Reengineering--it's totally radical

Reengineering. What does it really mean? How does it work? Where do you begin? And, if it's as great as it's cracked up to be, why does it fail more often than not?     

Profitability and social impacts of reduced impact logging in the Tapajós National Forest, Brazil — A case study

Brazil contains the world's largest tropical rainforests, most located in the Amazon River Basin. Over the last three decades, rapid growth of this region's deforested area has had negative impacts. To minimize these impacts and maintain biodiversity, the Brazilian Government has established several national forests in the Basin. The ITTO Project, a reduced impact logging (RIL) operation, was recently carried out at one of these forests: the Tapajós National Forest, also known as Flona Tapajós. This paper evaluates the Project's profitability and its effect on local residents. The Project, which ran between 1999 and 2003, was coordinated by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), with funding for planning and monitoring provided by the United Kingdom's Department of International Development (DFID) working through and approved by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO). Treviso Agropecuária Ltda, a private logging company, carried out timber extraction on the Project site. Our evaluation found the ITTO Project to have been highly profitable for Treviso, even after their compliance with all Brazilian labor and environmental laws. This finding was based on field interviews and the examination of documents from IBAMA and Treviso. Treviso's mean internal rate of return from the Project was calculated to have been 35.79%, considerably higher than that generated by the region's farms and ranches. The ITTO Project positively impacted Project workers, providing employment and exposing them to rainforest management techniques that maximize timber production while minimizing forest destruction. The paper closes by suggesting that more of the direct and indirect benefits of new reduced impact logging projects on Brazilian national forest land need to be channeled to the local population to increase the probability of them act as capable forest custodians.     

The Political Economy of Middle‐Income Traps: Is South Africa in a Long‐Run Growth Trap? The Path to “Bounded Populism”

The current literature on middle‐income traps has been dominated by economists who have relied on economic explanations mainly around stages of development and the structural transformation of economies. But there is an equally vigorous literature from political science which speaks to the political economy of transitions. We look at the dynamics of how economic modernisation triggers structural changes with winners and losers and how this is reflected in the polarisation of the political sphere amongst middle‐income countries. This paper asks the question of whether South Africa is an archetypical example of a country stuck in a trap and how this has affected the policy choices that it has made. South Africa needs to move up the value chain with a viable value proposition, and this requires a very different policy set and human capital plan.     

Treating and Pruning: New approaches to forecasting model selection and combination using prediction intervals

We propose a new way of selecting among model forms in automated exponential smoothing routines, consequently enhancing their predictive power. The procedure, here addressed as treating, operates by selectively subsetting the ensemble of competing models based on information from their prediction intervals. By the same token, we set forth a pruning strategy to improve the accuracy of both point forecasts and prediction intervals in forecast combination methods. The proposed approaches are respectively applied to automated exponential smoothing routines and Bagging algorithms, to demonstrate their potential. An empirical experiment is conducted on a wide range of series from the M-Competitions. The results attest that the proposed approaches are simple, without requiring much additional computational cost, but capable of substantially improving forecasting accuracy for both point forecasts and prediction intervals, outperforming important benchmarks and recently developed forecast combination methods.     

CONSTRUCTING OPTIMAL DENSITY FORECASTS FROM POINT FORECAST COMBINATIONS

Decision makers often observe point forecasts of the same variable computed, for instance, by commercial banks, IMF and the World Bank, but the econometric models used by such institutions are frequently unknown. This paper shows how to use the information available on point forecasts to compute optimal density forecasts. Our idea builds upon the combination of point forecasts under general loss functions and unknown forecast error distributions. We use real‐time data to forecast the density of US inflation. The results indicate that the proposed method materially improves the real‐time accuracy of density forecasts vis‐à‐vis those from the (unknown) individual econometric models. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reducing Brazilian greenhouse gas emissions: scenario simulations of targets and policies

This paper aims to evaluate the economic impacts of greenhouse gas emission reduction on the Brazilian economy. To this end, we developed an integrated input–output linear programming model for 2009 using the Supply and Use Tables and emissions data of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology and Innovation. We simulated emissions targets for various potential scenarios in which the adopted policy design took account of sectoral composition in terms of emissions and available production technology. The results were directly affected by the high level of livestock emissions, counterbalancing this sector’s economic importance for Brazil. In the short term, sectoral emissions targets associated with taxation policy or emission permits could be developed in order to create private incentives to mitigate emissions. In this sense, the results also show that different sectoral targets may be able to balance environmental benefits with the possible economic losses incurred by such policies.     

Narrow Replication of Fisman and Miguel's (2007a) ‘Corruption,Norms, and Legal Enforcement: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets’

This note provides a narrow replication of Fisman and Miguel's (Journal of Political Economy, 2007a; 115 (6): 1020–1048) original findings about estimating negative binomial count models to study corruption practices among United Nations diplomats. We present estimates based on zero‐inflated count models, given the possible presence of excessive zero counts in the dependent variable of the main specifications. Our results confirm Fisman and Miguel's original findings. However, they also suggest the importance of considering distinct generating processes for zero outcomes. We cannot reject hypotheses favoring the use of zero‐inflated negative binomial models over its simpler versions in this context. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Determining the utility functions of criteria used in the evaluation of real estate

This article presents an application of the UTA method and its variant UTA-CR to determining utility functions for the multicriteria evaluation of residential real estate. Data for the city of Volta Redonda, Brazil, were used in this study. Unlike UTA, UTA-CR makes use of the decision agents’ preferences in relation to a set of criteria to determine a ranking of the alternatives. It was concluded that UTA-CR manages to obtain utility functions closer to the preferences of the decision agents as compared to these that result from the use of UTA. This demonstrates an important advantage of UTA-CR over UTA.     

Social interactions,product differentiation and discontinuity of demand

We propose a discrete choice model of socially interacting consumers choosing between two product variants. The model shows that the discontinuity of demand as well as the demand polarization proposed by Becker (1991), A Note on Restaurant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influences on Price, depend crucially on the heterogeneity of consumers’ preferences and on the level of product differentiation. When the two products are sufficiently similar, it turns out that the market is shared asymmetrically as suggested by Becker (1991). By contrast, when the products are different and the preferences of the consumers are sufficiently heterogeneous, the market is shared symmetrically as in Hotelling’s (1929) model.     

Critical Success Factors of Brazilian Business Incubators

The main purpose of this study is to determine the Critical Success Factors (CSF) of Brazilian business incubator management and understand how they are structured. These factors are essential to improve the performance of these Brazilian businesses and to strengthening the Brazilian entrepreneurial ecosystem. The strategy used was survey, and the data obtained were analyzed using the statistical technique of Exploratory Factor Analysis. The validated CSF were grouped into seven constructs. Thus far, the literature does not present any article within the scope proposed here. Additionally, the statistical technique used here is applied for the first time in this theme.