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Value chain–based approaches offer tremendous scope for market-based improvements in production, productivity, rural economy diversification, and household incomes, but are often covered by literature that is too conceptual or heavily focused on analysis. This has created a gap in the information available to planners, practitioners, and value chain participants. Furthermore, few references are available on how these approaches can be applied specifically to developing agriculture in Africa. 'Building Competitiveness in Africa's Agriculture: A Guide to Value Chain Concepts and Applications' describes practical implementation approaches and illustrates them with scores of real African agribusiness case studies. Using these examples, the 'Guide' presents a range of concepts, analytical tools, and methodologies centered on the value chain that can be used to design, implement, and evaluate agricultural and agribusiness development initiatives. It stresses principles of market focus, collaboration, information sharing, and innovation. The 'Guide' begins by examining core concepts and issues related to value chains. A brief literature review then focuses on five topics of particular relevance to African agricultural value chains. These topics address challenges faced by value chain participants and practitioners that resonate through the many cases described in the book. The core of the book presents methodological tools and approaches that blend important value chain concepts with the topics and with sound business principles. The tools and case studies have been selected for their usefulness in supporting market-driven, private-sector initiatives to improve value chains. The 'Guide' offers 13 implementation approaches, presented within the implementation cycle of a value chain program, followed by descriptions of actual cases. Roughly 60 percent of the examples are from Africa, while the rest come from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The 'Guide' offers useful guidance to businesspeople, policy makers, representatives of farmer or trade organizations, and others who are engaged in agro-enterprise and agribusiness development. These readers will learn how to use value chain approaches in ways that can contribute to sound operational decisions, improved market linkage, and better results for enterprise and industry development.

Why has capitalism produced economic growth that so vastly dwarfs the growth record of other economic systems, past and present? Why have living standards in countries from America to Germany to Japan risen exponentially over the past century? William Baumol rejects the conventional view that capitalism benefits society through price competition--that is, products and services become less costly as firms vie for consumers. Where most others have seen this as the driving force behind growth, he sees something different--a compound of systematic innovation activity within the firm, an arms race in which no firm in an innovating industry dares to fall behind the others in new products and processes, and inter-firm collaboration in the creation and use of innovations. While giving price competition due credit, Baumol stresses that large firms use innovation as a prime competitive weapon. However, as he explains it, firms do not wish to risk too much innovation, because it is costly, and can be made obsolete by rival innovation. So firms have split the difference through the sale of technology licenses and participation in technology-sharing compacts that pay huge dividends to the economy as a whole--and thereby made innovation a routine feature of economic life. This process, in Baumol's view, accounts for the unparalleled growth of modern capitalist economies. Drawing on extensive research and years of consulting work for many large global firms, Baumol shows in this original work that the capitalist growth process, at least in societies where the rule of law prevails, comes far closer to the requirements of economic efficiency than is typically understood. Resounding with rare intellectual force, this book marks a milestone in the comprehension of the accomplishments of our free-market economic system--a new understanding that, suggests the author, promises to benefit many countries that lack the advantages of this immense innovation machine.

This article contributes to the development of contestable market theory by investigating how competitiveness in the eSports industry influences the size of this industry, as measured by the volume of monetary prizes. We use data on each gamer's prize earnings for each tournament from 1999 to 2015 to estimate panel vector autoregression (V.A.R.) model with fixed effects. The main finding is that competition does not increase industry size. This result confirms the hypothesis from the contestable market theory that perfect competition does not always facilitate better development, especially in industries where natural barriers result in a small number of leading firms or teams.

Seizing opportunities, inventing new products, transforming markets--entrepreneurs are an important and well-documented part of the private sector landscape. Do they have counterparts in the public sphere? The authors argue that they do, and test their argument by focusing on agents of dynamic political change in suburbs across the United States, where much of the entrepreneurial activity in American politics occurs. The public entrepreneurs they identify are most often mayors, city managers, or individual citizens. These entrepreneurs develop innovative ideas and implement new service and tax arrangements where existing administrative practices and budgetary allocations prove inadequate to meet a range of problems, from economic development to the racial transition of neighborhoods. How do public entrepreneurs emerge? How much does the future of urban development depend on them? This book answers these questions, using data from over 1,000 local governments. The emergence of public entrepreneurs depends on a set of familiar cost-benefit calculations. Like private sector risk-takers, public entrepreneurs exploit opportunities emerging from imperfect markets for public goods, from collective-action problems that impede private solutions, and from situations where information is costly and the supply of services is uneven. The authors augment their quantitative analysis with ten case studies and show that bottom-up change driven by politicians, public managers, and other local agents obeys regular and predictable rules.

We test the concept of contestability in the digital music player market. The theory suggests that the threat of new entrants keeps firms’ market power in check. But Baumol and others argue that pure contestable markets rarely happen in reality. The portable music player market has been dominated by one producer. We estimate a quality-adjusted price index from 2002 to 2010. Results show that market prices decline at an average rate of about 20 percent per year, which is similar to other IT products. This provides support for the idea that the market is fairly contestable.

This article contributes to the analysis of tacit collusion in quantity-setting supergames involving cost-asymmetric firms. Asymmetry is dealt with by assuming that firms have a different share of a specific asset that affects marginal costs. The model extends optimal punishment schemes in the style of Abreu (1986, 1988) and provides conditions for industrywide collusion to be enforced. From the analysis of the impact of asset transfers on the sustainability of tacit collusion, merger policy implications can be drawn. In particular, I show that if the merger induces an increase in the inequality of asset holdings, this will hinder collusion.

Background In most developed nations, there has been a shift from public services to a marketisation of public goods and services - representing a significant reform process aiming to transform the way in which community-based human services, such as health, are delivered and consumed. For services, this means developing the capacity to adapt and innovate in response to changing circumstances to achieve quality. The availability of rigorous research to demonstrate whether a market approach and contestability, in particular, is a coherent reform process is largely absent. Contestability operates on the premise that better procurement processes allow more providers to enter the market and compete for contracts. This is expected to create stimulus for greater efficiencies, innovation and improved service delivery to consumers. There is limited understanding, however, about how community-based providers morph and re-configure in response to the opportunities posed by contestability. This study focuses on the effect of a contestability policy on the community-managed mental health sector. Methods/design A realist review will be undertaken to understand how and why the introduction of contestability into a previously incontestable market influences the ways in which community-based mental health providers respond to contestability. The review will investigate those circumstances that shape organisational response and generate outcomes through activating mechanisms. An early scoping has helped to formulate the initial program theory. A realist synthesis will be undertaken to identify relevant journal articles and grey literature. Data will be extracted in relation to the emerging contextual factors, mechanisms and outcomes and their configurations. The analysis will seek patterns and regularities in these configurations across the extracted data and will focus on addressing our theory-based questions. Discussion Increasingly, community-based mental health markets are moving to contestability models. Rigorous research is needed to understand how such markets work and in what contexts. The knowledge gained from this study in community-based mental health will provide valuable lessons in how contestability works, in what circumstances and who benefits when. The results of the proposed research will be useful to policy-makers and may be applicable in other contexts beyond the community-based mental health sector. Systematic review registration PROSPERO CRD42015016808

A revisionist consensus among corporate law academics has begun to coalesce that, after a century of academic thinking to the contrary, states do not compete head-to-head on an ongoing basis for chartering revenues, leaving Delaware alone in the ongoing interstate charter market. The revisionist view pushes us to consider how free Delaware is to act. Where and when would it come up against boundaries, punishments, and adverse consequences? When do other states (and Washington) constrain Delaware? Recent state corporate lawmaking helps us to define those boundaries in terms of potential state competition and to see that the critical actors are not other states' lawmakers directly, but Delaware's own corporate constituents who, if disgruntled, can induce other states to enact new laws. Moreover, analysis of previously unassembled chartering revenue data from Delaware's Secretary of State's office displays a vital dimension of state competition, once thought to be relatively unimportant, but that's becoming increasingly powerful: Delaware's tax base is eroding, and it's eroding faster in the past decade or so than ever. Delaware must move ever faster to replenish that erosion. The dynamism of American business interacts with even a lackluster state-based corporate chartering market to put powerful pressure on Delaware, whose business base is persistently eroding as firms merge, close, and restructure.

The aim of this paper is twofold: to reformulate the concept of contestable markets in the context of property boundaries, and to recapitulate the characteristics of \"sunk costs.\" The first section outlines the idea of contestable markets developed in the 1980s and contrasts it with the perfect competition model. The second section explains the notion of sunk costs as entry barriers in the contestable markets framework. The third section summarizes the relation between costs and prices. The fourth section separates sunk costs from fixed costs and formulates main propositions on their nature. The fifth section deals with the contestable markets model, where sunk costs are perceived as an inefficient barrier to market entry. The sixth section modifies contestable markets theory in compliance with the \"Austrian\" theory of competition.

We analyze models of product differentiation with perfect price discrimination and free entry. With a fixed number of firms, and in the absence of coordination failures, perfect price discrimination provides incentives for firms to choose product characteristics in a socially optimal way. However, with free entry, the number of firms is always excessive. Our results apply to a large class of models of product differentiation. They also apply to models of common agency or lobbying with free entry and imply that one has excessive entry into the ranks of the principals.