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During the last three decades, thanks to the efforts of J. Schumpeter, G. Stigler, M. Blaug, P. Schwartz, T.W. Hutchison and others, a revaluation of the contribution of John Stuart Mill to the history of economic doctrines in general and to that of economic analysis in particular has taken place on a quite significant scale. The basic portrayal of J.S. Mill as an unoriginal and incoherent writer which prevailed from about the time of his death till around the middle of the present century came to be seriously and, one may say, successfully challenged. While the “eclecticism” of Mill was traditionally emphasised with a pejorative tone, no less than M. Blaug concluded that in the final analysis, it “worked to Mill's advantage” and that “the multiplicity of analytical ideas, often running in opposite directions, opened the way to subsequent refinement and development” (Blaug, 1968, p. 220). The theoretical inventiveness of J.S. Mill was stressed in still louder terms by G. Stigler when he wrote that “he was one of the most original economists in the history of the science” (Stigler, 1955, p. 7).

The dependence of farmers on money lenders for agricultural credit despite the penetration of the formal financial sector with subsidized interest rates remains an economic puzzle. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the relationship between money lenders and farmers in the presence of trade-loan nexus.

The study provides a theoretical framework supported by empirical evidence. It uses primary survey data of farmers in a major potato producing district of West Bengal, India. For the empirical analysis, apart from descriptive statistics, the authors use a logit regression model to derive insights from some testable hypotheses.

The study finds that trade-loan nexus increases defaults on agricultural loans through two channels: first, by increasing loan requirement and repayment obligations through high input prices and interest rates, respectively; and second, by reducing income of farmers by setting low prices for the output.

The functioning of money lenders in rural areas, including their sources of finance and political control over local economy, and the existing social hierarchies in the rural context will have to be studied in detail to understand the complexities of the issue.

The findings of the study underline the need for policy initiatives to break the trade-loan nexus to reduce the dependence of farmers on money lenders.

The higher defaults help the money lender to sustain in the rural agricultural loan market as the formal sector becomes reluctant to lend in the presence of pervasive defaults.

The study is entirely original based on primary survey data of seven blocks of a major potato producing district in West Bengal, India. It could be the first such study on the subject. The findings are fresh and expected to contribute to development economics and agriculture finance literature and policy making.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive framework of achieving supplier delivery performance based on contract governance mechanisms, justice perceptions and ethical behavior using cross sectional survey data from public procuring and disposing entities (PDEs) in Uganda. Public procurement contract governance covers the design, development, implementation and enforcement of contracts. It serves to align interests of the contracting parties, reduce opportunistic behavior, lower transaction costs, promote justice perceptions, improve ethical behavior and achieve value for money procurement. Poorly managed procurement contracts result in conflicts, yet in many developing countries only rich suppliers can afford to resolve disputes through courts. For other suppliers, justice is out of reach. While it has been assumed that contracts result in good performance, little research has been carried out to corroborate this assumption. In this paper we provide theoretical, empirical and policy implications of supplier delivery performance.

This chapter suggests that the key to entrepreneurial success lies in the ability to maintain trust-based networks and respect social norms. In elaborating this proposition, this chapter draws on the results of an exploratory study of 30 Nigerian traders to demonstrate how using an ‘institutional’ lens provides new insights into the influence of trust and indigenous norms on entrepreneurial behaviour. The concept of morality which presupposes an understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour is introduced to offer a supple and adaptable explanation for how actors rely on social norms to build trade networks. At the centre, trust was found to be indispensable to networks relationships and necessary for enforcing sanctions. The results facilitate a rich understanding of how a range of trust-based networks relationships and hybrid indigenous norms underpin entrepreneurial behaviour in Nigeria. The study contributes by providing well founded insights into the entrepreneurship within an African context.

Purpose: The world has been impacted distinctively by the Covid-19 outbreak. The economic recession in 2020 and 2021 is predicted to become the most intense since World War II. This chapter explores the effects of the Covid-19 epidemic crisis on entrepreneurship and different activities, emphasizing developing economies.

Design/methodology/approach: The work aims first on the major crises that could impact entrepreneurial activity triggered by the pandemic. The authors briefly study the literature on the previous health crisis and its impacts on entrepreneurship. Then, under Covid-19, the authors illustrated the navigational prospects for creativity and entrepreneurship.

Findings: Our research indicates that the pandemic’s impact on creativity and entrepreneurship would be adverse but not hugely harmful. A new opportunity ecosystem under COVID-19 is respected and researched for innovation and entrepreneurship. Simultaneously, the incentives provided by the COVID-19 pandemic for consumer e-commerce adoption in Saudi Arabia are being addressed.

Originality/value: This is probably the first chapter of the book focusing on the impact on the Covid-19 pandemic entrepreneurship. It directly discusses the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on both the global economy and entrepreneurship dynamics. It also recommends fascinating future-oriented, relevant research areas about helping entrepreneurs solve it and what new prospects are developing for them.

Religiousness is evident in every aspect of life, and its impact on construction project performance is undeniable. However, little has been done to fully understand the influences one's religiosity has on performance factors. This paper aims to explore the influence of religious elements on performance factors in the Ghanaian construction industry (GCI).

Using a desk survey and closed-ended questionnaire, data were obtained from the three religious' bodies (Christianity, Islamic and Traditionalist) in Ghana. The analysis of the collected data was done using mean score ranking and regression analysis.

It was revealed that most of the religious bodies were aware of the presence of the seven factors identified for measuring construction project performance. The findings suggested that there was a significant and positive relationship between the religious elements (of all the three religions) and cost as well as schedule performance. Islam recorded the highest relationship in influencing public construction project performance relative to cost performances. Specifically, 1% increase in Islamic elements accounted for an 82.7% increase in cost performance. Traditionalists and the Christian religion had minimal significance in influencing cost performance. Furthermore, a 1% progress in Islamic elements accounted for a 45.8% increase in the schedule performance of construction projects and among construction professionals.

This study has provided better understanding of the religious views on project performance. This research has also provided pragmatic directions to project stakeholders to encourage religious groups to take critical look at the other performance factors that were seen not to be significant.

This paper represents a novel attempt to measure the influence of religious elements on project performance factors in the construction industry. A key contribution to the body of knowledge is that the study has proven that religious element has tendencies to influence cost performance and schedule performance in the construction industry.

Under Malaysian Law, the maintenance and management of common property have traditionally been viewed as insoluble challenges in the self-organisational efforts for high-rise low-cost housing developments. As the population increases, more shared resources become heavily exploited with few willing to contribute towards the sustainability of resources. Many researchers argued a better way would be to convert these shared resources into a private or state-managed entity. Hence, with that assumption, this paper aims to examine how better physical characteristics can result in greater collective action.

This research paper adopted a quantitative method approach to determine how the standard of physical characteristics influenced the quality of collective action in high-rise low-cost housing. The method included a questionnaire survey of 519 parcel holders chosen via stratified purposeful random sampling from four high-rise low-cost housing areas.

The paper found a positive correlation between the quality of physical characteristics and the collective action gained. The findings highlighted that the standard of workmanship of high-rise low-cost units (including the common properties), the crime rate in the neighbourhood and the condition of lift systems – when improved – were significant positive predictors of collective action.

Housing developers should pay attention to the quality of both low-cost units and related common properties, as this endeavour will assist greatly in future collective action management.

The study was justified in terms of its originality as few research studies adopted the social-ecological system framework that focused on the correlation between the quality of physical characteristics and the collective action of parcel holders.

Travel interests of tourists during pandemics and outbreaks are reduced due to the prevalence of fear. It induces lifestyle changes, which may hinder efforts to recover the tourism value chain during post-COVID-19 lockdowns. Subscribing to domestic travel and domestic tourism is deemed to mitigate fear and gradually reopen the tourism industry. Although a crucial initiative, evaluating the perceived degree of exposure of tourists to COVID-19 in tourist sites operating under domestic tourism has not been fully explored in the emerging literature, which forms the main departure of this work.

The problem domain is addressed by adopting multiple criteria sorting method – the VIKORSORT. To demonstrate such application, with 221 survey participants, 35 tourist sites in a province in the central Philippines struggling to revive the tourism industry are evaluated under six attributes that characterize tourists' exposure to COVID-19. To assess its efficacy, the performance of the VIKORSORT is compared to other distance-based multiple criteria sorting methods (i.e. TOPSIS-Sort and CODAS-SORT).

Results show that proximity and volume of tourist arrivals are considered on top of the priority list of attributes. The use of VIKORSORT yields the assignment of 27 sites to the “moderate exposure” class, and eight under the “high exposure” class, with no tourist site assigned to the “low exposure” class. Sorting the tourist sites reveals some observations that tourists prefer sites (1) with open spaces, (2) with activities having limited group dynamics, (3) that are nature-based, and (4) with tourist arrivals that are not relatively high, with enough land area to practice social distancing. In addition, the assignments of the VIKORSORT with TOPSIS-Sort and CODAS-SORT are consistent at least 90% of the time, demonstrating its efficacy in addressing multiple criteria sorting problems.

This work provides an integrative approach in evaluating tourist sites in view of tourism recovery during pandemics. The findings offer crucial insights for the primary stakeholders (i.e. government, tourist operators, and tourists) in planning, resource allocation decisions, and policy formulation. Policy insights are offered, as well as avenues for future works.

Effective leadership at the grassroots level can make a crucial difference to disaster risk reduction (DRR) at the local level. Guidance, however, is often not provided through the visible structures of local government but through alternative means of articulating power that is no less real and frequently more effective than more formal agencies. The purpose of this paper is to present a biography of one such community leader and his influence in the Philippines and how he is able to foster resilience and reduce risk. These “small men” stand in direct contrast to the more authoritarian, materialistic and reputedly corrupt nature of governance in general.

This paper adopts an historical-sociological approach, utilising archival sources as well as fieldwork to explore the relationship between consensual leadership, social capital and DRR in the Philippines.

Social capital and consensual forms of local leadership have their origin in the challenges posed by daily living in the Philippines. At the grassroots level, Filipino civil society can exhibit a vibrancy, self-reliance and innovation that has not been given proper recognition. In fact, local leadership, social capital and DRR are not unrelated aspects of culture but part of the “mutuality” that exists between people and environment in the archipelago.

This paper employs an innovative historical-sociological approach to explore the much maligned and often neglected nature of local unofficial leadership in the Philippines in the context of DRR.