Given the growing interest in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure (CSRD), especially in developing countries, this thesis adopts neo-institutional theory to investigate the extent and types of CSRD practices and factors influencing its adoption in oil and gas companies operating in Libya. Two methods of data collection were used: namely, semi-structured interviews and annual reports. The semi-structured interviews were conducted first with 14 oil and gas firms’ managers working in Libya, to identify the factors influencing CSRD adoption, and second with 6 external actors to confirm or reject such claims. The second method involved a collection of 106 annual reports for the period 2009-2013, to first identify the extent and types of CSRD practices, and second to proceed with a regression test to assess the relationship between CSRD determinants and the extent of CSRD practices. The findings from the qualitative analysis show that managers perceive a diversity of coercive, mimetic and normative pressures interplay to influence CSRD in the Libyan context. Particularly, the adoption of CSRD is influenced by the state through its governance body - the National Oil Corporation (NOC), foreign business partners, other foreign-owned companies’ behaviour, the need to uphold firms’ reputation, and pressures to meet societal expectations. Other determinants identified include government ownership, parent company factors, board size, board meeting, firm size, age, presence of CSR committee, and profitability. Furthermore, the absence of clear legal requirements, a shortage of knowledge and awareness, the absence of civil society organisations, the absence of the Environmental General Authority’s (EGA) role, and a lack of motivation from the government were found to act as major impediments to CSRD development. The findings obtained from the quantitative analysis show that the level of CSRD is low when compared with Western countries, but in relative terms, the most disclosed types of CSR information were related to the human resources and environment. Moreover, the findings obtained from the CSRD regression model suggest that CSRD practice is positively associated with government ownership, joint venture ownership, foreign ownership, frequency of board meetings, parent company factor, and firm size. However, CSRD has no statistically significant relationship with board size, CSR committee, and age of the company, while profitability is negatively associated with CSRD practices. These results contribute towards the literature adding to the knowledge of CSRD practices’ “implementation”, by empirically providing evidence for the context of CSRD in Libya. This is achieved by explaining how specific external and internal determinants contribute to or impede the development of CSRD practices. These findings, therefore, could be useful to corporate regulators and policy makers in developing a more focussed agenda of CSRD activity, when considering regulations for disclosure.

Former Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude once made the ambitious claim that one million public sector workers would own and run the services they provide by 2015. It never happened, but there are still approximately 110 Public Service Mutuals (PSMs) in England. Yet whilst mutuality permeates the discourse of this policy, mutualism in PSMs, as both ethos and practice, is under-theorised and under-researched. This thesis addresses these gaps using a critical realist approach. Drawing on a review of literature on mutuality and co-operation, mutualism in PSMs is conceptualised as interrelated cultural and structural emergent properties, comprising mutual ideas, relations and practices. These are applied in an empirical research project to explore the mutual in PSMs. A large N survey of healthcare providers was followed by in-depth comparative case studies of an NHS Foundation Trust and two PSMs. Using a critical realist framework, mutual structures and generative mechanisms, together with agent (employee) interaction with them, were investigated. The findings revealed that organisational mutual practices of ownership, shared benefit, voice and transparency can cause the emergence of the mutual relations of trust, co-operation and reciprocity when allied to a common purpose. In turn, the causal powers of these mutual relations strengthen organisational mutual practices. However, this does not occur quickly or automatically and the corporate agency of managers and staff, coalescing around joint projects, is necessary for the mutual in Public Service Mutuals to emerge and thrive.

Investment and trade flows across East Asia during the last three decades have fostered the development of production networks and economic integration. However, only since the turn of the century, have East Asian countries begun to institutionalize such integration through free trade agreements (FTAs). With the exception of Japan, the literature portrays East Asian FTAs as driven by political elites on primarily foreign policy motivations and with marginal participation of businesses in their formulation and utilization. Most of these narratives have, however, overlooked endogenous sources of trade preferences, shortcoming that this Thesis attempted to correct by analyzing how FTAs fit within the strategies of states and firms. The project investigated the mutual interaction between evolving trends within East Asian production networks and states’ and firms’ preferences on FTA liberalization using as case studies the bilateral FTAs negotiated by Thailand and Malaysia within the context of key production networks, particularly the automotive industry. Research involved extensive process-tracing through semi-structured interviews and trade data analyses. The main findings of this dissertation were: 1) Compared to multilateral liberalization, greater technical complexity and easier assessment of impacts in bilateral FTA negotiations resulted in more intense government-business consultations and corporate lobbying. Successive FTA negotiations strengthened the technical capacities of bureaucrats and firms and prompted the emergence of new institutional structures for intermediation and coordination among all actors; 2) Sectors that had successfully lobbied ex-ante for FTA liberalization and/or benefited from unilateral liberalization schemes have made extensive utilization of FTAs; 3) Governments and firms in both countries sought and extracted selective rents in FTAs to improve their relative position not only with respect to states and firms outside the bloc but also inside, and; 4) The interplay between overlapping FTA areas and the investment sunk in them shaped governments’ and firms’ positions on further FTA liberalization.

This thesis has three pieces of empirical studies that analyse economic inequality across social groups (castes and gender) and its impact on human capital endowments in developing countries with particular reference to Nepal. Three aspects of inequalities have been examined: disincentive in educational attainment in female arising from labour market discrimination, disproportional representation of low-caste workers in better jobs and inequity in health care utilisation and health outcomes across castes. This study contributes to the literature of economics by developing a new theory and extending existing econometric models in analysing economic inequality across social groups. The first piece of research examines the impact of marital anticipation on female education in the presence of labour market discrimination. It develops a theoretical model for jointly determining the age at marriage and female education. The model hypothesizes that as females are not rewarded in the labour market as much as men are; married women are encouraged to engage in household work as a result of the intra-household division of labour in their marital union. Thus, parental anticipation of this effect affects their daughter's age at marriage and can influence investment in girls' schooling. It then estimates the causal effect of age at marriage on education in light of the theoretical model using household data from Nepal.

The thesis firstly examines the extent to which different sources of governance activity have both changed the supply, processing and consumption of seafood in Britain and achieved its sustainability, food safety and quality over the period 1950 to 2013 and secondly reflects on the implications for agri-food and governance theories in which the UK seafood chain has not previously been considered. Using documentary sources, the compilation of a database of seafood companies and stakeholder interviews the research has reconstructed development and change over this period. In doing so it demonstrates a range of changes which can be related to different forms of governance: these include transformation of supply, diverse activities to raise sustainability, greatly improved quality and food hygiene systems and variations in consumer attitudes and practices. The thesis underlines the significance of public forms of regulation in changing the sources of supply as well as in the contested movement towards the more sustainable exploitation of fisheries, in raising food hygiene standards and in establishing the basis for nutritional advice to consumers with regard to seafood. Complementarily, the account also shows how private forms, particularly certification systems, have dominated governance of domestic aquaculture and of quality generally and how they have impacted on food safety. The thesis further examines how implementation of public governance is delegated and shared, including by analysis of various forms of mixed public and private governance, considers the various ways seafood consumption has been governed with attention both to both retailing and foodservice roles and assesses the contributions of civil society organisations. Based on these findings, the thesis argues that agri-food theories about internal supply chain functioning and the role of major retailers needs to be modified; it shows the limitations of explaining standards systems as the mode of control and the benefits of incorporating a power model of chain relationships. Further, in relation to external supply chain impacts the thesis demonstrates the need to emphasise the role of state regulation in the overall governance of food systems to a much greater extent than has usually been done hitherto. In relation to governance theory more broadly, the thesis examines the way changes in the operation of the British state have related to the seafood supply chain and the importance of examining the interests served in different types of governance with particular attention to the balance of public and private benefits resulting. The thesis thus analyses change in an important food source, illustrates how delegated state governance functions in a specific area and contributes to the theoretical basis for understanding food chains in general.

The extraction of natural resources, most importantly petroleum, is associated with weak governance, economic underperformance and environmental degradation and companies from the oil and mining sectors are often able to exploit host countries’ insuffcient regulatory environments. Since the mid-1990s the corporate social responsibility agenda as well as increased regulation by companies’ home governments has partly addressed the externalities of natural resource extraction. On the face of it, the rise of China and the increased international presence of statowned Chinese oil and mining companies challenges the effectiveness of these efforts. The companies’ foreign ventures have been accompanied by increased activity of the Chinese government in diplomacy and development cooperation with resource-rich countries, mainly in Africa but also elsewhere. Criticism commonly levelled at China includes its diplomatic and financial support for human-rights abusing regimes, and the destabilisation of world raw materials supplies and markets, both in the form of diplomacy and development aid. Seemingly unconstrained by regulation and public opinion at home, Chinese oil and mining companies are able to leverage their home government’s support and thus gain preferential access to natural resources. This thesis challenges this view. It argues that the assumptions about China’s role are misplaced and do not account for changes in Chinese behaviour. In an industry where corporate and state actors have a less-than-stellar record, China is quickly catching up with the emerging global standards. The reasons for this have to do with the way that governance gaps in the extractive industries are increasingly being filled by civil regulation. By now, numerous regulatory initiatives — in the form of industry voluntary codes of conduct and corporate social responsibility, multi-stakeholder initiatives as well as host and home-government as well as financial market regulation — seek to mitigate the negative impacts of natural resource extraction. Civil society pressure has helped create norms on governance in the extractive industries that have led to the establishment of a transnational web of regulation which large companies — regardless of their origin — cannot easily escape.

Public policies are an important determinant of the welfare of individuals and the society at large. Careful evaluation of the impact of public policies on welfare is therefore imperative for our understanding of the positive and normative implications for these institutions. The three chapters of this thesis examine the welfare consequences of specific economic and political institutions. Chapters 1 and 2 study two distinct channels through which social housing, a common feature of developed countries, may impact the neighborhoods in which they are built and the labor market outcomes of their low income tenants. Chapter 1 is concerned with the effect of the provision of social housing on neighboring private ats. It assesses the spillovers of low-income tenants and the change in the composition of the housing stock that are to be expected from the provision of new social housing units. In particular, it uses the direct conversion of private rental flats into social units without any accompanying rehabilitation to identify the impact of the inflow into the neighborhood of low income tenants, separately from the effects of social housing on the quality of the existing housing stock. Chapter 2 shows that social housing influences the location of low income tenants, and that the neighborhood of social housing units may improve the labor market outcomes of the poorest tenants. I observe the relocation of welfare recipients through the selection process of social housing applicants in the city of Paris from 2001 to 2007. The institutional process acts as a conditional randomization device across residential areas in Paris. The empirical estimates outline that neighborhoods have weak short- and medium-run effects on the economic self-sufficiency of poor households. Chapter 3, by contrast, focuses on how regional migrations of unemployed workers may affect their job search prospect in Europe. Using a longitudinal sample of French unemployment spells, the empirical estimates outline positive migration effects on transitions from unemployment to employment that depends on the previous duration of the unemployment spells.

This thesis is composed of three chapters. The first one investigates the impact of distance, market and supply access and agglomeration externalities on FDI locations. Chapter 2 studies the change in trade costs on FDI locations. Chapter 3 examines the relative effect of trade costs on horizontal and vertical FDI locations. Chapter 1 provides empirical evidence of the effect of agglomeration with firms from the same country on other location determinants. I use data for the Taiwanese FDI projects in Chinese provinces from 1991 to 1996. In order to estimate the relative change in coefficient magnitude over time, I exploit Taiwan’s FDI policy shock in 1991. I find negative effects of the bilateral distance between the home and host country on FDI locations. Sectoral agglomeration with firms from the same country also has significant and positive impact on FDI locations. Chapter 2 investigates the impact of the change in trade costs on FDI locations. I study the effect on the FDI growth rate and the number of new FDI projects. Taiwan’s cross-strait direct flights policy in 2008 provides a quasi/natural experiment on the change in trade costs, arising from the implementation of direct flights between Taiwan and China. I use difference-in-difference estimator with Taiwanese firm-level data for the period 2002 to 2011 to identify the casual effect of the change in trade costs on FDI locations. Furthermore, I decompose the effect of trade costs by identifying the transaction and transport costs channels. Contract and unit value intensity are created to measure the relative effect of trade costs through two channels. I find that the dispersion of Taiwanese FDI after the policy shock in 2008. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of trade costs on horizontal and vertical FDI locations. I study the relative effects of trade costs on the number of new horizontal and vertical FDI affiliates across industries. I use Taiwanese firm level data during the period 2001 to 2011 in combination with the input-output links between the parent firm and affiliates to identify horizontal and vertical FDI as well as inter-and intra-industry vertical FDI. My findings indicate trade costs have additional negative impact on vertical FDI relative to horizontal FDI. In addition, as an increase in trade costs occurs, vertical FDI affiliates are affected relatively more than horizontal FDI through both transaction and transport costs channels.

Despite the vast amount of scholarship completed on the First World War, relatively little work has focused on the British Left and the conflict. The aim of this thesis is to rectify this, by examining left-wing support for the war effort, and the implications of this for the labour movement. This study aims to ascertain the extent and nature of support for the war effort amongst the Left. It will survey the relationship between patriotism and the Left in the years before 1914, in order to give context for the events of the war years. It will then examine the reactions of the men and women of the Left – at both an elite and subaltern level – to the First World War. Furthermore, it will investigate how left-wing patriotism in this period impacted on the fortunes of the labour movement after the Armistice. The war also saw a great increase in the size and scope of the state, and the significance and implications of this will be examined. Finally, this thesis will aim to enhance our understanding as to why and how the labour movement was able to remain united and purposeful in the war years and immediately after 1918. Overall, this thesis will contribute to our understanding of the nature and extent of support for the war on the Left, the impact of the war on Labour’s electoral fortunes, the relationship between the Left and the state, and labour movement cohesion in this period.

The English and Welsh water and sewerage industry was privatised in 1989 and is characterised by a series of regional monopolies. The majority of consumers currently have no choice in their supplier. The industry is regulated by Ofwat to guarantee the best value for customers whilst enabling the companies to undertake their activities. The motivation of this thesis is to examine the effectiveness of regulation. The aim is to examine five research questions. Firstly, has regulation encouraged convergence amongst the efficiency scores? Secondly, have the 1999 and 2004 price reviews been effective in improving efficiency? Thirdly, is there a capex bias in the industry? The final two aims come from a methodological perspective: firstly, to allow for the incorporation of environmental variables within the measurement of efficiency and secondly, to incorporate the long asset life of capital by incorporating capital as an intertemporal factor of production. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is employed to measure efficiency which is a non-parametric technique that creates a linear frontier over the data. Convergence is examined by drawing from the growth literature to examine -and -convergence. A three-stage DEA model is applied to examine the influence of environmental variables and to obtain an environmental adjusted DEA efficiencey score. Finally, the intertemporal nature of capitala is incorporated through a dynamic DEA model. This thesis reports that whilst regulation has produced limited improvements in the average efficiency, regulation has been effective in encouraging the least efficient firms to catch up with the frontier companies. Ofwat's tightening of the price review in 1999 has produced significant improvements in efficiency, whereas the 2004 price review was relatively lax and had no significant influence. Finally, the thesis highlights that the current regulatory framework induces a preference towards capital expenditure which can have implications on the consumer's bill.