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How to Negotiate under Co-decision in the EU: Reforming Trilogues and First-Reading Agreements
No full textEU Think Tanks: Innovation, Independence and Impact
No full textThink tanks have become taken-for-granted actors in contemporary governance, both inside but also beyond nation-states. This dissertation tackles the research puzzles of innovativeness, independence and impact for policy institutes operating at EU level. It argues that EU think tanks such as Bruegel or Centre for European Policy Studies inhabit a transnational organizational field, clustered in Brussels but extended beyond. What is the novelty behind their organizational forms and practices? Which leeway of action do they have in practice, given their funding and human resource situations? And what is the significance of EU think tanks, of their networks and hybrid experts? Against the backdrop of existing studies, these questions are empirically explored in a multi-method research effort: a primary databases on 85 EU think tanks; in-depth data on 39 Brussels-based institutes’ financial, human and symbolic resources; 80 semi-structured expert interviews with EU think tank leaders and core constituencies; network analysis based on biographical data from 2,080 EU think tank professionals; and standardized survey results from 671 randomly sampled European Commission officials asked how they use EU think tanks (24 percent response rate) are presented. EU think tanks, I show, are prime study sites for organizational institutionalist theory. After mapping the present field, its historical emergence and expansion is retraced to discover why and how transnational think tanks organize and behave as they do. At the crossroads of academia, politics, business and media, Brussels institutes’ resource dependencies and think tankers’ backgrounds are scrutinized, as are their sectoral and organizational ties, their roles and professional identity. In filling these empirical and knowledge gaps, conceptual and methodological frontiers of think tank research are pushed, namely on their originality, networks or socio-structural effects - reviving the research agenda on transnational think tanks, upgrading previous accounts of EU think tanks, aligning EU- with the latest advances in US scholarship, and linking the struggle of think tanks – as knowledge-intensive civil society actors in complex task environments – for survival, for legitimacy and impact to institutionalist perspectives
Trade and innovation in services: Evidence from a developing economy
No full textStudies on innovation and international trade have traditionally focused on manufacturing because neither was seen as important for services. Moreover, the few existing studies on services focus only on industrial countries, although in many developing countries services are already the largest sector in the economy and an important determinant of overall productivity growth. Using a recent firm-level innovation survey for Chile to compare the manufacturing and "tradable" services sector, this paper reveals some novel patterns. First, although services firms have on average a much lower propensity to export than manufacturing firms, services exports are less dominated by large firms and tend to be more skill intensive than manufacturing exports. Second, services firms appear to be as innovative as -- and in some cases more innovative than -- manufacturing firms, in terms of both inputs and outputs of "technological" innovative activity, although services innovations more often take a "non-technological" form. Third, services exporters (like manufacturing exporters) tend to be significantly more innovative than non-exporters, with a wider gap for innovations close to the global technological frontier. These findings suggest that the growing faith in services as a source of both trade and innovative dynamism may not be misplaced
Success and failure of African exporters
No full textUsing a new dataset with transaction-level export data from four African countries (Malawi, Mali, Senegal and Tanzania), this paper explores the determinants of success upon entry into export markets, defined as survival beyond the first year at the firm-product-destination level. We find that the probability of success rises with the number of same-country firms exporting the same product to the same destination, suggesting the existence of cross-firm externalities. We explore several conjectures on the determinants of these externalities and provide evidence suggestive of information spillovers, possibly mediated through the banking system
Decomposing firm-level productivity growth and assessing its determinants: evidence from the Americas
No full textThis paper provides novel empirical evidence on productivity growth in the manufacturing sector in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Relying on plant-level data, we first decompose productivity and productivity growth into plant-level growth and market allocation forces. While the average productivity of the survivors is higher than the overall contribution of reallocation forces, during recessions the inverse is true and reallocation gives a positive, albeit small, contribution to aggregate productivity growth. Next we analyze how policy measures can determine allocative efficiency levels and growth, and find important scope for action on education, financial regulation, and structural reforms
Closing the Gender Gap – Personal Initiative Training and Female Business Performance
No full textWhile female entrepreneurship has important impacts on economic development, female-owned businesses obtain lower profits and lower growth rates than male- owned businesses. We conduct a randomized controlled field experiment with 1196 entrepreneurs in Lomé, Togo, to determine whether personal initiative training constitutes a way to enhance female entrepreneurs’ business success and to close this gender gap. Basing our argumentation on social role theory and the process model of entrepreneurial action, we argue that because of their social gender roles female entrepreneurs perceive that entrepreneurial action incurs higher risks and lower returns. We hypothesize that personal initiative training leads female entrepreneurs to decrease perceived risks of entrepreneurial action by increasing their entrepreneurial self-efficacy and error competence and to increase their perceived returns of entrepreneurial action by increasing entrepreneurial passion, which ultimately leads to female entrepreneurs’ business success. The results largely support our hypotheses. This study contributes to the literature on the gender gap in entrepreneurship and has important implications for entrepreneurial training interventions
Teaching personal initiative beats traditional training in boosting small business in West Africa
No full textStandard business training programs aim to boost the incomes of the millions of self-employed business owners in developing countries by teaching basic financial and marketing practices, yet the impacts of such programs are mixed. We tested whether a psychology-based personal initiative training approach, which teaches a proactive mindset and focuses on entrepreneurial behaviors, could have more success. A randomized controlled trial in Togo assigned microenterprise owners to a control group (n = 500), a leading business training program (n = 500), or a personal initiative training program (n = 500). Four follow-up surveys tracked outcomes for firms over 2 years and showed that personal initiative training increased firm profits by 30%, compared with a statistically insignificant 11% for traditional training. The training is cost-effective, paying for itself within 1 year
Die vielen Motoren der Berufsbildung
No full textDie Organisationen der Arbeitswelt sind für die Berufsbildung unverzichtbar – sie sind die Motoren der Berufsbildung. Das vom SBFI unterstützte Leading House GOVPET: Governance in Vocational and Professional Education and Training hat nun erstmals umfassende Daten über die OdA erhoben und ausgewertet. Sie zeigt, dass sich seit der Berufsbildungsreform von 2002 die Anzahl spezialisierter Berufsbildungsorganisationen stark erhöht hat. Diese vereinen oftmals heterogene Mitglieder oder Träger und unterschieden sich in vielen Aspekten von traditionellen Unternehmensverbänden, Berufsverbänden und Arbeitnehmerverbänden
