Technology and the North?South division of labour

SUMMARY Historically, too little attention has been paid to the impact of radical technical change on development strategies. In the current context of slow rates of economic growth, electronics based innovations are having a major impact on these strategies, particularly with respect to the international division of labour. The importance of considering dynamic technical change is illustrated by reference to the semiconductor industry where there appears to be a strong trend towards reducing the industry's dependence upon off?shore assembly in developing countries. RESUME La technologie et la division du travail Nord?Sud Jusqu'ici, peu se sont penchés sur l'incidence du progrès technique sur les stratégies du développement. Dans le cadre actuel d'une croissance économique ralentie, les innovations d'ordre électronique ont un fort impact sur ces stratégies, notamment sur la division du travail internationale. L'importance de l'étude de l'évolution technique est exemplifiée par le cas du secteur des semi?conducteurs, dans lequel les PVD souhaitent réduire leur dépendance á l'égard du montage extérieur. RESUMEN La tecnología y la división del trabajo entre el norte y el sur Desde el punto de vista histórico, apenas se ha prestado atención a las repercusiones de los cambios técnicos radicales en las estrategias del desarrollo. En el contexto actual de bajos índices de crecimiento económico, las innovaciones basadas en la electrónica están teniendo importantes consecuencias sobre estas estrategias, especialmente en relación con la división internacional del trabajo. Se ilustra la importancia de considerar el cambio técnico dinámico con referencia a la industria de semiconductores donde parece observarse una fuerte tendencia hacia la reducción de la dependencia de la industria en el montaje exterior en los países en vías de desarrollo

Small store presence in Japan

The determinants of the development of small store presence in Japan are investigated using a fixed effects multinomial logit market share model. Large stores tend to have higher market shares in shop-types with increasing shares in consumer expenditures, increasing inventory turnover, and increasing diversification, but do not seem to be able to profit from scale economies in labour use

Some Bad News is Good News for Foreign Investors: The Case of Intellectual Property Rights Infringement in China

Despite China's attractiveness to foreign investors, intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in China has not caught up with international standards. This research aims to quantify the relationships between IPR violations, government effectiveness, and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in the context of China. Our econometric modeling and estimation based on provincial level data over 2002‐2012 show that in an early development stage of law and regulatory enforcement, the bad news of a rising number of IPR dispute cases signals the good news of an improvement in law and regulatory enforcement, which encourages IPR owners to raise legal cases. By contrast, in the later development stage, when law and regulatory enforcement has become much more effective, the bad news of a rising number of IPR disputes manifests itself as very bad news. Furthermore, this study confirms that FDI inflows enhance IPR protection through improving government effectiveness, and government effectiveness is one of the key factors promoting FDIs

The Dark Side of Transfer Pricing: Its Role in Tax Avoidance and Wealth Retentiveness

In conventional accounting literature, ?transfer pricing? is portrayed as a technique for optimal allocation of costs and revenues amongst divisions, subsidiaries and joint ventures within a group of related entities. Such representations of transfer pricing simultaneously acknowledge and occlude how it is deeply implicated in processes of wealth retentiveness that enable companies to avoid taxes and facilitate the flight of capital. A purely technical conception of transfer pricing calculations abstracts them from the politico-economic contexts of their development and use. The context is the modern corporation in an era of globalized trade and its relationship to state tax authorities, shareholders and other possible stakeholders. Transfer pricing practices are responsive to opportunities for determining values in ways that are consequential for enhancing private gains, and thereby contributing to relative social impoverishment, by avoiding the payment of public taxes. Evidence is provided by examining some of the transfer prices practices used by corporations to avoid taxes in developing and developed economies

Biofuels and the role of space in sustainable innovation journeys

This paper aims to identify the lessons that should be learnt from how biofuels have been envisioned from the aftermath of the oil shocks of the 1970s to the present,and how these visions compare with biofuel production networks emerging in the 2000s. Working at the interface of sustainable innovation journey research and geographical theories on the spatial unevenness of sustainability transition projects,we show how the biofuels controversy is linked to characteristics of globalised industrial agricultural systems. The legitimacy problems of biofuels cannot be addressed by sustainability indicators or new technologies alone since they arise from the spatial ordering of biofuel production. In the 1970-80s, promoters of bioenergy anticipated current concerns about food security implications but envisioned bioenergy production to be territorially embedded at national or local scales where these issues would be managed. Where the territorial and scalar vision was breached, it was to imagine poorer countries exporting higher-value biofuel to the North rather than the raw material as in the controversial global biomass commodity chains of today. However, controversy now extends to the global impacts of national biofuel systems on food security and greenhouse gas emissions, and to their local impacts becoming more widely known. South/South and North/North trade conflicts are also emerging as are questions over biodegradable wastes and agricultural residues as global commodities. As assumptions of a food-versus-fuel conflict have come to be challenged, legitimacy questions over global agri-business and trade are spotlighted even further. In this context, visions of biofuel development that address these broader issues might be promising. These include large-scale biomass-for-fuel models in Europe that would transform global trade rules to allow small farmers in the global South to compete, and smallscale biofuel systems developed to address local energy needs in the South