Search results

Industry, which in the 1960s was assumed to have made a major contribution to the growth of the Central American Common Market (CACM), has since 1968 lost its dynamism. Its revitalisation depends essentially on a choice between a deepening of the import substitution process and promotion of industrial exports outside the region.

During the 1950‐1979 period, the governments of Central America often pursued “cheap‐food” policies. A general‐equilibrium model is employed to show how these policies contributed to the resource‐allocation patterns observed in the region during this period. The model also shows how cheap‐food policies contributed to the observed shift in the functional distribution of income from wages to rents and profits. An empirical test verifies the contribution of bean‐pricing policy to the shift in land resources away from food crops in Costa Rica, and the causes behind the relaxation of cheap‐food policies in the 1980s are discussed.

Latin American countries must prioritize energy efficiency and renewable energies in their energy policies. This has been debated for the past few decades. However, it is impossible to deny that energy efficiency and renewable energies have significant potential to mitigate the adverse effects of ever-increasing energy consumption induced by economic growth and the transformation of societies toward more energy-intensive models. This chapter identifies how sustainable energy policies could be considered successful in various Latin American economies through an active review and comparison of traditional energy models and their transition and respective consequences. The chapter concludes that there are national energy plans in countries in the region with a sustainable approach, and that clean energy and renewable sources have great potential. But it is also concluded that there is still a long way to go concerning legislation and legal frameworks.

There has been very little written discussion of how transactions should be valued in an input‐output table. Conventional wisdom, however, prefers the use of ‘basic’ prices (in which flows are valued net of distributive margins and net indirect taxes) and the first part of this paper explores the reasoning behind this approach.

This chapter investigates the relevance of sustainability accounting practice (SAP) in the actualisation of the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs) 2030. Whilst the SDGs appear general, broad and far-reaching, the sustainable development agenda (SDA) impliedly places responsibilities on member nations to evolve strategies that will ensure the achievement of the SDGs in their respective countries in accordance with national circumstances and peculiar challenges. This brings to bear the need to consider measures to translate the SDGs to realities, especially in developing countries. We use a structured questionnaire to collect data on the application of SAP from publicly listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria. Secondary data on economic performance were obtained from the annual reports of companies for 5 years (2014–2018). Structural Equation Modelling and Mann-Whitney test were applied to analyse data. Result suggests that whilst the implementation level of SAP by companies is generally moderate, internalities/‘pull factors’ such as market orientation and deliberate strategy formulation significantly determine the sophistication level of SAP. The insignificant effect of the externalities/‘push factors’ (i.e. environmental uncertainty, structure of ownership and control, and intensity of competition) on SAP suggests that external pressure on companies to implement sustainability initiatives is weak. We also find that extensive usage of SAP can sustain economic performance in the long run. The chapter provides empirical evidence that manufacturing companies extensively implementing SATs can sustain economic performance and would likely have enough economic resources to implement some initiatives that are fundamental to the actualisation of the SDGs 2030. The chapter contributes to the sparse literature on sustainability practice in developing countries, and incrementally adds to knowledge on the factors driving SAP in a jurisdiction characterised by lax regulatory framework and weak institutional apparatus on sustainability. As evident in our findings, SAP engenders sustainable economic performance.

The literature examining the participation of developing countries in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and International Trade Organisation (ITO) negotiations generally sees their attitudes towards these projects as having been driven exclusively by a commitment to import substitution. This commitment, it is argued, led developing countries to oppose many aspects of the GATT/ITO project, particularly the requirement for reciprocal tariff cuts. The purpose of this paper is to focus on examining the critical period around the ultimately doomed negotiation of the Charter for an ITO and the process of creating the GATT.

This paper draws from GATT documents and from the literature on economic history to give a more comprehensive account of the motivating ideas underpinning developing countries attitudes to the post‐war negotiations.

This paper argues that this view misconstrues and caricatures the ideas and motivations underpinning developing countries' attitudes towards the GATT and ITO. Though import substitution and the related objective of industrialisation each played a part in shaping developing countries' attitudes, they are only aspects of a more complex set of aims and ideas. Developing countries were drawing from a range of key experiences and ideas beyond simply import substitution in forming their attitude towards the GATT/ITO project, in particular the volatility in commodity markets that preceded the negotiations, the legacy of colonialism and the lessons provided by the ninetieth and twentieth centuries on trade policy. Finally, this paper argues that the first round of GATT negotiations shows that developing countries were substantially less opposed to reciprocal tariff concessions than has previously been argued.

These findings are important for anyone who wants to understand the evolution of the GATT and the role developing countries played in it, and the difficulties between the rich and poor nations that continue to characterise negotiations in the World Trade Organisation.

This paper examines the evolution of Intellectual Property (IP) commercialization in historical perspective. IP Law imposes an incentive structure that determines the extent of societal investment in those assets. From their inception at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, IP has expanded due to the introduction of new technologies. Property rights allocation over these assets has traditionally been assigned to governments centralizing the recognition of such property. For a long period of time, government intervention was critical to allow IP commercialization; hence, the political economy of IP was dictated by the prevailing ideology of policymakers in favor or against market transactions. The resulting clash of ideologies has marked the position of developing countries seeking exclusions from open IP commercialization to obtain temporary relief from foreign competition of technology producing countries, as well as that of industrialized countries, seeking to export their technologies overseas. The emergence of blockchain technology, as a decentralized transaction exchange protocol that makes intermediary centralized institutions (i.e. governments) certifying IP irrelevant over a large portion of intellectual property (i.e., trade secrets and copyrights) will create revolutionary institutions facilitating IP commercialization, such as NFTs. We examine this historical evolution in the context of legal institutions governing intellectual property transactions and technology transfer.

This article presents a set of techniques to measure and analyse the structure of the information economy of a country using input‐output methods. Published national data bases for many countries fail to identify the information economy and the focus has been on the measurement of conventional sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing and services. However, it is now widely recognised that the information sector is emerging as a major force in the restructuring and growth of many economies in the world. The measurement and analysis of this information economy is invaluable for proper policy formulation in this information age. The article demonstrates the operational nature of the techniques proposed herein, by their application to Australia and a few developing economies in the Pacific.

Structural economists have been amongst the foremost proponents of a pro‐active industrial policy as the mechanism for promoting rapid economic growth (Lewis, 1956; Myrdal, 1957; Kaldor, 1967; Thirlwall, 1989). This is substantiated by the argument that manufacturing being characterised by increasingly specialised inter‐related activities, radiates tremendous impulses both intra and inter sectorally (Young, 1928: 527–42). Using a sample of 12 developed countries, Kaldor (1967:3–23; 1975:891–6; 1979; 1989:282–310) attempted an empirical study to support this relationship. A positive correlation between manufacturing growth and that of the economy has been defended on the grounds that manufacturing growth increases static (relate to size and scale of production units and are characteristic largely of manufacturing where in the process of doubling the linear dimensions of equipment, the surface increases by the square and the volume by the cube), as well as dynamic (relate to increasing returns brought about by ‘induced’ technical progress, learning by doing, external economies in production, etc.) returns (Thirlwall, 1989: 60). Since manufacturing also produces capital goods that are used in different industrial branches and other sectors, it is seen as a powerful mechanism for transmitting technical change (Weiss, 1988). It is for these reasons, structuralists generally prescribe government policies that favour manufacturing expansion. Malaysia is a good example of a natural resource rich country that has made manufacturing its main plank of economic growth especially since the launching of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1971 (see Malaysia, 1976). However, as industrial policy in each socio‐political space offers state‐specific characteristics, we will analyse industrialisation within Malaysia's setting.

This paper aims to use Latin America as a laboratory to better understand the relationship between inward foreign direct investment (IFDI) and outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) (both in total as well as in regional flows) and also examine the moderating effect of trade openness on that relationship. Latin America is an ideal study context for this purpose because of the relative homogeneity of its countries, which reduces confounding effects and increases comparability.

This paper uses longitudinal panel regression models with moderation effects. Secondary data were gathered on IFDI (per country and per country-sector), OFDI (total per country and region-targeted per country) and on trade openness from 11 Latin American countries.

IFDI in natural resources is positively associated with OFDI in both overall total flows and regional flows. The effect of IFDI in manufacturing has a consistent negative effect on total OFDI. IFDI in services has positive effects on total OFDI. Additionally, trade openness moderates positively the relationship between total IFDI and both total OFDI and regional OFDI. As a consequence, the authors found evidence suggesting that the relation between IFDI and OFDI in Latin America is positively moderated by trade openness.

The authors explored the nature of the impact of IFDI on the capacity of the recipient country to compete abroad as expressed by its OFDI flows. Specifically, they elucidated whether trade openness can be considered a suitable mechanism for home country firms to leverage potential spillovers provided by foreign entrants.