Search results

Internationalisation and academic mobility have long been integral parts, although serving different purposes in the higher education industry. Internationalisation has played a crucial role in facilitating academic exchange, knowledge sharing, research partnerships and collaborative innovation. However, the rise of neoliberalism has introduced the market forces of global capitalism that have significantly impacted higher education worldwide – invading the sector with neoliberal market values. This chapter aims to explore the impact of neoliberalism on the internationalisation of higher education in Africa, with a specific focus on trends in international student mobility. The chapter argues that the influence of neoliberalism on international mobility extends beyond market dynamics, encompassing discussions on hegemony within international knowledge systems, where African countries and institutions often find themselves marginalised. The study relies on published materials and publicly available statistical data from both governmental and non-governmental organisations. By examining the interplay between neoliberalism and the process of internationalisation in higher education, this chapter sheds light on the intricate and multifaceted aspects of both concepts, as well as their practical implications for international student mobility. Moreover, the chapter reflects on the implications of neoliberal entanglements for the prospects of internationalisation in African higher education.

This paper aims to trace the contours of Islamic political economy (IPE) for last four decades with the help of bibliometric analysis. This method does not focus on in-depth literature. However, it reviews more material content of the published papers in the field, generally including the number of publications, authors, title, H-Index and authors’ affiliation.

The authors use biblioshiny by R in conducting bibliometric analysis. Based on the results of analysis, the authors only found 39 relevant documents to the topic with the help of keyword of “Islamic political economy”. The authors analyse the data and visualize it into bibliometric images for the convenience of the readers.

There are 39 documents on IPE in the annual scientific production. The year 1980 had the lowest productivity at 3% while the year 2007 showed an increase in scientific productivity by 13%. The most significant increase in production occurred between 2014 and 2015 by 8%, while the most significant decline occurred between 2007 and 2008 by 10%. The most significant contributors are Akan, T., Choudhury, M.A. and Asutay, M. According to the Corresponding Author’s Country, the UK has eight articles on IPE. Humanomics is the most influential Journal, with six documents.

This research only examines documents sourced from Web of Science and Scopus under the title “Islamic political economy” and does not include articles from other sources. This research has implications for future researchers and suggests a shift in recent research on IPE towards exploring current realities and expanding beyond traditional economic and political aspects. The goal is to gain a comprehensive understanding of Islam’s role in shaping economic and political systems, promoting inclusive sustainable development and social justice, and exploring its relationship with broader political and economic systems.

IPE has become a trendy topic in the early days, the second half of the 20th century, during the revival of the Islamic mode of finance and development. However, with time, the discussion on this topic appeared less in scientific and academic publications; this issue needs an overview of how far this discipline has evolved. This work aims to identify future research trends in this area. Scholars should investigate articles by author, institution, country, databases, data sources with high-impact factors and objective metrics to get new perspectives.

This paper investigates the effect of state-society relations on the industrially-related growth paths of developed countries.

It introduces a novel theoretical framework, the state-business-labor relations (SBLR) framework, where four main actors are identified: the state, big businesspersons or tycoons, owners and managers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) or Entrepreneurs and labor. Different SBLR categories or modes are introduced depending on levels of coordination and power relations between the studied actors. The paper then investigates how these SBLR modes, through adopting various policies targeting the industrial sector, lead to different growth paths. Rather than focusing only on economic growth, this research regards a growth path as a matrix of the performance in long-run growth and equality of distribution.

Using regression analysis and statistical data, the results suggest that the Co-Balanced mode, having higher levels of coordination and lower favoritism, leads to the best growth path among the four introduced modes, especially with its emphasis on high levels of venture capital availability and easiness of starting business. while the Lib-Capture mode, characterized by lower coordination and higher favoritism, seems to have the worst growth path and the best implemented policy for this mode is suggested to be high profit taxes that seem to counter the negative impact of the existing high levels of favoritism.

Despite the important findings that this research has reached, this paper is mainly meant to open a further investigation into this topic and open this dimension that the research on VoC and political economy have under-researched. A deeper investigation of SBLR typologies that could only be possible by having richer datasets with more data on coordination for the whole world, rather than only the advanced economies, would further our understanding of the dynamics that shape the growth paths of different countries of the world.

To realize the best industrial growth path, fighting favoritism should be an important objective. The negative impact of favoritism on innovation could not be disregarded in the eve of the fourth industrial revolution, where innovation is increasingly pivotal to future industrial development. Actively engaging societal groups in the policymaking process is important in addressing their concerns and balancing them at the same time. This should lead to the double benefit of formulating better policies that should foster growth as well as provide better distribution of this growth. High levels of coordination should help in realizing this objective. Yet, this could only be possible if societal groups are free to associate and aggregate their power and when there are means of preventing one actor from gaining more favorite treatment and exclusive influence over policymakers. The presence of both powerful and broadly represented business associations and labor unions and the existence of a government interested in coordinating their efforts-rather than letting itself be controlled by one group at the expense of the others-should help in the realization of the best growth path. Thus, institutional reform that empowers societal groups and enables them to defend their interests as well as fights all forms of corruption should lead to the realization of a more prosperous and equitable industrial development, with the “re-industrialization” of the developed world being no exception. The technological and social challenges of intensive automation and digitalization accompanying the fourth industrial revolution make the envisaged institutional reform more urgent.

This paper is introducing a novel theoretical framework for studying the effect of state-society relations, particularly SBLR, on the industrial growth paths of developed countries. It integrates three important bodies of literature in order to build a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of state-society relations and their economic consequences. These are the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC), State-Business Relations (SBR) and Industrial Relations. The SBLR framework differentiates between tycoons and entrepreneurs, an important distinction that often goes unnoticed. Different SBLR categories or modes are introduced, depending on levels of coordination and power relations between the actors. It is proposed in this research that the effect on growth paths goes beyond the simple dichotomy between CMEs and LMEs usually present in the literature of VoC and that power relations provide an essential complementary dimension in explaining this causality.

This is a response to “Taming wicked problems”, a paper recently published in CPOIB in which modern slavery is framed as a wicked problem. The purpose of this study is to convey the author’s appraisal of its contribution to policymaking regarding modern slavery in global supply chains.

The author engages in a discursive review of “Taming wicked problems”, taking inspiration from its perceived strengths and weaknesses to expand on the problem of modern slavery as a challenge to international business (IB) researchers.

“Taming wicked problems” is welcomed as a provocative contribution to modern slavery research in IB, although it is perceived to give too little critical attention to the problem of modern slavery itself.

This is, by design, a subjective assessment of the treatment of modern slavery and policy from the perspective of an IB researcher who has previously studied the phenomenon without a wicked problem framing.

Modern slavery is a serious problem for IB scholars, as they have failed to extrapolate it from their analysis of international business strategy. This paper is intended to advance the disciplinary defence of vulnerable workers exploited to the ultimate benefit of MNEs.

IB must engage critically with international business strategies that heighten the risk of human rights violations. The persistence of modern slavery disadvantages all persons in employment.

This paper seeks to better define the offense implicit in modern slavery so to inform critical IB research into its causes and deterrence.

This article examines the effect of China's soft power projection through the Chinese media in Africa on the African audiences' perception of China's national image through a case study of the residents of Nairobi. It adopted Joseph Nye's soft power model and sought to address three fundamental questions : What is the extent and objective of China's media diplomacy in Africa? How has China's media “offensive” in Africa impacted African audiences' imagery of China? What are the implications, if any, of China's media diplomacy on the Kenyan public view of China?

This article used a mixed-methods research design, which deployed elements of positivism and interpretivism. It used a deductive approach and deployed the survey strategy, which entailed the collection of data from Nairobi city residents. The secondary data were collected from relevant academic literature sources. The primary data were analyzed empirically using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), while the secondary data were analyzed using discourse analysis.

China's soft power projection through the Chinese media in Africa is aimed at addressing the “misinformation” about China. China seeks its share of representation among the African public to correct negative perceptions of China. Kenyans had a generally positive attitude toward China. South Africa and Angola have “Fairly” positive perceptions of the Chinese media. However, this study did not reveal whether the perception was due to the influence of Chinese media. These findings implied that the African public's positive imagery of China cannot be fully attributed to Chinese media's influence.

This study is groundbreaking in that it is one of the few studies that have focused on China's public diplomacy in Africa and assessed the impact of Chinese media on the African public’s perception of China.

This study explores a hegemonic alliance and the role of relational forms of accounting and accountablity in the making of contemporary capitalism.

We use the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” documents to provide an account of the detailed machinations between interest groups (corporations and the state) that are constitutive of hegemonic activity.

Our analysis of the “Cablegate” documents shows that the US and Chevron were crafting a central role for Turkmenistan and its president on the global political stage as early as 2007, despite offical reporting beginning only in 2009. The documents exemplify how “accountability gaps” occlude the understanding of interdependence between capital and the state.

The study contributes to a growing idea that official accounts offer a fictionalized narrative of corporations as existing independently, and thus expands the boundaries associated with studying multinational corporate activities to include their interdependencies with the modern state.

The study traces how global capitalism extends into new territories through diplomatic channels, as a strategic initiative between powerful state and capital interests, arguing that the outcome is the empowerment of authoritarian states at the cost of democracy.

The study argues that previous accounting and accountability research has overlooked the larger picture of how capital and the state work together to secure a mutual hegemonic interest. We advocate for a more complete account of these activities that circumvents official, often restricted, views of global capitalism.

Due to the financial disturbances created by the COVID-19 pandemic and the burden on the government exchequer, it is expected to see a rise in the knowledge base of the research corpus so far as the government's fiscal sustainability is concerned. Therefore, the present research examines a systematic quantitative analysis of public debt sustainability research by applying a bibliometric approach. Research also analyzes journals, institutions, countries and authors contributing to public debt sustainability.

This paper scrutinizes the published scientific research on public debt sustainability based on the dataset of 535 articles from 1991 to 2021 obtained from the Scopus database. Biblioshiny (R-based application) and VoSviewer software were used to perform bibliometric analysis through Performance analysis and science mapping techniques. The authors combined co-citation analysis (CCA), bibliometric analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis (KCA) and a conceptual thematic map of the most cited articles to find the intellectual structure.

The research identified three dominating clusters, e.g. fiscal sustainability and policy rules, empirical sustainability testing and debt and growth dynamics. Another finding was that most articles were analytical and empirical and few descriptive articles were found. Owing to the empirical nature of the domain, the issues concerning public debt sustainability have continued to change over the past decades for different economies, reflecting the complexity and diversity of economic structures of different economies at different times.

The insight of this article provides academicians and researchers with a more refined comprehension of the conceptual and intellectual structure of the research corpus. The present research complements the existing literature review studies by pushing the research towards emerging or less developed issues such as financial and debt crises.

This study aims to define a “technological statecraft” concept to distinguish tech-based measures/sanctions from an array of economic measures ranging from restrictions of rare earth elements and natural gas supplies to asset freezes under the wider portfolio of economic statecraft. This concept is practically intended to reveal the USA’s “logic of choice” in its employment of technology as an efficient instrument to deal with China in the context of the great power rivalry.

This study follows David A. Baldwin’s statecraft definition and conceptualization methodology, which relies on “means” rather than “ends.” In addition to Baldwin and as an incremental contribution to his economic statecraft analysis, this study also combines national political economy with statecraft analysis with a particular focus on the utilization of technological measures against China during the Trump administration.

The US rationale for choosing technology, namely, emerging and foundational technologies, in its rivalry against China is caused at least by two factors: the nature of the external challenge and the characteristics of the US innovation model based largely on radical innovations. To deal with China, the USA practically distinguished the role of advanced technology and followed a grammer of technological statecraft as depicted in the promulgated legal texts during the Trump administration.

Despite a growing volume of literature on economic statecraft and technological competition, studies focusing on countries’ “logic of choice” with regard to why and under what conditions they choose financial, technological or commodity-based sanctions/measures/controls are lacking. Inspired from Baldwin’s account on the “logic of choice” from among alternative statecrafts (i.e. diplomacy, military, economic statecraft, and propaganda). This study will contribute to the literature with a clear lens to demonstrate the “logic of choice” from among a variety of economic statecraft measures in the case of the US technological statecraft toward China.

This study aims to convey the understanding of the ecosystem – how “hundi” works on the border trade between Myanmar and northern Thailand, which is an informal transfer system and is widely used as an alternative banking system. Even though the role of hundi is unable to declare the sources of money under the standard settlement of formal banking system, a failure to operate of its official mechanism are carrying using hundi, as a financial platform across the border between Thailand and Myanmar. This study surveys the best practice mechanism for the regional and international cooperation.

This paper draws on relevant literature, open-source reporting, and interviews with more than 30 interviewees on the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Interviewees includes border-trader, money changer, money transfer operators, business leaders, hundi operators, immigrant labors, government officials and commercial banking staffs.

This study provides a unique insight of hundi system, which work as the alternative mode of formal banking. It is an informal fund transfer payment platform used on the border between Thailand and Myanmar in the past five decades. It insists that hundi plays a significant role in both substitution and complementary on the trade and payment across the border of Myanmar–Thailand. Even though confronting with the barriers of financing of terrorism (anti money laundering AML/combating the financing of terrorism CFT) risk, the competition with the expanding and modernizing formal banking sector, and the introduction of Fintech and mobile money services. In the short term, these are unlikely to eliminate the hundi system completely, but may instead push hundi operators towards adopting these networks and technologies in their own operations.

This paper will be a useful source for academics, development professionals, policymakers, law enforcement agencies and business actors who are seeking to understand Myanmar’s informal payment system, hundi.

This is the latest work for border trade payment or trade financing role of hundi which has hidden under the informal market of the border for several decades. It has few research of hundi on border trade and payment, particularly after the military coup in 2021 which made hundi return to be on the spotlight and simultaneous mechanism of border trade and payment ecosystem of Myanmar. This paper will be a useful source for academics, development professionals, policymakers, law enforcement agencies and business actors who are eager to understand Myanmar’s informal payment system, hundi, especially during the hardship.