No comprehensive history of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation (AGC) has been written yet. While this doctorate thesis, due to time and word limit constraints, cannot claim to have achieved this level of completeness it does provide a major contribution towards such a comprehensive history by providing for the first time an academic account of this African-based gold mining firm from 1895 to 2004. The thesis has chronological range: from the firm's incorporation to its demise as an autonomous company. Depth of analysis is reserved for the consideration of important aspects of the four factors of production and how these resources affected the company's fortunes. The thesis will contribute to the business historiography of Africa as well as to our understanding of the history of Ghana with respect to British foreign investment and the development of the gold mining industry. The main question under investigation is how the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation managed to survive for so long: how the company evolved, what accounted for its longevity, and what assessment can be made of its business performance over time. It is found that AGC's business performance in terms of output experienced five distinct phases: steady growth between1898 and1939, decline between1939 and 1956; strong growth between 1957 and 1974; near-terminal decline between 1975 and 1986; and rapid growth between 1987 and 2004. A different and more erratic pattern emerges on profitability notably with a sharp decline in the company's last decade of existence, contributing to its loss of independence. The firm's longevity cannot solely be explained by the geological uniqueness of the Ashanti mines, although this gave the firm a critical advantage. In the face of challenging political and economic changes, managerial decisions and the manner in which the factors of production were employed help us to understand the firm's successes and failures.

This study analyses the dynamics and impact of international tourism in the Western Cape province of South Africa. It investigate how the Western Cape tourism sector interrelates with the international sector, and what developmental outcomes this has in the province. In terms of tourism's impact the study shows that it is geographically concentrated, with tourist activities focuses in and around the Cape metropolitan area and along the south eastern coastline. The province's rural areas have a very small share in the tourism market. Overall, tourism is following long-established patterns, being centred on the promotion of a number of traditional attractions and tourist images. The nature and distribution of tourism is partly related to the role and actions of key producers. Tour operators, for example, have an important effect on travel flows. They, along with other producers and agents such as the media, significantly influence consumers' knowledge and perceptions, and consequently the image(s) of the Western Cape. This in turn has an important consequence on localities and destinations that are visited by tourists. Furthermore, investment trends show that there is limited infrastructural development and demand-stimulation by the government or other tourism producers in regions where tourism impact is lowest. The provincial government is pursing an objective of sustained tourism growth, and greater tourism equity and impact distribution. This objective is hampered by several factors. The Western Cape tourism economy has significantly grown over the past seven years, but a number of aspects may constrain continued growth. Firstly, political, economic and social factors in the larger exogenous environment play an important role in restricting tourist demand. This, coupled with seasonal fluctuations in demand has led to a sector characterised by overcapacity. The regime governing flight access and availability to the Western Cape furthermore has a limiting effect on tourism production and consumption. In practice, the goals of growth and equity are difficult to balance. The government primarily seeks to do this by coupling the development of new products that involve the historically disadvantaged population of the province with an innovative product offer that appears to both traditional and new market segments. There is however a generally low level of demand for new or alternative products such as township tourism in international source markets.

This study examines in detail for the first time the emergence and development of a highly specialised sector of British manufacturing industry, charting its evolution and explaining its growth predominantly through scrutiny of original source material relating to the key actors in the story. It proposes that after 1888 Britain produced an optical munitions manufacturing structure which succeeded in dominating production of the most militarily important and commercially valuable instrument in the field, and which by 1914 had achieved an hegemonical position in the international marketplace. The study also overturns the conclusions of the previous brief scholarship on the topic, asserting that the industry responded well to the challenges of the Great War and going on to show that there was a difficult, but ultimately successful translation back to peace. This largely ignored branch of British technological manufacturing performed effectively and ran counter to notions of the relative decline or comparative failure of industries in the sector, and the narrative puts forward reasons to explain that success. To do this, the account employs a methodology embracing a combination of theories and models of historical explanation to demonstrate reasons for the industry’s path and to test the interpretations put forward.

This study investigates the relationship between the ancient settlements (in Lycia) and physical environmental parameters including topography, rock and soil types using GIS. Modern settlements are also included in the study to analyze if the response has changed to these parameters from past to the present. The databases created in the study include three topographic attributes (elevation, slope and aspect), rock type, soil type, ancient settlements and modern settlements. Analyses performed in the study involve distance and density analyses of ancient and modern settlements, morphological analysis, distribution of ancient and modern settlements within the rock and soil types, and visibility analysis of ancient settlements. Results of the analyses suggest that the ancient sites are located on the east, southeast, south facing and flat surfaces at slope values of 0 to 13 degrees within the elevation range of 0 to 1000 m. The average distance between the cities is 7 km preferably located over alluvium or limestone rock types with the soil types having thickness more than 20 cm. A set of decision rules are derived from the ancient settlements using above mentioned data layers to predict location of unknown settlements. This analysis indicated a few locations along the Mediterranean coast.

A theoretical model of coffee consumption in the U.K. is proposed, which is estimated and used to examine the influence of habit formation and advertising in the period 1957-80. This work challenges both the assumption of symmetrical consumer response and the statistical source for measuring coffee consumption. The model allows for asymmetrical consumer reactions. Explanatory variables are: price of coffee and of tea, income, advertising and the strength of the coffee drinking habit. This work is original in terms of interpreting and quantifying product field advertising and habit formation; and for allowing a minimal threshold level of predictors. Mistakes, repeated printing errors and unpublished changes in definitions were found in the statistics of domestic coffee supplies 0 Household coffee purchases estimated by the National Food Survey (N.F.S.) are consistently over-reported. Causes investigated provide grounds for correcting estimates by pooling N.F.S. with Family Expenditure Survey; the result is consistent with adjusted supplies. Advertising effect on demand is separated into two aspects. The first action increases sales by attracting new buyers, while protecting consumers from competitors' propaganda. The second action increases sales to habitual customers, while manufacturers are competing through advertising for a larger brand share. The transmission medium is a factor in both effects. The strength of the habit shifts market demand function. A routine way of thinking prevails under stationary conditions; yet shifts in the function occur in a non-stationary situation which initiates the problem-solving way of thinking. In the model, addiction can be either absolute or relative to changes in other factors. All the evidence supports the general model proposed, which shows that a non-symmetrical functional effect prevails and demonstrates the existence of an adjustment period. Irrefutably, coffee consumption depends on former consumption levels, coffee price, price-ratio tea to coffee, income and advertising.

The thesis compares the business activities of a particular type of British overseas trading company, the Agency House, in two former British colonies, Malaysia and Nigeria. The thesis charts the commercial and political circumstances that heralded the arrival of the Agency House in each colony and the companies’ rapid business growth thereafter while trading under the relative security offered by the British Empire. The thesis then examines the firms’ development in the aftermath of empire as the selected companies struggled to survive in independent nations. Here, each of the London-domiciled boards faced a very different set of commercial conditions overseas, which were largely shaped by politics both home and abroad. Each firm was forced into tough decisions on trade strategy to safeguard interests overseas and thereafter placate an increasingly hostile host regime. After independence, the Agency House, as obvious and symbolic reminders of imperialism, became targets for punitive legislation aimed at redressing imbalances in the private sector and achieving the repatriation of corporate wealth in each of the selected nations. The commodity trade was the basis for the development of the Agency House in each former colony. In Malaysia, a British-financed estate industry spread rapidly in response to escalating demand for rubber at the start of the 20th century. By the 1950s, for a number of reasons, the estate industry moved from rubber to oil palm cultivation, which quickly became a catalyst for a huge expansion in the plantation industry, the evidence of which is etched across the nation’s topography today. In Nigeria, the production of (although not trade in) commodities always remained the remit of indigenes only which was enshrined in law, both colonial and nationalist, despite the lobbying by resident British traders. This was one of a number of factors examined in the thesis to understand why trade there could not keep pace with the British estate development taking place in Malaysia and despite Nigeria’s long history in the export of commodities like palm oil. Examining the commodity trade of each nation helps to explain the growth of the British Agency House to become commercial powerhouses in each nation. The thesis therefore looks at the strategy of each firm, the trade they were engaged in and thereafter how each attempted to survive when confronted by increasingly hostile nationalist legislation. It will also explain why only one of the Agency Houses examined here continues to trade today.

The aim of this research was to examine the main organisational and social characteristics of the Romanian industrial enterprise under communist rule. The research explored the complex relations between state planning bodies, enterprises, and the managers. The research’s approach was multi-disciplinary drawing on industrial management, economics, organisation studies sociology, and political science. The research had also a consistent trans-disciplinary character because it aimed to create an over-arching perspective on Romanian industrialisation process. The approach employed in this study was the one labelled by Burrell & Morgan interpretivist. This means that author’s set of assumptions over society and social research lies on the subjective side of the philosophy of science dimension, and is characterised by an integrationist view over society. The research methods employed were predominantly qualitative, based on interpretation of data collected using interviews and document analysis. The empirical research focused on the formation and key features of Romanian industrial enterprises, on the process of negotiation of the plan objectives between enterprises and central state structures, and on the analysis of the human resources processes of the enterprise. The empirical findings offer an in-depth perspective over the practices, mechanisms, and actors involved in the activity of the Romanian industrial enterprises for almost four decades. The findings also confirm the consistent potential of the interpretive approach to provide a better understanding of the way organisations work in a challenging environment as the communist regime was.

For more than two decades, monetary policy of countries around the world has undergone significant transformation. The long-term stabilization and lowering of inflation is the primary target of central banks founded on the principles of transparency and credibility. The achievement of inflation targeting and control is ultimately judged by the public’s expectations about future inflation. This objective has focused central bank policy making on modern monetary principles and the adoption of one of its core principles, the monetary policy rule. The central bank of the United Kingdom officially adopted an explicit inflating targeting monetary policy in October 1992 following its operational independence in May 1997. In this study, we attempt to investigate the behaviour of the Central Bank of England under an inflation targeting framework. In other words, whether Taylor-type policy rules can be used to describe the behaviour of the Central Bank of England. We specifically attempt to shed light on the question does Taylor's rule (Taylor, 1993) adequately describes central bank behaviour? And whether the existence of formal targets has induced nonlinearity in this behaviour, beginning in October 1992 until December 2014. The study uses time series estimations of Taylor-type reactions functions to characterise monetary policy conduct in the UK, we use time series data, because all the other studies in this area are using the time series method and recommended it, Osterholm (2005), Nelson (2000), Adam et al (2003), Clarida et al (2000) amongst others. In addition, this study uses a long database which is useful for time series analysis. The analysis uses a modified cointegration and error correction model that is robust to the stationary properties of the data as well as vector autoregression techniques; therefore, our methodology in this study employed three types of econometric tests namely: unit root tests, cointegration tests and error correction models. We used monthly data for the UK over the period October 1992 to December 2014, and we estimate Taylor-type policy rules for the UK in order to find answers to these questions. Our results indicate that the Central Bank of England has not been following the Taylor rule. In other words, the regression results clearly indicated that the Central Bank of England did not follow the Taylor rule in the period 1992-2014. This is because all coefficients of inflation gap and the output gap were statistically insignificant. In addition, we conclude these results link with the New Consensus Macroeconomics, criticism of inflation targeting and endogenous money theory. The main contribution in this study is an up-to-date analysis, and evidence that Bank of England policy does not work with Taylor rules. In addition, on the methodological level most previous studies reviewed in the literature have measured the interest rate, inflation and the output gap using one dependent variable, to measure the behaviour of the Central Bank of England, to assess whether the Taylor rule is effective or not. However, this study fills this gap by using two measure for interest rate, three measure for inflation and two variables to measure the output gap, using The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter and moving averages, to assess whether the Taylor rule is effective or not effective by using more than one dependent variable.

No description available.

This Thesis contains four original essays that have been devoted to the study of different elements of the hypothesis of endogeneity of the natural rate of growth. The theoretical framework of the Thesis is presented in Chapter 1. In it, we explore various elements that are of utmost importance in order to understand the hypothesis of endogeneity and that have been generally overlooked by the literature. The four empirical essays presented in Chapters 2 to 5 explore different aspects of the endogeneity of the natural rate of growth in a sample of thirteen Latin American countries during the period 1981-2011. The first two empirical essays test the hypothesis of endogeneity using new specifications and various econometric techniques. The results indicate that the natural rate of growth is endogenous to the actual rate of growth, so that the long-run economic growth rate presents sensitivity both in the upward and downward directions in the majority of countries of study. We also find evidence that suggests that expansions are more important than recessions in the sample of Latin American countries. Chapter 4 tries to: 1) estimate a time-varying natural rate of growth; and 2) measure the sensitivity of the latter with respect to its individual components: the rate of growth of labour productivity and the rate of growth of labour force. The results show that the natural rate of growth is more sensitive to labour force growth in the sample of Latin American countries. Finally, the fifth essay studies the interactions between the individual components of the natural rate of growth and the individual components of the rate of growth of aggregate demand. The empirical results show that the rate of growth of labour productivity is more sensitive to the different components of the rate of growth of aggregate demand. However, we find mixed evidence regarding which component of the rate of growth of aggregate demand is more relevant, so that it is not possible to derive a single conclusion that encompasses all the Latin American countries of study. All in all, the present research finds both theoretical elements and empirical evidence that support the hypothesis of endogeneity of the natural rate of growth in Latin America during the period 1981-2011.