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Publications (21)
Research Brief
It is widely recognized that entrepreneurship is of critical importance to industrial development. Despite this importance we know little about the skills of business owners and managers in developing countries. In the WIDER Working Paper ‘The Role of Training in Fostering Cluster-Based Micro and...
Working Paper
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While it has been increasingly recognized that efficient management holds the key to the development of micro and small enterprises in developing countries, we know very little about the managerial capacity of business owners and managers in these countries. In order to explore whether we can...
Working Paper
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Aid providers frequently link supporting small firms to job creation. Small firms create about half of new jobs in Africa, but they also have higher failure rates. Ignoring firm exit exaggerates net employment growth. Using panel data for Ethiopia, we find that small and large enterprises create...
Research Brief
– A New Agenda
It is commonly acknowledged that developing economies are characterized by large differences in output per worker across sectors. For such economies the shift of resources from low productivity to high productivity is the key potential driver of economic growth. Nearly all developing countries that...
Working Paper
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This paper argues that official development assistance (foreign aid) is partly responsible for the lack of structural change in Africa. Africa’s development partners have devoted too few resources and too little attention to two critical constraints to private investment, infrastructure and skills...
– ICT Opportunities and Challenges
Within the last three decades, industrialization, and manufacturing in particular, has decreased in importance as the principal driver of economic growth and development in the world economy. The expansion of the service sector in industrialized societies reflects the increasing significance of the...
Working Paper
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– Are Developing Countries Different?
Factors determining the diffusion of digital mobile telephony across 200 developed and developing countries in the 1990s are studied with the aid of a Gompertz model. The market size and network effects are found to play more important roles in the developing countries; there is also more need for...
Policy Brief
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The rise of the new economy is undeniable. Yet its impact on the development process is still to be fully understood. Investment in ICT itself is not sufficient to ensure longterm improvements in social well-being but requires other factors that result in an enabling environment in which progress...
Working Paper
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A firm’s business model describes the way in which it creates, delivers, and appropriates value. In the debate about the ongoing demise of several e-commerce ventures, only a few analysts have looked at the relative sanity of innovative e-business Models, relying mostly on static environmental...
Working Paper
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– Is It an IT Story?
This paper examines trends in idiosyncratic risk in different ‘new economy’ and ‘old economy’ industries, and explores whether these developments can be attributed to the use of IT. A CAPM-based decomposition of equity returns is employed to estimate idiosyncratic risk. The results provide evidence...
Working Paper
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The pervasiveness of the illegal copying of software is a worldwide phenomenon. Software piracy implies a huge loss of potential customers of original software buyers, which directly translates into revenue losses for the software industry. Given this, conventional wisdom would suggest the need for...
Working Paper
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– A Firm-level Economic Analysis of Selected Indian Industries under Economic Liberalization
The economic liberalization in India was expected to boost the economy, particularly the industrial sector through faster technological development. The Schumpeterian hypothesis, which studies the relationship between market structure variables such as firm size and market concentration and their...
Working Paper
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– Pros and Cons of an Inward-Orientated Development Strategy
The software and information services (SIS) sector is at the heart of the New Economy and has been rapidly growing through the whole world during the last decades. This is also the case in Argentina where in the middle of a deep recession, the turnover of the sector augmented by 40 per cent and...
Working Paper
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– Determinants of Internet Adoption
This paper shows how organizational, technical, and environmental factors affected firm decisions to adopt Internet technologies during the early years of the commercialization of the Internet. Organizations that had made prior investments in client/server networks had a higher likelihood of...
Working Paper
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– The Dynamics and Impacts of B2B E-commerce on the South African Manufacturing Sector
This paper explores the current state of play and likely future direction of business-to-business electronic commerce in the South African manufacturing sector. The empirical evidence presented draws on 120 firm-level interviews, and 31 personal interviews with industry experts. The research...
Displaying 16 of 21 results