Decision Support Systems in Marketing

The practical application of decision support systems in marketing is still in its infancy, even though academic research has been recommending the use of such systems for years. This is largely due to the lack of a single, generally applicable decision support system. The specific requirements and problems of management are too dissimilar to make the development of one universal decision support system feasible. However, improved PC performance, enhanced market survey methods such as conjoint measurement, and further developed programming tools permit the varying requirements to be fairly flexibly met. The following article describes state-of-the-art know-how regarding the practical utilization of such systems, and addresses the preconditions for employing them. We have included many examples gathered from our own experience with numerous applications.     

Resource constraints and East European foreign trade structures

Among the many contraints facing all participants in the international division of labour in the present decade, some seem to affect centrally planned economies (CPEs) to a greater extent than other countries. The CPEs' additional problems are due, according to Prof. Winiecki, to specific, economic system-related features, in particular their relatively high resource intensity.     

Armutsmessungen im Zeitverlauf

Die Armut ist in Deutschland zu einem wachsenden Problem geworden. Trotz der aktuellen Konjunktur auf dem Arbeitsmarkt ist damit zu rechnen, dass der 2008 erscheinende dritte Armuts- und Reichtumsbericht der Bundesregierung für 2006 eine Rekordzahl für die Armutsentwicklung meldet. Wie l?sst sich Armut am aussagef?higsten messen? Welche Indikatoren beschreiben neben dem Einkommen die Lebensbedingungen? Dr. Olaf Groh-Samberg, 35, und Dr. Jan Goebel, 36, sind Mitarbeiter in der Abteilung L?ngsschnittstudie Sozio-oekonomisches Panel (SOEP) beim DIW in Berlin.     

The Maddison Project: collaborative research on historical national accounts

The Maddison Project, initiated in March 2010 by a group of close colleagues of Angus Maddison, aims to develop an effective system of cooperation between scholars to continue Maddison's work on measuring economic performance in the world economy. This article is a first product of the project. Its goal is to explain the aims and approach of the project, and, as a first result of this ‘collaboratory’, to inventory recent research on historical national accounts. We also briefly discuss some of the problems related to these historical statistics and we extend and where necessary revise the estimates published by Maddison in his latest overviews. Most new work relates to the period before 1820; it leads to a reassessment of levels of GDP per capita in western Europe in the early modern period, and to a confirmation of Maddison's previous estimates of Asian levels of real income.     

Counting carbon: historic emissions from fossil fuels,long-run measures of sustainable development and carbon debt

This article examines how to account for the welfare effects of carbon dioxide emissions, using the historical experiences of Britain and the USA from the onset of the industrial revolution to the present. While a single country might isolate itself from the detrimental effects of global warming in the short run, in the long all countries are unable to free ride. Thus, we support the use of a single global price for carbon dioxide emissions. The calculated price should decrease as we move back in time to take into account that carbon dioxide is a stock pollutant, and that one unit added to the present large stock is likely to cause more damage than a unit emitted under the lower concentration levels in the past. We incorporate the annual costs of British and US carbon emissions into genuine savings, and calculate the accumulated costs of their carbon dioxide emissions. Enlarging the scope and calculating the cumulative cost of carbon dioxide from the four largest emitters gives new insights into the question of who is responsible for climate change.     

Understanding Empirical Boundaries: A Systems-Theoretical Avenue in Border Studies

The aim of this contribution is to present a conceptual framework with potential application across the interdisciplinary field of border studies. This framework should embrace interdisciplinarity and the contextual nature of borders. Based on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, it elaborates an understanding of borders as being related to a dynamic process of social bordering/bounding processes that involves spatial, social, and conceptual boundaries. By introducing the notion of ‘empirical boundary’, our framework aspires to bridge the gap between (radical) constructivist theorising and the analysis of physical realities involved in the (re)production of boundaries.     

Rethinking Climate Change,Conflict and Security

This special issue of Geopolitics presents a series of critical interventions on the links between global anthropogenic climate change, conflict and security. In this introduction, we situate the special issue by providing an assessment of the state of debate on climate security, and then by summarising the eight articles that follow. We observe, to start with, that contemporary climate security discourse is dominated by a problematic ensemble of policy-led framings and assumptions. And we submit that the contributions to this issue help rethink this dominant discourse in two distinct ways, offering both a series of powerful critiques, plus new interpretations of climate-conflict linkages which extend beyond Malthusian orthodoxy.     

When does FDI have positive spillovers? Evidence from 17 transition market economies

We use rich firm-level data and national input–output tables from 17 countries over the 2002–2005 period to test new and existing hypotheses about the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the efficiency of domestic firms in the host country (i.e., spillovers). We document that backward linkages have a consistently positive effect on productivity of domestic firms while horizontal and forward linkages show no consistent effect. We also examine how the strength of spillovers varies by sector, FDI source, institutional environment (corruption, red tape, level of development), firm’s distance to the technological frontier, and other firm- and country-specific characteristics.     

Gesundheitsfonds — effizientere Steuerung des Gesundheitssystems?

In 2009 the German central health fund was implemented. It was the result of a political compromise. One political party intended to equalise the risk structure among 130 different health care funds, and the other wanted to intensify competition and to improve efficiency among the different health insurances. The fund is flanked by a health-based risk adjustment and is aimed at sustainably ensuring the funding of the statutory health insurance system. It also constitutes the basis for competition among statutory health care funds, securing quality and efficiency in health care provision. To cover additional expenditures, health insurers had to charge flatrate premiums. A new law, which will come into effect in January 2015, will oblige health insurers to charge income related contributions. It is not clear how this will change competition among insurers. The federal government will not need to finance subsidies to low income individuals anymore. Income redistribution will only take place within the public health insurance system, exempting the privately insured and public servants from supporting low income individuals. The authors claim that the health care fund will not succeed in its aim of securing a sustainable financial basis for the statutory health insurance system. Most of the authors argue that there is no evidence of greater efficiency thus far, and they offer proposals on how to achieve improved performance.