The Productivity Puzzle, Management Practices and Leadership

The research direction of this thesis is sparked by the puzzling variation in productivity among firms, underscoring the importance of understanding the drivers of productivity better. This thesis encompasses three empirical studies, each tackling a distinct challenge in productivity and management research. It is grounded in the framework of the World Management Survey (WMS), which offers a standardized approach to assess management practices and their relation to differences in performance indicators like firm productivity.The first study explores the universality of people management practices within the WMS framework across fourteen countries. It focuses on the role of firm-level human capital, and the cultural values and employment protection legislation in firms’ institutional environment. The results suggest that firms’ human capital is positively associated with people management practices’ effectiveness, and that the practices are universally linked to productivity without being significantly moderated by cultural context or regulatory factors of employment protection.The second study taps into individual managers’ role and investigates the influence of CEOs' instrumental leadership behaviors alongside management practices for firm productivity. Analyzing data from Dutch manufacturing firms, it concludes that both CEO leadership behaviors and management practices independently are associated with productivity, emphasizing the unique roles of CEOs and firm management.The third study examines the link between management practices, productivity, and export performance in Dutch manufacturing firms. It finds that better-managed firms tend to have higher productivity and export revenues, suggesting a relationship between management practices’ role in firm productivity and the heterogeneity in firms’ export performances

A Critical View of the Scholarly Discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian Problem

The scholarly discourse about Israel has at least two defects. First, although it is a colonial-settler state that has occupied the entirety of the former British Mandate of Palestine, it is still by and large treated as a “normal” state in the literature; and secondly, even the progressive scholars – who are very critical of Israel for is subjugation of Palestinian rights and massive breaches of human rights – have mostly confined their critique to the Palestinian territories occupied during the 1967 War. Therefore, the progressive scholarship ought to adopt a wider view of Israel’s irregular practices by extending its focus to the entirety of territories corresponding to the former Mandate of Palestine and the entirety of the history of the state of Israel in the context of its occupations, colonial policies, ethnic cleansing, population transfers, systematic racism and massive human rights violations against the Palestinian people. This “new” approach also requires, at least in the context of critical academics, an advocacy for multiple sanctions by international institutions, first and foremost, by the United Nations (UN), to be imposed against Israel as was the case with the Apartheid state of South Africa during the Cold War. 

The relationship between exchange rate and foreign trade in Turkey: Cointegration analysis of the term 1992 - 2013

Neredeyse tüm dünya ülke ekonomilerinin birbirlerine bağımlı hale geldiği günümüzde dış ticarete ilişkin akademik çalışmalar hızla devam etmektedir. Dolayısıyla dış ticaret teorileri ve politikaları da değişmeye ve gelişmeye devam etmektedir. Dış ticaretin öneminin hızla artmasıyla birlikte değerlendirilmesinde kullanılan kavramlar ve yöntemler de farklı hale gelmiştir. Bu sebeple ihracat ve ithalatın birimce ifade edilmesi ya da gelir cinsinden bilinmesi yetersiz kalmaktadır. Çalışmada Türkiye ekonomisinin dış ticaretinin incelenmesi amaçlanırken bu yetersizlik göz önüne alınmıştır. Bu bağlamda çalışmada ihracatın ithalatı karşılama oranı kavramı kullanılmıştır. Bu kavram, dış ticaret dengesi, ithalat ve ihracat kavramlarının hepsiyle ilgili bilgiyi barındırması nedeniyle önemlidir. Dış ticaretin kavramsal açıklamaları, dış ticaret verilerinin incelenmesi ve ampirik analizi bu çalışmanın bölümlerini oluşturmaktadır. Araştırmada 1992-2013 dönemi verileriyle, döviz kuru ve ihracatın ithalatı karşılama oranı değişkenleri arasındaki ilişki analiz edilmiştir. Bu ilişki Johansen eşbütünleşme yöntemi ile test edilmiştir. Değişkenlerin durağanlıkları Augmented Dickey Fuller ve Phillips Perron yöntemleriyle analiz edilmiştir. Ekonometrik süreçlere uygun olarak yapılan eşbütünleşme testi sonucunda belirtilen değişkenler arasında bir eşbütünleşme ilişkisinin olduğu öngörülmüştür.Nowadays economics of almost all countries of the World become dependent on each other, academic Works relating to foreign trade continue rapidly. On account of theories and policies of foreign trade go on to change and improve. Together with increasing the importance of foreign trade rapidly, concepts and methods using to evaluation of this become different. So to express as a unit or to be known in terms of income of import and export is inadequate. In the research , while examining foreign trade of Turkish economy is aimed, this insufficientness was taken into consideration. In this respect, the rate of export meeting to import was used in this work and it is very important because of including informations about all of the concepts that are import, export and balance of foreign trade. Conceptual explenetions of foreign trade, examination of data of foreign trade and empirical analysis are the parts of the work. In the research the relation between exchange rate and variables of rate of export meeting to import was analysed using the data of the term form 1992 to 2013. The ralation was tested with Johansen co-integration method. Stability of the variables are analysed by the ADF and PP methods. The consequence of co-integration testi which was made as appropriete to econometric progresses, it was conjectured that there is a co-integration relation between the given variables

Introduction: Tracing History, Politics and Law as a Vindication of Palestinian Liberation

Today, the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the continued dislocation of Palestinians for nearly a hundred years through brute force – combined with the former’s discursive hegemony over its victims – remain as major obstacles to the construction of a peaceful and stable international political order in the Middle East. The so-called Palestinian problem remains the key to understand the failure of the Middle Eastern sub-system to produce sustainable peace in the region. This brief introduction to the special issue seeks to explain the general perspective and summarise main arguments of the contributors who have approached the issue of Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lenses of various fields of study such as international law, foreign policy analysis and discourse analysis. As will be seen, all the authors offer notable critical reflections that challenge established understandings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the mainstream Western media and scholarly literature.