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The purpose of the chapter is to test the hypothesis that food safety (chemical) standards act as barriers to international seafood imports. We use zero-accounting gravity models to test the hypothesis that food safety (chemical) standards act as barriers to international seafood imports. The chemical standards on which we focus include chloramphenicol required performance limit, oxytetracycline maximum residue limit, fluoro-quinolones maximum residue limit, and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) pesticide residue limit. The study focuses on the three most important seafood markets: the European Union’s 15 members, Japan, and North America.Our empirical results confirm the hypothesis and are robust to the OLS as well as alternative zero-accounting gravity models such as the Heckman estimation and the Poisson family regressions. For the choice of the best model specification to account for zero trade and heteroskedastic issues, it is inconclusive to base on formal statistical tests; however, the Heckman sample selection and zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) models provide the most reliable parameter estimates based on the statistical tests, magnitude of coefficients, economic implications, and the literature findings. Our findings suggest that continually tightening of seafood safety standards has had a negative impact on exporting countries. Increasing the stringency of regulations by reducing analytical limits or maximum residue limits in seafood in developed countries has negative impacts on their bilateral seafood imports. The chapter furthers the literature on food safety standards on international trade. We show competing gravity model specifications and provide additional evidence that no one gravity model is superior.

Can changes in the trade of the world's largest trading countries be considered more global? Or should they be labeled as more regional? We investigated these questions for the G7 countries for the time period from 1980 to 1997. We found that the usual dichotomy of global–regional is not rich enough to answer these questions because globalization can be measured in terms of both physical and cultural distance. Our new taxonomy allows for testing these separate impacts on world trade and suggests that trade changes are best described as regional, though with some qualification. With respect to physical distance, we find that trade is clearly becoming more regional. On the cultural dimension, however, we find conflicting results. These results are robust to a series of tests. We find the same pattern at industry level, except for paper products and motor vehicles. The regionalization pattern holds for both imports to and exports from the G7, but it is stronger for exports.

This chapter examines the role of immigrant networks on trade, particulalry through the demand effect. First, we examine the effect of immigration on trade when the immigrants consume more of the good that is abundant in their home country than the natives in a standard Heckscher–Ohlin model and find that the effect of immigration on trade is a priori indeterminate. Our econometric gravity model consisting of 63 major trading and immigrant-sending country for the United States over 1991–2000. We find that the immigrants income, mostly through demand effect has a significant negative effect on U.S. imports. However, if we include the effect of the immigrant income interacted with the size of the immigrant network, measured by the immigrant stock, we find that higher immigrants income lowers the immigrant network effect for both U.S. exports and imports. This we find in addition to the immigrants stock elasticity of 0.27% for U.S. exports and 0.48% for U.S. imports. Capturing the immigrant assimilation with the level of immigrant income and the size of the immigrant enclave this chapter finds that the immigrant network effect on trade flows is weakened by the increasing level of immigrant assimilation.

Planetary sociology starts out from the supposition that sociology as a discipline emerged in the context and out of an interest in the fate of modern “national” societies. Yet, as a discipline, it emerged with tools designed to identify, track, and analyze processes and forms of organization which today are playing out and observable at the planetary level. For sociology to be in the position to make important contributions to the challenges modern societies are facing in the twenty-first century, it must apply the tools it developed over the course of more than a century, to processes and phenomena that are transforming and applying to planetary civilization and Earth's ecosystem. The necessary starting point is the critical investigation of the interconnected structuring principles that have been shaping both societies and individual identities, and how they reinforce patterns which thwart both sociology's ability to make increasingly necessary contributions, and modern societies' ability to embrace qualitative rather than quantitative forms of progress. A reinvigorated enlightenment will be necessary to increase the probability that sociology will be well-positioned to provide decision-makers and actors with the insights, tools, and knowledge needed to confront impending challenges and crises constructively.

In the field of international business one of the most basic issues is the relationship between multinationality and performance. Several hundred studies have examined the nature of this relationship, with somewhat inconclusive results. This literature is reviewed and extended in Part B of this book. However, the main contribution of this book lies in Parts A and C which explore the regional dimension of multinationality and performance.

An important question facing business scholars is whether and how organizations may best adapt their investments, resource profiles, and strategies to the demands of their particular environments. While a broad literature describes organizational design principles that may assist in this regard, more recent work builds on Kauffman's (1993) NK model of biological evolution to explore how selection mechanisms and adaptive principles promote firms' exploitation and exploration efforts. This research stream has made contributions regarding the importance and efficacy of various internal adaptive factors in particular environmental settings. For instance, Levinthal (1997) shows that, despite extensive adaptation efforts, the influence of imprinting persists in complex environments with many local peaks. Rivkin (2000) demonstrates that NK complexity degrades the efficacy of search, compelling imitators to rely on search heuristics rather than adaptation via local learning. Rivkin and Siggelkow (2003) explore the tradeoffs between exploration and stability, and describe how particular organizational attributes, such as vertical hierarchy and group- or firm-level incentive systems, influence the flow of information throughout the organization. These as well as other contributions have added precision to the conceptualization of environments and sharpened understanding of organization by describing precisely how interdependencies across investment choices and/or resource profiles affect adaptation efforts.

There are two main doctrines about the relation between war and national economy. The first considered that economy based on the market is a cause of war. The second one established that market and economic knowledge are essential for the realization of peace.

Bali’s tourism sector has seen a dramatic expansion over the past two decades, despite temporary security concerns following the 2002 and 2005 terrorist attacks. The growing influx of foreign and domestic tourists has put increasing strain on the island’s natural resources, including its freshwater sources and marine environment. This review chapter addresses conflicts within the tourism–environment–security nexus as a consequence of the increasing resource scarcity associated with the unfettered growth of tourism. This involves a fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental preservation and – more specifically – between the promotion of the tourism industry and the protection of traditional wet-rice agriculture and cultural heritage. The ongoing transformations of Bali’s communal water management (subak) system and the threat to coastal and marine environments by the controversial Benoa Bay Reclamation Project are particularly highlighted. The authors explore conflicting views over the value of natural resources through a discussion of different approaches to achieving a balance between economic, ecological and socio-cultural goals. This includes investigation of rights-based and polycentric approaches to resource governance as well as attempts to foster qualitative growth through the promotion of ecotourism and other niche markets.