Would adopting the Australian dollar provide superior monetary policy in New Zealand?

Counterfactual experiments with the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's core model provide some insight into the implications for New Zealand's economic performance over the 1990s, had it credibly fixed its currency to the Australian dollar. If New Zealand had faced the relatively more stimulatory Australian monetary conditions prevailing over the 1990s, then output growth may have been temporarily boosted. However, demand pressures would have probably been greater and inflation higher. In particular, results suggest that over the latter part of the 1990s annual inflation would have been approximately 1% point higher on average. Stochastic simulation experiments provide a vehicle to analyse what the implications of currency union might be more generally. Results suggest that if New Zealand were to lose its ability to set monetary policy independent of that set in Australia, then the variability of inflation and output would increase over the business cycle.     

Recreation and Tourism in Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty: Key Influences on the Policymaking Process

This paper reports on a study completed in 2000 into the policymaking process for recreation and tourism in AONBs across England and Wales, with particular focus on the key influencing role of communication within this process. A number of practical measures, which might aid AONB communication and collaboration for policy development and implementation in the future, are derived from the research. In addition, the findings of the study lend weight to calls (current at the time of the research) for enhanced powers and funding for AONBs, particularly in respect of recreation and tourism provision.     

The Future of Privacy: A Consumer‐Oriented Approach to Managing Personal Data Online

Beginning with Facebook's recent controversial “tweaks” to its privacy policy and its promise to support users against employers and others who attempt to compel users to divulge passwords, we critically review European Union (EU) and US digital privacy initiatives. Whereas the EU proposal relies on legislative regulation, the United States proposes industry self‐regulation partially enforceable by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). We conclude that not only do the sharply differing EU and US approaches present significant problems of global digital interoperability, but neither proposal promises to result in practical and feasible consumer protection, at least not in the near term. Moreover, the EU proposal poses serious threats to the profitability of digital commerce. As an alternative, we propose a “third approach,” empowering the individual digital consumer/user through a personal online strategy we call “wide‐open privacy,” which provides security without sacrificing the transformative economic, cultural, and personal benefits of the Internet. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Measuring Women's Quality of Life: A Discussion of Alternative Approaches

This paper reports our experiences with the application of a number of alternative approaches to a study of women's economic circumstances and quality of life in a typical western city. The important work of, especially, Martha Nussbaum on the capabilities approach to evaluations of “quality of life” has highlighted pitfalls associated with the use of a narrow informational base in studies of women's lives and has emphasized the value of qualitative methods in these evaluations. However, to date, most discussions of the relevance of plural approaches to studies of women's lives have been conducted in the context of developing countries. This paper contributes a practical, current example of the relevance of such approaches to assessments of the lives of women in western countries as well. The research findings reported in the paper also cast further light on the importance of several, related themes in the literature on the capabilities approach, namely the importance of understanding how women's aspirations and expectations change with their economic and social experiences; and the importance of appreciating the social uses of language and how this affects the way in which women describe their lives.     

The Algerian Retrenchment System: A Financial and Economic Evaluation

The government of Algeria has adopted a new retrenchment systemto facilitate labor shedding in a public sector characterizedby redundant workers and in an environment of already high unemployment.This article assesses the financial viability of the retrenchmentsystem and the inherent welfare costs and benefits associatedwith layoffs. A Financial flows model tracks the UnemploymentInsurance Fund's revenue and expenditure flows during the projectedfive-year adjustment period. It finds that even in the presenceof massive retrenchment (21 percent of formal sector employment),the fund accumulates reserves equivalent to nearly 2 percentof gross domestic product. Because many displaced workers willend up in the informal sector, the resulting productivity gainsor losses depend crucially on the initial level of productivityin the public sector. At the same time, retrenchment entailsunambiguous benefits by reducing subsidies to state-owned enterprises,thereby generating efficiency gains. Considering these two effectstogether, the welfare model estimates that retrenching 13 percentof the formal sector will generate annual net welfare gainsranging from costs of $358 million to gains of $774 million.     

An International Investigation of Problem‐Solving Performance in the Semiconductor Industry*

Using a unique survey of engineers in major semiconductor companies located in Japan, South Korea, and the United States, this article analyzes how a firm's human resource (HR) system (i.e., practices that structure work, develop skills, and reward performance) and knowledge system (i.e., information access, sharing and control) are related to the problem‐solving performance of engineers. Because of the short product market life cycles in the semiconductor industry, expeditious problem solving is an important performance goal. Therefore, this article examines the performance of engineers in terms of the time it takes them to solve problems in the context of their firms' HR and knowledge systems. It was anticipated during this study that externally oriented organizational systems, which support individual career performance and mobility (an externally oriented HR system) and the use of private knowledge sources (an externally oriented knowledge system), would be associated with superior performance in terms of problem‐solving speed. The findings support this hypothesis and demonstrate the importance of externally oriented HR systems and at the same time suggest the surprising insignificance of the orientation of the knowledge systems. These findings are applicable to engineers in the sample from the United States, whereas the findings for the Korean and Japanese engineers are inconclusive. International variation is found where the U.S. engineers work under the most externally oriented and the Japanese engineers under the least externally oriented systems, and the Korean engineers fall in between. The findings of this article suggest that when constructing a work environment for new product development, managers should take into account how the underlying components of their organizational systems contribute to an internal or external focus, and how this orientation may influence performance.