Invisible Hand Of Market Research Articles

Five-Star Sustainability

Abstract The $45 trillion-dollar consumer market—60 percent of global GDP—is the largest driver of human practices impacting sustainability. However, an insignificant number of products offer any insight into product sustainability. Labels like Fair Trade, though useful, have minimal market penetration. In the absence of sustainability information, consumers make purchases based on traditional indicators of product value like price, color, and brand but have no product-specific information on broader human values for issues like child labor, greenhouse gases, worker safety, or endangered species. A straightforward 1-to-5 star sustainability rating (coupled with an in-depth sustainability profile) on each consumer product would harness the power of the market's invisible hand, efficiently steering manufacturing decisions toward sustainability precisely to the degree that global consumers are concerned about social and environmental issues. Sustainability ratings would tweak the global market with every pur...

Crossing the Digital Desert in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Does Policy Matter?

The last decade has seen a rapid growth of Internet access across Africa, although it has not been evenly distributed. It is therefore important for policymakers to ask how policy can bridge this inequality of Internet access. This article addresses the dearth of research assessing the interplay between policy and Internet penetration by identifying Internet penetration‐related policy variables and institutional constructs in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Based on a literature review and data availability, four variables are suggested: (i) free flow of information; (ii) market concentration; (iii) the activity level of the Universal Service Fund (USF); and (iv) total tax on computer equipment. The results show that only the activity level of the USF and low total tax on computer equipment are significantly positively related to Internet penetration in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Free flow of information and market concentration do not show any impact on Internet penetration. The latter could be attributed to underdeveloped competition in most Sub‐Saharan countries. We recommend that policymakers promote the policy instrument of Universal Service and USF and consider substituting tax on computer equipment with other tax revenues, and not to blindly trust the market's invisible hand to fix inequality in Internet diffusion.

The Invisible Body-Balancing Economics: A Medium Approach

Our global world is under the variety of individual bodies on the division of work. This paper would consider the invisible body-balancing network and economics by a medium approach. This medium approach originated from the Newsboy problem, and would be attained by the invisible hand of market (demand) speed at Chameleon’s criteria. First, our new treatment and condition to balancing are given. Next, a few trial cases are discussed and verified at the series type.

Heterogeneous preferences, decision-making capacity, and phase transitions in a complex adaptive system

There has been a belief that with the directing power of the market, the efficient state of a resource-allocating system can eventually be reached even in a case where the resource is distributed in a biased way. To mimic the realistic huge system for the resource allocation, we designed and conducted a series of economic experiments. From the experiments we found that efficient allocation can be realized despite a lack of communications among the participants or any instructions to them. To explain the underlying mechanism, an extended minority game model called the market-directed resource allocation game (MDRAG) is constructed by introducing heterogeneous preferences into the strategy-building procedures. MDRAG can produce results in good agreement with the experiments. We investigated the influence of agents' decision-making capacity on the system behavior and the phase structure of the MDRAG model as well. A number of phase transitions are identified in the system. In the critical region, we found that the overall system will behave in an efficient, stable, and unpredictable mode in which the market's invisible hand can fully play its role.

A new perspective on infrastructure financing in Asia

This paper describes some of the major problems associated with current approaches to infrastructure financing in the Asia–Pacific region. It argues that efficient infrastructure financing should be guided by the capital market's invisible hand. And a key part of such financing must come from financial innovation.

Sustainability through cost internalisation: Theoretical rudiments for the analysis and reform of global structures

In the last 250 years, capitalism has been the cause of great wealth and affluence. This was brought about by the interaction between a dynamic mobilisation of resources and the efficient allocation of production factors, produced goods and services through control of the market, technical progress, the spread of trade and use of comparative cost advantages. In this respect, classical and neoclassical economics since Adam Smith has been proven correct. However, this school's postulation that the market's invisible hand will also provide for a balanced development of wealth between rich and poor regions and nations has not been proven correct. On the contrary, the gap between rich and poor has grown. The contradiction between theory and reality is not at all coincidental. Classical and neoclassical economics subordinate absolute equal opportunities between all (world) market actors and exclude extra-economic factors such as, for example, the disparity of power as a lever of wealth increment. Furthermore, it neglects the circumstance of capital accumulation and growth in consumption through the cost-free use of nature, which has many consequences for the destruction of the ecological balance. These methodical foreclosure proceedings do not only have fatal consequences for the theory; politics is also especially affected. To be sure, neoclassicism offers no solutions to the greatest challenges of the present, namely, social inequality on a global scale and the ecological crisis. The individual measures which have been enacted, such as the IMF's structural adjustment programme, often cause the opposite social and ecological effects. An important prerequisite for the development of strategies in a global reform perspective is, therefore, the dealing with some fundamental deficits in the dominant economic theory. This paper will (a) develop the idea that the disparity of political and economic power has historically promoted the externalisation of social and ecological costs and, as a result, caused the rise of non-sustainable structures in the world economy as well as social and ecological crises, and (b) prove that cost internalisation by means of new basic conditions in the world economy is an indispensable must for sustainable development in the world economy.

Prospects for the Development of a Black Business Class in South Africa

Thegrowth of business classes in Africa has attracted much interest since the 1980s when, in the context of severe economic malaise, the impact of the state on development was subjected to critical reappraisal.1Out of this emerged a consensus that the abysmal economic record of the 1960s and 1970s could, to a large degree, be ascribed to the debilitating effect of an overstretched and swollen state. Official development thinking took this argument the furthest: at the core of the problem, it was asserted, was the expansion of the state's rôle from the preferred minimalist function of providing the legal and macro-economic regulatory framework for capital accumulation, to a more profound intervention in the productive process. As a remedy, the state would have to be restrained from usurping the primary rôle which the market's invisible hand ought to be playing.2