Oil and international cooperation

The more that states depend on oil exports, the less cooperative they become: they grow less likely to join intergovernmental organizations, to accept the compulsory jurisdiction of international judicial bodies, and to agree to binding arbitration for investment disputes. This pattern is robust to the use of country and year fixed effects, to alternative measures of the key variables, and to the exclusion of all countries in the Middle East. To explain this pattern, we consider the economic incentives that foster participation in international institutions: the desire to attract foreign investment and to gain access to foreign markets. Oil-exporting states, we argue, find it relatively easy to achieve these aims without making costly commitments to international institutions. In other words, natural resource wealth liberates states from the economic pressures that would otherwise drive them toward cooperation

Concurrent Design of Embedded Control Software

Embedded software design for mechatronic systems is becoming an increasingly time-consuming and error-prone task. In order to cope with the heterogeneity and complexity, a systematic model-driven design approach is needed, where several parts of the system can be designed concurrently. There is however a trade-off between concurrency efficiency and integration efficiency. In this paper, we present a case study on the development of the embedded control software for a real-world mechatronic system in order to evaluate how we can integrate concurrent and largely independent designed embedded system software parts in an efficient way. The case study was executed using our embedded control system design methodology which employs a concurrent systematic model-based design approach that ensures a concurrent design process, while it still allows a fast integration phase by using automatic code synthesis. The result was a predictable concurrently designed embedded software realization with a short integration time

Understanding responsible innovation in small producers’ clusters in Northern Vietnam:A grounded theory approach to globalization and poverty alleviation

Abstract: The PhD thesis explores new economic dynamics within poor small producers’ clusters in craft villages in northern Vietnam; a country in full economic swing after market economy reforms and opening up to the world. The central research question of the thesis - positioned in current debates about poverty alleviation, small business, globalization and sustainable development - reads: How to understand responsible innovation within poor small producers’ clusters in Vietnam following the country’s integration into the global economy? The question is addressed in four subsequent published articles that draw on empirical studies involving grounded theory. The first article advances an operational definition of innovation for informally organized small producers’ clusters in Vietnam, enabling the identification of a number of cases of cluster-level innovation. The second article discusses the responsible innovation concept in the context of developing economies, arguing that it should be combined with current notions of poverty alleviation and sustainable development. The article concludes that it is problematic to evaluate responsible innovation on the basis of outcomes. This conclusion lays the basis for the third article which articulates an alternative approach that models responsible innovation as a societal process in which innovators acknowledge responsibility in resolving societal conflict as a result of harmful outcomes. The fourth article explores the dynamics of this societal process through Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in which all human actors and materiality are allowed and enrolled into a network. The PhD thesis concludes with ideas for further theory development and the policy implications of the findings of this thesis.