New Economic Policy Research Articles

Getting Malaysia Out of the Middle-Income Trap

The rapid rebound from the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1999 helped lead the Malaysian government to predict that the annual GDP growth rate in 2001-2010 would be 7.5 percent, up from the 7.0 percent in the 1991-2000 period. This higher growth rate would be generated by Malaysia’s transformation into a knowledge-based economy where Total Factor Productivity (TFP) would increase its contribution to GDP growth to 3.2 percentage points from 1.8 percentage points in 1991-2000. This optimism in 2001 has proved to be ill-founded even before the arrival of the global financial crisis in 2008. The annual GDP growth rate turned out to be 5 percent in the 2001-2007 period. The fact that, in the same period, economic growth accelerated in the neighboring countries of China, India and Indonesia reveals that Malaysia has descended to a much slower growth path. Malaysia is now caught in the middle-income trap because it is still using the economic growth strategy, the New Economic Policy (NEP), that was formulated in 1970 when the structure of Malaysia’s economy and the international economic conditions were very different from today. By being inconsistent with knowledge-led growth, the NEP has caused private sector investment to collapse from 32.7 percent of GDP in 1995 to 9.3 percent in 2007. By focusing too much on the redistribution of income and not enough on the generation of income, NEP rejects meritocracy and institutionalises racism, thereby preventing full mobilization of human resources (e.g denying top leadership positions to Chinese and Indians amounts to employing less than 60 percent of the national talent pool). Ethnic quotas on ownership structure either discourages successful Chinese Malaysian firms from tapping local stock market to fund expansion or drives Chinese Malaysian firms to move their headquarters to foreign lands. This is why, unlike the Taiwan case, there are very few Malaysian firms that have moved from producing import-substituting (import-competing) goods to become major exporters of these goods. Ethnic quotas on bank loans, business licenses, government contracts, and employment promote corruption throughout society. Side effects of such ethnic quotas include the perpetual infant industry phenomenon, and increasingly frequent rulings by the Malaysian courts on the protection property rights that are at odds with standard practices elsewhere. The NEP undermines high growth by enshrining mediocrity at best and rewarding incompetence in general; provides a social justice justification for corrupt practices; and erodes investor confidence by escalating inter-ethnic tensions.To escape the middle-income trap, the government must implement root-and-branch reform in many areas (most, notably, the civil service, educational and research institutions, the fiscal system, the state procurement system, the judiciary branch, the police force, and government-linked companies), and puts the culture of excellence at the core of its administration. Only then, would Malaysia get the microeconomic incentives right, get the macroeconomic balances right, and get the governance institutions right in order to transition to a knowledge-based economy.

Protection or Obstruction? Women and Precarious Work in India

This paper considers how India's economic liberalization under the New Economic Policy (NEP) has affected its labour policies designed to protect women in precarious work. Particular attention is paid to the negative influence the NEP has had on women's empowerment schemes from the 1990s onwards. Although India's GDP has increased exponentially from 267 billion USD in 1991 to 691 billion USD in 2004, women continue to have significantly higher levels of unemployment, illiteracy, and poverty than men. However, it is not solely the NEP that has limited women's protection in the workplace but also the entrenched hierarchical power relations within India's “soft state.”

Writing about the Cinema of the Stalin Years: The State of the Art

Scholars of the first decades of Soviet cinema have conventionally broken their study down into sub-periods marked both by developments in the film industry and by political change. The year 1924 saw both Lenin's death and the restoration of the film industry after the dislocation caused by revolution and civil war. The late New Economic Policy (NEP) years would produce both the first depictions of the revolutionary process by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko and the social comedies of everyday life of Kuleshov, Barnet, Ermler, and Room. The end of the decade saw collectivization and the First Five-Year Plan--and cultural revolution, which had a direct effect on the film industry. This second period also coincided with the start of the Soviet cinematic debate about sound film. The introduction of sound technology in the 1930s brought a new genre, the musical, but it also made it easier to use film for ideological ends, so filmmakers experienced increasing state intervention and censorship, and the number of shelved films grew. The third sub-period dates from June 1941 to May 1945 and is marked by the evacuation of the industry to Central Asia and its total ideological mobilization. The fourth, lasting from the end of the war to the Great Leader's death, saw a drive to re-impose orthodoxy and a dearth of films, the so-called malokartin e, the two phenomena connected by Stalin's famous dictum that we should make fewer films, but each of them should be a masterpiece. There have been, broadly, four approaches to writing about the film industry of these years. The first was to study individual films and the careers of individual filmmakers, and here a conservative canon was observed, with most attention paid to the great directors, to Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Vertov and Dovzhenko, and then, later, to the musicals of Aleksandrov and Pyr'ev. But the singular achievements of many other filmmakers and, more important, the links of these directors to their colleagues through the shared experience of cinematic education, professional organizations, and work in studios were insufficiently explored. (1) The other approaches were the publication, re-publication, and translation of documents, exemplified by The Film Factory, (2) still the most important single volume on the cinema of the period; contributions to the history of the industry in its political context, the approach taken in Richard Taylor's Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany and The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1917-1929; (3) and overviews of the cinematic process in historical context, as in Peter Kenez's Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953 and Denise Youngblood's Movies for the Masses) These five pioneering books set the agenda for the development of the study of Stalin period cinema in the West in the late 20th century. It is notable that they concentrated their gaze on the 1920s and early 1930s, which are the years that saw the greatest artistic and political debate about the direction of the industry, and arguably the years of its greatest achievement. The fate and achievements of the industry during wartime and later attracted far less attention, in part because of the inaccessibility of the films of this period. The approaches outlined above have not changed fundamentally in recent years, but a number of factors have led to a considerable expansion of the study of the subject. First and perhaps most important is that the video and DVD revolution has vastly increased the primary material which is accessible to scholars. Many of these films are re-issued in low-quality editions, poorly framed and with bad sound, and few attempts have been made by Russian publishers to re-issue the original versions of the many films that were de-Stalinized in the Khrushchev years, but it is now possible (indeed essential) to look at the achievements of the cinematic masters in the context from which they sprang. This context is now being examined in many ambitious documentary films being made by Russian companies, the most innovative and thoughtful of which, Zvezdnye gody Lentil'ma (The Star-Studded Years of Lenfilm), made for the Kul'tura channel, regularly includes footage from extremely rare films of the period. …

The Enemy, the Communist, and Ideological Closure in Soviet Cinema on the Eve of the Great Terror: ( The Peasants and The Party Card )

The Enemy, the Communist, and Ideological Closure in Soviet Cinema on the Eve of the Great Terror(The Peasants and The Party Card) Andrey Shcherbenok (bio) The figure of the contemporaneous internal enemy was an integral part of Soviet cinema throughout the 1930s. This figure was novel—Soviet cinema in the 1920s found little material in a Soviet reality dominated by the New Economic Policy (NEP) to warrant a violent political plotline; although ideological debates and anxieties were intense,1 the demarcation lines between "us" and "them" remained blurred, while the representations of the most obvious candidate for the role of the enemy—the nascent NEP bourgeoisie—tended to belong stylistically to comedy rather than political drama. As a result, Soviet avant-garde film, with its inherent predilection for vehement political struggle, concentrated on the past rather than the present: the Revolution and the Civil War—the events, although recent, clearly belonging to a quite different historical period—were the subject matter of the films that such directors as Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and Vsevolod Pudovkin made before 1929. The situation changed with the Great Break of 1928–29 that inaugurated the collectivization of agriculture and the industrialization drive. The radicalization of adversarial internal politics, with its sharp dividing lines between communist proponents of the new policies and their mortal enemies, coincided with an important development in cinematic art—the introduction of Socialist Realism, which strove to combine the political consciousness and propagandism of the Soviet avant-garde with the engaging potential of mass-entertainment cinema. Socialist Realist films promoted individualized and psychologized characters that replaced the collective hero of the avant-garde, making cinema an important vehicle for the process that Oleg Kharkhordin describes as the individuation/ [End Page 753] individualization that the Soviet subject underwent after 1929.2 This development was greatly facilitated by the introduction of sound in 1931, which made cinema closer to theater with its traditional models of psychologization. Thus the development of the figure of the contemporaneous, internal, and individualized political enemy in the 1930s was overdetermined by political practice, ideological discourse, the introduction of the new aesthetic, and the development of cinematic technology. Enemies of all kinds—wreckers, foreign spies, and double-dealers—routinely appear in 1930s Soviet films of all genres, including even musical comedies.3 Their centrality to the plot and their articulateness as characters, however, vary greatly. In many of the 1930s films, the enemy only appears in subplots to give the protagonist an opportunity to display his/her heroism, as in N. A. Kosheverova and Iu. A. Muzykant's Arinka (1939), where an unnamed enemy appears literally from the woods trying to derail the train, or in E. V. Cherviakov's Honor (1938), where a similar attempt to derail the train is made by one of the minor characters. Many industrial dramas of the period include sabotage as one of the obstacles faced by the builders of socialism, as in F. M. Ermler and S. I. Iutkevich's Counterplan (1932), S. I. Iutkevich's Miners (1937), or S. A. Gerasimov's Komsomol´sk (1938). Finally, the detective genre provides, as in Evgenii Shneider's High Award (1939) or A. V. Macharet's The Mistake of Engineer Kochin (1939), its share of foreign spies to be traced and captured by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). While the many Soviet films of the 1930s tend to use the enemy as an auxiliary figure to sustain the plot and do not concentrate on the enemy himself, some of them address the subject in a much more thorough and complex manner. Not surprisingly, these films did not pass unnoticed by the Soviet authorities. Ermler's The Peasants (1935), one of the two films I analyzet in this article, was included among just a few feature films to be put in a special preservation safe in the recently opened Soviet film archive;4 the other, I. A. Pyr´ev's The Party Card (1936), was specifically promoted by Stalin, who overruled the initial rejection of the film by the censorship committee and gave it its title.5 Not only are these two films among the first to address seriously the topic...

The contradiction of entrepreneurship through affirmative action

Malaysia’s affirmative action, introduced as the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1971 to redress Malay economic setbacks, failed in its objective of acquiring for the Malay public companies the 30 percent equity of Malaysian public companies by 1991. The government believed that the NEP’s affirmative action, boosted by Malay political primacy, was a recipe for the creation of entrepreneurship. While not minimizing the role it justifiably plays for marginalized societies, affirmative action for the creation of entrepreneurs is questionable. This paper attempts to explain that state assistance to an economically-challenged society does little to create entrepreneurship, and because of its dependency ethos, is likely to inhibit the survival instincts and gumption necessary to face the challenges of entrepreneurship. It offers a proposition: in the context of Malaysia, selective assistance under affirmative action invites cronyism which non-Malay entrepreneurs resent and react with even higher competitive resilience by organizing themselves more collaboratively and optimizing their resources.

THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY AND THE ACCOUNTING PROFESSION IN MALAYSIA: A CASE OF A MISFIT?

Puxty et al. (1987, p. 273) argue that a concern with the social context is important if accountants are to understand their position and roles in society and if the significance of accountancy is to be assessed. In a case study format where qualitative data were gathered mainly from primary and secondary source materials and semi-structured, open-ended interviews of selected participants, the study focused on what took place in the nation's accounting arena and its immediate surrounding following the violence between Malays and Chinese in May 1969. The New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1971 changed the direction of the Malaysian economy away from a full free enterprise economy in the earlier years. As a result, the Companies Act 1965 and Accountants Act 1967 which together were aimed to facilitate the emergence of such an economy were mainly left unapplied until the mid-1980s when several important facets of the NEP were ended. In addition, the Malaysian Association of Certified Public Accountants' debilitating conduct in the field of accounting examination and training and that of promulgation/adoption of accounting/auditing standards had certainly not helped in improving the situation. All in all, accounting in Malaysia during the NEP era was in an uncertain and unsatisfactory state perhaps befitting the context it was in where the government played the main role in the nation's economy. Thus when it concerned the accounting profession and related matters in the NEP era, following Hopper et al. (1987), it can be argued that accounting development in Malaysia had been implicated in broader ideological and political struggles in the society. Keywords: Accounting, Malaysia, New Economic Policy, Malaysian Institute of Accountants, Malaysian Association of Certified Public Accountants, social context.

Revolutionizing mind and soul? Soviet youth and cultural campaigns during the New Economic Policy (1921–8)*

During the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in Soviet Russia, between 1921 and 1928, the Bolshevik youth policy was highly ambivalent. On the one hand, the regime tried to suspend the milita...

Macroeconomic management amid ethnic diversity: Fifty years of Malaysian experience

This paper examines the role that macroeconomic policy has played in the Malaysian development experience. Given the multiracial nature of Malaysian society, macroeconomic policy has not only been about economic stabilization, but also about addressing income disparities along racial lines in order to preserve social harmony. The affirmative action program under the New Economic Policy (NEP) was an important signaling device, and served to demonstrate that all should share in future growth. These selective interventions were clearly distortionary, and promoted a culture of dependence on state hand-outs, as well as rent-seeking behavior. It was perhaps fortunate that FDI inflows and rapid export expansion were available to augment the domestic resource base. Although its resource cost was not a major drag on growth in the past, the slowdown in FDI inflows and exports post-crisis, combined with demographic change, implies that reforms may be necessary to ensure sustainability, going forward.

Comment on “Income Inequality in Malaysia”

Comment on “Income Inequality in Malaysia”

The development of entrepreneurship in Malaysia: State‐led initiatives

Summary The aim of this paper is to explore the entrepreneurship development in Malaysia and analyze the trends in the development of the field. It looks into the economic and industrial activities from independence up to year 2005, which are categorized into four phases according to Malaysia's first major government policy, the “New Economic Policy (NEP)”. The first phase refers to the period before the introduction of the NEP; the second is the first half of the NEP period; the third is the second half of the NEP era; and the fourth is the period after the NEP era. From the third phase onwards, entrepreneurship activities were carried out rather aggressively, particularly with the initiation of the government‐supported and government‐protected national automotive industry. Many enterprises were established as suppliers of parts and components to the national manufacturer under government assistance programs. The following phase put emphasis on technology in most entrepreneurial endeavors. The four phases had different foci of industrialization, but they were similar in terms of initiative, which was to become state led. The initiation of Malaysia's pioneer industrial project, the automotive industry, spurred the growth of firms and provided the gateway for the acquisition of relevant technological knowledge, technical skills, and entrepreneurial talent. Thus, this paper postulates that a new trend has emerged in the field of entrepreneurship in Malaysia as a result of the state‐led industrialization effort.

Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia

This essay investigates the explosive Soviet interest in space travel during the New Economic Policy (NEP) era of the 1920s, as expressed through amateur societies, the press, literature, painting, film, and other popular culture. In recovering an obscured history of the roots of Russian cosmonautics, it shows how the cause of space exploration in early twentieth‐century Russia originally stemmed from two ideological strands: technological utopianism and the mystical occult tradition of Cosmism. The former (seemingly modern, urban, international, materialist) alternately clashed and meshed with the latter (superficially archaic, pastoral, Russian, spiritual), creating an often contradictory but urgent language of space enthusiasm. Cosmic activists, who saw themselves as part of a new Soviet intelligentsia, actively used both ideals to communicate their views directly to the public. The essay argues that despite superficial differences, technological utopianism and Cosmism shared much of the same iconography, language, and goals, particularly the imperative to transform and control the natural world. In other words, the modern rocket with its new Communist cosmonaut was conceived as much in a leap of faith as in a reach for reason.

Urbanization and its Implication on the Malay Women’s Social Interaction

Over the past decades, Malaysia has seen a tremendous social and economic development. One of the developments is through the process of urbanization. With the implementation of the Malaysian New Economic Policy (NEP) from 1970 onwards, which specifically encouraged the involvement of the Bumiputeras, who are largely rural based, in the industrial and commercial sector of the economy, has a profound effect of the rate of urbanization in Malaysia. Rural areas are being developed and transformed to a new urban area. This process of transformation has an effect on the social interaction on the community in the area particularly the women. The aim of this paper is to examine the pattern of social interaction particularly on the Malay women’s communication in Malaysia, due to the process of development and urbanization in their area. Further, it is also intended to look at the women’s view on the meaning of urbanization, its implication towards their pattern of communication and their experience of having the telephone at home. This research employs a qualitative method by using an in-depth interview of fifteen Malay women, who live in the area that has undergone and experienced the process of urbanization. The selection of the informant was through snowballing. The research revealed that due to the rapid development, there is a changing pattern in the women’s social interaction particularly their communication. This communication changing pattern has led the women to change their way of communication that is by using Information Communication Technology (ICT) particularly the telephone to replace their daily face-to-face communication. The research also revealed the women’s story of their first experience of having the telephone at home and how they communicate with others. The research conclude that the meaning of urbanization to the women is apart from enables them to communicate easily via new technology, it is also seen as trying to separate the women among themselves physically, living them to communicate in isolation.

The Rise of the Corporate Economy in Southeast Asia

DOI: 10.1355/ae24-2j The Rise of the Corporate Economy in Southeast Asia. By Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 388. This thirteen-chapter book comprises the Introduction and Conclusion, three chapters each on Malaysia and Indonesia, two each on Singapore and Thailand, and one on the Philippines. It traces the post-war growth of large Southeast Asian corporations by their organization, finance, business environment, and corporate governance. The analysis of structures of ownership, concentration and governance of family-dominated conglomerates runs parallel to the development of banks, capital markets, state and foreign capital in a corporate economy. While not into the Asian crisis, which is covered in the extant literature since 1997, the book notes the crisis as a common denominator to belie the dramatic but debt-driven regional growth; none was spared one way or the other. In hindsight, 1997 was a blessing in disguise to catalyse reform and change to be more globalization-ready. The Asian setting is neither an excuse nor exclusivity. Every region or country claims to be unique in development. The book's analytical pole on organization and ownership of Southeast Asian corporations allows comparisons and contrasts of models and behaviour of various agents as owners and stakeholders. The book's balance of theory and empirical evidence by country and case studies is useful to both teaching and research-oriented academicians as well as policy-makers and practitioners. Nested within large family-dominated conglomerates are small, medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which the author noted are hard to study, but vital as supporting industries for foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) in the cluster theory. While agreeing with the author's lament on historiography of corporations at the micro-level and statistics as another constraint, two points are footnotes. One is the currency of the bibliography, like new literature on Singapore Inc, and its developmental state. Curiously, partly due to marketing and distribution, awareness of indigenous works by Asian scholars is not commensurate. All authors help to publicize new knowledge in collegial citations, but could do without typographical errors, such as, Dananmodal (p. 47) and Standard and Poor (p. 280). Following the ownership, concentration, governance to restructuring format after the Asian crisis, the three Indonesian chapters epitomize the most serious Southeast Asian constituent by magnitude, depth and complexity of issues. While Indonesian pribumi sentiment seems no different from Malaysian bumiputera in intent to nurture and shelter indigenous elite groups, the means and products are somewhat differentiated. The Soeharto patron-client cronyism is more patent with the Salim family accounting for 17 per cent of total listed corporate assets in 1995 (p. 10). In contrast, Malaysia appears to have democratized bumiputera patronage under the New Economic Policy (NEP) triggered by the 1969 race riots and ensuing privatization guises. Another interesting similarity and contrast is how loans in Indonesian and Malaysian banks or Thai finance companies as funding sources play out in their domestic settings to betray Asian household frugality and saving. Are these defective institutions as exposed by the 1997 crisis part of the state-regulatory blame or an institutional underdevelopment abbreviated as insufficiently globalization-ready? Any irrational exuberance is equally torched by real estate and equity bubbles. Foreign direct investment (FDI) and state capital are as double-edged, whether they aided and abetted risque and rogue Indonesian capitalism or were strong partners in Singapore Inc. To contain collateral damage, FDI in buy-outs of Indonesian joint partners posed as much an acquisition opportunity. Bail-outs turned out deconcentration and better corporate governance, but do they snuff out indigenous entrepreneur-ship and SMEs? …

Malaysia: Abdullah Does It His Own Vague Way

The ethnic diversity in Malaysia makes politics an endless balancing act that is reflected in the public sphere as an endless series of controversies and crises. This was certainly true of 2006, Abdullah Badawi's third year as prime minister. The long-term effects of Mahathir's 22 years in power had by now become more and more undeniable, and put to the test the ability of his successor to control the excesses of that period. The constitutional right to worship freely also became a pressing issue throughout the year, alongside heated debates about the affirmative action programmes ? the New Economic Policy (NEP) ? and the methods used to monitor them. Reforms to fight corruption and wastage were pushed to the back seat by events that aggravated inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations, and threatened to damage the already dented image of the dominant party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). On 6 June 2006, former premier Mahathir Mohamad finally decided to vent his frustration over government policies by attacking Abdullah Badawi himself. This occurred soon after the latter cancelled the Johor Bahru-Singapore bridge project. The country witnessed half a year of confusing accusations being hurled at Abdullah Badawi, with the situation calming down only after Mahathir suffered a mild heart attack in November.

Prosper-Thy-Neighbour Policies: Malaysia´ s Contributions after the Asian Financial Crisis

I. Introduction The emergence of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and its subsequent negative impact on Malaysia's economy in 1998 disrupted the decade-long sterling economic growth that the country had enjoyed prior to the crisis. Although the economy recovered quickly in 1999, there were numerous external and internal challenges that have confronted it since then. Externally, the catastrophe of September 11 and global downturn in 2001/2002 as well as the emergence of health risks associated with the Sudden and Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the avian flu in 2003, the tsunami in 2004, and escalating oil prices in 2005/2006 all posed different challenges to Malaysia's small, open economy. Internally, steering the country to the next stage of require a continuous search for a balance between further liberalization and the needs of the country. While the former is dictated by the size of Malaysia's relatively small domestic economy, the latter also includes the restructuring of society according to ethnic considerations and goals as encapsulated in the New Economic Policy (NEP). In spite of its own struggles with development, Malaysia is mindful that poor neighbours can be a source of problems which may spill over its borders, thereby undermining the peace and prosperity of the country (Mahathir 1997, p. 2). Hence, during his tenure as Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir advocated the use of prosper-thy-neighbour policies or policies that seek to assist neighbouring countries to develop together with Malaysia. Post Mahathir, the continued use of this policy is very much in line with ASEAN's Vision 2020 that envisaged ASEAN as a community of caring societies where there would be equitable access to opportunities for total human development and in which the gap among member economies would be reduced even as members forged closer economic integration (ASEAN 1997 as cited in UNDP 2004, p. 124). Based on this Vision, the Initiative for ASEAN Integration (IAI) was adopted at the Fourth Informal Summit in 2000 in order to narrow the gap within ASEAN by assisting the new members--Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam (or the CLMV countries)--to participate fully in regional economic integration. This plan was subsequently formally adopted at the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in 2001 in its Hanoi Declaration on Narrowing the Development Gap for Closer ASEAN Integration. This paper is organized as follows: after the introduction, an assessment of the major reforms in the financial and the manufacturing sectors is presented in section II. The update on the Malaysian economy is followed by a comparison of the economic performance and human of Malaysia with that of the ASEAN-10 in section III in order to ascertain the extent of the gap between Malaysia and the other member countries. Malaysia's contributions to the IAI programmes are evaluated in section IV while section V draws some policy implications based on the analysis in the earlier sections. The conclusion in section VI summarizes the main findings of this paper. II. Post-Crisis Malaysian Financial and Manufacturing Sector II.1 Financial Sector Since the crisis was essentially a financial crisis, the focus of this section will be on the main reforms in the financial sector. Malaysia's financial sector is highly diversified and among the most advanced in the ASEAN region, with banks accounting for two-thirds of the sector in terms of assets, and non-bank financial intermediaries for one-third. There is an offshore financial sector in the province of Labuan that is the Labuan Offshore Financial Centre. After recovering from the Asian financial crisis, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), or the central bank, stepped up its financial reforms through the implementation of the Financial Sector Master Plan (FSMP, 2001-2010), which was launched in 2001. The FSMP has three phases; in the first phase, it focused on the building of domestic banking capacity. …

Women at Work & Entrepreneurship in Globalization Era

This paper focuses on the impact on women at work and entrepreneurship in India. There was major shift in Indian economic strategy in July .1991. The new strategy was termed as New Economic policy (NEP). It was mainly based on the IMF- World Bank's structural Adjustment Programmer (SAP). The major planks of the WEP were liberalization, Privatization & globalization (LPG) of the Indian Economy In India women entrepreneurship can be considered as necessity entrepreneurship rather than opportunity entrepreneurship with the development of work culture in society for women. The performance of women entrepreneurship in India was quite improving during the period. However, these women workforce may be possessing skills in making handicrafts handlooms items or food production like making chips etc which can be used profitability by creating small enterprises. Therefore, the Government should take an active role in encouraging women to go to work like, to provide day care and also incentives to companies that encourage women's employment.

Globalization and Structural Changes in the Indian Industrial Sector: An Analysis of Production Functions

In 1991 India chose to open her economy and formulated the New Economic Policy (NEP). Under the structural adjustment and reform programmes, the NEP aimed at promoting growth by eliminating supply bottlenecks that hinder competitiveness, efficiency and dynamism in the economic system This study investigates into the structural changes in the manufacturing sector of India brought about by liberalization and globalization of the economy. Structural changes in terms of employment of labour and capital, indicated by replacement of the former by the latter, and changes in returns-to-scale have been examined by estimating CES, Zellner-Revankar, Transcendental, Diewert and Bruno's production functions. State-wise data for 1990-91 and 2003-04 have been analyzed. The findings have indicated that the rise in industrial output during the reference period is accountable to substitution of capital for labour in almost all states. The elasticity of substitution has declined for most of the states. In the pre-globalization period the industries experienced increasing returns to scale. Globalization has given way to diminishing returns to scale. Along with a rise in industrial output, globalization has led to a decline in regional disparities in terms of population-deflated indices of employment of manpower and capital, and the resultant output.

Dzherzhinskii and the Gerd Case: The Politics of Intercession and the Evolution of "Iron Felix" in NEP Russia

Unprotected by law, the civil rights of groups and individuals in 1920s Soviet Russia were at the mercy of tides of repression, whether those emanated from central campaigns or from local forces. In the personalistic order created by the Bolsheviks one of the most important avenues of redress against rights abuses, especially as concerned heterodox intellectuals, was intercession by regime oligarchs (Old Bolsheviks). (1) For this to occur, entree to such figures was needed. However, another factor that permitted efficacy of intervention was the continuing existence of relatively autonomous spheres of power--administrative fiefdoms--and of independent political authority, in the absence of a dictatorship by a single supreme leader. Such conditions perdured in the Soviet Union roughly until the 15th Party Congress but arguably had already become largely inoperative by mid-1926 with Politburo member Lev Kamenev's fall from power and especially the death of United State Political Directorate (OGPU) chair Feliks Dzerzhinskii. Although it is true that Commissar of Enlightenment Anatolii Lunacharskii was able to protect people until early 1929 and Commissar of Heavy Industry Sergo Ordzhonikidze did so until the mid-1930s, their power of patronage was based on borrowed time. (2) The Gerd Case, as it was labeled in Dzerzhinskii's files, is a revealing exhibit of the complicated 1920s politics of repression and intervention. For one thing, it demonstrates just how vulnerable was the broad intellectual life under the New Economic Policy (NEP) and how widespread, especially among local and provincial party elites, were illiberal views and prejudices. (3) It illustrates how these illiberal currents collaborated on the local level in the selection of specific targets for persecution. For another, it underscores the degree to which the security of individual members of the old intelligentsia was dependent on from among the Old Bolshevik oligarchy, whose salvatory power was limited both by political contingency and by their own understandings of the requirements of regime loyalty (as opposed to the claims of justice). Finally, the Gerd Case reveals that intercession itself was a practice that some influential party members had become emboldened to contest, even if the were none other than Dzerzhinskii and Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia. Hardliners discovered that by placing vulnerable clients or former friends of Old Bolshevik rivals in peril, as bait, they could draw those rivals out as intercessors and render them politically vulnerable as well. The Gerd Case: Background In October 1926 members of the Moscow Pedagogical Society met to honor the memory of Vladimir Aleksandrovich Gerd, a noted science teacher, educational theorist, and reformer, who was decisively influential in the pre-Soviet progressive movement. A third-generation pedagogue, Gerd collapsed of a heart attack after running to catch a Volga River steamer in July. Shocked colleagues and relatives were unprepared for the news. Emilia Orestovna Vakhterova, who wrote a short memorial piece, was certain that a full-length biography of Gerd would appear. However, Gerd, along with the memory of his educational initiatives, sank with scarcely a trace into the deep Soviet memory hole. (4) During the 1920s Lunacharskii himself once admitted that perfectly well understand that the very best kind of which we could succeed in creating is something very close to the new progressive schools of the past. (5) After the Bolshevik accession to power these schools--Tenishev Gymnasium, the Stoiunina Gymnasium, and the Lesnoe, Vyborgskoe, and Gerd's Putilovskoe kommercheskie uchilishcha (commercial schools) became part of the unified labor school network and Lunacharskii's People's Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) allowed most of them to retain as much of their staff and programs as possible. …

British business and the politics of trade with the USSR during the New Economic Policy (NEP)1

British commercial and political hopes to expand trade in the new Soviet state after 1920 were to an extent disappointed. Despite successful ventures by individual companies, in aggregate business fell short of expectations, especially compared with German and American competitors. The reasons were both (micro and macro) economic variables and political factors, in Britain and the USSR. From 1926 the Soviet regime was committed to rapid industrialization and a pattern of imports in which Germany enjoyed some comparative advantage. But, in contrast to major rivals, British governments occasionally tried to use trade as a political instrument to the disadvantage of commercial operations.

The Indian Business Scene, Challenges of Change, and Capacity-Building through People-Management Strategy

In today's business world of chaotic high incidence of competition, managing change is one of the most critical factors for corporate success. Studies show that Indian corporate leaders of the pre-reform era have not been able to sustain their growth rate in sales and profit. They have not been able to withstand the winds of change caused by the new economic realities. Even those players who have demonstrated greater incidence of success have not been seriously considering internationalization of their businesses. This paper discusses the opportunities offered by the new economic policy (NEP) to corporates in India; some of the achievements attained by them; and the problems and challenges they face in this regard. It identifies the need for change as a corporate strategic priority. The paper argues that for organizational capacity-building for performance excellence, Indian companies need to invest in learning and benchmarking in different spheres of organizational working; and also resort to leveraging the empowerment model of human resource management (HRM) strategy as a way of organizational life.