The internationalization of Chinese and Indian firms: trends, motivations and policy implications

The rapid rise in the overseas investments of Indian and Chinese firms has attracted widespread attention in recent years. To a large extent, the growing internationalization of these emerging economies has been driven by a search for resources, technology and related assets. What are the implications of this for foreign direct investment policy in both the source and the recipient countries? Furthermore, how will the ongoing global financial crisis affect the continued expansion of multinationals from the two countries, which have relied on international markets to fund their investments

The internationalization of Chinese and Indian firms: trends, motivations and strategy

The last two decades have seen significant internationalization of firms from developing economies, in terms of their greater participation in international trade, growing outflows of foreign direct investment (FDI), and a recent surge in their cross-border mergers and acquisition activity. Outward investment from developing countries is not a new phenomenon but in recent years there has been a marked increase in the magnitude of flows and a qualitative transformation in their pattern. Within this broad trend, the growing internationalization of firms from two fastgrowing developing countries, China and India, is particularly notable. Exports have been a central feature of the growth of the Chinese economy over the last three decades and, more recently, they have made a visible contribution to Indian growth too. Outward FDI from China and India has grown rapidly in recent years, and firms from these two countries are increasingly involved in overseas mergers and acquisitions

Labour's record on financial regulation

In 1997 the new Labour government launched major initiatives in the area of financial regulation, setting up the Financial Services Authority as a comprehensive regulatory body, supported by the legislative framework of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. We evaluate the Labour government’s record on financial regulation in terms of its achievements and failures, especially in dealing with the global financial crisis that started in 2007. While we identify some clear flaws in regulatory design and enforcement, our evaluation highlights some inherent difficulties of financial regulation

Applications of dynamic programming tp problems of routing pipework and cables

Imperial Users onl

Unification modulo a partial theory of exponentiation

Modular exponentiation is a common mathematical operation in modern cryptography. This, along with modular multiplication at the base and exponent levels (to different moduli) plays an important role in a large number of key agreement protocols. In our earlier work, we gave many decidability as well as undecidability results for multiple equational theories, involving various properties of modular exponentiation. Here, we consider a partial subtheory focussing only on exponentiation and multiplication operators. Two main results are proved. The first result is positive, namely, that the unification problem for the above theory (in which no additional property is assumed of the multiplication operators) is decidable. The second result is negative: if we assume that the two multiplication operators belong to two different abelian groups, then the unification problem becomes undecidable.Comment: In Proceedings UNIF 2010, arXiv:1012.455

Possible Indian nuclear options in 2030

Fifteen years from now, in 2030, what changes will India have made to its nuclear doctrine and posture? Fifteen years is a long period of time, and it is difficult to know what India’s strategic landscape will look like at the end of it. Nonetheless, it is possible to make some reasonable assumptions about India’s future strategic environment and to explore possible implications for Indian nuclear policy

Multiscale Modeling and Simulations of Defect Clusters in Crystalline Silicon

As the device dimension in semiconductor silicon transistors reach sub-20nm, it significantly enhances the tolerance limits on the size and concentration of defects in the underlying crystalline silicon wafer. Understanding the evolution of defect clusters is critical for controlling the defect density and size distribution within crystalline silicon. The objective of this thesis is to develop the computational methodology that quantitatively describes the evolution of defect clusters in crystalline solids at an atomistic level, and provide a mechanistic understanding of underlying physics behind the defect aggregation process. In first part of the thesis we develop a novel computational method for probing the thermodynamics of defects in solids. We use this to estimate the configurational entropy of vacancy clusters which is shown to substantially alter the thermodynamic properties of vacancy clusters in crystals at high temperature. The modified thermodynamic properties of vacancy clusters at high temperature are found to explain a longstanding discrepancy between simulation predictions and experimental measurements of vacancy aggregation dynamics in silicon. In the next part, a comprehensive atomistic study of self-interstitial aggregation in crystalline silicon is presented. The effects of temperature and pressure on the aggregation process are studied in detail and found to generate a variety of qualitatively different interstitial cluster morphologies and growth behavior. A detailed thermodynamic analysis of various cluster configurations shows that both vibrational and configurational entropies are potentially important in setting the properties of small silicon interstitial clusters. The results suggest that a competition between formation energy and entropy of small clusters could be linked to the selection process between various self-interstitial precipitate morphologies observed in ion-implanted crystalline silicon. Finally in the last section, we investigate the effect of carbon on self-interstitial aggregation. The presence of carbon in the silicon dramatically reduces cluster coalescence, with almost no direct effect on the single self-interstitials. This suggests that suppression of transient enhanced diffusion of boron (in presence of carbon), could be due to the direct interaction between carbon atoms and self-interstitial clusters

Capital and technology flows: changing technology-acquisition strategies in developing countries

Abstract Given the imperfections in markets for technology, foreign direct investment (FDI) has been regarded as a channel for the transfer of technologies from developed to developing countries. FDI was expected to generate technological spillovers through vertical linkages with host-country firms and through involuntary leakages. Evidence suggests that inward FDI was a weak channel for technology transfer. with only limited spillovers in developing countries. With the wave of globalization that started in the 1980s, trade in disembodied technology has boomed. Some large firms in developing countries have also acquired technology through outward foreign investment, typically through acquisitions of firms with a portfolio of technology products. Reinforcing these channels for technology acquisition by developing country firms merits active policy interventions

Rectification by charging -- the physics of contact-induced current asymmetry in molecular conductors

We outline the qualitatively different physics behind charging-induced current asymmetries in molecular conductors operating in the weakly interacting self-consistent field (SCF) and the strongly interacting Coulomb Blockade (CB) regimes. A conductance asymmetry arises in SCF because of the unequal mean-field potentials that shift a closed-shell conducting level differently for positive and negative bias. A very different current asymmetry arises for CB due to the unequal number of open-shell excitation channels at opposite bias voltages. The CB regime, dominated by single charge effects, typically requires a computationally demanding many-electron or Fock space description. However, our analysis of molecular Coulomb Blockade measurements reveals that many novel signatures can be explained using a {{simpler}} orthodox model that involves an incoherent sum of Fock space excitations and {\it{hence treats the molecule as a metallic dot or an island}}. This also reduces the complexity of the Fock space description by just including various charge configurations only, thus partially underscoring the importance of electronic structure, while retaining the essence of the single charge nature of the transport process. We finally point out, however, that the inclusion of electronic structure and hence well-resolved Fock space excitations is crucial in some notable examples.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure