Technological innovation is said to be breaking down borders. The internet, the explosion of globalised financial markets, the increased foreign direct investment by transnational corporations—all are portrayed as creating a global market in which the nation state is little more than an...

The relationship between technology, productivity and employment is a complex one. Increased productivity can lead not just to increased market share, but through falling relative prices can help expand markets, and through product innovation can develop new markets. On the other hand, if demand...

The international economics of business and management has focused - both in the academic literature and in corporate and public policy discussions - increasingly on issues of globalisation, innovation and 'competitiveness'. These issues, and in particular their interrelation, are analysed in...

There is increasing emphasis being put on the need to be 'internationally competitive'. This imperative is being driven, it is argued, by the globalization of economic and corporate life. This 'globalization' is the subject of a burgeoning academic literature. To achieve and maintain the...

Privatisation of telecommunications across the globe over the 1980s and 1990s has thrown up various regulatory problems. There are many political and social reasons for governments desiring universal access; this paper sets these to one side to focus on the key economic rationale for having a...

This paper discusses a dispute heard in Britain in 1992 by the Copyright Tribunal concerning royalty rates for compositions used on records, and sets out a framework for analysing such problems, which can be summarized as follows. A recording requires inputs of at least three kinds — the...

This paper contributes to the strategic human resource management literature by testing the three main approaches - the universalistic ('best practice'), contingency and configurational - against an original database. Specifically, we examine: (1) the relationship between HR and firm...

The relationship between HRM and performance was explored in 366 UK companiesusing objective and subjective performance measures and cross-sectionaland longitudinal data. Using objective measures of performance, greater use ofHRM is associated with lower labour turnover and higher profit per...

Labour ‘flexibility’ is often portrayed as important to competitive success. Using evidence from an original survey of UK firms, this paper investigates the relationships between firms' use of, on the one hand, various flexible work practices, human resource management techniques, and...

What is termed 'globalisation' has taken many forms over the centuries. The last time we had a 'free market' form of globalisation, such as is largely in force across the world today, was in the run up to the First World War; goods, people and capital crossed borders, as the leading industrial...