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Purpose – This study examines the effect of price regulation and competition on launch timing and pricing of new drugs.

Methods – Our data cover launch experience in 15 countries from 1992 to 2003 for drugs in 12 major therapeutic classes. We estimate a two-equation model of launch hazard and launch price of new drugs.

Findings – We find that launch timing and prices of new drugs are related to a country's average prices of established products in a class. Thus to the extent that price regulation reduces price levels, such regulation directly contributes to launch delay in the regulating country. Regulation by external referencing, whereby high-price countries reference low-price countries, also has indirect or spillover effects, contributing to launch delay and higher launch prices in low-price referenced countries.

Implications – Referencing policies adopted in high-price countries indirectly impose welfare loss on low-price countries. These findings have implications for US proposals to constrain pharmaceutical prices through external referencing and drug importation.

Purpose – Pharmaceutical expenditures have an important role in Europe. The attempts to control expenditure have used a wide range of policy measures. We reviewed the main measures adopted by the European Union countries, especially in countries where governments are the largest third-party payers.

Methodology – To complement a literature review on the topic, data was gathered from national reviews of health systems and direct inquiries to several government bodies.

Findings – Almost all countries regulate prices of pharmaceutical products. Popular policy measures include international referencing to set prices (using as benchmark countries that have set lower prices), internal reference pricing systems to promote price competition in domestic markets, and positive lists for reimbursement to promote consumption of generics (including in some cases substitution by pharmacists of drugs prescribed by physicians). Despite the wide range of policy measures, it is not possible to identify a “silver bullet” to control pharmaceutical expenditures. We also identified two main policy challenges: policy coordination among countries within the European Union to maintain incentives for R&D at the global level, and the development of new relationships with the pharmaceutical industry; namely, the so-called risk-sharing agreements between the pharmaceutical industry and governments/regulators (or large third-party payers).

This study draws upon the interorganizational imitation theory and endorsement literatures to explain the entry mode decisions of emerging-market firms (EMFs) into developed markets. Specifically, the study argues that EMFs entering developed markets pay differential attention to the prior actions of reference groups – by type of country of origin (whom to follow?) and by entry mode (how to imitate?). We test our hypotheses with a sample of 591 entries by EMFs investing in the United States over a 10-year period. The results support an isomorphism-based framework with different influences across reference groups by country of origin and entry mode. We find a dominant form of isomorphism, even after controlling for transaction costs and resource-based explanations.

This paper investigates institutional quality and its impact on entrepreneurship activities in a less-developed economy. The unifying characteristic of government policies in less-developed contexts is that, often, the primary focus of policy makers is not entrepreneurs and, especially, not the impact of these intuitions on entrepreneurs. This paper aims to show that this impact can be considerable. The author investigates political and macroeconomic institutions and regulations, human capital and skills development and access to finance.

This paper investigates institutions that have major impact on entrepreneurship activities in a less-developed economy. The data used for the analysis is focused on Kosovan entrepreneurship, but the findings are presented in the wider context of economies. The aim of the investigation in this study is to identify whether certain regulations and institutions in different countries affect the level of entrepreneurship activity. In addition, the purpose is to identify similarities and differences among entrepreneurship patterns in diverse economic and institutional settings and to capture this diversity within a common framework. Most of institutions that are subject of analysis belong to one of the following dimensions: political, legal and regulatory institutions, educational institutions geared towards entrepreneurship and the quality of the financial system (e.g. cost of and access to finance). What the empirical results in this paper show is that the impact of such institutions on entrepreneurship can be considerable. The more conducive and qualitative the country’s institutional conditions are, the higher the likely levels of entrepreneurship and vice versa.

The results of the investigation suggest that compared to the reference countries, entrepreneurship in Kosovo is subject to numerous constraints. However, they suggest, also, that the most binding of these are related to institutional quality, followed by the cost of finance and human capital limitations.

There are few studies in the entrepreneurship literature that use data at the country level, a level that provides a considerable level of precision on the quest to understand what propels and constraints entrepreneurial activity. Given the scarcity of studies at the country level, this study aims to contribute in three ways. First, it aims to advance our discussion of how institutions can rightfully support business creation and retention in a less-developed economy. Second contribution is empirical. Entrepreneurship research rarely incorporates the analysis of several cohorts of firm entrants and exits from a developing and relatively young economy, which, so far, has received little research attention. Third, this analysis contributes to the development of a comparative methodology to measure entrepreneurship activities from an international perspective. The findings obtained for a less-developed economy are compared to data for four benchmark countries, to measure entrepreneurship at the national level.

The international marketing field has witnessed many studies related to “country of origin” (COO) effects or the “made in” concept over the past few decades. Yet COO research is deeply rooted in the so-called “production-related” approach, which mainly accounts for production- or technology-based factors. Barely considered is the “consumption-related” perspective, which reflects consumers' proclivity to base their buying decisions on foreigners' product choice. In this paper, we propose the “country of reference” (COR) concept, in which consumers deliberately imitate the product choices of consumers from another country, to whom the former (i.e. the imitators) attribute superior or more prestigious personas.

Unlike the made in concept, which emphasizes favored product qualities from superior manufacturing countries, we believe product preferences may arise from cross-border benchmarking or “cross-country referencing.” Pivoting on the optimal distinctiveness theory, this paper suggests a COR framework that incorporates the system justification theory and the self-discrepancy concept, along with decision heuristics and mental simulation effects. The proposed framework aims to explain consumers' inclination to “buy what certain foreigners buy.”

We suggest critical propositions related to the COR concept, discuss its marketing implications, and pinpoint further research issues.

COR may become a coping strategy through which low-status consumers perceiving themselves as less privileged than their high-status counterparts can narrow this gap by means of decision mimicking.

Several bibliometric indicators that are extensively used to estimate research performance have not been validated against an external criterion of excellence. This paper aims to investigate whether this validation is possible using the number of Nobel Prize awards.

This study uses several analytical treatments of the data to investigate: whether Nobel Prize awards are sporadic events or they depend on the scientific activity of countries or institutions and can be used in research evaluation; and the association between the number of Nobel Prize achievements and conventional bibliometric indicators across countries and institutions.

This study finds that conventional bibliometric indicators, numbers of publications, citations, and top 1 per cent most cited publications, correlate with the number of Nobel Prize achievements in several advanced countries with similar research abilities. Contrarily, in countries and institutions with more variable research characteristics, there is no association between conventional bibliometric indicators and the number of Nobel Prize achievements, and their use as indicators of research excellence is not valid. In contrast, the number of national articles in Nature and Science correlates with the number of Nobel Prize achievements across countries and institutions.

Science administrators implementing research evaluations and research incentives based on conventional bibliometric indicators should consider that increasing the scores of these indicators does not imply an improvement in research excellence.

The study demonstrates that Nobel Prize achievements are not singular events that occur by chance. Therefore, the number of Nobel Prize achievements can be used to validate bibliometric indicators.

Numerous reference sources are available to help librarians answer questions regarding the geographical and cultural characteristics of nations. In this article, Lucretia McCulley identifies the features that determine the quality of such materials, and explains how each of 13 research aids meets her criteria.

We investigate the reasons why income inequality is so high in Spain in the EU context. We first show that the differential in inequality with Germany and other countries is driven by inequality among households who participate in the labor market. Then, we conduct an analysis of different household income aggregates. We also decompose the inter-country gap in inequality into characteristics and coefficients effects using regressions of the Recentered Influence Function for the Gini index. Our results show that the higher inequality observed in Spain is largely associated with lower employment rates, higher incidence of self-employment, lower attained education, as well as the recent increase in the immigration of economically active households. However, the prevalence of extended families in Spain contributes to reducing inequality by diversifying income sources, with retirement pensions playing an important role. Finally, by comparing the situations in 2008 and 2012, we separate the direct effects of the Great Recession on employment and unemployment benefits, from other more permanent factors (such as the weak redistributive effect of taxes and family or housing allowances, or the roles of education and the extended family).

The continuous development of information technology leads to intelligent education research. In the context of internationalisation, the study aims to understand the relevant research status worldwide, research similarities and differences that need to be discovered, and research frontiers that need to be explored.

Web of Science (WoS) core collection was used as the data source, descriptive statistical analysis, geographic data visualisation and coupling analysis are used to reveal coupling relationships, present a cooperative situation and discover research frontiers.

Intelligent education research has been widely carried out in countries around the world, and there is extensive scientific research cooperation. According to coupling analysis results, the coupling strength of bibliographic between countries has been continuously improved, while the coupling strength of keywords has remained balanced, and there is standardisation and diversity of research.

The weakness of the research lies in the limitations of the data sources. Important research achievements on a certain topic in many non-English speaking countries are usually published in native journals. In the future research direction, more coupling analysis objects can be carried out, such as focussing on authors and institutions.

Through the coupling analysis of country bibliographic and keywords, it reveals the consistency and divergence of intelligent education research between different countries at different time spans.

Design and implement country bibliographic coupling (CBC) and country keyword coupling (CKC) strength indicators to calculate the strength of coupling between countries.

Many future research proposals of Lean Manufacturing (LM) are presented in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to determine these future research proposals of LM which are country-related and classify them.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of peer-reviewed journal articles in LM was conducted. A total of 145 articles published in 34 journals during 2010–2020 were collected from four major management science publishers namely, Emerald Online, Elsevier/Science Direct, Springer Link and Taylor and Francis. The country-related future research proposals of LM identified in the literature were classified according to, firstly, the continent of the country of reference, and secondly, some form of natural affinity of these proposals creating meaningful themes. The quality tool “affinity diagram” was applied to classify the country-related future research proposals of LM.

The country-related future research proposals of LM, which are increasing in the literature over time, refer mostly to studies to be conducted in several continents/countries and to multinational studies. Conducting studies specifically in Asia, Europe, South and North America, Africa and Australia–New Zealand is also suggested. The plethora of the country-related future research proposals of LM were classified, based on the affinity of their content, into 18 meaningful themes. These themes were also classified based on their affinity into two broad categories, namely “themes concerning the LM approach itself” and “themes concerning factors outside the LM approach”.

The restricted number of the databases searched and the subjectivity of classifying the large number of the country-related future research proposals into themes are the main limitations of the present SLR. Based on these limitations, future literature review studies can be carried out.

Useful proposals are provided to researchers of several countries for conducting original and country-specific research studies which can enrich the knowledge of the implementation of LM under the specific circumstances of a country for the benefit of practitioners.

This study goes beyond previous literature review studies on LM by focusing exclusively on the LM future research agenda which is country related. The analytical presentation of the country-related future research proposals as well as the formulation of clusters of these proposals make the present SLR study substantially different from those carried out worldwide so far.