Eurasian Business Review 

About: Eurasian Business Review is an academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Entrepreneurship & Business. It has an ISSN identifier of 1309-4297. Over the lifetime, 267 publications have been published receiving 5379 citations.

Revealed comparative advantage and the alternatives as measures of international specialization

Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of Balassa's 'revealed comparative advantage' (RCA). It shows that when using RCA, it should be adjusted such that it becomes symmetric around its neutral value. The proposed adjusted index is called 'revealed symmetric comparative advantage' (RSCA). The theoretical discussion focuses on the properties of RSCA and empirical evidence, based on the Jarque- Bera test for normality of the regression error terms, using both the RCA and RSCA indices. We compare RSCA to other measures of international trade specialization including the Michaely index, the Contribution to Trade Balance, Chi Square, and Bowen's Net Trade Index. The result of the analysis is that RSCA—on balance—is the best measure of comparative advantage.

Innovation and Productivity: An Update

Abstract: This paper reviews the existing evidence regarding the effects of technological and non-technological innovations on the productivity of firms and the existence of possible complementarities between these different forms of innovation.

Factors influencing the entrepreneurial engagement of opportunity and necessity entrepreneurs

Abstract: The scholarly literature often distinguishes between so-called opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship and between “pull” and “push” motivations. Despite the pervasive use of this terminology, empirical analyses are mostly based on a single country. The present paper contributes by investigating business owner survey data for the United States and 32 countries in Europe and Asia. We analyze the differences between business owners motivated by opportunity and necessity in terms of their (1) socioeconomic characteristics, (2) personality, and (3) perceptions of entrepreneurial support. Descriptive statistics reveal that the two groups of business owners have very different profiles along these three dimensions. Moreover, multinomial logit regressions indicate that the determinants of business ownership (versus paid employment) differ for opportunity and necessity business ownership. A specific result of the present study (covering all 33 countries) is that the probability of being an opportunity versus a necessity business owner is higher for male, younger, wealthier, proactive, and optimistic business owners. Furthermore, those who prefer being a business owner and those who have more favorable perceptions of financial start-up support are more likely to be an opportunity versus a necessity business owner.

E-commerce adoption by SMEs in developing countries: evidence from Indonesia

Abstract: This study aims to provide an overview of e-commerce adoption by SMEs in developing countries and, in particular, the extent of the adoption of e-commerce by Indonesian SMEs. It identifies the e-commerce benefits realized by these SMEs and investigates the relationship between the levels of e-commerce adoption and the benefits thus realized. The study was motivated by the limited studies related to e-commerce adoption by SMEs, especially in developing countries. In addition, it seems that most e-commerce studies are focused more on upstream issues: to see the factors that facilitate, or barriers faced regarding e-commerce adoption, rather than downstream issues: to see post-adoption benefits. This certainly limits our understanding about e-commerce adoption by SMEs in developing countries, as well as the post-adoption benefits of e-commerce. Indonesia was chosen as the place in which to conduct the study. A survey of 292 SMEs shows that the majority of them are still at an early stage in their adoption of e-commerce. Their use of e-commerce is dominated by marketing and purchasing and procurement activities. “Extending market reach”, “increased sales”, “improved external communication”, “improved company image”, “improved speed of processing”, and “increased employee productivity” are reported as the top six e-commerce benefits perceived by these SMEs. This study also shows that SMEs at the higher level of e-commerce adoption experience greater e-commerce benefits than those at other levels of adoption.

The Evolution of Technologies: An Assessment of the State-of-the-Art

Abstract: Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines who have studied technological advance in some detail have converged on the proposition that technological advance needs to be understood as proceeding through an evolutionary process characterized by multiple search efforts, deep intertechnological differences in the ways potential opportunities are tagged, ubiquitous uncertainty and innovation-driven competition among firms. In this work we survey the state-of-the-art in the analysis of such evolutionary processes. We start by asking whether there are some invariances in the knowledge structure and in the ways technological knowledge accumulates and, together, what distinguishes different fields and different periods of technological advance, if any. Next we address (i) the differences across paradigms in terms of nature and sources of innovative opportunities; (ii) the mechanisms of appropriation of economic returns from innovative activities; (iii) the role of demand and other socio-economic factors in shaping the directions of technological advances; (iv) the possibility of identifying discrete families sectors, distinct according to their sources of innovative knowledge and modes of innovating; (v) the relationships between the nature of productive knowledge and the distribution of input coefficients across firms; (vi) the patterns of innovation diffusion; and, finally, (vii) we discuss the role of history in the evolution of technologies, that is their path-dependence.