Using surveys of business perceptions as a guide to growth‐enhancing fiscal reforms

This paper assesses the merits of using business perceptions of growth constraints as a guide to growth‐enhancing fiscal policy reforms. Using endogenous growth models in which the government levies an income tax to provide public inputs to the production of private firms, the paper demonstrates that such perceptions of growth constraints may be misleading from a policy perspective. In particular, firms can be expected to systematically overestimate the growth‐enhancing effects of lower tax rates relative to public services and public capital, and underestimate the growth‐enhancing effects of greater provision of public capital relative to taxation and public services. In addition, we show that firms rank different public services and different types of public capital according to the actual costs they impose on firms. It is then shown that these theoretical predictions regarding how firms rank constraints correspond closely to the observed ranking of constraints by firms in the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys.     

Alternative algorithms for the macRae OLCV strategy

Using dynamic programming MacRae obtained a linear feedback law for her open loop constrained variance (OLCV) strategy. To compute the control law requires solving a two point boundary value problem. The dynamic programming formulation does not admit gradient related algorithms. This paper presents an alternative augmented Lagrangian formulation which can be solved as a deterministic constrained optimization problem. The new approach is superior because it admits gradient related algorithms plus all the algorithms which could be employed using the original approach. Three examples demonstrate the superiority of the new approach.     

Are business ethics and engineering ethics members of the same family?

The thesis of the paper is that there are no important differences between problems in business ethics and problems in engineering ethics. The problems are both of the same logical type. What keeps this contention from being obvious is that many view engineers as professionals and business persons as nonprofessionals. If you accept the traditional definition of professional neither engineering nor business qualify. If you adopt the attitudinal definition of a profession which I propose, both practitioners could be professionals. This thesis is then tested by applying it to six specific issues in business and/or engineering ethics. Norman E. Bowie is Director at the Center for the Study of Values and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Delaware. Previously, he was Executive Secretary at the American Philosophical Association and received the Phi Beta Kappa Award. Important publications: Ethical Theory and Business, co-editor with Tom Beauchamp, Prentice Hall, 1979, Ethics, Public Policy and Criminal Justice, co-editor with Fred Elliston, Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1982, Ethical Theory in the Last Quarter of the 20th Century, editor, Hackett Publishing, 1983, and Making Ethical Decisions, editor, McGraw-Hill (forthcoming). He has also written numerous articles in professional journals.An earlier version of this paper was read at a conference on applied ethics as part of an NEH sponsored project, National Project on Philosophy and Engineering Ethics, University of Florida, January 13–15, 1982.     

Informational society

The coming technology of automation, communications, and information processing, contributing to a new “social nervous system”, is discussed. The basic assumptions are that in the future, organisations will have no physical location and that man's primary activities will not be traditional work. The article suggests what this would mean for communities, economic organisations, government and the individual, and proposes a utopian institutional structure based on the stated technological assumptions.     

Do Local Property Taxes Affect New Building Development? Results from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in New Zealand

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - We utilise a quasi-natural experiment in local property tax reform arising from a compulsory amalgamation of several local councils in 2010 in...