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The main aim of this paper is to examine empirically the extent to which firm-specific action, innovation, and an external factor, the quality of regional institution, affect firms' productivity. To this end, a firm-level dataset from 15 African countries was used and the three-step CDM approach was employed to estimate the relationship. The empirical results of the study highlight that firms that invest in R&D are more innovative and innovative firms are more productive, indicating the importance of innovation for firms' productivity. In addition, regional institutional quality has a significant positive effect on productivity, particularly for firms at low productivity distribution. Therefore, improving the quality of regional institutions, in addition to promoting R&D and innovation, is essential to enhance the productive capacity of firms in Africa. The present study contributes to the existing literature by providing new empirical evidence on the role of regional/local institutions on firm productivity for a region, Africa, which needs productivity enhancement the most. It is also recommended that further studies, similar to this one, should be carried out in order to better understand the topic in the context of African firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this study is to empirically examine the role of regional institutional quality, and compare the relative importance of three different institutional arrangements, namely regulatory quality, rule of law, and corruption, on propensity of firm innovation in African countries. To this end, we used the most recent World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) of firms from 19 African countries. Our empirical investigation using multilevel logistic regression has drawn three important conclusions. First, there is no significant relationship between firm-specific factors, such as age, ownership, and exporting, and firm innovation. Nonetheless, firms' propensity to innovate is significantly determined by the size of the firm, R&D expenditures, on-the-job training (OJT), and capability of managers/owners to adopt new technologies. Second, the innovation performance of firms is significantly affected by regional institutional quality. Third, among different regional institutional arrangements, reducing corruption and maintaining rule of law appeared to matter the most for firm innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study concentrates on answering following questions: (i) Do firm's internal factors such as size, age, ownership, R&D spending, and exporting significantly predict the propensity of firms to engage in innovative activities in Ethiopia? (ii) Do firm's external factors, namely, access to finance and competition, significantly predict the propensity of firms to engage in innovative activities in Ethiopia? The data source of the paper is a survey conducted by World Bank in 2015 on Ethiopian firms. Then, the factors influencing the innovativeness of Ethiopian firms are analyzed by using a logistic regression model. Results obtained through logistic regression suggest that internal factors such as the size of the firms, education level of the employees, technology adoption capability of managers, on-job training, and R&D expenditures have a significant positive impact on both types of innovations, while private and foreign ownership were only found to be significant for process innovation. Estimations also showed that access to finance has a significant (positive) impact on product innovation and the impact of the competition level is significant (negative) only in terms of process innovation. Most importantly, we found that, disregarding their statistical significance, all explanatory variables influence both process and product innovation in the same direction, probably because of the positive correlation between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses publication performance and patterns of Turkish economists by analyzing changes overtime and comparing results to economists’ performance in some emerging economies. The results indicate that (1) the publication performance of Turkish economists and economics departments has improved rapidly over the years but they are still performing below their potential; (2) there is a remarkable difference in research performance among the institutions, but competition has been increasing; (3) the majority of contributions to research output in Turkey are made by six leading universities, but competitive pressure is coming from other institutions; (4) the faculties of the six leading universities are highly motivated to publish in high-quality journals, while members of the other institutions are also increasingly eager to find themselves a place in these outlets; (5) more than one-third of the articles are published in 10 of the 350 Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) Economics Journals, but the concentration ratio is decreasing overtime; (6) publication performance and patterns of Turkish economists are similar to their counterparts in emerging economies, but in some aspects Turkish economists perform better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the socialist era, economists in the Balkan countries rarely published their work in the West due to political restrictions, methodological differences with the West, and inadequacy in Western languages. After the collapse of socialism, political barriers were lifted, a Western style of education in economics was adopted, and English began to be taught widely as the common language in the academic realm. The aim of this study is to discuss the impact of these policies on the publication performance of economists in the former socialist countries of the Balkans region. The results reveal that the number of international publications increased gradually over the post-socialist period and fast-reforming countries performed better than the slow movers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first study of technical efficiencies of higher education institutions and the first study evaluating performance at faculty level in Turkey. The study also compares technical efficiencies of private and public institutions. Estimation shows low overall efficiency with high variations across the faculties of economics. The results also demonstrate that average efficiency of public institutions is higher if the quality of data is not considered. However, when qualities of the outputs are taken into account, average efficiencies of public and private institutions converge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]