Creating and Recreating Heritage in Singapore

The aim of this paper is to examine the extent to which public planning and policy have created a 'national' identity for Singapore since its independence in 1965, the importance of heritage to contemporary Singapore, and how heritage is marketed to Singaporeans and visitors. Over the last 30 years Singapore has striven to create itself as one of the most modern and successful of the ASEAN nations, but this may have been at the cost of its indigenous cultures and authentic heritage. Many of the craft industries common in the late 1970s and 1980s have been lost, and while the Singapore Tourism Board promotes Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Glam as 'pockets of individuality' in Singapore's multicultural society, souvenirs currently on sale were made in China, India, Malaysia and Indonesia. By contrast, the enduring image of 'Singapore Girl' for Singapore Airlines led to an entire souvenir culture and a batik clad 'Singapore Girl' Barbie Doll.     

An Interview with Barbara Bergmann: Leading feminist economist

Barbara Bergmann, Emerita Professor of Economics at both the American University and the University of Maryland, has been a leader in the development and establishment of feminist economics, in scholarly, policy and organizational capacities. Professor Bergmann is particularly known for her crowding model of discrimination. She is the author of an excellent, accessible undergraduate textbook, The Economic Emergence of Women (1986) . She has authored several policy-oriented books, including In Defense of Affirmative Action (1996a), Saving Our Children from Poverty: what the United States can learn from France (1996b) , and What Child Care System for America? (2000). Professor Bergmann is past president of the Society for the Advancement of Socioeconomics, the Eastern Economic Association and the International Association for Feminist Economics. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard in 1959. This interview was conducted at the ASSA meetings in Chicago on 4 January 1998.     

An investigation of customer order flow in the foreign exchange market

This paper examines the effect that heterogeneous customer orders flows have on exchange rates by using a new, and the largest, proprietary dataset of weekly net order flow segmented by customer type across nine of the most liquid currency pairs. We make several contributions. Firstly, we investigate the extent to which customer order flow can help to explain exchange rate movements over and above the influence of macro-economic variables. Secondly, we address the issue of whether order flows contain (private) information which explain exchange rates changes. Thirdly, we look at the usefulness of order flow in forecasting exchange rate movements at longer horizons than those generally considered in the micro-structure literature. Finally we address the question of whether the out-of-sample exchange rate forecasts generated by order flows can be employed profitably in the foreign exchange markets.     

Consumer‐generated media and product labelling: designed in California,assembled in China

Product country‐of‐origin labelling is an important extrinsic cue for consumers about a product's attributes. In a globalized world where products components and parts originate from multiple countries, companies have resorted to inventive country‐of‐origin labelling. The objective then of this paper is to better understand consumers' evaluation of products that have inventive country‐of‐origin labelling (i.e. Designed in California, Assembled in China). Exploratory qualitative data were collected from consumer‐generated media (36 weblogs) using Nielsen's Research BlogPulse tool. A grounded theory analysis revealed that four key themes emerged from the data that related to confusion about the labelling strategy, strong symbolic and emotional ties to country‐of‐origin, and the importance of country‐of‐origin as a quality signal.     

The influence of instructor gender on learning and instructor ratings

This paper uses two large databases to determine if students of a given gender learn more from instructors of the same gender and if instructors of a given gender receive higher ratings from students of the same gender compared to students of the opposite gender. The Indiana University (IU) data set was collected over a six-year period from the fall of 1984 to the spring of 1990 for associate instructors teaching introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics courses. A subset of the data collected in norming the third edition of the Test of Understanding College Economics is the TUCE III data set. The results of this study do not lend support for a positive gender-match role model effect concerning student learning and instructor ratings. This effect appeared only in the IU micro data set but did not appear on a consistent yearly basis. The effect did not appear at all in the IU macro data or either of the TUCE III data sets.     

The Economic Benefits of the Biological Control of Rabbits in Australia, 1950–2011

Wild European rabbits are serious agricultural and environmental pests in Australia; myxoma virus and rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus have been used as biocontrol agents to reduce impacts. We review the literature on changes in rabbit numbers together with associated reports on the economic benefits from controlling rabbits on agricultural production. By using loss–expenditure frontier models in with and without biocontrol scenarios, it is conservatively estimated that biological control of rabbits produced a benefit of A$70 billion (2011 A$ terms) for agricultural industries over the last 60 years. The consequences for ongoing rabbit control and research investment are discussed.     

Tracking Resource Use in a Welfare Organization: Needs, Costs and Co-production

Public sector welfare organizations are situated at the sharp end of resource allocations in society and must cope in an environment where demand frequently far exceeds supply. In consequence, the resource problem of meeting the need for social welfare is never fully resolvable and evaluations of the ways in which scarce resources are used within the public sector are of critical importance for public policy. This paper draws on an empirical study of a welfare service for homeless young people in order to illustrate, first, the cost implications of two different approaches to service delivery (one more superficial – termed 'people-processing'; one more in depth – termed, 'people-changing') and, second, how the characteristics of the clients served (in particular, their ability to fully engage with the service termed –'co-production') can have a marked impact on the cost of the services delivered to them.     

Toward High Reliability Project Organizing in Safety‐Critical Projects

High reliability organizations claim to be special organizations that have consistently demonstrated safe performance in operating environments, which are simultaneously of high technical complexity, high consequence, and high tempo. This article argues that the literature on high reliability organizing, which emerged through studying day‐to‐day operations in the nuclear industry, air traffic control industry, and U.S. navy aircraft carriers, might hold important lessons for how the project management community can approach the management of safety‐critical projects—projects in which safety is of paramount importance. Its aim is to consider how high reliability organizing might be realized in these safety‐critical projects.     

Incorporating Systemic Influences Into Risk Measurements: A Survey of the Literature

Procyclicality has emerged as a potential drawback to adoption of risk-sensitive bank capital requirements. Systematic risk factors may result in increases (decreases) in bank capital requirements when the economy is depressed (overheated), thereby decreasing (increasing) bank lending capacity and exacerbating business cycle fluctuations. Procyclicality may result from systematic risk emanating from common macroeconomic influences or from interdependencies across firms as financial markets and institutions consolidate internationally. We survey the literature on cyclical effects on operational risk, credit risk and market risk measures.