OECD’s interim economic outlook,March 2017

The OECD’s overall projection for the global economy is for a modest pick-up in global growth. The bad news is that this remains too slow to make good on commitments and expectations, and has fragile foundations of sluggish productivity growth and rising inequalities. Further, a range of financial vulnerabilities have built up, and there is the threat of rising trade protectionism. To grow the global economy and share the prosperity, we need to introduce fiscal initiatives using the fiscal space gained by low or negative interest rates. These combined fiscal-and-structural initiatives to boost inclusive growth can support demand in the near term but also will address medium-term supply issues.     

Citizen and consumer involvement in UK public services

This paper is concerned with the involvement and participation of citizens and consumers in UK public services. It reflects on levels of involvement over a 30‐year period and maps this accordingly. Using models of participation, the paper reviews the citizen and consumer concepts. Conclusions are drawn about involvement and participation in practice and how this will develop in the future.     

Uptake of organisational work–life balance opportunities: the context of support

This research examines the relationship between structural and cultural dimensions affecting managerial decision-making about work–life balance (WLB) opportunities. Through a top-down study of two contrasting Irish organisations, we identify how each of five dimensions of work–life culture: ‘managerial and organisational support’, ‘organisational time expectations’, ‘career consequences’, ‘gendered perception of policy use’ and ‘co-worker support’ are mediated through managers to affect availability and uptake of WLB opportunities and creating gaps between policy and practice. This study demonstrates how marked distinctions between the personal opportunities managers may wish to offer and the discretion available to them arise. Secondly, the concept of organisational work–life culture is advanced by elaborating the ‘context of support’, namely interdependencies between organisational culture and structure that affect the uptake of WLB opportunities. Implications for researchers and practitioners are also discussed.     

A study of the internal control structure for electronic data interchange systems using the analytic hierarchy process

Electronic data interchange (EDI) systems involve the direct exchange of structured business data between trading partner computer systems. A reliable internal control structure is the primary means of providing assurance of information integrity in EDI systems. This paper reports the results of a study that examined information system (IS) managers' and computerised information system (CIS) auditors' judgements of the relative importance of elements of the internal control structure for EDI systems, using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). It then assessed the degree of consensus in their judgements. Generally consensus was found to be high. However, the areas where there was lack of consensus may indicate potential areas of control weakness in EDI systems.     

Wages and skills utilization: effect of broad skills and generic skills on wages in Singapore

Many people go for training to upgrade their skills which is hoped to pave the way for better pay. But what are the kinds of skills that really affect wages? Employers have emphasized the value of generic skills such as interpersonal and communication skills, teamwork and problem solving. Does possession of these skills translate to at least the same or better wages as compared with having broad skills represented by educational qualifications and job‐related training? This paper, arising from the research project on the Skills Utilisation in Singapore, aims to answer which skills can have more influence on wages and which job‐related training in terms of training duration can have more impact on wages. Using ordinal logistic regression, our findings show that educational qualification and initial training time can influence wages as well as utilization of leadership, planning and problem‐solving skills.     

Teaching problem solving and database skills that transfer

The main goal of teaching a database application is to prepare students to use the application as a tool to gather information and to solve problems. This study investigated two approaches to teaching problem solving with database applications with the goal of preparing students to transfer their problem solving and database skills to solve an ill structured business problem. The findings reveal that neither the problem solving instruction approach nor the problem solving discovery approach improved students' transfer of problem solving skills. Students continue to have difficulty selecting efficient database procedures to support their problem solving processes. Further research is recommended.     

Returns to public sector plant breeding in the presence of spill‐ins and private goods: the case of bean research in Michigan

This article illustrates a methodology for assessing economic returns to a publicly funded breeding program in the presence of private sector investments, and spill‐ins from other contemporary public institutions and past research efforts. The approach consists of determining yield gains from bean improvement research; applying these yield gain estimates to measure benefits attributable to different institutional players and time periods; and then assessing the benefit‐cost ratios of investments in a bean improvement program since 1980 by Michigan State University (MSU). The results indicate that investments in MSU's bean breeding program have yielded benefits to costs ratio in the range of 0.7 to 2.2, depending on the attribution rule used to estimate the benefits. The estimated benefit/cost ratios reported in this study are lower‐bound estimates, as they do not account for potential benefits from area planted to MSU varieties outside of Michigan (spillover effects), which was 1.5 times greater than the area planted to MSU‐bred varieties within Michigan in the period 1998–2002. The implications of the increasingly privatized bean seed markets for the role of public sector research in bean improvement research are discussed.     

Privacy Regulation and Market Structure

This paper models how regulatory attempts to protect the privacy of consumers' data affect the competitive structure of data‐intensive industries. Our results suggest that the commonly used consent‐based approach may disproportionately benefit firms that offer a larger scope of services. Therefore, though privacy regulation imposes costs on all firms, it is small firms and new firms that are most adversely affected. We then show that this negative effect will be particularly severe for goods where the price mechanism does not mediate the effect, such as the advertising‐supported Internet.