Suchergebnisse

IN ORDER TO GIVE SOME RATIONAL EXPLANATION FOR OPEC'S DURABILITY, GIVEN ITS DIVERSITY OF STATES AND NATIONAL INTERESTS, THIS ARTICLE USES CERTAIN THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EXAMINES THE HISTORICAL RECORD OF OPEC'S ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT. THE ANALYSIS WILL FOCUS ON THE ECONOMIC AND STRATEGIC POLICIES OF THE PERSIAN GULF MEMEBERS OF THIS ORGANIZATION. HOW HAS OPEC MANAGED TO SURVIVE WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO BRING ABOUT AN END TO THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR OF THE 1980S OR THE GULF CRISIS OF 1990-91? WHAT MOTIVATING VARIABLES KEPT IT INTACT? WHAT LESSONS CAN BE LEARNED FROM OPEC'S BEHAVOUR IN CONFLICT MANAGEMENT? HOW COULD THESE LESSONS BE APPLIED IN COMPREHENDING THE BEHAVIOR OF OPEC IN ITS INDEAVORS TO CONTAIN FUTURE CONFLICTS INVOLVING ITS MEMEBERS? ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE SOUGHT IN THIS ARTICLE.

Little attention has been devoted in this country to political areas and their relationship to each other. Not much is to be gained from a theoretical discussion of this subject, and this article is based upon a detailed study of conditions in Illinois. Similar problems present themselves in every state, although the details vary in different parts of the country, and the effort is made here to bring out the general issues involved, using the conditions in a single state as the basis for discussion.Attention should at the outset be called to the fact that the situation is complicated by the fact that this state has but one great city. The position of Chicago and Cook County constitutes one of the serious political problems in connection with reorganization of state and local government.

In 2006, Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler proposed a wager to technology and society author Nicholas Carr. Benkler argued that by 2011 the most influential websites would be based on content produced by people engaged in peer production. Carr maintained that the lure of money and the corporate hierarchies will be more effective. So, after 15 years, who has really won the bet? Are the most influential websites peer-produced or price-incentivized? To address these questions, this paper discusses what peer production is in relation to priceincentivized production. The Carr-Benkler wager is used as a lens to examine the current social and political struggles in the digital economy, to unveil the adversary value systems underneath and the respective implications for organization. We conclude with some reflections on the controversies and ambiguities of peer production and a call for critical scholarship to engage in a deeper discussion on value and organization in the digital economy.

Multidimensional crisis phenomena (financial–economic, environmental and social), plaguing the international community, especially in the last 30 years, have intensified resentment towards traditional models of growth and socio-economic development. The European Commission has placed the idea of a green economy (GE) at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy. This paper presents an assessment of the implementation of the green economy assumptions in EU countries in 2018, taking 2010 as the base year. Using taxonomic methods, a synthetic evaluation index (GEI—Green Economy Index) was constructed based on a multi-criterion set of 27 indicators. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: How green are the European economies? What are the main challenges in this context? The average value of the index for the EU countries decreased in the studied years from 0.3423 to 0.3294, which can be interpreted as a slowdown in the greening processes. The key recommendations for the upcoming years include the improvement of energy efficiency indicators, the further increase in the share of renewable energy sources in the energy balance. Moreover, a significant problem continues to be the high percentage of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion, as well as low CO2 and resource productivity rates.

AbstractIn today's global marketplace, small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly looking at internationalisation strategies to boost growth, profitability, and competitiveness. However, challenges, such as, sociocultural differences, political institutions, limited resources, competitive challenges, market threats, and economic and technological barriers all hinder SMEs from entering and competing favourably in the international markets. Considering the important link between lack of resources and internationalisation of SMEs, this study examined economic and technology‐related barriers of SMEs internationalisation from a neglected yet emerging market context in Bangladesh. To compare the relative importance of these two particular categories of barriers, this study developed and validated a partial least square‐based structural equation model (PLS‐SEM) with primary data gathered from questionnaires from 212 Bangladeshi SMEs. The findings of the paper suggest that technology‐related barriers seem slightly more influential than economic barriers. As the difference is very low, importance should be given to both types of barriers as found. Conceptually, this study extends this area of research by reframing economic and technology‐related barriers of internationalisation as a hierarchical reflective model within an emerging economy context. Empirically, it confirms that PLS‐SEM can be used to compare the relative importance of these two types of barriers. Practically, policy makers can give slightly more priorities on the technology‐related barriers where it is not possible to give equal importance to both because of limited resource and research neglect on developing economies.