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.

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.

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

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.

FinTech is inducing changes in how financial services (FS) are perceived, developed, promoted, delivered and consumed. Future of FinTech, however, is rooted in deliberate integrated actions to improve framework conditions related to consumer trust, regulation and scalability. Building on limited scholarship, this paper identifies the building blocks for the future of FinTech and provides prescriptive areas of focus to guide research, policy and practice. In sum, the purpose of the paper is to serve as a catalyst and a call for an integrative approach in developing a common understanding and interpretation of FinTech as a socially-constructed phenomenon at the intersection of research and technology management.

In this chapter, we propose the structural model in terms of the Stair Tree model and barrier option to evaluate the fair deposit insurance premium in accordance with the constraints of the deposit insurance contracts and the consideration of bankruptcy costs. First, we show that the deposit insurance model in Brockman and Turle (2003) is a special case of our model. Second, the simulation results suggest that insurers should adopt a forbearance policy instead of a strict policy for closure regulation to avoid losses from bankruptcy costs. An appropriate deposit insurance premium can alleviate potential moral hazard problems caused by a forbearance policy. Our simulation results can be used as reference in risk management for individual banks and for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

The first chapter provides an overview of our research on connecting the various aspects of technology that now shapes the Sharing as well as the Digital Economies. It underscores the integration of IoT, blockchain, and AI into a decentralized intelligence system that has profound possibilities to employ data in innovative ways. The explosion of data has the potential to transform how we view our current processes and possibilities. How we use and analyze data has become significantly important to our economics, and we discuss its transformative adoption in our industries and policy to enable its development. As we grapple with technology’s inherent risks, we describe how it can be used as a moral agent. It also describes the structure of the book, where each chapter elaborates on a specific application in a particular economic sector.

While Digital Libraries (DLs) are moving towards universally accessible collections of human knowledge, considerable advances are needed in DL methodologies and technologies to make this happen. Interoperability between DLs is a crucial requirement to achieve this goal. The European project, DL.org, is focused on advancing the state of the art in this area by proposing solutions, fostering best practices and shared standards, drawing on the knowledge acquired during the DELOS Network of Excellence, and harnessing the expertise of DL domain stakeholder communities. By serving this goal, DL.org is paving the way for the embedding of new research achievements into real-world systems, opening up new cross-domain research perspectives and supporting the advancement of the European Information Space for the knowledge-based economy.