Search results

First developed in the 1980s, one of the most essential ideas in international business research has the been the concept of emerging markets. Since the start of the twenty-first century, empirical research has shown that there is no clear correlation between long-term real growth in gross domestic product and real equity returns in firms active in emerging markets. The purpose of this paper is to develop an explanation for both the pervasiveness and endurance of the emerging market discourse despite empirical evidence that substantially questions its very robustness.

The author offers a “weak form” critique of the emerging market discourse that identifies weaknesses and gaps in the emerging market concept and offers suggestions on how to modify it without fundamentally rejecting its conceptual and ideological core. This paper also offers a “strong form” critique of emerging markets as a discourse arguing that the discourse itself is actually propagated to maintain and reinforce global economic inequality and should, therefore, be fundamentally transformed.

Based on the strong form critique of emerging markets discourse, this paper shows how a three-phase process allows emerging market discourse to engender strategic and public policy practice. Scholars and educators play a pivotal role through their writing and discursive interactions with students and executives in their classroom. The centrality of scholars and educators is supported by the broader media ecosystem as well as being reinforced by interactions between executives and policymakers.

This paper makes the case that international business scholars and educators should play a leading role in fundamentally transforming the emerging market discourse and to launch a renewed critical, inter-subjective discussion of dependency and global inequality through three mechanisms: peer-review research; course syllabi and programs; and public intellectualism.

Through critical discourse analysis, this paper addresses for the first time how emerging markets as a concept has prospered in academic and managerial circles despite credible empirical evidence of its lack of robustness.

This paper investigates whether democracy plays a mediating role in the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The empirical analysis is conducted using fixed effects and system GMM (Generalised Method of Moments) on a panel of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries covering the period of 1990–2018.

The results find that FDI has no direct effect on inequality whereas democracy reduces inequality directly in both the short run and the long run. The sensitivity analyses find that democracy improves equality regardless of the magnitude of FDI, resource endowment or democratic deepening whereas FDI only reduces inequality once a moderate level of democracy has been achieved.

The results discussed above thus have four policy implications. First, these results show that although democracy has inequality reducing benefits, SSA is unlikely to significantly reduce inequality unless the region purposefully diversifies its trade and FDI away from natural resources. Second, the region should continue to expand credit access to reduce inequality and attract FDI. Third, policymakers should undertake reforms that will reduce youth inequality. Lastly, the region should focus on long-run democratic reforms rather than on short-run democratization to improve governance and investor confidence.

Although there are existing studies that examine the association between FDI and inequality, FDI and democracy and democracy and inequality, this is the first study to explicitly examine the effect of democracy on the association between FDI and inequality in SSA, and the first study to separately consider the possible varied effects of contemporaneous democratization versus the long-run accumulation of democratic capital. In addition, rather than measure inequality by income alone, this study uses the more appropriate Human Development Index to account for SSA's sociological, education and income disparities.

In this study, the authors look at the case of Ferdinand Marcos, President of the Philippines between 1965 and 1986. Documenting the life and career of Marcos on Wikipedia provides an excellent example of the pitfalls confronting those seeking to address disinformation without first reflecting deeply on the reasons why people subscribe to views deemed outlandish by the intellectual or cultural mainstream.

The authors sampled the version of the Marcos article on Wikipedia as it existed after the first edit of each year since its inception (2002). This resulted in 22 texts for analysis. Content and thematic analyses were conducted on these texts as well as on the entire body of talk page comments for the article.

The authors' work suggests that the basic elements of responsible encyclopedic writing have prevailed in the case of Wikipedia's biography of Marcos. However, this is not an unalloyed victory, as issues of polarization remain unaddressed.

Underlying revisionist or distorted claims about Ferdinand Marcos (and other controversial topics) lie very real grievances that give these claims traction for many people. Hence, it is not enough to “just present the facts” to readers. Rather, the authors argue that what is needed is a synthesis of positions that would allow for common ground to be found between them. This could be done in the case of Wikipedia by cultivating editors who are capable and willing to engage with the subject literature in a deeper and richer fashion.

In 1991, India embarked on market-based economic reforms initiatives pillared on liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG). The reforms exposed the public sector enterprises to competitive market forces, raising the need to identify and develop the competencies necessary for survival. Executive training programs were initiated to prepare public enterprises for the market-based reforms. Three decades later, the reforms especially privatization is witnessing renewed interest under the current administration. In this context, the article takes a closer look at the structure of management education provided to public sector officers in India. The article also identifies barriers for implementing the learnings from the management courses in the workplaces and suggests approaches for closing the gap.

The study follows a thematic approach based on unstructured interviews of senior executives of Indian public sector enterprises covering oil and gas, aeronautical, power and transportation sectors. New public management (NPM) is used as a yardstick of “business-like” characteristics of public sector enterprises.

Despite heavy investment, trainings have had only partial success in implementing the core objective of NPM, i.e. to provide quality services in a professional manner to meet citizen requirements. The study found that though concepts of NPM are introduced at multiple management training programs, the public enterprises lag in the implementation of NPM. The ingrained hierarchical and procedural culture of the enterprises was often highlighted as the challenge to its implementation.

The study will be of significance to Indian policymakers in designing management education programs to public sector employees. It brings out – (1) various models of management education provided to public servants across industries, (2) provide evidence on the extent of NPM implementation, (3) identify barriers for transitioning the learnings from the management courses to workplace and (4) suggest changes for improving effectiveness.

The existing research on LPG in India covers the economic transformation post-implementation and the factors contributing to the success of its implementation. This study adds to the limited literature available on the management education of public servants in the country.

This study aims to investigate the implications of natural gas rents and institutions as co-drivers of economic growth, focusing on the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) with panel data between 2001 and 2021.

This research paper uses a specialised two stage estimator, the panel instrumental variable technique (panel IV), which takes care of the potential endogeneity issues in the model.

The findings show that natural gas rent significantly impacts the economic growth of the GECF. On average, natural gas rent increases the sample’s growth rate by about 2.634% percentage points in the short run. The result indicates that the qualities of institutions (political and economic) have a significant positive long-term effect on the economies of the GECF. In addition, the study’s energy price volatility positively correlates with the countries’ growth.

There might be a need to investigate the effects of natural gas rents and institutions as co-growth drivers in each country within the GECF. The likelihood exists that the impact of natural gas rents and institutions on economic growth at the country’s level may differ from the outcome of such an experiment on the group level. Because of space and time limitations, this study could not carry out the specific country’s investigation of natural gas rents and institutions as a co-growth driver. That limitation may constitute further study to advance this study to a new height.

With good institutions, natural gas rent is likely to be an alternative growth driver for some economies that rely on fossil fuels like oil as a growth driver. By extension, the GECF has the potential to rival Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the global energy market, particularly in achieving Sustainable Development Goal number seven. In essence, evidence in this study suggests that natural gas rent has long-term positive effects on the growth of the GECF, conditioned on good institutions. Moreover, the drive of global energy consumption towards sustainable energy usage is an economic blessing for the GECF. By extension, the demand for natural gas would continue to rise, creating opportunities to improve natural gas rents. By implication, the GECF would continue to benefit from the pursuit of sustainability as the world shifts towards energy consumption with less CO₂.

Firstly, this study models the qualities of institutions for the GECF. Secondly, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first attempt to examine natural gas rents and the qualities of institutions as co-determinants of economic growth among the GECF (a potential cartel).

The complex interaction of politics and the economy is a critical factor for the sustainable growth and development of the construction sector (CNS). This study aims to investigate the effects of type of political administration including democracy and military on the performance of CNS using the Nigerian Construction Sector (NCS) as a case study.

A 48 year (1970–2017) time series data (TSD) on the NCS and the gross domestic product (GDP) based on 2010 constant USD were extracted from the United Nations Statistical Department database. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) models were used to analyze the TSD. The ANCOVA model includes the GDP as correlational variable or covariate.

The estimates of the ANOVA model indicate that democratic administration is significantly better than military administration in construction performance. However, the ANCOVA model indicates that the GDP is more important than political administration in the performance of the CNS. The study recommends for a new national construction policy, favourable fiscal and monetary policy, local content development policy and construction credit guaranty scheme for the rapid growth and development of the NCS.

Hitherto, little is known about the influence of political administration on the performance of the CNS. This study provides empirical evidence from a developing economy perspective. It presents the relationships and highlights recommendations for driving growth in the construction industry.

This study aims to examine the effect of political connection on operational efficiencies in the case of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and to discover the channel through which political ties affect a firm's decision-making process.

Following the scope of the study, panel fixed effect has been adopted to explore the impact of political connection on a firm's operational efficiencies. The data were collected every two years from 2005 to 2015 from SMEs in Vietnam under the collaboration of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), the Institute of Labor Science and Social Affairs (ILSSA) and the Development Economics Research Group (DERG) of the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).

The results suggest that political connection has a significantly negative effect on both investment efficiencies and employee productivity. Significantly, the impact of political connections on employment decisions is more significant than it is on investment decisions. Furthermore, the findings also indicate that high-growth firms experience the interference of political connection in the decision-making process less often than their low-growth peers.

This paper provides some empirical evidence of the negative impact of political connections on a firm's operational efficiencies. It analyzes the channels through which political connection influences a firm's operational efficiencies. Providing empirical evidence demonstrates a dimension to capture the negative side of the political link to small and medium enterprises in developing economies.

During the Communist Party of China's endeavors over the past century, China has created “two miracles,” namely, large-scale and rapid economic development and long-term social stability.

The causes for China's achieving the “two miracles” lie in the adherence to the Party's leadership as the political guarantee, the scientific theoretical guidance as the ideological guarantee, the socialist system as well as the national governance system as the institutional guarantee and giving full play of people's creativity under the Party's leadership as the driving force guarantee.

From a political economy point of view, the theoretical logic behind the creation of the “two miracles” is that the combination of the state capacity and the scaling up of markets under the Party's leadership contributes to the rapid economic development and further the long-term social stability based on the financial foundation laid by rapid economic development. The historical experience of the “Two Miracles” can be summed up as the cultivation of state capacity under the leadership of the Party, the synergy and complementarity between the central government and local governments, the combination of development planning and market mechanisms, and the coordination of selective, functional and inclusive industrial policies.

It is necessary to judge future development trends from a medium and long-term development perspective, further promote the co-evolution of the state and the market, reshape the growth regime for high-quality development, fully tap the potential of domestic demand and create a “people-centered” economic development model so as to continue the “two miracles” and achieve a miracle of high-quality development in the second century.

The purpose of this study is to outline the reasons for the 2011 Arab Spring and why the Arab states failed to achieve sustainability and inclusive growth over the past three decades.

This study used the augmented growth model framework derived from a production function and a dynamic panel LSDCV estimation, which incorporates aggregated economic and political reform indicators generated by principal component analysis. The empirical analysis is a comparative assessment of the Arab region as a whole and the Gulf countries and emerging Arab countries. This study is based on several panel data models for the Arab region’s reform programmes from 1995 to 2018.

The absence of robust economic and institutional reforms was the main reason for the uprising. Structural reforms in Gulf countries have been insufficient and more difficult to address than macroeconomic stability. By contrast, Arab emerging economies have achieved strong progress in structural reform but with weak progress in economic stability. Critically, governance indicator reforms enhance growth, with different items of governance based on the type of each group of countries. The results of this study confirm that reform is simultaneously political, social and economical.

Economic reform should not be seen in a vacuum or in isolation from the political and social choices that society makes. Looking forward, the Arab reform agenda must address critical governance issues that hinder the effectiveness of reform policies.

Theoretically, this study reappraises governance’s role in economic growth using a unified mathematical model. Methodologically, this study analyses economic, social and political reform components in the Arab region using econometric analysis. Empirically, this study investigates regional socioeconomic reform programmes. Existing studies have failed to recognise the economic and institutional policy reform patterns in the Arab world.

This study aims to offer an up-to-date estimate of capital flight from selected emerging Asian economies and examine the anti-growth phenomenon of capital flight by using annual data for the period 1981–2019.

The study relies on residual methods to derive the estimate of capital flight with necessary adjustments. It then applies the autoregressive distributed lag Bounds testing approach in examining the impact of capital flight on the economic growth of Asian emerging economies.

The study identifies capital flight as the attributor to the slower economic growth of the selected emerging economies of Asia.

Apart from appropriate policies addressing the issues causing capital flight, unleashing the way of private sector-led growth of the emerging countries with necessary policy, infrastructural, institutional and regulatory support can rather help them retain and repatriate domestic capital.

The capital flight estimates in earlier studies are antithetical as they differ in terms of definition and estimation procedure. Again, the growth effect of capital flight in these economies has received meager attention in research and policy debates. Furthermore, being country-specific or region-specific, existing studies are unable to compare the growth effect of capital flight for different emerging economies in this region. Examining the growth effects for a large number of countries separately based on a common estimate of capital flight can resolve these issues that this study aims to do.