Rising Food Prices and Household Welfare: Evidence from Brazil in 2008

Food price inflation in Brazil in the 12 months to June 2008 was 18%, whereas overall inflation was 7%. Using spatially disaggregated monthly data on consumer prices and two different household surveys, we estimate the welfare consequences of these food price increases, and their distribution across households. Because Brazil is a large food producer, with a predominantly wage‐earning agricultural labour force, our estimates include general equilibrium effects on market and transfer incomes, as well as the standard estimates of changes in consumer surplus. Although the expenditure (or consumer surplus) effects were large, negative and markedly regressive everywhere, estimates of the market‐income effect were positive and progressive, particularly in rural areas. Because of this effect on the rural poor, and of the partial protection afforded by increases in two large social assistance benefits, the overall impact of higher food prices in Brazil was U‐shaped, with middle‐income groups suffering larger proportional losses than the very poor. Nevertheless, as Brazil is 80% urban, higher food prices still led to a greater incidence and depth of poverty at the national level.     

Supply chain network design under profit maximization and oligopolistic competition

In this paper, we model the supply chain network design problem with oligopolistic firms who are involved in the competitive production, storage, and distribution of a homogeneous product to multiple demand markets. The profit-maximizing firms select both the capacities associated with the various supply chain network activities as well as the product quantities. We formulate the governing Nash–Cournot equilibrium conditions as a variational inequality problem and identify several special cases of the model, notably, a generalization of a spatial oligopoly and a classical oligopoly problem to include design capacity variables. The proposed computational approach, which is based on projected dynamical systems, fully exploits the network structure of the problems and yields closed form solutions at each iteration. In order to illustrate the modeling framework and the algorithm, we also provide solutions to a spectrum of numerical supply chain network oligopoly design examples.This paper makes a contribution to game theoretic modeling of competitive supply chain network design problems in an oligopolistic setting.     

Flexible Working Practices In the Public,Not-For-Profit and Commercial Leisure Sectors In SCotland

Public sector leisure managers in the UK have been struggling, since the extension of compulsory competitive tendering to leisure management in 1989, to reconcile the conflicts between becoming more consumer led and satisfying the needs of the ‘recreationally deprived’. Rationalization has ensured that a fundamental priority for managers has been the introduction of more cost-effective working practices. This article examines the diversity in employment practices across the three sectors of the leisure industry, that is, the public, not-for-profit and private sectors. The case study evidence presented found clear differences between the sectors. Although managers in not-for-profit leisure facilities have more freedom to use greater flexibility in employment practices as compared with their public sector counterparts, they are still somewhat constrained by having to meet the social objectives set by their Board of Directors. Private sector managers were found to be providing the highest proportion of full-time jobs, although they offered lower conditions of employment. This was made possible by the funding certainties created by regular monthly/annual customer memberships.     

Evaluating training programs: development and correlates of the Questionnaire for Professional Training Evaluation

Psychometrically sound evaluation measures are vital for examining the contribution of professional training to organizational success in a reliable manner. As training evaluations tend to be both time‐consuming and labor‐intensive, there is an increasing demand for economic evaluation inventories. Simultaneously, evaluation measures have to meet psychometric standards. The present paper develops a time‐efficient training evaluation questionnaire that (1) has psychometrically sound properties; (2) measures more than the participants’ reactions; and (3) is widely applicable across different training contents, thus allowing for comparisons of training programs within and between organizations. The Questionnaire for Professional Training Evaluation is primarily developed for use in practice but is also applicable to field research and covers short‐term as well as long‐term training outcomes. Analyses based on a total of n = 1134 employees show the stability of the factor structure and hint at the questionnaire's differential and discriminant validity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

International Trade Agreements and International Migration

Despite large potential economic gains, bilateral and multilateral negotiations focusing on liberalisation of migration have not shared the high profile of international trade negotiations and agreements. Migration and trade have been traditionally viewed rather separately and the relevance of the many, and complex, interdependencies has been given remarkably little attention in the literature to date. In this article, we focus on the two‐way interaction between international migration and agreements designed to enhance cross‐border trade and investment. Liberalisation of international trade in services and in the movement of people potentially offers much greater economic gains than liberalisation of remaining barriers to goods trade. However, progress within multilateral frameworks is fraught with difficulty. The World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has yielded little real progress so far and negotiations within more flexible unilateral and bilateral frameworks are likely to be more successful in liberalising the movement of labour. We discuss a range of specific examples, focusing particularly on the interesting case of New Zealand. We find that trade agreements are increasingly including agreements on migration, though typically favouring temporary migration and involving numerically modest quotas. We conclude that migration regulatory frameworks are likely to be further and more strongly linked to trade and investment agreements in the future, particularly given changing economic and demographic forces. The primary focus of migration policies may nonetheless remain different from that of trade policies. While further migration liberalisation is likely to be through bilateral and regional agreements, it will be important to try to lock in the gains of such agreements, while simultaneously working to consolidating these in a way that will help to facilitate future multilateral agreement.     

Probabilistic assignment of objects: Characterizing the serial rule

We study the problem of assigning a set of objects to a set of agents, when each agent receives one object and has strict preferences over the objects. In the absence of monetary transfers, we focus on the probabilistic rules, which take the ordinal preferences as input. We characterize the serial rule, proposed by Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001) [2]: it is the only rule satisfying sd efficiency, sd no-envy, and bounded invariance. A special representation of feasible assignment matrices by means of consumption processes is the key to the simple and intuitive proof of our main result.     

The Valuation of Insurance under Uncertainty: Does Information about Probability Matter?

In a laboratory experiment we test the hypothesis that consumers' valuation of insurance is sensitive to the amount of information available on the probability of a potential loss. In order to test this hypothesis we simulate a market in which we elicit individuals' willingness to pay to insure against a loss characterised either by known or else vague probabilities. We use two distinct treatments by providing subjects with different information over the vague probabilities of loss. In general we find that uncertainty about probabilities has a weak impact on consumers' valuation of insurance. However, additional information about probabilities tends to marginally increase the price individuals are willing to pay to insure themselves. Implications for the insurance market are derived.     

The scope of application of management accounting methods in Polish enterprises

The transformation of Poland’s economic system in the 1990s as a result of transition from a centrally planned economy to a market-based system involves significant changes in the regulatory context and in accounting practice and education.This paper presents the scope of application of management accounting concepts and methods in 60 Polish enterprises covered by a questionnaire survey carried out by the author between November 1998 and December 1999 in enterprises located in central and southern Poland. The selected companies were interviewed by means of a postal survey, with inquiry forms delivered in person in some cases.The detailed analyses carried out in this paper and the conclusions presented are also based on information obtained from documentary evidence kept by the enterprises and from direct interviews conducted in the course of work in teams engaged in analysis and assessment of cost accounting practices and in management accounting system design in a number of large and medium Polish enterprises.The empirical research carried out is aimed at verification of a number of hypotheses including the following: • modification of cost accounting systems and implementation of management accounting tools in Polish enterprises is brought about by many different factors, the most important being growth of competition and ownership changes in business entities, • Polish enterprises mostly implement the methods and techniques of operational management accounting, • short-term budgeting for cost centres is the most widely used method of management accounting.     

Living to 100 and beyond--implications of longer life spans

The challenge of longer life spans will center on the problem of allocating individual, family and social resources most effectively. To create a context for understanding the significance of measuring and forecasting mortality trends, this article addresses concerns about the implications of increasing longevity to very high ages for families, businesses and society as a whole.     

Brand‐Building Efforts and Their Association with SME Sales Performance

The objective of this paper was to investigate the association between branding, captured by the combined use of the number of corporate and product trademarks and marketing expenses, and small‐ to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) sales performance in the fashion industry. The results of the panel regression model indicate that corporate trademarks and marketing expenses do have a positive association with SMEs sales performance, and in particular, marketing expenses show the highest estimates. These results suggest that branding may also play a relevant also in the SME context, thus opening new paths for research within this field.