Global E-Commerce: Impacts of National Environment and Policy,edited by Kenneth L. Kraemer,Jason Dedrick,Nigel P. Melville,and Kevin Zhu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xxii + 444 pp. $75.00 cloth. ISBN 0-521-84822-9

The potential of public Internet-based B2B (business-to-business) e-commerce applications to facilitate access to global markets and to reduce market entry barriers is a dominant theme in the burgeoning literature on e-commerce and international development. It is often assumed that these applications will enable producer firms in developing countries to benefit from reductions in the transaction costs they must incur to participate in international trade. Drawing on data from a detailed analysis of 117 B2B e-hubs in the garments/apparel and agriculture/horticulture sectors, it is argued in this article that the kinds of transaction-related support services available at these online trading platforms are more limited in their scope and functionality than is often assumed in the literature on B2B e-commerce development. The findings suggest that the mere application of, and access to, technologies such as the public Internet and the World Wide Web is not likely to enable a reduction in overall transaction costs that is sufficient to facilitate entry into new global markets by developing country producer firms.     

The Consequences of Information: Institutional Implications of Technological Change,by Jannis Kallinikos. Cheltenham,UK: Edward Elgar, 2006. $35.00 paper/$95.00 cloth. ISBN 978-1-84720-500-1 paper/978-1-84542-328-5 cloth

Abstract

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been mandated to “acquire and diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with agriculture in the most general and comprehensive sense of that word. …” With this authority the department has taken advantage of continuing advances of communications and computer technologies by initiating several programs related to the electronic dissemination of agricultural information. For example, the Foreign Agricultural Service has begun testing the release of agricultural trade leads through the University of Nebraska's AGNET computer‐based network. The Agricultural Marketing Service disseminates updated market data on more than 150 farm commodities over its leased wire market news network; the system has 140 terminals linked by some 14,500 miles of leased wires. Additional projects described in the article include a pilot project to deliver market news information to farmers via public television, programs testing the electronic marketing of livestock, and the electronic mail network operated by the department's Office of Governmental and Public Affairs.