Improving the effectiveness of persuasive communications: Matching message with functional profile

The functional approach to improving communication strategy has received little attention. This research attempts to partially correct this oversight by experimentally verifying the major functional hypothesis: matching message with functional profile brings about attitude change. Working adults were integrated into an experiment which was a before-after with control. The major functional hypothesis was confirmed at the 0.10 level. An associated hypothesis regarding the relative ease of changing value- expressive attitudes compared to utilitarian attitudes was confirmed at the 0.10 level. The results show the importance of matching message with functional profile and highlight the potential inherent in the functional approach.     

The Soviet Union’s attitude

The Soviet Union will not be represented at the North-South Summit in Cancún, even though both the developing countries and the Western industrialised countries would have liked to see it participate in the talks on solving the problem of underdevelopment. What are the USSR’s reasons for its negative attitude? Are there any prospects of involving the Soviet Union and its CMEA partners in joint development cooperation?     

ALTERNATIVE PRODUCTION FRONTIER METHODOLOGIES AND DAIRY FARM EFFICIENCY

This paper estimates technical efficiency (TE) measures using four alternative production frontier models, and evaluates the sensitivity of the results to the choice of methodology. The Cobb-Douglas functional form along with data for 1982 and 1983 from 404 dairy farms located throughout six northeastern states in the US are used in the estimation. A general conclusion is that, broadly speaking, frontier function models are neutrally upwardly scaled versions of the OLS or average model. A second conclusion is that different models yield markedly different efficiency levels across firms. However, the correlation between the indexes from the various methods is high, which implies that the ordinal ranking of firms according to their measured level of technical efficiency appears to be independent of the method used for a given year. By comparison, the correlation between efficiency indexes for the same method across time, although positive, is much lower than the previous set of correlations. Correlation analysis of efficiency versus farm size and of efficiency versus returns over variable costs, based on the alternative models, yielded consistent results.     

A theory of system-transcending integration

The integration of national economies of a different level of development and an opposite quality of system will have a more profound influence in shaping the world of tomorrow. Therefore a theory of economic integration must be formulated which transcends the existing systems, i.e. a theory of co-integration.     

Is the Income Elasticity of the Willingness to Pay for Pollution Control Constant?

How willingness to pay for environmental quality changes as incomes rise is a central question in several areas of environmental economics. This paper explores both theoretically and empirically whether or not the willingness to pay (WTP) for pollution control varies with income. Our model indicates that the income elasticity of the marginal WTP for pollution reduction is only constant under very restrictive conditions. Our empirical analysis tests the null hypothesis that the elasticity of the WTP for pollution control with respect to income is constant, employing a multi-country contingent valuation study of eutrophication reduction in the Baltic Sea. Our findings reject this hypothesis, and estimate an income elasticity of the WTP for eutrophication control of 0.1–0.2 for low-income respondents and 0.6–0.7 for high-income respondents. Thus, our empirical results suggest that the elasticity is not constant but is always less than one. This has implications for how benefits transfer exercises, and for theoretical explanations of the environmental Kuznets curve.     

Challenges in the Portuguese textile and clothing industry: a fight for survival

The Portuguese textile and clothing industry thrived after 1960, when Portugal joined the European Free Trade Association, and it has been an important industry in Portugal in terms of value added, employment, and exports. Nevertheless, the industry has experienced significant challenges with the final integration of the apparel and textile industry into GATT on 1 January 2005, as well as the admission of relatively low-wage Bulgaria and Romania into the European Union in 2007. This paper describes recent trends in the industry between 1995 and 2016, including a substantial decrease in output after 2005 and recovery in recent years. In addition, a translog cost function is used to examine the existence of economies of scale, the relationships among inputs, and the effects of the 2005 GATT entry on the industry’s costs. The findings include strong evidence of economies of scale, consistent with the many small and mid-sized enterprises in the Portuguese textile and clothing industry. The results are also consistent with capital and labour being complementary inputs, while other input pairs are substitutes. The entry into GATT may have had a negative impact on cost, though the evidence for that effect is weak.     

Stationary measures for some Markov chain models in ecology and economics

Summary. Let continuous, exists in for x in . Let be an i.i.d. sequence from F and X₀ be a nonnegative random variable independent of . Let be the Markov chain generated by the iteration of random maps by . Such Markov chains arise in population ecology and growth models in economics. This paper studies the existence of nondegenerate stationary measures for {X_n}. A set of necessary conditions and two sets of sufficient conditions are provided. There are some convergence results also. The present paper is a generalization of the work on random logistics maps by Athreya and Dai (2000).Received: 20 March 2002, Revised: 4 December 2002, JEL Classification Numbers: C22, D9.The author wishes to thank Professor Mukul Majumdar and the referees for several useful suggestions.