Offshoring in the New Global Political Economy

abstract    This essay challenges claims by economists and management scholars that 'offshoring' is simply another form of trade with mutual benefits. I argue that reducing wages through offshoring leads to wealth creation for shareholders but not necessarily for countries and employees, and that many displaced workers have difficulty 'trading up' to higher skilled jobs. Offshoring is a new phenomenon that entails the organizational and technological ability to relocate specific tasks and coordinate a geographically dispersed network of activities. It decouples the linkages between economic value creation and geographic location. The result is the creation of global commodity markets for particular skills and a shift in the balance of market power among firms, workers, and countries.     

Generating Enhanced Fishery Rents by Internalizing Product Quality Characteristics

This paper demonstrates howadditional rents are generated in a fisherycharacterized by intraseasonal variation infish characteristics, including size,condition, and composition. Based on anexpanded conceptual model of the optimalharvest rule, fish characteristics affect preand post harvest production yields and outputprices. A dynamic empirical model, which uses asystem of quality characteristics and anhedonic equation, illustrates the complexrelationships and management choices associatedwith internalizing seafood qualitycharacteristics in a hake fishery. The modelretains the regulated open access managementsystem, but controls intertemporal andintersectoral quotas, production portfolios,and total allowable catch. Results demonstratethat including revenue-side effects frominternalizing fish quality can generatesignificantly greater rents and reduce therelative benefits of increased productionyields. If excluded, bioeconomic models canunderestimate the level of regulatory rentdissipation and overemphasize managementobjectives such as full utilization, whichcould misdirect processing decisions and resultin a suboptimal resource management plan.Implications for data collection,multidisciplinary analysis, and improvements inmarine resource management are discussed.     

The historical origins of the Philippine economy: a survey of recent research of the Spanish colonial era

This article surveys recent research of the Spanish colonial era in the Philippines since the late eighteenth century. While highlighting imperfections in our understanding, the article establishes the parameters with which the Philippine economy entered the twentieth century. It outlines the intensification of Spanish colonial rule through changes in the taxation system, particularly the expansion of forced tobacco cultivation until its abolition in 1882. Since then, the Spanish set out to further change and intensify colonial rule but contradictions in the system of colonial rule caused the effort to come to an abrupt end in 1898.     

E-Business Transformation via Alliance Clusters

The number of firms using alliances as part of their corporate venturing or market entry strategies has surged over the past decade. Three common reasons cited for pursuing alliances are technology convergence, market access and alliance partners' complementary resources. This paper contrasts the alliance strategies of HP and IBM, two major competitors in electronic services (i.e. Internet-based 'e- service') businesses, using the Familiarity Matrix as a display tool to portray the strategies. Whereas the HP strategy is to attempt to establish its technology infrastructure as the standard e-services infrastructure on the Internet, IBM aims to position its IBM Global Services, rather than its technology, at the center of this ecosystem.     

Loanable Funds, Monitoring and Banking

This paper studies financial intermediation in a general equilibriumoverlapping generations model. Indivisible investment projects combine withinformational imperfections to create a (hidden action) moral hazard problemand introduce a role for third-party monitoring. Agency costs at theintermediary level are also considered. Under some conditions, monitors canbe viewed as banks facing a non-trivial portfolio diversification problem.Equilibria are derived in which a large nationwide bank coexists with anumber of community-regional banks, a structure of strong empiricalrelevance. Policies such as a mandatory reserve requirement are shown tohave substantial effects on the levels of investment in the economy.     

'Technoscience' Education: Empowering Citizens Against the Tyranny of School Science

The status quo for school science and technology is unacceptable. While the former often is required for admission to university engineering, as well as to science programmes, the latter is deemed most appropriate for less able, concrete thinkers. This situation persists, despite the fact school science tends to generate large groups of citizens who are relatively scientifically and technologically illiterate, largely as a result of its preoccupation with identifying and training potential scientists and engineers. This practice is tyrannical. It must be abandoned forthwith. A realistic alternative is a combined technology and science programme – perhaps called 'technoscience' education – that would treat science and technology as equals. Such courses may, as well, be more democratic in the sense that technological problem solving often is more natural to everyday situations that everyone may find useful, not just future scientists or engineers. A framework for combined technology and science courses is described and defended here. Originally developed through collaborative action research amongst practising teachers of science, the approach appears to be feasible, under certain – perhaps ideal – conditions. A number of changes to science and technology education may be necessary for broader implementation, not the least of which is a general retrenchment in expectations for pre-determined learning, along with adjustments to teacher education. Nevertheless, the approach is recommended because of its emphasis on: personalization, inclusion, problematization, explicitness, apprenticeship, authenticity, contextualization and freedom. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

TRENDS IN RURAL WAGES,WEST JAVA, 1977–83

This paper examines monthly wage data collected by the Agro Economic Survey from seven villages in the Cimanuk River Basin of West Java, where data on agricultural and non-agricultural wages and prices of nine essential commodities were collected twice monthly between 1977 and 1983. Movements in money wages deflated by both the rice price and a weighted index of basic commodities are analysed in detail and differences between lowland and upland villages are discussed.     

Should the Pre‐Notification of Mergers Be Compulsory in Australia?

Australia is unusual among the world's antitrust jurisdictions in not making the pre‐notification of mergers compulsory. However, if the parties are concerned that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is likely to object to the merger, there are strong incentives for them to notify the ACCC as the regulator has developed a strong reputation for imposing heavy costs on parties that fail to notify such mergers. The result is a system of quasi‐compulsory notification that creates the strongest incentives for parties to notify the ACCC of those proposals to which it is most likely to object. This study analyses data extracted from the ACCC's merger database and the empirical results are consistent with this characterisation. Mergers reported voluntarily by the parties are found to experience longer delays to completion, and are more likely to be challenged by the ACCC, when compared with a sample of all other mergers assessed by the regulator. The results suggest that non‐compulsory notification allows the parties themselves to pre‐sort the proposed merger vis‐à‐vis its interest to the ACCC.