Search results

In the last two decades the economic literature has devoted significant attention to the mechanisms behind firms′ recruitment strategies as a possible way of reducing (un)employment problems. At the workfloor many efforts have also been made by firms to develop strategies that both alleviate conflicts with employees and at the same time lead to acceptable levels of productivity. This effort has resulted in the broad acceptance of the personnel management function in the firm. Examines how successful this approach has been by focusing on the gap between practice and theory in recruitment, by investigating the extent to which and the way in which experiences and findings from actual recruitment (personnel management) have been incorporated in economic theory. Gives an overview of findings on recruitment and selection strategies of firms, with a particular emphasis on economic motives.

The aim of this paper is to explain the relationship between economic performance and labour manoeuvrability of township‐village enterprises in the Jiangsu province, People's Republic of China.

After a concise general overview of recent economic developments in the Chinese economy and the functioning of labour markets, a statistical analysis was performed on economic performance and labour market conditions based on a sample of 103 enterprises in the area considered.

The analysis shows that the flexibility to fire employees has a considerable impact on the rise in added value of the enterprises, whereas hiring flexibility appears to have negligible effects.

Although the paper has a limited scope related to one Chinese province, it seems plausible that the results – a positive economic effect of deregulation – have a more general validity, but this would call for a broader comparative study across sectors and regions.

The paper thus offers a novel contribution to a better understanding of the economic performance after the fast changes in the Chinese economy.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of the literature on the importance of taxes as a determinant of FDI attraction.

Approach – The chapter presents the fundamental elements of the conceptual background that explain how and under which circumstances taxation may be a significant factor underlying FDI decisions. Then it proceeds with an extensive review of the qualitative and quantitative literature on the topic. Finally, it draws several relevant conclusions on the main patterns that can be extracted from the evolution of the literature on this field.

Findings – In this chapter we arrive at three major findings concerning the effect of taxes on FDI, and we uncover one interesting puzzle worthy of further research.

First, from the literature review it becomes clear that both FDI and taxes are concepts covering heterogeneous phenomena, and therefore to compare studies, results or to make judgments on the relationship between taxes and FDI, the working definitions of FDI and taxes that are being used needs to be clearly established and understood.

Second, based on the review of the qualitative literature, it becomes clear that while taxes are an important aspect of FDI decisions among managers, they are probably not the main driver of the decision. Moreover, taxes may only play a ‘marginal’ role compared with other determinants of FDI.

Third, looking carefully at the quantitative literature as a whole, there is not a straight answer that permits to unequivocally say that lower taxes increase FDI attraction.

Finally, a puzzle emerges from the tension between what policy makers believe and what the studies show. The review in this chapter puts in evidence that while policy makers believe lowering taxes increases the attractiveness of their territories vis-à-vis FDI, the facts show that taxes appear only to play a marginal role compared with other determinants of FDI. So, why do policy makers put so much faith on tax policies as an FDI attraction tool?

Value – The value of this chapter is threefold. It presents a very complete and up to date review of the literature concerning the impact of taxation on FDI decisions, it analyses the literature's apparently disparate results and groups them into three clear emerging conclusions, and uncovers an interesting public policy puzzle.

Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to identify the key factors affecting banks’ liquidity in developing/less-developing countries.

In this paper, the author uses the ordinary least-square fixed effect model on an unbalanced panel data set of all conventional banks (686 banks) operating in the organization of Islamic cooperation countries over the period 1989-2008.

The estimation results show that all the determinants have statistically significant relationship with liquidity (except for concentration) but with different signs. On the one hand, capital ratio, foreign ownership, credit risk, inflation rate, monetary policy and deposit insurance negatively affected banks’ liquidity, while on the other hand, efficiency, size, off-balance sheet activities, market capitalization and concentration have a positive link with banks’ liquidity.

According to the best of author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical study to investigate the determinants of banks liquidity in developing/less-developing countries using a large sample of banks (686 banks) and for long period (19 years).