Edward Nissan

The future of services in a globalized economy

In recent decades, the New Economy approach has been developed. This approach tries to analyse the new relationships among countries through the globalization process and has changed the views of several economists about the behaviour of economic activity. In this approach, services play a relevant role. The main goal of this paper is to explore the important role of services in the new economy. Through an extensive literature review, a variety of topics that connect economic growth and development to the presence of services is analysed. It also, by providing recent trends in services when compared with manufacturing, shows that the role of services, especially financial, has been on the increase in recent years.

Relative welfare improvements of low income versus high income countries

Abstract The paper develops a composite measure of welfare attributes for international comparisons based on the concept of Euclidean distance. The attributes are life expectancy, infant mortality, and literacy. The measures were calculated for 1960 and 1980 to allow for relative comparisons among and between countries classified into six economies. It was found that between the two periods, although low income economies have advanced absolutely, the graps in welfare as measured by the three attributes have widened relative to the more advanced developing nations.

Women Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Internationalization

Specialized literature shows that internationalization, innovation, and entrepreneurship have positive effects on economic growth. Moreover, there is a positive relationship between them. In addition, female entrepreneurship is a key contributor to economic growth, not only by its creation of wealth and employment, but by the diversification of entrepreneurial activity. Nevertheless, evidence shows that female entrepreneurs are less likely to export and to participate in research and technology. The goal of this chapter is to contribute to the knowledge of entrepreneurial behavior, separating by gender. Special attention will be given to the gender-related differences in innovation and internationalization of entrepreneurs. To achieve this goal, we use a dataset of 42 countries from 5 continents that participated in Global Entrepreneurship Monitor in 2008. This study is an original large-scale empirical study about gender and entrepreneurial performance, focused on innovation and internationalization.

An inquiry into openness in international trade

The ratio of exports plus imports to gross national product may be viewed as a measure of openness in international trade. Constructs indexes for 1967, 1980 and 1988, using this ratio for cross‐country comparison of trade patterns. Analysis of variance and regression reveal that the patterns among countries differ according to levels of income, and that there was a trend towards convergence of the index in the late 1980s reversing an earlier trend towards divergence.

The effects of international debt on the economic development of small countries

Abstract This paper attempts to determine the effects of international debt on the economic development of small countries. Data on five economic variables for 51 small countries were collected and were subgrouped by income to assess their general economic performance. In this study any country with a population of less than five million was defined as a small country. Two types of statistical analysis were performed. The first was to test for independence between two pairs of variables based on correlation methodology, and the second, analysis of variance, was used for testing differences among groups of countries. It was concluded that international debt affects small countries with relatively higher incomes in a significantly different manner than it affects small countries with low incomes.

The measurement of employment diversity for states and regions

This paper uses an index to measure the level of employment diversity at the state level of two periods spanning two decades. The index is based on aggregating employment at eight major sectors. The findings indicate a movement toward more specialization in the latter period (2000) as compared to an earlier period (1970s).

Effects of antitrust enforcement on aggregate concentration

Four indexes are employed to measure trends in asset concentration of large business in the United States between 1967 and 1992 using the Fortune 500 data. The paper also investigates whether the merger wave of the 1980s was statistically significant. For all the 500 and the top 100 firms, each of the indexes confirmed that concentration trends were on the increase for the whole period and that the increase in the level of concentration due to the mergers of the 1980s was statistically significant. However, on both counts, not all indexes were in agreement for the bottom 300 firms when examined by subsets of 100 firms.

Relative Concentration of Sales and Assets in American Business

Hexter and Snow [3] examined the trend of concentration of assets among the largest industrial firms over the period 1955-66. Their investigation covered the top 500 firms as reported annually by Fortune and used the entropy measure of concentration as suggested by Theil [6]. Nissan and Caveny [5] extended the work of Hexter and Snow to cover the years 1967-82 using identical theoretical procedures and data sources. In a recent article, Hexter [4] has pointed out that the use of assets as a basis of measurement of concentration may be flawed. He proposed the use of sales and accordingly calculated entropy values using sales as the base variable for two specific years, 1969 and 1979. These computations led to the conclusion that the concern over using assets rather than sales is not warranted. The purpose of this paper is to provide (1) an extension of the work by Nissan and Caveny [5] to cover the years 1983-86, (2) the computation of entropy based on sales for the entire period 1967-86, and (3) a comparison between the two methods of measurements. The paper is divided into five parts. In section II, a brief description of the model is presented; section III contains the results. In section IV a statistical evaluation is given, and section V presents the summary and conclusions.

Inflow and Outflow of Foreign Direct Investment by Economies

The purpose of this article is to identify the extent of inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI) worldwide. A large number of countries were aggregated on a regional basis to examine their inward and outward stocks as a percentage of gross fixed capital formation for the period 1980–2006. Among the findings was that the annual increase for both inward and outward FDI was less than 1%. Also, countries grouped by the aggregates developed, Africa, Latin America and Caribbean, Asia and Oceania, and developing were found to differ significantly in their means.

LINKING LABOR PRODUCTIVITY TO ECONOMIC FREEDOM

This paper provides a review of the role of enterprise in a capitalistic setting to promote economic growth. For this purpose, two indexes on productivity and economic freedom were utilized to compare countries grouped by region and income. The finding by relating productivity to economic freedom index of the Heritage Foundation indicates a statistically significant relationship between the two. This gives credence to the hypothesis that economic liberalization induces growth, despite significant gaps in the levels of productivity and economic freedom index between groups of countries.