Risk and adventure education

Fire, an ever present hazard in Australia, causes approximately 100 fatalities and over 3000 injuries per annum. Significant resources are allocated to mitigate the risk. In this study, we estimate the total cost of fire in Australia for 2005 at AUD$12,000 million or 1.3% of GDP. Comparable studies in the UK, USA, Canada, Denmark and New Zealand are reviewed and show that the cost in these countries ranges between 0.8 and 2% of GDP. Breaking the Australian total down into its component parts, we find that 57% relates to costs in anticipation of fire, 29% for response activities and that the remaining 14% results from the consequences of fire. This estimate shows that the investment in mitigation (86% of the total costs) is over five times the consequences (14%) and raises questions as to whether the current system adopted in Australia is economically efficient.     

Financial applications of semidefinite programming: a review and call for interdisciplinary research

Optimisation problems in finance commonly have non-linear constraints for which previous solutions have required unrealistic assumptions. However, many of these can be efficiently solved as semidefinite programming (SDP) problems, which have less restrictive assumptions. Through review of the literature that uses SDP in finance, two major research streams are identified: portfolio optimisation and option pricing. Nevertheless, many finance researchers are unaware of SDP. One possible reason is that this research is often published in non-finance journals. This paper aims to better integrate the SDP research to promote wider use of current findings and further interdisciplinary research, particularly in environmental finance.     

Modelling choice and switching behaviour between Scottish ski centres

The paper identifies the need to model the skier's choice of centre and the basic ideas underlying discrete choice models and their estimation. It then identifies data requirements and sources, the final choice of specification and the estimated parameters of the resultant nested multinomial logit model. The results indicate two quite distinct markets. For day-trippers snow cover, cost, and, to a lesser extent, the journey length, were the critical factors. For those staying overnight the key determinant in this market seems to be accommodation. Interestingly centres which for the day-tripper are competitors, become, for the overnight customer, complementary.     

Tinged shareholder theory: or what’s so special about stakeholders?

This paper contrasts the normative foundations of the stakeholder and shareholder theories of the firm. It demonstrates how the shareholder theory of the firm appears to have at least as much normative support as stakeholder theory and suggests that a way forward may be for a variant of pure shareholder theory to emerge.     

Assessing the Effects of Hazards and Interventions on Farm Household Liquidity in Sudan - A Preliminary Accounting Model

The informed assessment of the effects of hazards on farm households and the design of appropriate interventions requires a knowledge of the pattern of household cash and asset stocks and flows. This paper uses the example of a poor farm household in Kordofan, Sudan to build a debt/savings model and then study the effects of environmental “shocks” and different forms of interventions. The results suggest that, in the absence of external injection in the form of technological improvement or worker remittances, over the period 1988–1992, households would have descended into a debt spiral, even with formal credit. With income improvements solvency would have only been ensured if formal credit had been available. Although more work needs to be done to increase the validity of such “accounting” models of farm household liquidity, this study has established a methodology which can be improved upon and applied elsewhere.     

Scale,Scope and Survival: A Comparison of Cooperative and Capitalist Modes of Production

This paper draws on a comprehensive data set from Portugal to investigate the activities, internal characteristics and survival prospects of cooperatives and capitalist enterprises. Consistent with theory, high levels of market concentration and low entry costs were shown to be conducive to cooperatives. Cooperatives were found to be, on average, older and to operate with a larger, more highly educated and more productive labour force than do their capitalist counterparts. Finally, we show that cooperatives have a markedly higher probability of survival than do capitalist enterprises due, in part, to differences in industry of operation and internal characteristics.