China’s strong economic presence in Africa has resulted in an increased interdisciplinary debate. Our contribution is the incorporation of a business perspective by uncovering the prominence and role of business in China’s diplomatic Africa engagement. Our theoretical contribution by applying the state-business relations (SBR) literature is to examine whether established frameworks can be expanded by an international dimension through intergovernmental initiatives like the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). The paper conducts a document analysis of all declarations and Action Plans of all FOCAC conferences in the period 2000–2021, combining both a content and a thematic analysis based on an explorative and iterative coding process. Our data suggests that the prominence of businesses has increased while the scope of their activities and the number of focus sectors (especially infrastructure) has risen particularly since 2012. Companies are considered as enablers for political and economic goals in the state-driven FOCAC. We find that SBR frameworks are applicable to international contexts and propose an expanded SBR approach integrating transnational intermediary institutions like the intergovernmental FOCAC and transnational business platforms which facilitate positive state-business relations across countries and a conducive business environment.

This commentary explores the potential of private companies to advance scientific progress and solve social challenges through opening and sharing their data. Open data can accelerate scientific discoveries, foster collaboration, and promote long-term business success. However, concerns regarding data privacy and security can hinder data sharing. Companies have options to mitigate the challenges through developing data governance mechanisms, collaborating with stakeholders, communicating the benefits, and creating incentives for data sharing, among others. Ultimately, open data has immense potential to drive positive social impact and business value, and companies can explore solutions for their specific circumstances and tailor them to their specific needs.

El objetivo de este artículo es establecer el nivel de eficiencia del gasto público sanitario en América Latina y comprobar su relación con determinadas características institucionales como calidad regulatoria, participación del sector privado, descentralización o tamaño de la burocracia. Se estima una frontera estocástica de verdaderos efectos aleatorios que relaciona el gasto público en salud per cápita frente a la tasa de mortalidad neonatal e infantil y la esperanza de vida después de los sesenta años. Se regresan las ineficiencias resultantes respecto del conjunto de variables institucionales explicativas. Se evidencia el importante papel del gasto público sanitario en la obtención de determinados niveles de realización sanitaria. Sin embargo, su eficiencia es mejorable, especialmente a partir de optimizar la calidad regulatoria del Estado. Latinoamérica ha configurados sistemas sanitarios complejos, pero no han logrado mejorar la coordinación entre sus actores, lo que explica su ineficiencia. La rectoría del gobierno es esencial.

Left-leaning and right-leaning governments hold opposing views on economic policy, resulting in disparities in economic behaviours and outcomes. Given this context, we explore the effect of political ideology on domestic credit using an unbalanced panel data of 29 countries from 1960 to 2014. Our empirical analysis shows that left-leaning governments reduce total domestic credit allocations. Also, we find that right-leaning governments provide more credit to the private sector, while left-leaning governments prefer to boost domestic credit to the public sector. In a further analysis, we show that political parties and their domestic credit strategies remain unchanged even during electoral periods. Our novel insights, that are robust to alternative measures, samples, and a set of econometric identifications, contribute to the literature on partisan politics and lending behaviour.

In Japan, despite its private-dominant and disjointed health-care system, national initiatives to coordinate various types of health-care facilities are lacking. Municipal governments manage this task with limited resources. This study describes a successful example of a bottom-up approach to create city-wide collaboration for disaster preparedness. In Minato City, located in central Tokyo, a group of physicians created a project involving a city-wide disaster medical care drill. The city Public Health Center, in charge of health-care systems including disaster medicine, helped the group to increase proponents of the project. The city-wide disaster drill started in November 2017; thereafter, the drills were held every year. Participation in drills by various health-care personnel helped establish a city-wide system for disaster medical care, coordination mechanisms among stakeholders, increased motivation among health-care personnel, and development of in-hospital systems. This approach is flexible and applicable to various forms of health-care systems in other areas.

The Philippines was among the fastest-growing economies averaging within the 6.5 percent GDP growth in the past five years. However, the COVID-19 crisis brought major disruptions to the Philippine economy as growth, employment, and overall productivity fell into recession levels along with the declaration of a nationwide lockdown. As the pandemic resulted in a series of business closures, supply chain breakdowns, and massive job cuts, the private sector was forced to confront the challenges brought by the pandemic including its threat to business continuity and survival. This article presents the private sector's assessment of the pandemic's impact on the Philippine economy along with their views on the national pandemic response and the extent of public-private collaborations in countering the effects of COVID-19. Following the insights and experiences shared by industry leaders and other corporate executives, this article also discusses pivots in corporate strategy along with a significant shift in corporate mindset toward new ways of doing business and fulfilling their responsibilities in society.

Over the past several decades, private sector workers in the USA with employed-sponsored pensions have experienced a dramatic shift from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution plans, while this trend has been less pronounced for public sector workers. In this paper, we use data from the Health and Retirement Study to explore changes in the retirement incentives and retirement behavior of public and private sector workers over the past quarter-century. We find that both groups have become less likely to report having a DB pension or any pension. Compared to their private sector counterparts, public sector workers have a higher level of retirement wealth and a larger financial gain from continued work at older ages, and these differences by sector are growing across cohorts. Both groups respond to financial incentives in making retirement decisions. However, growing differences by sector in the gain to continued work do not appear to have translated into diverging retirement behavior, as we observe similar trends in the two groups.

Despite the plethora of discourse about how sustainable development should be pursued, the production of agricultural commodities is held responsible for driving c. 80% of global deforestation. Partially as a response, the private sector has made commitments to eliminate deforestation, but it is not yet clear what factors these commitments should take into account to effectively halt deforestation while also contributing to broader sustainable development. In the context of private sector commitments to zero-deforestation, this study characterizes the perceptions of different types of stakeholders along the cocoa and chocolate supply chain in order to determine the main challenges and solutions to encourage sustainable production. The main purpose is to understand the key factors that could facilitate a transition to a more sustainable supply while harmonizing the multiple actors’ interests. A qualitative thematic analysis of perceptions was conducted based on responses from 59 interviews with different stakeholders along the cocoa and chocolate supply chain in six key producing and consuming countries. Thematic analysis of the responses revealed six main themes: (1) make better use of policies, regulations and markets to help promote sustainability; (2) improve information and data (e.g., impacts of climate change on cocoa) to inform sound interventions; (3) focus on the landscape rather than the farm-level alone and improve integration of supply chain actors; (4) promote better coordination between stakeholders and initiatives (e.g., development assistance projects and corporate sustainability efforts); (5) focus on interdependent relationships between social, environmental and economic dimensions to achieve sustainable development; and (6) engage with the private sector. The study shows the importance of identifying different stakeholder priorities in order to design solutions that accommodate multiple interests. It also emphasizes the need to improve coordination and communication between stakeholders and instruments in order to address the three different dimensions of sustainability in a synergistic manner, considering the interactions from production of raw material to end consumer.

The years surrounding the origins of the term “Manifest Destiny” were a transitional period in the history of industrialization. Historians have done much to analyze the impact of major technological shifts on business structure and management, and to connect eastern markets and westward expansion. They have paid less attention, however, to the relationship among continental geopolitics, industrial development, and frontier warfare. This article uses War Department papers, congressional reports, and manufacturers’ records to examine how the arms industry developed in response to military conflict on the frontier. As public and private manufacturers altered production methods, product features, and their relationships to one another, they contributed to the industrial developments of the mid-nineteenth century.

Democratic consolidation was the top priority of re-democratized Argentina and Brazil. Regional integration was also part of this goal from two perspectives: from the outside, through a treaty that diminished the scope for political manoeuvring by the military and increased international support for the incumbent administrations, and; from within, through encouragement of a proactive role for business in integration that would give it democratic legitimacy, while, at the same time, exercising democratic practices. Argentine and Brazilian political classes expected to combine these two aspects but soon had to face business reluctance. Government-business relations in the construction of Mercosur reflected government attempts to balance the trade-off between the approaches from without and from within. Although business was largely excluded from the strategic formulation of integration, in a democratic context, governments have to accommodate societal interests. This occurred through a significant overlap between powerful business interests and the executive's plans. The achievement of integration helped consolidate democracy and the choices made by political elites drove forward the democratic process.

To what extent do the ways in which we anticipate threats, analyze their possible consequences and determine ways to mitigate them explain the causes of warfare in the future? This article – though never attempting to predict – poses plausible causes of future wars that may stem from transformative change over the next two decades. In asking the question “Are we ready?” to deal with such wars, the answer is framed in terms of the interrelationship between the prospect of profound change, emerging tensions, unprecedented violence and organizational capacities to deal with complexity and uncertainty. To be prepared to deal with the prospect of future wars, relevant organizations have to be more anticipatory and adaptive, while at the same time looking for new ways to engage the wider international community. The article concludes with a set of recommendations intended to meet such organizational challenges – with the aspiration that the question “Are we ready?” can be answered more affirmatively in the future.

This article addresses the right to strike in the context of the new Labour Code and amended Trade Union Law of Vietnam.1 It analyses major problems posed today by wildcat strikes in Vietnam’s private sector. It argues that the ongoing approaches of the Vietnamese government and its social partners in strike resolution are ineffective and inconsistent with International Labour Standards. Finally, it suggests a model for the prevention and settlement of such strikes.