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The main objective of this study is to explore the relationship between total quality management (TQM) practices and the business performance of Japanese‐owned manufacturers in the USA.

In this empirical study, 200 companies were chosen by random sampling from the universe group of 519 in August 2007. A total of 32 usable questionnaires were received, and the overall response rate was 16 percent.

The survey results show that TQM practices significantly influence the overall company performance of Japanese‐owned manufacturers in the USA. This implies that TQM is an effective method for improving business performance, regardless of where the company might be operating, as long as the TQM practices are appropriately implemented. In addition to the research data, findings from a field research also provide supplementary evidence to support this conclusion.

This study compares the findings from a recent survey conducted in the USA with the authors' previous study done in China. The survey uses the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) criteria as a measuring scale, and the project adopts a pre‐tested questionnaire as a survey instrument, which has also been used in previous empirical studies.

Climate finance is regularly not only seen as a tool to efficiently combat global warming but also to solve development problems in the recipient countries and to support the attainment of sustainable development goals. Thereby, conflicts between distributive and allocative objectives arise, which threaten the overall performance of such transfer schemes. Given the severity of the climate change problem, this study aims to raise concerns about whether the world can afford climate transfer schemes that do not focus on prevention of (and adaptation to) climate change but might be considered as a vehicle of rent-seeking by many agents.

Future designs of international transfer schemes within the framework of the Paris Agreement are to be based on experience gained from existing mechanisms. Therefore, the authors examine different existing schemes using a graphical technique first proposed by David Pearce and describe the conflicts between allocative and distributional goals that arise.

In line with the famous Tinbergen rule, the authors argue that other sustainability problems and issues of global fairness should not be primarily addressed by climate finance but should be mainly tackled by other means.

As there is still ongoing, intense discussion about how the international transfer schemes addressed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement should be designed, the research will help to sort some of the key arguments.

There are prominent international documents (like the Paris Agreement and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) seeking to address different goals simultaneously. While synergies between policies is desirable, there are major challenges for policy coordination. Addressing several different goals using fewer policy instruments, for example, will not succeed as the Tinbergen Rule points out.

The integration of co-benefits in the analysis allows for taking into account the social effects of climate policy. As the authors argue, climate finance approaches could become overstrained if policymakers would consider them as tools to also solve local sustainability problems.

In this paper, the authors will not only examine what can be learnt from the clean development mechanism (CDM) for future schemes under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement but also observe the experiences gained from a non-CDM scheme. So the authors pay attention to the Trust Fund of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) which was established with global benefit orientation, i.e. – unlike the CDM – it was not regarded as an additional goal to support local sustainable development. Yet, despite its disregard of local co-benefits, the authors think that it is of particular importance to include the GEF in the analysis, as some important lessons can be learnt from it.

This paper aims to study the impact of municipalities’ own resources on their investments‘ expenditure.

Panel data analysis. A sample of 34 municipalities in Benin. Econometrics tests for the panel data models – estimation of the fixed-effect and random-effect models. Hausman test to identify the best model to explain the impact of the explanatory variables on local investments’ expenditures. Heteroskedasticity, normality and autocorrelation tests.

The results establish a positive and significant impact of own resources, state transfers and demographic variables on local investments’ expenses.

As an implication, the results show the importance of local resources’ mobilization for the municipalities’ investment capacity building. They also show that the central government transfers continue to play a major place in local investments’ finance, even in a decentralization context. Limitation: Available data do not allow to well evaluate the impact of the electoral variable on municipalities’ investments’ expenditure. This situation does not allow to well analyze the public choice considerations in local authorities’ behaviors.

Local mobilization of financial resources must be encouraged to raise municipalities’ investments’ capacities. Strategies must be developed to reinforce local capacities in local resources mobilization.

The results show the importance of local resources in local investments. They show the importance of citizens’ participation in their well-being construction, through local resource mobilization (ex: local fiscality).

Many authors assert in the literature that financial autonomy has a real impact on local development. However, empirically, it was not demonstrated. This paper contributes to correct this lack.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze long-term institutional causes and consequences of preference falsification by studying the evolution of China’s patriarchal clan system.

The historic study shows that although the clan system was abolished in the Qin dynasty, it re-emerged among high-standing families in the Han dynasty and spread to common people after the Tang dynasty.

The author submits that the clan system was an institutional response to the preference falsification problem that arose due to the dictatorial political institutions first established in the Qin dynasty. It helped people to take collective action by themselves and also opened a back door to influence government decisions. A piece of clear evidence is the co-evolution of the clan system and government personnel system.

In this sense, the clan system probably also helped to prolong the political institutions for 2,000 years.

This is the first institutional study on the clan system in China.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how national innovation policies strategically interact to form emergent de facto global entrepreneurship and innovation policies.

Reviews the innovation economics theory and policy literature, synthesizing the existing work into three models (autarky, cooperation and competition), then adds four new models of strategic interaction (asymmetric information, duopolistic competition, competitive factor mobility and complementary assets).

The different models predict very different outcomes. Therefore, it matters which model is true. Entrepreneurship and innovation policy needs to start with an improved science of strategic global interaction of national innovation policy.

Conceptual approach only, without empirical analysis, calls for empirical analysis to test the different models.

Points to the problem of absence of global coordination in innovation policy arising from strategic interactions between national innovation policies. Recognizes that entrepreneurship public policy is caught in this strategic game, and that there are missing global institutions here.

Improved innovation policy should enable more effective entrepreneurial environments.

Proposes seven models for understanding global strategic interaction of innovation policy, out of which four are new. These new ones are highly relevant to entrepreneurship policy.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the development of China's rural labor markets and the identification of the important factors that affect rural labor's off-farm employment and migration.

Based on a set of long-term panel data, this paper makes a clear judgment on the trend of rural labor transfer. High-quality survey design makes it possible to examine the development of the rural labor market from multiple dimensions. Adding household fixed effects to the empirical model alleviates endogenous problems.

The authors find that the increasing trend toward off-farm employment, which is dominated by migration, has continued. There are some other important findings: (1). young male workers dominated off-farm employment, but the gap between groups continues to narrow; (2). the structure of employment is a good response to the economic transformation and (3). the quality of off-farm laborers, especially in terms of human capital, has also enhanced significantly and has continued to support off-farm employment and migration. These findings all indicate that the China's rural labor markets have been constantly improving in recent years, although there is still segmentation.

It is the first paper that uses a nationally representative survey data to address the development of rural labor market in the 21st century. With the help of a long-term panel data structure and by controlling the household-level fixed-effect, the authors obtained a deeper and more robust conclusion. Specifically, this article finds that whether it is for the off-farm transfer or the migration, the influence of labor age, gender, human capital and marital status is gradually weakening.

This article investigates the relative impact which marketing growth strategies have on profit performance as opposed to strategic debt utilisation, asset management, and margin management. A structural equation approach is used to assess which areas deserve the greatest attention in the process of making strategic decisions. Implications for management and future research are offered.

Examines the effects of decision unstructuralness (unstructuredness + noisiness) on decision‐support systems (DSS) adoption. Suggests that end‐users are sensitive to “unstructuralness” when they select a decision support approach. Problem structuring at the intelligence phase generates the first signal about DSS usefulness. If this signal is in favour of DSS, the manager either immediately adopts the DSS, or performs problem solving at the design phase. At this phase a new signal will be generated thus, confirming or denying DSS usefulness. This confirms that problem structuring prevails in making the DSS adoption decision. That is, in making the DSS adoption decision, priority is given to problem structuring in the intelligence phase.

In this paper we show how the Kolm triangle method, which is a standard tool for visualizing allocations in a public good economy, can also be used to provide a diagrammatical exposition of matching mechanisms and their effects on public good supply and welfare. In particular, we describe, on the one hand, for which income distributions interior matching equilibria result, and on the other hand, for which income distributions the agents voluntarily participate in a matching mechanism. As a novel result, we especially show that the “participation zone” is larger than the “interiority zone”

We employ the Kolm triangle approach, which has – compared to most other graphical methods for representing allocations in a public good economy – the advantage that it allows for showing the aggregate budget constraint, the levels of considered agents' private consumption, and the level of public good supply directly in the same diagram.

The Kolm triangle method can be used to visualize important effects of matching in an elegant way, so basically the increase of public good supply through matching. The interiority of matching depends on the income distribution and especially, on how the “interiority zone” is shrinking when the matching rate increases. Moreover, we were able to delimit the “participation zone” in the Kolm triangle. An important and novel insight is that the participation zone is larger than the interiority zone, which means that also corner matching equilibria in which only one agent makes a positive flat contribution to the public good may make both considered agents better off.

Corner matching equilibria in which only one agent makes a positive flat contribution to the public good may improve all considered agents' welfare. How this welfare effect can be generalized to the case of different utility functions and matching rates will be an issue of future research.

The examined matching mechanism finds application in many policy fields where public good undersupply is pending. International climate policy is one of these fields of application, for example.

The Kolm triangle method has been particularly helpful to describe the Nash equilibrium in the case of non-cooperative public good provision and to compare this outcome with Pareto efficient public good allocations. Furthermore, the Kolm triangle approach facilitates the analysis of mechanisms for attaining an efficient public good allocation like the Lindahl equilibrium as well as the study of preconditions and limitations faced by such mechanisms. An important and novel insight of our study is that the participation zone is larger than the interiority zone.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the Integrated Household Extension Program (IHEP) on participant households’ welfare and see the policy effectiveness. The government of Ethiopia – in contrast to the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – invests heavily in agricultural extension but very little empirical evidence is available on the impact of the services on farm performance and household welfare that could justify these investments. The IHEP program is a particularly interesting case as it is an example on how agricultural extension systems in developing countries changed during the past two decades, from centralized top-down technology-transfer-orientated approaches to decentralized, participatory and more integrated approaches.

The authors use household survey data from 730 farm households (361 treated and 369 control) in the Tigray region of Ethiopia and propensity score matching methods to estimate the impact.

The authors find that the extension program had a large positive impact on household welfare – increasing income with about 10 percent – and on investment but have not impacted on income diversification. In addition to the main variable of interest (extension), household characteristics, such as household head age, gender, adult labor availability in the household, asset holdings and social capital variables were found to have an influence on income, investment and income diversification.

The paper has tried to assess the impact of a program which claiming substantial public money using primary data. Hence, the findings will serve to inform policy makers as how the program is running.