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The 1997 merger of two USDA agencies, the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service and the Farmers Home Administration, into the Farm Service Agency created a need for consistent finance training. A highly successful Penn State Cooperative Extension borrower training program was selected to provide national financial training to more than 850 new staff and former loan technicians, and former ASCS staff and district directors. Analysis of workshop evaluations, based on pre‐workshop knowledge levels, identified five distinct clusters of trainees differing substantially in terms of experience, age, knowledge of finance principles, and job classification within FSA. However, evaluations confirmed testing results that the financial training was equally effective across all clusters. A critical result was that the training was successfully adapted to accommodate the distinct needs of each trainee cluster.

The author argues that international business carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Globalization and attendant international business activities tend to trigger countervailing political forces, resulting in de-globalization. Scholars have documented this pattern for the past, and it will likely repeat itself in the future. International business thus seems to constitute a self-limiting, oscillating system that triggers its own crises. The author reviews and applies theories accounting for the role of international business in (de-)globalization and discusses measures to prevent or at least dampen future oscillations.

The impact of competition on innovation has been extensively studied, but with ambiguous findings. We study the impact of import competition on U.S. corporate innovation and present some new perspectives. We conjecture that U.S. firms view import competition from high-wage countries (HWCs) as “neck-and-neck” competition and will respond by intensifying innovation. In contrast, U.S. firms will reduce innovation in response to import competition from low-wage countries (LWCs), because such competition does not always increase the potential benefits from innovation. Our empirical results are supportive. We find that, when confronting HWC import competition, U.S. firms increase R&D spending while intensifying and improving innovation output (file more patents, receive more citations to their patents, and produce more breakthrough patents). Moreover, U.S. firms closest to the technological frontier – largest firms, firms with the largest stocks of knowledge, and most profitable firms – increase and improve their innovation the most in response to HWC competition. These results shed light on the relationship between product market competition and innovation, and point to the origin of import competition as a determinant of innovation decisions made by different U.S. companies.

Decolonizing involves dismantling deeply entrenched colonial systems of knowledge and power by disrupting colonial patterns of thought, questioning how teaching and learning occurs, and critiquing the colonial practices that are merged into the fabric of higher and adult education. Within this process, scholars and practitioners engage in interrogating teaching and learning approaches and developing a critical consciousness regarding what knowledge is valued and how this value is acquired. Within higher and adult education, limited research has explicitly considered the ways in which conceptions of andragogy and its accompanying instructional approaches might be deconstructed within the context of decolonization. The purpose of this chapter is to deconstruct and decolonize foundational higher and adult learning conceptual and theoretical frameworks that are routinely embedded within courses and programs. The conceptual and theoretical frameworks selected and analyzed include self-directed learning, transformative learning, and action learning as conventional examples of individual and collective instructional approaches employed within higher and adult learning settings. Maōri scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith's (2012) nine characteristics of theory that contribute to colonizing discourses and 25 Indigenous projects/principles are employed as the lenses that frame this analysis. These lenses include social science and methodological approaches and strategies that decolonize populations and promote Indigenous epistemologies.

Understanding and predicting the emergence of venture initiation entails research to explore the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention (EI) and behavior. This book chapter aims to provide an overview on the role of exogenous factors (entrepreneurship education), contextual and environmental factors (perceived entrepreneurial motivators and barriers) in developing EIs and behavior among the university graduates. It also highlights the different strands of opinion and research on the role that formal entrepreneurship programs may (or may not) play in developing EI and action. This book chapter further provides some developments on the factors mentioned above among the different Asian countries while using Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). Since 1999 GEM reports have been a key source of comparable data across a large variety of countries on attitudes toward entrepreneurship, start-up, established business activities, and aspirations of entrepreneurs for their businesses.

The use of an ICT 1905 computer for the mechanization of library procedures at The City University was considered as part of the library reorganization prior to the acquisition of University status. In view of the smallness of the library staff and the pressure of work it seemed essential to select an area which would quickly lead to relieving staff of tedious routine work, and at the same time provide useful training in computer applications. There seemed no point in attempting to duplicate exercises which were being currently tackled by larger libraries e.g. cataloguing, and the volume of loans hardly justified mechanization of circulation records at the present time.

This study investigates important factors that should be used by lenders in risk‐rating their farm customers. These factors predict actual farm performance and debt repayment ability. Linear and logistic regression models are used to identify the debt‐to‐asset ratio as a major predictor of repayment ability. In addition, the rate of asset turnover and family living expenses are strong predictors of farm performance. The results are tested over several time periods to verify the robustness of the predictors.

The economics literature on gender has expanded considerably in recent years, fueled in part by new sources of data, including from experimental studies of gender differences in preferences and other traits. At the same time, economists have been developing more realistic models of psychological and social influences on individual choices and the evolution of culture and social norms. Despite these innovations, much of the economics of gender has been left behind, and still employs a reductive framing in which gender gaps in economic outcomes are either due to discrimination or to “choice.” I suggest here that the persistence of this approach is due to several distinctive economic habits of mind – strong priors driven by market bias and gender essentialism, a perspective that views the default economic agent as male, and an oft-noted tendency to avoid complex problems in favor of those that can be modeled simply. I also suggest some paths forward.