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Table of Contents :
Editorial – Introduction to the Issue
Nnamdi O. Madichie5
In popular discourse, African countries are typically lumped together and there is little understanding about the large differences in economic complexity between them. This paper seeks to fill in that gap by creating an economic complexity index, which is a tool that can be used to help gauge the relative successes or failures of each African country’s business environment. The tool is based on the Herfindahl index, which is a widely used measure of industry concentration in the economics literature that has been adapted for this use. Potential uses of the complexity index in future research include tracking economic development over time, creating an alternative measure of economic success besides GDP growth and examining correlations with business environment variables to find out which ones most influence economic development across industries.
Fairtrade supply chains lack information linking commodity producers with Fairtrade shopper behaviour. This paper aims to show how supermarket loyalty card data of over 1.7 million shoppers can be analysed using paired-samples t-test analysis to objectively profile the Fairtrade shopper and address its supply chain management implications. The paper demonstrates the huge marketing potential that segmentation based on actual behaviour brings to supply chain management. The results show that global South producers – including those in Africa – have more incentive to adopt a supply chain orientation by understanding the characteristics of Fairtrade shoppers that drive consumer satisfaction and repeat buying behaviour.
This paper aims at extending sequential loyalty model by proposing and empirically validating simultaneous and formative re-conceptualizations of the four-stage brand loyalty model within the telecommunication industry in an emerging economy context. The proposed models were tested using data collected from a cross-section of 227 subscribers of four leading multi-national mobile networks in Ghana. A response rate of 67.1% was obtained for data analysis using Partial Least Square (PLS) Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The findings indicate that while consumer loyalty follows a sequential order, from cognitive to affective to conative to behavioural loyalty dimensions, the alternative simultaneous loyalty model and implicit-explicit model appears to better capture the complexity of consumer behaviour, and predicts behavioural loyalty (R2 = 0.60) better than the sequential model (R2 = 0.45). The findings further demonstrate that the proposed formative specification of loyalty could explain loyalty in telecommunications context better than the sequential loyalty model does. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. The paper advances our knowledge on consumer loyalty in telecommunication service contexts.
A rising food demand is the global challenge and aquatic food bases fill nutritional requirements. However, fish consumption in northern Ethiopia is limited. This study investigates reasons for lower fish consumption and assesses demand determinants. A sample of 420 households was surveyed using structured questionnaire. Three competing regression models (Heckman’s, Tobit and OLS) were employed to identify determinants and fish consumption intensity. The descriptive statistics reveal that only 6 percent of the surveyed households had consumed fish previously. The rest didn’t consume owing to supply shortage, lack of experience of eating and cooking fish, fear of spoilage, religious belief, and lack of interest. The result also shows that presence of children, access to rivers and frequency of swimming in rivers, fasting, and literacy as significant determinants of fish consumption. Home-users however consumed little fish. Interestingly, 73 percent of the responding households are willing to consume fish if improvements are made in promotion and awareness creation, supply, quality, and transportation. Establishing convenient and reliable cold-chain, aggressive promotion and awareness creation, supply and quality consistency will foster fish demand. Encouraging private sectors in processing, transporting and packaging may also improve the situation.
The ability of a typical university to engage in academic entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is constrained not only by lack of strong internal resources, but also by poor absorptive capacity of the industries and absence of enabling intermediary institutions. However, an SSA university can still develop university-industry relationships by taking a development path that begins at the inception stage, where the university is prepared to put aside seed funding for research and commercialisation from its meager resources. The focus of such research should be on strategic projects that will deliver demonstrable artifacts within a reasonable time frame to incite the interest of medium scale entrepreneurs, who are neither too small to be unable to fund further research nor too big to develop an “I can do without you” attitude. Furthermore, issues around technology transfer offices and intellectual property can evolve with the process from inception to maturity stages.
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