Consumer demand for nutrition versus taste in four major food categories

This study addresses the trade‐off between nutrition and taste in expenditure on breakfast cereal, milk, bread, and soft drinks. Within each category, products have similar cost and convenience, but have markedly different flavor and nutritional content. Using annual expenditure data for a large sample of households participating in the ACNielsen Homescan system, we regress a measure of “healthiness” on household demographics and market prices, and find that households with college‐educated heads and higher incomes made significantly healthier choices in all four categories. These effects are puzzling in that the nutritional differences between products were well known to consumers, and there are no cost or convenience differences between them. The presence of children was associated with less healthy choices, especially for cereal and bread, while older households made healthier choices in all categories except milk.     

Russian Voices from a Danish Company

This article starts by discussing inclusion and exclusion as key characteristerics of local middle managers and specialists working in a foreign-owned company. It then analyzes the way these characteristics distinguish two groups of Russians working for a Danish company in Russia – the "insiders" and "outsiders"– including how they interpret and react to foreign managers' decision-making andplanning. The Russians' ideas and practice of decision-making and planningwere very different from those adopted by the Danes. The article concludes bysuggesting guidelines on how to reduce cross-cultural conflicts.     

Just How Low are China's Labour Costs?

This paper provides a new perspective on Chinese international competitiveness in manufacturing using relative unit labour costs. We find that Chinese unit labour costs are about 25–40 per cent of US labour costs. They are also low relative to costs in the EU, Japan, Mexico, Korea and most other newly industrialising countries. However, China's relative unit labour costs indicate a substantially smaller cost advantage than that implied by a comparison of wages alone. China's cost advantage derives from large currency devaluations that preceded the establishment of a de facto peg around 1995, and rapid productivity growth in the period since 1995.     

Imposing curvature restrictions on flexible functional forms

A general computational method for estimating the parameters of a flexible functional form subject to convexity, quasi-convexity, concavity, or quasi-concavity at a point, at several points, or over a region, is set forth and illustrated with an example.     

Water pricing reform analysis: alternative scenarios

This paper compares alternative transition paths to efficient water pricing. The analysis is based on representative agent model, where two sources of water supply exist: exhaustible groundwater stock and a renewable substitute. Two alternative water pricing reforms are considered: gradual tariff increase and multipart pricing with first block sold at the initial pre-reform tariff and additional water sold at higher prices (block pricing reform). Under block pricing reform, the amount of water offered at low price gradually diminishes. The results of comparative analysis prove that under the same reform time horizon block pricing is preferred to the gradual tariff increase.     

Firms,queues, and coffee breaks: a flow model of corporate activity with delays

The multidivisional firm is modeled as a system of interconnected nodes that exchange continuous flows of projects of varying urgency and queue waiting tasks. The main innovation over existing models is that the rate at which waiting projects are taken into processing depends positively on both the availability of resources and the size of the queue, capturing a salient quality of human organizations. A transfer pricing scheme for decentralizing the system is presented, and conditions are given to determine which nodes can be operated autonomously. It is shown that a node can be managed separately from the rest of the system when all of the projects flowing through it are equally urgent.     

Agent-based modelling in directional-change intrinsic time

We describe an agent-based model where trades happen in event-based time called directional-change intrinsic time. Events are defined as the reversal price moves of a directional-change threshold from a local extreme. The price impact of traded volumes is modelled according to the empirically observed squared root impact function. The time series generated by the agents is characterised by statistical properties typical for foreign-exchange rates: low autocorrelation of returns, fat-tailed distribution of returns, aggregated normality, and the price jump scaling law. Furthermore, we introduce and use as a benchmark, the overshoot scaling law, which is an omnipresent feature of liquid markets and relates the expected length of price overshoots to the length of the corresponding directional-change threshold.     

Entrepôt Trade and Smuggling in West Africa: Benin,Togo and Nigeria

Official trade statistics indicate very little intra‐African trade, but this is often because of the prevalence of unrecorded trade, particularly smuggling. This paper explores smuggling from Benin and Togo into Nigeria. Nigeria has very high import tariffs and bans on certain products. Togo and Benin have deliberately maintained low import barriers to facilitate an Entrepôt role vis‐à‐vis Nigeria and land‐locked Sahelian countries. Togo competes at a geographic disadvantage relative to Benin for access to the Nigerian market and compensates with lower transit taxes. The volume and composition of cross‐border trade is analysed using data obtained from Benin and Togo customs authorities, as well as interviews with traders and customs officials in both countries. Benin and to a lesser extent Togo are the origin of a very large volume of transshipment of precisely those products which are heavily protected in Nigeria, such as used cars, cloth and rice. It is common knowledge in Benin and Togo that these imports, although declared for domestic consumption or transit to other countries, are in fact overwhelmingly intended for Nigeria. Smuggling is a major source of income and employment in Benin and Togo, but provides a fragile and unreliable foundation for economic development.     

The monitoring of the e-government projects realization in the South of Russia

A methodology for electronic government projects’ evaluation, taking into account the specifics of its implementation in the regions of Russia, is provided. Four blocks of interconnected indicators are the base of the assessment. The subsystems of indicators describe the information and communication infrastructure of the region, the information sector condition of the region’s economy, the human development index and the level of online presence of the regional authorities. The rating method is used for the construction of the integral measure. The integral measure, the index of the electronic government development, is calculated according to an additive scheme. The information and analytical system of complex regional electronic government projects’ monitoring is constructed on the basis of the given system of indicators. The methodology approbation is carried out on the regions of the South of Russia with the construction of the regions rating by the index of the electronic government development.