Firm Ownership, FOEs, and POEs

Where the theory of free competition reigns, developing countries should open their arms to investments from all types of enterprises in order to maximize jobs. Ownership, measured by votes of shareholders or boards of directors, is immaterial to performance. Matters change drastically, though, when competition depends on monopolistic assets and market theory no longer rigorously holds. Then, ownership matters. Foreign owned enterprises from developed countries can 'crowd out' privately owned enterprises from developing countries. They can break their back before they have a chance to acquire their own assets. FOEs in direct competition with POEs are not necessary for economic development to flourish, and it is dangerous for a promising POE to confront a privileged FOE in its own back yard, often with the backing of the FOE's powerful government. In this paper it is argued that because assets differ systematically between FOEs and POEs in their respective stages of evolution, FOEs may not contribute more to economic development in monopolistic industries than POEs. Indeed, the best POEs in the fastest growing emerging economies (e.g. Korea's Samsung, India's Tata, and Brazil's Embraer) tend to be more entrepreneurial than FOEs. The paper discusses the contribution of POEs vis-a-vis FOEs to economic development in emerging economies.entrepreneurship, foreign investment, firm ownership, industrialization

Property Rights and Elites

An elite derives its status from its relationship to property, whether physical or human capital. While stable property rights are necessary for everyday business, unstable property rights that result in major institutional changes (such as land reform) may have a positive impact on economic development. When are the ‘wrong’ property rights right? Institutional changes have a positive impact on economic development when a country’s elite can manage them. To support this generalization we examine the managerial capacity associated with elite status, highlighting which capabilities enable them to control changes in property rights regimes to their individual and national advantage. We compare how nationalization of foreign firms, a radical change in property rights, was managed in Argentina, China, Korea and Taiwan after the Second World War.Elites, property rights, indigensim, capabilities, role models

Some Missing Tools For Business Statistics: How To Teach Them

Missing from business statistics texts are several tools, but how does one add additional material to an already crammed, required course?  We briefly describe these tools.  This paper explains how to incorporate these missing tools in a time-efficient manner.  We show how to teach them in a way that helps students to: (1) learn basic statistical concepts, (2) distinguish the two kinds of variation, (3) find structure within data, and (4) set priorities on problems.  By learning these four concepts at the beginning of a statistics course, students will then have a solid, practical foundation for learning the remaining statistical material to be covered

Timeflies: Push-pull signal-function functional reactive programming

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is a promising class of abstractions for interactive programs. FRP systems provide values defined at all points in time (behaviors or signals) and values defined at countably many points in time (events) as abstractions. Signal-function FRP is a subclass of FRP which does not provide direct access to time-varying values to the programmer, but instead provides signal functions, which are reactive transformers of signals and events, as first-class objects in the program. All signal-function implementations of FRP to date have utilized demand-driven or pull-based evaluation for both events and signals, producing output from the FRP system whenever the consumer of the output is ready. This greatly simplifies the implementation of signal-function FRP systems, but leads to inefficient and wasteful evaluation of the FRP system when this strategy is employed to evaluate events, because the components of the signal function which process events must be computed whether or not there is an event occurrence. In contrast, an input-driven or push-based system evaluates the network whenever new input is available. This frees the system from evaluating the network when nothing has changed, and then only the components necessary to react to the input are re-evaluated. This form of evaluation has been applied to events in standard FRP systems but not in signal-function FRP systems. I describe the design and implementation of a signal-function FRP system which applies pull-based evaluation to signals and push-based evaluation to events (a push-pull system). The semantics of the system are discussed, and its performance and expressiveness for practical examples of interactive programs are compared to existing signal-function FRP systems through the implementation of a networking application