Who Will Feed China in the 21st Century? Income Growth and Food Demand and Supply in China

This study uses resource‐based measures to explore the evolution of China's demand and supply for food. China's dietary shift from plant to animal‐based foods, induced by its income growth, is likely to impose considerable pressure on agricultural resources. China's demand for food on this measure appears consistent with global trends, while China is an out‐performer on the supply side, producing much more food than its income level and land endowment would predict. China's current per capita income is in a range where consumption growth is high and in excess of production growth, but the gap between supply and demand is likely to diminish as population and per capita consumption growth decelerate. Continuing agricultural productivity growth and sustainable resource management will be important influences on the growth of China's future net import demand for food.     

Diversity management and the effects on employees’ organizational commitment: Evidence from Japan and Korea

With globalization increasing, diversity management has emerged as an important workplace issue, even in the traditionally non-diversified companies of Japan and Korea. These companies will need to pay more attention to diversity management as a potentially competitive resource. Most of the existing studies in diversity have been conducted in the United States, and thus may not represent the situations of Asian countries, such as Japan and Korea, in which cultural values significantly differ and the labor force is highly homogeneous. The current research describes the realities of diversity management practices in Japanese and Korean companies, and empirically examines how the practices influence employees’ attitudes at the workplace. The results indicate that diversity management practices trigger positive effects on employees’ organizational commitment, which was mediated by their perception of procedural justice.     

Theoretical and experimental investigations of the performance of keyword auction mechanisms

Two keyword auction mechanisms, the Generalized Second‐Price auction (GSP) and the Vickrey‐Clarke‐Groves mechanism (VCG), were compared theoretically and experimentally. The former is widely used in practice; the latter is not, but it has a dominant strategy equilibrium where all participants bid their true values. In the theoretical investigation, by applying the “locally envy‐free Nash equilibrium” to the VCG, we found that the allocations are efficient and that upper and lower bounds of the auctioneer's revenue coincide in the two mechanisms. A laboratory experiment, in which the revenues and efficiencies were similar in both mechanisms, supported this result.     

Job Opportunities in Foreign Firms and Internal Migration in Vietnam

Using the 2004 Vietnam Migration Survey and the 2004 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey, this paper investigates the role of employment opportunities created by foreign‐owned firms as a determinant of internal migration and destination choice. Multinomial logit and conditional logit models are estimated to study both origin‐and destination‐specific characteristics of migrants. The paper finds that the migration response to foreign job opportunities is larger for female workers than male workers; there appears to be intermediate selection in terms of educational attainment; and migrating individuals tend to go to destinations with higher foreign employment opportunities, even when controlling for income differentials, land differentials and distances between sending and receiving areas.     

Solutions to the Asset Allocation Problem by Informed Respondents: The Significance of the Size-of-Bet and the 1/N Heuristic

Asset allocation is a classic topic in the theory of finance and a crucial issue for investment policy. Noted for its significance in driving pension fund performance, it is also an issue that individual investors consider when designing their investment portfolios. In theory, Markowitz and those following in his wake have an optimal solution. In practice, however, we show that when asked to allocate their own money to a set of asset classes (from relatively low risk to high risk) in an experimental situation, most of our informed respondents would vary their investment strategies according to the size-of-bet (the money value of assets to be invested). We also show that most participants in the study adopted one of three solutions to the posed problem only one of which could be thought consistent with Benartzi and Thaler's 1/ n  heuristic. Since respondent solutions do not seem to be explained by formal education, professional qualifications, or training, it is suggested that solutions to the asset allocation problem are a product of strategies that mix intuitive responses to the initial tranche of money with theoretical cum practical shared conventions. Solutions to the asset allocation puzzle suggest that the size-of-bet could be a significant consideration for many informed investors. In conclusion, suggestions are made about taking forward closer scrutiny of these experimental results.     

Possible Dynamic Effects of AFTA for the New Member Countries

We discuss the possible dynamic benefits of economic integration for the new members of ASEAN. Direct evidence on regional integration and growth is weak, but three indirect channels are possible. Openness increases access to foreign knowledge, which could help productivity growth. Trade liberalisation is likely to stimulate investment and might promote the integration of the regional production network. Binding liberalisation under AFTA would help ‘lock‐in’ and accelerate liberal economic reforms. These gains are not automatic, however. Discriminatory liberalisation will switch imports from sources with high stocks of knowledge towards ASEAN countries, which have lower stocks, and so may lower productivity growth. We term this ‘dynamic’ trade diversion. In addition, local absorptive capabilities must be developed to benefit fully from technology transfer. Finally, we recommend extending AFTA commitments on an MFN basis in order to avoid static and dynamic trade diversions.     

Foreign Wage Premium,Gender and Education: Insights from Vietnam Household Surveys

This paper investigates the differential impacts of foreign ownership on wages for different types of workers (in terms of educational background and gender) in Vietnam using the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys of 2002 and 2004. Whereas most previous studies have compared wage levels between foreign and domestic sectors using firm‐level data (thus excluding the informal sector), one advantage of using the Living Standards Surveys in this paper is that the data allow wage comparison analyses to extend to the informal wage sector. A series of Mincerian earnings equations and worker‐specific fixed effects models are estimated. Several findings emerge. First, foreign firms pay higher wages relative to their domestic counterparts after controlling for workers' personal characteristics. Second, the higher the individual workers' levels of education, the larger on average are the wage premiums for those who work for foreign firms. Third, longer hours of work in foreign firm jobs relative to working in the informal wage sector are an important component of the wage premium. Finally, unskilled women experience a larger foreign wage premium than unskilled men, reflecting the low earning opportunities for women and a higher gender gap in the informal wage sector.     

Informal parental care and female labour supply in Japan

Using the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement, Japan’s first globally comparable panel survey of the elderly, we estimate the effect on female employment in Japan due to the provision of informal parental care. We observe that informal parental care has little impact on female employment, after controlling for endogeneity of informal care or individual unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity. This finding is consistent with those observed in Europe and the US, underscoring a limited association between care and work in Japan, which is facing ageing at the fastest pace among advanced economies.     

Wages,non-wage characteristics,and predominantly male jobs

This paper estimates the wage premium associated with working in predominantly male jobs. It also examines whether this wage premium is greater than the compensation workers demand for the less desirable non-wage characteristics of such jobs. The coefficients of the change in the proportion of men in an occupation on the change in wages for quits and layoffs provide opposing biased estimates of the wage premium; because workers who voluntarily quit move to better matches, but those that are laid off accept jobs from the representative distribution of job offers. Specifically, when the premium paid over- (under-)compensates for undesirable work characteristics, the quit estimate is a downward (upward) biased estimate of the wage premium, while the layoff estimate is biased upward (downward). Results from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that: (1) the estimated bounds of the wage premium are large; and (2) the wage premium overcompensates for the non-wage characteristics of male jobs.