Identifying and characterising price leadership in British supermarkets

Price leadership is a concept that lacks precision. We propose a deliberately narrow, falsifiable, definition then develop it, illustrate its feasibility and test it using the two leading British supermarket chains. We find both firms engaging in leading prices upward over a range of products, with the larger being initially more dominant but the smaller increasing leadership activity to take overall leadership over time. However, more price leadership events are price reductions than price increases, consistently led by the smaller firm. Nevertheless, the increases are of larger monetary amounts than the falls, so average basket price increases over time.     

Public Service Leaders as ‘Change Agents’ – for Whom?

Abstract

This article examines how far senior staff in English educational and health service organizations view themselves as leaders who are ‘change agents’ for government-driven reform and independent change agendas. The contribution of external leadership development provision to shaping these self-perceptions is explored. Special attention is paid to national leadership development bodies with different degrees of formal association with government. Whatever this relationship, such provision and other development support apparently reinforced a strong sense of personal agency (choice of action) associated with being a leader, empowering senior staff to adopt a modestly mediatory stance towards both reform and leadership development provision.     

MNEs and development: a review and reconceptualization

In this paper, we review and critique two prominent theories in the international business and international economics literatures regarding the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in host country development: the “spillovers” perspective on the impact of MNE investment in host countries and the liabilities of foreignness (LOF) view that specifies the constraints MNEs must overcome to succeed in local, developing country markets. We then propose an alternative conceptualization of MNE-host country relations in which MNEs and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) pursue collaborative relationships that make a positive, collective contribution to host country development and to MNE and NGO strategic goals in ways that neither sector is positioned to do alone.     

Who in Brazil Will Gain from Global Trade Reforms?

The potential impacts of multilateral trade liberalisation on developing countries are the subject of numerous controversies. One particular concern is that Brazil, a major agricultural exporter and a country with one of the world's most unequal income distributions, will reap a substantial share of the potential benefits to developing countries from agricultural trade reform, and that most of those benefits will go to large‐scale commercial farmers rather than to the country's smallholders. This claim is explored via a global general equilibrium model and a national model of Brazil containing multiple agricultural and non‐agricultural households. Brazil is found to account for nearly one‐half of all the benefits to developing countries deriving from global agricultural trade reform. These gains are associated with improvements in the welfare of each group and a lower incidence of poverty. Large‐scale producers gain more than smallholders as they tend to be relatively specialised in export products, but there are important gains to agricultural employees, who are relatively poor, and to urban households, who benefit from the expansion of the agro‐food sector. Overall, there is no discernible impact on income inequality, and no evidence that the gains to commercial farmers occur at the expense of poorer households.     

Contracts and competition: an introduction

Changes in public policy and corporate strategy have enhancedthe role of contracts as mechanisms of economic governance.The understanding that norms, standards and other forms of regulatorymechanism can affect the structure of incentives and the qualityof contractual outcomes has helped to stimulate a wider debateconcerning institutions and economic performance. Among thethemes explored in this Special Issue, which draws on the UKESRC's Contracts and Competition Programme, are the need forinterdisciplinary analysis of economic organisation; the linkbetween contracts and trust; and the complex relationship betweeninstitutional forms and economic outcomes.     

Import Competition, Productivity, and Restructuring in UK Manufacturing

We discuss the literature on the importance of entry and exitfor raising productivity growth. Using micro data for the UKfor a period from 1980 to 2000, we find that the share of productivitygrowth accounted for by entry and exit has increased considerably:from around 25 per cent in the 1980s to around 50 per cent inthe 1990s. We then ask to what extent increased globalization—measuredas sectoral import penetration—might have explained thisand find effects from both globalization and information andcommunication technology.     

Measuring voting power in an international institution: the United States and the inter-American development bank

This paper applies a measure of relative voting power to the weighted voting system of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). Almost all assessments of internal governance of the IADB and other international financial institutions make reference to members' votes as a proxy for relative influence. But as this paper demonstrates, voting weights are misleading. The number of votes a country has in a weighted voting system does not necessarily denote its ability to affect outcomes. The conventional wisdom holds that the United States is omnipotent in the IADB because it has a large number (over 30 percent) of all the votes. This paper reveals that the U.S. obtains much more control over outcomes than originally intended by the institutions' designers. Received: September 2000 / Accepted: October 2001     

全球股市低迷 亚洲首当其冲

一年前，当信贷危机在美国和欧洲刚刚崭露头角时，许多投资者都将亚洲股票视为了天堂。时至今日，全球股市经历了6个多月的下跌，而亚洲市场的跌幅位居前列。     

Short and long run movements in U.S. merger activity

This paper uses the NPV approach to merger decisions to select variables which are expected to explain changes in the aggregate number of mergers of US manufacturing and mining firms over time. We test for and estimate a cointegrating relationship between such variables. We find that in the long run the number of mergers and acquisitions is positively related both to the level of manufacturing production and to the level of the nominal bond yield. A short run dynamic model is also presented. Annual changes in merger and acquisition activity were found to be positively related to current changes in Tobin's Q and changes in Q lagged one, two and four years; positively related to changes in the current bond yield but negatively related to changes in the yield in the previous year; and finally that changes in merger activity were related to the degree to which the number of mergers differed from the long run or equilibrium value in the previous year.