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Abstract Although Argentina came late to the biofuels revolution, a series of measures taken recently at federal and provincial government level have created new opportunities. New federal laws on biofuels promotion have sparked an investment boom. The main activity has been in the biodiesel sector—partly because diesel is the dominant fuel sector in Argentina, and partly because the country had already engineered a soy revolution over the past 15 years, becoming the world's largest exporter of soy oil and soy meal. Biodiesel allows this revolution to be extended—from soy as foodstuff to soy as fuelstock. The biodiesel revolution now underway promises to extend Argentina's latecomer advantages by combining greater scale and lower costs with introduced technical innovations such as genetically modified crops and no-till farming. In this way, Argentina can be seen to be demonstrating the superiority of biofuel production in countries of the South over the conditions obtaining in countries of the North—including superior resources availability, superior energetics and lower costs. Whereas Brazil has demonstrated its superiority in sugarcane-based ethanol, Argentina is about to demonstrate its superiority in soy-based biodiesel.

Accelerated internationalization is an important phenomenon in international business (IB), where it has been linked mainly with studies of born globals and patterns of internationalization utilized by small and medium-sized enterprises. Building on recent research on the (redefined) concept of speed of internationalization, we seek to extend the domain of accelerated internationalization to encompass cases where large firms in certain industries from emerging markets such as China and India globalize at an accelerated pace. We utilize cases from the Chinese wind turbine manufacturing industry to illustrate the process, and apply strategic reasoning based on resource leverage as a means of explaining such phenomena – complementing the extant frameworks based on microeconomic reasoning. We argue that both approaches are needed to make sense of the important empirical phenomena revealed by examination of the patterns of internationalization exhibited by emerging market multinationals.

Abstract Capitalism is arguably the most amazing cultural and economic product of humankind. It nurtured political liberty in Europe; it ushered in the industrial revolution in Britain and then around the world; it raised incomes everywhere; and it cleared away centuries of obscurantism and superstition. But it also brought into being a ‘spirit of capitalism’ that is individualist, expansive, acquisitive, ruthlessly rational and insatiable. This spirit has been responsible for commodifying relations and turning the natural world into a ‘resource base’ on the one hand, and a sink for wastes at the other. The industrial scale of this objectification and destruction of the natural setting has proceeded to the point where it is global, and now threatens our industrial civilization with collapse. My purpose in this paper is to sketch an account of how industrial capitalism might be ‘naturalized’, so that it continues to grow and deliver improvements in the quality of life without destroying humankind's resource base, and the biosphere as well. My focus is on rules and institutions rather than policies or prescriptions. My argument is that a green economy is already growing within the old, fossil-fuel economy, and that through competitive dynamics it will dominate by mid-century – unless blocked politically by vested interests.

Summary Eco-industrial initiatives, which close industrial loops by turning wastes at one point in a value chain into inputs at another point, are attracting growing interest as a solution to the problem of sustainability of industrial systems. Although Germany and Japan have made important advances in building recycling incentives into their industrial systems and sought competitive advantage from doing so, China is arguably taking the issue even further (in principle) through its pursuit of a circular economy, now enshrined in law as an official national development goal. In this article, we review a number of the eco-industrial initiatives taken in China and compare them using a common graphical representation with comparable initiatives taken in the West and elsewhere in East Asia. Our aim is to demonstrate some common themes across the case studies, such as the transformation from the former linear economy to a circular economy and the evolutionary processes in which dynamic linkages are gradually established over time. We discuss the drivers of these eco-industrial initiatives as well as the inhibitors, setting the initiatives in an evolutionary framework and introducing a notion of Pareto eco-efficiency to evaluate them. We make the argument that China might be capturing latecomer advantages through its systematic promotion of eco-industrial initiatives within a circular economy framework.

AbstractProduction of biomass for bioenergy generation, and in particular production of biologically derived liquid fuels, is attracting great interest as an alternative to the fossil fuel economy. Biofuels represent as yet only 1% of world agricultural output, but this small extension has triggered widespread fears, many now shown to be groundless, such as the fear that it was biofuels that drove up food prices in 2008. This perspective reviews the literature on the extent to which biofuel production can be integrated into agricultural production, taking a global view of the potential for land, water and other resources to be extended beyond current food, feed and fi ber applications. As opposed to the focus on negative impacts, there are benefi cial practices in biofuels that could be expected to propagate to agriculture more generally and have a positive impact on yields and practices. These include (1) promoting a shift from wasteful annual crops to perennials, particularly low‐input high‐diversity (LIHD) crops; (2) sequestering carbon in soil both organically and as biochar; (3) improving conservative water management practices; and (4) recycling resources. The possibilities of encouraging biofuel production (and biomass for bioenergy generally) in the tropical South, for consumption in the temperate North, based on certifi cation of such sustainable practices in the South, could be expanded if global trade in biofuels were liberalized. Copyright © 2009 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd