The EU’s Medium-term Financial Perspective and Turkey’s Potential Slice of the Cake

The issue of Turkey’s membership in the EU remains controversial, and the arguments for and against are not only economic. Nevertheless, the potential economic impact of Turkish membership does play an important role. How much financial support is Turkey presently receiving under existing pre-accession programmes and what changes could be expected in the case of full membership?     

An Analysis of Factors Influencing Membership Retention at a Children’s Museum

Membership fees are an important source of sustained revenue for not-for-profit organizations. Moreover, these membership programs facilitate loyalty to the organization and provide certainty to a percentage of revenue intake. In this study, we examine how frequency of visits, satisfaction with membership programs, length of membership, age, average household income, and driving time affect membership retention in a children’s museum. Findings indicate that all of the factors above influence membership renewal intention. We summarize this study with recommendations for both member recruitment and retention for not-for-profit organizations that utilize membership programs.     

The Effect of GATT/WTO on Export and Import Price Volatility

Despite much interest and discussion concerning the trade‐promoting effects of membership in multilateral trade agreements, little is known about the effect of membership on world trade prices. This paper fills this gap by studying the effects of membership on export and import price volatility. We document a surprisingly strong and robust empirical regularity: GATT/WTO membership reduces the volatility of prices over time for both import and export countries, with similar results found for free trade agreements. We show that results are not driven by sample selection or endogeneity concerns and that the effect is captured by members subject to rigorous accession procedures.     

我国涉外税收政策入世后的调整

加入WTO以后,我国的政策、法律法规有很多地方需要加以调整和修改,在涉外税收政策方面也应该与时俱进,适应经济发展的需要。文章分析了我国现行涉外税收政策存在的问题,提出了调整涉外税收政策的一些看法和建议。     

The Political Economy of Brexit: Why Making It Easier to Leave the Club Could Improve the EU

The UK exit from the EU represents a qualitative change in the nature of EU membership. On the one hand, it conveyed the lesson that for the Union to be sustainable, membership needs to entail constant caretaking as far as individual members’ contributions to the common good are concerned, with both rights and obligations. Countries with preferences that are too divergent for the Union to function properly should then not be discouraged to invoke Article 50 and to opt instead for membership in the EEA or for a free trade agreement. The Union has to deliver to be sustainable, but it cannot do so if there is a constant hold up of decisions that are in the common interest. On the other hand, with the eurozone having established itself as the de facto core of European (political) integration, the UK’s preference for a stand-alone (and incomplete) economic union became untenable, because the need to make the monetary union work calls for further integration and institution-building in the economic union sphere.     

The potential of African trade integration – Panel data evidence for the COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite

ABSTRACT

The COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite FTA, formed in 2011, is supposed to be a milestone towards Africa's continental trade integration. This study analyzes the impact of regional integration among the Tripartite countries on their bilateral imports before that date to evaluate the latest integration efforts. We estimate an extended gravity model on a large panel of 51 African countries using yearly observations from 1995 to 2010. We proxy existing formal trade barriers by sample average tariff data on imports from the world as well as indicator variables for the membership in regional FTAs. We consider different estimation techniques and discuss distinct sets of fixed effects. The PPML regression results indicate that remaining tariffs are significantly negatively correlated with imports throughout the preferred multiplicative models. An FTA status does not show a clear-cut import enhancing effect. In the specifications that control for country-year effects, the EAC coefficient is positively correlated with imports, and the COMESA and SADC FTA membership show a positive relation to imports within some reduced-sample robustness checks.     

Modelling the Extensive Margin of World Trade: New Evidence on GATT and WTO Membership

Recent literature has argued that, contrary to the results of a seminal paper by Rose (2004), General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/World Trade Organization (WTO) membership does promote bilateral trade, at least for developed economies and if membership includes non‐formal compliance. We review the literature to identify open issues. We then develop a simple extension of the gravity model that gives rise to an extensive country margin of trade separating positive trade from zero trade country pairs. The model is used to identify WTO membership effects at both the intensive and the extensive margins. Empirical estimation of this model, based on Poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood methods with exporter and importer fixed effects, allows us to readdress the empirical issue of whether GATT/WTO membership does or does not promote trade. We find that GATT membership was successful on the extensive margin of world trade but not on the intensive margin. For the recent WTO episode (1995–2008), we find consistent and robust evidence for a substantial trade‐creating role of membership which is driven primarily by the intensive margin. WTO membership results in higher bilateral trade of about 40 per cent.     

Member Values Over Time. A Study of the Relationship Between Member Values,Age and Length Of Membership

Expectations of association members change over time depending on two factors: age and length of membership. In the product- and service-marketing literature, the fact of changing needs and expectations during a customer’s life cycle is already well explored. So far, this is not the case in the research on members of nonprofit organizations. This paper closes this research gap from a member-value perspective by discussing the links among age, length of membership, and value perception. Survey data from 1,613 members of a Swiss hiking trail association reveal that both temporal metrics show significant positive relationships with all member-value dimensions: enjoyment, affection, identity, power, participation, understanding, and safety. In this respect, length of membership shows stronger effects than age and the only member value unaffected by time is that of individual economic goals. The paper closes with practical implications for the management of membership associations.     

The effect of WTO on the extensive and the intensive margins of trade

We use 6-digit bilateral trade data to document the effect of WTO/GATT membership on the extensive and intensive product margins of trade. We construct gravity equations for the two product margins motivated by Chaney (2008). The empirical results show that standard gravity variables provide good explanatory power for bilateral trade on both margins. Importantly, we show that the impact of the WTO is concentrated almost exclusively on the extensive product margin of trade, i.e. trade in goods that were not previously traded. In our preferred specification, WTO membership increases the extensive margin of exports by 25%. At the same time, WTO membership has a negative impact on the intensive margin. Based on novel comparative statics results about how fixed and variable trade costs impact the product margins of trade, our results suggest that WTO membership works by reducing primarily the fixed rather than the variable costs of trade.     

Selbstorganisation von Verbrauchern-theoretische Überlegungen und empirische Befunde

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag referiert die Ergebnisse zweier in den Jahren 1977/78 durchgeführten Befragungen von Vorständen und Mitgliedern von Verbrauchervereinen in der BRD und bringt sie in Zusammenhang mit weiterführenden Argumentationen, die im Rahmen laufender Forschungsvorhaben der AGVP erarbeitet wurden.Ausgehend von einer Analyse der Handlungen von fremd- und selbstorganisierten Verbrauchervereinen wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob die derzeit bestehenden selbstorganisierten Verbrauchervereine eine formale und inhaltliche Alternative zu bestehenden Verbraucherfremdorganisationen bilden.

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The paper reports on a study of local consumer organizations in the Federal Republic of Germany with and without individual membership. The study is part of a theoretical and empirical evaluation of present consumer policy aiming at the discovery of ways to activate consumer organizations. Above all, the project explores whether organizations with individual membership would be an organizationally feasible and qualitatively preferable alternative.To do this, it was necessary, as a first research step, to evaluate the existing local consumer organizations by considering various aspects of organizational and individual behaviour within them. Questionnaires were constructed for both officials and members of the organizations. The study shows that local consumer organizations with and without individual membership do not differ much in their activities. Distributing information about prices and qualities of goods becomes the main task. The direct membership of consumers in consumer organizations does not automatically lead to a qualitatively different situation.Member consumer organizations—that receive their legitimization because of a connection to the rank-and-file — need active consumers. Therefore, in the second step in this research phase, an attempt was made to explain the extent of individual activity in consumer organizations. It was shown that preference for collective strategies and participative organizational structure were relatively strong predictors. The study shows further that organizations without individual membership tend to resemble member organizations; as the organizational structure becomes rigid, individual activity ceases.

     

An institution-stakeholder framework for examining business relationship dynamics in a transforming Eastern Europe

Since the collapse of the USSR, most Central and East European countries have been integrated into global economic institutions through membership in the WTO and EU significantly changing the regional business climate. Through an in-depth analysis of a petroleum pipeline project initiated in Ukraine, a country on the EU's periphery, this research presents a framework based on institutional climate and stakeholder levers of influence for explaining the type of existing and evolving business relationships in the region. A relational matrix for Eastern Europe is developed with a set of guidelines for global firms and investors seeking markets in the region.     

Proliferating Regional Trade Arrangements: Why and Whither?

This paper investigates why regional trade arrangements (RTAs) are proliferating extensively and how the effects of multiple RTAs, by interacting with each other, evolve over time. Our empirical analysis, based on an extended gravity model utilising a large panel dataset of 175 countries from 1948 to 1999, shows that RTAs on average increase global trade by raising intra‐bloc trade without damaging extra‐bloc trade. The net trade effects, however, heavily depend on the types of RTA strategic evolution over time, which we categorise as ‘expansionary’ RTAs, ‘duplicate’ RTAs or ‘overlapping’ RTAs. We find that countries excluded from an RTA can benefit more from duplicating a separate RTA than from joining an existing RTA. This result explains why the number of bilateral trade blocs, rather than the membership size of existing RTAs, is currently exploding. We also find that the net trade‐creating effects of RTAs are substantially lower for countries participating in overlapping RTAs. This result suggests that it is less likely that the currently proliferating RTAs will completely merge and lead the world economy to global free trade. Our empirical results are robust to controlling for the characteristics of countries that may influence the impact of RTAs.     

Tax-based Own Resources as a Core Element of a Future-Oriented Design of the EU System of Own Resources

Sustainability-oriented tax-based own resources would do more than just help to close the existing sustainability gaps in EU taxation.Member States primarily consider their individual net positions, i.e. the difference between their payments into the EU budget and the transfers they receive out of it, when determining the benefits derived from the EU (budget). Much less attention is paid to indirect benefits from EU membership and expenditures, which generally exceed Member States’ contributions to the EU budget considerably.     

A Neural Network Classification of Export Success in Japanese Service Firms

Abstract

This study examines the export performance of 350 randomly selected Japanese engineering service firms. Inquiry is made regarding environmental, organizational, managerial, strategic, and functional determinants of these exporting firms. Two primary questions are addressed. Can performance category membership of engineering service exporters be predicted? Second and foremost, which determinants are the most effective in differentiating between the export performance categories? An Artificial Neural Network is selected as the statistical method because of the different perspective it provides for a highly non-linear function having many variables, offering results that consistently prove to numerically approximate such functions much easier than conventional methods, together with the ability to dependably and accurately predict membership classification while providing weighted analyses of input variables. Findings suggest that each group's membership can be consistently and accurately predicted and further identify which determinants dominantly impact category membership as supported by differences in the feature extraction phase of the neural network approach.     

The Constitution of the International Purchasing and Supply Education and Research Association (IPSERA)

At its inception it was resolved to prepare a Constitution for the International Purchasing and Supply Education and Research Association (IPSERA), and this report sets out the proposals that were presented for the approval of the membership in March 1994. As is required by a comprehensive Constitution, the main areas of importance for the efficient working of the Association are addressed. These include the name, aim, objectives, membership criteria, management issues, affiliation possibilities, the manner of conducting general meetings, financial control matters, rules of operating, dissolution contingencies and ways in which the Constitution may be altered. While subject to final ratification in 1995, the Constitution has been favourably received by the membership.     

Membership Benefits,Membership Action: Why Incentives for Activism Are What Members Want

SUMMARY

This article identifies the benefits of political party membership and which of these benefits also operate as incentives for participation. This exploration is conducted in the context of competing relationship marketing hypotheses, and frameworks from other relevant academic disciplines.

Exploratory empirical research identifies two purposive and three solidary benefits of membership. Values functional motivations, socialization and job satisfaction are identified as having statistically significant relationships with participation. Frequency of agreement with party policies and enhancement functional motivations do not appear to have any relationship with participation.

The article concludes that members using their membership as a vehicle for realizing solidary benefits are more likely to respond to incentives for participation, whilst those merely seeking a relationship with their party are more likely be inactive.     

New membership function for poverty measure

Fuzziness in a fuzzy set is determined by its membership function (m.f) which translates the reality of a problem. Accordingly, the shapes of membership functions (m.fs) are important for a particular problem such as poverty since they effect on a fuzzy inference system. Some authors have used to visualize the behaviour of poverty, different shapes like triangular, trapezoidal. In this paper, a specific (m.f), named modified logistic membership function better illustrating the complicated reality, is proposed to measure poverty. The modified logistic membership function is first formulated for several states of poverty and its flexibility in taking up vagueness in poverty is established by an analytical approach using aggregate operators in order to infer a logical conclusion measuring poverty. An application based on individual well-being data from Tunisian households in 2010 is presented to illustrate use of proposed concepts.     

近五年我国科技社团会员发展与服务研究现状

党中央高度重视党的群团工作,近年来先后出台了一系列文件政策,对新时代科技社团会员发展与服务工作提出了新的更高要求。在科协系统深化改革的背景下,本文对近五年我国科技社团会员发展与服务相关研究文献进行了综述,梳理了科技社团会员发展模式和会员服务形式,比较和总结以往的相关理论成果,以期为我国科技社团会员发展与服务相关理论研究提供基础,同时并借助现有理论成果为实践工作提供指导和借鉴。本研究对于加快会员发展,提升会员服务质量,夯实组织基础,进一步推进治理结构和治理方式改革、建设世界一流学会具有重要意义。     

Signaling Sustainability Leadership: Empirical Evidence of the Value of DJSI Membership

We explore the relationship between corporate sustainability, reputation, and firm value by asking whether signaling sustainability leadership through membership on a recognized sustainability index is value generating. Increasingly, stakeholders are demanding that firms demonstrate their commitment to sustainability. One signal that companies can send to stakeholders to indicate that they are sustainability leaders is membership on a recognized “best in class” sustainability index. This article explores both the short-term and the intermediary impact on North American firms of being included or removed from the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI). Our results provide evidence that being added to the DJSI results in a sustained increase in a firm’s share price, suggesting that the benefits of being included on the DJSI outweigh the costs associated with applying. This article also notes a temporary decrease in the value of firms for the first 10 days after their removal from the DJSI; however, this effect is eliminated within the next ten trading days.