People management after state socialism: A literature review and research agenda

This paper reviews the existing evidence base on the practice of people management in the context of post-state socialist countries of Asia. The focus is on Asian successor states of the Soviet Union and those under direct Soviet domination. In an undeniably diverse region, in all the countries under review there appears to be a disarticulation between liberal market reforms, economic progress, the ability to attract FDI and the development and persistence of a formal employment base. Extended informal networks of support often play an important role, inter alia, in informing recruitment, although clan based networks appear as quite impermeable to outsiders. Regulatory coverage is uneven but in many instances job protection is high. Drawing on the available research base, this paper consolidates and extends the existing state of knowledge on people management within the institutional contexts examined and draws out the implications for theorising and practice. The study highlights how reforms in one area may lead to counter-movements in others, shoring up existing modes of people management. Again, whilst clans and middle classes both have channels for political advocacy, there are fewer opportunities for workers and their representatives; this means that there is little impetus for legislation to promote better practice, workplace inclusivity and equity.     

Entrepreneur and the state-managed economy under socialism

The paper deals with institutional change in Poland. The accompanying pherlomenon is an escalating wave of entrepreneurial ventures. They take on different legal forms. The most popular, limited liability companies, emerge in the private, the cooperative, and the state sectors, and often across these sectors. These developments give rise to new interest groups which generally support a market reform. The conflict between the market oriented sector and the administered sector becomes one of the main factors influencing the economic policies of the state. In the paper, the development of the private sector is analyzed with the use of measures relating to the proportion of revenues from the private sector in the total state budget revenues.     

Industrial policy,social capital,human capital,and firm-level competitive advantage

Despite the popularity of governmental action devised to foster firm performance, the link between industrial policy and firm-specific human capital and social capital has received scant attention in the strategic management literature. In this paper, we build a dynamic optimization model which bridges concepts from industrial policy, social capital, human capital, and firm-level competitive advantage. We derive theoretical and policy implications from our competitiveness model, concluding that it increases in the opportunity cost of social capital reduce the production of human capital, so the optimal opportunity cost of social capital under feasible industrial policy should be set equal to zero. A government’s optimal industrial policy to help accumulate and churn human capital should reduce the opportunity cost of social capital to zero and reduce the probability of human capital leaving the community to zero. Thus, the model not only expands the potential determinants of competitive advantage in the context of governmental intervention, but also broadens the human capital theory and social capital theory in the creation of firm-specific human capital.

     

Modeling social,economic, and health perspectives for optimal pandemic policy decision-making

While different control strategies in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic have helped decrease the number of infections, these strategies have had an adverse economic impact on businesses. Therefore, optimal timing and scale of closure and reopening strategies are required to prevent both different waves of the pandemic and the negative economic impact of control strategies. This paper proposes a novel multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MOMILP) formulation, which results in the optimal timing of closure and reopening of states and industries in each state to mitigate the economic and epidemiological impact of a pandemic. The three objectives being pursued include: (i) the epidemiological impact, (ii) the economic impact on the local businesses, and (iii) the economic impact on the trades between industries. The proposed model is implemented on a dataset that includes 11 states, the District of Columbia, and 19 industries in the US. The solved by augmented ε-constraint approach is used to solve the multi-objective model, and a final strategy is selected from the set of Pareto-optimal solutions based on the least cubic distance of the solution from the optimal value of each objective. The Pareto-optimal solutions suggest that for any control decision (state and industry closure or reopening), the economic impact and the epidemiological impact change in the opposite direction, and it is more effective to close most states while keeping the majority of industries open during the planning horizon.     

The renewed Lisbon Strategy and social exclusion policy

In the light of its manifest mid‐term failure to make progress towards its key objectives, the EU introduced in 2005 a major ‘relaunch’ of its Lisbon Strategy for economic, employment and social development. The core aspect of this was ‘prioritisation’, involving an increased focus on growth and jobs. This raised the issue of whether the pursuit of greater competitiveness would lead to a downgrading of the importance of the original social objectives of the programme. In its focal concern on the fight against social exclusion, the EU's strategy involved both employment and social objectives. These emphasised in particular the creation not only of more but of ‘better jobs’ and the pursuit of actions to reinforce ‘social inclusion’ and ‘social cohesion’. This article considers whether a significant shift did occur in policy emphasis and the implications of the Lisbon reform for progress in reducing the risks of social exclusion. It reviews first the basic changes in the formulation of the strategy and then examines in turn the effectiveness of its policy initiatives with respect to employment, the quality of work and social inclusion.     

都市农民的二次分化与分类社会保障对策

都市农民工在城市产业分工体系的影响上已经出现了具有层级意义的二次分化,由此产生了对社会保障需求不同层次的差异性,存在实施分类社会保障的现实可能性.因此,按照城乡协调的科学发展观的要求,城镇社会保障的制度扩展与制度创新应该依据都市农民工的分化状况有序地进行城乡社会保障制度的对策.     

Forecasting in social settings: The state of the art

This paper provides a non-systematic review of the progress of forecasting in social settings. It is aimed at someone outside the field of forecasting who wants to understand and appreciate the results of the M4 Competition, and forms a survey paper regarding the state of the art of this discipline. It discusses the recorded improvements in forecast accuracy over time, the need to capture forecast uncertainty, and things that can go wrong with predictions. Subsequently, the review classifies the knowledge achieved over recent years into (i) what we know, (ii) what we are not sure about, and (iii) what we don’t knowIn the first two areas, we explore the difference between explanation and prediction, the existence of an optimal model, the performance of machine learning methods on time series forecasting tasks, the difficulties of predicting non-stable environments, the performance of judgment, and the value added by exogenous variables. The article concludes with the importance of (thin and) fat tails, the challenges and advances in causal inference, and the role of luck.     

Confucianism,socialism, and capitalism: A comparison of cultural ideologies and implied managerial philosophies and practices in the P. R. China

This article posits that management theories and practices in the P. R. China have been influenced by three cultural forces: Confucianism, socialism, and capitalism. It explores the impact of the three ideological systems, cultural values, and beliefs on managerial philosophies and practices. It is suggested that contemporary organizational behavior and management practice in the P. R. China tend to reflect ideologies of three cultural forces.     

Education choice under uncertainty: Implications for public policy

We analyse how progressive taxation and education subsidies affect schooling decisions when the returns to education are stochastic. We use the theory of real options to solve the problem of education choice in a dynamic stochastic model. We show that education attainment will be an increasing function of the risk associated with education. Furthermore, this result holds regardless of the degree of risk aversion. We also show that progressive taxes will tend to increase education attainment.