Jerry Courvisanos

IT Investment Strategy for Development: An 'Instrumental Analysis' Based on the Tasmanian and New Brunswick Information Technology Strategies

In April 1997, Tasmania (Australia) adopted the reputably successful New Brunswick (Canada) industrial strategy to build an information technology (IT) industry of significance. The strategy aims to overcome isolation in small regional economies and structurally change from declining natural resource industries. Both plans reject neo-classical economics-based industry policy, opting instead for a strong state-based investment planning approach. An analytical framework is set out, using Adolph Lowes Instrumental Analysis, to examine implementation of both IT strategies. Implications of this analysis are drawn for any attempts at developing IT regional plans and, more generally, as a guide for broad strategic-based national industrial strategies.

Keynes and Keynesians on Investment Decision-making A Behavioural Perspective

Abstract…Keynes’s theory determines only the ex post level of investment, but that it does not say anything about ex ante investment...Keynes did not explain precisely what causes changes in investment, but, on the other hand, he has fully examined the close link between these changes and global employment, production and income movements. (Kalecki 1982, 251, 253)

Enterprise Development: Strategic Collaboration for Economics and Business

An uncomfortable tension exists between economics and business within universities, both at the teaching and the research levels. At the teaching level, there is the challenge of business courses in accounting, management, marketing and international business that are strongly attracting students while enrolments in traditional economics degrees are declining.’ Lawson (1997) identifies the lack of “realism” in the study of economics as the source of this decline, where students are voting with their feet to more “relevant” courses in business. The irrelevancy of economics is based on both the abstract nature of the economic models taught and the perceived less vocational orientation of practical skill formation compared to business courses. The issue generally gets raised only in the context of business course coordinators demanding “more relevant and less abstract” economics material in the compulsory “economics for business” unit in their business-based degrees. EDINEB provides the appropriate forum to discuss this unease link between economics and business. The link tends to be ignored, with the focus staying firmly within each sector, except in terms of what basic economics is needed in business degrees.