This chapter examines the spread of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in South Australia. It starts by assessing South Australia’s leading role in the adoption of democratic reforms in the nineteenth century. It then suggests that there is not the same enthusiasm for the more contemporary reforms found in the implementation of e-democracy. The chapter draws from an appraisal of ...

We examines the legal penalties imposed on Dutch listed firms targeted by competition authorities from 1998-2008. By using event study techniques we estimate the impact of the main events in an antitrust investigation on a firm’s stock market value and analyse the causes of the value impacts. The first announcement of an antitrust investigation has a statistically significant effect on the firm...

Article history: Received 3 March 2009 Received in revised form 14 July 2009 Accepted 3 September 2009 Available online 14 October 2009 Tariffs and anti-dumping duties are two important tools used to protect industries from foreign competition and to generate revenue. While the two tools have been studied extensively in separate contexts, little is known about their comparative effects. This pa...

We study the impact of special interest politics on competition for a multinational between two countries. We show that whether a country will win this competition is determined by both economic factors, which include for which country foreign direct investment will bring more national welfare, and in which country the multinational will make more profits; and to what extent each country’s gove...

Information security education and training needs to be valued and assessed from various perspectives. This study presents two differing viewpoints from which such an evaluation can be perceived – those of the individual and the organisation. Some sorts of profits are sought after by each of the two, although this is expressed and hence valued differently depending on the perspective taken. We ...

A large share of the poor in developing countries run small enterprises, often earning low incomes. This paper explores whether the poor performance of businesses can be explained by a lack of basic business skills. We randomized the offer of a free, 48-hour business skills course to female entrepreneurs in rural Mexico. We find that those assigned to treatment earn higher profits, have larger ...

This paper has presented research in progress concerning the contribution of target costing approach to achievement competitive price in the Iraqi firm. The title of the paper is one of the subjects that get large concerns in the finance and business world in the present time. That is because many competitive firms have appeared in the regional and global markets and the rapid changes that cove...

We show that the presence of sufficiently significant switching costs, which are increasing in the degree of product differentiation, generates an equilibrium configuration with maximal differentiation within the framework of a Hotelling model with linear transportation costs. The equilibrium with maximal differentiation offers a formalization of the idea that competing firms have noncooperativ...

This paper is adapted from a speech given by James Bond at the International Energy Agency, 14 May 1998. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organisations, or to members of its board of executive directors or the countries they represent. The long-term price of oil should rest near its long ru...

This is a theoretical paper in which we attempt to present an economic and sociological theory of entrepreneurship. We start from Schumpeter’s idea in Theory of Economic Development that the economy can be conceptualized as a combination and innovations as new combinations. Schumpeter also spoke of resistance to entrepreneurship. By linking the ideas of combination and resistance, we are in a p...