Guild Research Articles

The evolution, progress, and future direction of Nepal's universal salt iodization program.

Nepal is located in what was once known as the Himalayan Goitre Belt and once had one of the highest prevalence's of iodine deficiency disorders in the world. However, through a well‐executed universal salt iodization program implemented over the past 25 years, it has achieved optimal iodine intake for its population, effectively eliminating the adverse consequences of iodine deficiency disorders. A comprehensive review of policy and legislation, surveys, and program reports was undertaken to examine the key elements contributing to the success of this program. The paper reviews the origins and maturation of salt iodization in Nepal, as well as trends in the coverage of iodized salt, the iodine content in salt, and population iodine status over the past two decades. The paper describes critical components of the program including advocacy efforts, trade issues with India, the role of the Salt Trading Corporation, monitoring, and periodic program reviews. The paper discusses the recent findings from the 2016 national micronutrient survey demonstrating the success of the salt iodization program and describes emerging challenges facing the program in the future.

CEOs' hometown connections and access to trade credit: Evidence from China

In this study, we investigate how informal institutions, namely, chief executive officers' hometown connections with suppliers, impact firms' access to trade credit. Using unique data manually collected from China, we find that hometown connections significantly increase access to trade credit. The hometown effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned firms, firms in provinces with poorly developed financial institutions, and firms whose chief executive officers come from hometowns with a strong merchant guild culture or hold an important position in the hometown's chamber of commerce. We suggest two plausible channels for the hometown effect: information and social trust. Overall, this study contributes to the literature by documenting how hometown connections help firms to obtain external financing in emerging markets.

Borders and Walls Made of Privileges? Urban Communities and the Rivalry in Drapery in the Surroundings of Ypres during the 14th Century

This article deals with several conflicts between Flemish cities in the fourteenth century that concerned export-oriented drapery. The focus is made on the contradictions between one of the powerful Flemish cities, Ypres, and two of the smaller neighbouring towns, the monastic town of Poperinge and Langemark that produced drapery resembling that manufactured in Ypres. The author also draws a comparison with a similar conflict between Saint-Omer and the monastic town of Arques in the county of Artois. The study of these contradictions is mostly based on documental sources and gives an opportunity to find out what measures the cities resorted to in order to protect the well-being of their artisans and drapers. For example, Ypres and Saint-Omer obtained privileges over their neighbouring regions with monopoly rights to produce cloth meant for export; their rivals (Langemark, Poperinge) made attempts to get excluded from such “monopolies”; the cities in question also used legal methods of regulation (arbitrage, appeals to supreme courts) and sometimes employed force to convince smaller towns to observe their “monopoly”, especially during revolts. Additionally, the author defines various forces that took part in the process of balancing the interests of the rival cities and towns: the count, the lords of the towns, urban authorities, supreme courts (the Council of Flanders, the Parliament of Paris), and deans of the craft guilds of the cities. The measures used by the rival towns often brought no durable results, but the search of means to protect their interests in long-time conflicts itself shows the high level of self-organisation reflected in what urban authorities, city craft-guilds, and the urban communities did.

Rzemiosło żydowskie w Lublinie i jego instytucje w latach trzydziestych XX wieku

Jewish crafts in Lublin and their institutions in the 1930s The paper attempts to reconstruct the condition of Jewish crafts in Lublin in the 1930s after the new legal regulations for industry were introduced in 1927 (“The act on industry law”). Crafts in Lublin in this period were ethnically strongly polarized between the two groups. Jews owned 60 percent of all the workshops in the city, while Poles held the rest of the crafts and services. Jewish craftsmen dominated mainly in textile (tailoring) and leather (shoemaking) industries and services like hairdressing or photography. The article focuses primarily on quantitative and statistic aspects of the discussed topic. Jewish craft organizations (craft guilds), supporting institutions (credit institutions for craftsmen) and Jewish personnel of the Lublin Chamber of Crafts are also presented.

Knowledge Discovery and Destination Market Intelligence Framework of the Maritime Trade Route Connecting Ancient Port Towns. - A Survey on Tamilnadu Cultural Route and Smart Heritage Tourism

The international trade network of the ancient Chera, Chola, Pandyan kingdoms with Rome in particular since Sangam age has been studied well by various researchers. However, a recent archaeological excavation study at Thandigudi, Pattanam and Keeladi have generated a lot more data and throws more light with new research dimension and direction, particularly concerning the trade routes. The supply chain business intelligence of the various merchant guilds operating in all three Chera, Chola, Pandya territories are reviewed to provide a framework for knowledge destination and cultural heritage trade routes from the emerging new evidence. The proposed logistics network design and destination market intelligence of the trade routes naturally evolved into three clusters of towns and places - the outcome of the research survey concludes with a newly developed smart heritage cultural route of Tamilnadu.

Haringhandel en heiligenverering

Abstract Herring trade and holy feast. The growing importance of religious practices in the Schonenvaarders guild in sixteenth-century Haarlem This article examines the importance of religious and social practices for a sixteenth-century guild of herring merchants in Haarlem. Although recent historiography on medieval and early modern corporations has shown the importance of these practices for guild life in general, not much is known regarding merchant guilds specifically. Using practice-oriented sources such as the administration and memberships lists in guild books, and religious artefacts such as the guild’s altar, this article maps the religious and social practices of the guild members. It argues that although in the sixteenth century the guild still presented itself as a guild of herring traders, these economic activities of the guild declined in importance in this period compared with its pre-existing social and religious activities. Thus, the function and practices of the guild changed over time, showing the flexibility of these dynamic institutions. The Schonenvaarders guild shows also the importance of these religious practices for both community cohesion within the guild and corporation-based lay piety in sixteenth-century Haarlem.

Vanguards of globalization: Organization and political action among America's pro-trade firms

AbstractThis paper identifies recurrent patterns in the political activity of American corporations that support trade. These firms have made public coalitions a central element of their pro-trade activities, and their collective efforts vastly outstrip those of trade's corporate opponents. This superiority in organization is paired with dramatically greater volumes of lobbying and campaign contributions. I explain these striking divergences by integrating collective action theory into a firm-centred model of trade politics: the heavy concentration of gains from trade among a small number of firms makes both individual and collective political action easier for pro-trade firms than for producers opposed to trade. This explanation is supported in panel analysis of firms’ participation in pro-trade coalitions, which shows that size, multinationality, and heterogeneity in global networks of production and sales drive participation in pro-trade groups. Globally engaged firms have supported trade by matching pro-trade preferences with highly organized political action.

Cinema and the mask of capital: Labour debates in the Malayalam film industry

Labour discourses in the film industry are often couched in the language of ‘welfare’ and an effort to maintain harmony among different filmmaking sectors. But such arrangements do not proffer equal participation or bargaining rights to everyone in the industry. Focusing on the Malayalam language film industry based in Kerala, this article examines how the film industry’s apprenticeship and unpaid labour arrangements affect below-the-line labour and less influential job profiles on a film set. In corollary, I also explore how labour and bargaining rights are conceptualized differently by film organizations based on their ideological positions. Using a mixed-methods approach, including media ethnography and interviews with members of different trade guilds who form part of Malayalam cinema’s professional, technical and service sectors, I demonstrate how structural inequalities in the film industry are overlooked while the cine-worker’s agency is co-opted by a neoliberal system that masquerades as welfare.

Access to the Trade: Monopoly and Mobility in European Craft Guilds in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract One of the standard objections against guilds in the premodern world has been their exclusiveness. Guilds have been portrayed as providing unfair advantages to the children of established masters and locals, over immigrants and other outsiders. Privileged access to certain professions and industries is seen as a source of inequality and a disincentive for technological progress. In this paper, we examine this assumption by studying the composition of guild masters and apprentices from a large sample of European towns and cities from 1600 to 1800, focusing on the share who were children of masters or locals. These data offer an indirect measurement of the strength of guild barriers and, by implication, of their monopolies. We find very wide variation between guilds in practice, but most guild masters and apprentices were immigrants or unrelated locals: openness was much more common than closure, especially in larger centers. Our understanding of guild “monopolies” and exclusivity is in need of serious revision.

RED BOWL-SHAPED FLOWERS: CONVERGENCE FOR BEETLE POLLINATION IN THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION

ABSTRACT Anemone coronaria, Papaver rhoeas, Ranunculus asiaticus, and Tulipa agenensis are pollinated primarily by scarabaeid beetles (Amphicoma, Glaphyridae) and secondarily by bees (Lasioglossum marginatum Br., Halictidae, and Synhalonia plumigera Kohl, Anthophoridae). The four plant species have large bowl-shaped flowers which are orange-red in color with a black center, radial symmetry, weak scent (to humans), and filamentous stamens. It is suggested that there is a convergent evolution of red bowl-shaped flowers in the East Mediterranean region, concordant with a center of diversity in the genus Amphicoma. The floral phenology of these “Poppy guild” species correlated positively with the amount of edible pollen produced by each of them and with the visiting frequencies of their pollinators. Field experiments showed that Amphicoma beetles also preferred red, odorless flower models over odorless models of different colors, and models with a dark center over plain red ones. This evidence extends the cla...

Financial Deepening and its Impact on the Credit Culture in Bihar

Ancient India (especially during the Maurya and the Gupta empires) had an organized private credit dispensation system. Although there were no banks in the modern sense of the word, but the merchant guilds did have systematic procedure of evaluating, vetting and sanctioning of credit to its members. The system was not open to the general public but then, the membership of the guild could be acquired quite easily by anyone desirous and serious enough to do business in the specific area that a particular guild promoted. This system of credit dispensation remained in India till the advent of the British East India Company.

From periphery to centre and back again: elite transformations in Mechelen (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries)

AbstractThis article explores the social history of the political elites of Mechelen, a town that evolved from a seigneurial enclave within the duchy of Brabant to the de facto capital of the Burgundian–Habsburg Low Countries between the 1470s and 1530. Proceeding from a quantitative analysis of lists of aldermen, fiscal registers and epitaphs, the article argues that the short-lived functioning of Mechelen as a capital city had great impact on its ruling classes. Mechelen was traditionally ruled by a coalition of craft guilds and prominent citizens, but the latter reoriented their social networks to the court elite, as the latter's presence supercharged pre-existing trends towards ennoblement among the urban elite.

Tamil and European Merchant Guilds

“Thirai kadal oodium thiraviyam thedu” are the words by the Avvaiyar and our ancestors were the people who lived in the way. Tamils have always admired the plow and the business. All three hairdressers gave their business a boost. Sustainable business is seen as the backbone of the economy. The lows of a country can be determined by the economy of the country. From time to time, the rulers protected the business. Merchants who do business are like the eyes of a country. Although society provides the merchants with convenience, specialty, superiority, prominence and importance, they also have many difficulties. Traders were greatly affected by natural disasters, alien invasions, unrelenting wars, and negative regime changes. Merchants were plagued by domestic thieves and wayward robbers. Unrelenting nuisance of pirates

Dowd & Guild appointed as distributor by Cathay & Orion

Dowd & Guild appointed as distributor by Cathay & Orion

СТРАТЕГІЧНЕ УПРАВЛІННЯ ОРГАНІЗАЦІЙНИМИ ІННОВАЦІЯМИ В ТОРГІВЛІ. МЕРЕЖЕВИЙ ПІДХІД

The article deals with the types of management decisions implemented by commercial establishment in response to the determination of networking features in their activities. The nature and content of the strategic management of relationships with the development of the organizational structure of commercial establishments in the course of the stages of formation and development network. It has been proved that the turns of network development depend on the level of bifurcation of network connections and the independence of its constituent elements, and the qualitative changes in the nature and forms of intra and intercompany relationships are the result of strategic management. A set of measures optimizing operational decisions is proposed, through the implementation of a portfolio of investment projects and the qualitative transition of the system from one state to another. The qualitative transition of the corporate trading network to the level of the business network structure is described.   It includes the preparatory phase, planned consolidation of development scenarios, coordination and strategic consensus between the goals of the development of network members, strategic iterations, identification of development conditions, scenarios, strategic plans. A mechanism for estimating the value of the trading network was proposed .

Blockchain technology in corporate governance: disrupting chain reaction or not?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to determine the stakeholders’ acceptance on blockchain and to investigate the model fit by using “Technology Acceptance Model” with special reference to corporate governance through cryptography to resolve the decades-old problems of financial record-keeping.Design/methodology/approachThe whole analysis has been performed in the two steps, i.e. confirmatory factors analysis and structural equation modeling, to prove model fit between behavioral intention and actual behavior for using blockchain technology. Total 223 respondents have been selected, and the selection of the respondent is primarily on the basis of their previous experience with trading corporate equities.FindingsThe study determines empirically all the mentioned relationships of attitude, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness with the behavioral intention as per the conceptual model to prove the relationship. The results of the manuscript shows the model fit indexes for various constructs are prove the model fit as per the theorized model. The values of the various indexes are found to be under the permissible range which explains the relationship of various constructs based on the theorized model.Research limitations/implicationsDespite, the limitations in terms of selection of sampling methods, outcome and the interpretation, the results proves the fit with the theoretical framework. The major implication is to understand the real-time use of blockchain technology for the transfer of shares from one party to other.Practical implicationsStakeholders in corporate governance namely customers, creditors, suppliers, community, employees, owners, investors, trade unions and social activists could benefit in different ways. Investors could benefit from being able to purchase equity at low price and to sell them into a market with greater liquidity, but they would found it difficult to camouflage their trades.Social implicationsThe study opines that virtually all aspects of the corporate governance can be improved through the adoption of this technology resulting in greater transparency, improved liquidity and lowering costs.Originality/valueThis study will be a reference for global players in the financial industry that have started investing in this innovative technology vis-à-vis recent announcement of adoption of blockchain by global exchanges including NASDAQ, NYSE and Deutsche Borse, as a new method for trading, tracking ownership and monitoring systemic risk for strengthening corporate governance mechanism. This study will have a significant index for future reference where the technology adoption will be tested to have better corporate governance which will be useful for academics and professionals.

Performance and Functioning of Guilds in Hoysala Period

Performance and Functioning of Guilds in Hoysala Period

A review essay on The European Guilds

Ogilvie’s The European Guilds is a major contribution to economic history and institutional economics. This review essay surveys the main contributions of Guilds, locating it in a long-standing debate over whether craft guilds contributed positively or negatively to economic development in medieval and early modern Europe. The wealth of evidence Ogilvie amasses suggests that craft guilds should be thought of as organizations that primarily benefited their members at the expense of non-members, and used regulations to extract rents and exclude outsiders.

The Effect of Export Insurance and Guarantees on Export Performance: An Empirical Analysis for Korea

There is a series of empirical papers (Kim and Lee 2004; Egger and Url, 2006; Moser, Nestmann, and Wedow, 2008; Baltensperger and Herger, 2009; Auboin and Engemann, 2014; Van der Veer. 2015) which show that trade finance is positively associated with export. Despite its positive impact on export, trade finance has been a contentious issue in international organizations such as the WTO and OECD in terms of implementing related policy measures. This is based on the argument that trade finance hurts fair international trade because it ultimately plays a role just like a subsidy. Regarding this contentious issue, in this paper we examine whether there is evidence supporting that trade finance is associated with an increase in export. We also investigate the channel through which the effect of the trade finance on export is working. To this end, we focus on a specific part of trade finance: short-term export insurance and export credit guarantee. This is because noble and ample data on these types of trade insurance are available. This confidential data is provided by the Korea Insurance Trade Corporation (henceforth KSURE) exclusively. We conduct a panel regression using Korean sector-level export data covering from 2010Q1 to 2017Q4. This dataset enables us to control for destination country-, sector-, and time-fixed effects. Our empirical results show that the short-term export insurance and export credit guarantee have a positive impact on exports, and the main channel behind this is related to mitigating financial constraints of exporting firms. The trade finance effectively eliminates the risk of importers' payment, which helps export firms reduce the financial frictions. This ultimately leads to an increase in export. Since the main mechanism in which the trade insurance affects export is related to alleviating financial frictions, it becomes more definite that the way how trade insurance contributes to an increase in export is somewhat different from that of a subsidy. When we consider the fact that financial friction is an important factor for restraining international trade, which can partly explain the great collapse in international trade during the global financial crisis, the trade insurance policies would rather be a useful policy measure which can dampen negative impact on export during recession.

The transformation of an urban political elite: oligarchy and aristocracy in sixteenth-century Ghent

AbstractThe composition of the political elites in sixteenth-century Ghent, one of the political and economic centres of the county of Flanders, changed from a relatively open elite group that included representatives from the craft guilds into a compact, aristocratic class. This article analyses the reasons for this transformation. First, the number of office-holders in the city council declined and power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller political elite because of interventions in the urban political framework by the Habsburg authorities in the wake of a fiscal rebellion (1537–40) and a Calvinist takeover of power (1578–84). Secondly, the once dominant position of the craft guilds on Ghent's two benches of aldermen was weakened by institutional reforms, a Catholic backlash against Calvinism and an economic recession. Thirdly, the growing wealth gap between rulers and the ruled, coupled with an influx of noblemen into Ghent City Council, gave urban politics a more aristocratic character. Consequently, a series of interconnected changes gave rise to a trend towards oligarchy and aristocracy on the city's benches of aldermen.