Documents decentralization 185 results

"The Law of Global Value Chains
Global value chain (GVC) analysis captures how firms become the dominant organizational form in the coordination of global social relations of production (Baglioni et al., 2017: 315), breaking with state-centric approaches to understanding economic development. Changing patterns of global production and the prevalence of outsourcing mean that industrial capacity is owned by producers in developing countries but controlled to a significant extent by lead firms located in developed economies (Gereffi, 2018: 255). From this starting point, GVC analysis focuses on how global lead firms ‘drive' the actions of other firms in the chain (Gereffi et al., 2005; Gibbon et al., 2008). These dynamics of ‘drivenness' are undergirded by a legal infrastructure, which plays a crucial role for the governance and coordination of the chain and for the generation and distribution of economic value (The IGLP Law and Global Production Working Group, 2016; Danielsen, 2005). A key part of this legal infrastructure are mechanisms of contractual governance, which both ensure control over value chains and formalize power asymmetries among the different actors. For instance, suppliers might be pushed to assume disproportionate financial risk, while lead firms can disengage from their contractual relationships at their discretion (Anner, 2020; Hering, 2021). Yet implicit in the capacity of lead firms to control and drive the chain through mechanisms of contractual governance is also their potential to act as regulators of the production process, possibly guaranteeing labour, social, and environmental standards by pressuring suppliers. Lead firms export legal frameworks that eventually shape the law on the ground, functioning as proxies of legal homogenization and isolating economic activities from the contingent exercise of national public authority (Ferrando, 2014). This opens a door for a possible re-internalization of ‘externalities' of production – of aspects of the production process that have nothing to do with product quality standards, such as labour rights and environmental standards. In other words, while the fragmentation of global production initially enables divorcing value accumulation from liability for wrongdoing, the ‘drivenness' of value chains by lead firms entails at least the theoretical possibility that such firms assume broader forms of regulatory capacity with regard to distanced stakeholders – workers along the supply chains and various local communities."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"What Trajectory for the Regulation of Transnational Corporate Responsibility?
The framework for transnational corporate responsibility along global value chains (GVCs) is in flux. While the legal mechanisms have generally become tighter in recent years, the development follows no uniform trajectory. With scattered, disparate, and overlapping initiatives and regulatory regimes currently coexisting, it seems an open political question which regulatory paradigm will prevail in the medium and longer term. This chapter zooms in on specific transitional moments in the regulatory evolution of corporate responsibility. The dominant narrative portrays this evolution as roughly two decades of linear progress from ‘voluntary' (deemed ‘ineffective') corporate social responsibility to ‘mandatory' (and hence deemed more ‘effective') instruments, with each stage reacting to deficits of the previous one by imposing tighter standards, leaving fewer gaps, and allowing stricter enforcement. While this sequential understanding of corporate responsibility with each stage implementing selective improvements indeed captures an important dynamic within corporate responsibility, it paints an incomplete picture. First, it stresses rupture over continuity and thereby distracts attention from shared and structural deficits of the regulation of corporate responsibility across its different ‘stages'. Second, it assumes regulatory discourses of corporate responsibility to be largely self-referential and isolated from broader regulatory developments in other fields. These two limitations have deflected the debate from exposing certain structural difficulties in regulating complex value chains, as well as the deeper political dynamics at play in framing regulatory ‘innovations'.
Against this background, this chapter examines the example of reporting regulation as deployed to address different dimensions of corporate responsibility, including modern slavery. Among the substantive goals on the agenda of corporate responsibility, curbing modern slavery is arguably the most intricate. Intrinsically linked to and sustained by the business model of offshore capitalism, modern slavery forms a ‘viable management practice for many enterprises' (Crane, 2013: 49)."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? Using two large micro datasets on firm decentralization from US administrative data and 10 OECD countries, we find that firms that delegated more power from the Central Headquarters to local plant managers prior to the Great Recession out-performed their centralized counterparts in sectors that were hardest hit by the subsequent crisis. We present a model where higher turbulence benefits decentralized firms because the value of local information and urgent action increases. Since turbulence rises in severe downturns, decentralized firms do relatively better. We show that the data support our model over alternative explanations such as recession-induced reduction in agency costs (due to managerial fears of bankruptcy) and changing coordination costs. Countries with more decentralized firms (like the US) weathered the 2008-09 Great Recession better: these organizational differences could account for about 16% of international differences in post-crisis GDP growth."

"Depuis le milieu des années 2000, l'adoption d'un nouveau mode de financement des hôpitaux fait peser une forte pression économique sur le personnel soignant, dans un contexte d'érosion de la convention collective de branche. En réponse, le syndicat des services, ver.di, cherche à imposer des accords d'établissement, qui fixent un taux d'encadrement des patients afin d'alléger la charge de travail du personnel soignant. La décentralisation de la négociation collective et un nouveau projet de loi de réforme fondamentale du financement des hôpitaux, dont l'adoption est attendue à l'automne 2024, entraînent actuellement un regain de conflits dans le secteur."

"In a search model with two sided heterogeneity and on-the-job search, we compare collective bargaining agreements (CBA) with a decentralized bargaining outcome case. Under CBA, a union chooses a pay-scale schedule and the firm can select a wage from this pay scale after observing match quality. An advantage of collective bargaining agreements is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached. What the most desirable system is, depends on worker bargaining power (?) and the relative efficiency of on- versus off- the job search. We find both for the Netherlands and the US that as long as ? lies between 0.1 and 0.7, CBA is less desirable."

"This paper studies the effects of managerial delegation in a duopoly game under alternative unionization structures. Introducing managerial delegation in a framework with centralized unionization leads to incentives for sales, lower profits and higher consumer surplus as well as overall welfare. In contrast, delegating output decisions to managers in the presence of decentralized unionization produces opposite results unless unions are strongly employment-oriented. Moreover, managerial delegation makes unionization structure neutral in relation to consumer surplus and overall efficiency. Finally, the timing of moves in the three-stage game proves to be important for obtaining the above qualitative results under decentralized unionization."