Focus: Information Ethics

"The overall goal of information ethics is to integrate information technology and human values in such a way that IT advances and protects human values rather than doing damage to them" (Simon Rogerson). We are pleased to present in this issue five papers from a recent European conference on information ethics edited and introduced by Simon Rogerson, Director of the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University, England.
We are also pleased to announce a major new feature of the Review, entitled Business Ethics on the Internet, which will be contributed from time to time by members of the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. This will provide regular up-to-date information and comment on the resources which are becoming increasingly available on the Internet relating to the study of business ethics and the practice of ethical business. It will be launched in our July issue in an article entitled "Business Ethics on the Internet".     

Tourism and local economic development: The case of the Highlands Meander

Local economic development (LED) planning is of major policy importance in post-apartheid South Africa. Although issues surrounding LED have attracted considerable policy attention, one neglected theme has been the role of tourism as a lead sector for LED. The aim of this article is to examine the planning and workings of one tourism-led LED initiative in South Africa. The case study is that of the Highlands Meander in Mpumalanga province, where five towns are collaborating in their LED initiatives in order to promote the area's tourism products. A key finding is that this growing tourism initiative is currently not benefiting local black communities. Recommendations are offered for developing a pro-poor tourism initiative.     

High‐technology clusters and infrastructure development: international and South African experiences

The factors that have encouraged the emergence and clustering of high‐technology activities are investigated in the international and South African experience. This article focuses specifically on the significance of improved transport and telecommunication facilities for the development of high‐technology manufacturing. In line with international patterns, high‐technology manufacturing in South Africa is strongly agglomerated in the Pretoria‐Witwatersrand region. Central to the historical establishment of this cluster were the infrastructural advantages of Gauteng. Strengthening of the Gauteng cluster is linked to agglomeration economies deriving from the spatial concentration of both high‐technology production and non‐producer enterprises. Two distinct subclusters are identified: in Midrand and in the East Rand     

Market Work, Home Work, and Taxes: A Cross-Country Analysis

This paper uses a simple model of labor supply extended to allow for home production to understand the extent to which differences in taxes can account for differences in time allocations between the US and Europe. Once home production is included, the elasticity of substitution between consumption and leisure is almost irrelevant in determining the response of market hours to higher taxes. But to account for observed differences in leisure and time spent in home production, one still requires a relatively large elasticity of substitution between consumption and leisure, combined with a relatively small elasticity of substitution between time and goods in home production.     

Tourism Innovation in the Global South: Evidence from the Western Cape,South Africa

A research gap exists for the conceptual strengthening, measurement and analysis of innovation at the tourism firm and systems levels, especially in the context of the global South. This paper investigates tourism innovation in the Western Cape region of South Africa. In particular, the nature and types of innovation by tourism firms and system actors are interrogated. It is revealed that innovation by tourism firms is widespread, albeit is largely incremental in nature. The main contribution of this research is the development of an expanded evidence‐based tourism innovation typology from a cross‐sectoral survey of tourism firms and qualitative interviews undertaken with tourism system actors. In addition, recommendations are provided regarding measurement of innovation in tourism. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aggregate implications of indivisible labor, incomplete markets, and labor market frictions

We study the impact of tax and transfer programs on steady-state allocations in a model with search frictions, an operative labor supply margin, and incomplete markets. In a benchmark model that has indivisible labor and incomplete markets but no trading frictions we show that the aggregate effects of taxes are identical to those in the economy with employment lotteries, though individual employment and asset dynamics can be different. The effect of frictions on the response of aggregate hours to a permanent tax change is highly nonlinear. There is considerable scope for substitution between “voluntary” and “frictional” nonemployment in some situations.     

2018 KLEIN LECTURE: INDIVIDUAL AND AGGREGATE LABOR SUPPLY IN HETEROGENEOUS AGENT ECONOMIES WITH INTENSIVE AND EXTENSIVE MARGINS

We study business cycle fluctuations in heterogeneous agent general equilibrium models featuring intensive and extensive margins of labor supply. A nonlinear mapping from time devoted to work to labor services generates operative extensive and intensive margins. Our model captures the salient features of the empirical distribution of hours worked, including how individuals transit within this distribution. We study how various specifications influence labor supply responses to aggregate technology shocks and find that abstracting from intensive margin adjustment can have large effects on the volatility of aggregate hours even if fluctuations along the intensive margin are small.     

Labor market fluctuations in the small and in the large

Shimer's calibrated version of the Mortensen–Pissarides model generates unemployment fluctuates much smaller than the data. Hagedorn and Manovskii present an alternative calibration that yields fluctuations consistent with the data, but this has been challenged by Costain and Reiter, who say it generates unrealistically big differences in unemployment from the differences in policy we see across countries. We argue this concern might be unwarranted, because one cannot assume that elasticities relevant for small changes work for large changes. Models with fixed factors in market or household production can generate large effects from small changes and reasonable effects from large changes. This is reminiscent of attempts to improve the labor market in the Kydland–Prescott model, especially ones incorporating household production, like Benhabib, Rogerson, and Wright.