the Customer Councils. If yours is one of the many departments who participated in the second annual DAS customer satisfaction survey recently, we thank you for taking the time to give us this important feedback. We look forward to sharing survey results with you, and pledge to consider responses carefully as we work to determine benchmarks and set future priorities

Global Entrepreneurship Scotland 2010 Report

GEM is a major research project aimed at describing and analysing entrepreneurial processes within a wide range of countries. GEM has three main objectives: • To measure differences in entrepreneurial attitudes, activity and aspirations among economies. • To uncover factors determining the nature and level of national entrepreneurial activity. • To identify policy implications for enhancing entrepreneurship in an economy

Налоговое или монетарное стимулирование? Эволюционные аргументы в пользу налоговых реформ

Статья посвящена исследованию проблемы обоснования мер регулирования развития эмерджентной экономики - фискальных и (или) монетарных, с использованием методов эволюционного моделирования. Для этого была построена экономико-математическая модель, имитирующая процессы коэволюции развитой и развивающейся стран, связанных через глобальные цепочки создания стоимости. В этой модели каждая из стран характеризуется собственной исходной структурой экономических субъектов, определяемой соотношением предприятий-эгоистов (предрасположенных к консервативному поведению) и предприятий-альтруистов (предрасположенных к инновационному поведению), а также специфическим населением и демографическими процессами. Результаты вычислительных экспериментов показали, что успех того или иного способа экономического регулирования принципиально зависит от особенностей исходного состояния институциональной среды хозяйствования. В институциональной среде с «прозрачными» длинными правилами игры и, соответственно, длинным горизонтом хозяйственного планирования наилучший результат в виде высоких темпов роста производства в эмерджентной экономике дает политика дешевых денег в сочетании с высокими «европейскими» налогами. Иная ситуация наблюдается в более реалистичной ситуации с короткими правилами игры и, соответственно, коротким (не более 5 лет) горизонтом хозяйственного планирования. В этом случае любая налоговая политика (низкие или высокие налоги) в сочетании любыми деньгами (дешевыми или дорогими), в определенном смысле теряет значение, поскольку изначально отсталая инновационная система не позволяет быстро получать высокие результаты, а преимущества экономического роста в отделенном будущем не принимаются во внимание. Вместе с тем, для постепенного формирования лучшей инновационной системы низкие налоги и дешевые деньги имеют важное значение, поскольку создают лучшие условия для выживания предприятийальтруистов, облегчая им инвестиционную деятельность, способную принести многократный прирост технической производительности и экономической эффективности. В любом случае, в контексте эволюционной экономической теории, исходя из проведенных вычислительных экспериментов, налоговая политика в условиях эмерджентных рынков сохраняет свой регуляторный потенциал, и, таким образом, требует дальнейшего реформирования в контексте «новой реальности», основанной на глобальных цепочках создания стоимости.The article deals with the problem of substantiation of the emergent economies development regulatory measures (fiscal and / or monetary), using the evolutionary modelling methods. For this purpose, the mathematical model was constructed that simulates the co-evolution process of the advanced and developing countries, linked by global value chains. In this model, each country is characterized by its original structure of economic entities, defined by the ratio of the egoistic enterprises (predisposed to conservative behaviour) to the altruistic enterprises (predisposed to innovation), as well as by specific population and demographic processes. The results of the computational experiments have shown that the success of economic regulation fundamentally depends on the peculiarities of the initial state of the institutional environment. In the institutional environment with the «transparent» long behaviour and, accordingly, a long economic planning horizon, the best result in the form of average annual production growth rate of the emergent economies is provided by the cheap money policy combined with the high European taxes. A different situation is observed in more realistic short behaviour and, accordingly, short (under 5 years) economic planning horizon. In this case, any tax policy (neither low nor high taxes) together with any money (neither cheap nor expensive), to a certain extent loses its significance, as the initially backward innovative system does not allow to quickly get good results, and the long-term benefits of the potential economic growth are not taken into consideration. However, low taxes and cheap money are important as they create better conditions for survival of the altruistic enterprises, facilitating their investment activities, which can multiply increase their technical performance and economic efficiency. Still, in the context of the evolutionary economics and following the conducted computational experiments, the fiscal policy in terms of emerging markets retains its regulatory capacity, and therefore requires further reforms in the context of the «new reality» based on the global value chains