Increasing returns, multinationals and geography of preferential trade agreements

This paper uses a model of horizontal multinational enterprises to explore the relationship between transportation costs and trade policy cooperation. Tariffs have the effect of attracting foreign direct investment to the benefit of consumers in the host country. As transport costs fall, the incentive to impose tariffs falls and the benefits to cooperation rise. Thus, in a repeated game in which cooperation is limited by a self-enforcement constraint, a reduction in transport costs facilitates free trade. This logic is applied to a three-country model to examine preferential trade agreements. It is found that if any country is too distant from the others, then global free trade is not attainable. Rather, if two of the countries are within a critical distance of each other and distant from the third country, then the unique outcome is an exclusive free trade agreement between the two adjacent countries. Thus, the model predicts a strong regional bias in preferential trade agreements.     

Underwriting idiopathic interstitial lung diseases

Interstitial lung disease (ILD) incorporates a large number of pathologic processes that have in the interstitial compartment of the lung. This article focuses on the diagnosis, morbidity and mortality implications of persons diagnosed with idiopathic interstitial pneumonias/fibrosis. Even within this category, the mortality and morbidity varies greatly (from months to near-normal mortality) given the specific disease present.     

New development: The future of public service regulation—the professional's perspective

Regulatory failures have shifted the debate from the burden of regulation to its effectiveness. In response, regulators will be more sceptical of self-assessments, more responsive to consumers, provide better information, investigate inputs as well as outcomes and work more collaboratively.     

Economics,Ethics, and the Long Arc of Public Utilities: A Paper in Honor of Harry M. Trebing

Harry M. Trebing has made substantial contributions to the understanding of social control of economic enterprise, particularly in the regulation of public utilities. Imbued with institutional economic ways of knowing, he sustained the construct of progressive-era public interest regulation during a period of neoclassical economic assault on regulatory institutions.     

Forecasting Success on Large Projects: Developing Reliable Scales to Predict Multiple Perspectives by Multiple Stakeholders Over Multiple Time Frames

Our aim is to develop a set of leading performance indicators to enable managers of large projects to forecast during project execution how various stakeholders will perceive success months or even years into the operation of the output. Large projects have many stakeholders who have different objectives for the project, its output, and the business objectives they will deliver. The output of a large project may have a lifetime that lasts for years, or even decades, and ultimate impacts that go beyond its immediate operation. How different stakeholders perceive success can change with time, and so the project manager needs leading performance indicators that go beyond the traditional triple constraint to forecast how key stakeholders will perceive success months or even years later. In this article, we develop a model for project success that identifies how project stakeholders might perceive success in the months and years following a project. We identify success or failure factors that will facilitate or mitigate against achievement of those success criteria, and a set of potential leading performance indicators that forecast how stakeholders will perceive success during the life of the project's output. We conducted a scale development study with 152 managers of large projects and identified two project success factor scales and seven stakeholder satisfaction scales that can be used by project managers to predict stakeholder satisfaction on projects and so may be used by the managers of large projects for the basis of project control.     

Learning to organise risk management in organisations: what future for enterprise risk management?

This paper identifies recurring issues in the regulation of new technologies through an historical review of the risk management of automobiles in the 1800s. Parallels are drawn between the regulation of early automobiles and that of the regulation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) today. It is found that many of the regulatory challenges facing UASs are analogous to those which faced the automobile industry more than a century and half ago and that the need for informed and objective decision making in policy development is reinforced. A systems engineering approach, based on general systems theory and decision‐based design principles, is then proposed as a means for improving the objectivity, transparency and rationality in the risk management decision making process. An example risk management decision making scenario is given within the context of a small UAS operating over a populated area. The results obtained from this case study illustrate how even simple analysis can support the decision making process and highlights some of the potential challenges in the regulatory approach currently applied to UASs.     

DIVISION MANAGEMENT BUYOUTS OF UNRELATED DIVISIONS WITHOUT A SALES PRICE REPORTED

Shareholder wealth effects of division management buyouts are examined: (1) for selling divisions with business operations unrelated to the parent, and (2) for announcements that do not report the sales price. Initial evidence suggests that both of these characteristics result in smaller abnormal returns. Further analysis, however, indicates that these individual effects are interdependent and that only their combined effect is accompanied by an abnormal return that is not significant.     

Gulf War Reparations

Abstract . On February 27, 1991, the government of Iraq accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 674, a measure requiring it to pay reparations to the victims of its aggression in the Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991. The economic problems and consequences that may result as Iraq faces the provisions of Resolution 674 are discussed. This latest example of international economic compensation is placed in the context of the transfer problem and the economic debate engendered by the experience of Germany in dealing with its reparations burden after World War I. Lessons gained from this historical example of reparations are then applied to the case of Iraq, one of the world's major petroleum producers, a country that must rely on oil exports to make its reparations payments.     

VALUE OF IMPROVED LONG-RANGE WEATHER INFORMATION

An important human welfare implication of climate involves effects of interannual variation in temperature and precipitation on agriculture. Year-to-year variations in U.S. climate result from El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a quasi-periodic redistribution of heat and momentum in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The study described here represents a preliminary assessment of the value to the entire U.S. agricultural sector of improved ENSO forecasts in the southeastern United States. This interdisciplinary assessment combines data and models from meteorology, plant sciences, and economics under a value of information framework based on Bayesian decision theory. An economic model of the U.S. agricultural sector uses changes in yields for various ENSO phases to translate physical (yield) effects of ENSO changes into economic effects on producers and on domestic and foreign consumers. The value of perfect information to agriculture is approximately $145 million. The economic value of an imperfect forecast is $96 million. These results suggest that increases in forecast accuracy have substantial economic value to agriculture.