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The prevailing approaches to modelling interactive uncertainty with epistemic models in economics are state-based and type-based. We explicitly formulate two general procedures that transform state models into type models and vice versa. Both transformation procedures preserve the belief hierarchies as well as the common prior assumption. By means of counterexamples it is shown that the two procedures are not inverse to each other. However, if attention is restricted to maximally reduced epistemic models, then isomorphisms can be constructed and an inverse relationship emerges.

Abstract Professor Saras Sarasvathy is the recipient of the 2022 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. Her research contributions have fundamentally changed and invigorated the conversation in the domain of entrepreneurship research. Sarasvathy’s work on effectuation emphasizes how entrepreneurs operate based on available resources, think in terms of affordable loss rather than profit maximization, leverage trustworthy partnerships, and treat unforeseen contingencies as opportunities rather than problems. It has led and inspired a new generation of researchers in the quest for a better understanding of how entrepreneurs make their decisions and the unfolding of the entrepreneurial process.

La transición a la economía circular implica un cambio profundo en los patrones de producción y consumo cuyo impulso requiere actuaciones coordinadas de las diferentes políticas (ambientales, regulatorias, industriales, innovación, compras públicas...) y, en particular, de la política fiscal. La orientación ambiental en los instrumentos fiscales puede constituir un instrumento clave para la transición de la EC y la sostenibilidad. Este estudio analiza la situación actual en España, constatando la ausencia de instrumentos de beneficios fiscales que favorezcan la EC para, posteriormente, identificar aquellos que pueden presentar potencialidades para promover la EC y la sostenibilidad. El artículo pone de manifiesto el volumen y la diversidad de estos mecanismos fiscales, el coste en la recaudación, así como también las figuras con una mayor incidencia, lo que ha permitido destacar las potencialidades, adversidades y retos que presenta la política de beneficios fiscales en España para el impulso de la EC y la sostenibilidad.

This study investigates the impact of green human resource management (GHRM) practices on sustainable performance (SP) in Qatari private companies. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 216 private companies, including top management, human resource managers, quality managers, and employees. Reliability and validity tests were performed on the survey forms, followed by a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique to evaluate the hypothesis. The study found evidence that GHRM practices have a positive impact on SP outcomes in Qatar's private companies. This empirical link between GHRM practices and SP contributes to the literature on GHRM. The results further showed that GHRM practices can lead to green empowerment among employees, thereby improving long-term sustainability. The research demonstrates the importance of GHRM practices for private companies to achieve sustainable development goals. The paper highlights the need to incorporate GHRM practices in the private sector to encourage employees to take an active role in promoting environmental sustainability, leading to long-term business success. The study offers practical implications for private companies in Qatar, suggesting that GHRM practices should be implemented to improve SP.

This study analyzed the effects of company size, leverage level, profitability, and company age on carbon emissions disclosure and sustainability reporting and the implications thereof on investor reactions. The manufacturing and mining companies listed on the Indonesian and Malaysian stock exchanges from 2017 to 2019 supplied the sample of this research. The analysis used the partial least squares approach to structural equation modeling. The results show that firm size and leverage significantly affect carbon emissions disclosure in Indonesia and Malaysia. Profitability and company age have no impact on carbon emissions disclosure in Indonesia. In Malaysia, profitability and company age do have a significant positive effect on carbon emissions disclosure. Company size has no effect in Indonesia, while in Malaysia, company size has a negative effect on sustainability reporting. Leverage level and company age have a significant positive effect on sustainability reporting in Indonesia, while in Malaysia, a company’s level of leverage and age have no impact on sustainability reporting. Profitability has a significant effect on the sustainability report in Indonesia, while in Malaysia, profitability has a significant positive impact on the sustainability report. Company size does not affect investors' reactions in Indonesia, while company size has a significant negative effect on Malaysian. A company’s level of leverage, profitability, and age do not affect investors' reactions. Carbon emissions disclosure has a significant positive effect on investors' responses in Indonesia, while in Malaysia, carbon emissions disclosure has no impact on investors' reactions. The sustainability report has a significant positive effect on investors' responses.

The COVID-19 crisis has had an impact on every aspect of human life, including business. Many industries ground to a halt, and some businesses had to resort to liquidation. In this context, corporate governance was not spared the effects of the pandemic either, as the crisis almost paralyzed the entire business ecosystem. Therefore, this research aims to determine the most affected area of companies’ corporate governance and examine how companies changed their corporate governance structure in response to the COVID-19 crisis to ensure the survival of their business. Thirty-seven publicly listed companies were selected as the samples of the study. Their annual reports were analyzed using a qualitative data analysis technique. The results showed that the majority of companies had to transfer their Annual General Meeting (AGM) or/and Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) to an online platform, while the shareholders were required to vote electronically. Moreover, some companies had to revise their budget, revisit their strategic plan, reduce director fees, send their directors for additional training, or conduct board evaluations online.

Environmental policy is a way to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, the impact of complying with these policies on companies is still a matter of debate. This study examined the effect of environmental performance on firm value mediated by financial performance. This quantitative research used the purposive sampling method to select the sample. The sample comprised 95 non-financial companies with an observation period from 2017 to 2021. The panel data was tested using path analysis in SEM-STATA. The results show that financial performance partially mediates the effect of environmental performance on firm value. Environmental performance can also have a direct impact on firm value. The result indicates that investors consider factors other than financial performance when making investment decisions. The results also show that environmental performance positively impacts financial performance. Furthermore, financial performance positively impacts firm value. Investors optimally use the non-financial information provided by the company. One type of non-financial information used is environmental performance. Investors are aware of the importance of the company’s concern for the impact of its operations on the environment. Companies that display good environmental performance tend to have a higher level of sustainability, which is profitable for investors. However, implementing strict environmental policies carries the risk that companies will move to countries with looser environmental policies. Developing countries, in particular, still need to overcome many obstacles in the implementation of environmental policies.

A pandemia da Covid-19 ten un efecto considerable nas desigualdades sociais. Este artigo ten como obxectivo identificar, medir e describir os cambios nas desigualdades de renda en Galicia despois da pandemia. Para isto, calcúlanse diferentes indicadores de desigualdade de renda que permiten analizar a súa evolución antes e despois da pandemia (2014-2020), considerando as diferentes fontes de ingreso. Os principais resultados poden sintetizarse en tres aspectos. Primeiro, a pandemia implica un incremento das desigualdades de renda en Galicia en 2020. Ademais, aumentaron as desigualdades segundo o sexo, a nacionalidade, a idade e o nivel de estudos dos compoñentes do fogar, así como as desigualdades territoriais. Finalmente, as prestacións sociais desempeñaron un papel relevante á hora de suavizar o efecto da pandemia nas desigualdades. Cómpre sinalar que este efecto é asimétrico, levando a que os fogares compostos por persoas máis novas se visen claramente menos protexidos que os de maior idade.

Growing pressures from various directions have caused managers in the UAE’s retail sector to initiate the use of environmentally friendly approaches such as green purchasing (GP). Expanding on prior work by examining general GP practices, this study explores the GP drivers/enablers that motivate firms in the UAE to adopt GP practices. The results show that retail firms in the selected sectors respond strongly to institutional pressures to adopt GP practices with a beta value of 0.54, customer pressures with a beta value of 0.27, and expected business benefits with a beta value of 0.37. Evidence of a positive relationship between management support and firms’ willingness to take on GP initiatives was weak, so the first hypothesis was not supported with a usual cut-off p-value of 0.05; however, by applying a cut-off p-value of 0.10 or above, it appears that all latent variables suggested in this study have a positive impact on the adoption of GP initiatives among retail hypermarkets in the UAE. This study had three main limitations. First, the sample was drawn from a specific government source, so it may not be a truly comprehensive representation of all retail firms. Second, the small number of samples might have led to bias. Third, as each questionnaire was answered by a single respondent, a common method variance may have resulted. This study will aid firms, as well as the government, who wish to improve their environmental performance in the value chain.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of goals designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” Despite being meticulous about achieving the SDGs, India’s overall SDG score is 61.9 out of 100. While multiple models and frameworks have been developed, a new concept that has gained currency is impact investing. Content analysis of academic journal articles was employed to analyze the terminology, definition, and similarities and differences in the use of the term impact investing. Impact investing helps to benefit society and the environment without the need to sacrifice financial returns. It attempts to address the global challenges of access to energy, potable water, basic hygiene, nutrition, health, and education by exploring innovative commercial solutions. The degree of sustainability achieved through impact investing depends upon the efficiency of the multidisciplinary team formed to conduct the due diligence to achieve the social and financial goals by paying equal attention to risk, value addition, impact, and investor expectations. This study builds a case for India, suggesting the execution strategy of impact investing as an answer to India’s sustainability conundrum.

This paper examines how mining, oil, and gas companies address environmental issues and communicate their actions to stakeholders through sustainability reports. Using market capitalization as a size metric, 50 mining, oil, and gas companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) were included in the research sample. Sustainability reports were subjected to quantitative and qualitative content analysis to identify keyword occurrences that were pertinent to the investigation. The findings revealed that environmental protection, emissions, carbon footprint, climate change, biodiversity, nature, planet, effluent, and conservation were addressed in the companies’ sustainability reports. This study confirmed, in line with research on other industries, that the intensity of communication on these topics varies with company size. It was also found that, although some companies discuss many keywords that correspond to the Global Reporting Initiative, they are irrelevant because the reports do not show the companies’ commitment and efforts to achieve the concepts. The practical implication of this research is that companies should show more commitment in their efforts to address environmental issues – sustainability disclosure is not just about words.

This study adopts an intrapersonal perspective to explore how and when employees shift roles from help giver to help seeker by investigating the relationship between their help-giving and following help-seeking behavior. Based on self-regulation theory, we hypothesize two contradictory psychological processes (i.e., consistency vs. licensing) via which employees determine whether to seek help after giving help. Importantly, we differentiate autonomous help-seeking from dependent help-seeking and propose stronger effects of help-giving on dependent help-seeking. Further, we identify leader respect as a moderator to solve the opposite effects of employees’ help-giving on their subsequent help-seeking indicated by the two contradictory mechanisms. Results of two field studies consistently showed that the negative (positive) relationship between help-giving and dependent help-seeking was serially mediated by personal reputation and reputation maintenance concerns (perceived increase of moral credits and help-seeking justification). Results regarding autonomous help-seeking were inconsistent and help-giving only positively affected autonomous help-seeking via perceived increase of moral credits and help-seeking justification in Study 2. Leader respect weakened the positive (in Study 1) but strengthened the negative relationship (in Study 1 and 2). We discuss theoretical implications for helping literature, self-regulation theory, and moral behavior research.

Creativity is a determining factor of organizational success. To engage employees with a high level of creativity, it is necessary to encourage excellent psychological capital and employee curiosity. This study examines the effect of psychological capital on employee creativity, mediated by curiosity. Research on creativity is closely related to curiosity as well as psychological capital; however, there is still a research gap. Therefore, our research focuses on the relationship between these variables. It employed a survey to gather data from 222 employees in seven retail store branches in Bandung, Indonesia. To evaluate the hypothesis proposed by the authors, partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used. The results indicated that psychological capital had an effect on employee creativity that was mediated by curiosity. The study results suggest that organizations can empower employees by increasing psychological capital and employee curiosity.

This essay offers a philosophical defense of deception about reservation prices in business negotiation. Its discussion is prompted by arguments that Nicholas Sherwood makes in a recent issue of Business Ethics Quarterly and develops ideas I put forward in an earlier issue of Business Ethics Quarterly. The essay argues that although reservation price deception cannot be justified by appeal to the consent of negotiating parties, it can be justified by appeal to a separate but related notion, assumption of risk, as long as the assumption of risk occurs in a suitably fair context.

This study examined the influence of corporate governance – including the presence of board gender diversity, board independence, board attention, and audit committee – and firm performance on waste and effluent disclosure in polluting industry companies in Indonesia. This study used secondary data obtained from the companies’ annual and sustainability reports during the period 2017 to 2021. The waste and effluent disclosure was measured using a scoring method based on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standard 306: Waste and Effluent. This study focused on companies in five polluting industries, including Pulp and Paper, Chemicals, Oil and Gas, Metals and Mining, and Infrastructure, Utilities, and Transportation, listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. The results of the study show that corporate governance, including the presence of board gender diversity, board independence, board attention, and audit committee, has a significant influence on waste and effluent disclosure. In contrast, firm performance, which was proxied by return on assets (ROA), has no significant influence on the waste and effluent disclosure of companies in polluting industries listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange.

China’s institutional quality and organizational structure have been altered as a result of the 4.0 industrial revolution. Because of this, the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has become even more important since the arrival of the fourth industrial revolution. This study explores whether or not there is a complementarity between SOEs and the quality of institutions in terms of their influence on economic growth for selected regions in China. The data on SOEs is collected for 29 regions (provinces, autonomous regions, or municipalities) of China over the period of 2001 to 2020. The study uses the Cross-Sectional Autoregressive Distributive Lag model (CS-ARDL) approach to estimate the model. The findings indicate that the effect of SOEs is conditioned on the quality of institutions. Our analysis reveals that the quality of a nation's institutions is an important factor to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of SOEs in spurring economic growth.

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between the stringency of red tape and the entry and exit rates of firms. To do so, we use a panel dataset on firm entry and exit rates, obtained from Eurostat Business Demography, covering 22 European countries and 14 manufacturing sectors observed over the period 2013–2019. We complement the information on firm dynamics with country-level data on red tape from the World Bank’s Doing Business database. Five dimensions of red tape are considered: regulations for starting a business, construction permits, procedures for getting electricity, registering property, and contract enforcement. In addition, both the cost and the time taken to complete the administrative procedures are used as metrics of red tape. Using a difference-in-difference approach à la Rajan and Zingales (1998), we find a negative effect of administrative burdens on the entry and exit rates of firms across European countries. Moreover, we find that the negative effect is more pronounced for smaller firms. Finally, the time taken to comply with bureaucratic procedures is a greater impediment to smooth entry and exit than the monetary costs associated with these administrative barriers.

Many business transactions and employment contracts are wrongfully exploitative despite being consensual and beneficial to both parties, compared with a nontransaction baseline. This form of exploitation can present governments with a dilemma. Legally permitting exploitation may send the message that the public condones it. In some economic conditions, coercively enforced antiexploitation law may harm the people it is intended to help. Under these conditions, a way out of the dilemma is to enact laws with provisions that lack coercive enforcement. Noncoercive law would convey the state’s condemnation of wrongful exploitation without risking the harmful effects of coercively enforced law. It would also give firms and their agents a way of explaining nonexploitative pricing decisions to investors, and it may help give precise content to the moral duty to set prices and wages fairly. Governments should thus consider noncoercive law a viable component of their responses to exploitation.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from economic, employee, social and environmental dimensions in a hypothetical company setup. This study employs the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) in which the elements of the pairwise comparison matrix are expressed by triangular fuzzy elements. Furthermore, the classical non-fuzzy methods, such as the eigenvector and geometric mean, were also employed to calculate the weights of the fuzzy comparison matrices. First, some existing literature on CSR and its impact on the internal and external environments were explored. Second, the FAHP goal and the criteria were established, and this was followed by the pairwise comparison using the linguistic scale. Next is the computation of the geometric magnitude and weight of each criterion. Thereafter, the defuzzified and normalized weights were obtained. In the order of priority of CSR activities and their impact on the four identified criteria, alternative 1 (company 1) is ranked first, followed by alternative 2 (company 2), and alternative 3 (company 3) is ranked last. The implementation of CSR activities for companies 1 and 2 reflect positively in their internal and external environments, although to varying degrees. This study provides a practical guided approach for the use of the FAHP for solving a multi-criteria decision, such as ranking the impact of CSR activities in relation to certain criteria. The outcome of this study can guide organizations in making informed decisions regarding the implementation of CSR activities.

The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers demonstrate that partnerships and place are intrinsically reciprocal: the morality and materiality inherent in places repeatedly reset the reference points for partners, trigger epiphanies, shift identities, and redistribute capacities to act. Place thus becomes generative of partnerships in the most profound sense: by developing an awareness of their emplacement, CSPs commit to place, and through their place-based commitments produce three intertwined modalities of place-specific ethics that bind CSPs and place: ethic of recognition, an ethic of care, and an ethic of resilience. Our authors have found vivid examples of how emplaced CSPs embody these ethics, signaling hope for the sustainability of our (always hyper-local) life-worlds.

We review and synthesize over two decades of research on ethical culture in organizations, examining eighty-nine relevant scholarly works. Our article discusses the conceptualization of ethical culture in a cross-disciplinary space and its critical role in ethical decision-making. With a view to advancing future research, we analyze the antecedents, outcomes, and mediator and moderator roles of ethical culture. To do so, we identify measures and theories used in past studies and make recommendations. We propose, inter alia, the use of validated measures, application of a wider range of theories, adoption of longitudinal studies, and study of group-level data in organizations. We explore research possibilities in new and emergent forms of organizations, ways of organizing work, and technology in ethical decision-making, such as the role of artificial intelligence. We also recommend the study of a broad range of leadership styles and their influence in shaping ethical cultures in organizations.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic, which led to lockdowns and new working norms, has influenced business and accounting transactions in significant ways. This phenomenon and its longer-term impacts are still under-researched and remain unexplored in emerging countries, particularly Malaysia. Therefore, the current study intended to determine the actions taken by Malaysian organizations, specifically in their accounting and finance functions, in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Online survey questionnaires were distributed to collect data. The questionnaires comprised several sections, including demographic information of the respondents and factors affecting users’ intentions to use technology for accounting and finance functions in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. This research adopted the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model as a theoretical basis from which to evaluate the research objectives. The findings showed that only performance expectancy is related to user intention, while other factors, such as effort, attitude, social influence, self-efficacy, and anxiety, display the opposite effect. This empirical study suggests that accounting and finance functions in Malaysia still lag behind in terms of the technology used by employees. In addition, organizations, particularly government departments, are not ready to adopt a fully integrated scientific accounting and finance system.

As the cyber insurance market is expanding and cyber insurance policies continue to mature, the potential of including pre-incident and post-incident services into cyber policies is being recognised by insurers and insurance buyers. This work addresses the question of how such services should be priced from the insurer’s viewpoint, i.e. under which conditions it is rational for a profit-maximising, risk-neutral or risk-averse insurer to share the costs of providing risk mitigation services. The interaction between insurance buyer and seller is modelled as a Stackelberg game, where both parties use distortion risk measures to model their individual risk aversion. After linking the notions of pre-incident and post-incident services to the concepts of self-protection and self-insurance, we show that when pricing a single contract, the insurer would always shift the full cost of self-protection services to the insured; however, this does not generally hold for the pricing of self-insurance services or when taking a portfolio viewpoint. We illustrate the latter statement using toy examples of risks with dependence mechanisms representative in the cyber context.

How are individuals affected by their own self-interested unethical behavior? Although self-interested unethical behavior commonly occurs as people attempt to advantage themselves, we argue that this unethical behavior can have deleterious implications for individuals and their social relationships. We propose that engaging in self-interested unethical behavior is positively related to state paranoia—an aversive psychological state. In turn, the social cognitive biases underlying state paranoia can prompt people to misjudge the potential for social threat. This may motivate them to curtail coworker-directed affiliative behavior, thereby inadvertently undermining their social relationships. Our predictions were supported across four studies, including a behavioral study in a controlled environment, a recall study, a field survey in a single organization, and a two-wave survey. Theoretical and practical implications include highlighting the importance of understanding the personal and social consequences of self-interested unethical behavior as well as the impact of state paranoia in the workplace.

Cyber incidents are among the most critical business risks for organisations and can lead to large financial losses. However, previous research on loss modelling is based on unassured data sources because the representativeness and completeness of op-risk databases cannot be assured. Moreover, there is a lack of modelling approaches that focus on the tail behaviour and adequately account for extreme losses. In this paper, we introduce a novel ‘tempered’ generalised extreme value (GEV) approach. Based on a stratified random sample of 5000 interviewed German organisations, we model different loss distributions and compare them to our empirical data using graphical analysis and goodness-of-fit tests. We differentiate various subsamples (industry, size, attack type, loss type) and find our modified GEV outperforms other distributions, such as the lognormal and Weibull distributions. Finally, we calculate losses for the German economy, present application examples, derive implications as well as discuss the comparison of loss estimates in the literature.

This paper explores the role of learning in organizational responses to sustainability. Finding meaningful solutions to sustainability challenges requires companies and other actors to broaden their thinking, go beyond organizational boundaries and engage more with their stakeholders. However, broadening organizational perspective and collaborating with diverse stakeholders involves inherent political and process-related tensions. Learning has been identified as a key organizing process for overcoming the challenges that arise through collaborative action for sustainability. In order to understand the role of learning in organizational responses to sustainability, we conduct a cross-disciplinary systematic review of the literature on learning for sustainability and incorporate perspectives from diverse disciplines including business, management, environmental science, sociology, policy, urban planning, and development. The review explores how different disciplines conceptualize and operationalize learning for sustainability and identifies the common themes and challenges. Our findings highlight the different ways that power relations influence learning and decision-making processes, and how entrenched traditional value structures and ‘reflexive complicity’ limit practitioners and researchers alike in finding meaningful sustainability solutions. We conclude that shifting how we motivate business and management research on learning for sustainability, in a way that prioritizes sustainability outcomes over firm performance, could bring us a step closer to more meaningful responses to sustainability. Similarly, breaking patterns of ‘reflexive complicity’ by key actors in business could assist in shifting toward more radical and long-term responses to sustainability in practice.

A conditional tail index estimator is introduced which explicitly allows for right-tail censoring (top-coding). We show that the factor values used to adjust top-coded wages have changed over time and depend on individuals' characteristics, occupations and industries, and propose suitable values. Specifically, contrasting the results of our approach with those of a conservative fixed adjustment factor of 1.5 (used in the literature), suggests that wage inequality in 2017 measured with the Gini coefficient is larger than that suggested by the fixed adjustment factor.

Our paper explores the complex place-based relations of cross-sector partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners. We draw on a longitudinal in-depth case study of the Bundian Way, an Indigenous-led cross-sector partnership of over 40 organisations. Through practices of listening to history and walking ‘on Country’, the non-Indigenous partners and our team came to appreciate the indivisibility of place and time and bear witness to the intergenerational trauma of colonially imposed divisions. By combining a 45-day place-based ethnography with a 36-month participant observation and repeated interviews with the Advisory Committee members, we explain how non-Indigenous members of the cross-sector partnership came to realise, and reverse, these place-time divisions. We contribute to an ethics of custodianship by first contrasting, and then combining, Indigenous and Western ways of knowing place through time.

This article analyzes two longitudinal datasets (October – December 2020; April 2021) of 1,000 and 900 women in Kenya and Nigeria, respectively, alongside in-depth qualitative interviews with women at risk of changes to time use, to study two pandemic issues: women’s substitution of paid for unpaid work and how these shifts compromise their mental health. Women devote more time to domestic care (30–38 percent), less time to employment (29–46 percent), and become unemployed (12–17 percent). A rise in domestic work is correlated with depressive (Nigeria) and anxiety symptoms (Kenya and Nigeria). Women with greater agency (Kenya) and fewer children (Nigeria) are less likely to report a domestic burden or loss in paid activities. Social protection programs may fill the void of assistance traditionally provided by informal networks in the short term, while campaigns shifting norms around household work may preserve women’s economic participation in the long term.

The early work by Kuznets and Chenery originally developed the theme that economic development was not simply a synonym for aggregate GDP growth, but entailed qualitative changes in the structures of production, employment, and consumption. Later work in international business and economics explored the co-evolution between FDI and economic structure. We investigate the co-evolution between FDI, economic structure and export structures in the two largest Latin American economies, Brazil and Mexico, over the period 2000–2015. Both initially followed similar development strategies during the import-substitution era. During the liberalization era they followed somewhat different strategies towards maintaining the competitiveness of domestic actors. In addition to the analysis of key indicators, we discuss the role played by industrial policies—or their absence—within Brazil’s and Mexico’s development strategies. Industrial policy instruments, such as infant industry protection, subsidies, tax and financial incentives, as well as performance requirements may be crucial to shift the economic structure in the direction of the desired industries. Tracing the co-evolution between FDI and economic structures, even in the absence of statistical rigour to support causal claims, provides interesting insights for industrial policy in the twenty-first century.