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Analysis of a Scholarly Article
Analysis of a Scholarly Article
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Migration Fears in the United States and the Geopolitical Risk Index
Introduction
Migration fears in the United States and the geopolitical risk index is a journal published by Technium Social Sciences Journal. The journal was published in August 2020 and written by Christopher Olds, the head of Fort Hays State University’s political science department. The purpose of conducting the study was to explore and understand the relationship between the migration fears in the U.S.A and the geopolitical risk index, which is a core indicator of political instabilities in international relations (Anderson, 2019). The research hypothesis states that; prior change in migration fears positively predicts an increase in geopolitical risk.
Summary
The journal is about a study conducted by Christopher to find the relationship between the publicly observable migration fears in the United States of America and the available geopolitical risk index. The period that is being analyzed in the journal starts from the year 1990-2019, where it was observed that changes in migration fears in the United States would increase the levels of geographical risk index. The United States discerns the immigrants as a potential threat, and in turn, they respond aggressively when interacting with other countries internationally. Measures have been developed to compute the migration fears intensity of various countries globally, such as Germany, the United States of America, France, and Great Britain. The language that the news coverage will use will be determined by how frequently a country perceives migrants. The United States for a long time has been eminent in geopolitical matters, and this is the reason why the study is conducted to measure if any changes in migration fears in the United States will impact the current discerned geopolitical risk index.
Research design and methods
In the study, the researcher uses an experimental research design to conduct the study. The data collection methods for this study included documents and records. The ideas of work by Baker et al. (2015) have been used to measure the variables. With the help of computers, an analysis of the number of times the United States appears to show migration fears in news headlines within the given timespan is conducted. In order to calculate the index, the sum of published articles with migration risks appearing on them is divided by the total number of articles published within the quarter of a year. The calculation results are a representation of the number of times the United States has appeared to show migration fears in a quarterly count.
The United States migration index is used instead of the migration economic uncertainty index because researchers found that the economic migration index measures migration’s economic variables and not the migration risks. In order to calculate the geopolitical risk index, the method was invented by Caldara and Lacoviello in 2019. The technique uses the same criteria as Baker et al. (2015), where a newspaper analysis of seven leading newspapers is done. The total number of published articles containing terms related to geopolitical risk is divided by the total number of published articles to calculate the index. The quarterly average geopolitical index had to be computed for the study for compering with the migration risk index.
The researcher had to account for any possible factors that would influence either the geopolitical risk or migration fears, so he studied three control variables. One of these control variables is caldera and Lacoviello’s events to increase the geopolitical index in the study period. The second variable is elections because of the uncertainties in the outcomes that can increase the geopolitical risk. The last control variable is an indication that the United States has recession periods; this is because there are high chances that economic uncertainty will influence geopolitical risk and migration fears (Schain, 2018). Since the study variables keep changing with time changes, then procedures on time series had to be implemented.
Data analysis
The time-series approach was used for the analysis of the data, which is a statistical analysis method. One of the time series procedures used includes the vector auto regression procedure, which simultaneously computes the chances that a previous change in the migration fears will predict the existing geopolitical risk levels. That earlier changes in geopolitical risk will predict the current levels of migration fears. In this time-series approach, to test for the hypothesis, the granger- causality test was used. The test helps find if previous changes of one variable can predict the current value of any other dependent variable measured. The advantage of the vector auto-regression is that it put all the previous factors for any dependent variable. It helps determine if any prior changes in one variable will predict a similar variable’s current level. This time series approach’s disadvantage is that it finds the causal relationship among variables but does not account for the direction and magnitude of the variables’ relationship.
The reason for the disadvantage of vector auto regression is that the use of lags in statistical analysis results in multi-linearity, leading to an alternative method that would account for the relationship between scale and polarity of variables. The second time series technique used for the research is the moving average representation which helped calculate the relationship between magnitude and direction of variables. This time-series approach helps test what happens over time to geopolitical risk when there are increased migration fears. Researchers need to determine if the endogenous system variables are dynamic or stationary before conducting either two-time series above. The reason for this is that static variables have statistical properties that are continual as time progresses. Variables that are stationary happen to be random in time, meaning they have no signs showing dynamics have followed a deterministic trend.
Critical analysis
The study’s findings were that; it was confirmed that previous changes in the migration fear levels would increase the geopolitical risk levels. In the U.S.A, when the concerns on migration continue to be on the rise, this will, in turn, lead to increased possible disruptions of the peace in international relations. The United States has been a prominent state in matters concerning international relations, and any actions of the state have consequences regardless of the levels of geopolitical risk. When the United States of America fears migrants seeking refuge, there will be an aggressive response from other countries, affecting the political stability of the entire continent. The research vector auto regression showed that previous changes in the migration levels in the United States significantly predict the existing geopolitical risk index levels.
The results also showed that previous geopolitical risk index changes did not significantly predict the current migration fear index. The study lasted for 29 years, but this did not establish any relationship between variables. A change on one variable would result in a difference in the other variable, which was proof that a reciprocal relationship between variables did not exist. Pieces of evidence show that variables stagnant in nature such that previous changes of variables will have significant predictions on the current values of the same variable. Among the three control variables, no variable seems to have an effective prediction of the existing migration fear index in America’s the United States. The economic regressions in the United States and global events positively and significantly affect the geopolitical risk levels.
Since migration fears in the United States greatly influence the geopolitical risk index, leaders from all parts of the world should be mindful of the United States’ current conditions. How the U.S. responds to these conditions has a great impact on global political affairs. From the study results, an increase in the migration fears index results in an immediate rise in the standard deviation of the global political index in the area of shock. From the study results, there was an increase in the migration index for one quarter. The geopolitical index did not bind away from the standard deviation, which means a relationship between the two variables.
Conclusion
An increase in migration fear levels will, in turn, will cause an increase in the geopolitical risk level. The increase in geopolitical risk index cases one standard deviation in the migration fear level, which lasts for eight quarters which turns to a standard deviation of zero in the ninth quarter after the shock. The analysis results show that the repercussions of an increase in the standard deviation by one in the migration fear index of the United States. The increase in geopolitical risk index can be more prominent when the United States migration fears index’s standard deviation increases.
References
Anderson, Ruben. No, go world: how fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics—University of California Press, 2019.
Schain, M. A. (2018). Shifting tides: Radical-right populism and immigration policy in Europe and the United States. Washington, DC: Ed. Migration Policy Institute.
Economics of Company Perfomance
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Economics of Company Performance
The performance of a company is highly influenced by the environmental factors. Both internal and external factors (macro and micro-factors) determine the success of the company. Newly established businesses might either flop or remain relevant to the industry with their new ideologies and economies of scope. When these firms remain relevant to the latter, their implications to the new firms, therefore, are either to embrace the changes or fight them through the old existing strategies. Technological advancements are the most dynamic economic ventures (Bresnahan, Greenstein, & Henderson 65). New businesses and business ideas are constantly developed in the industry to ensure that new inventions are made to satisfy the constant needs of the customers. However, old business ventures implemented different strategies from those strategies used in the present day. This not only poses a challenge of adoption of the new strategies of the entrants, but also makes the former firms irrelevant.
Nevertheless, there exists interplay in the external factors such as timing of entry, pricing of the firms products, distribution of the market share, changes in organizational leadership in the determination of the success of either the old businesses or the new entrants. These factors, coupled with the economies of scope determine the diffusion of technology and the incentives of market circumstances. While considering the IBM and Microsoft cases presented in this article, it is identifiable that both companies used strategies that have been considered outdated and failed to embrace the new business economies of scope to remain relevant to business and compete with the new entrants.
Competition is a common phenomenon in the business environment. While new entrants into the market might offer competition to the old firms, determining the resultant victor would be difficult and unfair to consider the internal factors in the dominant incumbent firms, long successful in existing technologies. Through detailed case of histories of IBM’s response to the invention of the PC and Microsoft’s response to the invention of the browser indicate that the presence of necessarily shared assets have a critical role to play in the aforementioned phenomenon (Bresnahan, Greenstein, & Henderson 56). Both cases indicate that the old incumbent firms have difficulties in creating and developing the required fresh organizational capabilities required to compete with the new firms in the new markets. The new markets have become so diverse with new challenges and interplaying factors, which have ensured that all the businesses operate in an interrelated mutually beneficial interaction rather than the old independent operations. For instance, in the Microsoft case presented in this article, while they left the firm as dominant in one new Internet technology, the browser, they forced the firm to pursue a very different strategy with respect to the Internet than those pursued by successful new entrants. On the other hand, the IBM Company could not keep up with the competition for control over standard PC business and was later forced to quit the business and sell the PC department to Lenovo (Bresnahan, Greenstein & Henderson 68)
Unlike the new entrants, the old incumbent firms such as IBM and Microsoft have posited organizational decisions on the managers especially on legacy control over the new businesses. This is considered an old method that the new firms have learnt to deal with it. While the old incumbent firms operate in isolation under the control of the managers, the new entrants share resources amongst themselves, thereby building a competitive base against the former. This not only provides a competitive advantage, but also disorganizes the old firms, which have failed to identify the new economies of scope. This threatens the competitive advantage of the former and reduces such assets as firms’ reputation and distribution channels.
Business conflicts are likely to arise in any environment. The old incumbent firms have in the past tried to minimize these conflicts by ensuring that they reduce the interaction with competing firms. However, avoiding new entrants as competitors can no longer minimize these conflicts in the business environment. While the old incumbent firms have a tendency of protecting assets such as reputation and distribution channels, the new entrants operate in interdependence that ensure that no specific company can enjoy the specific reputations or claim responsibility to the interrelated efforts resulting into success (Bresnahan, Greenstein, & Henderson 76). Old incumbent firms have used their old business incentives to ensure that they preserve their identity and reputation, which contradicts the economies of scope. The latter indicates that the new entrants might not have the best methods to manage economies of business operations. While it is generally assumed that the old incumbent firms have become irrelevant in the present business environment, some old strategies have proved advantageous over the new entrants’ techniques.
While financial competence is important in ensuring that the old incumbent firms compete against the new entrants, who might have small capital bases compared to the former, market relevance is very important in the development and exploitation of the shared assets. While a firm might have all the required resources to produce specific assets, serving the interests and needs of these markets is equally important in ensuring success (Bresnahan, Greenstein, & Henderson 54). Therefore, the old firms might fail to compete successfully with the new entrants in new markets since the latter might develop stronger strategies as opposed to the former, which might only rely in financial base. Therefore, using shared or different assets in different markets depend on the relevance of the assets in the specific market, which must be assessed prior to business engagement. Nevertheless, the incumbent firms should have an advantage over the new entrants in entering new markets through taking advantage of the economies of scope through using the existing assets (Bresnahan, Greenstein, & Henderson 98). On the contrast, they can choose to build new assets and compete with the new entrants on their own terms. However, in case the incumbent firm becomes unable to develop a new asset to serve the new market, especially the necessarily shared assets, it may be at a great disadvantage in competing in these new markets.
In conclusion, the interplay of interrelated factors in the business environment ensures that every business organization adapts to the economies of scope. Dynamism is a common phenomenon in business that might keep some firms irrelevant, especially the old incumbent firms. New entrants often offer challenges to the former, which implies that the old incumbent firms require adjustments to match the new entrants and economies of scope, necessarily shared assets also ensure that both the old incumbent firms and the new entrants in the business environment share responsibilities. Nevertheless, the old incumbent firms have an advantage over the new entrants if they use proper economies of scope coupled with their large financial base because the ideas require financial backing for proper implementation.
Works Cited
Timothy, Bresnahan, Shane Greenstein, & Rebecca, Henderson. “Schumpeterian competition and diseconomies of scope; illustrations from the histories of Microsoft and IBM.” Harvard Business School, 2003. pp. 1-69
Analysis of a Passage from Karl Marx
Karl Marx
“We proceed from an actual economic fact. The worker becomes all the poorer the wealth he produces, the more his production increase in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity, the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceed in direct proportion to the direct devaluation of the world of men”.
The passage is themed on the economic effect of a capitalist state. The writer is known for his strong stance on socialism. Socialism is the direct opposite of a capitalist form of government. This type of system supports the principles of working together so as to distribute the wealth of the overall society. The passage talks against the social ills that come with the adaptation for a capitalist state. Karl Marx thus forms an argument that showcases the impact of this form of government.
A capitalist state allows for an individual to accumulate as much assets as they so desire. The passage mentions the way productivity affects the economic state of a worker. A worker is responsible for meeting deadlines in any kind of work environment. This means that they have to maximize on their productivity so that they can fulfill the output requirement. An ordinary man works for the benefit of the more elite and powerful in the society. They have to work harder every day to maintain their jobs in the workplace. Despite the fact that they work extremely hard, they are faced with the fact that their economic condition depreciates in value.
This creates a system whereby the majority of the population continues to embrace poverty in the society. This leaves the wealthy minority with complete control of the economic development. One of the repercussions of this situation is the increase in prices of all the basic amenities. The increase of the prices makes the general population a slave to the economy in that they cannot afford the basic needs. This in turn, reduces the value of man in relation to all aspects of life. In conclusion, there is a direct relationship between the increased hard work and the economic gains. This relationship is not ideal because the increased labor works against the improvement of the social status.