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In various parts of francophone Africa, farmers use 'pieces of paper' to record transactions such as the 'sale' (with all the inherent ambiguity of the term) of land or delegation of cultivation rights. The aim of these local institutional innovations is to certify that the transaction has taken place. The parties often try to get these contracts validated by a local government authority. Although the procedures may be incomplete and not legal, such 'informal formalisation' of transactions does help to reduce uncertainty and provide greater security within the complex web of tenure relations. New insights can now be gained into local dynamic processes and the role of the state in making tenure rights more secure. (Resume d'auteur)

(2002). Monetary Land Transactions in Western Burkina Faso: Commoditisation, Papers and Ambiguities. The European Journal of Development Research: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 109-128.

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.

The aim of the paper is to show whether the systems of mathematics teacher education in two countries whose historical development may seem quite similar (the Czech Republic and Hungary were parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, and they were part of the Eastern European communist block) are also very similar, or whether each country follows its own, unique path. In this paper we build on the general need for more international comparative studies in the area of teacher education. We present a historical review of development of mathematics teacher education in both countries and analyse and compare current teacher education programs, their structure and organization, the demands on mathematics teachers and their qualifications for teaching at various levels. In the paper we pinpoint a number of aspects resulting in differences in the two systems, including historical development and traditions, (de)-centralization, globalization and international cooperation, etc. The comparison based on these aspects shows that the systems in both countries are very different. The analysis described in this paper could become the starting point for further research using the data from international surveys (e.g. PISA). Such research would enable us to make conjectures about the effects of various ways of organizing teacher education.

In the twenty-first century, corporate social responsibility is not a new phenomenon to India’s capitalist development model. Instead, the concept itself is implicitly rooted in traditional values, customs, and ideal systems of charismatic leaders. Trusteeship is one such ideal notion of Gandhi’s work on economic justice and equality, which influence business communities for voluntary activities. However, with exposure to globalization, the adaptation of new economic policy and its adverse impacts changed business communities’ role towards voluntary activities and forced the state for the enactment of statutory provisions through the Companies Act 2013. In this context, the present paper employed the content and content configuration analysis method to analyze the relevance of these two ideas—trusteeship and statutory provision of CSR, in the current state of development. For that, the paper makes a comparative analysis between these two ideas with their eight inherent similar segments. After comparing and interrogating what present CSR deficient, the paper concludes that the alternative and future of Indian CSR practice and sustainability lie within the practice of trusteeship. Corporate and state need to incorporate the Gandhian idea of “trusteeship” within the present CSR framework to achieve a long-term sustainable society.

Globalization pressure on organizations calls for new approaches to survive, grow, and compete. An approach is to allow inter-organizational business processes (IOBP) collaboration where each partner would expose its public know-how without putting its private know-how at-risk nor impeding this collaboration from happening. Private processes would be the result of running views over public processes. For a successful IOBP collaboration, constraints like temporal need to be satisfied. Organizations could have different time requirements. This paper presents an approach for generating views over collaborative IOBP along with satisfying the combined temporal constraints that would restrict these collaborative IOBP. The paper also details how the consistency of these constraints would be achieved. The approach is illustrated using an online shopping scenario and demonstrated through a system.

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.

The globalisation of recent decades has led to a soaring demand for the translation of legal or quasi-legal instruments for national judiciaries and for the corporate sector, performed outside institutions. However, there has been little, if any, downstream impact or risk assessment in this field. The international and interdisciplinary project described in this paper, drawing data, inter alia, from case law and stakeholder reporting, seeks to bring to light the ways in which translated legal documents may be challenged, contested or discredited at the various stages of their ‘lives’, and the repercussions of such challenges on trade and the economy, law enforcement, rights, and legal security. A focus is placed on written legal translation performed outside institutions, given that this is an extremely under-researched area, indeed hardly researched at all. Until now, legal translation studies as an (inter)discipline has concentrated on process, context, participants and product, but has not investigated the impact of translated documents as binding or non-binding artefacts on the wider world, or their appearance in litigation. The project described in this paper seeks to fill that gap.

This paper empirically investigates the impact of trade liberalisation on the informal economy for the BRICS nations. Common criteria for choosing these countries are (a) trade reforms and (b) presence of a large informal sector. While trade liberalisation and globalisation may have propelled economic growth for these countries, their impact on the unorganised sector in these countries is not so straightforward. An increase in the size of informal sector may lead to higher inequality, lower efficiency and other development-related issues. Using panel data for the five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa for the period 1996–2015, this paper attempts to investigate whether trade reforms undertaken by the BRICS nations have led to higher informal sector activity or have caused the shadow economy to expand in these countries. Due to the complexity involved in defining and measuring informality, two measures of informality, given by Kauffmann and Kaliberda and Schneider, were used to identify the impact of trade liberalisation on the informal sector activity in these countries. Empirical investigations based on the Kauffmann and Kaliberda approach revealed higher informality with greater trade volumes, whereas the impact of trade liberalisation was found to be insignificant on the measure of informality provided by Schneider’s approach.

The globalization, increased migration, and mobility of workforce necessitate the need to study religious diversity in organizations, which has not yet received adequate academic attention of management scholars. The paper attempts to define and understand the nuances of religious diversity with the help of certain theories from psychology and sociology domains. It aims to present the legal provisions of different countries regarding workplace religious discrimination and endeavours to synthesize and analyze the pros and cons of religious diversity at workplace. The paper follows a systematic literature review approach. The descriptive analysis of search results and thematic analysis of the literature reviewed has been presented. It is found that the theories from other domains can be borrowed to understand the root cause of different perceptions for religious diversity. The favourable and unfavourable outcomes of workplace religious diversity have been identified and categorized at two levels i.e. individual and organizational. It is realized that the favourable outcomes of bringing religion to workplace outnumber the unfavourable outcomes and therefore it is time to leverage workplace religious diversity. Lastly, the paper attempts to equip the human resource managers with certain strategies to better deal with religious diversity issues at the workplace.

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.

Plagiarism is a pervasive challenge throughout academia perpetuated by the advent of technology, lack of ethical education, and the ambiguity in its definition. Plagiarism in the United States’ higher education settings has gained more attention over the years as international student population has increased. Considering how higher education institutions are growing as international spaces due to globalization, it is crucial to closely examine ethical issues concerning the diverse and multicultural student population. A prevailing view of plagiarism asserts that international students’ plagiarized texts are influenced by their ethical judgment and cultural backgrounds. This invites the question of whether ethical decision-making processes and cross-cultural perspectives are taken into consideration when instructors encounter instances of plagiarism committed by international or multicultural students. This paper intends to expand on the concept of culture in regard to the ethical dilemmas of plagiarism. Extending the discussions of cross-cultural influences surrounding plagiarism and ethical judgments in higher education, we position ourselves as viewing culture through the expanded lenses of macro- and micro-level cultural practices. In response to the internationalization of higher education, we advocate for changes in higher education curricula and instruction towards more cultural responsiveness and inclusivity. Instead of questioning or criminalizing ethics based on cultural background, especially in the cases of plagiarism committed by international students, we suggest approaching culture using the expanded perspectives of macro- and micro-cultural practices. The paper also provides recommendations for higher education instructors when tackling ethical dilemmas while preventing and managing situations of plagiarism.

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 examines the impact of economic integration on labour income share both at the aggregate as well as at the disaggregate industry levels of Indian economy. The paper uses the ARDL approach for the aggregate level analysis and the panel GMM method for the disaggregate level analysis. The results from both the analysis confirm that global economic integration and technological progress affect the labour income share in India. It also brings out the evidence that a stronger degree of economic integration is associated with the declining labour income share which is accompanied by rising labour productivity, employment, wage rates, and capital income. That means there is a positive correlation of economic integration with the wage rate, employment, capital earnings and labour productivity. However, it also makes an important observation that the labour share is adversely affected, as the wage rate growth lags the labour productivity growth and the compositional shift takes place due to the rising capital income. The increases in employment and wage rate are not enough to offset the adverse effects on the labour share in India.

With the globalization of higher education, the tertiary institutions in Macao have adopted English as the main medium of instruction in order to strengthen their competitiveness, having attracted a large number of Mainland Chinese students. However, little has been known about their experiences and perceptions of English use in Macao, especially in English-medium universities. In this regard, this paper takes an integrated approach of language survey and interviews, examining how Mainland Chinese students use English in different settings and perceive their English use in Macao by looking into the students studying at the University of Macau. It is found that Mainland Chinese students use English mainly in the academic-related settings inside campus, yet rarely use English in non-academic-related settings. Also, English is infrequently used due to the dominant use of Putonghua. Moreover, the paper discusses the implications for how English-medium programmes help improve Mainland Chinese students’ English learning and use, along with the practical suggestions for the universities and Macao government.

Through a case study of a girl student, this paper attempts to draw linkages between science classroom, gender and the larger discourse on the economy and job market. The ideal science student is constructed through classroom interactions, and a particular ideal is fostered which is highlighted in this paper. This paper sets itself to locate the micro-processes such as the classroom interactions, pedagogy and textbooks in the larger macro-context of economy, social mobility and jobs. It draws from the critiques of meritocracy and neoliberal ideology to present the arguments. Through an ethnographic approach, the study focuses on the experiences of students in science classrooms. The school chosen is located in an urban context in India. Examples from the classroom interactions and discussions with the students reveal how certain kind of conduct is promoted in the classroom. Through the description of dreams and aspirations and notions of science and scientists of a girl student, this paper argues that the learning of science is situated in the context of globalisation and neoliberal ideology. The classrooms, pedagogy and notion of aspirations and mobility seem to foster this economic discourse. This paper points to the fact that there is a need for alternative approaches in the teaching of science.

Globalisation and subsequent restructuring of the Indian economy after economic reforms have created conducive environment for more internal migration across sub-regions. This paper attempts to locate several aspects of internal outmigration within the country of India as a response to development strategies undertaken by the government at state level. Using a balanced panel regression method, the paper identifies that all the measurements of outmigration behaviour varied similarly across the states in the milieu of development policies and in the face of widespread variation in outmigration behaviours among the various agents of migration at state level. However, development aspects at state level inflicted different types of moves for different sector-wise, gender-wise, and stream-wise outmigration behaviours. Indian government should, therefore, cast serious glance on regional policy making across and within Indian states while planning the development aspect at state level keeping in mind the predictable outmigration strategies.

State policies regarding the internationalization of higher education (IHE) in China have undergone significant shifts between 1949 and 2019. This paper advances the proposition that these shifts in policies pertaining to IHE can be understood as part of a process of ongoing Chinese state formation in relation to national and global developments and does so by examining the history of IHE policy and policy changes between 1949 and 2019 to demonstrate this possibility. We consider three specific periods to make this case, including (1) the period of Marxist-Leninist socialist nationalism, patriotism and proletarian internationalism and the early engagements of IHE (1949–1976); (2) neoliberal globalization and opening-up: a return to the international stage and further IHE (1977–2002); and finally, (3) state developmentalism and the era of globally engaged higher education (HE) (2003–2019). In conclusion, the current implications of a neoliberal (capitalist) globalization are discussed in terms of real and potential implications for Chinese state formation, Chinese HE and society. The paper aims to investigate the historical underpinnings and formation of international HE in China and contribute to the significant gap in our current literature regarding IHE in China as a socio-historical phenomenon. It not only offers a detailed documentation of how policy on IHE has evolved and shifted in the context of significant changes in political and economic directions in China but also teases out influences of national concerns such as ideological and cultural considerations as well as neoliberal globalization.

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 proposes a novel channel by which trade affects the skill premium and the household income distribution: the selection-into-entrepreneurship mechanism. Trade liberalization intensifies competition for profit, discouraging less able educated workers from sorting into entrepreneurship and increasing the skill supply. As a result, the return to college declines, leading college enrollment to decrease. We illustrate this mechanism with a simple trade model and show that while highly talented households optimally respond to export opportunities by engaging in entrepreneurial investment and moving up the income distribution, less able educated households self-select downward along the income distribution, which gradually results in household income polarization. Using Chinese household survey data, we employ a Bartik-type instrument for export expansion to investigate how globalization affects the return to college, the selection into entrepreneurship, and the income distribution. The analysis shows that regions facing more export exposure are associated with a larger drop in the skill premium, a greater selection effect on household business ownership, and a stronger polarization pattern in the household income distribution. The entrepreneurship angle highlighted by this paper offers another lens through which to study the broader impact of trade shocks on workers’ occupation sorting and the distribution of income.

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.

Clean air is a fundamental requirement for the existence of life on earth. However, with the rapid rate of economic development, globalization, and increasing energy demand, large amount of emissions and waste are generated, leading to severe air pollution. This paper surveys the literature to provide an overview of the impact of air pollution on various aspects of human life. The impact is categorized broadly into health and socio-economic aspects and further subcategorized into multiple dimensions of health and socio-economic consequences. The survey reveals that the impact of air pollution is comprehensive, ranging from chronic to life-threatening diseases, and from malfunctioning of specific organ systems to subjective well-being. Additionally, evidence of the impact of air pollution on unexpected dimensions such as housing prices, larger economy, academic outcomes, and more is uncovered, leaving no doubt on the need to address this problem with the attention of the highest order. This evidence can be used to trigger more research and give policy-makers a starting point for clean-air campaigns. Merely highlighting the seriousness of the issue is not enough, and hence the paper also surveys the broader literature to identify interventions for clean air developed by public and private stakeholders across the world. While none of them may be ripe for blind duplication, this paper aims to provide decision-makers and researchers a bouquet of solutions to choose from while developing clean air programs and research agenda.

The global trend of increasing participation rates, coupled with regional goals to increase participation in higher education, such as the European Union’s Europe 2020 Strategy target of 40% of all young people to hold a tertiary education qualification by 2020, has led to a strain on public resources, and a review of funding priorities in mass higher education systems, in some cases prioritising funding towards an elite. Reforms within European higher education systems have been further prompted by the lacklustre performance of European higher education institutions in international university rankings. The paper aims to contextualise French reforms within the broader European Union agenda for the modernisation of higher education, and its focus on greater differentiation, in order to assess how this has been disseminated and translated in the French context, and how it breaks with the French egalitarian tradition. Through a policy document analysis of French and EU strategies for higher education and research and political communications and data extracted from the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation’s Excellence Initiatives scheme, the paper seeks to understand whether France is creating a multi-tiered higher education system for which no precedent has existed before. However, because of the sui generis structure of French higher education that makes it difficult to classify within the various structural models of higher education, policy implications for other countries will not be discussed. The French case will provide insights on the converging trends of globalisation, and the agency of institutional carriers such as the European Commission in interpreting and disseminating particular strategies.

Social responsibility of business is not new to India. With regard to CSR, the country depicts one of the richest traditions of the world. Involvement of business people in the community as well as in social development has a glorious history in India. The term corporate social responsibility (CSR) might have originated from Western discourses but prior to it the idea of philanthropy in India has evolved from its own ethos and cultural values. Philanthropic activities undertaken by rich business titans and the Gandhian trusteeship model are prominent distinctions of Indian CSR. But with the advent of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, the popularly called LPG policy during the early 1990s led to a fundamental shift from the philanthropy-based model to a multi-stakeholder perspective. During this phase, companies changed their approach and became responsible for all the stakeholders. The stakeholders include environment, community, customers, shareholders, suppliers and employees. In contemporary time, CSR has undergone a drastic change but some of the traditional features are still prevalent. The current paper has made an attempt to comprehend CSR practices in the context of Indian businesses in the early days, and major CSR initiatives during this time as well as during the post-independent period. Subsequently, CSR in the post-globalisation era with a focus on the Companies Act has been examined. Despite many unique characteristics, the paper critiques the practice of CSR by Indian companies in the current scenario.

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 provides a critical reading of Quinn Slobodian’s “Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism”. Slobodian’s narrative centers around the concept of a “Geneva School” of economists and lawyers who, from the 1930s to the 1990s, shaped the international economic order through activities in Genevan institutions. The paper shows in what ways the book constitutes a highly stimulating challenge for readers who align normatively with the characters portrayed by Slobodian. Despite some weaknesses in its historiographical construction, the Geneva School is interpreted as an innovative contribution to the neoliberalism literature. The critical remarks on the book are embedded in posing an overarching question: In what ways can globalists like the author of the paper and moderate critics of globalism like Slobodian enter a fruitful conversation about improving the deficiencies of the global politico-economic order, especially in light of the far-left and far-right critique of globalism in recent years.

In India, management education has made significant growth since its inception in 1950s, and by the mid 1960s, India became one of the leaders in the field of management education; at present, India has the second largest number of business schools in the world. However, the mushrooming of B-Schools in India led by globalization has resulted in an intense competition among the B-Schools themselves giving rise to many contemporary issues and challenges in the changing time affecting the quality of management education in the country. The present study is a review paper in nature and aims to study the growth of B-Schools in India and the resultant competitive landscape. The analysis found that although the number of B-Schools has increased significantly in India, the quality aspect did not receive due attention. The B-Schools in India have been facing a number of key issues and challenges which have been addressed in this paper. Moreover, the distribution of B-Schools across states and zones in India has been found to be very much uneven and highly correlated with industrialization.

Although over the years several contributions to the concept of the value chain have been provided, there is no systematic literature review focused on its evolution. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap. A final sample of 66 papers has been analysed through an historical approach. On the one hand, the value chain concept has been developed in order to reach new fields, while on the other hand, a new concept of a Value Network has appeared and seems to be more suitable in respect of the original value chain concept for designing and analysing business, in the increasingly complex world of today. When analysing the various papers, six key concepts emerged that guided this evolution from value chain to value network: sustainability, globalization, collaboration, intangible assets, flexibility, and agility. Furthermore, this paper is useful when deciding which tool to use to manage a company, whether to do business within a network and how to pursue a sustainable competitive advantage. Finally, further research suggestions about firms performance inside and outside a network and about networks creation are provided.

Urbanization is becoming the most important human social change in the world, especially in developing countries. However, what is the process of urbanization? What forces are driving the urbanization process? This paper summarizes five main processes of urbanization through various aspects of urbanization in different countries, including economic growth and development, demographic change, social transformation, reshaped and stretched urban spaces, and shrinking cities. Based on the comprehensive method of analyzing urbanization, this paper sorts out five driving forces of urbanization, which are industrialization, modernization, globalization, marketization and administrative/institutional power. The author tries to contribute to the healthy development of urbanization in developing countries through the analysis of process and driving force in urbanization.

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.

Over the past three decades, the banking industry has influenced by significant events such as deregulation, the advent of new technologies, the trend of globalization and financial crises. These events influenced the research areas of the field. This paper provides the study of an emerged timespan view of the development and evolution of banking literature from 1994 to 2017, during our explorations of literature from 1900 onward. It explores the changes, examines the conceptual orientations by the authors, and outlines the future study areas in the banking studies. We created a dataset of 8278 records of banking papers from Web of Science scientific citation indexing service. The results of scientometrics analysis of the articles indicate that banking literature falls into eight different coherent themes of study such as competition, debt, economies of scale, financial crises, credit, saving, banking in transition, and finance. Our findings show that among the eight emerged themes, the two study areas of financial crisis and competition are the youngest ones that will have a significant impact on the opening of future research avenues in banking studies.

The European Commission has emphatically declared that the EU is committed to harnessing globalization by promoting a normative approach to trade. Based on the case study of the ongoing negotiations for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with Indonesia, this paper scrutinizes the external conditions for the effectiveness of the European Union (EU) as a norm promoter. Despite the preference of the government to conclude the deal, so far, Indonesia has avoided taking a position on EU-sponsored norms concerning an investment court system and biofuel sustainability standards. This paper explains such a cautious attitude from an international political economy perspective. The proliferation of trade agreements concluded by the EU in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has mobilized the umbrella organization representing Indonesian exporter firms, which has a preferential status as interlocutor of the trade ministry, in support for the European proposals. At the same time, the low degree of trade dependency of the country has empowered Indonesian firms that enjoy the benefits of the large domestic market and, therefore, are in favor of the status quo. Indonesian civil society organizations are also divided on the opportunities and risks associated to the European normative approach to trade. This case study shows how the attempt of the EU to emerge as a normative power through trade has to face the complex political economy incentives and constraints shaping the trade policy of its negotiating partners.

This paper attempts to characterize China’s approach to global economic governance during the Xi Jinping era, and to provide details on how it is playing out. One finding is that China has moved away from the period of “hiding one’s strength and biding one’s time” and is now acting in a more norm-making and agenda-setting role in which it is seeking largely incremental change. Another finding is that China is doing these things through a variety of global governance forms such as inter-governmental organizations with a fairly highly degree of formality, looser international organizations that have weaker implementation capacity and unilateral initiatives which put China very much in a leadership position. Findings are based on an examination of major activities of the Xi period, including hosting the G20 leaders’ summit in Hangzhou, China, joint creation of new multilateral development banks, and the Belt and Road Initiative. The paper also touches on motives for China’s activities, including hedging against adverse developments in the international system, greater wealth, and a global power vacuum that has arisen with the rise of nativist and populist movements in the West, and possible constraints to the realization of China’s objectives such as slowing domestic economic growth and a backlash against China’s globalization, which could intensify.

What is open government? The contemporary conceptualization of open government remains rooted in transparency and accountability, but it is embedded within the political economy of policy, where forces of globalization through supranational organizations strongly influence the creation and dispersion of policy across the globe. Recognizing the direct impact of subnational governments on residents, in 2016 the Open Government Partnership (OGP) launched the Subnational Pioneer’s Pilot Project with 15 participating government authorities globally. Each subnational participant submitted an action plan for opening their government information and processes in 2017. The uniformity of the OGP action plan provides a unique opportunity to assess the conception of open government at the subnational level globally. This paper uses a document analysis to examine how open government is conceptualized at the subnational level, including the salience of various components, and how local context can influence the development of action plans that are responsive to the realities of each participating jurisdiction. This paper assesses whether being a part of the political economy of policy homogenizes the action plans of 15 subnational governments or allows for local context to influence the design of commitments still aligned within a general theme.

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.

Films can be powerful tools in teaching environmental studies. In this paper, we examined 36 environmental documentaries on China for their content, theme, production, and reception with a view towards using them as teaching tools. In our analysis, the films roughly fall into five categories: (1) globalization and global environmental justice, (2) urbanization and displacement, (3) human-nature relationships, (4) the fossil fuel economy, and finally, (5) civil society and the environmental movement. We also discuss the politics of documentary-making in China. Many of the independent filmmakers identify as activists and present alternative perspectives to mainstream narratives. They strive to document the realities among the marginalized populations. Close to half of the documentaries we analyzed are censored in China due to either foreign production, collective action potential, or excessive popularity. Despite political constraints, high-profile environmental documentaries have enabled a number of significant policy changes in China in recent years. In sum, this paper can serve as a “viewing guide” for students and instructors to learn about China’s environmental challenges through films.

In 2015, the United Nations agreed to pursue the Sustainable Development Goal #8 ‘To promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all’. The paper argues that this goal will not be achieved. The abundance of persons offering their labour power in relationship to the limited demand for their labour stems from the insufficient absorption of peasants set free from their land. In many late industrialising countries, most of those who are leaving agriculture do not find gainful employment even at the current junction. In fact, many of the late industrialisers are prematurely de-industrialising. Explanations for the lack of absorption capacity of industries and productive services range from overregulated labour markets to globalisation. On the basis of a comparison between the conditions prevalent among the early industrialisers and present-day late comers to industry and advanced services, the paper highlights other factors: demographic pressures, restrictions on migration, productivity differentials vis-a-vis the Global North and the few successful late industrialisers, and the constraints on the promotion of industry stemming from neoliberal globalisation.

As competition has increased worldwide, national corporations have recombined the best elements of input across national borders. However, unlike the denationalisation views of neoliberalism and leftist global capitalism school, this paper, based on the Korean experience, holds that patterns of globalisation differ widely. The comparative institutionalist views, including the (post-)Varieties of Capitalism and Comparative Capitalism schools, hold that exposure to globalisation reinforces rather than disrupts national economic models. However, Korea changed its traditional development model in the course of its core firms’ internationalisation by building new collaborative interfirm relations at home and nationally oriented networks on foreign soil. To examine the causes of diverse patterns of globalisation and co-evolutionary reconstitution of national economies, this paper emphasises the agency of key actors—particularly governments and lead firms.

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.

Education is in the core of societal change in all its different forms-from kindergartens to vocational schools and lifelong learning. Education-understood as goal-oriented personal movement-re-structures personal lives both inside school and outside the school. This special issue stems from the Cultural Psychology of Education (Marsico Culture & Psychology, 21(4), 445-454, 2015a, b, Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 40(4), 754-781, 2017)-a new approach to the field of education that examines how educational experience is culturally organized. This special issue is focused on the work of schooling as a crucial scientific arena to investigate. It is the follow up of an international workshop host by the Centre for Cultural Psychology (at Aalborg University, Demark) that was very thought provoking and from where several outcomes came out. Some of them are the papers here presented that tried to illuminate the different dimensions of the educational context in the East and West society with specific attention to the Chinese and Scandinavian educational practices. The dialogue between Chinese, European and North American scholars offered a complex view of the current educational challenges in the age of globalization. In this paper I try to focus on some of the most debated and challenging aspects in educational psychology worldwide: diversity, values and practical usability of psychology at school. I re-read these "hot topics" with the help of the themes developed by the authors of this special issue and in light of Cultural Psychology of Education. Then, I conclude by proposing a new agenda for the education of the future.