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Why do some countries (often developing and emerging economies) adopt special laws on PPP, whilst in others PPPs are governed by the legislation on public procurement and related bylaws? This paper explains the above global discrepancies from an institutional perspective. In a contract-theoretical framework we demonstrate how PPPs can enable projects that are not feasible through standard public procurement arrangements. Incentives for private partners are created through extra benefits (often non-contractible) from their collaboration with the government (e.g. risk reduction, reputational gains, access to additional resources, lower bureaucratic burden, etc.). In a well-developed institutional environment these benefits are implicitly guaranteed, suggesting no need in a specialized PPP-enabling legislation. Otherwise, a PPP law should establish an institutional architecture to provide the above benefits.

Investments in intellectual capital (IC) are often linked to competitive advantages that improve economic profit and increase the value of a company. However, this effect is reciprocal: companies that generate higher cash flow can invest more in IC. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a dynamic relationship between IC components and economic profit, with a special emphasis on industry specific effects in pharmaceutical, retail, steel, telecommunications, and service sectors.

Panel vector autoregression was used to deal with the mutual influence of IC components, the lag effect, and heterogeneity. The data were taken from Compustat database and covers the period from 2001 to 2010.

The paper proves that there is interaction between investments in the IC components and company performance. However, there are sectoral differences: there is a positive impact of economic profit on human capital in retail; in the steel industry a mutual influence is revealed. Moreover, interaction between different IC components is detected in telecommunication and steel industries.

This is the first study to present clear evidence of the effects of performance on IC investment decisions. The time lag in the effects of IC investments was estimated and compared for different industries. On the methodological side, the paper presents a rather simple method capable of yielding results consistent with other studies and yet rich enough to be applied to an analysis of sectoral differences in dynamic IC investment decisions.

Purpose – In this chapter, we compare the cases of India and Russia as they address the spread of HIV-AIDS in their respective countries. The countries, former Cold War allies, have embarked upon a path toward economic liberalization in the past decade and a half. In Russia's case, this came with political upheaval. In India's case, liberalization started with tentative steps and reached more full-blown economic and social liberalization in recent times. Both have also had to deal with the rapid spread of HIV-AIDS within their societies which brings with it the threat of derailing recent economic progress.

Methodology – A comparative case-study method is used to make comparisons between these countries which are facing similar challenges but whose approaches to them differ.

Findings – The chapter looks at how the government and a tradition-bound society in both cases have addressed the crisis. While both governments are recently becoming more serious about sustainable responses to the spread of the disease, in India's case this response has been buttressed by social liberalization unleashed by recent economic success.

Contributions to the field – We argue that social liberalization, as in the case of India, has made an impact in terms of the spread and acceptance of prevention education. This has positive implications for those countries where liberalization has changed traditional societies and where these changes are being used to battle the HIV-AIDS crisis.