The demand for medical care services: evidence from Kuwait based on households’ out-of-pocket expenses

This article used a data set containing information on 1267 households from Kuwait to investigate the determinants of demand for medical care services by examining households’ out-of-pocket expenses. To deal with the problems associated with households’ health expenditure data, a two-part model (TPM) was estimated. Given Kuwait’s demographic composition, the model was estimated for full sample, nationals only and expatriates only. Prior to estimating the model, tests were conducted to select a transformation that reduces problems associated with heteroscedasticity and non-normality of the errors. In addition, tests were performed to determine if differences in the estimated coefficients across population groups were statistically significant.     

The true shadow price of foreign exchange

For the last half century, trade theorists, development economists, and development practitioners have been calculating what was claimed to be the shadow price of scarce foreign exchange. In fact, what they have been calculating is the social value of the receipt of a unit of a numeraire good from abroad, typically obtained from real models. In our paper, we explicitly deal with a model of a monetized economy, and we develop formulas for the social value of a unit of foreign currency, which, in general, differ from the traditional formulas.     

Wagner's hypothesis: evidence from Kuwait using cointegration tests

This paper investigates the relationship between public expenditure and a number of socioeconomic variables, including the level of income, in Kuwait. A general form of the public expenditure function is formulated and recent developments in time series econometrics, including unit roots and cointegration tests, and an error-correction model are used. Given the characteristics of the economy, alternative measures for each variables are used. The analysis in the paper is based on time-series data covering the period from 1969/70 to 1994/95. In general, the findings lend little support to the existence of long-run equilibrium relationship between public expenditure and the socioeconomic variables, and the evidence does not lend support to the validity of Wagner's law in Kuwait.     

Will export taxes replace VERs?

Some economists use an export tax, which alters the domestic relative price of exports, to model a voluntary export restraint, which is a restriction on the quantity of exports with restriction-induced rents accruing to the exporting country. Implicit in this approach is the presumption that the two policies are equivalent. In a very general model that allows for a finite number of goods and factors and intermediated goods and joint production, we demonstrate that, in general, this is, in fact, not the case. Specifically, from the exporting country’s perspective, the real income effects of the two policies are nonequivalent.     

Countering Service Information Challenges in the Internet of Services

Business Webs apply the idea of value networks to the WWW. The underlying delivery platform is commonly referred to as the Internet of Services and will certainly have to deal with a great variety and amount of information about services along several service information dimensions. As soon as brokerage, discovery, or community feedback parts are decentralized, there emerge a number of service information challenges (modeling the information in a holistic way, documentation, interlinkage, tool interoperability, distributed querying, inconsistent information, and cooperation of different stakeholders). In this paper, we propose to counter such service information challenges by two artifacts. First, we contribute a Service Ontology based on a sound and rigid foundational ontology. The Service Ontology provides a holistic and consistent way of capturing service information. We apply the recommendations of the W3C Semantic Web Activity whose recent standardization has already opened new possibilities for tool interoperability, interlinkage of information, and distributed querying on the web. However, building and prescribing an ontology in standardized languages is not enough to address all service information challenges. Therefore, as a second contribution, we provide a method around the ontology including a governance framework, guidelines for applying the W3C Semantic Web recommendations, a lifecycle-spanning tool chain, and different levels of applicability. We label our method Semantic Business Web approach, since we build on W3C Semantic Web standards, use and extend them in the Business Web setting. Both artifacts are constructed in an interdisciplinary way by experts participating in the German lighthouse project THESEUS/TEXO. The project’s scenario also serves as a proof of concept evaluation of the artifacts.     

Board gender diversity and dividend policy in Australian listed firms: the effect of ownership concentration

Asia Pacific Journal of Management - We examine the association between board gender diversity and corporate dividend payout. Our results suggest that although board gender diversity impacts...     

If You Can Measure It,You Can Manage It: A Case of Intellectual Capital

Despite the great importance attributed to intellectual capital (IC) in the past two decades or so, its measurement and management have remained elusive, mainly because of inappropriate prior models of IC measurement. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to make adjustments to an existing model, the Value Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC), and to present an adjusted‐VAIC model to measure IC. We tested our new model on data from 10 emerging and developed world markets and obtained more consistent results than prior studies. Our results indicate a significant positive relationship between IC and its components (human, innovation and physical capitals) and firm performance. Therefore, the adjusted‐VAIC model can be used with confidence to measure IC. Our study has important implications for both academia and industry concerning the measurement of IC.     

Return Migration and Occupational Change

Return migrants exhibit a high tendency for self-employment over waged employment. Using cross- sectional data from Pakistan, the paper explores the determinants of this choice. Retirement from the domestic labor market is not a reason for opting for self-employment. The preference for non-farm self-employment is a two-period process of self-selection. Migrants who expect to switch occupation to non-farm self-employment upon return save more from high transitory overseas income than do their counterparts. Upon return, savings become a significant factor in the choice of self-employment over waged employment. International migration and return have little influence on the choice of farm self-employment.     

The Importance of Intellectual Capital for Firm Performance: Evidence from Australia

This study investigates the dynamic relationship between intellectual capital (IC) and firm performance (FP) through system generalised methods of moments, when previous studies produced divergent results based on static OLS or fixed‐effects estimations. Based on 571 listed firms in Australia for the period of 2005–2014 (5518 firm‐years) this study reveals that IC efficiency is positively significant with ROA and ROE – which endorses resource‐based theory. Further analysis shows that human capital, structural capital and physical capital are also significant and confidently endorse resource‐dependency and organisation‐learning theories. The findings of this study are vital for stakeholders such as management, shareholders and potential investors to understand the role of IC for FP. Moreover, the findings are particularly important for policy‐setters to highlight the importance of IC and develop a systematic framework for IC disclosure. This study also opens new avenues for future research to consider the dynamic nature of the IC–FP relationship and account for endogeneity.     

President George W. Bush and his faith‐based initiative: creative solution or political minefield?

On 29th January, 2001, President Bush issued an executive order creating a faith‐based initiative office. This paper examines the history of the separation of church and state in the United States starting with the Constitution's First Amendment which established the freedom of religion. Pertinent historical facts through the 1990s are presented. The paper then defines President Bush's faith‐based initiative and how it will be implemented. There is concern about whether this initiative will violate the Constitutional separation of religion and government. Another concern is how it will affect the religious organisations and the charities it is supposed to be helping. There is also a discussion on whether President Bush's faith‐based initiative will have a positive or negative impact on religious organisations as well as keeping then separate from the government. The concern is whether the initiative will benefit and progress society as a whole. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications