Family planning: the unfinished revolution

This is a general overview of family planning programs in developing countries, with a focus on east and southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The author concludes that "by the year 2000, the number of contraceptive users in developing countries will have to be 40 percent higher if fertility declines are to match projections." Suggestions for program improvement are included.     

Health and finance: exploring the parallels between health care delivery and professional financial planning

This article compares the role of risk and uncertainty discourse across two rather disparate areas of expertise: personal financial planning and health care delivery. On the basis of 42 semi-structured interviews and eight recorded meetings between planners and their clients, as well as a comprehensive review of extant health literature, it is argued that three points of convergence – the discursive management of uncertainty, the temporalization of risk, and the use of images – offer a modicum of certainty which functions ultimately to legitimize expertise and facilitate courses of remedial action while simultaneously assuaging laypeople’s existential anxieties. The article concludes with a number of reflections on the importance of agency and trust.     

Family ownership and productivity: the role of owner-management

This article analyses the relationship between family ownership and productivity, with special focus on the role of owner-management. The results show that family-owned firms are less productive than non-family-owned firms. This productivity gap is, however, explained by differences in management regime. Family-owned firms managed by a person hired outside the owner family are equally productive as non-family-owned firms, while family-owned firms managed by a person from the owner family are significantly less productive. This finding is sustained after controlling for endogeneity of management regime.     

Manufacturing controls and performance: An experiment

This paper reports the results of an experiment that tests the effects of three manufacturing controls—inventory and production (pull vs push), incentives (fixed vs contingent) and quality control (process vs output)— on performance effectiveness and efficiency. The results indicate that both incentive and quality control systems affect performance efficiency, and incentives also had a significant effect on performance effectiveness. We also hypothesized and found a significant interaction of the production/inventory control system and the quality control system on performance effectiveness and efficiency.     

Evaluating the Nordea experiment: Evidence from market and accounting data

This paper discusses results and difficulties of comparing banks’ performance based on publicly available data for the case of Nordea, a pan-Nordic bank created through mergers of important national banks. The objective is to determine whether Nordea’s unique strategy of functional integration across four countries can be advantageous. For stock-market data, however, Nordea does not have stable betas on risk factors, and thus the comparables method must be used with great care. The Nordea holding company performed about as well as the comparables, both in terms of stock-market and accounting data. Nordea banks in individual countries outperformed comparable holding companies; by arithmetic, Nordea non-bank operations are not as profitable as its bank operations. In event studies, the data lend only the weakest support to the hypothesis that the market viewed Nordea’s acquisitions as adding value.     

City foresight and development planning case study: Implementation of scenario planning in formulation of the Bulungan development plan

This article discusses the formulation of the Bulungan Development Plan (2002) that sought to formulate a 25 year city vision. The foresight process included how to prepared the process, implemented the scenario planning method, created consensus amongst stakeholders, and formulated graphic and narrative scenarios that explored alternative future for Bulungan. Based on these scenarios, the stakeholders formulated a vision for the city's preferred future. The vision is “excellence in agro industry supported by qualified human resources”.Project debriefing showed that unlike traditional forecasting or market research, the methods of foresight, especially scenario planning, is a more appropriate and powerful planning tool for integrated regional development. The main reason for this is that the future is unpredictable, and scenarios allow stakeholders to make sense of complexity.     

Gold and tax capitalization: A natural experiment

This research examines whether U.S. income taxes are capitalized into gold coin prices. For years, the American Eagle (Eagle) was the sole gold coin to be IRA eligible. The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 expanded eligibility to include all other gold coins beginning on January 1, 1998, except the South African Krugerrand (Rand). In this natural quasi-experiment, we examine whether gold coin prices reacted to the change in IRA-eligibility. Results are largely consistent with the capitalization of implicit taxes in gold coin prices. When legislation allowing IRA eligibility of both the Canadian Maple Leaf (Maple) and the Rand was introduced, the prices of both coins increased relative to the Eagle. When final legislation excluded the Rand from IRA eligibility, but not the Maple, the Rand's price declined while the Maple's did not. The findings contribute to the tax capitalization literature and the effects of interjurisdictional taxation in integrated global markets.     

SFAS 8 and information inductance: An experiment

Awareness of the potential economic consequences of accounting standards has increased in the accounting literature over the last several years. The effects on management behavior of accounting standards has been cited as one of the consequences. This paper reports the results of a controlled behavioral experiment which examined the effects on managerial actions of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 8.An accounting variable and an organizational climate variable were manipulated as independent variables. The dependent variable involved a measure of tradeoff between cash flow consequences to the firm and bottom line (net income) effects to the firm. Results of the non-parametric tests performed indicate that managers will sacrifice cash flows in making decisions, if the bottom line effects are disadvantageous to their own position.     

The educational planning system: Change and tension

If educational planning is conceived as a means of making and implementing policy and not merely as an intellectual exercise, deeper consideration ought to be given to social tension and conflicts which might be implied by, and reflected in, social change processes. In this article, discrepancies are analysed as the main causes of social tension and conflict, and a discrepancy conceptual model is suggested as a means of identification of tension origins. Furthermore, since every system is characterised by its tension absorbability, assumptions are made about the critical limits of the system's “tension-input overload”, which are essential to educational planning.     

Socioeconomic planning and the British economy

Recognising that institutions designed to regulate the postwar development of the UK economically and socially have failed, the author proposes a simplified model of their causal links to show where and how this failure has happened. On the basis of this framework he suggests implications for industrial innovation, the civil service, education, and industrial policies, and advocates that an indicative national planning system should be institutionalised in the UK, as it is in France and Japan.     

Taming the untamable: planning,programming and budgeting and the normalization of war

This paper demonstrates the profound political consequences accounting can have by examining the emergence of Planning, Programming and Budgeting (PPB) in the United States as an ostensibly value-free tool for allocating defense resources during the 1960s. The research shows how PPB assisted with normalizing the preparation for nuclear war by converting the “unthinkable” into a technical and mundane resource allocation problem, as well as the internal inconsistencies generated by placing an economically rational frame of representation on a dialectical and political process. In addition, the paper demonstrates how this accounting technique was strategically deployed by the Secretary of Defense to centralized decisions over resource allocations within his office.     

Inefficiency and predictability in the Brexit Pound market: a natural experiment

Exploiting the near-experimental conditions provided by the GBPUSD exchange rate during the Brexit vote of 2016, we quantify a significant delay of the market price in reflecting the increasing probability of a Brexit outcome over the vote counting period. We claim that the Brexit outcome could realistically have been predicted hours before the market adjusted to the outcome. This inefficiency is identified by comparing the market-implied probability of a Brexit outcome with a separate probability, estimated by a standard Monte-Carlo algorithm based on a simple linear regression model, representative of what should have been easily possible in real time. The core of the method is the real-time re-calibration of ex-ante ‘pollster’ predictions for the voting district outcomes by regressing the observed voting results onto them. For comparative purposes, a study of the MXNUSD exchange rate in the 2016 US Presidential Election was done, finding that the market-implied and model-estimated probabilities moved more consistently toward the Trump outcome. Put together, this identifies a somewhat anomalous breakdown in market efficiency in the case of the Brexit vote, which we attribute to its novelty as well as a kind of political bubble and subsequent crash, generated by confirmation bias and social herding.     

Family learning in the workplace: nurturing lifelong learning

Lifelong learning must become a reality for all employees if we are to create and sustain organizations which can survive in the knowledge economy of the future. But how do we engage those who never access training and development opportunities at work? In this article it is argued that these people may be attracted back to learning by offering them opportunities at work to learn with their families.This different method of facilitating lifelong learning is examined here. The benefits to business and the wider community of encouraging families to learn together at work are explored. It is concluded that the addition of family learning in organisations to our current range of training and development activities can engage a new constituency in learning at work and can model the importance of lifelong learning to a new generation of future employees.     

Financial market design and bounded rationality: An experiment

This paper experimentally compares a Call Market and a Walrasian Tatonnement under asymmetric information. The experimental environment and the market institutions are such that, at the theoretical equilibria, the two trading institutions exhibit identical prices and surpluses. During the experiment, prices are fully revealing on the two trading venues. However, the gains from trade are higher on the Walrasian Tatonnement than on the Call Market. This is because uninformed agents trade less on the CM. I show that this behavior is due to bounded rationality and strategic uncertainty, and that the Walrasian Tatonnement fosters learning by mitigating the impact of both factors. This paper supports the view that trading institutions should be designed including cognitively ergonomic features to fit the limited nature of human rationality.     

金融素养、家庭财富与家庭创业决策

本文利用2015年中国家庭金融调查(CHFS)数据,分析了金融素养、家庭财富与家庭创业决策三者之间的关系。整体上,金融素养的提高显著增加了家庭参与创业的可能性,但家庭参与创业面临着财富约束效应;而金融素养对家庭财富具有替代作用,提高金融素养有效缓解了家庭的财富约束效应,促进家庭参与创业。同时,研究发现家庭财富对家庭创业决策的影响并不存在明显的城乡差异,但金融素养更能缓解农村家庭创业所面临的财富约束效应。另外,提高金融素养能有效缓解家庭的信贷约束,增加其风险偏好,间接地促进创业。     

Violence and repression : Neglected factors in development planning

This article proposes that political violence and repression be taken into account as integral parts of the development planning process. A preliminary theory is proposed that emphasizes economic fluctuations, repression and the strength of opposition movements as causes of violence. The theory is represented as a system dynamics model. Violence is viewed as a cyclic phenomenon, and from a much longer-term perspective than is customary. An application of the theory to Argentina is described, and consideration is given to what the theory portends for Mexico, the most important Third World neighbour of the USA.