Development of the Service Sector: A Critical Survey of Macro-economic Models

The slow-down in the economic growth and the rise in unemployment have revived the discussion about the oppor- tunities for growth through the development of the service sector. This article reviews what models tell us about the mechanism of the development of the service industries. An attempt b made to specify the relative importance of demand and supply aspects of the service economy and to indicate the black holes in our knowledge.     

Qualitative discrete multiple criteria choice models in regional planning

The paper provides a concise review of evaluation methods for decision problems in which qualitative data is involved. Special attention is paid to a new qualitative evaluation method: the regime method. An application of the regime method is given in the field of multiregional conflict analysis.     

Transparency, Integration, and the Cost of International Real Estate Investments

This paper investigates the importance of market institutions for the performance of international property investors during the 1996?C2007 period. The results show that international property companies underperform local property companies in the early years of the sample period. This underperformance is driven by the political environment, the level of economic integration, and the transparency of the real estate market in target countries. The underperformance of internationals disappears in the later years of the sample period, and so does the significance of the aforementioned factors in explaining performance differences among international companies. These findings suggest that the increased transparency of the global real estate industry has leveled the playing field for foreign property investors.     

Internalising the costs of fragmentation and nutrient deposition in spatial planning: Extending a decision support tool for the Netherlands

The Land Use Scanner (LUS) is a decision support system for land use planning that is widely used in the Netherlands. The model yields solutions that have a high resolution (500×500 m) and reflect economic equilibrium in the land market, in which eighteen types of land use and nine aggregated habitat types competitively bid for locations. Here, an extension to the LUS is presented that enables the internalisation of environmental externalities. The focus in this study is on two important externalities, namely ammonia emissions from agriculture and habitat fragmentation. We simulate four IPCC-based land use scenarios and assess the level of fragmentation of the nine habitat types. We also perform sensitivity analyses in the most market-oriented scenario on the effectiveness of market-based instruments in promoting more efficient land allocation. The simulation results suggest that particularly the habitat type ‘rain-fed mires and bogs’ is susceptible to fragmentation. The sensitivity analyses show that internalising the damage costs of fragmentation resulted in smaller changes in land allocation than internalising those of nitrogen deposition. For both instruments, the policy effort was large in relation to the efficiency gains in land allocation.     

Technology education in South Africa since the new dispensation in 1994: An analysis of curriculum documents and a meta-synthesis of scholarly work

Technology education was introduced as a successor to various forms of craft or technical education in some parts of the world in the 1980s. In South Africa (SA) the implementation of technology education was in more than one sense unique. Not only was it a new subject within the South African educational context, but it coincided with the dawn of a new political dispensation in which the new government favoured outcomes-based education (OBE). This has resulted in a series of curriculum documents over the past two decades which made certain demands on and held challenges for the teachers who were responsible for the implementation of technology. The purpose of this conceptual article is to investigate the demands and challenges that various curriculum documents have made on the technology teachers concerned. The research question that underpinned the research was: What were the demands and the challenges various curriculum documents had on technology teachers? The research methodology was desktop research in the form of a critical analysis of various intended or specified curriculum documents. The research also included a qualitative meta-synthesis of other scholarly work on the challenges posed by the implementation of curricula both in SA and other international contexts. The South African experience may hold important insights for ministries of education, curriculum developers and technology teachers that form part of the broader international technology fraternity. It was found that the underlying political ideology of a new government impacts and steers the country’s education in a particular direction. Soon after the dawn of the new political dispensation in SA in 1994 there was a move away from a content-based curriculum (CBC) towards an OBE curriculum. However, it was mainly contextual and practical factors at chalk level that placed major demands on and posed challenges to the implementation of a new education system, aligned with a new ideology. Due to these challenges the country now finds itself moving back towards content-based education just more than ten years later. In a developing context, in particular with insufficient logistical resources and where teachers are inadequately trained (and therefore have less competence) a more specified and fixed CBC rather than an open, flexible OBE curriculum seems more feasible. Subsequently, the effects of a CBC as opposed to an OBE curriculum in technology education need to be researched in future, specifically which approach would be conducive to a general design-driven subject or a fragmented vocationally-oriented technology subject.

     

Continental Factors in International Real Estate Returns

This paper examines the extent to which real estate returns are driven by continental factors. This subject is relevant for determining the country allocation of international real estate portfolios. If returns are driven by a continental factor, investors should look for diversification opportunities outside their own continent. This paper finds strong continental factors in North America and especially in the United States. For the Asia–Pacific region, real estate returns are not driven by a continental factor. The results suggest that, for European, North American and Asia—Pacific real estate portfolio managers, the Asia—Pacific region provides attractive international diversification opportunities.     

Inflation Protection from Homeownership: Long‐Run Evidence, 1814–2008

This article examines the inflation hedging capacity of the private home. We employ unique long‐term data for inflation, house price dynamics and rents for Amsterdam dating back to 1814, allowing us to study total housing returns in different inflation regimes and for varying investment horizons. Our Amsterdam data show that homeownership's protection against actual and expected inflation increases with the investment horizon. This increase is especially strong for horizons up to 10 years. Inflation protection from housing is stronger when inflation is persistent, and the hedging capacities of housing regarding unexpected inflation are weak.     

CEO Overconfidence,REIT Investment Activity and Performance

This is the first article to study the effects of overconfidence on trading activity and performance in real estate. The article looks at Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), as their investments and divestments can be identified with precision. We look at the effect of CEO overconfidence on investment activity and separately investigate property acquisitions and dispositions. We find that REITs with overconfident CEOs tend to invest more; these REITs acquire more assets and are less likely to sell assets than their counterparts if they have enough discretionary cash. Valuable private information is not the main driver for CEOs to be net buyers of company shares: the shares of their companies perform relatively weakly. In addition, we find that overconfident managers have lower property investment performance measured by net operating income and gain on sale of real estate.     

Information use and company performance : An application to the retail electrical appliances sector

While there is no doubt that we are living in an information age, the question as to whether information is really beneficial to its users has not often been addressed empirically. This paper aims to address this issue by analysing information use by retail electrical appliance companies in order to explain differences in company performance. The results suggest that some companies spend too many resources on information, so that information use becomes counterproductive.