Dear Reader,

The idea for this journal results from countless discussions about India and Europe, their differences, economic development and interdependencies we had during the past two years. This owes a lot to the India-EU Study Centres Programme that is part of the India-EU Joint Action Plan. Much of this wouldn’t have happened without the EU funded study centres this led to, and one of them being the Centre for European Business Studies (CEBS).

Many of the more business related issues and questions were raised before and after the annual CEBS conference in Mumbai. These span from general aspects of economic structure, markets and policy issues to very business related matters of planning, finance, delivery or management. The attempt to include this in courses and classes at the CEBS parent institutions, namely the ESB Business School at Reutlingen University in Germany and the S.P. Jain Institute of Management in Mumbai, India, led us to seek for ways to formalise this discussion at first. However, the apparent lack of research on Indo-European business as well as the response and interest we received from other institutions soon proved this to be an area of growing interest and so triggered the decision to create an institutionalised platform for scientific research and discussion: the Journal of Indo-European Business Studies (JIEBS).

This is the first copy of JIEBS. The papers it presents are the result of a call for papers CEBS made in 2011. We actually received far more interesting papers and research reports than expected. They all passed a double blind review and the papers naturally are the original work of the named authors. The choice we finally made was also influenced by the topic of the CEBS annual conference 2011, namely the influence of infrastructure and skilled labour on Indo-European Business. The papers analyse structure and explain many issues related to this, they raise questions and point towards areas for further research and they form the nucleus of this new and currently only scientific platform for Indo-European business studies.

Dennis A. De

November 2011

The first issue of the journal has been introduced at this years conference and is now available for download --->