Estimating the effects of the container revolution on world trade

Many historical accounts have asserted that containerization triggered complementary technological and organizational changes that revolutionized global freight transport. We are the first to suggest an identification strategy for estimating the effects of the container revolution on world trade. Our empirical strategy exploits time and cross-sectional variation in countries’ first adoption of container facilities and combines it with product-level variation in containerizability and container usage. Applying our container variables on a large panel of product level trade flows for the period 1962-1990, our estimates suggest economically large concurrent and cumulative effects of containerization and lend support for the view of containerization being a driver of 20th century economic globalization

Youth as Actors of Change? The Cases of Morocco and Tunisia

In the last decades, ‘youth’ has increasingly become a fashionable category in academic and development literature and a key development (or security) priority. However, beyond its biological attributes, youth is a socially constructed category and also one that tends to be featured in times of drastic social change. As the history of the category shows in both Morocco and Tunisia, youth can represent the wished-for model of future citizenry and a symbol of renovation, or its ‘not-yet-adult’ status which still requires guidance and protection can be used as a justification for increased social control and repression of broader social mobilisation. Furthermore, when used as a homogeneous and undifferentiated category, the reference to youth can divert attention away from other social divides such as class in highly unequal societies

The impact of generation and socioeconomic status on the value of higher education in the UAE: A longitudinal study

© 2017 This study explores the differences between student and parents’ value orientation for a college degree across a large sample in the UAE. The value of obtaining a higher education degree in the UAE is transgenerational. Salient benefits of a college degree can be categorized by economic, social and entrepreneurial factors and a model is set forth based on an intrinsic/extrinsic and self vs. other continuum. Education and income are related to valuing several educational outcomes. The most important factor identified across generations included both self-transcendence and self-enhancement values. From 2011–2015, the importance of higher education\u27s social benefits has increased

Technological Revolution, Sustainability and Development in Africa: Overview, Emerging Issues and Challenges

The paper examines the silent technological revolution in sub‐Saharan Africa focusing on emerging issues and challenges. In view of the centrality of technology diffusion in fostering local innovations and economic development in developing countries, it is surprising that our understanding of the challenges and opportunities in scaling‐up technologies remains limited. This paper capitalises on the ongoing silent technological revolution in sub‐Saharan Africa to present an overview of how new technologies have been adopted and utilised to achieve sustainability. The study identified a host of factors such as weak regulatory enforcement systems, lack of financial credit availability, and limited banking services, which have created conditions for technological innovations such as mobile phone‐based banking, mPedigree, “cardiopad,” and M‐PEPEA to emerge. The public policy implications and directions for future research are identified and examined

Influence of transnational economic alliances on the IFRS convergence decision in India - institutional perspectives

This study contributes to the literature on global governance by highlighting the importance of not losing sight of the nation state as an important player in the transnational governance arena. Specifically, literature on global (accounting) regulation devotes a great deal of attention to the roles of organisations and agencies with transnational remit (such as global standard setters, donor agencies) while often downplaying the significant impacts of the more traditional cross-country links forged through economic relationships and resource dependencies between national and transnational institutional fields. This was specially noted in the case of the indirect influences of the US’s decision to delay IFRS convergence. While being interpreted as an indirect source of influence, such a decision played a very significant role on the convergence negotiations in India. The study shows how the US influence was channelled through Japan with which India has significant trade and economic relations and, most importantly, holds a joint forum specifically to discuss convergence issues. The consequences of India’s links with countries such as US and Japan in the decision-making process provide a vivid indication of the important roles of cross-governmental relationships in the global governance arena, and also question the position of transnational organisations as pervasive powers in such governance. The study’s findings clearly demonstrate that the pursuit of full IFRS convergence strongly favoured by the transnational forces was invariably challenged in the Indian context by the influences of powerful nation states advocating a more cautious approach