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The article presents a novel normative model of shared responsibility for remedying unjust labor conditions and protecting workers' rights in global supply chains. While existing literature on labor governance in the globalized economy tends to focus on empirical and conceptual investigations, the article contributes to the emerging scholarship by proposing moral justifications for labor governance schemes that go beyond voluntary private regulations and include public enforcement mechanisms. Drawing on normative theories of justice and on empirical-legal research, our Labor Model of Shared Responsibility introduces three main claims: First, that responsibility for protecting and promoting labor standards in global supply chains should be shared by all private and institutional actors involved (whether directly or indirectly) in the production and distribution processes. Second, we offer a normative model for allocating responsibility among the various actors, based on five principles: connectedness, contribution, benefit, capacity, and power. Last, we demonstrate how the normative model could be implemented through various national and international institutional mechanisms.

The three sustainability pillars of social, environment and economy were initially introduced by the United Nations in 2002, addressing major global sustainability issues including economic problems, income inequality, environmental pollution and social shortcomings. Comparing East Asia & Pacific with North America, there is a growing concern over economic, political and even social competition as a result of recent development and industrialization that is taking place in Asian countries. This might lead to an unhealthy conflict that favors regional independency as opposed to the current globalization and trade facilitation trend. As a result, this study aims to assess the effects of development in three main pillars of sustainability (social, environment and economy) in the East Asia and Pacific on that of North America and vice versa. To estimate this interactive or spillover effects of sustainable development (or sustainability elasticities), our research employs Econometric methodologies including Simultaneous Equations System, Vector AutoRegressive (VAR) and Granger Causality approaches during 1971-2016. The results show that most of the sustainability elasticities are positive between and inside the two regions, supporting the synergetic character of the sustainability spillover effects and confirming constructive role of globalization and openness in the sustainability progress. Based on the results, this research suggests policy-makers to follow cooperative and flow-based governance rather than the placed-based or regional independent thinking that supports integrated sustainable development benefiting not only the two parties but also the overall global sustainability.

Simultaneous with the rise of trade protectionism in the twenty-first century has been a resurgence in nationalist politics, most notably in the USA, the UK, and parts of the EU. These developments in international and US trade policy, including Washington’s launch of a full-fledged trade war against China in March 2018, have converged disastrously with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in November 2019 and the onset of a worldwide pandemic. Given the status of the USA as the world’s hegemon since 1945, what is new here is the effort of the Trump administration to abdicate US leadership, jettison longstanding alliances, and turn back the clock on the country’s close integration with the world economy. Already, greatly reduced flows of goods, services, and people have translated into radically reduced global growth, widespread business disruptions, and high unemployment. Remarkably, the White House has refused to recognize the severity of the pandemic and has undermined the precautions of the US science community. We argue that these multiple shocks constitute a major critical juncture on par with what the world community faced in 1945. However, in the twenty-first century we have seen that high levels of economic uncertainty and political instability have superseded the long-held notion that international interdependence would pull the world community through tough times such as these. Could the triple whammy of a destructive trade war, deadly pandemic, and secular decline of US leadership trigger a new generation of policy innovation and institution building on par with the post-1945 era? In terms of the global trade regime, it would be difficult to imagine a buoyant recovery of the world economy in the absence of a serious reckoning with the pattern of norm erosion that we identify here.

China–US relations are the most important bilateral relations in the world. Today, China–US relations are neither the same as then Soviet–US relations, nor as their previous situation. After the breakout of COVID-19 Pandemic, China–US relations show great differences in terms of public opinions, economic and trade relations and strategic trust. It is of great importance to keep sober minded about China–US relations after the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and to uphold Deng Xiaoping’s guiding principle of “hiding your strength and biding your time while trying to accomplish something”, which are essential for China to deal with various severe challenges under the new circumstances and to safeguard China’s security and development environment.

With the advancement of globalisation, urbanisation and environmental change, the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), as an infectious disease, has become a global threat. The entire world is continuously trying to adapt to the pandemic situation due to the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 and the lockdown phase, which has not been faced before. The fear of infection by such an unknown virus and the epidemic transformed the built-up environment and impacted various sectors of lives and livelihoods, which must be assessed in spatial perspectives. The objective of this research is to assess the multi-sectoral impact due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, it is designed to inspect seven essential sectors, namely, the economy, employment, education, transport, travel and tourism, health and environment sector-wise impact assessment of the West Bengal state of India. Taking the required COVID-19 data from the government website of India ( http://www.covid19india.org ; https://www.mygov.in/corona-data/covid19-statewise-status ) and West Bengal ( https://covidindia.org/west-bengal ), a methodology is proposed on an integrated framework for the multi-sectoral impact assessment. The study concentrates on West Bengal, as no study exists on the multi-sectoral impact assessment due to the COVID-19 pandemic during the 1st wave, especially using the geospatial platform. The economy, employment, education, transport, health, tourism and environment multi-sectors of West Bengal are selected in this research, as these sectors have built the economic, sociocultural and environmental pillars of the state. All these sectors have been seriously affected, and the nature of the impact is diverse and large. Before the vaccine comes into the hands of the common people of West Bengal and in a broad sense in India, the awareness should be increased at the grass-root level to fight against the pandemic situation and even after the post-COVID era. The application of geospatial technology used for the mapping and analysis of COVID-19 affects the related database to tease out the multidimensional study, which aims to plan future road maps, search for answers and learn to add further security to overcome the future virus attack.

In recent times, globalization has emerged as more than purely an economic phenomenon manifesting itself on a global scale. The elements of globalization include international movement of goods and people, financial capital, and information along with technological developments, political dynamics, tourism, and ecological consequences. This study used the Globalization Convergence Index (GCI) as a measure of multi-dimension globalization and linked it with health indicators to analyze if high-ranking countries were doing better in terms of mortality rates. Different statistical tests were performed to measure the impact of the globalization process on mortality indicators of public health. Findings suggest that highly globalized countries have better health measured in the form of low mortality rates. On domain level, technology was found to be the major driving force for reducing mortality rates followed by social-cultural and ecological domains. In globalization debate, the top-ranked countries were usually lauded as “achievers”, while low-ranked ones were regarded as “losers”. In our opinion, care should be taken while interpreting the observed positive association as simple evidence that globalization is mostly good for our health.

Logistics and freight transport show a rapid growth in the last two decades, driven by globalisation of production, distribution and sourcing and parallel to the growth of trade, which was almost double of the growth of production. The value added by this economic sector has increased accordingly and is estimated at about 10% of the total gross domestic product of the EU. As logistics and transport are not clustered as one sector in the statistics of national account this estimation is rough but it gives a good impression of the relevance for economic growth and prosperity. In recent years, the importance of big logistics hubs has been increasingly recognised such that they have become an intrinsic element of Transeuropean Networks according to the recently published guidelines. The efficient use of links, hubs and nodes has been a traditional field of logistics research. In a long-term view, dynamic efficiency of logistic systems implies not only individual cost minimisation but also a significant reduction in energy consumption and environmental costs. Therefore, the main issue of this volume is the combination of green and efficient logistics to guide this sector to a sustainable path. Transport’s share of total GHG emissions in the EU was 19% in 2009, and the contribution of freight transport to this figure is about one-third. This seems to be a modest share but one has to recognise that after a suitable disaggregation of GHG producers every sector appears to be small, such that ‘‘being a small contributor’’ cannot be used as a general argument to exclude a sector from contributing to the GHG reduction targets. These targets have been set rather ambitiously in the EU. In the medium term (until 2020), about 20–30% of CO2 emissions should be reduced, and in the long run (until 2050), this target is set at 80%, based on the 1990 level. For the transport sector, the target is slightly more modest at 60% until 2050 (see the EC White Paper 2011, Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area—Towards a competitive and resource efficient transport system). But compared with the trend development which points to a further increase in CO2 emissions of more than 50% until 2050, this appears most challenging and implies that freight transport and logistics need to converge to a zero-carbon world within less than 40 years. The instruments for achieving such a radical change are manifold: energy efficient technology, alternative fuels, increased use of environmentally friendly transport modes, organisational adjustment or redesigning the interfaces M. Browne University of Westminster, London, UK

This paper argues for the characterization of contemporary capitalism as monopsony capitalism and, specifically, as global monopsony capitalism. This means that the degrees of buyer power should be added to the usual demand–supply analysis of markets for labour power and other inputs. Monopsony is used to understand the nature of global value chains, within which the paper distinguishes high, medium and low levels of monopsony power and outlines the main features of labour conditions in these different levels of monopsony power. The paper also sees how the working of monopsony power is gendered. The concluding section points to the difficult task of forming countervailing power in the age of global monopsony capitalism.

This paper examines the learning-by-exporting effect in Chinese manufacturing firms from 2005 to 2007. The traditional view is that exporting can lead to increased productivity by facilitating access to the global market and, thus, information and cutting-edge technologies. This process has been explained by the learning-by-exporting theory, which is supported by mixed empirical evidence. A semiparametric estimation method was used to measure firm-level productivity and examine the contingent impact of exports on productivity. On the one hand, the exporting firms exhibited significantly higher productivity and faster growth than the non-exporting firms. On the other hand, the effect of exporting on productivity was dependent upon firms’ innovation behavior. Therefore, the learning-by-exporting effect is contingent on a firm’s innovation capabilities. Only sufficiently innovative firms could actually experience faster growth through exports and innovation. For non-innovative firms, exporting could even result in decreased productivity. This paper successfully reconciles the mixed findings from the existing literature and explains why both positive and negative evidence can simultaneously and reasonably exist under learning-by-exporting theory.

This paper harmonizes the business group literature in international business and across relevant fields within a unified theoretical framework. Business groups (firms under common control but with different, if overlapping, owners) are economically important in much of the world. Business groups’ economic significance co-evolves with their economies' institutions and market environments, patterns of particular interest to international business scholars. The vast literature on business groups raises discordant perspectives. This paper first proposes a unifying definition and provides a list of stylized historical observations on business groups across different parts of the world. It then develops a Coasean framework to harmonize seemingly disparate views from the literature by building on recent surveys and the stylized historical patterns of business groups. We enlist two concepts – fallacies of composition/decomposition and time inconsistency – to harmonize these perspectives. This yields a theoretical framework for understanding business groups that mobilizes concepts long-used to understand multinational enterprises: the economy's market and hierarchical transaction costs, openness, and their dynamic interactions. We then apply this framework to globalization and business group internationalization. This work leads to an overarching research agenda encompassing seemingly inconsistent prior work.

This paper empirically explores the dynamic relationships between financial development, globalization, energy consumption, economic growth, and ecological footprint in G7 countries over the period 1980–2015. Using a recently introduced threshold cointegration test with an endogenous structural break, the paper aims primarily to determine the effects of financial development and globalization on environmental degradation. The results confirm the presence of cointegration in Canada, Italy, and Japan. The long-run estimates indicate that globalization significantly reduces ecological footprint in Canada and Italy, while financial development reduces pollution in Japan. The findings also demonstrate that energy consumption stimulates environmental degradation in these three countries. Furthermore, the causality test that considers smooth structural breaks via a fractional frequency flexible Fourier function indicates that globalization causes ecological footprint in all the G7 countries except France, while financial development causes ecological footprint in France, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Finally, the overall results suggest that globalization is a more effective tool than financial development in regulating ecological footprint for G7 countries. Therefore, we recommend that policymakers should make use of the opportunities that globalization offers to solve environmental problems.

This paper analyses recent developments in HR practice toward core white collar employees at Japan’s major automobile companies. It confirms there have been incremental but substantial changes in key HR policies such as compensation and the ranking system, but also finds that traditional long-term employment continues to be practiced at most firms. It further observes that Japan’s auto companies have introduced global HR polices earlier than have Japanese firms in comparable sectors. This, however, has not resulted in the alignment of policies toward those of overseas operations, which one often finds in other Japanese industries such as finance and pharmaceuticals. This would indicate that different trajectories of change are emerging in employment practices—that is, diversification in employment systems is expanding—according to sector (or, the products and services firms offer). This paper also analyses several background factors propelling such divergence, and suggests possible future constellations of employment systems among large elite firms in Japan. In these ways this study contributes to the debate on the effects of globalization on divergence and convergence of employment systems.

With rapid globalization, industrial parks are playing an increasingly important role in the national and regional development. Since the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was put forward, national-level overseas industrial parks of China have emerged with new development features and trends. It is of great importance to carry out a comparative study on domestic and overseas industrial parks of China. Based on the perspective of spatiotemporal evolution, this paper compares and analyzes national-level overseas industrial parks along the Belt and Road (B&R) and domestic industrial parks of China. In time, China’s industrial parks have experienced four stages with distinctive state-led characteristic. There are different development paths and modes for overseas industrial parks along the B&R and domestic industrial parks. In space, the national-level overseas industrial parks are invested and constructed by Chinese enterprises (mostly from the coastal developed cities), and mainly distributed in the countries along the B&R. Through typical cases comparison of Thai-Chinese Rayong Industrial Zone and Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area, the paper finds that national-level overseas industrial parks are basically market-driven and concentrated in traditional advantageous industries, while domestic industrial parks are mainly government-led high-tech industries. Localization of overseas industrial parks and remote coupling with domestic industrial parks become very important.

This paper attempts to capture the missing ‘distance’ puzzle in the globalization process driven by trade flows. It is widely recognized that the growing global economic integration process play a major role in the spatial restructuring of many countries at varying geographical scales. The paper illustrates a model of international trade flows that builds upon existing research on the geographies of global trade. Empirical results of the current study indicate that the basic and augmented gravity model provides a useful framework for understanding international trade. The evidence of map pattern in residuals across temporal scale is noted. The results further indicate the importance of distance in the Indian context. An identification of the patterns and determinants of India’s international trade with 87 countries suggests that potentially important differences in regional demands and country specific factors may impact the trade interaction over the years.

This paper seeks to problematise the historical significance of the EU for British governing strategy with reference to immigration policy and the concept of depoliticisation. Situating British governing strategy in terms of the crisis-prone nature of capitalist society, this paper argues that British immigration policy has been depoliticised through, initially, the invocation of globalisation and, more recently, the EU. Through this strategy, the British state has been able to repeatedly claim that immigration policy is largely out of its hands, as they have no control over workers wishing to enter Britain looking for work. This paper makes three claims: firstly, immigration policy has been used as a means by both Conservative and Labour governments to manage inflation and labour; secondly, successive governments have sought to depoliticise immigration policy through reference to external forces; thirdly, this strategy of depoliticisation ultimately failed, politicising Britain’s relationship with the EU and creating conditions for Britain’s exit from the EU.

The market landscape has undergone dramatic change because of globalization, shifting marketing conditions, cost pressure, increased competition, and volatility. Transforming the operation of businesses has been possible because of the astonishing speed at which technology has witnessed the change. The automotive industry is on the edge of a revolution. The increased customer expectations, changing ownership, self-driving vehicles, and much more have led to the transformation of automobiles, applications, and services from artificial intelligence, sensors, RFID to big data analysis. Large automobile industries have been emphasizing the collection of data to gain insight into customer’s expectations, preferences, and budgets alongside competitor’s policies. Statistical methods can be applied to historical data, which has been gathered from various authentic sources and can be used to identify the impact of fixed and variable marketing investments and support automakers to come up with a more effective, precise, and efficient approach to target customers. Proper analysis of supply chain data can disclose the weak links in the chain enabling the adoption of timely countermeasures to minimize the adverse effects. To fully gain benefit from analytics, the collaboration of a detailed set of capabilities responsible for intersecting and integrating with multiple functions and teams across the business is required. The effective role played by big data analysis in the automobile industry has also been expanded in the research paper. The research paper discusses the scope and challenges of big data. The paper also elaborates on the working technology behind the concept of big data. The paper illustrates the working of MapReduce technology that executes in the back end and is responsible for performing data mining.

During the past few years, the financial industry has been characterised by an ongoing cross-sector and cross-border consolidation of financial institutions spanning banking, securities, and insurance institutions and the blurring demarcation of their respective products and instruments. Against the backdrop of these changes, the creation of a level playing field for financial services has become a key challenge for policy makers, regulators, and market participants alike. At different national and international levels, regulators, and supervisors have been responding to this challenge with a plethora of measures. This paper presents a number of initiatives at different supervisory levels in view of recent financial sector developments and discusses how the challenge of a level playing field is being tackled. The Geneva Papers (2009) 34, 9–23. doi:10.1057/gpp.2008.36

This paper echoes a tradition in agricultural geography by focusing on a single crop: cherries. It illustrates how developments associated with globalisation and growing urban markets are re-shaping rural areas. The interplay between global and local is investigated in two different contexts. A Chinese example reflects transformations affecting the countryside following national economic reforms. Focusing on the hinterland of Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi Province, it examines farmers’ responses to the changing socio-political context and the rising size and wealth of the local market. Individual initiatives backed by government support have spawned localised concentrations of cherry growing and increased horticultural production. Farm-based tourism is creating new relationships between farmers and consumers, with farms becoming more diversified and multifunctional. The second example is the Adelaide Hills, South Australia, where cherry growing is increasingly combined with direct sales to consumers and gastronomic tourism. The paper addresses contrasts and similarities between the two examples in the interplay between global and local, and a ‘multifunctional transition’ in farming. Concluding remarks include reference to new economic links forged between China and Australia through relaxations on cherry imports to China and new patterns of Chinese foreign direct investment into Australian cherry production. A research agenda for future research is suggested.

The paper reviews the rapid development of higher education and science in China in the last forty years. It discusses the conditions and strategies of that development, including the ways that it embodies a distinctive Chinese approach to higher education. In particular, the paper reflects on the policies whereby China coordinated with globalization in higher education and science after 1978, in building national capacity and global influence. Scale, nation-state policy goals and accelerated investment on their own are necessary but not sufficient (otherwise Saudi Arabia’s research universities would be stronger than they are). The effective national/global synergy developed by China, made possible by the international openness and part-devolution to science communities that was implemented in the Deng Xiaoping era, has been crucial in the rapid rise of China’s universities and science. This national/global synergy—and its potentials, tensions and limits—in turn has determined the nature of the achievement and will shape its future evolution.

In the Arab Middle-East, power relations have been conceived of as unequal, unilateral, and imposing. However, globalization has posed challenges to this absolute and authoritarian political order. More specifically, the process of globalization diminishes governments’ domination and absolute power, changes the attitude of subjects and inevitably transforms power relations in the Arab Middle-East. Weakening the control mechanisms and provision of proper facilities and platforms leads eventually to a change in the subjects’ attitudes and growth in their awareness. The present paper aims to study the effects of globalization on power relations in the Arab Middle-East, with a focus on Egypt and Libya. The paper argues and concludes that the change in power relations and political order transformation are inevitable.

The development of overseas industrial parks is a key component of the Belt and Road Initiative and an expected experimental way of promoting inclusive globalization by inventing new forms of cooperation between China and local host countries. Policy mobility, a classic theory within international political geography addressing the connection between local and global policies, has implications for overseas industrial parks development. In this paper, we argue that policies are not easily moved directly from one place to another; instead, policies are embedded due to the role of local actors in policy mobility. This article first provides an overview of seven China-Southeast Asia economic and trade cooperation zones identified by the Ministry of Commerce, and analyzes their key participants. It then discusses policy mobility by looking into the roles of revenue, land, and talent in developing these industrial parks. The paper finds that these parks face challenges, such as the complicated geographical environments of host countries, huge pressure from enterprise investment capital, the lack of overseas service platforms, and underdeveloped agglomeration economies. In the light of the current situation, policy suggestions for the future sustainable development of overseas industrial parks are put forward.

Whilst there is a rich body of literature linking globalization with economic disparities between rich and poor nations, there is very little situated understanding of causal links, if any, between globalization and health gaps between nations. Set against this background, this paper contributes to the empirical literature by investigating globalization as a channel of the health gap between countries in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Results from a dynamic panel data analysis show that globalization has statistically insignificant impact on the health gap between the OECD and SSA countries. Rather, economic and demographic structures, measured by the age dependency ratio (% of working-age population) and GDP per capita growth emerged as the main determinants of the health gap between SSA and OECD countries. The paper draws out some policy implications which may usefully impact programmes aimed at checking health inequities between developing and developed countries.

Focusing on international relations from the perspective of geography, geopolitics exerts powerful influences on the course of economic and political development in the world. In the tide of globalization and information technology, geopolitics has become an important subject for global pattern interpretation and policy making. It is essentially important to have a scientific and systematic review on international geopolitics to promote its development. Based on the bibliometric statistics, the paper reviews the research development of geopolitics on the Web of Science from 1996 to 2015. The history, journals, papers and key research areas of geopolitics have been revealed in the paper. By the analysis of bibliometric statistics, the number of papers recently published in the journals of political geography and related geography journals continues to increase. The key areas of geopolitical papers which are globally highly cited include geopolitical interpretation of the countries and borders, critical geopolitics, emotional geopolitics, feminist geopolitics and other topics. Before the year of 2000, the state and borders were hot topics of the geopolitical research. Yet since 2000, it has been the trend that the geopolitics is increasingly set in the context of geographical implications. At the same time, critical geopolitics appears to be the main area of geopolitical research, especially transitioning from traditional geopolitics towards the humanism-embeddedness (such as emotional geopolitics, feminist geopolitics). The paper then systematically reviews the branch trends of geopolitical research, including the borders and the territory, global geo-culture and geo-economics, Chinese models of geopolitics, resource conflicts and ecological politics, as well as emotional geopolitics. Finally, it puts forward the implication that Chinese geopolitical studies should reinforce the importance of geographical space and scale, use the process of description and multiple methods, as well as integrate humanistic thoughts, in order to further enrich the theories and practices of geopolitical research.

Economic geography in China’s mainland has developed in a different way from that in many other countries. On the one hand, it has been increasingly active in participating in academic dialogues and knowledge development led by Anglophone countries; on the other hand, it takes practice-based and policy-oriented research, i.e. satisfying the demands from the Chinese government and society, as the linchpin of research. Since there has been a lot of literature reviewing the development of economic geography in the country before the new millennium, this paper will make a comprehensive analysis of the discipline in 2000–2015, based on a bibliometric survey and research projects done by Chinese economic geographers. The analysis indicates that (1) economic geography research in China’s mainland is unevenly distributed but concentrated in several leading institutions; (2) traditional research fields like human-nature system, regional disparity, industrial location and transportation geography remain dominant while new topics such as globalization, multinational corporations and foreign direct investments, information and communication technology, producer services, climate change and carbon emission emerge as important research areas; (3) Chinese economic geography is featured by policy-oriented research funded by government agencies, having considerable impacts on regional policy making in China, both national and regional. To conclude, the paper argues that the development of economic geography in China’s mainland needs to follow a dual track in the future, i.e. producing knowledge for the international academic community and undertaking policy-oriented research to enhance its role as a major consulting body for national, regional and local development.

Nyonya cuisine echoes the cultural identity of the Peranakans, who are both Chinese and localized. Despite the fact that the food is much localized, its symbolism remains traditionally Chinese. This paper explores the history, ingredients, and cooking methods crucial in the production of the cuisine, the types of food served for daily consumption, festivities and ancestral worships, as well as their Chinese symbolism. Furthermore, this paper also discusses factors that contributed to the obscurity of the culture and the cuisine after the Second World War. Lastly, the revival of the culture through the immense interest in its cuisine, especially from the 1980s, and the extent of globalization of this cuisine are also examined. Findings reported are expected to highlight the significance of Nyonya cuisine in Malaysia in the past and the present.

The paper considers how thinking on inequality in relation to development has evolved over the last half century, including three critical questions: why be concerned about inequality; inequality of what; and among whom. Fifty years ago, inequality was defined unidimensionally in terms of incomes, with a focus on inequality among individuals, and it was regarded purely instrumentally, as a means to achieve higher economic growth. Since then, the objectives of development have widened while the extent of inequality is increasingly regarded as important in itself, for justice, as well as instrumentally. Exploration of inequality and its effects now extends to a plurality of dimensions. Consideration of inequality among whom has also broadened, beyond inequality among individuals (vertical inequality), to concern with inequality among groups (horizontal inequality) both in relation to justice and instrumentally. Evidence suggests that greater horizontal equality tends to reduce violent conflict, and greater vertical equality to reduce criminality, while both are likely to improve social outcomes and promote sustainable growth. The paper argues that although the objective of achieving more equality is increasingly accepted, many countries are experiencing more inequality and few effective redistributive measures have been adopted. It reviews how political economy considerations explain this paradox.

Full-scale globalisation of trade has been accompanied by a progressive liberalisation of maritime transport. The proliferation of open registries has created a situation in which Port State Control (PSC) has become much more effective than the feeble or non-existent control exercised by those States. This study has been conducted on the influence of the professional profile of inspectors on inspection results. The objective of our paper was to evaluate the impact of PSC inspectors’ professional profile by conducting a case study of the Spanish Maritime Administration. The paper concludes with a discussion of the correlation between deficiencies detected and professional profiles.

Background In recent years, Ireland has experienced a large-scale, outward migration of doctors. This presents a challenge for national policy makers and workforce planners seeking to build a self-sufficient medical workforce that trains and retains enough doctors to meet demand. Although, traditionally, medical migration has been considered beneficial to the Irish health system, austerity has brought a greater level of uncertainty to the health system and, with it, a need to reappraise the professional culture of migration and its impact on the Irish health system. Methods This paper illustrates how a culture of migration informs career and migration plans. It draws on quantitative data—registration and migration data from source and destination countries—and qualitative data—in-depth interviews with 50 doctors who had undertaken postgraduate medical training in Ireland. Results Of 50 respondents, 42 highlighted the importance of migration. The culture of medical migration rests on two assumptions—that international training/experience is beneficial to all doctors and that those who emigrate will return to Ireland with additional skills and experience. This assumption of return is challenged by a new generation of doctors whose professional lives have been shaped by globalisation and by austerity. Global comparisons reveal the comparatively poor working conditions, training and career opportunities in Ireland and the relative attractiveness of a permanent career abroad. Conclusion In light of these changes, there is a need to critically appraise the culture of medical migration to determine if and in what circumstances migration is appropriate to the needs of the Irish health system. The paper considers the need to reappraise the culture of medical migration and the widespread emigration that it promotes.

With increasing globalization, supplier selection has become more and more important than before. In the process of determining the best supplier, the expert judgements might be vague or incomplete due to the inherent uncertainty and imprecision of their perception. In addition to that, the sub-criteria are relevant to each other in the selection of right supplier. In this paper, a novel methodology based on fuzzy set theory and analytic network process (FEANP) is developed to address both the uncertain information involved and the interrelationships among the attributes. This paper concludes with a case study describing the implementation of this model for a real-world supplier selection scenario. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed model by comparing with existing method.

Following the situation of poverty in the rights paradigm, this paper explores the links between the rights-based and corporate social responsibility (CSR) approaches to the realization of socioeconomic rights in the broader context of an emerging recognition of CSR as private regulation of business behaviour. It examines complex theoretical and practical dimensions of responsibility and potential contributions of businesses to poverty alleviation and clarifies the apparent paradox of legal compulsion of essentially voluntary CSR activities. Rather than treat rights and CSR as parallel approaches to protecting socioeconomic rights, it is argued that CSR can be part of a coherent framework of laws and policies for legally translating broad human rights commitments to poverty reduction into concrete programmes. The paper demonstrates how legally propped CSR arrangements can support poverty reduction and appropriate task-specific contextualised definitions and boundaries of CSR that complement the rights-based approach. It is argued that human rights principles have normative dimensions to guide and help formulate policies, programmes and practices, which in turn allow for a creative use of and legal prop to CSR. The conceptualization of human rights is not restricted to one implementation method, and CSR can partly satisfy states’ human rights obligations and transcend the narrow conventional human rights discourse on obligations of non-state actors.

The paper aims at investigating the possible trajectories of regional clusters (industrial districts or local systems) in order to depict feasible strategies to cope with globalization. First, same relevant stylized facts on the new structure of global market are presented in order to illustrate the new competitive framework the SME must face. Second, the concept of ‘complete productive process’ is introduced to characterize the special setting is necessary for the survival of the regional systems of SME. Said briefly, a local cluster needs to co-produce values, capabilities, institutions: its very identity. Since local systems are essentially ‘cognitive systems’, they need to go global not as single firm but as a system. To accomplish this difficult task they must resort to a collective and cooperative behaviour. The paper tries to fill this gap introducing the concept of ‘Collective Local Entrepreneurship’, a reference point, a device to whom anchor the strategic pragmatism necessary to regional clusters to cope with globalization. The renewal of the local ‘ecosystems’ within the international networks (at all different levels) appears to be a general objective. A strong public-private partnership emerges as a strategic commitment. In this perspective the paper tries to capture, as a conclusion, the potential dynamics of the four evolutionary trajectories, which the regional clusters are called upon to deal with.

This paper, concerning uneven development in China, empirically analyzes the core-periphery gradient of manufacturing industries across provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities), and assesses the extent to which these provinces have changed in recent years. Since China’s reform and opening-up, the spatial structure of the economy has presented a significant core-periphery pattern, the core evidently skewing towards east-coastal areas. With the deepening of market reforms and expansion of globalization, industrial location is gradually in line with the development advantages of provinces. The core provinces specialize in those industries characterized by strong forward and backward linkages, as well as a high consumption ratio, a high degree of increasing returns to scale, and labor or human-capital intensity. However, it is the opposite with regard to peripheral provinces, in addition, energy intensive industries are gradually concentrating in these areas. To a certain degree, the comparative advantage theory and new economic geography identify the underlying forces that determine the spatial distribution of manufacturing industries in China. This paper indicates that the industrialization of regions along different gradients becomes unsynchronized will be a long-term trend. Within a certain period, regions are bound to develop industrial sectors in line with their respective characteristics and development stage. A core-periphery pattern of industries also indicates that industrial development differentials across regions arise because of not only the uneven distribution of industries but also the inconsistent evolving trends of industrial structure for each province.

Despite a huge amount of speculation and expectation surrounding medical tourism, hard empirical evidence is only now beginning to emerge. This paper widens the focus of discussion by contrasting two country experiences (UK and Korea) which on the surface illustrate the diversity of medical tourism and little else. However, considered more comparatively, the accounts contribute toward wider, albeit tentative, theoretical understandings, and insights. The paper is drawn from two broad programs of empirical study conducted over three years in UK and Korea, respectively. The article is structured in three parts: first, a brief overview of policy, legislative, and accreditation frameworks that exist to govern medical tourist flows. Second, we present evidence around flows, demographics, treatment, and medical tourism for Korea and UK (both for supply and demand). Third, we examine conceptual and theoretical implications of this evidence. We argue that viewing medical tourism as a global market is problematic; some medical tourist markets are best viewed as networks with long-term exchange relationships; some specific areas of activity do function more strongly as price-related; decision making around medical tourism frequently involves a range of information and social networks (economic action as embedded social structure); and medical tourism is a function of globalization.

Fifteen years ago, Paul Gray and I wrote the above article describing four potential trajectories technology may take (Gray and Hovav, 1999). The trajectories were developed based on a number of general assumptions and by using scenario building methodology. When I read the paper over in preparation for writing this postscript, it occurred to me that “had I known then what I know now...” I found our outlook somewhat naive, techno centric and at points shortsighted. Hindsight is of course always 20/20. The key to good scenario building is not to try and describe a predictable future but to create a set of diverse futures and analyze the drivers and consequences of each. As such, scenario building methodologies often represent the views of the researchers that use them and the state-ofaffairs at the time they are developed. In the late 1990s, our discipline’s foci were on organization, inter-organization and at best industry level use/effect of technology. As the reach of the Internet increased and technologies such as Web 2.0, social networks, mobile computing (smart phones, tablets) and the cloud became dominant, our discipline expanded its investigative boundaries to include topics such as the effect of technology on society, ethics, and culture, and unintended consequences of technology (e.g., addiction, cyber bulling). In this postscript, I will highlight the differences between our predictions and the current state-of-affairs. The rest of the postscript is organized as follow: in the next section, I describe the main drivers and propose a slightly different approach to the four scenarios that Paul and I introduced in 1999. Then, I briefly summarize the variables that did follow our initial proposed trajectory followed by a section discussing the variables that did not materialize as we predicted. In section five, I introduce globalization as a potential catalyst. Section six describes two trends we did not include in our 1999 paper. I end with concluding remarks and call for action.

During the past two decades, a growing body of research has explored the implications of increased trade and financial openness for the relationship between output and inflation. This paper reviews proposed theoretical channels through which the degree of openness might ultimately affect the output-inflation trade-off and surveys the empirical studies that have sought to determine the net effect of greater openness on this trade-off. In addition, the paper utilizes a single cross-country data set to evaluate, taking into account recent developments in the literature, the likely sign and significance of this net effect. In particular, we find current data imply that there is a negative and significant relationship between openness and the sacrifice ratio, regardless of the transmission channel that is proposed.

Because of current globalization trend, production has shifted from the single factory production to multi-factory production network. To become competitive in today's rapidly changing market requirements, factories have shifted from a centralized to a more decentralized structure, in many areas of decision making including scheduling. In multi-factory production network, each factory can be considered as an individual entity which has different efficiency and is subject to different constraints, for example, machine advances, worker cost, tax, close to suppliers, and transportation facilities, etc. Since limited resources make scheduling an important decision in the production, for several decades, researchers focused on determining an efficient schedule to improve the productivity. The recent remarkable attention in distributed production management in both academia and the industry has demonstrated the significance of multi-factory scheduling. For the first time, this paper provides a review on the multi-factory machine scheduling. For this, first, the paper classifies and reviews the literature according to shop environments, including single machine, parallel machines, flowshop, job shop, and open shop. Then the reviewed literature is quantified and measured. At the end, the paper concludes by presenting some problems receiving less attention than the others and proposes several research opportunities in the field.

Globalization, migration and the increasing diversification of identity patterns within traditionally homogeneous groups have expanded the phenomenon of cultural diversity. Diversity points to the existence of many cultures that are different, heterogeneous and often incommensurable, whereas multiculturalism promotes the acceptance of cultural diversity by encouraging the recognition of minorities by the society and its institutions. In the backdrop of violence in some countries, the present paper explores how organizations are helping in enhancing toleration for other cultures. The present paper explicates how the Indian cities having a concentration of offshore industries are transitioning from cultural diversity to multiculturalism.

This paper examines the extent to which developmental idealism has been disseminated in Malawi. Developmental idealism is a set of beliefs and values about development and the relationships between development and family structures and behavior. Developmental idealism states that attributes of societies and families defined as modern are better than attributes defined as traditional, that modern societies help produce modern families, that modern families facilitate the achievement of modern societies, and that the future will bring family change in the direction of modernity. Previous research has demonstrated that knowledge of developmental idealism is widespread in many places around the world, but provides little systematic data about it in sub-Saharan Africa or how knowledge of it is associated with certain demographic characteristics in that region. In this paper, we address this issue by examining whether ordinary people in two settings in Malawi, a sub-Saharan African country, have received and understood messages that are intended to associate development with certain types of family forms and family behaviors. We then examine associations between demographic characteristics and developmental idealism to investigate possible mechanisms linking global discourse about development to the grassroots. We analyze data collected in face-to-face surveys from two samples of Malawian men in 2009 and 2010, one rural, the other in a low-to-medium income neighborhood of a city. Our analysis of these survey data shows considerable evidence that many developmental idealism beliefs have been spread in that country and that education has positive effects on beliefs in the association between development and family attributes. We also find higher levels of developmental idealism awareness in the urban sample than we do in the rural sample, but once dissimilarities in education and wealth between the two samples are controlled, awareness levels no longer differed between urban and rural respondents. We explore how these beliefs intersect with longstanding local values and beliefs in Malawi.

The papers presented in this special issue of the African Archaeological Review all explore interactions between particular African regions and the Indian Ocean from prehistory to the present. The scholarly interest in this theme is manifested in numerous conferences and seminars that have taken place over the last 20 years. These seven articles present different kinds of empirical material and analytical approaches. Exploration of our empirical theme had to confront a particular bias that seems inherent in our discipline: namely the way area-study specialization tends to narrow our search for wider culture-historical influences. Africanists become inclined to search for African connections while Indologists focus on Indian connections. This may even lead to different conceptual orientations that may serve to limit scholarly exchanges between archaeologists working in Africa and in Asia. This becomes particularly problematic with the development of scholarship focusing on various classical traditions characterizing the complex societies of Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. The first paper, by Nicole Boivin, Alison Crowther, Mary Prendergast and Dorian Q. Fuller, “Indian Ocean Food Globalisation and Africa,” covers a long timespan, from 4,000 years ago to the recent period. The authors explore the patterns of food globalization vis-a-vis Africa, focusing especially on the arrival of new food crops and domesticated animals in Africa and also touching on flows from Africa to the broader Indian Ocean world. They use archaeological, archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological materials, as well as historical and ethnographic sources. Drawing on data from the interdisciplinary Sealinks Project, they explore how seafaring activities in the Indian Ocean changed over time and how this had impact on dispersals of plants, animals, material objects, people and ideas. More than 4,000 years of seafaring between the Indus and Mesopotamian civilizations was well established. In the first centuries BCE, Indians had discovered that they could sail across the Indian Ocean by using the seasonal changes of the monsoon. According to the account of the Periplus from the first century CE, this stimulated increased open-sea seafaring between India and the Red Sea. Afr Archaeol Rev (2014) 31:543–545 DOI 10.1007/s10437-014-9177-0

This paper provides an analysis of China's trade performance from the 1840s to the present. Its focus is on Shanghai, the world's largest port, which began direct trade relations with Western nations starting in 1843. The paper finds that Shanghai had, and continues to have, an important role in China's trade structure. Applying the well-known gravity equation of trade for Shanghai's treaty port period, the paper shows that this relationship fits today's actual trade quite well when projected into the modern period. Second, the foreign presence, as measured by foreign direct investment (FDI), in Shanghai is shown to be related not only to trade in the past, but also to trade today, which suggests that FDI is one of the sources of persistence in foreign trade.

During recent years, the natural environment has become a challenging topic that business organizations must consider due to the economic and ecological impacts and increasing awareness of environment protection. Globalization and the increased number of countries entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) have promoted green supply chain management (GSCM) practices in manufacturing organizations. GSCM has emerged as an important organizational philosophy and a proactive approach to reduce environmental risks. Increasing pressures such as stricter regulations, increased community, and consumer pressures, and the developing country’s aim to enter the WTO have caused automotive supply chain managers to consider and to implement GSCM practices to improve both their economic and environmental performances. This paper explores the practices and performances of the GSCM based on the GSCM literature, and it considers the relationship between green supply chain practices (initiatives) and performance outcomes. In this paper, two questionnaires were developed and a survey conducted to assess the importance of GSCM practices and performances in an automotive company in a developing country using a fuzzy multiple criteria decision-making method. The result of this paper presents practical guidance for managers in performing GSCM practices by ranking GSCM practices according to their importance which leads to improving GSCM performances.

Faced with global climate change, local elites are confronted with the main dilemma of a developing country: development requires economic growth, but this effort also requires consideration of environmental factors and sustainable patterns of production and consumption. Based on empirical evidence from qualitative research on businesses and political elites in Chile—a paradigmatic South American middle-income country—this paper explores the extent to which local elites are aware of the severity of challenges posed by global climate change and identify main climate change concerns in their discourse. The degree to which domestic elites are aware of the paradigm shift they must assume toward clean industrial production is a key issue of environmental governance that involves private non-governmental actors. This paper gives clues to a better understanding of what is happening with strategic actors in developing nations and their understanding of their decision-making capacity concerning environmental policy and investments for facing global climate change. The main conclusion of the research is that awareness of climate change in local elites’ discourse is relative. It is not accompanied by a full acceptance of their agency and is not leading to a paradigm shift toward a clean model of development because of domestic elites’ position within globalization processes.

In this second issue of a two-volume set, we introduce four papers that continue the theme of neoliberal issues in public education articulated in the first issue. The 16 authors from issues one and two have written papers that describe as well as problematize neoliberal issues, influences, and networks. Focused but varied inquiry on pivotal issues in education are explored through rigorous approaches to empirical research and in-depth, ‘‘edgy’’ argumentation. The topics covered in the special issue across the two-part volume include the following and expand beyond this list

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the efficiency of the countries over the period of 10 years by applying data envelopment analysis (DEA). Based on rational and factual parameters such as freedom of press, freedom of religion, percentage of export in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), index of globalization, life expectancy at birth, gender ratio etc., this paper attempts to measure the efficiency of happiness. A combination of social and economic factors has been used to measure technical efficiency. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it measures the relative efficiency of all the countries included in the study. The nations have been ranked as per their relative efficiency and the peer group has been formed. Second a comparison between the rich and the poor countries have been done to test empirically whether the economic growth enhances the happiness among people. Presently, more than 3,000 studies have been published on happiness and Veenhoven in 2004 created a database called World Database of Happiness. The World Database of Happiness has attempted to present the available research findings on happiness. Part of the findings on happiness in nations is available in ‘States of nations’. For the research purpose, States of Nations and the data published by have been considered. Although happiness has been quantified and the existing literature has sufficient empirical evidences of the same, in the present context, the relative efficiency has been calculated for the countries on basis of objective and subjective happiness parameters. As per the literature, happiness has two aspects (1) objective and (2) subjective. Objective parameters are external to the individuals and covers material living parameters viz. GDP growth, income, nutrition, mortality rate, literacy etc. However, Subjective indicators measure the quality of life of the individuals. These are summarized as ‘‘subjective well-being’’. The various parameters considered in the study capture different aspects of happiness. The result shows how the government can increase the happiness of the people by analyzing the behavior and expectations. People express their preference explicitly about political parties, religion believes, law and order situation, trust in official institutions etc. Although, the behavior of people largely depends upon availability of goods and services in the market, the government can make budgets according to priority or preferences of people. Another way to increase happiness can be done by analyzing the peer group, which is an outcome of DEA. This shows the nations which are similar in terms of their economic and social conditions. The government can compare the prevailing conditions in different countries that improve the condition in their respective country. This could be an effective method as some of the parameters can be replicable in order to make people happier. The limitation of this study is lack of availability of data for many countries. As the number of countries increases, a change in the relative efficiency can be observed. Therefore, a future study can be conducted where the relevant data can be collected and a more global result can be obtained.

This paper examines how opportunity structures for learning, income, and status emerge in a global space shaped by local stakeholders aspiring for strategic positions in international competition. The case-study of Hong Kong suggests that moving up the pyramid of college and university degrees provides opportunities for higher income and reduces turbulence in times of global recessions and layoffs. However, low socio-economic status students are more likely to sustain their upward movement if their learning experiences are enriched with boundary-crossing competencies provided by studies abroad, foreign language training, cross-disciplinary programs, etc. While outbound mobility enhances opportunities for upward mobility, it also challenges the established cultural patterns of learning. This paper discusses the tensions and ties between outbound and upward mobility by analyzing local–global disequilibria in human and institutional agencies of higher education working across social, economic and political boundaries.

The emergence of new technologies is acting both as a driving force and an enabling factor to globalization. At the same time, these technologies are changing rapidly, shortening the life cycles of products and the underlying processes, and raising technology costs. Technology transfer from academic and scientific institutions has thus transformed into a strategic variable for companies and nations to cope with these challenges in a global economy. This article introduces the rationale for the special issue on the role of technology transfer in a global economy. The paper summarizes the main topics and themes covered by a selection of papers and keynotes presented at the annual conference of the Technology Transfer Society in 2011, as well as providing some pointers towards a future research agenda.

International audience; This paper introduces a series of 11 studies on the relationships between large Western cities (Paris, London, Brussels, Vienna, Barcelona, Athens, New York, Providence) and their surrounding territories over a long historical time period. The concept of hinterland is introduced to designate a rural territory structured by its function of supplying the city with food, fuel, water and other material. The papers question the usefulness of this concept in the current globalized world, where cities are often considered as simple nodes of a network of worldwide trade exchanges, but where new citizen aspirations for reconnecting urban and rural territories are emerging.

This paper contributes to current debates on the relationship between globalisation and higher education. The main argument of the paper is that we are currently witnessing transnationalisation of academic capitalism. This argument is illustrated by examining the collaboration between transnational corporations and research universities, and how transnational academic capitalism has been promoted by different intermediating organizations. On theoretical level the paper draws from global capitalism school and the theory of academic capitalism, but also moves beyond them by introducing new concepts such as knowledge-intensive transnational economic practices. The emergence of transnational academic capitalism challenges the common assumption that universities are primarily promoters of national economic competitiveness.

This paper discusses six major changes and challenges that have emerged since World War II that will shape the global economy for the indefinite future. These are the changing economic role of women, the emergence of the global economic and financial system, the re-emergence of state-supported enterprises, the impact of the Internet, the global diffusion of opportunity and innovation, and globalization as an opportunity and a threat. How these challenges are addressed will have important consequences for business and for public policy. In addition to the prepared remarks, this paper also has a summary of the question-and-answer session that followed Dr. Hormats’ address.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it documents the changing global landscape before and after the crisis, emphasizing the shift towards multipolarity. In particular, it emphasizes the ascent of developing countries in the global economy before, during, and after the crisis. Second, it explores what these global economic changes and the recent crisis imply for shifts in the direction of research in development economics. The paper places a particular emphasis on the lessons that developed countries can learn from the developing world.