The question of access to the Japanese market

This survey focuses on the question of how market structure and different corporate organisational forms might affect access to the Japanese market for industrial goods. The question is how and whether keiretsu corporate structures in Japan constitute an important unofficial barrier in access to the Japanese market for manufactured goods

Growth, profits and technological choice: The case of the Lancashire cotton textile industry

Using Lancashire textile industry company case studies and financial records, mainly from the period just before the First World War, the processes of growth and decline are re-examined. These are considered by reference to the nature of Lancashire entrepreneurship and the impact on technological choice. Capital accumulation, associated wealth distributions and the character of Lancashire business organisation were sybiotically linked to the success of the industry before 1914. However, the legacy of that accumulation in later decades, chronic overcapacity, formed a barrier to reconstruction and enhanced the preciptious decline of a once great industry

Shifting Characterizations of the ‘Common People’ in Modern English Retranslations of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War: A corpus-based analysis

Little research has yet explored the impact of (re)translation on narrative characterization, that is, on the process through which the various actors depicted in a narrative are attributed particular traits and qualities. Moreover, the few studies that have been published on this topic are either rather more anecdotal than systematic, or their focus is primarily on the losses in character information that inevitably occur when a narrative is retold for a new audience in a new linguistic context. They do not explore how the translator’s own background knowledge and ideological beliefs might affect the characterization process for readers of their target-language text. Consequently, this paper seeks to make two contributions to the field: first, it presents a corpus-based methodology developed as part of the Genealogies of Knowledge project for the comparative analysis of characterization patterns in multiple retranslations of a single source text. Such an approach is valuable, it is argued, because it can enhance our ability to engage in a more systematic manner with the accumulation of characterization cues spread throughout a narrative. Second, the paper seeks to move discussions of the effects of translation on narrative characterization away from a paradigm of loss, deficiency and failure, promoting instead a perspective which embraces the productive role translators often play in reconfiguring the countless narratives through which we come to know, imagine and make sense of the past, our present and futures. The potential of this methodology and theoretical standpoint is illustrated through a case study exploring changes in the characterization of ‘the common people’ in two English-language versions of classical Greek historian Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the first produced by Samuel Bloomfield in 1829 and the second by Steven Lattimore in 1998. Particular attention is paid to the referring expressions used by each translator—such as the multitude vs. the common people—as well as the specific attributes assigned to this narrative actor. In this way, the study attempts to gain deeper insight into the ways in which these translations reflect important shifts in attitudes within key political debates concerning the benefits and dangers of democracy

A Further Examination of the Export-Led Growth Hypothesis

This paper challenges the common view that exports generally contribute more to GDP growth than a pure change in export volume, as the export-led growth hypothesis predicts. Applying panel cointegration techniques to a production function with non-export GDP as the dependent variable, we find for a sample of 45 developing countries that: (i) exports have a positive short-run effect on non-export GDP and vice versa (short-run bidirectional causality), (ii) the long-run effect of exports on non-export output, however, is negative on average, but (iii) there are large differences in the longrun effect of exports on non-export GDP across countries. Cross-sectional regressions indicate that these cross-country differences in the long-run effect of exports on nonexport GDP are significantly negatively related to cross-country differences in primary export dependence and business and labor market regulation. In contrast, there is no significant association between the growth effect of exports and the capacity of a country to absorb new knowledge

Changing Commercial Policy in Japan During 1985-2010

In this paper we examine the changing nature of Japan's commercial policy over the last 25 years while reviewing Japan's changing structure of trade, FDI and economy that underlay policy changes. We argue that until the late 1990s Japan adopted a two-track approach of relying on multilateral liberalization under the GATT/WTO and open regionalism under Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) on the one hand and on the bilateral trade relationship with the US on the other. Although the Japan-US bilateralism sometimes resulted in managed trade and encountered negative perceptions of the US approach in Japan, overall, it had a positive impact on the Japanese economy in opening domestic markets through various reforms and deregulation measures. Japan's more recent commercial policy focuses on bilateral and plurilateral economic partnership agreements particularly with - but not limited to - East Asian economies. We argue that agricultural sector liberalization is key to the further integration of Japan with the Asian and global economies

External Learning Opportunities and the Diffusion of Process Innovations to Small Firms: The Case of Programmable Automation

In this chapter, we are concerned with explaining which types of firms have failed to adopt well-known improvements in process technology. This problem has, of course, been the underlying concern of all studies of diffusion “to rationalize why, if a new technology is superior, it is not taken up by all potential adopters” (Stoneman, 1983). Drawing on various theoretical perspectives, we identify a number of different barriers to adoption. With data collected from a 1987 nationally representative sample of US establishments in 21 metal-working and machinery manufacturing industries, we then construct a multivariate logistic regression model to empirically test for the effects of these factors on the likelihood of adoption of a particular process innovation, namely programmable automation (PA) machine tools

The memoirs of Ernest G. Saxonhouse.

Life in Vienna and St. Gall (Switzerland); Nazi "Anschluss" of Austria; emigration to USA; mostly on life in USA after emigration; also contains memoirs of Amy Saxonhouse (4 p.) who lived in Prague after World War.Born in Vienna in 1908, Ernest G. Saxonhouse was a manager in the St. Gall (Switzerland) branch of his father's business. He emigrated into the USA in 1939.Czechoslovaki