The challenges faced by both developed and developing nations to collect, distribute, and conserve water are becoming even more difficult. While different strategies have been attempted by different governments, an economically viable solution appears to be the use of increasing block-rate...

Since the 1990s, Japanese firms have sought to expand their capacity for innovation by incorporating Western management practices into their organizational culture. This combination of Japanese and Western management practices has been highly successful — Japanese firms are presently at...

Large plantations producing tropical cash crops based on hired labor represent a sharp contrast with small family farms, popularly called "peasants" in developing economies. The family farm is an old institution that has existed since time immemorial, but the plantation is a new institution...

Economic unification forced an unprecedented adjustment crisis on the East German economy. The revolutionary shock of the transformation of the economic order was reinforced by a real appreciation shock exceeding 50%, due to the immediate introduction of the Deutschmark. This paper examines in...

This paper sees countertrade as a means by which the PCPEs (previously centrally planned economies) and LDCs extract some of the monopoly profits from firms in OECD countries to subsidize their exports. Viewed in this way, countertrade is an exchange of market entry for marketing assistance in...

Unprecendented growth of barter is a striking phenomenon of Russia's transition. The explanations of barter include tight monetary policy, tax evasion and poor financial intermediation. We show that the market power may also be important. We build a model of imperfect competition in which firms...

The objective of this study is to examine technical efficiency and productivity growth in the Indian banking sector over the period from 2004 to 2011. We apply an innovative methodological approach introduced by Chen et al. (2011) and Barros et al. (2012), who use a weighted Russell directional...

This book provides an overview of approaches to internationalization as experienced by smaller manufacturing enterprises over a relatively long period of time — the 35-year period from 1974 to 2009. The original research on which this study is based dates back to the mid-1970s, when...

The paper presents a political economy model linking terror and governments' respect for human rights. Using panel data for 111 countries over the period 1973-2002, we then empirically analyze whether and to what extent terror affects human rights - measured by three indices covering a wide...