Rich and Poor Countries in Neoclassical Trade and Growth

A neoclassical growth model provides an explanation for a 'poverty trap', 'club convergence', or 'twin peaks', in terms of specialisation and international trade. The model has many countries with identical linearly homogeneous technologies for producing three goods using capital and labour. With diverse initial endowments, initial equilibrium has unequal factor prices and two diversification cones. With savings out of wages, following Galor (1996), there may easily be multiple steady states. Poor countries converge to a low steady state while rich countries converge to a high one, even though all share identical technological and behavioural parameters.     

Accounting for Foucault

Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality has been central to critical accounting research for two decades, a centrality that has placed systems of calculation as the starting point of discussions of the state, the firm and the market. We begin by outlining the development of governmentality in Foucault's own work. Despite the rich, productive nature of the concept, Foucault was careful to define governmentality as broadly and loosely as possible, the better to convey its open-endedness. The second section considers the introduction of Foucault to accounting research. The combination of Foucault and accounting history is not at all obvious, but became possible because a series of important contextual studies demonstrated that accounting history had to consider both the historicity of the profession and that its practices were vital in constructing measures of organisational performance, not simply uncovering previously obscure or hidden social realities. Moreover, accounting history studies the production of targets and measures of progress towards utility and welfare, processes that are not reducible to the firm or even to economic calculation. Our third section outlines the genesis of the ‘London School of governmentality’ and the main strands of their theoretical contribution. Finally, we examine the governmentalists’ analysis of corporate restructuring and the introduction of new production organisation by Caterpillar. Our aim is to use the Caterpillar case as the vehicle for a broader consideration of governmentality, strategy and the enterprise.     

A Multi-Objective and Multi-Design Evaluation Procedure for Environmental Protection Forestry

A unique and important application of a comprehensive and practical multi-objective evaluation framework is presented which goes far beyond traditional cost-benefit analysis (CBA). It is characterized by transparency which is not always the case for methods beyond CBA. The application is geared to the evaluation of environmental protection forestry with several alternative designs. The framework suggested consists of five key steps integrating orthodox cost-benefit analysis and the analytical hierarchy process developed by Saaty (1980). It is shown to be a flexible framework which can coherently function with a mixture of both monetary and physical units of measurement. The framework is applied to a consideration of alternative designs for the Three Norths Shelter Belt (TNSB) in China.     

Analyzing Real Estate Data Problems Using the Gibbs Sampler

Real estate data are often characterized by data irregularities: missing data, censoring or truncation, measurement error, etc. Practitioners often discard missing- or censored-data cases and ignore measurement error. We argue here that an attractive remedy for these irregularity problems is simulation-based model fitting using the Gibbs sampler. The style of the paper is primarily pedagogic, employing a simple illustration to convey the essential ideas, unobscured by implementation complications. Focusing on the missing-data problem, we show dramatic improvement in inference by retaining rather than deleting cases of partially observed data. We also detail Gibbs-sampler usage for other data problems.