Propuesta de indicadores SMARTER de trabajo decente para la agenda de desarrollo posterior a 2015

Los indicadores actuales de los ODM sobre empleo presentan deficiencias importantes, como problemas de medición, uso inadecuado de estadísticas agregadas, ambigüedad interpretativa y supuestos de base no aplicables a los países en desarrollo. Tratando de superar estos problemas, los autores proponen cuatro nuevos indicadores de empleo productivo y trabajo decente: el crecimiento de la contribución del trabajo al valor añadido por trabajador, la tasa de trabajadores pobres y los porcentajes de trabajadores que ganan menos de un ingreso laboral mínimo absoluto y relativo (el 60 por ciento de la mediana del ingreso laboral). Aplican empíricamente estos indicadores a los casos de Uganda y Perú.     

Is real-time pricing smart for consumers?

Journal of Regulatory Economics - We examine the effects of real-time pricing on welfare and consumer surplus in electricity markets. We model consumers on real-time pricing who purchase...     

Reflections on the Euro Area Fiscal Stance

Avoiding the mistakes of the past, when the good times were not used to build buffers, will be crucial to avoid countries again being forced to engage in a pro-cyclical fiscal tightening in the next downturn.     

Eudaimonic tourist experiences: the case of flamenco

In recent years, participation in flamenco, as a cultural art form, has gained momentum within Spain and internationally. Engagement in flamenco music and dance workshops in Spain has also become an increasingly significant tourism activity. Despite this trend, little research has looked into the nature of leisure experiences of flamenco. This paper seeks to address this knowledge gap by exploring how tourists experience flamenco music and dance courses in the city of Seville. Through a grounded theory research strategy in which in-depth interviews were conducted with 20 participants, the study reveals that four key themes characterise tourists’ experiences of flamenco. These are: the social and physical environment, which refers to physical flamenco spaces in Seville and tourists’ interactions with instructors and peers; secondly, the experience of challenge, characterised by hardship and sacrifice in the pursuit of flamenco; thirdly, activation of the sensual body or a sense of arousal; and lastly, an intrinsic and deep desire for self-discovery. The study demonstrates that the flamenco tourist experience strongly contributes to self-realisation and fulfilment of those who engage in it, or in other words, that the flamenco tourist experience is eudaimonic in character. The interview findings were linked to literature on self-realisation, self-fulfilment, true self, stress-related growth and related eudaimonic themes. Eudaimonia, or a sense of personal expressiveness and self-realisation, has not been previously established in this context. Therefore, the research findings provide a theoretical understanding of what a eudaimonic tourist experience of dance and music may look like.     

Firm Characteristics and NPD Program Success: The Significant Influence of Global Discovery Management

Managing new product development (NPD) with a global point of view is argued to be essential in current business more than ever. Accordingly, many firms are trying to revitalize their NPD processes to make them more global. Therefore, examining global NPD management is one of the top priorities for research. While scholars have examined global launch management, there has been scant attention on the direct effect of global discovery management on NPD success. Therefore, this study investigates how a globally managed discovery phase enhances a firm's overall NPD success. Drawing upon the resource‐based view (RBV) and using Kotabe's ( 1990 ) generic model for market success in global competition as the overarching framework, this study examines four drivers of NPD success: global discovery management, the firm's “global footprint,” its inbound knowledge sourcing practices (i.e., “open innovation proclivity”), and nationality of the teams (i.e., “cross‐national global NPD team use”). The hypotheses are tested using a sample of 255 business units from multiple industries, headquartered worldwide, and surveyed during the 2012 PDMA Comparative Performance Assessment Study (CPAS). The PLM‐SEM analyses show that, of the four drivers examined, only global discovery management strongly influences a firm's NPD program success. The findings enhance our understanding of the particularities in global NPD. Based on the study's results, suggestions are provided as to how multinationals can leverage their international operations in the course of their front‐end activities.     

Global and Country‐Specific Output Growth Uncertainty and Macroeconomic Performance

We identify global and country‐specific measures of output growth uncertainty for a large OECD country sample by means of a dynamic factor model with stochastic volatility. We find evidence for major bouts of global uncertainty in the early 1970s and late 2000s, and a number of periods with elevated levels of either global or national uncertainty, particularly in the early 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. VAR impulse responses of national macroeconomic variables to our estimated measures of uncertainty reveal that global uncertainty is the major driver of macroeconomic performance in most countries, whereas the impact of national uncertainty is small and frequently insignificant. We also find that uncertainty is transmitted primarily through investment and trade flows rather than through consumption demand.     

Cross-country differences in the contribution of future migration to old-age financing

As life expectancy increases and fertility declines, population aging puts pressure on the financing of welfare states in Europe and other developed countries. Given that immigrant workers are younger than the domestic population, a continuous flow of immigrants reduces the old-age dependency ratio and improves financing. Existing general equilibrium estimates of the public finance contribution of migration, performed with different models, are not comparable across countries and sometimes differ even in sign. We use the same overlapping-generations model with a detailed representation of institutions and labor market activity to provide comparable estimates of the impact of immigration on public finance in four European countries. We find that future projected immigration flows are equivalent to 14.3 % points labor income taxes in Austria, 7.3 points in Germany, 6.2 points in the UK and 1.7 points in Poland in 2060. These differences are due to the projected volume of immigration and institutional setups, among other factors. For comparable volumes of immigration, future flows have largest impact in Germany and smallest in the UK.