BACKGROUND Social scientists have suggested that cultural diversity in a nation leads to societal instability. However, societal instability may be affected not only by within-nation or alpha diversity, but also diversity between a nation and its neighbours or beta diversity. It is also necessary to distinguish different domains of diversity, namely linguistic, ethnic and religious, and to dist...

Confidence in macro-economic forecasting has periodically been punctured by episodes of economic turbulence and concomitant predictive failure. The poor performance in predicting the consumer boom in the late 1980’s, and the depth and duration of the recession in the 1990’s, can be viewed as merely the latest examples in a catalogue of failures, with noteworthy antecedents including the under-p...

This study looks at rural livelihoods in semi-arid and arid rural areas in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The decade-long socio-economic recession coupled with recurrent droughts presented a myriad of challenges to rural households in Zimbabwe. Taking Mudzi, a rural district in Zimbabwe, as a case study, the study explores the livelihood conditions and how households have managed to organize and cluster t...

Economic activity can be regarded as an evolutionary process governed by the 2 law of thermodynamics. The universal law, when formulated locally as an equation of motion, reveals that a growing economy develops functional machinery and organizes hierarchically in such a way as to tend to equalize energy density differences within the economy and in respect to the surroundings it is open to. Div...

This paper examines the impact of industrial policy on capital structure based on a partial adjustment model of capital structure that incorporates financial flexibility, macroeconomic conditions, economic development as well as firm-level factors. The issue is investigated in the context of Taiwan where industrial policy is widely considered to have played a strategic role in its economic succ...

The need for economic analysis for the design and implementation of efficient water resources management policies is well documented in the economics literature. This need is also emphasised in the European Union's recent Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC), and is relevant to the objectives of Euro-limpacs, an EU funded project which inter alia, aims to provide a decision-support system for...

Until recently, the geographic element of concentrations of economic activity and knowledge spillovers was almost completely disregarded by economic theory. Although space is a central concept in theories in the field of geography, geographers have not attached great value to technology as a motivating factor for clustering of economic activity. A pooled market of skilled labour and the availab...