China’s increased trade with and investment in Africa has boosted the continent’s growth rate but has also generated considerable controversy. In this paper we investigate China’s outward direct investment (ODI) in Africa using macro and micro data. The aggregate data on China’s ODI in African countries reveal that China’s share of the stock of foreign investment is small, though growing rapidl...

In this essay the mainstream story about how resources are allocated in a market economy is challenged. The conventional view is that a change in relative prices leads to a change in the composition of output as a result of a reallocation of the stock of primary factors of production (land, labor and capital). No investment is required. This is possible, however, only if the primary factors of ...

Information system (IS) is defined as a system of people, data records and activities that process the data and information in an organization, and it includes the organization's manual and automated processes. The aim of information systems (IS) is to process data collected in the information for their transformation into knowledge for various purposes. The term “human resources” is used since...

Business groups are important in many countries. Several studies have looked at the performance and behavior of firms that are members of a business group. This paper looks at the issue in more detail and tries to answer some related questions. First, do business groups really have internal capital markets and do they provide efficient resource allocation (in a view of the controlling sharehold...

The resource-based view of the enterprises generally attributes superior financial performance to organizational resources and capabilities. Firm-specific IT resources are classified as IT infrastructure, human-IT resources, and ITenabled intangibles. This paper empirically examines the association between IT investment and firm performance. Results indicate that firms with high levels of IT in...

Maternal effects are ubiquitous in nature and affect a wide range of offspring phenotypes. Recent research suggests that maternal effects also contribute to ageing, but the theoretical basis for these observations is poorly understood. Here we develop a simple model to derive expectations for (i) if maternal effects on ageing evolve; (ii) the strength of maternal effects on ageing relative to d...

Indonesia has around 40% or the world‟s capacity for geothermal energy production, yet lags behind neighbors, such as the Philippines, in developing this resource. There are ambitious plans to increase production to nearly 6GW and then to 9.5GW, with the bulk of the investment coming from the private sector. With Chevron being the only overseas company currently investing in Indonesia, this pap...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software systems integrate key business and management processes within and beyond a firm’s boundary. Although the business value of ERP implementations has been extensively debated in trade periodicals in the form of qualitative discussion or detailed case studies, there is little large-sample statistical evidence on whether the benefits of ERP implementation...

Industry has been upgrading its production processes through ecoinnovation combining environmental and economic benefits, thus reducing some resource burdens which otherwise lie outside economic accounting. Some companies have shown interest in evaluating investment options for resource burdens and total value added across a whole-system value chain. Our EC research project developed a method f...