The Financial Services Authority’s review of With Profits policies has been motivated by a perception that consumer understanding of these products is insufficiently developed. This paper suggests that these concerns have not so much been overstated as misguided. With profits policies are...

In 1950 poultry was a rare luxury in Britain, only one per cent of the total meat consumption. But over the next thirty years chicken consumption grew at the remarkable (compound) rate of 10 per cent per annum, while the overall consumption of meat remained stagnant from the 1950s to the 1980s....

This paper uses original research on the roles played by two sets of foreign entrants into Chinese retailing since the 1850s - the overseas Chinese entrants and western entrants - to explore the psychic distance paradox over the long run. It explains how the advantages of psychic closeness in...

British overseas investment was one of the most powerful forces contributing to rapid global integration before World War 1. Approaching half of this total was in the form of foreign direct investment, as British entrepreneurs increasingly located their activities away from the mature domestic...

Internationalisation is a useful strategy to gain firm specific advantages during periods of technological discontinuity. The pharmaceutical industry offers us two such episodes as examples: when the antibiotics revolution was beginning and when the possibilities of genetic routes to new drug...

Nicholas Alexander's (2011. British overseas retailing, 1900--60: International firm characteristics, market selections and entry modes. <italic>Business History</italic>, <italic>53</italic>, 530--556) survey of British overseas retailers from 1900 to 1960 provides pathbreaking new evidence of international retailing activity...

This paper compares the development of the poultry industry in Italy with the UK. Earlier research has suggested that the UK poultry industry developed a symbiotic relationship with the emerging supermarket retailers. Italy had a retarded supermarket sector. Its distribution system favoured...

Internationalization is a useful strategy for gaining firm-specific technological advantages especially during periods of technological discontinuity as the pharmaceutical industry illustrates. The antibiotics revolution in the 1940s saw laggard US firms scrambling to gain capabilities in...