http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/2605/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/26332/ 2011-07-01T00:00:00Z SUMMARY Companies operating in multiple countries face different and often changing regimes of environmental regulation. This regulatory turbulence raises the question of what environmental strategies multinational enterprises with a portfolio of divergent regulatory regimes should develop in relation to their international business expansion strategies. We argue that multinationals seeking to develop an effective environmental strategy should integrate relative regulatory stringency and international market interdependence. We discuss and illustrate four environmental strategies that match different regulatory/market configurations for multinationals from both developed and emerging markets, as well as the factors that drive strategic changes. We introduce a „regulatory turbulence tool‟ that describes relevant regulatory/market configurations and prescribes contingently effective, dynamic environmental strategies. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/25620/ 2011-03-01T00:00:00Z Asian agriculture is faced with major new challenges as a result of globalisation, urbanisation and environmental problems such as climate change. To meet these challenges, Asian agriculture needs to become more knowledge intensive and innovation oriented. This article frames the new Asian challenge in terms of innovation theory, emphasising the importance of the co-evolution of technological and institutional change and linkages between actors in open, interactive innovation processes. It studies the performance of agricultural research and technology organisations (RTOs) in four small and medium-sized South and Southeast Asian economies: Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia and Vietnam. A key performance issue is the linkages between actors, which is a key weakness in the agricultural innovation systems of most Asian countries. The need for effective linkages is growing as agricultural production and innovation are becoming increasingly complex due to the impact of the consecutive green, sustainability, biotechnology and supermarket revolutions. Linkages are in short supply, but the demand for them is exploding. As a consequence, traditional public agricultural research organisations in Asia, created at the time of the green revolution, no longer play a central role in agricultural innovation as they did when countries faced only one challenge. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/40125/ 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Multinational enterprises face a great variance of environmental regulations in the countries in which they operate. How best to confront this challenge? In our research, we set out to develop and illustrate a conceptual framework for understanding the problem and suggest appropriate strategies. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/23828/ 2010-10-27T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/20065/ 2010-07-05T00:00:00Z The aim of this study was to present and compare the content of (inter)national clinical guidelines for the management of low back pain. To rationalise the management of low back pain, evidence-based clinical guidelines have been issued in many countries. Given that the available scientific evidence is the same, irrespective of the country, one would expect these guidelines to include more or less similar recommendations regarding diagnosis and treatment. We updated a previous review that included clinical guidelines published up to and including the year 2000. Guidelines were included that met the following criteria: the target group consisted mainly of primary health care professionals, and the guideline was published in English, German, Finnish, Spanish, Norwegian, or Dutch. Only one guideline per country was included: the one most recently published. This updated review includes national clinical guidelines from 13 countries and 2 international clinical guidelines from Europe published from 2000 until 2008. The content of the guidelines appeared to be quite similar regarding the diagnostic classification (diagnostic triage) and the use of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions. Consistent features for acute low back pain were the early and gradual activation of patients, the discouragement of prescribed bed rest and the recognition of psychosocial factors as risk factors for chronicity. For chronic low back pain, consistent features included supervised exercises, cognitive behavioural therapy and multidisciplinary treatment. However, there are some discrepancies for recommendations regarding spinal manipulation and drug treatment for acute and chronic low back pain. The comparison of international clinical guidelines for the management of low back pain showed that diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations are generally similar. There are also some differences which may be due to a lack of strong evidence regarding these topics or due to differences in local health care systems. The implementation of these clinical guidelines remains a challenge for clinical practice and research. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/40048/ 2010-05-01T00:00:00Z The economic crisis shows remarkable parallels to a personal crisis in its characteristics and consequences. If that is the case, does this imply that solutions should also run parallel? For sure, such crises provide corporate leaders with many new demands. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22982/ 2009-11-04T00:00:00Z Trade can be an important driver in poverty alleviation and empowerment in developing countries. International trade relations can be an important impetus to change, but in what direction? Whether the optimistic expectation related to trade liberalization and globalization materializes, depends on the conditions under which trade relationships are managed. As an arms-length relationship between independent actors, or as dependency relationships in networks of supply and demand, also known as international value or commodity chains? This makes the issue of ‘fair trade’ a prime topic not only for policy makers and international economists, but also for business scholars. Firstly, fair chains involve the inclusion of small entrepreneurs: firms, farmers (small-holders) and their co-operatives. Are they able to participate in global value chains, can they get a fair share of the economic pie and can they produce under sustainable conditions? Secondly, there is the big business perspective which involves major traders and multinational firms that ‘steer’ global value chains either in-house or at arm’slength. Thirdly, the question involves the acts of consumers. Can their – sometimes inarticulate – demands for sustainability and fairness be translated in feasible market propositions (products, business models) and clear communication (labels, codes)? Finally, there is a role that has to be played by governments: can they be neutral bystanders or should they become active, and if so in what areas? http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/26790/ 2009-06-01T00:00:00Z It is well accepted that multinational enterprises (MNEs) prefer equity joint ventures (JVs) over wholly owned subsidiaries (WOSs) in foreign countries where the formal and informal external environment is highly uncertain. Many entry mode studies have modeled the external uncertainty faced by MNEs in foreign countries as the cultural distance to these countries (thus focusing on the informal environment), or as their political risk level (thus focusing on the formal environment). We argue that both approaches are suboptimal because (1) cultural distance not only reflects the external uncertainty associated with WOSs but also the internal uncertainty associated with JVs, and (2) political risk covers only one aspect of the formal external environment. We contend that the governance quality of foreign countries is a better proxy for external uncertainty. The lower this quality, we hypothesize, the higher the likelihood that MNEs will choose JVs over WOSs. An analysis of 231 entries by Dutch MNEs into 48 countries offers support for this hypothesis. We also find that cultural distance has no impact on entry mode choice and that political risk has the weakest impact of all aspects of governance quality. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/16063/ 2009-04-22T00:00:00Z This article explores whether the internationalization trajectories-patterns over time in the level, pace, variability, and temporal concentration of international expansion - of large firms from China and India are fundamentally different from those of developed country firms. A longitudinal cross-country comparative study of 256 large firms for the 1990-2004/2005 period shows that although internationalization trajectories of large and leading Chinese and Indian firms are indeed different, there are also considerable similarities between established developed country firms and the new firms from emerging markets, not in the least, because they often interact within the same sector. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/16243/ 2009-04-01T00:00:00Z This article examines whether the involvement of stakeholders in the design of corporate codes of conduct leads to a higher implementation likelihood of the code. The empirical focus is on Occupational Safety and Health (OSH). The article compares the inclusion of OSH issues in the codes of conduct of 30 companies involved in International Framework Agreements (IFAs), agreed upon by trade unions and multinational enterprises, with those of a benchmark sample of 38 leading Multinational Enterprises in comparable industries. It is found that codes of the IFA group have a higher implementation likelihood in OSH than the codes of the benchmark group. Further, European firms, culturally more used to stakeholder involvement, score higher than their US and Japanese competitors, and hence are more capable of addressing the safety and health issues in international supply chains. The implementation likelihood of codes seems closely related to the type of corporate CSR approach. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/14003/ 2008-12-02T00:00:00Z This paper examines the sustainability claims of private quality standards, voluntary adopted by supermarket to improve the quality of products in respect of food safety, and environmental and social sustainability. The concept of ‘sustainability’ is defined as the opportunity for upgrading by developing country suppliers in the retail supply chains. The paper reports of an explorative analysis on the perceived effects of 36 quality standards in the retail on upgrading. Data was collected through a survey of a wide variety of relevant media: websites, scientific articles and reports, policy reports, and online newspaper articles. The overall conclusion is that the majority of the 36 standards are perceived to facilitate trading opportunities for developing country producers, but only for those suppliers who can meet the criteria of quality standards. The study found interesting differences between various categories of standards. Standards initiated by NGOs and partnerships are perceived to offer better upgrading opportunities to suppliers than do standards initiated by (inter-) governmental authorities, by individual firms, or by business associations. Standards with an explicit social and social/environmental focus have a more positive influence on process and product upgrading in developing countries compared to voluntary food safety standards. Product-specific standards offer better upgrading opportunities than do generic quality standards. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22981/ 2008-11-05T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22979/ 2007-10-31T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/16291/ 2006-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7189/ 2005-12-21T00:00:00Z The debate on globalization has long been characterized by theses of institutional convergence and divergence. The emergence of Anglo-Saxon shareholder capitalism as the dominant paradigm since the start of the 1990s is associated with the pursuit of global strategies by Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and the consolidation of a multilateral trade regime. Yet the link between actual MNE strategies and developments in the institutional arena remains an understudied phenomenon. Tensions between multiple levels of institution building – unilateralism, regionalism and multilateralism – create an environment of strategic uncertainty for MNEss. Consequently, MNEs’ actual international strategies reveal much about perceptions of the institutional environment in which they operate and allows for the documentation of more subtle paradigm shifts. The internationalization strategies pursued by MNEs from the Triad over the 1990s reveal that a multilateral strategic reality was anticipated by only an elite few, while the vast majority of firms operated in a unilaterally- or at best regionally-determined institutional environment. This contribution suggests that institutional restructuring is multifaceted and sometimes contradictory, casting a new and more subtle light on the globalization debate. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7174/ 2005-12-19T00:00:00Z Recent work has emphasized the importance of regional strategies downstream, adding new depth to the debate on ‘globalization’. This paper adds to the debate by exploring the regional dimension upstream for a sample of Triad-based Fortune 500 firms. We find support for our hypothesis that MNEs with higher levels of value-added upstream are relatively constrained in their ability to shift that activity outside the home region due to its strategic significance to home-region stakeholders. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/210/ 2002-07-01T00:00:00Z Since the early 1990s international - or even global - outsourcing of intermediate products from suppliers has been propagated as a key means to improve the performance of firms. It is argued that becoming more lean and internationally focused is beneficial for the buyer as well as for the supplier . Global sourcing is currently believed to be a common phenomenon. Drawing upon a recent survey among a representative sample of 200 large Dutch manufacturing firms this paper gives an answer to the question to what extent internationalization of sourcing is indeed taking place and whether it affects a firm's performance. The analysis reveals that for this sample of firms global sourcing is the exception rather than the rule. Although firms undertake considerable international outsourcing, this is mostly limited to nearby ( European Union) countries. Statistical tests reveal that there is no significant relation between international outsourcing and either market or financial performance. International outsourcing can not be used to adequately explain firm performance. Therefore, an alternative approach is discussed, in which the degree of (international) outsourcing is contingent upon factors like the size and location of the headquarters of the firm. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/135/ 2001-12-11T00:00:00Z The current understanding of Regional Integration is largely macro-economic and political in orientation and has tended to neglect, even ex post, the significance of the Single European Market (SEM) for the spatial restructuring of individual firms. The problem stems largely from a lopsided understanding of Regional Integration. This paper introduces a two-level approach in which integration and its outcomes are studied based on the strategic intent and strategic realities of two types of key actors: governments and core companies. In this contribution it is argued that in advocating the SEM, these actors did not necessarily share the same strategic intent. A new firm-level data set shows also that the expectations of European policymakers did not accurately match actual strategies developed by European core companies.