Narrow Results

Economic behaviour observed in experiments and in people's everyday dealings is often at variance with predictions and explanations based on standard theory. The findings of systematic patterns of such economic behaviour provide significant opportunities to extend the usefulness of economics. However, like the hesitation of participants in economic experiments to give up their coffee mugs, economists appear reluctant to take advantage of these opportunities.

The focus of this paper is on competition policy and law in the ASEAN countries. The paper begins with a descriptive evaluation of competition policy in the ASEAN countries. We then look at the effect of economic structure on the probability of early adoption of competition law among the ASEAN countries after which the competition laws of the ASEAN countries are evaluated in terms of objectives, jurisdictional exception, horizontal agreements, vertical agreements, definition and abuse of dominant position and mergers. We find that the competition laws of the four ASEAN countries that have implemented competition law are not completely harmonized.

The trajectory of Singapore's population size and composition can be mapped out with its progression through the various phases of demographic transition from high birth and death rates in the post-war years to very low birth and death rates today, all within the context of rapid economic and social development that has taken place in the past 50 years. Population planning has been integral in Singapore's national development strategy, balancing the economy's needs for more and better qualified workers with social considerations such as the dependency burden and the integration of large numbers of foreigners in a global city-state. This paper considers Singapore's population and manpower planning policies, with an account of the country's passage through the various stages of its demographic transition, and how its working age population composition has evolved. Population and labor force policies are examined with specific consideration of the social, economic and political implications resulting from those policy choices. A final section considers the challenges for the future stemming from these demographic trends.

With China’s rapidly aging population, this paper constructs a policy model using overlapping generation (OLG) model and the computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling to analyze the second-child policy and delaying retirement policy. Our research findings suggest that considering the short-term effects, delaying the retirement age imposes a greater impact on the economy than the second-child policy. Its economic impact increases initially, but then decreases to a stable level showing a diminishing influence. In the long term, the second-child policy has greater ability to boost the economy than the delaying retirement age policy and its economic impact gets stronger. From an industrial output perspective, the two policies exert greater influence on agriculture, light industry, finance and service sector than on construction and heavy industries. From an industrial import and export perspective, the two policies have great influence on finance, electric power, and fossil energy more than they do on the agricultural sector. From a monetary perspective, the impacts are greater on household income followed by the government income and corporate income, respectively. The policies also make a bigger difference to fixed capital than to changes in deposits and loans.

Mandatory access control (MAC) mechanisms control which users or processes have access to which resources in a system. MAC policies are increasingly specified to facilitate managing and maintaining access control. However, the correct specification of the policies is a very challenging problem. To formally and precisely capture the security properties that MAC should adhere to, MAC models are usually written to bridge the rather wide gap in abstraction between policies and mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a general approach for property verification for MAC models. The approach defines a standardized structure for MAC models, providing for both property verification and automated generation of test cases. The approach expresses MAC models in the specification language of a model checker and expresses generic access control properties in the property language. Then the approach uses the model checker to verify the integrity, coverage, and confinement of these properties for the MAC models and finally generates test cases via combinatorial covering array for the system implementations of the models.

A key focus for entrepreneurial development strategies for many economies is to facilitate sustainable and inclusive growth that will create jobs and reduce poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is confronted with institutional challenges in bringing these objectives into fruition. We draw from institutionalism and entrepreneurial governance theory to explore institutional context and challenges to entrepreneurial development and inclusive growth in Africa. We theorize that entrepreneurial governance and public policy must focus on policy direction, enterprise enabling institutions for nascent entrepreneurs, seed funding and local embeddedness to eliminate institutional voids. We provide a dynamic view of institutional context and offer a policy framework to uncover challenges to entrepreneurial emergence and sustainable development in Africa. The study submits that enabling entrepreneurial activities for inclusive growth and sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa requires the right institutional and supporting ecosystem.

In order to ensure policy compliance, it is important for all stakeholders to understand the policy. One of the ways in which policies are represented in an organization is first-order logic. We propose a metric-based approach to measure understandability by measuring the structural complexity of the first-order representation of a policy. In this regard, we define a two-step approach that first calculates the complexity of an individual policy and then computes the complexity of a set of policies or a policy set. A running example of a policy set of six policies taken from the health domain is used. Finally, we evaluate the metrics using theoretical framework of Zuse. The relationship between structural complexity of a policy set and understandability is established by performing empirical validations. This was done by formulating policy sets from 23 domains.

The article states a list of venture capitalists in Shanghai.

New Policy to Boost Indian Biotech Industry.

Japan Drafting Guidelines for Human Embryo Cloning.

Asia-Pacific: Falling behind in the fight against HIV/AIDS

The Vietnam economy has gained lots of achievements after the financial crisis 2007–2011, until it reached a low inflation rate of 0.6% in 2015. This paper measures the volatility of market risk in Vietnam banking industry after this period (2015–2017). The main reason is the vital role of the bank system in Vietnam in the economic development and growth in recent years always goes with risk potential and risk control policies.

This research paper aims to figure out the increase or decrease in the market risk of Vietnam banking firms during the post-low inflation period 2015–2017.

First, by using the quantitative combined with comparative data analysis method, we find out the risk level measured by equity beta mean in the banking industry is acceptable, although it is little higher than ($>$) 1.

Then one of its major findings is the comparison between risk level of banking industry during the financial crisis 2007–2009 compared to those in the post-low inflation time 2015–2017. In fact, the research findings show us market risk level during the post-low inflation time has increased much. We compare beta in two periods because we want to figure out the reason underlying the fact beta has increased. One of the reasons is that the accumulated banking risks during the longer time and criteria to meet Basel 2 have been partially contributing to increasing market risk.

Finally, this paper provides some ideas that could provide companies and government more evidence in establishing their policies in governance. This is the complex task but the research results show us warning that the market risk might be higher during the post-low inflation period 2015–2017. Our conclusion part will recommend some policies and plans to deal with it.

Supplementing the literature on information sharing between firms, the paper seeks to understand information sharing between hackers and how firms defend against increasingly sophisticated hackers. Each hacker seeks financial gain, mutually beneficial information exchange, and reputation gain. The two hackers’ attack and the firm’s defense are inverse U shaped in each other. A hacker shifts from attack to information sharing when attack is costly or the firm’s defense is cheap. The first hacker’s information sharing increases as both hackers focus increasingly on reputation gain. The two hackers largely increase their information sharing, with two exceptions. The second hacker’s attack is deterred by the first hacker’s reputation gain. The firm’s defense against the second hacker increases in the second hacker’s unit cost, decreases in the second hacker’s information sharing effectiveness and utilization of joint sharing, and also decreases in both hackers’ reputation gain. Policy and managerial implications are provided.

Food security is a complex phenomenon made up of multiple dimensions — food availability, physical access to food, economic access to food, food utilization — each of which has a stability dimension which underpins it. This review provides details on these dimensions and links them to two published indices which provide assessments of the state of food security in a country. The paper further provides analyses of the main supply and demand factors in the food security equation. Food security faces natural and anthropogenic threats such as loss of productive land and water, climate change and declining crop productivity, all of which are potentially amenable to solutions provided by science and technology. Demographic and accompanying diet changes further exacerbate the demands made on the natural resource base for food production. Finally, possible responses to the challenges confronting a secured food future are discussed from technological, policy and system level perspectives.

This study is executed in order to determine whether public institutions of higher learning in Libya have policy and guideline for managing electronic records and also to identify whether there are problems in managing electronic records. The study adopts survey as its method for employing the questionnaire as a technique to collect data. The study involves three institutions of higher learning in Al-Joufra, Libya namely College of Arts and Sciences, Teachers Preparatory College and College of Economics and Accounting. About 10% of their staff members (from the entire population of 1000) were chosen randomly as a study sample. The study revealed that institutions of higher learning in Al-Joufra do implement electronic record management but without clear policy and guidelines. Only 46% of the surveyed samples agree that they have a written policy and guidelines for managing records. In addition, the study also discovered institutions of higher learning (80%) in Al-Joufra face difficulties in handling and managing electronic records.

Organizations are looking for new ways to compete within increasingly turbulent business environments. At the macro level, governments are challenged to develop strategic innovation policies that seek to support business competitiveness in this new era. At the same time at a micro level, companies are struggling to re-orientate themselves and become strategically innovative so that they can effectively overcome threats presented by, for example, new emerging low wage economies. This paper aims to develop a clearer understanding of the interface between innovation policy at a macro (regional) level and strategic innovation development at an organizational (micro) level.

This paper sets out to understand the use of public procurement as a policy instrument for catching up. Brazil and China, who have explicitly linked procurement to innovation, are used as empirical cases. We review their respective institutional settings, policy approaches, and micro-level processes related to the public procurement of innovation (PPI). We have discovered that they share similarities concerning issues encountered during PPI implementation. Although both countries have made some achievements in promoting innovation through procurement, this paper highlights some of the obstacles they have experienced when implementing this policy, such as institutional problems, changes in the political landscape, and macroeconomic constraints. Such obstacles, more prominent in the case of Brazil, may have acted as an obstruction to achieving the pursued objectives, thereby restricting the full potential of PPI in driving technological catching up. The article then offers managerial and policy implications for the implementation of PPI, such as the importance of choosing relevant procurement procedures, critical roles played by policy champions, and demonstrating effects of leading firms and regions. While in China PPI was once an instrumental part of its technology development agenda, in Brazil it has been sporadic and unconnected to a given national strategy.

The traditional macroeconomic approach to poverty alleviation in neighborhoods and communities is to use housing development and job-creation programs to address the income and the opportunity gaps. Entrepreneurship is a much less used poverty alleviation strategy that, in our estimation, can have a significant effect in favorable policy environments. After a brief literature review, we highlight policy approaches that use entrepreneurship as a poverty alleviation strategy. We present several case studies from the United States as evidence of how public policy can empower an entrepreneurial ecosystem to support the self-employed and other low-income entrepreneurs. We conclude with a framework for how public policy can alleviate poverty through entrepreneurship that is generalizable in other contexts.

All other parts of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in any country are governed by the political and legal aspects of the system. This study examines the integrated effect of the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s political-legal subsystem on the performance of MSEs based on system theory and the mediating role of entrepreneurial competence, based on a resource-based view. There has been no detailed examination of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of MSEs in Africa in general, and Ethiopia in particular. Although the political-legal aspects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem have a major effect on both entrepreneurial competency and MSE’s performance, the relationship between entrepreneurial competencies and MSE performance was found to be insignificant. The role of entrepreneurial competency in mediating the relationships between policy and business performance and other business environments and business performance was shown to be insignificant. The study suggests that the policies designed by the government for MSEs should be flexible enough to affect other aspects of the entrepreneurial environment, such as the economic and social dimensions. Finally, additional studies in the field are encouraged to clarify the discrepancies in the findings concerning the relationships between entrepreneurial competencies and the performance of SMEs.

This article examines the effects of the Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) policy on black entrepreneurship in South Africa. The BBBEE policy is a legal framework aimed at addressing historical inequalities by promoting equal opportunities and encouraging the participation of black individuals in the economy. The policy highlights include increased access to funding for previously marginalized groups to start and grow their businesses, improved market access to encourage large businesses to partner with small businesses owned by previously marginalized groups, and increased skills and development. Using the policy as a quasi-natural experiment, the study adopts a difference-in-difference estimation technique contrasting periods before and after implementation and measuring its effectiveness on black entrepreneurial entry. Results from the analysis indicate that the policy was ineffective in improving black entrepreneurship in South Africa.

This paper highlights perhaps one of the most fundamental issues constraining strategic environmental assessment (SEA) practice — its definition. Current reviews fail to explain why certain assessments are referred to as strategic while others are not. Furthermore, there appears to be very little attention given to the basic characteristics of strategy in the environmental assessment of proposed or existing policies, plans and programmes. This paper attempts to identify the characteristics of SEA that make it strategic and therefore different from other forms of impact assessment. A review of selected case studies is undertaken with the purpose of identifying those assessments that actually conform to the characteristics of a "strategic assessment". It is argued here that if SEA methodology and practice is to advance, then a common understanding of its definition and characteristics must first be achieved.