Estimating a socially optimal water price for irrigation versus an environmentally optimal water price through the use of Geographical Information Systems and Social Accounting Matrices

This article develops a method for establishing water prices and their effects in order to provide policy makers an environmentally and socially optimal range of regional prices for irrigation water. Two prices are determined. The “environmentally optimal price” of water is defined as the one that internalizes the environmental costs generated by agricultural consumption. The “social optimally price” of water is defined as the one that maximizes levies on water for agriculture without affecting the regional economy. The environmentally optimal price is calculated with an economic model built over a Geographical Information System (GIS) that allows the economic quantification and valuation of the environmental cost of water in different basins. The optimal price is calculated with a demand curve for irrigation water introduced into a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) to observe if the regional economy can accept higher prices without affecting the regional GDP. Potential water prices are established, ranging from prices that minimize the negative impact in the regional economy to those that totally internalize the environmental cost of water.     

Why do patterns of environmental response differ? A stakeholders' pressure approach

The objective of this article is to analyze the strategies or patterns of adaptation of firms for responding to environmental requirements or expectations. We specifically analyze the influence of the different pressure agents or stakeholders on the degree of proactivity of these patterns. We therefore propose and validate four types of environmental response pattern, representing particular configurations of both the scope of environmental objectives and their allocation of internal resources. The analysis, which is focused on a sample of 240 industrial firms, provides empirical evidence enabling us to identify, understand, and evaluate the impact of stakeholders on the choice of environmental response pattern. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Regulation and Public Sector Development: A Post-Transition Perspective

The article is devoted to the changing role of the major public policy function of regulation and the changing role of the public sector in various phases of systemic change in central and eastern Europe. It surveys the consequences of bloodletting for the civil service and state capactiy in a world increasingly dominated by delocalisation and dematerialisation. Meanwhile a large part of the economy is unlikely to be transformed into purely asset value maximising units, thus the importance of regulating the intermediate forms of activity between public and private firms is going to gain in importance. Limitations of the current EU model, based on traditions rather than attending tasks of the future are highlighted in both the administrative and the enonomic spheres.     

The influence of ability,benevolence, and integrity in trust between managers and subordinates: the role of ethical reasoning

Numerous researchers have examined the antecedents of trust between managers and subordinates. Recent studies conclude that their influence varies depending on whether what is being examined is a manager's trust in a subordinate or a subordinate's trust in a manager. However, the reasons given to justify this phenomenon present limitations. This article offers a new theoretical approach that relates the influence of each antecedent to Aristotelian forms of reasoning, ethical, and instrumental. The proposed approach shows that the influence of each antecedent depends on which rationality prevails in the person who trusts. The contribution of this article is to better explain the phenomenon of interpersonal trust formation and its logic, while offering at the same time several practical implications for managers interested in developing an organizational culture based on trust. The article begins with a literature review of more relevant empirical studies analyzing superior–subordinate trust formation and presents some theoretical limitations of the arguments described in these works. Then, it offers a new theorerical approach based on Aristotelian thought to explain the influence of the antecedents of trust in management–subordinate relationships. The theoretical contribution is then confirmed in an empirical study of 163 mid‐level managers in Spain.     

Wavelet power spectrum and cross-coherency of Spanish economic variables

We analyze six relevant economic and financial variables for the period 2000M1–2015M3 in the context of the Spanish economy: a financial index (IBEX35), a commodity (crude oil price in euros), a foreign exchange index (EUR/USD), a bond (Spanish 10-year bond), the Spanish national debt and the consumer price index. The goal of this paper is to analyze the main relationships between them by computing, using a special toolbox in MATLAB, the wavelet power spectrum and the cross-wavelet coherency associated with Morlet wavelets, focusing our interest on the period variable. We decompose the time–frequency effects and improve the interpretation of the results by non-expert users in the theory of wavelets. This yields empirical evidence on instability periods and reveals various changes and breaks in the causality relationships for the data available from recent years. Moreover, we introduce a comparison with Gaussian wavelets and use the MATLAB software suite for computing, taking the scale instead of the period as the reference variable. These same variables were analyzed individually in a previous paper that specifically considered the decomposition of non-stationary monthly rate series in the period 2000M1–2014M12 using Daubechies wavelets db8 to visualize high frequency variance, seasonality and trend.