Leopold Kohr theorist of economic decentralisation

The work of Leopold Kohr has attracted attention from social scientists in the field of international political studies, but few political economists have studied his theoretical argument in detail. Few students have tried to unite economic and polit-ical arguments to understand his contribution in a more analytical way. We will argue that Kohr's principal theory (diseconomies of scale) was inherently econom-ic, an attempt to elaborate on the concept of scale in a broader perspective and in a more complex way, including the idea of quality and, in particular, power rela-tions. In this paper, we try to make sense of Kohr's idea of decentralisation by studying his contributions from a political economy perspective. Moreover, con-clusions will be drawn that relate Kohr's view to present-day governance problems in the European Monetary Union, in which actual governance reflects all dangers that this scholar feared.

Rational Organizational Structure:For Brick-and-Mortar Lifestyle Retailers in India to Overcome Diseconomies of Scale and Protect Firm’s Sustainability(ROLS-b)

A majority of organized brick-and-mortar lifestyle retailers in India believe that the brick-and-mortar retailing model ensures economies of scale as they keep opening new stores. Having more stores might help retailers to gain product sourcing advantages in addition to generating additional revenue to the firm but at the same time, it fails to provide any other benefits towards economies of scale as every new store comes with new one-time capital expenditures and recurring fixed expenses. Another misconception is that lifestyle retailing must follow an organizational structure (OS) that is adopted by their parent company and hence a majority of OS adopted by lifestyle retailers in India is dependent on organizational form. This study was not limited to just recommending a rational OS based on exploratory research and existing theories in the OS domain. Once the ROLS-b was designed, we have experimented with the proposed rational OS on one of the ten lifestyle retailers in the study to test the validity and reliability. Experimentation results empirically and qualitatively demonstrate that the existing belief of brick-and-mortar lifestyle retailers in India which assumes economies of scale and long-term firm’s sustainability as the retailer increases the store count is just a misconception and does not hold. On the other hand, when we experimented the ROLS-b for over twelve months at over 25 percent stores of a select retailer, results demonstrate that these stores which have gone through the treatment have shown 5.34 times improvement in the store-level profit and 1.97 times in the firm-level profit in addition to eliminating a majority of gaps found in the existing OS that was leading to diseconomies of scale and deteriorating firm’s performance.

The Status of Sustainable Social Innovation in Malta

Governments are increasingly using social innovation to stimulate economic growth and address social issues sustainably. Unfortunately, due to its size, Malta faces a very different challenge to sustainably kick-start high-value-added innovative ecosystems compared to larger states. This is due to a number of issues, including diseconomies of scale, that tend to impede conventional innovation policy efforts. Based on grassroots data, this paper presents the results of a study which determined the status of social innovation in Malta and presents a few recommended measures that can be implemented in order to stimulate social innovation sustainably in Malta and possibly in similar small jurisdictions.

Empirical Study on Economies of Scale in China Manufacturing

The paper is based on Chinese industrial enterprises database, applying the method of translog cost function to measure the economies of scale in manufacturing during the period between 2000 to 2013. The result shows that the mean of scale economies (SCE) is between 0.993 and 0.996, which indicates slight diseconomies of scale. From the perspective of the SCE variation trend, before 2010, there was a decreasing trend year by year, and the variation remained stable after 2010. Considering manufacturing heterogeneity, the paper divides manufacturing into nine groups to measure economies of scale. The group measurement results show that mining industry and light industry have high economies of scale, but in a decreasing state, other sub-sectors show slight diseconomies of scale and in a stable state.