Italian Firms in History: Size, Technology and Entrepreneurship

The economic performance of a country depends, among other things, on the strategies and structures of its firms. In the framework that is designed by institutions and policies and determined by technology and macroeconomic cycles, entrepreneurs decide how to allocate available resources in order to face off competitors and to hook up with demand cycles. This paper looks at the evolution of the Italian economy across the last 150 years from a business history perspective. Analyzing Italian firms over the long-term cycles of the global economy and with respect to the different paradigms of the three industrial revolutions, we identify some structural features that explain successes and failures of the Italian economy. In doing this we explicitly connect the micro level of the business enterprise to the macro one of the national business system and explain the comparatively good performance of the Italian economy from the end of the 19th century to the 1970s. Over the last three decades this performance has turned negative, highlighting the role played by the small average size of firms and the failure of institutions to provide incentives for growth.firm size, technological paradigms, innovation, entrepreneurship

Proposal For A Market-Based Solution to Airport Delays

With the clamor rising over airport delays and with both the Congress and the Administration considering remedies, this paper advocates the use of market mechanisms, specifically slot auctions, to promote efficient usage of airport capacity, reduce airport delays, and, more generally, promote competition.

Strengthening Community Foundations - Redefining the Opportunities

Commissioned by the Council on Foundations and released in October 2003, this white paper details the findings and the implications of our study of costs and revenues at nine community foundations. Offering a new perspective for community foundation sustainability, the white paper proposes that community foundations examine their strategy and operations on a product-by-product basis, taking into account their mission-driven priorities, internal costs, customer preferences and the competing donor alternatives for each type of product or service they offer

SKIRT: hybrid parallelization of radiative transfer simulations

We describe the design, implementation and performance of the new hybrid parallelization scheme in our Monte Carlo radiative transfer code SKIRT, which has been used extensively for modeling the continuum radiation of dusty astrophysical systems including late-type galaxies and dusty tori. The hybrid scheme combines distributed memory parallelization, using the standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) to communicate between processes, and shared memory parallelization, providing multiple execution threads within each process to avoid duplication of data structures. The synchronization between multiple threads is accomplished through atomic operations without high-level locking (also called lock-free programming). This improves the scaling behavior of the code and substantially simplifies the implementation of the hybrid scheme. The result is an extremely flexible solution that adjusts to the number of available nodes, processors and memory, and consequently performs well on a wide variety of computing architectures.Comment: 21 pages, 20 figure

Formes coopératives hybrides

On constate avec un intérêt croissant la transformation d’organisations du tiers secteur en organisations hybrides. Les chercheurs se sont penchés sur les processus d’« hybridation » ayant mené au développement de l’entreprise sociale, dont l’incarnation la plus remarquable est le modèle italien de la coopérative sociale. Il s’agit d’un modèle doublement « hybride », tant par son mode de gouvernance que par la diversité de ses pourvoyeurs de ressources. D’autres formes hybrides de coopératives se sont développées au cours de ces dernières années, en particulier dans le secteur des coopératives agricoles, qui ont adopté certaines pratiques des entreprises privées (par exemple au niveau des droits de vote). D’autres formes d’hybridation ont concerné les coopératives de consommateurs ou les coopératives ouvrières. Parfois, ce processus s’opère au niveau multi-organisationnel, avec le développement de structures de holding, lorsqu’une coopérative diversifie ses activités en créant une filiale ou en ayant recours à une structure d’entreprise traditionnelle. Abstract in English: There is growing interest in the transformation of third sector organizations into hybrid forms of organization. Researchers focus attention on some of the ‘hybridization’ processes that lead to the development of what is often recognized as a major new hybrid organization: the social enterprise. One of the most notable examples of this is the social cooperative model in Italy, which is “hybridized” in two respects: firstly in adopting a multi-stakeholder governance structure and secondly in terms of using multiple resources. We have also witnessed other hybrid forms of cooperatives develop over the years, particularly in the agricultural cooperatives sector, where we have seen changes (for example in voting rights) moving the form closer to that of private business. And in the consumer cooperatives and worker cooperatives sectors we have seen other patterns of hybridization. Sometimes this functions at the multi-organizational level, where we have seen the growth of holding structures when a cooperative grows and diversifies by developing a line of business which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the cooperative and uses a conventional company structure

Aftercare of inward foreign direct investment: A case study of South Africa

Attraction of new inward foreign direct investment (FDI) globally, especially in the developing countries, is problematic. Economic development practitioners have recently started to prioritise the retention and growing of existing investments to enhance their economic development agenda. The purpose of this paper is to analyse and investigate the relationship between inward FDI and investment aftercare in South Africa (SA). Only a few studies have been carried out on the topic at the global level and none on SA as far as could be ascertained. A structured questionnaire was used to collate data, and 30 face-to-face interviews were conducted with 16 investment aftercare practitioners and 14 executives from the investment promotion agencies (IPAs) in seven of the nine provinces of SA. The main finding of the study is that although investment aftercare services are essential, they receive limited funding, staff and attention, and have not yet been developed in SA.

The Case of the Missing Market: The Bond Market and Why It Matters for Financial Development

Over the last decade interest in the role of finance in economic growth has revived. Building from the pioneering work of Goldsmith (1965) and the insights of Shaw (1973) and McKinnon (1973), the more recent work examines the role of financial institutions and financial markets in corporate governance and the consequent implications for economic growth and development. Levine (1997) and Stulz (2000) have provided excellent reviews of this literature and Allen and Gale (2000) have extended it by developing a framework for comparing bank-based financial systems with market-based financial systems. Although the literature addresses "capital markets," on closer inspection the main focus is really equity markets. Bond markets are almost completely overlooked. Although the omission of the bond market is not defended in the literature, one could argue that it does little violence to reality. As Table 1 shows, in most emerging economies in Asia, bond markets are very small relative to the banking system or equity markets. Moreover, the most striking theoretical results flow from a comparison of debt contracts with equity contracts and at a high level of abstraction bank lending can proxy for all debt. In any event, data are much more readily available for equity markets and the banking system than for bond markets, even in the United States.