THE SUITABILITY OF A GREATER CHINA CURRENCY UNION

Abstract. The study assesses the level of integration among the three Greater China economies (China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and examines the suitability of a Greater China currency union. The three economies already have extensive trade and investment linkages. Our analyses show that they share common long‐run and short‐run cyclical variations. We also estimate the output costs of relinquishing policy autonomy to form a currency union. The estimated output losses, which depend on, e.g., the method used to generate shock estimates, seem to be moderate and are likely to be less than the efficient gains derived from a currency union.     

A Study of Environmental Reporting: International Japanese Airlines

Economists are of the view that tourism leads to economic development just like human and physical capital and exports. A few studies have discussed this issue empirically. The current study aims to estimate the long-run relationship between income from tourism and the economic growth of Pakistan by using the annual time series data of 1971–2008, and by employing the Johansen Juselius cointegration, autoregressive distributed lag model and rolling windows bounds testing approach to check the stability of the model. The results confirm the long-run relationship between income from tourism and economic growth and explain that income from tourism has led economic growth in Pakistan except in the years 2006, 2007, and 2008.     

Leisure Spaces,Community, and Third Places

ABSTRACT

After decades of highlighting the decline of social networks, leisure spaces as third places constitute a welcomed approach to mediate this loss. Third places are defined as public gathering places that ultimately contribute to the strength of community. We appreciate the concept and believe that it has and will continue to influence scholars in the field of leisure. For this reason, this research reflection argues Oldenburg's conceptualization of third places requires reconsideration. Specifically, we address the increasing prevalence of technology and question Oldenburg's claim that technology contributes to the isolation of individuals. We also encourage a more complex understanding of third places—one that is beyond the idealized notion of public places. Oldenburg's social dimensions of third places (enjoyment, regularity, pure sociability/social leveler, and diversity) are offered as a useful framework. More specifically, we argue that diversity is the most relevant characteristic when exploring third places as a platform for community.     

Broadband penetration and economic growth nexus: evidence from cross-country panel data

This article investigates whether there are Granger causal relationships between broadband penetration, degree of urbanization, foreign direct investment and economic growth using a panel data set covering the G-20 countries for the period 1998–2011. Using our multivariate framework, we first find that all of the variables are cointegrated. Our findings further reveal a network of causal connections between the variables including short-run bidirectional causality between broadband penetration and economic growth among the more developed countries within the G-20. On the other hand, for the developing countries within the G-20, there is evidence of unidirectional causality from economic growth to broadband penetration.     

Localisation of Japanese subsidiaries in Southeast Asia

The success story of Japanese firms, both in their home country and their overseas subsidiaries, has been the focus of comparative management research in the 1970s and early 1980s. Several scholars attributed the impressive productivity gains in Japanese industries to the basic principles of Japanese management. Further, they advocated the adoption of these principles by American and European businesses to solve employee morale and productivity problems. However, in recent years, the validity of the “happy worker” hypothesis in explaining the effectiveness of Japanese management has been seriously questioned. In fact, the results of several empirical studies indicate that Japanese firms are facing manpower management problems both at home and in their overseas subsidiaries. The main purpose of this article is to identify and discuss the Japanese management problems of overseas subsidiaries, based on several empirical studies of Japanese overseas subsidiaries undertaken by the authors of this article and other scholars during the last 17 years (1968 to 1985). These studies are:

Localisation Problems of Japanese Subsidiaries Overseas: A Comparative Study in Southeast-Asian Countries.

A comparative study of American, Japanese and local firms in Taiwan.

A comparative study of American, European and Japanese multinationals' subsidiaries in Brazil, Peru, India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.

A comparative study of American, German, and Japanese multinations in the United States, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan.

A comparative study of upper-level Japanese and American managers of subsidiaries of Japanese firms in the United States.

A comparative study of subsidiaries of American and Japanese multinationals in Singapore.

An intensive case study of a Japanese subsidiary in Australia.

     

The causal relationships between residential property prices and rentals in Hong Kong: 1982–1991

This study examines the causal relationships between sale price changes and rental rate changes in the Hong Kong real estate market. Three different hypotheses are put forth: 1) the demands in the two markets are substitutes, 2) prices and rentals are positively correlated; and 3) prices and rentals are not correlated because of market segmentation. Using quarterly data of sale prices and rental rates for the five categories of residential property from four different districts, causal relationships are not found in 29 cases out of 40. For the other 11 cases, we find that price changes lead rental rate changes. The lag period is found to be one quarter, and this shows that the two markets are efficient: only one quarterly lag is necessary to establish causality where it exists.     

Visualization of multi-scale dynamics of hydrous cold plumes at subduction zones

Recent increases in the computational power of high-performance computing systems have led to a large gap between the high-resolution runs of numerical simulations—typically approaching 50–100 million tracers and 1–5 million grid points in two dimensions—and the modest resolution of 1–2 million pixels for conventional display devices. This technical problem is further compounded by the variety of fields produced by numerical simulations and the limited bandwidth available through the Internet in the course of collaborative ventures. We have developed a visualization system using the paradigm of web-based inquiry to address these mounting problems. We have employed, as a case study, a problem involving two-dimensional multi-scale dynamics of hydrous cold plumes at subduction zones. A Lagrangian marker method, in which the number of markers varies dynamically, is used to delineate the many different fields, such as temperature, viscosity, strain, and chemical composition. We found commercially available software to be insufficient for our visualization needs and so we were driven to develop a new set of tools tailored to high-resolution, multi-aspect, multi-scale simulations, and adaptable to many other applications in which large datasets involving tens of millions of tracers with many different fields are prevalent. In order to address this gap in visualization techniques, we have developed solutions for remote visualization and for local visualization. Our remote visualization solution is a web-based, zoomable image service (WEB-IS) that requires minimal bandwidth while allowing the user to explore our data through time, across many thermo–physical properties, and through different spatial scales. For local visualization, we found it optimal to use bandwidth-intensive, high-resolution display walls for performing parallel visualization in order to best comprehend the causal and temporal relationships between the multiple physical and chemical properties in a simulation.     

Dual aspects of mantle convection through time: Changes in global upper mantle temperature,Earth’s rotation,and global plate motion acceleration induced by mantle avalanches

We use modern and novel techniques to study the problems associated with detection and analysis of multitudinous seismic events, which form the background for isolated great earthquakes. This new approach involves multivariate analysis of low and large magnitude events recorded in space over a couple of centuries in time. We propose here the deployment of the clustering scheme both for extracting small local structures and large-scale trends in synthetic data obtained from four numerically simulated models with: uniform properties (U), a Parkfield-type asperity (A), fractal brittle properties (F), and multi-size-heterogeneity fault zone (M). The mutual nearest neighbor (mnn) clustering scheme allows for extraction of multi-resolutional seismic anomalies in both the spatio-temporal and multi-dimensional feature space. We demonstrate that the large earthquakes are correlated with a certain pathway of smaller events. Visualization of the anomalies by using a recently introduced visualization package Amira reveals clearly the spatio-temporal relationships between clusters of small, medium and large earthquakes, indicating significant stress relaxation across the entire fault region. We demonstrate that this mnn scheme can extract distinct clusters of the smallest events, which precede and follow a singularly large magnitude earthquake. These clusters form larger spatio-temporal structures comprising a series of large earthquakes. The link between the large and medium magnitude events is not so clearly understood. Short-ranged correlations are dominated by strong spatio-temporal anomalies, thus reflecting the global seismic properties of the entire fault zone.