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Plowing the Sea: Nurturing the Hidden Sources of Growth in the Developing World
Michael Fairbanks , and Stace Lindsay Manufacturer: Harvard Business School Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0875847617 |
Book Description
The authors address the issue of competitiveness in the developing world. Using the Colombian cut-flower industry as a backdrop (and drawing from a variety of industries in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Peru), they identify seven core elements of the failed model of competitiveness in which much of the developing world appears to be trapped. These patterns include an over-reliance on basic production factors and natural resources, inadequate supplier and distributor relationships, and insufficient tools for performing customer and competitor analysis. In a challenge to conventional economic development theory and practice, Fairbanks and Lindsay propose an action framework, emphasizing strategic and microeconomic approaches to growth, based on a partnership between the public and private sectors. The authors argue that only by identifying common goals, committing to a long-term perspective, investing in human resources, and assigning new leadership roles for businesspeople and policymakers alike, can developing countries break out of the vicious cycle of underperformance.Customer Reviews:
Making True Revolution with Success.......2001-05-06
As stated on the first page, Simon Bolivar's epitaph reads, "Whomsoever has worked for a revolution has plowed the sea." Meant by Bolivar to convey despair and the heartbreak of failure, these words are transformed by the authors who have maintained a sense of optimism and good humor throughout their own experiences in the rugged world of transformation consulting. The Introduction, the book's first substantive chapter, is a cautionary tale of the Colombian flower industry, that prospered globally for decades, but later declined and has not yet recovered. Through this "case", seven patterns of firm behavior that inhibits economic agility are identified. The first seven chapters of the book elaborate on these patterns, wonderfully illustrated with other cases (Peru's fishmeal and Bolivia's soy industry, for example). The authors describe a sort of bratty adolescence that traps companies and industries in emerging economies. Chapters 8 and 9 are a fine application of micro principles around the theme of strategy, again focused on the firm. The authors advocate the old-fashion but culture shattering step of focusing on customers, costs and competitors in order to guide and inform decisions about strategy, positioning and productivity. They offer information and learning as a way for firms to experience a "coming of age" in the competitive sense. The role of government in promoting economic transformation is not touched until Chapter 10, two-thirds of the way through the book. Chapter 10-12 are probably where readers will find the book a bit frustrating and repetitive. Not enough time is spent defining what the authors mean by "steering mechanisms". This is undoubtedly because the book assumes the reader already knows alot. Chapter 10 mostly illustrates shifts in steering mechanisms using the case of a wall-bouncing Bolivian government. Chapter 11 is almost singular for business books - there is an actual discussion of research and the presentation of data. It is a practitioners discussion, however, not an academic one, so potential readers can relax.
B-school vets and other warriors will recognize alot here as an application of Michael Porter's "diamond model" from his Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990) and indeed, Porter writes the Foreword. The authors have extended the "diamond's" scope and reach, but their own model is not apparent until the end, Chapter 13. Their model for bringing about industry level change appears in the book's final four pages.
This book's protagonists are leaders in firms, industries and government, as well as their mindsets and actions. The word "leader" might be interpreted by some readers as "government" but this is not accurate. This book does do something extraordinary, however. On one hand, it is a blood and guts how-to on diagnosing and fixing the self-defeating decision making of firms in the emerging world. On the other hand, the conceptual framework within which political economics is practiced, debated, planned and evaluated is updated to reflect the fact that competitive advantage, not absolute or comparative advantage will increasingly referee the win/loss columns in the global economy. The context of political economics is addressed entirely without reference to ideology. This might strike some as soulless or arrogant. It might strike others as about time.
The writing in this book reflects a highly integrated understanding of business and economics, as well as intimate and affectionate knowledge of Latin American business and classical culture. Also apparent are the authors very fine liberal arts backgrounds, years on the road and a sense of mirth. Finally, these authors clearly know their work and thinking is culture altering and socially revolutionary. Their obvious goal is to realize the dream of Bolivar by capturing the minds of today's business, industry and government trend setters. While I would say their hearts are definitely not bleeding nor on their sleeves, their drive and focus are more uplifting than anything I have read or seen in a long time.
Insightful but too wordy.......2000-05-09
The book falls short on readability. The authors could have conveyed the same message in half the pages. Often, I found myself skipping entire paragraphs and sections to find the ideas burried in all the verbiage.
I still rate it a 4 because of the importance of the topic covered and the insights contained in the book.
A refreshing guide to strategy in third world economies.......1999-03-09
terrific read.......1999-03-07
The book gives anyone from an emerging country some hope that they too can compete in this quickly advancing world.
Cheers
Victor
terrific read.......1999-03-07
The book gives anyone from an emerging country some hope that they too can compete in this quickly advancing world.
Cheers
Victor
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Sources of Chinese Economic Growth, 1978-1996 (Studies on Contemporary China)
Chris Bramall Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0198296975 |
Book Description
This analysis of the political economy of growth in the era of Deng Xiaoping takes issue with the growth-accounting methodologies and market-centred explanations which characterize so much of the literature on transition-era China. By adopting an approach which echoes the pioneering work of Chalmers Johnson, Alice Amsden, and Robert Wade on other East Asian Economies, and which makes full use of the rich statistical materials that have become available since 1978, this book shows that Chinese growth was driven by a combination of state-led industrial policy and the favourable infrastructural legacies of the Maoist era. And in giving due weight to the sheer complexity of the growth process by looking in detail at the experience of four very different Chinese regions, it avoids over-simplistic macroeconomic generalization. Nevertheless, even this type of approach is inadequate, because it fails to explain why industrial policy has been so much more successful in China than in other countries. This book therefore goes beyond the 'development state' approach to argue that state autonomy in China reflected the remarkably equal distribution of income and wealth at the end of the 1970s and, paradoxically, the destruction of party structures and institutions during the Cultural Revolution. The policy implications are stark. The Chinese experience demonstrates that industrial policy and state spending on physical and social infrastructure can produce rich rewards; conversely, slavish reliance on foreign direct investment and trade are likely to limit the pace of growth. But attempts to replicate China's success in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia will fail because their governments will not resist rent-seeking by classes and interest groups. Moreover, as the state becomes weaker in the wake of the re-emergence of a powerful capitalist class, even Chinese growth may prove unsustainable.Customer Reviews:
A leftist growth theory by a sociologist.......2006-06-14
Demonstrates how the State caused China's growth.......2004-09-06
Brilliant study of the conditions of growth.......2003-12-02
Bramall argues that a combination of state-led industrial policy and the favourable infrastructural legacies of the socialist era produced China's growth. He shows that industrialisation was the key source of growth, and that foreign trade and foreign investment were less important than usually thought.
He reminds us of the great achievements of the Chinese people under socialism - the spreading of industry, the tripling, between 1952 and 1978, of the area of China that was irrigated, the consistently high investment in the countryside, the development of a transport network, and the great improvements in health and education. He notes that in the 1950s and 1960s China was forced to adopt a strategy of defensive industrialisation in the face of threats from both the USA and the USSR.
In his general discussion of the conditions of economic growth, he shows that, "contra Nairn, Anderson, and others, the British problem is capitalism itself, not the persistence of pre-capitalist structures and institutions." Capitalist rapacity has always held back manufacturing industry, and is now destroying it. Britain is too capitalist, not too feudal. The `left', like Thatcher and the European Union, attack the wrong targets - the Constitution, the monarchy, the House of Lords, the landed gentry.
Bramall shows that, in general, inequalities of property and wealth are the real obstacle to growth and improved living standards. The owners of capital, the ruling class, block economic progress. He concludes, "A radical and effective land reform coupled with an assault on private industrial capital are necessary preconditions for the implementation of successful state intervention in a developing country" - not only in developing countries! To achieve these goals, "for most countries, there is probably no alternative but the seizure of power by armed struggle."
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Productivity in the U.S. Services Sector: New Sources of Economic Growth
Jack E. Triplett , and Barry P. Bosworth Manufacturer: Brookings Institution Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0815783353 |
Book Description
The services industrieswhich include jobs ranging from flipping hamburgers to providing investment advicecan no longer be characterized, as they have in the past, as a stagnant sector marked by low productivity growth. They have emerged as one of the most dynamic and innovative segments of the U.S. economy, now accounting for more than three-quarters of gross domestic product. During the 1990s, 19 million additional jobs were created in this sector, while growth was stagnant in the goods-producing sector.Here, Jack Triplett and Barry Bosworth analyze services sector productivity, demonstrating that fundamental changes have taken place in this sector of the U.S. economy. They show that growth in the services industries fueled the post-1995 expansion in the U.S. productivity and assess the role of information technology in transforming and accelerating services productivity. In addition to their findings for the services sector as a whole, they include separate chapters for a diverse range of industries within the sector, including transportation and communications, wholesale and retail trade, and finance and insurance.
The authors also examine productivity measurement issues, chiefly statistical methods for measuring services industry output. They highlight the importance of making improvements within the U.S. statistical system to provide the more accurate and relevant measures essential for analyzing productivity and economic growth.
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Economic Prospects of the CIS: Sources of Long Term Growth
Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Publishing ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 1843766159 |
Book Description
This book brings together ten original studies on the transition and growth experience and the foundations for long-term growth of the newly independent states created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union.Beginning with an overview of the common pre-1992 background and comparative information on the post-1992 performance of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, the authors continue by reviewing the Soviet background and post-independence experience. They then emphasize both the uniformity and diversity of the twelve CIS countries' recent history. The problem of explaining economic growth in transition economies is also explored, and individual in-depth country studies are presented.
The contributors to the book are a combination of in-country researchers with in-depth local knowledge and access to data, and international economists with technical expertise and experience of long-term growth in other countries. This approach ensures the book's appeal to academics and researchers of economic growth, transition and comparative economics. Economists assigned to the region or any individual CIS country will find the analysis invaluable.
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Agricultural Productivity: Measurement and Sources of Growth (Studies in Productivity and Efficiency)
Manufacturer: Springer ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0792376226 |
Book Description
Agricultural Productivity: Measurement and Sources of Growth addresses measurement issues and techniques in agricultural productivity analysis, applying those techniques to recently published data sets for American agriculture. The data sets are used to estimate and explain state level productivity and efficiency differences, and to test different approaches to productivity measurement. The rise in agricultural productivity is the single most important source of economic growth in the U.S. farm sector, and the rate of productivity growth is estimated to be higher in agriculture than in the non-farm sector. It is important to understand productivity sources and to measure its growth properly, including the effects of environmental externalities. Both the methods and the data can be accessed by economists at the state level to conduct analyses for their own states. In a sense, although not explicitly, the book provides a guide to using the productivity data available on the website of the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Economic Research Service. It should be of interest to a broad spectrum of professionals in academia, the government, and the private sector.
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The Clean Tech Revolution: The Next Big Growth and Investment Opportunity
Ron Pernick , and Clint Wilder Manufacturer: Collins ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 006089623X Release Date: 2007-06-12 |
Book Description
When industry giants such as GE, Toyota, and Sharp and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are making multibillion-dollar investments in clean technology, the message is clear. Developing clean technologies is no longer a social issue championed by environmentalists; it's a moneymaking enterprise moving solidly into the business mainstream. In fact, as the economy faces unprecedented challenges from high energy prices, resource shortages, and global environmental and security threats, clean tech—technologies designed to provide superior performance at a lower cost while creating significantly less waste than conventional offerings—promises to be the next engine of economic growth.
In The Clean Tech Revolution, authors Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder identify the major forces that have pushed clean tech from back-to-the-earth utopian dream to its current revolution among the inner circles of corporate boardrooms, on Wall Street trading floors, and in government offices around the globe. By highlighting eight major clean-tech sectors—solar energy, wind power, biofuels and biomaterials, green buildings, personal transportation, the smart grid, mobile applications, and water filtration—they uncover how investors, entrepreneurs, and individuals can profit from this next wave of technological innovation. Pernick and Wilder shine the spotlight on the winners among technologies, companies, and regions that are likely to reap the greatest benefits from clean tech—and they show you why the time to act is now.
Groundbreaking and authoritative, The Clean Tech Revolution is the must-read book to understand and profit from the clean technologies that are reshaping our fast-changing world.
Customer Reviews:
A recommended pick for business and public lending libraries alike........2007-10-18
essential investment info.......2007-08-23
Great ideas for investors who want to make money AND protect the planet.......2007-08-16
Fantastic Book.......2007-08-06
The past, present, and future of Clean Tech and the companies and cities that are leading the way.......2007-07-29
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Emerging Patterns of Innovation: Sources of Japan's Technological Edge (The Management of Innovation and Change)
Fumio Kodama Manufacturer: Harvard Business School Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0875844375 |
Book Description
The nature of technological innovation is such that no company or nation can remain dominant forever. What is more, according to Fumio Kodama, we are entering an unprecedented age of mutual learning. In order to leverage our collective knowledge, we must create a common language to describe the innovation process. Kodama makes an invaluable contribution to that learning in Emerging Patterns of Innovation, in which he applies rigorous scientific measurement, historical perspective, and in-depth case studies to outline a model for how Japanese high-tech firms manage innovation and devise their technology strategies. The result is an analysis from which companies-and governments-all over the world can draw enduring lessons.Kodama uses the concept of a techno-paradigm shift to express the radical changes in the way technology has been and continues to be developed, applied, and commercialized over time. In analyzing data gathered over ten years of intensive research and study of Japanese firms, he distinguishes six dimensions along which the shift is occurring: manufacturing, business diversification, R&D competition, product development, innovation pattern, and societal diffusion of technology. He illuminates his discussion of each dimension with a profile of specific technologies and the companies that have advanced them, including consumer electronics (Sony and Toshiba), fiber optic cables (Sumitomo Electric), computers and communications equipment (NEC), machine tools (Fanuc), and automobile parts (Honda, Toyota, and Nissan).
Has Japan deliberately developed its social, political, and economic environments to enable the efficient generation, innovation, and diffusion of technologies to match the techno-paradigm shift? Kodama's empirical analysis suggests the opposite -- that the techno-paradigm shift, driven by rapid evolution in science and engineering, naturally favors the Japanese system.
The concepts presented in Emerging Patterns of Innovation not only have implications for the competitive strategies of non-Japanese firms and the economic policies of their corresponding nations, but could also help promote important international alliances in technological development at both the business and the national levels. In particular, Kodama describes his vision of option sharing, through which it is possible to resolve the tensions between international cooperation and national autonomy as well as to promote a nonprotectionist, "plus-sum game" in technological innovation that would benefit the world as a whole. The Management of Innovation and Change Series.
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Sources of Growth in Latin America. What Is Missing?
Manufacturer: Inter-American Development Bank ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 1597820164 |
Product Description
Declining per capita income in Latin America relative to that in other countries has generated concerns about the regions capacity to raise its living standards substantially. This comprehensive overview examines the growth process in Latin America and promotes urgently needed transformations to ensure the regions long-term economic success.
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The Sources of Economic Growth
Richard R. Nelson Manufacturer: Harvard University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0674001729 |
Book Description
Technological advance is the key driving force behind economic growth, argues Richard Nelson. Investments in physical and human capital contribute to growth largely as handmaidens to technological advance. Technological advance needs to be understood as an evolutionary process, depending much more on ex post selection and learning than on ex ante calculation. That is why it proceeds much more rapidly under conditions of competition than under monopoly or oligopoly.
Nelson also argues that an adequate theory of economic growth must incorporate institutional change explicitly. Drawing on a deep knowledge of economic and technological history as well as the tools of economic analysis, Nelson exposes the intimate connections among government policies, science-based universities, and the growth of technology. He compares national innovation systems, and explores both the rise of the United States as the world's premier technological power during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and the diminishing of that lead as other countries have largely caught up.
Lucid, wide-ranging, and accessible, the book examines the secrets of economic growth and why the U.S. economy has been anemic since the early 1970s.
Customer Reviews:
This book is OK!.......2001-03-27
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The Sources of Economic Growth in India: 1950-1 to 1999-2000
S. Sivasubramonian Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0195666011 |
Book Description
S Sivasubramonian has long been regarded as the foremost authority on national income estimation and analysis in India. The National Income of India in the Twentieth Century (OUP 2000) was the first book of its kind to present national income estimates for the entire period from 1900 to 2000. THis book, identifying the sources and triggers of economic growth in India between 1951 and 2000, is a result of the interpretative work that Sivasubramonian undertook using the growth accounting approach first developed by Edward Denison for USA. Using the same measure of output as earlier, he presents detailed evidence on and causal analysis of factors affecting growth of output. Specifically, the book discusses: BL estimates of the growth of employment by age and sex, and by level of education in different sectors of the economy BL new estimates of key components of gross and net fixed capital stock and inventories, and shows how they differ from official estimates. BL changes in the cultivated area providing weights to add together the different inputs in order to derive a measure of total factor productivity which gives a measure of the rate of technical progress BL growth accounts which also show the impact of foreign trade, structural change in output and inputs, changing energy inputs, and the effect of weather fluctuations on agricultural performance. The transformation of the Indian economy from a state of near stagnation during the first half of the twentieth century under colonial rule to one of moderate to rapid growth in the second half following independence and the era of planned economic development has evoked much interest and attention. India is now the world's fourth largest economy and there are very few countries which can match its income growth in real terms per head of population over the past decade. The result of immense and meticulous research underpinned by a lifetime of experience in this field, this book will remain a bas ic reference text for many years. It provides a coherent statistical framework for the Indian economy, which will be of fundamental importance for economists and economic historians who want to study India's performance in historical perspective. The transformation of the Indian economy from a state of near stagnation during the first half of the twentieth century under colonial rule to one of moderate to rapid growth in the second half following independence in 1947 and the era of planned economic development has evoked much interest and attention. This volume contains detailed empirical data on the sources of economic growth in the country for the fifty years since independence. It analyses growth in GDP and factor inputs (labour, capital and land), presenting: annual data and growth rates for selected periods smoothened data for long term analysis of growth rates disaggregated GDP by sectors contributions of various sectors to overall growth. This is an invaluable compilati on of very useful data for researchers and policy-makers.Books:
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