This book addresses the central challenge facing rich countries: how to ensure that ordinary working families see their living standards and the prospects for their children improve rather than stagnate over time. It presents the findings from a comprehensive analysis of performance over recent decades across the rich countries of the OECD, in terms of real income growth around and below the middle. It relates this performance to overall economic growth, exploring why these often diverge substantially, and to the different models of capitalism or economic growth embedded in different countries. In-depth comparative and UK-focused analyses also focus on wages and the labour market and on the role of redistribution. Going beyond income, other indicators and aspects of living standards are also incorporated including non-monetary indicators of deprivation and financial strain, wealth and its distribution, and intergenerational mobility. By looking across this broad canvas, the book teases out how ordinary households have fared in recent decades in these critically important respects, and how that should inform the quest for inclusive growth and prosperity.
This chapter discusses the role of energy in economic development, the transformation of energy markets, trade in energy resources themselves, and the geopolitical dynamics that result. The transformation of energy markets and their expansion via trade can help or hinder development, depending on the processes behind them and how stakeholders interact. The availability of renewable, climate-friendly sources of energy, domestically and internationally, means that there is no inherent trade-off between economic growth and the use of fossil fuels. The existence of economic, political, social, and geopolitical adjustment costs means that the expansion of international energy markets to incorporate alternatives to oil and coal is a complex balance of environmental trade-offs with no solutions completely free of negative impact risk. An understanding of the supply of and demand for energy must incorporate the institutional context within which they occur, as well as the social and political dynamics of their setting.
This paper discusses the use of contracts as the prevailing coordination mechanism in IS innovation processes in which an external provider is appointed. Drawing from a theoretical framework founded on systems theory, structuration theory and neo-institutionalism, this paper argues that IS innovations take place in a relatively weak institutional context, which accounts for the generalised preference for contracts over other coordination mechanisms (i.e. trust) as a means of governing interorganizational exchange. Based on secondary data, two constituent elements of the institutional context of IS innovations are analysed, namely the institutional aspects of the IT industry and the legal system. Our argument has both academic and practical implications. Academic implications emphasize the importance of acknowledging the institutional dimension of contracts and trust. Regarding practice, the need for a better understanding of the role of contracts is suggested.
A limitation in the downsizing literature is its lack of attention on how firms’ institutional context interacts with firm’s internal drivers of employee downsizing. This study examines the firm performance - employee downsizing relationship in 1,747 firms across 35 countries over three years and demonstrates that while this relationship is similar among firms across countries, its magnitude varies across countries, and that the cultural dimensions of in-group collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance help explain this variance. Implications from these findings and future directions for employee downsizing research and practice are discussed.
Controlling environmental pollution: dynamic role of fiscal decentralization in CO2 emission in Asian economies