International Management

In this chapter we revisit the empirical findings of Rugman and coauthors concerning overwhelming home-regionalisation among the world’s largest firms. Using a longitudinal research design and continuous measures of internationalisation we discover a number of secular trends. We find that sales growth beyond the home region is considerably faster than sales growth in the home region. We use our empirical results to critique and augment existing regionalisation theory. In particular, we raise doubts about the sharp distinction in the literature between expansion in the home region and expansion in host regions. It would seem that firms expand simultaneously within and outside their home region, targeting individual countries rather than entire regions.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

Over the past decade, international business and international management researchers have utilized meta-analytic approaches to synthesizing findings in the extant literature. This chapter reviews the studies published in the top-five international business and management journals from 2004 to 2012. The review investigates major problems in the published meta-analyses by evaluating their overall analyses as well as the approaches utilized. Findings of this review reveal differences amongst the journals and improvements in the approaches applied in recent years. The chapter ends by discussing why and how international business and management researchers need to focus more on methodological fundamentals in their applications of meta-analysis.

"BOTH Obama and Romney will fix the US economy without free trade.

Or at least that is the conclusion you might draw if you watched their last two presidential debates or viewed their recent attack ads.

Amid two presidential debates focused largely on fixing the US economy, trade expansion took a back seat to anti-China grandstanding."

This study uses exchange rate and OECD GDP to explain the exports of India for the period 1994 to 2008. Since the ADF and Phillips-Perron tests show the first order cointegration in Indian exports, OECD GDP and exchange rate, the first difference of the log of exports of India has been regressed on first differences of the log of OECD GDP and the log of one of the four exchange rate variables at a time namely the Trade weighted Real effective exchange rate(REERT), Exports weighted Real Effective exchange rate(REERX), Trade weighted Nominal Effective exchange  rate(NEERT) and Export weighted nominal effective exchange rate(NEERX). The empirical results indicate that only OECD GDP is significant in explaining the Indian exports.

The purpose of the qualitative research was to assess models of education developed for the study to investigate how and when to incorporate second and third languages into the curriculum to improve language acquisition. Research indicates that L3 enhances and reinforces L2 and L1. The stratified systematic grounded theory study explored the perspectives of neurolinguists, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, and interdisciplinary education researchers to derive variables for constructing a new model of education. The outcome of the Internet survey revealed that 100% of the participants agreed that education must change and that teacher training must improve. Variables from the cross-disciplinary data contributed to the construction of an integrated model of multilingual education consisting of four primary models and other models to serve as tools for designing curriculum, instruction, and assessment as well as determining demographics and student meta-analysis of language abilities and storage in the brain. The first model emerged from the data to offer multilingual principles of education. The other primary models are macro, meso, and micro models. The macro model represents schools, instruction, assessment, and the curriculum cycle. The meso model depicts the developmental domains of the individual learner and includes a cyclical equation. The micro model delineates multilingual processing in the brain based on neurolinguistic research, variables from the current study, and Kees de Bot's bilingual adaptation of Levelt's language processing model. Recommendations include the incorporation of notional-functional pragmatic-aesthetic concepts as depicted in the models developed for the study and enhanced by input from published researchers with unique language and research repertoires who were located on four continents.

Open Educational Resources are being promoted by governmental, non-governmental, inter-governmental and private business houses. There are different funding mechanisms for developing OERs. Due to restricted or limited funding provisions currently, we need to have a look at alternatives. Educational providers need to examine ways to meet the challenge of numbers, costs, quality etc. MOOCs are getting popular in extending the outreach of education.