The global strategies of the three South African retail giants are examined with a view to understand what factors motivate South African multinational enterprises to move into Africa, as well as what motivates their particular choice of countries, and how the capabilities and resources are deployed and managed in their foreign operations, so as to remain competitive in both local and foreign markets. The South African retail giant geographic expansion is a way to penetrate new markets, explore new opportunities and deliver the growth they seek on the journey to high performance. Their choice of countries is determined by various factors that contribute to the competitive nature of a country, namely: national values and cultures; macro and micro economic environment; political stability; institutions, and history. As these emerging market multinational enterprises cannot depend on countryspecific advantages, the contenders accelerate their development of firm-specific advantages at a rapid rate. South African companies have developed expertise for trading in Africa as they are more familiar with the physical, regulatory and social terrain than businesses from other parts of the world. The market, the culture and realities of infrastructure, poverty, lack of skills, as well as the technology in their non-South African operations are not a shock to the South African companies. The business strategies will, therefore, not entirely be the same as those of the multinationals from the developed world. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Prediction markets have recently gained favour with the academic and business communities. Prediction markets have evolved a long way from their basic beginnings as friendly wagers among friends to become large scale markets connecting traders from around the world. They have been adopted into many large and dynamic corporations that require up to the minute information that can keep up with their business. Organisations like Google, HP, Yahoo! and Best Buy have been experimenting with prediction markets for demand forecasting tasks. Governments have also been using markets, although not always as successfully. The U.S. government looked at PAM which became the terrorist futures market in the post 9/11 world. This did not appeal to the American populous and it has since been withdrawn. Through technological advancements the capabilities and availability of prediction markets has grown. With this the interest in how they work and what can be done to improve the accuracy of the markets. This research looked at the inclusion of a deliberative technique to the markets to improve that accuracy of the market. For this research, markets that made use of discussion boards were used. They were compared against traditional markets, which had no means of communication between traders.The research took the form of a quantitative comparison between the two market types. Data was acquired from the Iowa Electronics Market (IEM) and Inkling Public Markets. The findings from this research indicate that there was a significant difference with α=0.012 for the markets at close. This indicated that there was a significant between the traditional (control) and non-traditional (experimental groups) markets from descriptive statistics it was indicated that the traditional markets performed better in the prediction tasks. The conclusions of this research indicate that allowing traders to communicate and see the actions of others creates group biases which impacts on their independence when making trades and thus on the performance of the market.Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

We might wonder, after two centuries of economic science and thousands of articles and books written by economists, if something new can still be said about 'markets'. Today, what new contribution could still be given to a so fundamental concept in economics? This thesis builds on the main legacy of Veblen, Polanyi and Hayek's Institutionalism: the distinction between the 'interactional' level of human sociality and the 'structural' level of society that Veblen named 'institutions'. The three authors tentatively formulated an original idea: the two levels of sociocultural reality are interdependent and mutually constitutive. This is a proto-emergentist ontology of institutions that makes the starting point of the thesis. Convergent results of different disciplines are explored in order to develop such ontology. It is argued that sociocultural systems have properties that make them specific, namely the human capacity to interact in multiple scales of time-space using human language. Sociocultural research cannot be guided by conceptual schemes abstracted from other levels of Nature. This is the bedrock of a Naturalist Institutionalism. To understand institutions we need to discuss meanings and culture; we need to enter the semiotic of Peirce, the founder of Pragmatism. The foregoing implies the distinction of three types of inter-dependent processes in sociocultural systems: the cultural ('norms'); the social (networks, organisations); the material reality. This analytical move enables a redefinition of 'institution': a sociocultural system emergent from inter-related organisations, networks, norms and material reality, which structure individuals and organisations and serves a societal function. In this sense, the 'economy' is a macro-institution and markets are sub-systems of the 'economy', meso-institutions. Thus, a market is a self-organizing, complex, and open system endowed with structural levels emergent from persons' interactions-communications participating in the transformation processes of production, distribution, appropriation and consumption, using matter-energy and symbolic tools. Finally, it is argued that the evolutionary process of markets has a specific sociocultural nature that goes by the name of 'history'. Their motion is discussed with recourse to a model that highlights the interactions of markets with science, state and culture to solve problems of uncertainty and coordination in the processes of competition, cooperation and valuation.

As a result of agreements negotiated at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), traditional trade protection measures such as tariffs and quotas are falling away. But to some extent they are being replaced by domestic technical regulations that permit countries to bar products from entering their markets if the products do not meet certain standards. To become and remain competitive, producers and suppliers must meet the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) requirements set by importers’ governments in importing countries. Some SPS measures are very simple and specific, but others are combined in extremely complex systems like the requirements governing the import of plants and plant products for entry in to the European Union (EU). The aim of this study was to evaluate the phytosanitary certification system currently used by the National Plant Protection Organisation (NPPO) of South Africa with regard to exports of agricultural produce to the European market and to develop an effective and efficient strategy to ensure compliance with the European Union’s phytosanitary regulations. The expansion of world trade has placed a huge responsibility on the National Plant Protection Organisation (NPPO) of South Africa to facilitate safe agricultural trade with its international trading partners. After putting the phytosanitary constraints/ weaknesses faced by the South African Export Regulatory System into perspective, numerous aspects of the export process were considered in this study. The NPPO of South Africa does experience capacity constraints in its phytosanitary export regulatory system mostly due to the recent restructuring of the Department of Agriculture (DOA). This information, combined with background information obtained from the personal experience of the author as a plant health officer for the past ten years at the Department of Agriculture and the analysis of questionnaires indicated that the current phytosanitary certification system are the most fundamental impediment to accessing foreign markets. This is followed by an evaluation of the export certification system to identify the major challenges experienced by the NPPO officials in phytosanitary certification to the European markets. Lack of fundamental scientific knowledge and the inability to interpret the phytosanitary import requirements of the European market were identified as the elementary barriers to phytosanitary compliance. Finally, the accuracy of phytosanitary certification is of paramount importance for international trade. If credibility is lost, this can result in stricter and lengthier inspection procedures in importing countries and eventually loss of markets. This study resulted in the development of a certification guide to equip the NPPO of South Africa with the necessary technical assistance to ensure compliance with the European Union’s phytosanitary regulations. This standard operating procedure (SOP) is currently in used by the certification officials of the DOA. / Dissertation (MInstAgrar)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Microbiology and Plant Pathology / unrestricted

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Thesis advisor: Theodore Papageorgiou / Thesis advisor: Robert Ulbricht / This thesis contains three independent essays on topics in macroeconomics and labor economics. In the first chapter, I investigate the implications of the increasing share of older businesses in the United States economy for labor market outcomes across workers in different age groups. I find that over the period 1994-2019, employment and wages fall by more for younger cohorts, driven by a ``firm competition” channel. Moreover, workers are better sorted, but receive a lower share of the match surplus, on average. In the second chapter, my co-author Div Bhagia and I ask whether broad sectoral shifts in labor demand account for the divergence of employment outcomes between Black and White men after 1970. We find that they explain no more than one-fifth of the increase in the employment-to-population ratio gap, and that the widening of this gap is primarily driven by differential responses to labor demand shocks across groups. In the third chapter, I quantify the roles of increases in job separations and decreases in job finding in recessionary increases in unemployment. I find that while job separations lead job finding, both margins contribute significantly to unemployment fluctuations. I conclude that future research should not ignore the interaction between unemployment inflows and unemployment outflows in explaining the cyclical behavior of the labor market. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

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No / By assuming that all uninsurable risk is permanent, a closed form multi-period, multiple agent and multiple asset incomplete market asset pricing model is presented that allows for jump as well as diffusion risk to personal income.

The character of Virginia's nonindustrial private forests is changing primarily for two reasons. First, many large, continuous forested tracts are being sub-divided, into with the resulting smaller tracts purchased for amenity values and recreation instead of as a timber investment (Hodge 1993). Second, the demographics of non-industrial private forest (NIPF) landowners are shifting away from an agricultural, rural focus to an urban oriented lifestyle and absentee ownership. These changes may mean less timber available for purchase by the forest industry. Timber that is sold will be on smaller parcels that is bound to have an impact on the procurement activities of forest industries. However, little research has been performed on the impacts of site and landowner characteristic on stumpage prices. The objective of this research project is to identify how the stumpage price of timber is altered by the characteristics associated with the changing forest: decreasing tract size, decreasing harvested volumes, landowner residence, and landowner harvesting preferences. In addition to the price of timber, the competitiveness of timber sales is analyzed to determine what impact the fragmented forest could have on the competitiveness of timber markets. To perform the study, site and landowner information was collected for 138 recent NIPF timber sales that occurred within central Virginia. This region is identified as a critical area for the study of forestry activities because of the growing urban and suburban residential populations and the large amount of forest industry activities taking place there. Results show that access to the site is the most important characteristic determining the selling price of timber. Sites that are easy for logging crews and vehicles to approach dramatically increase the price paid per ton. Tract size is less important in determining bid prices for timber either once the total volume harvested passes a minimum of 500 tons, or there is mature hardwood sawtimber on the site and the acreage is greater than 50 acres. Landowners preference for select cut harvests results in a lower price per ton being paid by the purchaser due to the increased logging costs associated with this type of harvesting. / Master of Science

This thesis examines the relationship between private equity activity and perceived corruption in Asian countries controlling for many different economic factors. The study finds indications that perceived corruption negatively affects private equity in Asia, however this is not statistically proven for all countries. When analysing groups of countries separately, the study finds that higher perceived corruption is positively correlated with private equity activity in Developed markets but negatively correlated with private equity activity in Emerging markets. For Frontier markets, the relationship is not statistically significant, even though indications point to a negative relationship. The ability to enforce contracts, measuring the quality of judicial systems, is the most significant determinant of private equity activity. Furthermore, the paper finds that control variables overall have bigger effects for emerging and frontier countries than for developed economies, implying that richer economies already have higher levels of economic development and small changes do not have much impact, but for poorer countries, smaller changes in different factors seem to boost private equity activity