A multinational corporation engages in foreign direct investment for the extraction of a natural resource in a developing country. The corporation bears the initial investment and earns as a return a share of the profits. The host country provides access and guarantees conditions of operation....

Nanotechnology is becoming increasingly important for the food sector, and advances and products are already being made in the areas of food packaging and food safety. However, there are several potential issues associated with the commercialization of agricultural and food (agrifood)...

The present study constructs a decision support system to determine the best seeding rate out of a group of seeding rates applied in the field. The DSS has been built receives the field data as inputs, and then apply split plot algorithms of (Gomez & Gomez, 1984) to find the results. These...

Irreversible benefits favor an earlier introduction of GM crops versus a later one. A non-trivial question is if they also weigh more than reversible benefits similar to irreversible costs but in the opposite direction. In this contribution, I will show that indeed irreversible benefits do weigh...

Penang has always been a focal point, absorbing knowledge (and popular culture) from civilizations to the East and West. In modern Penang the pattern of cultural contacts has changed over time. Research institutes and universities in Penang cooperate with foreign partners to produce research...

Regional science policy aims at the creation of productive knowledge clusters, which are central places within an epistemic landscape of knowledge production and dissemination, K-clusters are said to have the organisational capability to drive innovations and create new industries. The following...

The internationalization of R&D network is a recent phenomenon. In this knowledge based environment, the driving forces for this phenomenon are digitization, the internet, and high-speed data networks that are keys to address many of the operational issues from design to logistics and...

We establish the following stylized facts: (1) Exports are characterized by Big Hits, (2) the Big Hits change from one period to the next, and (3) these changes are not explained by global factors like global commodity prices. These conclusions are robust to excluding extractable products (oil...

Building on the idea that religious communities provide mutual insurance against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious membership is more valuable in societies exposed to greater common risk. In our empirical analysis we exploit rainfall risk as a source of common economic risk in...

The aim of this work is to specify, accept or reject a priori assumption of a positive synergy in economic cluster development, to propose à quantitative assessment of synergy and à description of the interaction process among enterprises in the cluster. There are presented arguments in...