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This article provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis revisited classical and Marxian concepts such as productive/unproductive labor, economic surplus, subsistence wages, reserve army, and capital accumulation in his investigation of economic development. The Lewis 1954 development model is compared to other models advanced at the time by Harrod, Domar, Swan, Kaldor, Solow, von Neumann, Nurkse, Rosenstein-Rodan, Myint, and others. Lewis applied the notion of economic duality to open and closed economies.

The objective of this chapter is to explain how an innovation-driven economic development model can help to mitigate corruption and facilitate competitiveness in Nigeria.

With the use of descriptive narratives, Nigeria was examined in comparison with other countries such as South Korea. The chapter argues that Nigeria has not experienced development as much as South Korea because of her primary dependence on crude oil for economic sustenance.

Evidence from the statistics showed that innovation-driven economies are more competitive and less corrupt compared to natural resource-driven economies such as Nigeria. Nigeria has performed poorly in terms of competitiveness, transparency, and governance owing to her dependence on natural resources as a major means for economic sustenance.

Helps to explain why an innovation-driven economic development model is the solution to mitigating corruption and facilitating competitiveness in Nigeria.

Among the various global options for self-employment, venturing into the micro-enterprise sector has been recognized as an important way for employment generation and poverty alleviation in many developing/emerging economies. In this context, women-owned businesses at the grassroots play a vital role in developing countries like India far beyond contributing to job creation and economic growth. The informal sector is a sizeable and expanding feature of the contemporary global economy.

However, the informal economy operates at the cusp of the institutional framework, which makes them susceptible to many risks like lack of formal financing options, legal aid or increasing margin through access to formal markets. Non-Profit Development Agencies (NPDAs) have emerged as a viable and essential middle ground support in promoting women entrepreneurship in their capacity to contribute beyond governmental institutions.

The study adopted an inductive qualitative option through a case study design to explore the approaches adopted by NPDAs in promoting micro-entrepreneurship among women at the base of the pyramid (BoP) in the urban informal sector in India. The findings suggest that the NPDAs created an impact through the services, which translated into monetary earnings for the entrepreneurs. They could make financial contributions to their families, which boosted their self-confidence and overall personality. The findings also indicate positive changes like increased self-confidence, self-dependence, and inner strength as reported by the entrepreneurs.

This paper introduces a hitherto unpublished 1970 paper written by Lauchlin Currie (1902–1993) on Paul Rosenstein Rodan’s famous 1943 paper on the “Big Push” which led to the balanced-unbalanced growth debate to which Albert Hirschman (1915–2012) was an important contributor. Both Currie and Hirschman had been key economic advisers to the Colombian government, and their respective views on development planning are contrasted. In particular, it is shown how Currie’s 1970 paper illuminates the theory behind the 1971–1974 national plan for Colombia that he prepared and helped deliver; and how the related institutional innovations have had an enduring impact on Colombia’s recent economic history.

The Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) was created in the post-war, when Latin-American countries were facing disequilibrium in international trade, capital shortage and rising inflation. The ECLAC intended to aid in the definition of a development strategy that could deal with these issues. Between the first ECLAC publications, three of them are considered to be “the trilogy that founds the structuralist theory” (Bielschowsky, 2011, p. 8): the Latin-American Manifesto, the Economic Survey of Latin America-1949, and Theoretical and Practical Problems of Economic Growth. These documents set the center-periphery relation as a conditioning feature for the behavior of national economies, and describe the trajectory of terms of trade deterioration and its consequences to peripheral nations. The objective here is to argue that this trilogy contains an analysis of inflation in underdevelopment, and anticipates the main elements of what would later be called the structuralist theory of inflation. The introduction depicts the context that originated the ECLAC and the debates on how to foster post-war Latin-American development. The second section analyzes the Singer Report and the Latin-American Manifesto with regard to the causes of inflation in peripheral nations. The third section discusses the Economic Survey of Latin America – 1949, with a focus on the consequences of technology incorporation in underdeveloped structures. Section four explores “Theoretical and Practical Problems of Economic Growth” and the issue of inelastic production. Section five surveys the incorporation of Prebisch’s approach into the Brazilian debate. The conclusion sets Prebisch’s contribution in perspective with other structuralist authors.

The global recession has strongly affected the credibility of the international banking system, damaging also the real economy.

Developing countries, not fully integrated with international markets, seem less affected and local microfinance institutions might also allow for a further shelter against recession, even if foreign support is slowing down and collection of international capital is harder and more expensive.

Intrinsic characteristics of microfinance, such as closeness to the borrowers, limited risk and exposure and little if any correlation with international markets have an anti-cyclical effect. In hard and confused times, it pays to be little, flexible and simple.

To reexamine the Weber Thesis pertaining to the relationship between ascetic Protestantism – especially Calvinism – and modern capitalism, as between an economic “spirit” and an economic “structure,” in which the first is assumed to be the explanatory factor and the second the dependent variable.

The chapter provides an attempt to combine theoretical-empirical and comparative-historical approaches to integrate theory with evidence supplied by societal comparisons and historically specific cases.

The chapter identifies the general sociological core of the Weber Thesis as a classic endeavor in economic sociology (and thus substantive sociological theory) and separates it from its particular historical dimension in the form of an empirical generalization from history. I argue that such a distinction helps to better understand the puzzling double “fate” of the Weber Thesis in social science, its status of a model in economic sociology and substantive sociological theory, on the one hand, and its frequent rejection in history and historical economics, on the other. The sociological core of the Thesis, postulating that religion, ideology, and culture generally deeply impact economy, has proved to be more valid, enduring, and even paradigmatic, as in economic sociology, than its historical component establishing a special causal linkage between Calvinism and other types of ascetic Protestantism and the “spirit” and “structure” of modern capitalism in Western society at a specific point in history.

In addition to the two cases deviating from the Weber Thesis considered here, it is necessary to investigate and identify the validity of the Thesis with regard to concrete historical and empirical instances.

The chapter provides the first effort to systematically analyze and distinguish between the sociological core and the historical components of the Weber Thesis as distinct yet intertwined components.

These structural, economic and political developments in the global economy go a long way to explaining the expansion of commercial diplomacy activities by nations. On the one hand, nations use commercial diplomacy to expand trade and investment in the context of declining economic policy sovereignty. The creation of the WTO in 1995 led to an extension of the rules and regulations of international trade and trade-related matters (including the financial services industry). This leaves national economic policy-making severely restricted. Expanding commercial diplomacy to secure new export markets and new inward investments becomes a necessary political tool for nations competing for new markets. When these new markets are in nations where the formal institutional context for doing business is underdeveloped or non-existent or where much of the economy is under state control, the need to expand and develop commercial diplomacy is all the more important.

We contend that the concept of liability of foreignness is inadequate to describe the set of disadvantages faced by emerging economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) in international markets. In order to address this theoretical gap, we develop the concept of “liabilities of origin” (LOR). We propose that the concept of LOR explains how the national origins of the MNE shape its disadvantages in international markets through three distinctive contexts of the MNE's ongoing activity: the home country context, the host country context, and the organizational context. We argue that in order to understand how emerging economy MNEs overcome their LOR, we need to engage simultaneously with the theoretical perspectives provided by the institutional entrepreneurship and organizational identity literatures. We suggest, further, that the concept of LOR may be useful to understand the character of MNE disadvantage in any international foray where the national origins of the MNE engender legitimacy-based and capability-based disadvantages for the MNE in a host country.

Research suggests that context matters for MNEs’ international business strategy. MNEs’ strategies vary when different intertwined contexts interact with each other. While International Business scholars understand well the influence of the institutional environments on firms’ international strategies and operations, some contextual differences are less understood as is the case involving African countries and firms. In this study we investigate how different institutional contexts and legitimacy challenges combine to impact ownership strategic choices of African firms in their cross-border acquisitions (CBAs). Specifically, we study the influence of the host country institutional development and two institutional dimension distances: administrative distance and knowledge distance. Methodologically, we use a sample of 314 CBAs made by acquirers from 24 African countries in 71 host countries worldwide to test a number of theoretically driven hypotheses. This study contributes to our understanding of how foreign investors from less institutionally developed countries that are more likely to face higher legitimacy barriers use ownership strategies to achieve legitimacy abroad.