Suchergebnisse

The paper investigates the effects of institutions and their interaction with firms' research & development (R&D) levels on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in China based on a sample of 680 European Union (EU) firms over the period of 1998 to 2008. Employing panel data estimation approaches and further augmented with the cross-validation technique, our results indicate that EU FDI in China is influenced by the host country's institutions, rendering support to the institutional theory. Our analysis indicates that the rule of law, institutional reforms and the interaction between institutional reforms and R&D have significant effects on FDI inflows in China. Further analysis suggests that the coefficient for the interaction between the rule of law and R&D is positive and significant after World Trade Organisation (WTO) entry implying that the effects of reforms following the WTO entry much outweigh the impact of rule of law in EU firms' decisions to invest in China. We also find evidence that EU firms tend to adjust their FDI levels in China in an attempt to reach the desired investment level.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to focus on large-scale portfolio entrepreneurship and its impact on the creation of stable wage employment in African economies. Design/methodology/approach The three studies focussed on Egypt, Uganda, and Malawi were all exploratory, inductive, and qualitative studies, which involved semi-structured interviews with 65 entrepreneurial founders of some of these countries' most prominent business portfolios between 2009 and 2012. The data were collected through face-to-face interviews, which lasted between one and four hours, with the founders of each of these portfolios. Findings This inductive and qualitative study finds a connection between the creation of stable wage-paying jobs and portfolio entrepreneurship in three countries, representing three of the four different archetypal African economies. It also finds a strong connection between the development of new industries and portfolio entrepreneurship. Practical implications The practical and societal implications of these findings are incredibly important. The current and looming shortage of stable wage employment in Africa is reaching calamitous proportions. The growth in religion-affiliated terrorism and high-risk economic migration to Europe can be directly related to the lack of employment opportunities in African nations. The findings indicate that portfolio entrepreneurs are major players in the creation of such employment opportunities and government policies focussing on this area, as compared to focussing solely on SMEs, may be more effective in mitigating some of the drivers for emigration and terrorism. Originality/value This is the only study of its kind that investigates the role of large-scale portfolio entrepreneurship in the growth of employment opportunities in Africa.

This empirical study investigates the determinants of self-employment propensity of Polish and Romanian immigrants in Germany. The German economy is an important object of analysis, as it is the most important destination for international migrants in the European Union. In the paper, we use the recently collected M sample of the German Socio-Economic Panel to examine which personal, country of birth-specific socio-economic and cultural factors influence the self-employment propensity of immigrants. The results of binominal logit regression show that the Central European migrants exhibit different self-employment propensity than migrants from former Yugoslavia, Russian and Kazakhstan, Turkey and Italy, with the self-employment aversion especially strong among Romanians. These differences remain substantial even after controlling for social and human capital endowment of the individuals. This study offers important policy recommendations, showing the potential obstacles in encouraging entrepreneurial activity of immigrants. This topic is becoming increasingly important with the current migration crisis in the EU, caused by intensive inflow of asylum-seeking foreigners in 2015.

During the 1970s and 1980s, economic and financial crime turned into a societal issue in Switzerland. The perpetrators of white-collar crime often enjoyed total impunity: legal proceedings were very time consuming, authorities in charge of judicial investigation were under-resourced. This paper investigates how the political and judicial authorities responded to this challenge. By the end of the 1980s, a strong shift towards a more specialized handling of financial crime by public prosecutors occurred. Specialized departments were set up and judges were trained in commercial matters. This transformation breached with a long tradition of leniency and inefficient judicial handling of economic crime. Based on archival evidence, this paper sheds new light on the drivers of an institutionalization process which affected not only the Swiss financial centre, but also all the global judicial proceedings which relied on it. Professionalizing the response to financial crime also aimed at restoring the corporate reputation of Swiss financial firms, in a context of growing competition among offshore financial centers.