COAL WAS DISCOVERED IN NIGERIA IN 1909 AND COAL MINING STARTED WITH A DRIFT MINE AT OGBETE, ENUGU IN 1915. SINCE 1958/59, WHEN COAL PRODUCTION REACHED ITS PEAK, THERE HAS BEEN A PERSISTENT FLUCTUATION IN THE AMOUNT OF COAL PRODUCED IN SUBSEQUENT YEARS. THIS PAPER THEREFORE INVESTIGATES THE MAJOR...

In advanced market economies, the use of trade credits is an important way of short-term financing and generally considered as being part of normal business practice. Some transition economies, however, have experienced a rapid accumulation of trade credits which have led to interlocking webs of...

In this paper, we analyze the existence of firm owned export channels as a response to the firm's specificities. The different theories justifying the internalization of such channels have shown, as well, that the larger the amount of exports the more likely the firm will establish its own...

This is a set of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) about the economic, institutional, and technological structure of the Internet. We describe the history and current state of the Internet, discuss some of the pressing economic and regulatory problems, and speculate about future developments.

The rate of patenting in the U.S. has exploded in the last half of the 1990s. It is widely believed that the increase in patent grants is at least partly a result of the apparent decline in examination standards. There has been little exploration, however, of the theoretical prediction that a...

The present paper develops a basic framework for evaluating and optimizing profits in a business operation. In developing a business we are often faced with an infinity of choices ranging from what products or services to sell and what customers to target to how to structure and manage the...

Spatially differentiated duopolists set higher-than-monopoly prices at some distances. This phenomenon is shown to occur in any finite- dimensional space for a class of reservation prices that covers concavity and convexity in perceived distance from a design. But an upper bound on the...

Previous research shows that both exporting and the use of advanced technologies independently enhance the performance of U.S. manufacturing plants in a variety of ways. The research presented below shows that plants that both export and use advanced technology outperform other plants in a...

This paper follows two objectives: (i) It demonstrates the merits of the survey based approach to B2C eCommerce characteristics and company strategy, and (ii) it presents empirical evidence of the crucial importance of size and marketing investment in B2C eCommerce markets. It presents...

The main argument of this paper is that consumption and demand, like production, are discovery processes guided by trial-and-error and learning by consuming. The key question that is addressed is: how do consumers deal with innovation? By bringing together a number of threads within the...