China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Action, Entrepreneurship and Energy
Published in Alison E. Woodward, Jerry Ellig, Tom R. Burns, Municipal Entrepreneurship and Energy Policy, 2019
Alison E. Woodward, Jerry Ellig, Tom R. Burns
Economists first applied the term “entrepreneur” to describe actors in the private marketplace. As a result, the economics literature on entrepreneurship provides a useful backdrop for our case studies. The entrepreneur has alternately been identified as a salaried manager, an independent business owner, a capitalist, a merchant, an innovator, a risk-taker and an uncertainty-bearer.1 While some of these definitions identify the entrepreneur as a specific person—more or less a category of skilled laborer—others place more emphasis on entrepreneurship as an aspect of all human behavior. The first notion of entrepreneurship fits well within traditional neoclassical economic theory, with its emphasis on optimization within given constraints; such a framework can easily accommodate entrepreneurship as “just another factor of production.” On the other hand, the view of entrepreneurship as an aspect of all behavior is more in keeping with social science theories that emphasize the role of creative human action in altering the constraints themselves. This concept of entrepreneurship can be found in both sociological and economic literature, particularly among scholars influenced by market process or “Austrian” economics. This creative notion of entrepreneurship more aptly describes the way in which our six selected municipalities responded to the energy crisis.
Economics of Additive Manufacturing
Published in Linkan Bian, Nima Shamsaei, John M. Usher, Laser-Based Additive Manufacturing of Metal Parts, 2017
The factors of production are, typically, considered to be land (i.e., natural resources), labor, capital, and entrepreneurship; however, capital includes machinery and tools, which themselves are made of land and labor. Additionally, a major element in the production of all goods and services is time, as illustrated in many operations management discussions. Therefore, one might consider the most basic elements of production to be land, labor, human capital, entrepreneurship, and time. The human capital and entrepreneurship utilized in producing additive manufactured goods are important, but these are complex issues that are set aside for this discussion. The remaining items, land, labor, and time, constitute the primary cost elements for the production of a product.
How entrepreneurship and technological innovation are bound together
Published in Paul Trott, Dap Hartmann, Patrick van der Duin, Victor Scholten, Roland Ortt, Managing Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 2015
Paul Trott, Dap Hartmann, Patrick van der Duin, Victor Scholten, Roland Ortt
Entrepreneurship can be described as a process of action that an entrepreneur undertakes to establish an enterprise. Entrepreneurship is a creative activity. It is the ability to create and build something from practically nothing. It is an ability to see an opportunity where others see chaos, contradiction and confusion. Entrepreneurship is an attitude of mind to seek opportunities, take calculated risks and derive benefits by setting up a venture. It comprises the numerous activities involved in the conception, creation and running of an enterprise. Similarly, an entrepreneur is a person who starts such an enterprise. He searches for change and responds to it. There are a wide variety of definitions for an entrepreneur: Economists view him as a fourth factor of production, along with land, labour and capital. Sociologists feel that certain communities and cultures promote entrepreneurship. The US is often cited as having a culture that supports entrepreneurs. Still others feel that entrepreneurs are innovators who come up with new ideas for products and markets. To put it very simply, an entrepreneur is someone who perceives opportunity, organizes resources needed for exploiting that opportunity and exploits it.
When the virtual water runs out: local and global responses to addressing unsustainable groundwater consumption
Published in Water International, 2022
Iman Haqiqi, Chris J. Perry, Thomas W. Hertel
The employment is calculated assuming a gridded labour market with no labour mobility across grid-cells. Labour is part of the non-land composite input within a Leontief form for combining labour and other non-land inputs. Thus, the demand for labour input follows the changes in demand for non-land composite input due to changes in intensifications. Figure 9 illustrates the spatial pattern of change in employment. The pattern is slightly different from changes in cropped area and production. This is due to the differing contributions of non-land factors of production among countries. The initial numbers for gridded employment were obtained from subregional rates of labour per hectare of cropland. Section A6 in the supplemental data online provides more information on the average number of workers per hectare and per ton of corn-equivalent output in rainfed and irrigated agriculture.
The spatial effect of factor market distortion on green agriculture development in China
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2022
Xinming Wang, Chao Hua, Jianjun Miao
This article uses agricultural fertilizer use level (FU) and pesticide use level (PU) to reversely reflect the current status of China’s agricultural green development. The main explanatory variables are labor market distortion (LD) and capital market distortion (CD). The measurement methods of factor market distortion mainly include production function method, frontier technology analysis method, shadow price method and market index method (Miao and Han 2020). The advantage of the production function method is that it can separately measure the degree of distortion in the market for different factors of production. This paper draws on the method of Zhao, Liu, and Lu (2006) to estimate the output elasticity of China’s factors, and substitutes it into the function to measure the two factor market distortions of labor and capital.
Efficiency and productivity of Nigerian seaports in the pre and post concessioning periods
Published in Maritime Policy & Management, 2021
Ogochukwu Ugboma, Kayode Oyesiku
Productivity and efficiency are quite significant in performance measurement. However, these two totally different concepts have erroneously been treated as the same in most of the literature. The productivity of a producer is often loosely described as the proportion of output(s) to input(s). This definition is extremely clearly capable of explaining any condition of one output and one input. However, in reality, it is more likely that production has multiple outputs and inputs, accordingly productivity here would refer to Total Factor Productivity, which as deduced by Coelli et al. (1998) is a productivity measure involving all factors of production. In other words, efficiency can be defined as relative productivity over time or space, or both. For example, efficiency can be divided into intra- and inter-firm efficiency measures. The inter-firm efficiency measure involves measurement of the level of utilization of the firm’s own production potential by computing the productivity level over time relative to a firm-specific Production Frontier that refers to the set of optimal outputs given the various level of inputs. In comparison, Lansink, Zhu, and Demeter (2001) felt that the inter-firm efficiency measures the performance of a selected firm relative to its best counterpart(s) within the trade.