Understanding Firm Performance: the Case of Developing Countries's Firms that Compete Internationally in Technologically Advanced Industries

Insights from industrial organization, Schumpeterian innovation, and economic development theories are used to try to explain firm behavior in cases of successful acquisition of advancedtechnological assets and international trade competitiveness by Asian and Latin-american countries at an intermediate level of industrial and technological development. The role of the state as innovador as well as the importance of alternative forms of organization emerge as the most salient findings.Enterprise, innovation, industrialization, technology, developing countries, industrial organization, institutions, public sector.

Innovation Promotion and Learning in International Trade: the Case of Colombian Manufacturing Exports

Colombian manufacturing exporting firms survey results are analyzed highlighting innovation, promotion, and learning, as well as the influence of factors such as: size, ownership, output objectives, destination of exports, competition and pricing, export incentives, and firm configuration, in their export performance.Manufacturing exports, learning, Colombia, export incentives, preferences, industrialization, import substitution, innovation, international trade, industrial organization.

Globalization and its disconnects.

Globalization, defined in economic terms as the phenomenon of increased integration of the world economy, generates strong reactions due to some negative effects of the growth of international trade, the internationalization of industrial production, and unrestricted cross-border capital flows, while the overall mobility of labor remains quite limited. Evidence on the growth of international trade and factor mobility is reviewed and analyzed, and problems affecting developed and developing countries are detected. Policy measures to alleviate some of the dislocations from increased globalization are discussed, and some measures recommended to avoid social and political disruptions.Globalization; international trade; capital flows; labor mobility; technology; intellectual property rights

On Semi-Industrialized Countries and the Acquisition of Technological Capabilities.

The last decades have witnessed a breaking down of the hitherto quasi-monopoly in industrial and technological development by highly industrialized countries. Man-made changes in comparative advantage due to rapid accumulation of human capital, development of technical institutions, and public policies in support of enterprise development and innovation, have led to the emergence of advanced technical capabilities in a number of semi-industrialized countries. Study of selected instances of their technological achievement show that they cannot be adequately interpreted as necessarily requiring the working of a well integrated national innovation system. They seem to be instead, path, or process, dependent, and determined by the circumstantial convergence of requisite skills, appropriate institutions and supportive public policies.Industrialization; technology; semi-industrialized countries; innovations

Liouville field theory coupled to a critical Ising model: Non-perturbative analysis, duality and applications

Two different kinds of interactions between a ${Z}_{n}$-parafermionic and a Liouville field theory are considered. For generic values of $n$, the effective central charges describing the UV behavior of both models are calculated in the Neveu-Schwarz sector. For $n=2$ exact vacuum expectation values of primary fields of the Liouville field theory, as well as the first descendent fields are proposed. For $n=1$, known results for Sinh-Gordon and Bullough-Dodd models are recovered whereas for $n=2$, exact results for these two integrable coupled Ising-Liouville models are shown to exchange under a weak-strong coupling duality relation. In particular, exact relations between the parameters in the actions and the mass of the particles are obtained. At specific imaginary values of the coupling and $n=2$, we use previous results to obtain exact information about: (a) Integrable coupled models like Ising-${\cal M}_{p/p'}$, homogeneous sine-Gordon model $SU(3)_2$ or the Ising-XY model; (b) Neveu-Schwarz sector of the $\Phi_{13}$ integrable perturbation of N=1 supersymmetric minimal models. Several non-perturbative checks are done, which support the exact results.Comment: 29 pages, 1 fig., LaTeX file with epsfig, amssymb, 3 references added. To appear in Nucl. Phys.

The fully frustrated XY model with next nearest neighbor interaction

We introduce a fully frustrated XY model with nearest neighbor (nn) and next nearest neighbor (nnn) couplings which can be realized in Josephson junction arrays. We study the phase diagram for $0\leq x \leq 1$ ($x$ is the ratio between nnn and nn couplings). When $x < 1/\sqrt{2}$ an Ising and a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions are present. Both critical temperatures decrease with increasing $x$. For $x > 1/\sqrt{2}$ the array undergoes a sequence of two transitions. On raising the temperature first the two sublattices decouple from each other and then, at higher temperatures, each sublattice becomes disorderd.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Interface Fluctuations on a Hierarchical Lattice

We consider interface fluctuations on a two-dimensional layered lattice where the couplings follow a hierarchical sequence. This problem is equivalent to the diffusion process of a quantum particle in the presence of a one-dimensional hierarchical potential. According to a modified Harris criterion this type of perturbation is relevant and one expects anomalous fluctuating behavior. By transfer-matrix techniques and by an exact renormalization group transformation we have obtained analytical results for the interface fluctuation exponents, which are discontinuous at the homogeneous lattice limit.Comment: 14 pages plain Tex, one Figure upon request, Phys Rev E (in print

Global Law as Intercontextuality and as Interlegality

Since the 1990s the effects of globalization on law and legal developments has been a central topic of scholarly debate. To date, the debate is however marked by three substantial deficiencies which this chapter seeks to remedy through a reconceptualization of global law as a law of inter-contextuality expressed through inter-legality and materialized through a particular body of legal norms which can be characterized as connectivity norms. The first deficiency is a historical and empirical one. Both critics as well as advocates of ‘non-state law’ share the assumption that ‘law beyond the state’ and related legal norms have gained in centrality when compared with previous historical times. While global law, including both public and private global governance law as well as regional occurrences such as EU law, has undergone profound transformations since the structural transformations which followed the de-colonialization processes of the mid-twentieth century, we do not have more global law relatively to other types of law today than in previous historical times. The second deficiency is a methodological one. The vast majority of scholarship on global law is either of an analytical nature, drawing on insights from philosophy, or empirically observing the existence of global law and the degree of compliance with global legal norms at a given moment in time. While both approaches bring something to the table they remain static approaches incapable of explaining and evaluating the transformation of global law over time. The third deficiency is a conceptual-theoretical one. In most instances, global law is understood as a unitary law producing singular legal norms with a planetary reach, or, alternatively, a radical pluralist perspective is adopted dismissing the existence of singular global norms. Both of these approaches however misapprehend the structural characteristics, function and societal effects of global law. Instead a third positon between unitary and radical pluralist perspectives can be adopted through an understanding of global law and its related legal norms as a de-centred kind of inter-contextual law characterised by inter-legality

Judging Inter-Legality

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