Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries draws out the underlying economics in business history by focusing on learning processes and the development of competitively valuable asymmetries. The essays show that organizations, like people, learn that this process can be organized more or less effectively, which can have major implications for how competition works. The first three essays in this volume explore techniques firms have used to both manage information to create valuable asymmetries and to otherwise suppress unwelcome competition. The next three focus on the ways in which firms have built special capabilities over time, capabilities that have been both sources of competitive advantage and resistance to new opportunities. The last two extend the notion of learning from the level of firms to that of nations. The collection as a whole builds on the previous two volumes to make the connection between information structure and product market outcomes in business history.
Technology is constantly changing our world, leading to more efficient production. In the past, technological advancements dramatically increased wages, but during the last three decades, the median wage has remained stagnant. Many of today's machines have taken over the work of humans, destroying old jobs while increasing profits for business owners and raising the possibility of ever-widening economic inequality. Author James Bessen argues that avoiding this fate will require unique policies to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to implement the rapidly evolving technologies. At present this technical knowledge is mostly unstandardized and difficult to acquire, learned through job experience rather than in classrooms. Nor do current labor markets generally provide strong incentives for learning on the job. Basing his analysis on intensive research into economic history as well as today's labor markets, the author explores why the benefits of technology take years, sometimes decades, to emerge. Although the right policies can hasten this process, policy has moved in the wrong direction in recent decades, protecting politically influential interests to the detriment of emerging technologies and broadly shared prosperity.
How can today's workforce keep pace with an increasingly competitive global economy? As new technologies rapidly transform the workplace, employee requirements are changing and workers must adapt to different working conditions. This volume compares new evidence on the returns from worker training in the United States, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Norway, and the Netherlands. The authors focus on Germany's widespread, formal apprenticeship programs; the U.S. system of learning-by-doing; Japan's low employee turnover and extensive company training; and Britain's government-led and school-based training schemes. The evidence shows that, overall, training in the workplace is more effective than training in schools. Moreover, even when U.S. firms spend as much on training as other countries do, their employees may still be less skilled than workers in Europe or Japan. Training and the Private Sector points to training programs in Germany, Japan, and other developed countries as models for creating a workforce in the United States that can compete more successfully in today's economy.
Introduction to Business covers the scope and sequence of most introductory business courses. The book provides detailed explanations in the context of core themes such as customer satisfaction, ethics, entrepreneurship, global business, and managing change. Introduction to Business includes hundreds of current business examples from a range of industries and geographic locations, which feature a variety of individuals. The outcome is a balanced approach to the theory and application of business concepts, with attention to the knowledge and skills necessary for student success in this course and beyond. This is an adaptation of Introduction to Business by OpenStax. You can access the textbook as pdf for free at openstax.org. Minor editorial changes were made to ensure a better ebook reading experience. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Economic and social progress requires a diverse ecosystem of firms that play complementary roles. Making It Big: Why Developing Countries Need More Large Firms constitutes one of the most up-to-date assessments of how large firms are created in low- and middle-income countries and their role in development. It argues that large firms advance a range of development objectives in ways that other firms do not: large firms are more likely to innovate, export, and offer training and are more likely to adopt international standards of quality, among other contributions. Their particularities are closely associated with productivity advantages and translate into improved outcomes not only for their owners but also for their workers and for smaller enterprises in their value chains. The challenge for economic development, however, is that production does not reach economic scale in low- and middle-income countries. Why are large firms scarcer in developing countries? Drawing on a rare set of data from public and private sources, as well as proprietary data from the International Finance Corporation and case studies, this book shows that large firms are often born large—or with the attributes of largeness. In other words, what is distinct about them is often in place from day one of their operations. To fill the “missing top†? of the firm-size distribution with additional large firms, governments should support the creation of such firms by opening markets to greater competition. In low-income countries, this objective can be achieved through simple policy reorientation, such as breaking oligopolies, removing unnecessary restrictions to international trade and investment, and establishing strong rules to prevent the abuse of market power. Governments should also strive to ensure that private actors have the skills, technology, intelligence, infrastructure, and finance they need to create large ventures. Additionally, they should actively work to spread the benefits from production at scale across the largest possible number of market participants. This book seeks to bring frontier thinking and evidence on the role and origins of large firms to a wide range of readers, including academics, development practitioners and policy makers.
As globalization explodes, so has international business scholarship. This second edition of the Oxford Handbook of International Business synthesises all the relevant literature of the last 40 years in 28 original chapters by the world's most distinguished scholars. Reflecting the changes and development in the field since the first edition this new edition has a changed structure, all the chapters have been updated to take account of the latest scholarship, and five new chapters freshly written. The Handbook is divided into six major sections, providing comprehensive coverage of the following areas: · History and Theory of the Multinational Enterprise · The Political and Regulatory Environment · Strategy and International Management · Managing the MNE · Area Studies · Methodological Issues These state of the art literature reviews will be invaluable references for students in business schools, social sciences, law, and area studies.
Why is catch-up rare and why have some nations succeeded while others failed? This volumes examines how nations learn by reviewing key structural and contingent factors that contribute to dynamic learning and catch-up.
"The contributors explore two main themes: the challenge of remaining innovative and the necessity of managing institutional boundaries in doing so. The book is organized into four parts, which move outward from individual firms; to networks or clusters of firms; to consultants and other intermediaries in the private economy who operate outside of the firms themselves; and finally to government institutions and politics. "--Editor.
Seventeen in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2020 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity.
Based on evidence from Asia and Latin America, this book explores the role of innovative firms in emerging markets, and their contributor to growth, development, and knowledge transfer.
