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33162. Multiethnic State, Ethnically Homogenous State and the Future of the Nation-State in the Balkans
- Author:
- Plamen Pantev
- Publication Date:
- 02-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Austrian National Defence Academy
- Abstract:
- Approaching and testing the capacity and effectiveness of the nation-states in the Balkans is a long-term research necessity for many reasons: First, despite the tendency of making the state boundaries less and less significant in the era of new information technology, global economy and new communications capabilities the nation-state will remain the key organisational unit of the international system and the features of national sovereignty will continue to dominate and influence the management toolbox of international relations and domestic politics. Hence, any form and nuance of the nation-state in the Balkans will have a decisive meaning for dealing with the political and security agenda of the region.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Security, Ethnic Conflict, and Globalization
- Political Geography:
- Eastern Europe and Balkans
33163. Innovation and Social Capital in Silicon Valley
- Author:
- Martin Kenney and Donald Patton
- Publication Date:
- 07-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy
- Abstract:
- The high cost regions of Europe, North America, and Japan recognize that the key to their economic vitality is innovation. Increasingly, many also accept that the primary units of competition based on high quality, innovative products are not nations, but firms within regions, some of which occasionally bridge national boundaries. This has resulted in a significant increase in interest in the nature and functioning of such regional economies, variously known as clusters or industrial districts.
- Topic:
- Economics and International Trade and Finance
- Political Geography:
- United States, Europe, Israel, East Asia, and North America
33164. Sponsors, Communities and Standards: Winning in the Local Area Networking Business
- Author:
- Martin Kenney and Urs von Burg
- Publication Date:
- 07-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy
- Abstract:
- Economics has treated technological standards creation as an outcome of network externalities and decisions on the demand side. They pay little attention to the supply side, where firms make strategi choices on which standard to support. These choices can ignite a contest between adherents to the different proposed standards. This case study examines the contest btween the Ethernet and Token Ring standards for local area networking. We find that the critical difference in explaining the success of Ethernet vibrancy was the nature and strategy of the standard's sponsors in assisting the growth of a community of firms supporting the standard.
- Topic:
- Economics, Industrial Policy, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States
33165. Went for Cost, Stayed for Quality?: Moving the Back Office to India
- Author:
- Rafiq Dossani and Martin Kenney
- Publication Date:
- 07-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy
- Abstract:
- Will the next great wave of globalization come in services? Increasingly, components of back-office services, such as payroll and order fulfillment, and some front-office services, such as customer care are being relocated from the U.S. and other developed countries to English-speaking, developing nations especially India, but also other nations such as the Phillipines. Though moving service activities offshore is not entirely new, the pace has of late quickened. The acceleration of this offshoring is intertwined, though not synonymous, with another phenomenon, namely an increasing willingness by firms to outsource what formerly were considered core activities. The importance of the fact that a substantial number of service activities might move offshore is that it was service jobs that were thought to be the future growth area for developed country economies as manufacturing relocated to lower labor cost regions offshore. This is especially important, because these services commonly known as "business processes" (BPs) are among the fastest growing job categories in the US (Goodman and Steadman 2002). Should these jobs begin to move offshore, a new tendency may be underway in the global economy that will be as important or more important than the relocation of manufacturing offshore, and might necessitate a rethinking of government policies across a wide spectrum.
- Topic:
- Economics, Globalization, and Industrial Policy
- Political Geography:
- United States, South Asia, and India
33166. The Spatial Distribution of Entrepeneurial Support Networks: Evidence from Semiconductor Initial Public Offerings from 1996-2000
- Author:
- Martin Kenney and Donald Patton
- Publication Date:
- 03-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Brookings Institution
- Abstract:
- Theory and recent research demonstrates that entrepreneurship is a spatially and socially embedded activity. In certain regions, dense support networks of institutions dedicated to assisting entrepreneurial start-ups have been established and a wide variety of authors have given credit to these networks for supporting regional entrepreneurship (Kenney and von Burg 1999; Saxenian 1994; Bahrami and Evans 2000). As Marshall (1890) recognized many, but not all, industries exhibit a strong clustering effect (see also, e.g., Storper and Walker 1988; Porter 1990; 1998). Research on these networks has been hampered by a lack of empirical data that contains spatial variables and identifies the relationship between various actors (i.e., venture capitalists, law firms and investment bankers) and the start-up firm. Thus research has been qualitative and anecdotal or when quantitative limited to certain industries usually biotechnology.
- Topic:
- Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Non-Governmental Organization
- Political Geography:
- United States
33167. Enron's Missed Opportunity: Enron's Refusal to Build a Collaborative Market Turned Bandwidth Trading Into a Disaster
- Author:
- Andrew Schwartz
- Publication Date:
- 02-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Brookings Institution
- Abstract:
- Why did Enron fail? The easy answer is that Enron was a fraud, a Ponzi scheme designed to enrich scoundrels. But beneath the off-balance sheet transactions and partnerships that have drawn such intense scrutiny, Enron's efforts to reduce complex products into tradable commodities represented one of the most promising ideas of the past twenty-five years. Enron's failure was due in part to a business strategy that regarded competitors as ruthless and uncompromising. That mentality led the company to reject the very real possibility that rivals could, working together, create the new markets that in turn would open up profit opportunities for all. Enron's brilliant vision of the New Economy didn't go far enough; it required a New Economy business model that emphasized cooperation among competitors.
- Topic:
- Economics, Emerging Markets, and International Trade and Finance
- Political Geography:
- United States
33168. Secrets or Shields to Share?: New Dilemmas for Dual Use Technology Development and the Quest for Military and Commercial Advantage in the Digital Age
- Author:
- Jay Stowsky
- Publication Date:
- 02-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- The Brookings Institution
- Abstract:
- For a brief period in the early 1990's the U.S. Department of Defense pursued an R policy that was explicitly “dual-use,” funding projects aimed at simultaneously developing both military and civilian applications of the same underlying technologies. The policy emerged from more than a decade of bipartisan agitation in Congress and segments of the military-industrial establishment, spurred by a shared belief that more advanced technologies now “spun on” from civilian to military applications than “spun off” in the other direction (US Department of Defense, Office of the Undersecretary for Acquisition, 1987; Gansler, 1989; Alic et al., 1992; Stowsky 1992, 1999). With the end of the Cold War and mushrooming budget deficits constraining defense spending, Pentagon planners saw dual-use development as a strategy for improving efficiency and lowering costs as well as enhancing quality by enabling the construction of sophisticated weapons systems off a more integrated civil-military technology base (US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1995; US Department of Defense, 1995).
- Topic:
- Defense Policy, Economics, and Science and Technology
- Political Geography:
- United States
33169. Executive Leadership and the Role of “Veto Players” in the United States and Germany
- Author:
- Ludger Helms
- Publication Date:
- 10-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- In recent comparative works on the constitutional structures of contemporary liberal democracies, the United States and Germany have been grouped together as examples of democratic systems with an exceptionally high degree of “institutional pluralism”. In other typologies both countries have even been classified as “semisovereign democracies”. Whereas such classifications are of some use, especially in the field of public policy research, they fail to pay reasonable attention to the fundamental difference between parliamentary and presidential government that dominated the older literature on comparative political systems. As the comparative assessments offered in this paper suggest, the difference between parliamentary government and presidential government does not only constitute very different conditions of executive leadership in the core executive territory and at the level of executive-legislative relations, but has also a strong impact on the role and performance of the various “veto players” that characterize the political systems of the United States and Germany, and which are at the center of this paper.
- Topic:
- Government and Politics
- Political Geography:
- United States, Europe, and Germany
33170. European Corporate Governance Reform and the German Party Paradox
- Author:
- Martin Höpner
- Publication Date:
- 08-2003
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
- Abstract:
- This paper addresses the current discussion on links between party politics and production regimes. Why do German Social Democrats opt for more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU although, in terms of the distributional outcomes of such reforms, one would expect the situation to be reversed? I divide my analysis into three stages. First, I use the European Parliament's crucial vote on the European takeover directive in July 2001 as a test case to show that the left-right dimension does indeed matter in corporate governance reform, beside cross-class and cross-party nation-based interests. In a second step, by analyzing the party positions in the main German corporate governance reforms in the 1990s, I show that the SPD and the CDU behave “paradoxically” in the sense that the SPD favored more corporate governance liberalization than the CDU, which protected the institutions of “Rhenish,” “organized” capitalism. This constellation occurred in the discussions on company disclosure, management accountability, the power of banks, network dissolution, and takeover regulation. Third, I offer two explanations for this paradoxical party behavior. The first explanation concerns the historical conversion of ideas. I show that trade unions and Social Democrats favored a high degree of capital organization in the Weimar Republic, but this ideological position was driven in new directions at two watersheds: one in the late 1940s, the other in the late 1950s. My second explanation lies in the importance of conflicts over managerial control, in which both employees and minority shareholders oppose managers, and in which increased shareholder power strengthens the position of works councils.
- Topic:
- Democratization, Government, and Politics
- Political Geography:
- Europe and Germany