Globalization offers opportunities for workers to achieve higher levels of economic prosperity. Unfortunately, it also causes job insecurity for specific groups in certain sectors. This is particularly so in the Malaysian manufacturing sector which is actively fragmenting its production structure. There are prior concerns that some workers in certain labour-intensive segments of the production ...

Manufacturing firms operating in a post-industrial environment have customers who demand specialized products and short lead times. To meet these needs, organizations are adopting time-based manufacturing practices to cut time and improve performance. The central tenet of this study is that time-based manufacturers employ traditional work system practices including standardization, formalizatio...

In this paper the findings of an empirical study concerning the innovation determinants in manufacturing firms is presented. The empirical study covers 184 manufacturing firms located in the Northern Marmara region of Turkey. The types of innovation considered here are product, process, marketing and organizational innovations. An extensive literature survey on innovation determinants is provid...

4 Non-technical Summary 5

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are considered as an engine for economic growth all over the world and especially for developing countries. During the past decade, new product development (NPD) has increasingly been recognized as a critical factor in ensuring the continued survival of SMEs. On the other hand, the rapid rate of market and technological changes has accelerated in the past dec...

This paper studies the export behavior of a panel of Indian manufacturing firms for a period of 17 years from 1990 to 2006. Specifically, we look at whether exporting firms differ from domestic firms in size, productivity, capital intensity, remuneration levels, etc. We find that exporters systematically outperform non-exporters over a number of characteristics. We find evidence of “self-select...

Substantial increases in retail concentration (particularly in Europe) raise concerns about the welfare implications for consumers. In a formal model, we argue that retailer market power reduces upstream firms incentives to introduce new products. On the basis of a survey of firms in German food manufacturing, the results of a negative binomial regression model supports the proposition of a det...

Theoretical models have been ambiguous on the relationship between industry competition and inventory holdings of manufacturing firms. Facing competition, on the one hand, firms may desire to hold more inventory to avoid losing sales to competitors; on the other hand, firms strive to improve inventory turns to control costs and stay competitive. Using U.S. Census data on manufacturing industrie...

The increasing dominance of Asian manufacturing firms in the global economy has raised an important issue: whether these firms’ superior manufacturing performance is caused by their management control systems, the national culture of their employees, or the interaction of these two factors. This experimental study provides a direct test of the effects of national culture and management control ...

Does trade liberalization foster total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the manufacturing sector? Does sectoral trade orientation determine sectoral TFP levels and growth rates? These questions are addressed using pooled pre-and post-liberalization panel data from Cameroonian firms of eight manufacturing industries. A single production function for the whole manufacturing sector is estimated...