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This chapter aims at presenting the ISO 9000 standards and their crucial role in the regulation of the quality management process in a company. To achieve this goal not only have the standards been deeply scrutinized but also evidences of their importance and consequences of their application have been collected after a deep period of study and research.

The chapter begins with a quick review of the standards history, followed by a consistent part that describes the process of standardization and who releases the certifications. The following part is devoted to the analysis of the structure of the standards and the principles in which their content is based. The chapter ends highlighting the areas influenced by the quality standards and the benefits that they bring to the companies.

In conlusion, this section of the book is dedicated to a normative topic that is in continuous evolution and that influences a lot the quality management system.

The paper offers a survey of major Italian accounting scholars and their work for the period from 1900 to 1950. Apart from the late works of Rossi and Besta, the main focus is on the contributions by Zappa, who undoubtedly dominated the scene. In this period, as well as later, most Italian accountants and “aziendalisti” adopted the so‐called “income system”. Although its premises originated with Fabio Besta, master of the so‐called “patrimonial or proprietorship system”, the Italian School under Zappa gave this system a new theoretical basis that differed fundamentally from that of Besta. Zappa also developed the dynamic aspect of accounting and business economics that still prevails in Italy. The paper also devotes attention to other Italian scholars, less well‐known abroad. In the area of cost accounting it concentrates on the views of De Minico and his disciple Amodeo, but also mentions other contributors. The final Section deals with Italian contributions to accounting history during this period

China’s experience of industrial growth is noteworthy for several reasons, not least because it has made a massive use of selective industrial policies. The industrial development guidelines set by the Five-Year Plans are extensively based on the choice of “strategic” or “pillar” industries to be promoted and supported. What remains unclear is the way in which such industries are identified among many. The purpose of this paper is to propose a debate on how to improve the government choice of strategic sectors and suggests a methodology to make this choice more transparent and rigorous.

The methodology allows ranking the different industries according to their strategic importance in the Chinese economy. The authors employ an uncertainty analysis methodology to verify the robustness of the ranking.

The results point to a list of strategic sectors for China. Comparing the ranking of the strategic sectors to the list of strategic priorities described in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, we find that, by and large, the ranking coincides with the list of strategic sectors of the Chinese government.

The authors argue that improving the transparency and the rigor of the choice of pillar industries can be crucial for the Chinese government to maintain social legitimization in the transition to a “market” economy.

Very little is known about the choice of strategic sectors in China in the international literature. By addressing the debate on the choice of pillar industries in China, the paper discusses a topic scarcely studied offering a unique and original contribute.

This chapter studies the effect of increasing formality via tax reduction and simplification schemes on micro-firm performance. We develop a simple theoretical model that yields two intuitive results. First, low- and high-ability entrepreneurs are unlikely to be affected by a tax reduction and therefore, the reduction has an impact only on a segment of the micro-firm population. Second, the benefits to such reduction, as measured by profits and revenues, are increasing in the entrepreneur's ability. Then, we estimate the effect of formality on the entire conditional distribution (quantiles) of revenues using the 1996 Brazilian SIMPLES program and a rich survey of formal and informal micro-firms. The econometric approach compares eligible and non-eligible firms, born before and after SIMPLES in a local interval about the introduction of SIMPLES. We develop an estimator that combines both quantile regression and the regression discontinuity design. The econometric results corroborate the positive effect of formality on micro-firms’ performance and produce a clear characterization of who benefits from these programs.

Die Besonderheiten der Standortproblematik für den Fremdenverkehr in Österreich ergeben sich aus vier Faktoren: Lage, Grösse, Figur, Gestaltung des Staatsgebietes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if shared brands provide sustainable competitive advantage according to an adapted valuable, rare, imitability/replaceability and organization (VRIO) model to the Brazilian wine sector in the opinion of the government agencies, associations and managers of the wineries.

This study was based on a qualitative and exploratory research, based on in-depth interviews. Fine wines that have geographical indications and are located in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul were analyzed and content analysis was used to explore data.

It was concluded that shared brands in the Brazilian wine sector can be considered a source of sustainable competitive advantage according to the resource-based view.

Qualitative research has the aspect of the subjectivity of the researcher when analyzing the data.

The government agencies, associations and wineries can improve the production process and seek certified products for commercialization in the domestic and foreign markets. These contributions may also, in practice, be used by other sectors and countries.

This work contributes to the understanding of the shared brand’s concept, including geographical indications, collective brands and the sector brands. The proposition that shared brands provide sustainable competitive advantage, according to an adapted VRIO model was confirmed. Barney’s VRIO framework (Barney, 1991, 1995) hitherto thought for individual companies, has the letter “O” of Organization replaced by the letter “A” of Association, becoming VRIA. The authors found that the four conditions that form the here proposed acronym VRIA are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable/replaceable and association.

The authors analyze a model for N different measurements of a persistent latent time series when measurement errors are mean-reverting, which implies a common trend among measurements. The authors study the consequences of overdifferencing, finding potentially large biases in maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) of the dynamics parameters and reductions in the precision of smoothed estimates of the latent variable, especially for multiperiod objects such as quinquennial growth rates. The authors also develop an R² measure of common trend observability that determines the severity of misspecification. Finally, the authors apply their framework to US quarterly data on GDE and GDI, obtaining an improved aggregate output measure.

In some settings, sharecropping is associated with large extended families, high fertility, and early age of marriage. These demographic practices are often considered to be labor strategies for working extensive share‐tenancies. Where agricultural production is primarily labor intensive, landlords can increase their income, within certain limits, by maximizing the number of adult workers. If landlords hold considerable power over their tenants, they may have a large influence on demographic practices. Although this relationship between sharecropping and some of these demographic practices is found throughout much of history in northern Italy, the evidence is less clear for fifteenth‐century Tuscany. Herlihy and Klapisch‐ Zuber's study of the Catasto of 1427, a set of tax declarations, found no relation between household structure and land tenure. Some of their work suggested that fertility was higher among sharecroppers, but this relationship was not specified in detail. They did not consider the relationship between land tenure and age of marriage. This paper reconsiders the relationship between land tenure, household structure, fertility, and age of marriage. To try to correct for problems with Herlihy and Klapisch‐Zuber's land tenure variable, their data were aggregated to the administrative unit of analysis. The aggregated data show that sharecropping in rural Tuscany in 1427 was associated with household extension, high fertility, and early age of marriage, although the magnitude of this relationship was not large. Possible reasons for this weak relationship are discussed.

This study examines the non-linear impact of financial development on income inequality and analyses the mediators through which financial development affects income inequality.

The study uses a dynamic panel threshold method with an endogeneous threshold variable on a comprehensive sample of 85 countries over the period of 1996-2015.

The author finds that financial development activities increase income inequality in developed countries. However, financial development promotes income equality in developing countries. Further, the study finds that education and institutional quality are the channels through which financial development has non-linear impacts on income inequality.

The study explores relatively new method to examine the nonlinear impact of financial development and also considers new dataset for the main explanatory variable.