Less-developed Nations Research Articles

Corruption and the Multinational Enterprise

Although there is some literature on the general phenomenon of corruption, one is hard pressed to find any references—much less elaborations of it—in articles, books and programs in the area of international business administration. This paucity of treatment is difficult to comprehend. On the one hand, we are in an age when the public is increasingly emphasizing the need for corporations to exercise social responsibility. On the other, we have assertions by individuals that multinational enterprises are among the foremost practitioners of corruption, particularly in the less-developed nations where they operate. In view of these parallel developments, it would appear that there would be much more research and, thereafter, discussion of multinational corruption in the programs and literature of international business than presently exists. Some possible reasons for the lack of treatment given to this area may be (1) the difficulties in defining the phenomenon; (2) the delicacy of the research which characterizes the area; (3) the problems of obtaining data; and (4) the lack of agreement on the political, social, and economic effects of corruption.© 1973 JIBS. Journal of International Business Studies (1973) 4, 93–96

Environmental consequences of increasing food production

The success of agriculture in the technologically-advanced countries has been accompanied by a number of environmental problems. These problems have arisen because of the need for insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, and the local accumulation of large quantities of animal wastes. The less-developed nations have not achieved the same success in food production, and yet it is prudent for them to give attention even now to the environmental consequences of agricultural activities. They must initiate courses of action, so that there will be the least possible environmental perturbation as they come to rely more and more on pesticides and fertilizers. Both the advanced and the less-developed countries, however, must now devote considerable effort to minimizing salinization, erosion, and soil deterioration.

Economic Stabilization in Wartime: A Comparative Case Study of Korea and Vietnam

A careful review and comparison of the tools used during wartime to combat inflation in Korea and to control it in Vietnam is undertaken. It examines the trend in the major inflationary and counterinflationary forces--government expenditures and tax revenue, advances to U.N. and U.S. forces, credit to the private sector, domestic production, and imports--and shows how the import program has been a major factor in controlling Vietnamese inflation. In addition, the trend in the velocity of money and the sensitivity of the tax structure to inflation in each country are examined. The analysis provides insights into methods of stabilizing other less-developed nations not in war.

Less-developed nations will get tariff relief

RETURN TO ISSUEPREVNewsNEXTLess-developed nations will get tariff reliefEEC plans to allow duty-free entry to exports from less-developed countries; U.S. seen as willing but unable to follow soonCite this: Chem. Eng. News 1971, 49, 16, 40–42Publication Date (Print):April 19, 1971Publication History Published online7 November 2010Published inissue 19 April 1971https://doi.org/10.1021/cen-v049n016.p040Copyright © 1971 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETYArticle Views4Altmetric-Citations-LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit PDF (527 KB) Get e-Alerts

The Problems We Face: An Introductory Comment

During the next decade, the United States will be facing new global problems unimaginable a few years ago. In attempting to foresee these problems, there are two uncertain factors: (1) the extent of domestic problems' effects on our international role and (2) the extent of isolationist trends engendered by the waning "devil" theory of communism and by the frustrations resulting from the Vietnam war. The realities of the 1970's should include: a continued bipolar world; attempts by the two superpowers to alter international power relationships; greater co-operation between them in areas where neither has an overriding interest; further narrowing of the gap between the superpowers and the secondary powers; greater influence of China in Asia, counterbalanced by her internal struggles and the influence of Japan and India; gravitation of the regional alliances toward politico-economic rather than military objectives; proliferation of nuclear weapons, increasing world instability; widening of the gap between the developed and less-developed nations, with resultant tensions and population problems; increased multilateral aid, accompanied by self-help; and intensified trade and balance-of-payments difficulties. Great change, with potential dangers, will be the keynote of the next decade, but change and opportunity go hand-in-hand. Bold, effective leadership will be needed to deal with the challenges of the 1970's.—Ed.

The Food Potential of Developing Nations

tural production in the United States up to that time was inadequate to keep up with the projected demands for food and a better diet to be generated by high birth rates and rapid economic growth. Within a few years, the Fifth Plate thesis had been discarded. Surpluses rather than shortages became the national concern. The threat to the American diet subsided as farm output rose more rapidly under the thrust of postwar technology and the rate of population growth and demand for food began to slow. Now we are considering the elements of population and food in the wider context of the less-developed world and the higher stakes of a potential world food shortage. As background, I will review briefly the historical experience in the population-food race, treating the less-developed free nations as a group but keeping in mind the American experience that the past is not always the key to the future. Then I will move on to considering as a case study the potential of India for feeding its own in the future. This seems fair enough, since India has one-third of the population in the less-developed free world, a high population growth rate representative of most LDC's, a diet among the poorest (roughly 10 percent below the minimum energy standard), and a disappointing food production record in recent years which required massive imports of grain under P.L. 480. Much of the food-crisis syndrome hangs on India. Most other countries are conceded a better chance. If India can make it, the world food problem will at worst be quite manageable. The Historical Experience of the LDC's The FAO measurements of population and food-output trends during the period 1953-1963 are shown in Table 1. Taking the whole 10-year period, food output in the LDC's (excluding communist Asia) rose faster than population. In fact, food output rose faster than in the developed countries (3.0 percent per year compared with 2.4 percent). Even with a high rate of population growth (2.3 percent in the LDC's compared with 1.3 percent for the developed countries), food production per capita

The world outlook for conventional agriculture. More emphasis is needed on farm price policy and plant research if future world food needs are to be met.

1) The worldwide demand for food will continue to be strong in the coming decades. Two forces-rapidly growing population and, in much of the world, rapidly rising incomes-are expected to result in increases in the demand for food even more rapid than those that have occurred during the past. 2) Conventional agriculture has assured an adequate food supply for the economically advanced one-third of the world. The challenge now is to assure an adequate food supply for the remaining two-thirds, where population is now increasing at the rate of 1 million people per week and where malnutrition is already widespread. 3) Economically feasible prospects for significantly expanding the world's area of cultivated land in the 1960's and 1970's are limited and largely confined to sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon Basin. Even here, agronomic problems will limit the rate of expansion. When the cost of desalting seawater is substantially reduced-probably not before the late 1970's or early 1980's at best-it may become feasible to irrigate large areas of desert. 4) Given the limited possibilities for expanding the area of land under cultivation, most of the increases in world food needs must be met, for the foreseeable future, by raising the productivity of land already under cultivation. Food output per acre, rather static throughout most of history, has begun to increase rapidly in some of the more advanced countries in recent decades. All of the increases in food production over the past quarter century in North America, western Europe, and Japan have come from increasing the productivity of land already under cultivation. The area under cultivation has actually declined. 5) Achieving dramatic gains in land productivity requires a massive investment of capital and the widespread adoption of new technology. A similar effort must now be made in the less-developed nations if these nations are to feed their people. The most important single factor influencing this rate of investment is food prices, more particularly the relationship between the price farmers receive for their food products and the cost of modern inputs such as fertilizer. 6) In some of the more-developed countries where per-acre yields have been rising for a long time, there is now evidence that the rate of yield increase may be slowing. Nonrecurring inputs may have made their maximum contribution to output in the case of some crops, pushing yield levels past the middle of the S-shaped logistic curve. Although this cannot be determined with any certainty, the possibility that the middle of the curve has been passed in some instances should be taken into account in viewing the long-term future. 7) If the rate of increase in yield per acre does in fact begin to slow in some of the agriculturally advanced countries, additional pressure will be put on the less-developed countries-which have much of the world's unrealized food-production potential-to meet the continuing future increases in world food needs. 8) Man has not yet been able to bypass the process of photosynthesis in the production of food. This dependence on photosynthesis plays a significant role in determining the upper levels of the S-shaped yield curve. Additional research is urgently needed to increase the photosynthetic efficiency of crops and to raise the upper levels of economically feasible yields.

Foreign Supply and Demand Projections: Outlook for U.S. Agricultural Exports

S recently as a year ago, a major emphasis of the export policy of the United States Department of Agriculture was the disposal of agricultural surpluses. The effort was directed toward the development of new markets for products in excess supply. Large stocks of some commodities were in storage and we were looking for markets wherever they could be found. However, concern over surpluses has been replaced by a concern over shortages. The recent drought in India, the continued large imports of grain by the Communist countries, and the reduction of U.S. grain stocks have brought the world food problem into the headlines. The USDA has recently taken actions to increase the production of grain in the United States. Some people are asking the question: In the future, will there be sufficient food to supply the rapidly expanding population at acceptable levels of nutrition? Many projections have been made of the expanding food import needs of the less-developed countries and the magnitude of their food deficits. In fact, I have given several papers on this subject in the past year [1]. However, this emphasis on need gives only a partial picture of trade. To project world trade, food needs must be translated into effective import demand and countered with effective supplies from exporting countries. In addition, concern about the food needs of the deficit countries sometimes conveys the idea that the gap must be filled largely from U.S. output. This paper, although recognizing the problem of inadequate diets in the less-developed nations, treats the total agricultural export picture of the United States. It makes realistic projections to 1970 of the level of U.S. exports of major commodities to both the commercial and the concessional markets, based upon an evaluation of the total foreign demand and supply situation which will probably exist at that time. Although the emphasis on food needs is important, the development of the commercial market is also important. The eventual goal of world trade-including the goal of the Food for Freedom legislation now being considered by Congress-is the expansion of agricultural trade on a commercial basis. In the Department of Agriculture, we have been analyzing the food sit-

Socio-economic considerations in the utilization of solar energy in underdeveloped areas

I N the march of c, ivilization man has faced no challenge as grea t in scope or dimensions--as confronting him today: the amelioration of the living conditions of more than two billion people. The disparities in the effort are emphasized by the fact that while even the more advanced of the underdeveloped areas are still struggling to comprehend some of the more basic problems of an industrial society, others are making ready to explore space. In an analysis of the task of raising the living standards of the world, the great differences in energy available to peoples stand as a barrier. Furthermore, the prospect for any major improvement in energy for utilization by the less-developed nations is slight. At present the nations of advanced industrialization and mass consumption, with 31.3 percent of the world population, consume 84 percent of the world energy used. It. is estimated tha t this same group of nations will, by the year 2000, comprise 27 percent of the total population and consume 68.4 percent of the energy.~ At the other end of the scale, the least developed nations, comprising now about 19.7 percent of the people, have at their disposal only one percent of the world energy. At the end of the century it is expected that this group, with 22 percent of world l)opulation, will consume no more than 2.3 percent of t he world total. Meanwhile the world population will rise from a present three billion to an anticipated nearly six billion, and the average energy use will rise from 1.16 equivalent tons of coal per person to 2.62 tons. If this projected pat tern holds, the known world deposits of fossil fuels (estimated at 30 X 10 n tons of coal), at the anticipated rate of consumption, in the year 2000 would last less than 200 years. With the possibility of a still greater rate of consumption after the year 2000 for the underdeveloped areas, the known deposits may not last. a 100 years from now. Therefore, by the t ime the underdeveloped areas succeed in building tip an industrial complex around the existing sources of energy, the resources might reach a stage of near depletion. This would become particularly alarming if the advances in technology enable