风险合资——公司投资新动向

目前,欧洲主要的跨国企业参与创业企业融资活动的方式正在悄悄发生变化.去年,它们正式建立了自己的投资策划执行部门,开始从事风险投资业务.但是,从那时开始,世界各国的科技股价就一泻千里,不可收拾.血的事实使它们认识到,合作投资是分散风险的一个好办法.     

Herbicide resistance and the adoption of integrated weed management by Western Australian grain growers

Extension programs to encourage farmers to reduce reliance on herbicides by adopting integrated weed management (IWM) practices have met with limited success. Studies aiming to understand the factors that influence farmers' choices of integrated control practices have faced difficulties in variable specification, and have not achieved high explanatory power. Using data from grain growers in Western Australia, where herbicide resistance in major crop weeds is common, this study tests the applicability of a framework for the IWM adoption decision in which herbicide efficacy is assumed to be a potentially exhaustible resource. Farmers' perceptions of multiple techniques and other variables are aggregated using principal components, and used in logistic regressions to explain the intensity of use of IWM practices. Eighty‐six percent of growers were correctly classified according to use of multiple IWM practices. Herbicide resistance and expectations of the future availability of effective new herbicides were significant in explaining IWM adoption. IWM adoption and herbicide‐resistance management are shown to be information‐intensive and involving an intertemporal resource management decision.     

The TUC’s Organising Academy: an assessment

In 1998 the British Trades Union Congress established an Organising Academy to train a new generation of paid union organisers. This article reviews the first two years of the Academy and offers an initial evaluation. It seeks to gauge whether the initiative has prompted innovation in organision policy in unions and led to successful organising outcomes.     

全球财务功能转变带来的机遇与挑战

我们注意到，财务部门的职能正逐渐发生变化。原先的会计人员是作为“记账先生”而出现的，25年前当我在这个领域工作时也是如此。随着时代的进步、经济的发展，财务人员逐渐发展成为财富的守护者、绩效的评判者，现在成为商业合伙人。作为商业合伙人，意味着财务人员可以更多地参与企业的战略决策，为公司创造更多的价值。现在，会计界出现了一些重要发展趋势：     

Implicit water pricing in Namibian farmland markets

Groundwater can augment total agricultural water supply in areas where rainfall is persistently low, but can also function as a buffer source of water in areas where rainfall is high but variable. In arid countries it is important to examine which of these functions dominates, as this has implications for water policy. As aquifers become depleted, the buffer function can be replaced by other local water supply schemes. However, if groundwater is mainly used to augment total water supply, the only replacement is long-distance supply schemes that may not be economically desirable. This study used Namibian farm price data to estimate implicit water values. The results are consistent with a buffer function for groundwater, but do not show conclusively that this function is more important than other functions. On precautionary principles, one should therefore assume that it will become necessary to decrease agricultural water use as aquifers become depleted.     

Inferring Market Structure from Customer Response to Competing and Complementary Products

We consider customer influences on market structure, arguing that market structure should explain the extent to which any given set of market offerings are substitutes or complements. We describe recent additions to the market structure analysis literature and identify promising directions for new research in market structure analysis. Impressive advances in data collection, statistical methodology and information technology provide unique opportunities for researchers to build market structure tools that can assist real-time marketing decision-making.