Collaboration and innovation: An empirical study of Indian technological enterprises

In 2010, the Indian government declared 2010–2020 to be the ‘Decade of Innovation’ and established the State Innovation Councils and Sectoral Innovation Councils to encourage and facilitate innovation by technological firms. In this paper, we study the relationship between collaboration and innovation in a cross‐section of Indian firms, paying particular attention to the impact of the innovation councils. Our results suggest that domestic collaborations have an important impact on firm innovation, as do the innovation councils, but that the impact of the councils is less for firms that collaborate.     

Trends in Total and Subgroup Income Inequality in the Singaporean Workforce

This paper examines the trends in income inequality in Singapore using Labour Force Survey data from 1974 to 1998. Trends in inequality within and between age, educational and occupational groups are studied using the Theil inequality index. A new method based on the Gini coefficient is also utilized to explore the nature of inter-temporal variation in within-group inequality. Any increase within age-group inequality is due to changing income shares, while the decrease in educational-group inequality comes from decreases in within-group inequality. The contribution of intereducation inequality has also increased over the years, as has inter-occupational inequality.     

The trend of welfare disparity among subgroups of population in Australia 1983-1984 - 1993-1994

The aim of this paper is to estimate the trend of social welfare for Australia using 1983–1984, 1988–1989 and 1993–1994 Household Expenditure Survey data. The functional form of the Social Welfare Function (SWF) was derived by Sen, Degum, Yitzhaki and Shesinski (all independently). Since the function contains the Gini coefficient as the inequality parameter, it could not be formally disaggregated by subgroups of population. This paper, using a method of subgroup decomposition of the Gini coefficient developed by Podder, attempts to disaggregate the SWF. With this method it is now possible to identify disadvantaged groups by their relative shares in total welfare. In addition the method is used to determine effect of economic growth on specific subgroups, and in turn, on total social welfare. This study is based on the Australian economy. Distribution of relative shares of total social welfare among various regional groups are identified, groups determined by occupational status and groups determined by country of birth. The effect on society's welfare for a percentage change in income of a group and the trend of relative welfare of a specific group are also computed. This information can be used in a variety of social decision making situations, including cost benefit analysis.     

City Size and Wage Disparity in Segmented Labour Market in China

The relation between city size and wage inequality is well established for Western countries. This paper finds that city size–wage premium exists across Chinese cities to a lower extent than the Western world. Further, using a simplified model on the Chinese Household Income Project survey data, we find that the city size–wage premium varies with difference in skills among urban citizens. The variation amounts to 50% more for the high‐skill workers compared with their low‐skill counterparts. Moreover, owing to the presence of segmented labour market, the patterns of city size–wage premium and city size–wage inequality premium are notably different for the migrants, who receive a much lesser wage than the citizens and do not experience wage variation owing to their skill heterogeneity.     

Old‐Age Income Insecurity in Singapore: A Problem of Non‐Inclusive Development

With a growing old‐age population, ensuring income security for the elderly is becoming an increasingly important element of public policy worldwide. The World Bank report proposed a three‐tier system to avert old‐age crisis, which was extended into a five‐tier system by Holzmann et al. Our analysis of Singapore's old‐age income security system in light of these two systems shows that it lacks the basic zero and first pillars of protection against old‐age hardships. We show that a budget allocation of less than half a percent of national gross domestic product (GDP) can ensure that no elderly citizen suffers from poverty in Singapore. As Singapore occupies the status of a developed country, a government‐financed pension system that is adequate, affordable, sustainable and robust is long overdue.     

Jury Size and the Free Rider Problem

In recent times, judges in the United States have said that6-person juries are inferior to 12-person juries. But by whatreasoning is a smaller jury inferior? One argument is the Condorcetjury theorem, which says that a larger jury will reach a moreaccurate decision. This, however, assumes that the informationof each juror is independent of the size of the jury. I showthat a juror's information does depend on the size of the jury.In a larger jury panel each juror has less incentive to payattention in the court, even though they are all pledged tohear and deliver a verdict on a trial. Because of the free-riderproblem, a larger jury may actually make poorer decisions. Theresults apply to many environments in which decisions are madeby committees and work teams.     

Changing labor-force gender composition and male-female income diversity in Singapore

This paper traces the employment trends by gender in various industries, occupational groups, and educational levels in the city-state of Singapore. Over the years, Singapore’s female labor-force participation rate has increased as a result of rising educational attainment. At the same time, income inequality among the females has increased, while male-female income inequality has decreased. This paper explores the gender wage gap at various occupational and educational levels. It is found that the gender wage gap has been reduced over the period 1975–1999. This paper also finds that because of a lack of sufficient childcare facilities and unavailability of part-time work, women who leave the labor market to start families face certain obstacles when trying to re-enter the workforce.     

The Changing Pattern of Sources of Income and its Impact on Inequality: The Method and its Application to Australia, 1975–94

This paper proposes a new method of explaining the temporal change in economic inequality in terms of changes in the sources of income. The method is based on the decomposition of the Gini coefficient by source of income. Using this method, the paper also examines changes of the sources of private income in Australia over the last two decades and their impact on the distribution of income. It will be seen that not only have the shares of income from different sources changed, but that there has been significant change in inequality of distribution of the components themselves.     

Limitations of the Theories of Nonprofits and Benchmarking Services Delivery Dimensions of Poverty-Reduction Programs in Rural Bangladesh

Even though both contract failure and consumer control theories of nonprofits stress the need for monitoring the performance of the firms, these models fail to offer any guidelines on how to do so. In general, the performance of poverty-reduction projects are assessed on amounts of loan disbursement, repayment rates, area of coverage, and financial sustainability. However, performance assessment based on the efficiency of service delivery has in the past been ignored even though the importance of efficient service delivery in poverty-reduction programs is well recognized in the literature and in the theories of nonprofits. Due to this specific lacuna, benchmarking in the aspects of efficient service delivery has never been applied. Based on primary data collected from 78 villages in Bangladesh from September to December 2009, this article develops a two-dimensional multi-item service delivery index to compare the efficiency of participating organizations in the stated programs in order to set industry benchmark values for each item of the index.