Current and future changes in corporate attitudes to national identity

This commentary is a revised version of a speech that was delivered by the Honorable Thomas Harris to the Thunderbird community at the Glendale campus on February 6, 2001. Although the speech was delivered in 2001, its attendant concerns and arguments endure and are germane in today's global business considerations. Ambassador Harris is presently Her Majesty's Consul General and Director General of British Trade and Investment in the United States. Following his graduation from Cambridge University, Ambassador Harris joined the Board of Trade in 1966, and subsequently the British Diplomatic Service. His diplomatic career included stints in Tokyo, Washington, and Lagos. He has also held various appointments in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. His most recent overseas posting was as British Ambassador to Korea between 1993 and 1997. He was later appointed Director General for Export Promotion in the Department of Trade and Investments (now known as British Trade International), before taking on his present assignments in New York. As Director General of British Trade and Investment, he has overall responsibility for the promotion of British trade throughout the U.S. and for securing investment by U.S. firms in the United Kingdom. In 1995, Ambassador Harris was appointed by Her Majesty, the Queen of England, to be a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG). © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The application of Operation and Technology Roadmapping to aid Singaporean SMEs identify and select emerging technologies

In order to aid Singaporean SMEs identify and select emerging technologies for business benefit, a modified process of the Cambridge T-Plan methodology has been introduced and applied to a pilot sample of 30 companies in a variety of manufacturing sectors. This fast and simple process takes the company through five key steps to enable them to create their first Operation and Technology Roadmap (OTR). The paper explains the background to the approach and focuses on the initial benefits identified by a survey of the pilot companies.     

A note on “Bed allocation techniques based on census data”

Capacity planning and resource allocation are crucial to the cost-effective delivery of health care services. In this paper, we present an analytic approach based on a modified version of the Holt-Winters multiplicative seasonality forecasting model to determine the frequency distribution associated with a hospital care unit's census. This paper is a follow-up to the census frequency distribution simulation model described in Lapierre et al. (Socio Econ. Plan. Sci. 33 (1999) 25). We demonstrate that our model can provide census frequency distributions equivalent to the simulation model of Lapierre et al. [1], but without the computational effort common to simulation models.     

The Abuse of the “Confident Consumer” as a Justification for EC Consumer Law

A reference to the need to create confident cross-border consumers who can contribute to the strengthening of the internal market has often been used as one of the main arguments for EC consumer policy and legislation. The argument has been presented in order to justify both the creation of a minimum safety net for consumers (the minimum confidence argument) and the current turn towards more total harmonisation of consumer protection (the harmonised confidence argument). In the paper these lines of argument are critically evaluated with reference to common sense knowledge about the behaviour of consumers as well as on the basis of Eurobarometer data concerning consumer confidence. In this light the substantive minimum harmonisation measures which have been justified with reference to the need for promoting consumer confidence seem only to a limited extent relevant with respect to the creation of such confidence. The current turn towards total harmonisation most certainly cannot be justified in this way. Other substantive measures, facilitating the access to a counterparty, would be more important in order to create consumer confidence in cross-border shopping, but the Community has almost systematically avoided adopting such measures.     

The Falsification of Four Popular Hypotheses About the Asian Crisis

Various claims have been made about the causes of the Asian crisis and its spread. Here, we use data on the behaviour of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses, that portfolio investors and hedge funds played a dominant role in initiating and/or spreading the crisis; that moral hazard kept efficient markets from predicting the crisis; and, finally, the common lender hypothesis of Kaminsky and Reinhart. In the process we also test implications of the Calvo-Mendoza model of rational investor ignorance. All are falsified as monocausal explanations. For example, portfolio investments that could not have been subject to substantial moral hazard continued to flow into Asia until very shortly before the crisis. Likewise, banks were a much larger source of capital outflows during the crisis than were portfolio investors. While falsified in their strongest forms, several of these hypotheses in less strong forms should play a role in a more nuanced analysis. It is necessary to move past simple single-factor approaches in order to produce a more complete, synthetic explanation of this episode.     

Corporate environmental policy and abnormal stock price returns: An empirical investigation

This paper examines the correlation between the excess stock market returns and the adoption of an environmental protocol by companies. The underlying hypothesis that I test is whether evidence of the adoption of environmental policy, prosecution by an environmental agency or the routinized training of staff in environmental protocols, which proxies for the willingness of managers to invest for the long term, is associated with superior economic returns to shareholders. I find that both the adoption of an environmental policy and prosecution for breach of environment standards have significant explanatory power in an analysis of excess returns. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment