Changes in UK tax‐effective giving: implications for donor fundraising strategies

Strategies for fundraising from committed donors in the UK have long placed considerable emphasis on tax‐efficient giving, in particular the use of deeds of covenant and gift aid which enables charities to recover tax paid by the donor and thus increase the value of a donor's gift. However, recent developments and proposed developments in UK legislation and Inland Revenue procedures are about to make radical changes to this regime. Although in general the changes are beneficial to charities, the precise implications will, in many cases, require a significant change in fundraising strategies to make effective use of the new giving environment. This paper seeks to analyse the nature of those changes and the consequence for fundraising strategies. In relation to three main strategies some approaches to further research are proposed, which a charity may wish to apply in order to assess whether and to what extent new approaches to committed donor fundraising are required. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Institute of Charity Fundraising Managers Convention (Academic Stream) in July 1999, but it has been substantially changed to take account of further government announcements made in November, 1999. Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications     

Distribution of stock ratings and analyst recommendation revision

With the implementation of NASD Rule 2711 in 2002, each brokerage firm is now required to publicly disseminate the distribution of stock ratings in each research report. Hence, this paper investigates the relationship between the percentage of buy recommendations and probability of deciding to downgrade or drop coverage of stocks. Our findings suggest that the percentage of buy recommendations can enhance the probability of deciding to downgrade stock ratings and drop coverage of stocks. Furthermore, we find that analysts tend to revise their recommendations downward to hold instead of an unfavorable level. In addition, we find the market tends to heed downgrade decisions of analysts with a higher percentage of buy ratings. This finding is consistent with Barber, Lehavy, McNichols, and Trueman (2006) by applying data at the broker level.This study further investigates the changing dynamic in buy ratio of analysts by partitioning pre and post regulatory reform period. We show that analysts are more likely to revise their ratings to hold and less likely to revise their ratings to sell; in particular after post regulatory reform. Moreover, we observe one key coefficient in the post-Rule period with superior performance in contrast to the pre-Rule period. Compared to the results in the pre-Rule period, the results show that analysts are more likely to revise their ratings to hold and less likely to revise ratings to sell, and more likely to drop coverage of stocks in the post-Rule period. Overall, our findings suggest that the implementation of Rule 2711 will contribute to reduce analysts’ optimistic stock ratings.     

Towards a cross-cultural framework of strategic international human resource control: the case of Taiwanese high-tech subsidiaries in the USA

Due to the growing expansion of newly emerging multinational companies (MNCs) in the USA market, it seems pertinent to explore how to manage their Western industrialized subsidiaries in terms of human resource management. This study combines the institutionalism, resource dependence perspective, and control theory to provide an integrative framework in an attempt to investigate the cross-cultural determinants of strategic international human resource control over MNCs' subsidiaries. By a qualitative analysis of 10 Taiwanese top high-tech manufacturing companies operating in the USA, our findings are as follow: In order to perform subsidiary's value-added activities, multinationals need to identify the value and capabilities need for these activities. At the same time, subsidiaries also need to compare the cultural advantage of the home country in terms of these activities. In addition, from the perspective of cross-cultural influence, input control is designed to respond to high integration and high adaptation; output control is executed in the case of low integration and high cultural adaptation; while behavioural control is used to respond to high integration and low adaptation, simultaneously in the case of low value of subsidiary's activities.     

Pro/E仿真模块在产品开发中的应用

文章讲述了利用Pro/ENGINEER进行产品零部件运动仿真的流程,以实例的形式说明了Pro/ENGI-NEER软件的机构模块和动画模块在产品开发中的应用,为人们从事产品预先演示、广告宣传、零部件的早期验证、及时地暴露设计过程中存在的匹配和干涉等问题提供了参考借鉴作用。     

Contextual Influences on Thinking in Organizations: Learner and Tutor Orientations to Organizational Learning

This paper examines the orientations, or frames of reference, of participants in five bank training programmes run by three banks in the United Kingdom. Adopting a symbolic interactionist approach and ethnographic methods of investigation, the paper attempts to elucidate the ways in which both learners and tutors thought about their roles in the learning events and the goals and strategies they adopted in order to cope with their situation. It is suggested that in order to understand the participants' behaviour it is necessary to take into account the contexts in which their actions were constructed. In particular it is proposed that the organizational context of the training programmes, which exposed the participants to the gaze of ‘hidden audiences’ of organizational superiors, inhibited the potential of the programmes as vehicles for learning. It is also argued that interactionist approaches using ethnographic methods, which enable organizational actors to be studied in situ, have an important contribution to make to the wider study of organizational cognition.     

The Rank-Size rule in the absence of growth

This paper makes a discovery in comparing Steindl's model of a growing system of cities to Champernowne's model of a stationary one: While the so-called Pareto coefficient (a measure of size concentration) of the city size distribution for a growing system is determined by the ratio of the average rate of growth in the sizes of cities to the rate of growth in the number of cities, and is thus independent of the variance in growth rates across cities, and also, to a large degree, independent of their behavior over time, the coefficient is directly proportional to this variance in the case of stationarity. This has interesting policy implications: As long as the urban system is growing as a whole, efforts to reduce rates of growth in high-growth areas and to raise them in low-growth areas, i.e., to reduce the dispersion in growth rates across cities, will have no effect on the shape of the size distribution of cities. However, if the system were to cease to grow, these same efforts would have a potentially great effect on this distribution. This suggests that the customary pessimism expressed by students of urban phenomena in the efficacy of legislation to alter the form of the size distribution of cities, a pessimism induced by their observation of the persistence of the current distribution over time in many countries, is primarily due to the circumstances in which these systems are observed, i.e., in periods of growth and expansion.     

Land Value Taxation and Housing Development

A bstract . The effects of land value taxation on housing development are studied in three disparate cities: Pittsburgh, McKeesport, and New Castle, Pennsylvania. These places are examples of three different types of city: central city, suburban city , and relatively isolated city , respectively. Shifting taxes from buildings to land is hypothesized to have different effects in the different types of cities. A liquidity effect , due to increases in the land tax rate , is expected to operate in all three types of cities. An incentive effect , due to decreases in the tax rate on improvements , is expected to function in central cities and, possibly, in relatively isolated cities. It is not expected to be important in suburban cities such as McKeesport. An incentive effect was found in Pittsburgh, but not in the other two cities. No evidence of a liquidity effect was found in any of the three cities. An explanation of why observed effects may not conform with hypotheses is given.     

An assessment and ranking of barriers to doing environmental business with China

The transfer of environmental goods and services to China will increasingly be of importance to developed nations as the demand for environmental management services increases in China. A review of the literature on technology transfer to China revealed a range of well recognized and commonly known constraints to transferring technologies to China. There were gaps in the literature in relation to the concerns that environmental professionals have regarding technology transfer to China, as there is limited information on the transfer in environmental goods and services to China. A survey of the non‐trade barriers and their practical impact on the transfer of environmental technologies and goods and services to China, focusing on Australian suppliers, was undertaken to address these gaps. The survey, which was developed from barriers to technology transfer already described in the extensive research addressing the wider issues of technology transfer to China, targeted environmental professionals but also included other professionals with interests in transferring environmental goods and services to China. From the survey, the highest priority barriers to transferring environmental goods and service to China were identified, and those that are most likely to limit Australian vendors of environmental goods and services in their technology transfers to China were protection of intellectual property (IP), limitations of the rule of law, fragmentation and bureaucracy of the Chinese government and establishing appropriate level of ownership (of environmental goods and services providers in China). Examples of Australian experience were also examined, which confirmed these barriers to providing the needed technology and innovation to manage China's increasing environmental impacts. The research also shows that the barriers identified do not appear to be unique to transfer of environmental goods and services but rather generic to the transfer and adoption of Australian technology into China. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

A firm level perspective on migration: the role of extra-EU workers in Italian manufacturing

A production-theory approach to migration is adopted in this paper to address the role of migrant workers from extra-EU countries in Italian manufacturing firms. The adoption of flexible functional forms to model firm-level technology lets us directly derive different measures of elasticity from the coefficients of the estimated production and cost functions. The use of foreign labour is shown to affect the industry composition in favour of low skill intensive sectors and the estimated cross demand elasticities confirm the complementarity between migrant and native workers found in previous studies. However, the two labour inputs prove to be substitutes in terms of the Morishima elasticity of substitution: in general, firms tend to increase the foreign labour intensity of production in response to a decline in migrants’ wage, while the migrant to domestic labour ratio responds to changes in the domestic workers’ wage only for firms in low skill intensive sectors.     

Examining the role of leadership,trust for school culture and policy

Quality of life relies on also the quality of working context and the group dynamic. Culture of schools, trust and leadership facilitate quality in fostering strategic policies in establishing policy and development. The aim of the research study is to examine the role of leadership, trust for school culture in regard to the perceptions of inspectors. As this research stands on qualitative nature, experiences, perceptions of research participants shape the current understanding to give insights on the role of leadership, trust. In addition, establishing school culture is a part of quality to set policy in terms of development, inspection is a moderation of encapsulating the nature of school culture. Interview was employed to gain understanding and experiences of inspectors in relation to leadership, trust for the school culture. Mission, vision of schools, principles of schools, loyalty to schools, policies, objectives of practices in schools, social interaction in schools. Thematic analysis through laddering was done that five themes were established in examining leadership, trust in the school culture. It is important that employees in the training organization act in a joint view on implementing educational objectives. This is achieved by developing positive attitudes in people and by being able to act constructively with each other. The research results revealed that the inspectors who are currently working at the Ministry of National Education have their views on the mission, vision and leadership of schools and what they think about school culture trust in schools.

     

Making the Prevention of Homelessness a Priority: The Role of Social Innovation

Mass homelessness emerged in Canada in the wake of neoliberal policies that reduced government production of housing and other supportive measures. Efforts to reduce homelessness have occurred in three stages: 1) an emergency response in the 1990s that consisted mostly of investment in shelters, soup kitchens, and day programs, 2) the implementation of community plans to end homelessness, combined with the adoption of Housing First as a strategy that seeks to provide reliable shelter as a first step to anyone without it, followed by other remedial services, and 3) the recent development in Canada of early intervention strategies to prevent homelessness from its inception. The second stage was highly successful in dealing with the situation of chronically homeless adults, and many communities have begun to see reductions in homelessness. However effective, this approach does not break the cycle by intercepting potentially homeless individuals in their youth, which is when it begins for many people. Canada is at the beginning stages of the move towards a stronger focus on prevention, aided by a social innovation agenda to identify, design, test, and evaluate preventive interventions to determine which ones will be most strategically effective, setting the stage for implementation and going to scale.     

Entrepreneurship and innovativeness of small and medium-sized construction enterprises

The construction industry is a key industry in any economy. Due to its specific characteristics, the industry is of substantial importance to the development of other sectors. Competition is highly intense, and the industry itself is susceptible to changes in market circumstances that force the entities operating in it to continuously take actions to enhance their competitiveness by, among other things, introducing innovative solutions. The objective of the present study is to evaluate the level of innovativeness of enterprises in the small and medium-sized (SME) sector in the Polish construction industry and to identify the factors that influence this level of innovativeness, which relates to the location of the business and managers’ awareness of the significance of innovation in shaping a firm’s competitiveness. Qualitative research was conducted on a sample of 608 companies. The obtained results demonstrate that construction companies from the SME sector in Poland are characterized by a level of innovativeness that is similar to that found in other enterprises, which is a consequence of the relatively high awareness of the significance of innovation to obtaining a competitive position among the managers of these companies. An analysis of the innovative activities of these companies by location shows, in turn, that entities operating in regions that are less economically developed and less attractive in terms of investment are more innovative.     

Swedish auditors' view of auditing: Doing things right versus doing the right things

Abstract

This paper aims to describe and analyse the thought patterns of Swedish auditors with regard to the way in which they audit information provided by listed companies, and possible changes in their duties. Eighty-two auditors were interviewed using the repertory grid technique and open-ended interview questions. To check the stability in the thought patterns of the respondents, six retests were made and, to validate the findings, an expert panel and two reference groups consisting of auditors and other representatives of the accounting and auditing professions were consulted. Distinct patterns emerged in the mean grid of the thought patterns of all the respondents. One dimension was related to the time perspective, past versus future, and another to auditing practice. Auditors devote a relatively long time and considerable effort to objects that can be satisfactorily verified, but not to objects that they perceive as being of primary importance to investors and other stakeholders. This inconsistency in the thought patterns of the auditors is similar to the gap between auditing in practice and stakeholders' expectations of auditing, which is a phenomenon frequently found in previous research. Moreover, the auditors were very reluctant to make statements about any information except that elicited according to current practice. In addition to this traditional view, the auditors appear to be more concerned about their own situation than that of the parties they are meant to be protecting. Doing things right seems to be more important than doing the right things. That the auditors spend much time on objects that they themselves do not consider to be of primary importance for the investors and other stakeholders, and their unwillingness to change current practice is of great concern in Sweden, where there is a strong belief in self-regulation of the auditing profession.     

Cultural differences and entrepreneurial behaviour: an intra-country cross-cultural analysis in Cape Verde

Two recent research trends give rise to the current work: the need to extend the conclusions reached in entrepreneurship studies to other cultural contexts, particularly important given the interest in stimulating the creation of firms in recently industrialised and less developed countries; and the need to go beyond the axiom ‘nation=culture’ in favour of the multiple cultures perspective. With these antecedents, we present the current work, which aims to answer two research questions: (1) are the cultural values associated in the literature with venture creation generalisable to different cultural contexts? (2) are there intra-cultural differences in a country generating differences in the entrepreneurial behaviour of its population? Thus, this work contributes to extending knowledge about entrepreneurship and international cross-cultural management by taking the novel approach of studying the cultural values and the decision to create a venture from the intra-cultural differences perspective. A sample of 448 individuals, obtained in the Republic of Cape Verde and analysed in six territories within this country, allows us to confirm the existence of cultural differences in individualism between regions of the Republic of Cape Verde, as well as their capacity to explain entrepreneurial behaviour in these regions.     

The London Business School with Gower Publishing

Output has stagnated in the main industrialised countries this year but we expect the benefits of lower oil prices to show up in rapid growth from now on. The present weakness in the world economy stems from tighter US fiscal policy and the oil price shock itself. These have combined to reduce domestic demand in the United States, and hence to cut the market for Japanese exports in particular, and also to reduce expenditure by energydependent countries and companies. A further factor is that, with prices of oil-based products falling, there is an incentive to delay expenditure. We expect this impact effect of OPEC III to be short-lived and to give way to its positive effects in the second half of this year. Specifically, we expect consumer spending to lead the recovery as real incomes will be boosted by the terms of trade gain from lower oil prices - equivalent to 3 per cent of GNP in the OECD area as a whole. On the basis of oil prices holding at $15. we forecast OECD output growth of 3 per cent this year, rising to 41/2 per cent in 1987. Additionally, we expect lower oil prices to produce a significant reduction in world inflation. Zero growth of producer prices is forecast on average this year arid consumer price inflation is expected to fall to wards 2 per cent in the course of the year.     

Building value through sustainable project management offices

Organizations' attempts to implement and gain value from investments in project management have resulted in the rapid growth and, in some cases, demise of project management offices (PMOs). The recent research literature on PMOs provides an ambiguous picture of the value case for PMOs and suggests the tenuous nature of their current position in many organizations. In studying project management implementations for the Value of Project Management project, we chose to use three detailed cases and comparisons with the remaining 62 organizations in the value project to study how PMOs are connected to value realization for organizations investing in project management. Specifically, we sought to understand how PMOs deliver sustained value to organizations. Using the theories of Jim Collins (Collins, 2001; Collins & Porras, 1994) as an interpretive framework, we explore these cases to understand how to create and sustain project management value through investment in PMOs.     

“一带一路”框架下的中拉绿色产品贸易:特征、比较优势与出口潜力

在“双循环”背景下,加强“一带一路”建设对中国深化对外开放意义重大,促进中拉绿色贸易符合双方利益,可为“一带一路”延伸至拉美创造新的合作增长点。本文使用2002年至2018年的货物贸易数据,分析了中拉共建“一带一路”过程中中拉绿色产品贸易的特征和趋势,并重点研究了中国绿色产品对拉美的出口潜力。通过使用双边显示性比较优势指数和出口潜力矩阵,文章发现,在现有的中拉货物贸易结构中,绿色产品贸易所占比重较低,贸易对象高度集中,但随着双方经贸合作的全面深化、特别是“一带一路”延伸至拉美,双边绿色产品贸易金额和种类都在稳定上升。尽管中国绿色产品在拉美市场面临着地理距离遥远、市场竞争激烈等客观困难,但中国的优势产品已成功出口到拉美。中国的出口潜力更多地取决于拉美地区的市场需求,一旦拉美对绿色产品的需求提升,那么中国就具备进一步扩大向拉美出口该类产品的潜力。此外,出口潜力矩阵也找出了部分对拉美市场而言具备不可替代性的中国产品,这也将成为中国潜在的对拉出口重点绿色产品。     

The Social,Spatial, and Economic Roots of Urban Inequality in Africa: Contextualizing Jane Jacobs and Henry George

Unravelling the social and economic roots of urban inequality in Africa has remained a thorny issue in African political economy. Stripped to its bare essentials, the critical questions are who causes urban inequality, what causes it, and how it is caused? While all different, the questions are interrelated. Answering the “who causes inequality” question requires a related analysis of what and why, and that is connected to the how question. Indeed, the how question has two parts—how inequality is caused and how it can be addressed. Both are connected to the why question and to its resolution. Unfortunately, while studies about urban inequality abound, they tend to hive off one aspect or another of the tripartite questions on inequality and, even worse, they study the three questions separately. This article tries to overcome the existing atomistic and piecemeal approach to the study of urban inequality in Africa by contextualizing the work of Jane Jacobs and Henry George, who took a holistic view of urban inequality. It argues that Jacobsianism and Georgism have much to offer in terms of understanding urban inequality in Africa, but neither analysis goes far enough to be able to serve as a solid foundation for policy. Ultimately, it is in their approach to urban analysis—the emphasis on context, on actual urban problems, inductivism, and some of their mechanisms for change such as George's land tax and cautious abstraction, in that order, along with their combined vision—which I call “diversity in equality”—that can add to the insights of postcolonialism in understanding and transforming urban inequality in Africa.     

The Familiar Face of the State: Affect,Emotion and Citizen Entitlements in Dehradun,India

Municipal Councillors (MCs) are the ‘familiar face of the state’ in Dehradun, India: the first port of call for citizens seeking to claim entitlements from the state. The way MCs respond to the requests of their constituents is a major factor in the uneven distribution of government welfare and services. This article seeks to contribute to understandings of citizen entitlements by drawing attention to the role of affect and emotion in shaping the interactions between MCs and voters. I examine the ways citizens consciously or unconsciously engender emotions and affective responses, and the effect these have in mobilizing MCs. Attention to the, at times, involuntary nature of these responses suggests a need to go beyond the instrumental and calculating motivations of municipal councillors, to consider the way they are compelled and animated to meet the demands of some citizens, but not of others. The capacity to affect, and the ways one is affected, are tied to the social identities and self-making projects of both the MC and the voter, resulting in an uneven (mal)distribution of state resources. A focus on affective configurations in urban governance thereby reveals heretofore overlooked determinants of unequal access to urban resources and services.     

Qualitative growth and complementary technology: Beyond the technical fix

At present, improved environmental performance and corporate growth work hand in hand as part of a single business strategy. Growth enables the company to invest in environmental technology; environmental technology in turn enables it to grow while holding increases in environmental impact to a minimum. But this ‘Golden Age’ relationship could break down as the environmental benefits of technological advance are overwhelmed by growth in output. For this reason, there is already concern in some industries that the need to protect the environment may lead in due course to regulations designed to suppress further growth. However, any attempt to suppress growth would have extremely severe economic implications, and would require us to address the Growth Enigma: how are the needs of a stable economy and a stable environment to be met at the same time? The concept of ‘qualitative growth’, i.e. corporate strategy based on a reduced rate of growth, is examined with special reference to the airline industry and to Swissair, which has recently announced a qualitative growth strategy. It turns out that the company is not in fact implementing the strategy, but the declaration of intent itself reveals some valuable lessons which may help in a solution to the central problem of growth and the environment.