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This study examines whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) improves firm productive efficiency and highlights the role of product market competition in addressing agency conflicts associated with CSR. Using a sample of French firms from 2008 to 2018, we estimate firm productive efficiency through a semi-parametric and non-parametric methods (Data Envelopment Analysis—DEA). The results show that CSR positively affects firm productive efficiency supporting the instrumental stakeholder theory. We also find that the positive effect of CSR on firm productive efficiency is more prevalent among firms operating in highly competitive environments and standing out high governance quality. These findings suggest that agency problems related to CSR are less likely in firms subject to high external and internal control. These findings have several practical implications and may provide valuable insights in particular to the French National Productivity Council, which has been actively investigating the primary catalysts of firm productivity in France.

OrientationThe manufacturing sector in Kenya has been experiencing employee safety and productivity issues despite adopting safety programmes and laws regulating employee safety. Employee safety attitudes significantly worsen workplace safety and productivity problems.Research purposeThe study determined the intervening effect of workplace safety attitudes on the relationship between workplace safety and employee productivity in manufacturing firms in Kenya.Motivation for the studyManufacturing firms adopt new technologies that expose employees to new safety risks, while globalisation has led to a diverse workforce with diverse safety attitudes.Research approach/design and methodThis study is grounded on the risk homeostasis theory; it adopted a cross-sectional survey research design guided by a positivist research philosophy. The target population comprised 853 manufacturing firms registered with the Kenya Association of Manufacturers. A sample of 124 firms distributed across the 14 sub-sectors in the manufacturing sector was obtained using a statistical formula to ensure all sectors were represented. Regression analysis was carried out in four steps to assess the intervening effect of workplace safety attitude on the relationship between workplace safety attitude and employee productivity.Main findingsThe coefficients were significant in each step, therefore leading to the conclusion that employee safety attitude significantly intervened in the relationship between workplace safety and employee productivity.Practical/managerial implicationsThe study offers managerial insights into the situational position of workplace safety, employee safety attitudes and employee productivity.Contribution/value-addThe study provides epistemological insights on the impact of employee safety attitudes on workplace safety and employee productivity.

Since the early 1990s, most developing economies have become more integrated with the world's economy. Trade and foreign investment barriers have been progressively lifted and international trade agreements signed. These reforms have led to important changes in the structures of these economies. The labor markets have adjusted to these major changes, and workers were required to adapt to them in one way or another. In 2006, the Social Protection Unit of the World Bank launched an important research program to understand the impact that these profound structural changes have had on workers in developing countries. 'Globalization, Wages, and the Quality of Jobs: Five Country Studies' presents the findings and insights of this important research program. In particular, the authors present the similar experiences of low-income countries with globalization and suggest that low-income countries' working conditions have improved in the sectors exposed to globalization. However, 'Globalization, Wages, and the Quality of Jobs' also highlights concerns about the sustainability of these improvements and that the positive demonstration effects on the rest of the economy are unclear. The empirical literature that exists, although vast, does not lead to a consensus view on globalization's eventual impact on labor markets. Understanding the effects of globalization is crucial for governments concerned about employment, working conditions, and ultimately, poverty reduction. Beyond job creation, improving the quality of those jobs is an essential condition for achieving poverty reduction. 'Globalization, Wages, and the Quality of Jobs' adds to the existing literature in two ways. First, the authors provide a comprehensive literature review on the current wisdom on globalization and present a micro-based framework for analyzing globalization and working conditions in developing countries. Second, the authors apply this framework to five developing countries: Cambodia, El Salvador, Honduras, Indonesia, and Madagascar. This volume will be of interest to government policy makers, trade officials, and others working to expand the benefits of globalization to developing countries.

Economic growth has been sustained for many years pre-crisis in the region, but this has not resulted in the creation of an adequate number of jobs and has succeeded, at best, in generating low-quality, informal jobs. The report addresses one margin of exclusion: informal employment and the vulnerabilities and lack of opportunities associated with it. The report analyzes the constraints that prevent informal workers from becoming formal and discusses policy options to effectively address these constraints. This report looks at informality through a human development angle and focuses particularly on informal employment. Informality is a complex phenomenon, comprising unpaid workers and workers without social security or health insurance coverage, small or micro-firms that operate outside the regulatory framework and large registered firms that may partially evade corporate taxes and social security contributions. The first section provides a detailed profile of informal workers in the region. The second section describes the characteristics of informality in micro-firms that operate outside the regulatory framework and in larger firms that do not fully comply with social security contribution requirements and tax obligations. The third section presents informality and the firm. The fourth section focuses on informality: choice or exclusion? The fifth section discusses policy options for effectively expanding coverage of health insurance and pension systems and promoting the creation of better quality jobs.

There is one asset that poor people have in abundance: labor. Thus, what distinguishes the poor from the non-poor in low income countries is, simply, their ability to sell labor at a good price. It should be of little surprise, then, that enhancing the poor's access to employment is increasingly recognized as key to development. But while the creation of \"good\" jobs for the poor has become a policy priority for many developing countries, the mechanisms by which employment stimulates growth and reduces poverty have, until now, not been well understood. This book aims to help fill that gap. Focusing on labor market mobility as a central mechanism for both growth and poverty reduction, it brings together contributions originally presented at a conference organized by the World Bank's Poverty Reduction and Development Effectiveness department in June 2006. Using examples from all continents, these papers discuss why multi-segmented labor markets offer a good starting point for analysis, what role the informal sector plays in employment, whether self-employment is an engine of growth, how worker mobility affects income, and how firm dynamics affect both growth and employment through job creation and destruction.

Poor people derive most of their income from work; however, there is insufficient understanding of the role of labor markets, employment, and earnings as a linkage between growth and poverty reduction, especially in low income countries. To provide inputs into the policy discussion on how to enhance poverty reduction through increased employment and earnings for given growth levels, this study explores this linkage in the case of Nicaragua using data for 2001 and 2005. To do so, the study discusses macroeconomic growth and the labor market in Nicaragua, presenting sectoral employment and productivity profiles. A poverty profile of the labor market is developed, with an examination of the income sources and a decomposition of poverty reduction. Other topics include labor regulation, segmentation, and barriers to mobility.This report is part of a series of the studies conducted in the context of the World Bank’s research framework aiming to improve the understanding of the linkages among growth, labor, and poverty reduction.

The analysis presented in this report assembles, for the first time, evidence from a variety of sources in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to show that policy and institutional reforms are important in achieving higher productivity growth. However, significant challenges remain in sustaining that growth. Many countries that started the reform process early, such as the new member states of the European Union, have come to resemble advanced market economies and face challenges in competing successfully in the global economy that are similar to the challenges faced by other European countries. For these new European Union members, the report argues, policies that facilitate innovation and firm expansion will be a key. But for other countries that started the reform process later, such as the countries of Southeastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, there is still a need to address the legacy of transition. For these countries, policies that accelerate restructuring and ease the entry and exit of firms will continue to be essential. This report - part of a series of regional studies of the World Bank's Europe and Central Asia region that has already covered poverty and inequality, the enhancement of job opportunities, trade and integration, migration and remittances, and the challenges posed by aging populations is intended as a contribution to the author thinking about how the World Bank may work more effectively with client states and other partners in the region to promote growth and foster higher living standards in a rapidly changing World.

The paper proposes a framework for measuring and testing the causal effects of a set of entrepreneurial ecosystems factors (eco-factors) on productive entrepreneurship (eco-output). Existing research studies provide long lists of relevant eco-factors; however, the causal relations of eco-factors with productive entrepreneurship has not been sufficiently and holistically studied. As the research on entrepreneurial ecosystems continues to develop, there is a need for a measurement framework and subsequent empirical validation of these causal relations. Otherwise, research on entrepreneurial ecosystem risks engaging only in a simple description of successful territories without the possibility of generalizing findings. Therefore, our paper’s contribution is a critical review of the set of eco-factors proposed by the extant literature and propose indicators and related data sources that could be used to measure the indicators more holistically. In an analogous way, with respect to eco-output, our contribution is to trace which indicators are the appropriate proxies for productive entrepreneurship and to explore the data sources for these indicators.

The productive efficiency of a firm can be seen as composed of two parts, one persistent and one transient. The received empirical literature on the measurement of productive efficiency has paid relatively little attention to the difference between these two components. Ahn and Sickles (Econ Rev 19(4):461–492, 2000) suggested some approaches that pointed in this direction. The possibility was also raised in Greene (Health Econ 13(10):959–980, 2004. doi:10.1002/hec. 938), who expressed some pessimism over the possibility of distinguishing the two empirically. Recently, Colombi (A skew normal stochastic frontier model for panel data, 2010) and Kumbhakar and Tsionas (J Appl Econ 29(1):110–132, 2012), in a milestone extension of the stochastic frontier methodology have proposed a tractable model based on panel data that promises to provide separate estimates of the two components of efficiency. The approach developed in the original presentation proved very cumbersome actually to implement in practice. Colombi (2010) notes that FIML estimation of the model is ‘complex and time consuming.’ In the sequence of papers, Colombi (2010), Colombi et al. (A stochastic frontier model with short-run and long-run inefficiency random effects, 2011, J Prod Anal, 2014), Kumbhakar et al. (J Prod Anal 41(2):321–337, 2012) and Kumbhakar and Tsionas (2012) have suggested other strategies, including a four step least squares method. The main point of this paper is that full maximum likelihood estimation of the model is neither complex nor time consuming. The extreme complexity of the log likelihood noted in Colombi (2010), Colombi et al. (2011, 2014) is reduced by using simulation and exploiting the Butler and Moffitt (Econometrica 50:761–764, 1982) formulation. In this paper, we develop a practical full information maximum simulated likelihood estimator for the model. The approach is very effective and strikingly simple to apply, and uses all of the sample distributional information to obtain the estimates. We also implement the panel data counterpart of the Jondrow et al. (J Econ 19(2–3): 233–238, 1982) estimator for technical or cost inefficiency. The technique is applied in a study of the cost efficiency of Swiss railways.

This paper aims to enhance the understanding of the relationship between corporate governance mechanism and firm performance among Shariah-compliant firms using an integrated theoretical framework. This study is carried out on the top 200 Shariah-compliant firms listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange from 2014 to 2017. Given the longitudinal nature of the data, the researchers employ generalized least squares and random effect with robust and clustering standard error models to estimate the impact of ownership structure, board independence, board competence, firms’ characteristics, and debt structure on firm performance as measured by the firm’s return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). The findings show that ownership concentration has a statistically positive effect on firm performance. Having an external Chair and independent board members with an educational level beyond a bachelor’s degree also have a positive effect on firm performance while CEO duality has a statistically negative impact instead. Insider representation has a positive impact on firm performance but when these inside board members are also the owners, the impact turns negative. Furthermore, the statistical significance of holding a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and other type of qualifications imply the need for board members to have greater knowledge in order to positively influence ROA and ROE. This is the first study to examine the influence of corporate governance mechanism on firm performance using a multi-theoretical approach in the context of Shariah-compliant firms. The interaction terms of elements in agency theory, stakeholder/resource-based theory, and stewardship theory are used as pre-conditions to the direct effect of these regressors on firm performance.