Joint Ventures as an Internationalisation Strategy for SMEs

For some time believed to be inferior to Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprises, Joint Ventures have become a popular vehicle for foreign market servicing. Although there are various proponents of the joint venture strategy as a means of enabling SMEs with limited productive resources and/or market knowledge to enter international markets, relatively few have focused on the actual joint venturing activities of SMEs. This article examines the activities of 9 U.K. and 12 German SMEs that have joint ventures in China. Based on a questionnaire survey and in-depth case interviews, it reveals that the initiatives appear to have been successful but that they are not without their problems and in many ways the experiences of the firms involved seem similar to those of the large multi-national enterprises. It argues that the key to success appears to be the choice of the joint venture partner and concludes that, given the limited resources of small firms, assistance is required to help them locate and select appropriate partners.     

Marketing and company performance: An examination of medium sized manufacturing firms in Britain

In recent years several studies have pointed to the importance of marketing to company performance and considerable emphasis has been placed, in Britain, on improving the marketing performance of small and mediumsized enterprises. Based on a mail survey of 231 medium sized manufacturing firms in the U.K., and in-depth inteviews with the Chief Marketing Executive of a sub-sample of 20 firms, the study confirms that the most successful companies are those which are marketing orientated. Nevertheless, several traditional tenets of marketing are questioned by the findings and it would seem that the traditional marketing model, as developed for large companies, is neither entirely necessary nor applicable for the smaller firm.     

ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF LAND DEGRADATION IN AUSTRALIA

In this article an overview of several economic aspects of land degradation in Australia is presented. The economic rationale for government intervention in land management decisions relating to degradation is explored. Some potential sources of inefficient private land use decisions are identified. However, there are significant difficulties in designing policies which will result in resource allocation decisions superior to market outcomes.     

Economic assessment of acquiring water for environmental flows in the Murray Basin*

This article is an economic analysis of reallocating River Murray Basin water from agriculture to the environment with and without the possibility of interregional water trade. Acquiring environmental flows as an equal percentage of water allocations from all irrigation regions in the Basin is estimated to reduce returns to irrigation. When the same volume of water is taken from selected low-value regions only, the net revenue reduction is less. In all scenarios considered, net revenue gains from freeing trade are estimated to outweigh the negative revenue effects of reallocating water for environmental flows. The model accounts for how stochastic weather affects market water demand, supply and requirements for environmental flows. Net irrigation revenue is estimated to be 75 million less than the baseline level for a scenario involving reallocating a constant volume of water for the environment in both wet and dry years. For a more realistic scenario involving more water for the environment in wet and less in dry years, estimated net revenue loss is reduced by 48 per cent to 39 million. Finally, the external salinity-related costs of water trading are estimated at around 1 million per annum, a quite modest amount compared to the direct irrigation benefits of trade.     

Approaches to learning at work and workplace climate

Three studies are reported concerning employees' approaches to learning at work and their perceptions of the workplace environment. Based on prior research with university students, two questionnaires were devised, the Approaches to Work Questionnaire (AWQ) and the Workplace Climate Questionnaire (WCQ). In Studies 1 and 2, these questionnaires were administered to two different samples of employees, and the factor structure of the questionnaires was explored. In Study 3, the two data sets were combined, and a random half of it was used to develop reduced sets of items that addressed selected factors for each of the questionnaires. The other half of the data was used to test the scales developed. For the AWQ, three factors are proposed: deep, surface‐rational, and surface‐disorganised. The first of these is consistent with the student learning literature, but the other two represent a division of a unitary surface factor. The three components of the WCQ are good supervision, choice‐independence, and workload. Correlations between scales indicated that the deep approach is positively associated with good supervision and choice‐independence, whereas the surface‐disorganised approach is negatively associated with these two constructs and positively associated with workload. Surface‐rational is negatively, though less strongly associated with choice‐independence. Suggestions are presented for use of these instruments in future research and practice.     

Estimating the Cost‐of‐Equity Capital Using Empirical Asset Pricing Models

Empirical asset pricing models seek to capture characteristic‐based patterns in the cross‐section of average stock returns. I propose a new approach for constructing these models, and investigate its performance with respect to estimating the cost‐of‐equity capital. Using a model that accounts for the cross‐sectional relation between five characteristics and average stock returns, I obtain cost‐of‐equity estimates that outperform those produced by the Fama‐French five‐factor model in out‐of‐sample tests. Because the proposed approach builds directly on standard cross‐sectional regression techniques, it provides complete flexibility in choosing the firm characteristics used to formulate the cost‐of‐equity estimates.