Finance and long‐term development issues in Southeast Asia

This article analyses Southeast Asian finance over more than a century in light of three issues: the realisation of finance‐leading development; indigenous entrepreneurship; and effective credit provision in rural areas. Colonial currency board systems and non‐interventionist government characterised finance in pre‐World War II Southeast Asia. There was decisive change after independence to a variety of state‐directed, or indeed socialist, attempts to overcome unfavourable pre‐war development legacies. Despite these departures, the article finds that throughout Southeast Asian history, finance rarely, if ever, led development. Today, indigenous entrepreneurship, explored for Malaysia, is generally either bolstered by political patrons or even entirely substituted for by state finance. More positively, market‐aware state initiatives in microfinance may offer a realistic institutional alternative to rural Southeast Asia's historic reliance on informal finance.     

Maternity rights and mothers' return to work

This paper uses a cohort of 12,000 births to examine the effect of maternity rights on mothers' post-birth return to employment decisions. It uses a discrete hazard model to disentangle the effects of the terms of maternity rights entitlements from other factors that influence the timing of a mother's return to work. Mothers with rights have an underlying (but unobserved) stronger attachment to the labour market that prompts earlier return than on average. We take this into account by estimating a counterfactual distribution of return times using a sample of women who failed to qualify for maternity rights but who have similar levels of labour market attachment. Even when differential attachment is taken into account there remains a substantial impact of maternity rights on behaviour.     

Migration consequences of welfare reform

We investigate whether recent changes in welfare policy affect the migration of low-educated unmarried mothers. Estimates indicate that welfare reform is associated with an increase in employment-related intrastate migration, and a decrease in non-employment related migration, both within and between states. The net effect was a small increase in intrastate migration and a small decrease in interstate migration. The close link between migration and employment suggests that welfare reform has motivated low-income women to move for economic reasons. In general, welfare policy appears to have a much larger effect on residential location because of its relationship to employment than because of benefit differences between states.     

麦肯锡全球调查创新与商业化

随着企业开始重新关注增长,创新冉一次成为了优先要务:在最近进行的麦肯锡全球调查中1,84%的高管称创新对于其企业的增长战略极为重要或非常重要.调查结果还显示,与危机前相比,企业用于产生出色创意并将这些创意转变为产品或服务的方法变化不大,而这并非因为高管们认为这些方法非常有效.此外,发现合适的人才、鼓励协作与承担风险,以及从头到尾组织创新流程等挑战也依然如故,这一点值得大家注意.事实上,过去几年的调查显示,成功创新的核心障碍一直没有变化,而企业在克服这些障碍方面也没有什么进展.     

New Labour and the labour market

The recent run of good macroeconomic news masks mounting evidencethat worklessness is increasingly concentrated on selected individuals,households, and socio-economic groups and in geographical areas.These distributional aspects have been overlooked or ignoredover the last 20 years, but we believe they now form the mostpressing labour-market and social problems facing this administration.We focus on what we view as the government's selected priorities:the concentration of unemployment on certain individuals, groups,and areas; increasing inactivity, especially marked among lesseducated, older men; low pay, persistence of low wages, andits relationship with job loss; and the distribution of workacross households and child poverty. Many of these problemsleave lasting scars on individuals, so that successful interventionmay beneficially change an individual's life-chances. We examinethe evidence on each of these issues and the current state ofpolicy aimed to reduce their scale or intensity.     

The Implicit Association Test in Market Research: Potentials and Pitfalls

Direct measures of attitudes, such as self‐reported evaluations of consumer products and brands, are vulnerable to biases that undermine their validity (i.e., social desirability, self‐deception, and self‐ignorance). In contrast, indirect measures, many of which rely on reaction time to index underlying associations, resist such biases. Here, one such indirect measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), is highlighted, and its promise and pitfalls in market research, evaluated. It is concluded that the IAT can serve as a viable and valuable methodological tool. Its diagnostic and predictive advantages, which have been empirically established, outweigh its practical and theoretical drawbacks, which can be satisfactorily addressed.     

MORALITY, ECONOMICS AND THE MARKET IN THE THOUGHT OF BENEDICT XVI

While not uncritical of aspects of modern capitalism, John Paul II's 1991 social encyclical, Centesimus Annus , directed official Catholic teaching towards more explicit affirmation of the moral potential of free markets, exchange and enterprise. Analysis of the pre-pontifical writings of Pope John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, suggests that an equally nuanced approach to economics and the market from the most authoritative Catholic teaching authority is likely to continue.     

ETHICS AND THE MARKET ECONOMY: INSIGHTS FROM CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY

The ethical dimension of market solutions to problems is often neglected by their proponents. This article examines the market from the standpoint of orthodox Roman Catholic moral theology. It illustrates how Catholic theologians have contributed to thinking about the market, draws attention to Catholicism's positive assessment of entrepreneurship, and outlines paths for future Catholic reflection on the market.     

The Growth of Jobless Households in Australia

In this article it is shown that individual-based measures of joblessness and household measures of joblessness have diverged over the last twenty years with joblessness becoming increasingly concentrated in certain households.     

Changes in Union Status, Increased Competition and Wage Growth in the 1980s

This paper reports that unionized firms experienced lower average wage growth than their non-union counterparts between 1984 and 1988. We attempt to evaluate the relative importance of two possible explanatory factors, the union-related legislation of the 1980s, and increases in product market competition. While recognizing that these factors are intertwined, the results suggest the latter is of primary importance.