Efficiency of New Zealand’s District Health Boards at Providing Hospital Services: A stochastic frontier analysis

Journal of Productivity Analysis - The majority of secondary and tertiary healthcare services in New Zealand are provided through public hospitals managed by 20 local District Health Boards. Due to...     

Improving Supplier New Product Development Performance: The Role of Supplier Development

Suppliers play an increasingly central role in helping firms achieve their new product development (NPD) goals. The literature implicitly assumes that suppliers are able to meet or exceed the quality standards and technological expectations of the firm, and yet, in practice, suppliers often lack the technological capabilities needed to undertake collaborative NPD. In such situations, a firm may choose to intervene and actively develop the supplier's technological and product development capabilities. We develop a theoretical framework that conceptualizes supplier development activities within interorganizational NPD projects as part of a bilateral knowledge‐sharing process: design recommendations, technical specifications, and new technology flow from supplier to the firm, and in turn, the firm can implement supplier development activities to upgrade the supplier's technological capabilities. Antecedents (supplier responsibility, skills similarity, single sourcing strategy) and consequences of supplier development activities (on supplier, product, and project performance) are examined using a sample of 153 interorganizational NPD projects within UK manufacturers. We find broad support for our hypotheses. In particular, we show that the relational rents (in the form of improved product and project performance) attained from supplier development activities in new product development are not achieved directly, but rather indirectly, via improvements in the supplier's creative and technological capabilities. Our results emphasize the importance of adopting a strategic view of the potential returns available from investing in the NPD capabilities of key suppliers, and provide clues about underlying reasons for the suboptimal experiences of many companies' collaborative NPD projects.     

The Government Transformation Programme of Malaysia: a successful approach to public service reform

The 2009 Malaysian Government Transformation Programme (GTP) could be useful as a model for reform given its positive impact on improving public services in targeted key result areas. This paper assesses the GTP's approach in the context of the wider debate on whether reforms should be based on best practices or whether they should be diagnostic or problem-solving in approach. The GTP's success was largely the result of blending both approaches. The GTP experience in Malaysia provides a number of insights and lessons for delivering intelligent reforms quickly and effectively.     

Exotic Passport Options

The Vanilla Passport Option is an insurance against trading loss. In this paper, we add various exotic features to the Vanilla contract and price the resulting financial products. The assumptions that we make are the same as the Black-Scholes ones and the resulting pricing equations are Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman type equations or parabolic free boundary PDE's which can be solved via finite difference methods.     

The world bank in Africa: Historical reflections on the African present

This paper offers a historical commentary on the World Bank's influential report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. A very broad perspective is adopted, partly to identify the main points of connection between historians and development economists, and partly because the Report, though widely commented on, has not been addressed directly by historians of Africa. The principal aim of the paper is to show how Africa's past bears upon its present by linking the economic history of the continent to its contemporary development problems. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part deals with some of the unstated assumptions underlying the Report. The second part focuses on the World Bank's assessment of the current “crisis” in Africa, and offers a long-run interpretation of the relationship between population, resource use, institutional change, and political incorporation. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the dangers of excessive specialization among experts, and by pressing the case for reuniting history and development economics.     

Teaching International Business Across Multiple Modes of Delivery: How to Maintain Equivalence in Learning Outcomes

The drivers of globalization are changing how, where, and when international business (IB) is being taught, and increasing student diversity. Concomitantly, education is becoming an important contributor to GDP in developed economies. Today, the same course may be taught at home to domestic and in-bound international students, in host countries, online, and through blended learning techniques. The increasing variety of modes of delivery raises an important question, however—how to deliver the same material in different contexts and achieve the same learning outcomes. This article examines the changing face of IB education and presents a case study on how this question has been answered at one Australian university.     

Inter-organizational communication as a relational competency: Antecedents and performance outcomes in collaborative buyer–supplier relationships

Inter-organizational communication has been documented as a critical factor in promoting strategic collaboration among firms. In this paper, we seek to extend the stream of research in supply chain management by systematically investigating the antecedents and performance outcomes of inter-organizational communication. Specifically, inter-organizational communication is proposed as a relational competency that may yield strategic advantages for supply chain partners. Using structural equation modeling, we empirically test a number of hypothesized relationships based on a sample of over 200 United States firms. Our results provide strong support for the notion of inter-organizational communication as a relational competency that enhances buyers’ and suppliers’ performance. Implications for future research and practice are offered.