On the Limits of the Post-Industrial Society Structural Change and Service Sector Employment in Spain

The purpose of this paper is to examine the growth and the structure of employment in the service sector in the Spanish Economy from 1958 to 1989 and to draw comparisons with the trends exhibited by other European countries. In contrast to the explanation offered by the theory of stages, which assumes that growth in services is associated with the pattern of final demand, this research argues that, since the middle of the 1970s, the growth of market service employment is due to an increase in intermediate demand of services. In order to demonstrate this, an intersectoral analysis is applied to input output data which was homogenised for this research. This methodological approach enables employment in the service sector to be connected to the other sectors. Rejecting the idea that services are replacing manufacturing as the new engine of growth, the results show an increased dependence on market services by industrial production. The final part of the paper presents explanations for this trend.     

A Re-examination of the Legalization of Casino Gambling from the Japanese Tourist Perspective: A 10-year Review

With the explosion of casino development in the Asia Pacific as well as the USA, casino gambling has become more culturally embraced as a recreational activity. The purpose of this study was to re-examine the legalization of casino gambling in Hawaii from Japanese-speaking tourists' perspective and compare these results with a previous study completed a decade before. With the continuing decrease of Japanese visitors to Hawaii, and with the importance of the Japanese market to Hawaii's economy, state officials are considering other forms of tourism to help revive the Japanese tourism market and increase Hawaii's global competitiveness. By analyzing the responses of the current Japanese-speaking tourists to Hawaii and comparing these responses with the Japanese tourists surveyed 10 years previously (1996), an attempt can be made to determine whether Japanese tourists in 2006 have changed their perception of the legalization of casino gambling in Hawaii. This research examines a number of challenges to consider concerning the legalization of gaming in an established tourism destination such as of Hawaii. Although the findings of this study indicate that the Japanese-speaking tourists have changed their perspective from past studies on the effects that legalization of casino gambling has in Hawaii, future research should focus on other segments of the tourist market.     

Equity in Poverty Program Evaluations

Poverty‐reducing programs often use indicators other than household income to transfer resources to the poor which has important implications in terms of equity of the program. This paper offers a decomposition methodology to analyze the horizontal and vertical equity components of a redistribution policy for subgroups defined according to policy‐relevant characteristics. Our measures are derived by comparing the cost of inequality in terms of equally distributed equivalent poverty gaps in the pre‐transfer income and post‐transfer income distributions. An application to the poverty‐reducing program Oportunidades in Mexico in 2006 reveals that the use of indicator variables more strongly correlated with pre‐transfer incomes in rural households can improve the redistributive effect while it also points out the difficulties of the program in targeting different levels of support among the poor, both within and between groups.     

Building knowledge to improve enterprise performance from inventory simulation models

This paper describes the process of building knowledge to improve enterprise performance. This allows managers both to identify unknown risks and to develop solutions that mitigate these risks. One of the most critical risks that the enterprise faces involves the unidentified presence of serial-correlation components on the demand patterns. Depending upon the levels of such correlation, inventory control policies can be appreciably inaccurate. We propose to use a knowledge management portfolio that allows managers to capture and build knowledge from their complex systems. We find that the error generated from ignoring identified risk factors exponentially grows as the autocorrelation increases. We construct an enhanced simulated annealing algorithm that provides superior solutions to this type of problem.     

Role Models and Women Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurial Superwoman Has Her Say

It is suggested that more “role model” women entrepreneurs are needed. However, the gender gap in entrepreneurship remains. This study analyses the narratives of 51 role model women entrepreneurs to explore how they represent women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. We found that in accordance with the contemporary pressure for women to succeed and perform personally and professionally, the voice of the (super)woman doing “individualized entrepreneurial femininity” dominates. The role models narratives obscure race, class, and age barriers; reproduce prevailing gender stereotypes; normalize discriminatory workplace treatment and depict entrepreneurship as an appropriate alternative for working mothers. Implications for policy makers are presented.     

Firm size and productivity in Spain: a stochastic frontier analysis

This paper analyses the performance of the small and medium-sized manufacturing firms during the period 1995–2001, focusing on the degree of technical inefficiency and its determinants. We use a micro panel data set to simultaneously estimate a stochastic frontier production function and the inefficiency determinants using an unbalanced panel of manufacturing firms. Our empirical results suggest that small and medium-sized firms tend to be less inefficient than the large firms are. Also, we centre our analysis in the effect on efficiency of some organisational factors related to the managerial ability to use and adjust capital and labour properly.

国际股市何去何从?

2006年1月,世界大部分股票市场都达到或接近了历史高位。尽管1月中旬有两天走势很糟,大市下跌了至少100点,但随后市场就迅速反弹,而且上涨力度更强。     

Exploring the relationship between technical and service characteristics

The paper explores the complex relationship between technical and service characteristics discussed by the Saviotti–Metcalfe model of innovation. It is proposed that principal components analysis (PCA) is a more appropriate method of analysing this relationship than approaches previously used. A PCA is performed on a dataset of mobile phone handsets for the period 2003 to 2008. In addition to the relationship between technical and service characteristics, the analysis explores the existence of clusters of ergonomic characteristics within mobile phone handsets. The findings indicate that a limited set of core technology components underpin the large set of service characteristics offered by mobile phone handsets, and that the mapping between technical and service characteristics can be highly complex.