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Religion can unite and divide, it can lead to a strengthening or a weakening of identity and legitimacy. Religion can stoke conflicts but it can also pacify them – within societies and in international politics. Religion endures and it can exist independently of states, it can constitute them, and it can provide new forms of states, societies, and empires. Arguably, religion shapes or even constitutes the international society of states, an aspect so far neglected in the field of International Relations. The dissertation provides a new definition of religion for International Relations and the English School in particular. Based upon this understanding of religion, the five publications presented in the dissertation provide new analytical and theoretical concepts and approaches to fill the research gap. Religion is integrated into the theoretical framework of the English School in the form of a “prime institution” and with the help of the “quilt model”. While the former expands the theoretical framework, the latter adds an analytical layer. Based upon this definition religion is also introduced as a concept (“hybrid actorness”) in Foreign Policy Analysis, opening it up to become less state-centrist and more transnational-oriented, thereby boosting its relevance considering the evolving international (global) society. In another step, the Securitization framework of analysis is expanded to include (freedom) of religion. By revisiting the publications, the dissertation is able to identify next steps in terms of avenues of research. Finally, the dissertation reveals areas of study which contribute to increasing the pertinence of IR, particularly of the English School.
Age and radial growth rate are key data on understanding some aspects of tropical forest dynamics and ecology. In species that produce annual tree rings, tree-ring analysis allows the most precise estimate of these two parameters. The present study assessed the age and radial growth rate of three Hymenaea species inhabiting four of the six biomes found in Brazil. Out of these four biomes, two harbor the largest rainforests in South America, the Amazon Forest on the west and the Atlantic Forest in the east. The Cerrado biome is an open and seasonally drier vegetation found between them and the Pantanal is a wetland in the west. The H. courbaril species inhabits almost the entire Neotropical lowlands while H. parvifolia and H. stigonocarpa are restricted to the Amazon and Cerrado biomes, respectively. To investigate these species dynamics within different biomes, age and radial growth rate were calculated for 217 trees through tree-ring analyses. The oldest H. courbaril and. H. parvifolia trees were 316 and 371 years old, respectively, while H. stigonocarpa trees were considerably younger, up to 144 years old. Hymenaea courbaril trees showed the widest variation in average growth rate, from 1.00 to 6.63 mm per year, while the other two species showed a narrower variation from 0.89 to 2.81 mm per year. The studied populations presented distinct trends in the lifetime growth pattern that seems to be related to the biome of provenance. Overall, trees from the Amazon forest showed a trend of increasing growth rate up to about 100 years followed by a decreasing of it, while trees growing in the Pantanal and Atlantic forest showed only decreasing growth rates. In the Cerrado, trees showed a constant pattern of growth rate up to 50 years followed by a clear decline. It is important to highlight that different species of Hymenaea showed similar growth trends within the same biome. In larger trees, the average growth rate is lower in the Cerrado, which is characterized by deeper water tables and more dystrophic soils while the growth rates in the Amazon and Atlantic Forests are 60% and 79% higher, respectively. This study represents one of the most comprehensive datasets of trees age and growth rate of tropical congeneric species under such large geographical range.
A tropical tree-ring study is presented using 36 specimens of Cariniana estrellensis from the Mata Atlantica Biome within the State of São Paulo: Caetetus and Carlos Botelho. We aimed to assess the suitability of this species for chronology building, as well as for dendroclimatological studies, with the help of its lifetime growth trajectories. Cariniana estrellensis forms visible tree rings with a dense sequence of parenchyma bands at the end of the latewood, followed by a relatively distant sequence of parenchyma bands in the subsequent early wood of a tree ring. However, it was impossible to establish a chronology, solely by tree-ring width measurements and crossdating, for a number of reasons, including sequences of problematic wood anatomy, abundance of wedging rings and probably missing rings. Therefore, building a robust chronology for this species requires a multi-parameter approach, however, no experience is currently available. Therefore, to reveal possible climate-growth relationships for Cariniana estrellensis at both sites, we tested to correlation analyses of microclimatic conditions with tree growth and investigated patterns of lifetime growth trajectories. Annual precipitation is over 1300 mm at both sites, with the dry season primarily between June and August. Both sites showed clear differences in their microclimatic regime and topography. Overall, light availability is the most likely crucial factor for the studied species. A significantly lower photosynthetic active radiation and daily photoperiod was found at Carlos Botelho by the strong influence of orographic rainfall, foggy conditions and shade caused by the adjacent mountain chain. Consequently, trees at this site generally showed a lower average annual growth rate as compared to the Caetetus site with differences between juvenile and mature growth phases remaining nearly constant throughout their lives. In contrast, trees from Caetetus had less consistent growth phases, with increased growth after the juvenile growth phase. Thus, it can be concluded that dendroclimatological studies using growth characteristics have the potential to clarify the generally complex stand dynamics of Cariniana estrellensis. However, the development of tree-ring chronologies, based on tree-ring width analyses of cores or discs is nearly impossible.
Deforestation in tropical regions is raising fragmentation to alarming levels. Not only does it lead to losses of forest area, but also the abiotic and biotic changes on forest edge areas alter the development of the remaining trees. We aimed to assess the impacts of forest fragmentation on the growth of tropical emergent trees. We sampled the endangered species Aspidosperma polyneuron (Apocynaceae) at forest edge and interior in the highly fragmented Brazilian Atlantic Forest. We obtained increment cores of each tree along with data about tree and surrounding canopy heights, plus their current levels of liana infestation. We used tree-ring analyses to estimate age and growth rate of trees. Sampled trees and surrounding canopy were taller at the forest interior than at the edge, even though both sampled populations have similar ages. Overall, trees at forest interior show a lifetime growth pattern common to shade-tolerant species, with a peak of growth rate at 120 years. Indeed, all sampled trees exhibited this pattern before fragmentation. However, trees at forest edge presented constantly slow growth rates for all diameter classes after the fragmentation event. The strong presence of lianas at forest edge prevents trees from experiencing the expected growth releases throughout their lifetime, probably by keeping the leaves of A. polyneuron under shaded conditions. Therefore, the management of lianas at the forest edge is likely the most effective procedure to ensure the growth of emergent trees, guarantying their role on forests structure, carbon storage, and ecosystem functioning.
In three essays, this dissertation examines the past, present and future of branding in an international context, contributing to the research area of global/local brands, while also offering managers valuable insights for their branding strategies.
The first essay provides scholars and practitioners a detailed state of the art of global/local brand research and proposes promising angles for future research, especially considering major
challenges for our societies.
The second essay incorporates the segment of cosmopolitan consumers into perceived brand globalness/localness research. Theoretically grounded in the concepts of social identity theory and complexity, the essay builds on perceived brand globalness/localness to analyze how cosmopolitans arrange both their global and local orientations. Aside offering scholars a new theoretical lens regarding consumer cosmopolitanism, managers can benefit from the gained insights, if cosmopolitans are a particular target group in their business strategy.
The third and final essay meta-analytically investigates how the variables perceived brand globalness and localness materialize on various key outcome variables. At heart of this essay is a comparison of both perceived brand globalness and localness, offering scholars and practitioners valuable empirical insights on similarities and differences between their effects on outcomes such as brand quality.
Die Digitalisierung des Geldes durch die Einführung des elektronischen Zahlungsverkehrs in diesem Jahrhundert bildet die Grundlage des heutigen unkörperlichen Geldverkehrs. Das Aufkommen neuer rein digitaler Zahlungsarten wie Kryptowährungen setzen diesen Trend der Entmaterialisierung des Geldverkehrs fort.
Insofern ist auch das Recht der Zwangsvollstreckung der Frage ausgesetzt, inwieweit die Vollstreckung in solche Werte zur Befriedigung des Gläubigers möglich ist. Dieser Frage geht die vorliegende Dissertation auf Basis des deutschen Vollstreckungsrecht am Beispiel der Kryptowährung Bitcoins nach.
Due to the advances of digitalization, firms are able to collect more and more personal consumer data and strive to do so. Moreover, many firms nowadays have a data sharing cooperation with other firms, so consumer data is shared with third parties. Accordingly, consumers are confronted regularly with the decision whether to disclose personal data to such a data sharing cooperation (DSC). Despite privacy research has become highly important, peculiarities of such disclosure settings with a DSC between firms have been neglected until now. To address this gap is the first research objective in this thesis. Another underexplored aspect in privacy research is the impact of low-cognitive-effort decision-making. This is because the privacy calculus, the most dominant theory in privacy research, assumes for consumers a purely cognitive effortful and deliberative disclosure decision-making process. Therefore, to expand this perspective and examine the impact of low-cognitive-effort decision-making is the second research objective in this thesis. Additionally, with the third research objective, this thesis strives to unify and increase the understanding of perceived privacy risks and privacy concerns which are the two major antecedents that reduce consumers’ disclosure willingness.
To this end, five studies are conducted: i) essay 1 examines and compares consumers’ privacy risk perception in a DSC disclosure setting with disclosure settings that include no DSC, ii) essay 2 examines whether in a DSC disclosure setting consumers rely more strongly on low-cognitive-effort processing for their disclosure decision, iii) essay 3 explores different consumer groups that vary in their perception of how a DSC affects their privacy risks, iv) essay 4 refines the understanding of privacy concerns and privacy risks and examines via meta-analysis the varying effect sizes of privacy concerns and privacy risks on privacy behavior depending on the applied measurement approach, v) essay 5 examines via autobiographical recall the effects of consumers’ feelings and arousal on disclosure willingness.
Overall, this thesis shines light on consumers’ personal data disclosure decision-making: essay 1 shows that the perceived risk associated with a disclosure in a DSC setting is not necessarily higher than to an identical firm without DSC. Also, essay 3 indicates that only for the smallest share of consumers a DSC has a negative impact on their disclosure willingness and that one third of consumers do not intensively think about consequences for their privacy risks arising through a DSC. Additionally, essay 2 shows that a stronger reliance on low-cognitive-effort processing is prevalent in DSC disclosure settings. Moreover, essay 5 displays that even unrelated feelings of consumers can impact their disclosure willingness, but the effect direction also depends on consumers’ arousal level.
This thesis contributes in three ways to theory: i) it shines light on peculiarities of DSC disclosure settings, ii) it suggests mechanisms and results of low-effort processing, and iii) it enhances the understanding of perceived privacy risks and privacy concerns as well as their resulting effect sizes.
Besides theoretical contributions, this thesis offers practical implications as well: it allows firms to adjust the disclosure setting and the communication with their consumers in a way that makes them more successful in data collection. It also shows that firms do not need to be too anxious about a reduced disclosure willingness due to being part of a DSC. However, it also helps consumers themselves by showing in which circumstances they are most vulnerable to disclose personal data. That consumers become conscious of situations in which they are especially vulnerable to disclose data could serve as a countermeasure: this could prevent that consumers disclose too much data and regret it afterwards. Similarly, this thesis serves as a thought-provoking input for regulators as it emphasizes the importance of low-cognitive-effort processing for consumers’ decision-making, thus regulators may be able to consider this in the future.
In sum, this thesis expands knowledge on how consumers decide whether to disclose personal data, especially in DSC settings and regarding low-cognitive-effort processing. It offers a more unified understanding for antecedents of disclosure willingness as well as for consumers’ disclosure decision-making processes. This thesis opens up new research avenues and serves as groundwork, in particular for more research on data disclosures in DSC settings.
Poverty, underemployment, lack of infrastructure, low agricultural productivity, degradation of natural resources, climate change, and eroding social cohesion are among the biggest challenges that many low and lower-middle income countries are facing. Objectives linked to addressing these pressing challenges have been ascribed to public works programmes (PWPs). These are social protection instruments which offer remuneration (in cash or kind) for vulnerable people in exchange for temporary work on labour-intensive low-skill activities with social benefits. PWPs are being implemented in around two out of three developing countries. Given the substantial amounts spent on PWPs, it is critical to know to what extent the expectations towards them are backed by evidence. This dissertation sheds light on this overarching question with three self-contained essays. The first essay synthesises the evidence from PWPs in Sub-Saharan Africa, guided by three questions: First, what can we infer from the available impact evaluations regarding the effectiveness of PWPs as a social protection instrument? Second, what do we know about the role of the wage vector, asset vector, and skills vector in this respect? Third, what can we infer about the role of design features in explaining differences in outcomes? The other two essays use empirical evidence from Malawi to address more specific questions regarding the potential of PWPs to strengthen climate resilience and the relationship between PWPs and social cohesion.
What sets the evidence synthesis in my first essay apart from existing reviews of PWPs is that it accounts for their heterogeneity by systematically differentiating results by PWP type and outcome area (income, consumption and expenditures, labour supply, food security, nutrition, asset holdings, agricultural production and techniques, and education). Programmes that offer short-term ad-hoc employment (Type 1) are distinguished from programmes that offer more predictable employment over longer periods (Type 2). For the review of impacts, this paper relies solely on (quasi-)experimental studies, but for the analysis of the role of design factors also on other literature. In line with existing reviews, my results suggest that Type 1 programmes can effectively enable consumption smoothing in the wake of acute crises, whereas in contexts of chronic poverty, Type 2 programmes perform, on balance, better. Offering complementary access to extension services in Type 2 programmes can boost impacts further. However, in all cases, evidence is too scant and mixed to safely conclude whether the higher benefits of costlier PWP types justify the cost premium.
The second essay investigates the potential of PWPs to strengthen climate resilience. Among the main social protection instruments, the biggest potential to strengthen climate resilience is often ascribed to PWPs if they create climate-smart community assets and transfer knowledge of climate-smart practices. Yet, there is a lack of evidence whether design changes to this end can indeed enhance the contribution of an existing PWP to climate resilience. I use a difference-in-differences approach based on two-period panel data to analyse how a modified PWP model performs compared to the standard model of Malawi’s largest PWP after 24 months. The key modification is to embed public works in a communal watershed management plan with a strong emphasis on collective action and capacity building. I find that the modified approach considerably increased communal watershed management activities through voluntary labour contributions on top of the paid public works labour. While this increase was mainly driven by PWP participants, non-participants also made substantial contributions. I also find a small increase in the adoption of soil and water conservation practices on respondents’ private land, especially by non-PWP participants. These findings imply that such modest changes can make PWPs climate-smarter. In particular, they can broaden the engagement in and adoption of climate-smart activities beyond the group of PWP participants.
The co-authored third essay investigates the relationship between Malawi’s MASAF PWP and social cohesion, specifically within-community cooperation for the common good. Like the existing studies, we face the challenge that neither the assignment of the programme to communities nor the selection of individual participants is randomised. We try to mitigate the endogeneity concerns by triangulating fixed effects panel analyses for a set of outcomes and sectors using two datasets with different units of analysis (households and communities). We find that public works are positively associated with coordination activities and voluntary (unpaid) contributions to public goods, along both vertical ties (between community members and local leaders) and horizontal ties (among community members). Especially for school-building activities, voluntary inputs in the form of labour and other in-kind contributions are higher in the presence of the public works programme. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the link between social protection programmes with community-driven features and social cohesion.
Overall, the findings of the three essays in this dissertation contribute to the knowledge base regarding effectiveness and potential of PWPs across a broad range of outcome areas. Specifically, they offer new insights how to harness the potential of PWP to strengthen climate resilience and into the seemingly positive relationship between PWPs and social cohesion. The findings can help researchers and policy makers who are interested specifically in PWPs or in any of the many objectives that can be pursued through PWPs.
In meiner Dissertationsschrift schlage ich vor, gesellschaftliche – auf einer Mikroebene der spätsozialistischen Gesellschaft der DDR liegende – Interaktionsprozesse durch das analytische Visier des Konzeptes Persönlichkeit und seiner Dimensionen zu lesen und zu dechiffrieren. Dabei gehe ich davon aus, dass jene Dimensionen in Form von lebensgeschichtlichen Motiven, Wünschen und Ideologemen sowie normativen Forderungen und Bewertungen im Zentrum dieser Interaktionen standen und innerhalb der spätsozialistischen Sinnwelt (zum Begriff vgl. Kapitel 1.2.1; Sabrow 2007) prägend wurden.
Gestützt wird dieser Ansatz durch die Tatsache, dass Persönlichkeit ein zentrales innersystemisches Diskursmotiv des Spätsozialismus war und den diskursiv konstruierten offiziellen Gesellschaftsentwurf prägte (Kapitel 2). Als Teil der „Erziehungsdiktatur“ (Dietrich 2018: S. XXIX) prägte die Figur der sozialistischen Persönlichkeit die ideologischen Diskurse der DDR.
Vor diesem Hintergrund widme ich mich vier Fallstudien (Kapitel 3), in denen ich von mir erhobene narrativ-biografische Interviews mit vier Zeitzeugen sowie die zu diesen Personen durch das MfS geführten Vorgänge als verflochtene, konkurrierende und interagierende Narrationen lese (zur Methode vgl. Kapitel 1.2.1–1.2.4). Was diese Analysen deutlich zeigen, ist, dass sich in den einzelnen Fällen spezifische, sinn- und lebensweltlich eingebundene Konflikte und Interaktionsprozesse kondensierten, die ihrerseits Dimensionen von Persönlichkeit semantisierten oder aber auf deren Grundlage geführt wurden. Innerhalb der sinn- und lebensweltlichen Verflechtungen rezipierten die verschiedenen Akteur*innen (meine Gesprächspartner, ihre Freund*innen, staatliche Organe) die unterschiedlichen Referenzsysteme und diskursiven Einflüsse und zogen daraus entsprechende Konsequenzen für das eigene Handeln, eigene Ideen, Wünsche und Normen. In unterschiedlichen Ausprägungen und Formen artikulierten sie diese sinnweltlichen Verarbeitungen und traten so in kommunikative und performative Interaktionsprozesse, die wiederum das sinnweltliche Gefüge beeinflussten, da sie rezipiert wurden respektive sogar rezipiert werden sollten. Im Zentrum dieser Prozesse stand das Ideal kollektivistisch denkender, mitarbeitender und engagierter sozialistischer Persönlichkeiten. Alle vier Herren betrieben auf ihre jeweils spezifische Weise die Dekonstruktion dieses Ideals und wurden dabei durch die staatlichen Organe sprachlich bewertet, kriminalisiert, exkludiert oder vereinnahmt.
Das Studium der vier Fallgeschichten zeigt auf: Die staatlichen Akteur*innen, vor allem aber ihre kommunikativen Strategien, ihr Sprachgebrauch waren nicht in der Lage eine tatsächlich qualitative Erfassung zu bieten. Vielmehr wurden sprachliche Bausätze genutzt, die jede Abweichung, jedes nicht-sozialistische Verhalten von Persönlichkeiten als Defizit stigmatisierten und gerade dadurch die eigene Inadäquatheit und somit die Überforderung der staatlichen Organe offenbarten. Die Dynamik des Spätsozialismus konnten sie deshalb sprachlich nicht mehr vereinnahmen. So bietet die vorliegende Arbeit einen weiteren Einblick in den Wesenskern der spätsozialistischen, diktatorischen Herrschaft in der DDR.
The increasing relevance of massive graph data reinforces the need for adequate graph data management. While several graph database engines have been developed, the storage of graph data in a relational database management system, and therefore the seamless integration into existing information systems remains an open challenge.
Motivated by the use case to integrate Building Information Modeling (BIM) data into the MonArch system, we propose a solution that transforms the BIM data into a property graph and stores this graph in the database system.
We present a novel approach to efficiently store property graph data in a relational database management system using JSON functionality and redundant storage of edges in adjacency lists and show how to import huge data sets into this schema. Applying this approach, we import data sets of up to nearly 1 TB of disk space within the relational database, while only having 96 GB of main memory available.
We also present a new approach of how to retrieve data from this database schema, translating queries written in the popular property graph query language Cypher into SQL. Hence, we provide an intuitive way to write semantically complex queries.
We also demonstrate the efficiency of our approach using the standardized Linked Data Benchmark Council – Social Network Benchmark (LDBC - SNB) framework. Our approach increases the throughput for this benchmark by up to 85 times, compared to existing approaches for RDBMS.
In addition, we propose a new method to transform BIM data into the property graph model and how to apply the aforementioned property graph storage to this data. We can import IFC models of up to 300 MB within five minutes.
We show the suitability of our approach using our own use case specific benchmark, which we integrated into the previously mentioned Social Network Benchmark. For our interactive use case-specific queries, we achieve response times faster than 5 ms in 99% of all executions.
Finally, we present how the aforementioned approach to store BIM data in a relational database management system is integrated into the existing MonArch system by splitting the different functionalities of our approach into a microservice architecture.
Most Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries experienced sound economic growth and a declining rate of poverty over the last two decades. Though, by far, the SSA region remains the poorest in the world and faces tremendous political, social, and economic challenges. Moreover, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SSA entered into a recession with a GDP growth rate of minus 5% in 2020 as ever recorded over 25 years. This has also induced an increase in poverty in the region, which adds up to the structural challenges and further highlight the need of sound policies to address economic growth, governance, jobs, and poverty for the region to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2030 and beyond.
This thesis examines the effects of institutional quality, political instability, and a government targeted entrepreneurship program on the accumulation of human, physical, and financial capital by households and firms. In the literature, these factors are identified as the key determinants of economic growth and job creation, yet this thesis contributes to a knowledge gap, especially at the microeconomic level, on how households and firms accumulate these factors in the presence of weak institutional quality, political instability, and government targeted entrepreneurship programs. In particular, this thesis investigates heterogeneity as well as a single country study of the effects of institutional quality and political instability; it also employs a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess the impacts of two different targeted entrepreneurship support programs; and finally, it taps on data from this field experiment to assess the performance of two different targeting mechanisms for selecting growth-oriented entrepreneurs. Each paper is self-contained and three among the four papers were written with co-authors.
The first paper assesses the effects of institutional quality and political instability on household assets and human capital accumulation in 19 Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 2003-16. In this paper, the concept of instability is enlarged to include factual instability as measured by the number of political violence and civil unrest events, perceived instability as measured by the perceptions of the quality of institutions by households, and the interplay between factual and perceived instability. Contrary to most previous analyses, this paper takes into account household wealth distribution to show how the effects of political instability differ for poor vs. rich households. For identification, I exploit the variation of factual and perceived instability across 185 administrative regions in the 19 countries. My regressions control for a large range of confounding factors measured at the levels of households, regions, and countries. Overall, factual and perceived instability are associated with higher investments in assets, and factual instability is also associated with more investment in house improvements, yet it is negatively associated with the ownership of financial accounts. With regard to the heterogeneous effects, increased factual or perceived instability is associated with more investments in physical capital but less investments in financial and human capital among rich households, and with less investments in physical, financial and human capital among poor households. These findings suggest that political instability might enhance the accumulation of wealth by rich households and reduce that of poor households, implying that the detrimental effects of political instability have lasting consequences for poor households, especially when poor households are exposed to an actual or even just perceived deteriorating quality of the country’s institutions.
The second paper, written with Nicolas Büttner and Michael Grimm, analyzes households’ investments in assets and their consumption, and education and health expenditures when exposed to actual instability as measured by the number of political violence and protest events in Burkina Faso. There is a large, rather macroeconomic, literature that shows that political instability and social conflict are associated with poor economic outcomes including lower investment and reduced economic growth. However, there is only very little research on the impact of instability on households’ behavior, in particular their saving and investment decisions. This paper merges six rounds of household survey data and a geo-referenced time series of politically motivated events and fatalities from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED) to analyze households’ decisions when exposed to instability in Burkina Faso. For identification, the paper exploits variation in the intensity of political instability across time and space while controlling for time-effects and municipality fixed effects as well as rainfall and nighttime light intensity, and many other potential confounders. The results show a negative effect of political instability on financial savings, the accumulation of durables, investment in house improvements, as well as on investment in education and health. Instability seems, in particular, to lead to a reshuffling from investment expenditures to increased food consumption, implying lower growth prospects in the future. With respect to economic growth, the sizable education and health effects seem to be particularly worrisome.
The third paper, written with Michael Grimm and Michael Weber, employs a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess the short-term effects of a government support program targeted at already existing and new firms located in a semi-urban area in Burkina Faso. Most support programs targeted at small firms in low- and middle-income countries fail to generate transformative effects and employment at a larger scale. Bad targeting, too little flexibility and the limited size of the support are some of the factors that are often seen as important constraints. This paper assesses the short-term effects of a randomized targeted government support program to a pool of small and medium-sized firms that have been selected based on a rigorous business plan competition (BPC). One group received large cash grants of up to US$8,000, flexible in use. A second group received cash grants of an equally important size, but earmarked to business development services (BDSs) and thus less flexible and with a required own contribution of 20%. A third group serves as a control group. All firms operate in agri-business or related activities in a semi-urban area in the Centre-Est and Centre-Sud regions of Burkina Faso. An assessment of the short-term impacts shows that beneficiaries of cash grants engage in better business practices, such as formalization and bookkeeping. They also invest more, though, this does not translate into higher profits and employment yet. Beneficiaries of cash grants and BDSs show a higher ability to innovate. The results also show that cash grants cushioned the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for the beneficiaries. More generally, this study adds to the thin literature on support programs implemented in a fragile-state context.
The fourth paper, written with Michael Weber, examines the selection of entrepreneurs based on expert judgments for a BPC in Burkina Faso. To support job creation in developing countries, governments allocate significant funds to a typically small number of new or already existing micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) that are growth oriented. Increasingly, these enterprises are picked through BPCs where thematic experts are asked to make the selection. So far, there exists contrasting and limited evidence on the effectiveness and efficiency of these expert judgments for screening growth-oriented entrepreneurs among contestants in BPCs. Alternative or complementary approaches such as evaluation and selection algorithms are discussed in the literature but evidence on their performance is thin. This paper uses a principal component analysis (PCA) to build a metric for comparing the performance of these alternative mechanisms for targeting entrepreneurs with high potential to grow. The results show expert subjectivity bias in judging contestant entrepreneurs. The paper finds that the scores from the expert judgment and those from the algorithm perform similarly well for picking the top-ranked or talented entrepreneurs. It also finds that both types of scores have predictive power, i.e. have statistically significantly associated with 17 firm performance outcomes measured 10 or 34 months after the BPC started. Yet, the predictive power, as measured by the magnitude of the regression coefficients, is higher for the algorithm metric, even when it is considered jointly with expert judgment scores. Despite the statistical superiority of the algorithm, expert assessments at least through pitches of entrepreneurs have proved useful in many settings where free-riding or misuse of public funds may occur. Hence, efficiency and precision could be achieved by relying on a reasoned combination of expert judgments and an algorithm for targeting growth-oriented entrepreneurs.
These four papers bring new insights on the relationship between weak institutions, political instability, and targeted government support to entrepreneurship for increasing the accumulation of financial, physical, and human capital, and productivity. And these are the key factors for spurring economic growth and creating jobs in SSA. These findings suggest that efficient institutions building in SSA countries would enhance citizen perceptions of good governance which would reduce political instability and enable households including the poor to accumulate productive assets, increase their productivity and reduce poverty. The findings also suggest that targeted government entrepreneurship support programs, e.g. in the forms of cash grants with monitored disbursements yet flexible in use, can enhance firms’ human capital, productive assets, and innovations, even in the short term. Moreover, the targeting mechanism of such programs could be made more effective and efficient by relying on a combinaison of expert judgments and an algorithm for picking growth-oriented entrepreneurs.
Die Arbeit unternimmt eine begriffshistorische Einordnung des Wirtschaftsverfassungsbegriffs von 1924 bis 2017 aus Sicht der deutschen, vor allem rechtswissenschaftlichen Literatur und den damit verbundenen anhaltenden Deutungsschwierigkeiten.
Im Hauptteil wird die EU-Wirtschaftsordnung in Gestalt von Primärrecht, Sekundärrecht sowie der bedeutendsten (EU-)Kommissionspraxis in Sachen Regulierung und finanzieller Mittelvergabe auf deren wirtschaftssystemischen Gehalt untersucht, mithin inwieweit die EU-Politik aus ordnungspolitischer Sicht als liberal/liberalisierend, bürokraitsch-neutral oder als interventionistisch anzusehen ist. Dabei wird ein Schwerpunkt bei der bisher wirtschaftssystemisch wenig beleuchteten Geldpolitik am Beispiel der EWU gesetzt.
Zuletzt wird die Entwicklung mitgliedsstaatlicher Volkswirtschaften anhand üblicher Kennziffern der volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen im Zeitraum von 1997 bis 2018 im direkten Vergleich dargestellt. Ausgewählte Problemkreise der ökonomischen Analyse wurden vertieft, darunter die Verteilung der Geldschöpfung im Euroraum (nach Eurozonen-Mitgliedsstaaten) sowie die Bedeutung anhaltender Zahlungsbilanzungleichgewichte.