Reviews

POLICIES FOR TRAINING AND THE LONG-TERM UNEMPLOYED.

Corney, M. 1990: The Black Hole in Britain's Training System; Training for People in Employment: Robinson, P. 1989: Stagflation; Lessons from Other Places; and Meacher, M. 1990: Adopting the Employment Principle: A Green Paper. All published by the Campaign for Work. The price of the first is £4.00, the second £5.00 and the third £3.50.

US LESSONS IN EVALUATION.

Bingham, R. D., Hill, E. W. and White, S. B. (eds) 1990: Financing Economic Development: An Institutional Response. Newbury Park, California and London: Sage Publications, £33.25 cloth, £16.75 paper.

LESSONS FROM THE USA.

Hambleton, R. 1990: Urban Government in the 1990s: Lessons from the USA,

Occasional Paper No. 35, Bristol: School for Advanced Urban Studies. No price stated.

SKILLS TRAINING.

CBI, 1989: Managing the Skills Gap. London: CBI, £10.00 paper; Report of the Vocational Education and Training Task Force, 1989: Towards a Skills Revolution. London: CBI, £20.00 paper; Association of London Authorities, 1990: Training for London. London: ALA.     

Bridge over troubled waters? problems and opportunities in interfirm research collaboration

Effective interfirm collaboration is an incresingly significant factor in technological innovation. A wide and complex range of options exists within collabotative arrangements which affect the outcome and rewards for both partners. Firms are often unaware of the strategic implications of collaborative ventures. While some large firms may be invloved in strategic alliances at the corporate level in order to establish or maintain competitiveness, many remain unaware or unconvinced of the potential for the generation of innovations through collaborations with small, flexible, 'hi-tech” firms. the pace of change and the challenge of international competition threatens Western European firms with a 'technology gap' within a 'disorganized capitalist' setting. Various forms of interfirm cooperation within and across natinal boundaires may be important responses to such uncertainty and amy ultimately provide successful strategic remedies to the situation. This article presents the findings of a recently completed research project in which 27 pairs (mostly small/large) of collaborating, innovative firms were studied in order to examine the strategic and operational issues involued in interfirm research cooperation. Whilst highlighting the advantages of collaboration, and the potential problems for both the small and the large partner, we argue that the adoption of 'cooperative game' rules id vital for successful collaborative innovation. Additionally, we attempt to posit our findings within the current debate on organized/disorganized capitalism.     

Democracy,Veto Players and the Depth of Regional Integration

We examine how domestic political factors influence the type of regional integration arrangement (RIA) that states enter. States can pursue at least five types of RIA, in order of their depth of policy integration: preferential trade agreements, free trade areas, customs unions, common markets and economic unions. We argue that a country's regime type and the number of institutional ‘veto players’ strongly affect the type of arrangement that states choose. Democracies are more likely to form an RIA than other states, a tendency that becomes more pronounced as the proposed level of integration in an arrangement rises. However, all democracies are not the same. As the number of veto players rises, the likelihood of a democracy entering an RIA declines. Furthermore, veto players are expected to have a larger effect on the odds of a democracy forming an RIA, the greater is the extent of integration that the arrangement aims to achieve. A series of statistical tests, based on analysis of all pairs of countries from 1950 to 2000, support our arguments.     

Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, and Danielle F. Wozniak, eds. Consuming Motherhood. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. ix + 323 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3429-1, $62.00 (cloth); 0-8135-3430-5, $22.95 (paper).

Motherhood imposes a birth of sorts for the women involved,according to the various authors in this exceptionally wellintegrated and provocative volume of essays. Women are rebornto a new status of ‘mother’ and simultaneously asa new kind of consumer of goods—goods in the form of services,consumer products, and even of babies. This volume weds thestudy of consumerism to the anthropological study of motherhoodand represents a genuine contribution to an array of fields,including     

Endometriosis,an unknown entity: the consumer's perspective

This paper reports the findings of a consumer‐driven investigation conducted by the Centre for Clinical Nursing Research at Epworth Hospital in conjunction with the Endometriosis Association (Victoria, Australia) aimed at identifying the information and support needs of women experiencing endometriosis. Women's experiences of endometriosis and laparoscopy were examined. A questionnaire was designed to explore women's experiences of, and informational need for, the four categories of: diagnosis of endometriosis, endometriosis, laparoscopy and managing at home. A total of 465 women who had a positive diagnosis of endometriosis, including patients at the Epworth Endometriosis Centre and members of the Endometriosis Association, were included. The data were analysed in terms of frequency of responses and themes that arose from the research. Five main themes consistently emerged from the overall analysis of the questionnaire; these included: lack of communication, no‐one listens, the emotional turmoil, expressions of gratitude to the Endometriosis Association and being young and helpless. Also identified was a lack of understanding of endometriosis and laparoscopy, on behalf of both the patient and the practitioner, which has led to communication of misinformation, extended physical pain and emotional distress. Based on these findings, recommendations were made for education strategies to be focused towards increasing awareness of endometriosis and for information to be disseminated using the preferred printed format and to be made available from gynaecologists, hospitals and schools. Through consumer participation, the information obtained in this study is of benefit to all women who come in contact with endometriosis by (a) validating women's experiences of endometriosis and (b) identifying women's needs in relation to the disease.     

Are there nonlinearities in short‐term interest rates?

The present paper investigates the characteristics of short‐term interest rates in several countries. We examine the importance of nonlinearities in the mean reversion and volatility of short‐term interest rates. We examine various models that allow the conditional mean (drift) and conditional variance (diffusion) to be functions of the current short rate. We find that different markets require different models. In particular, we find evidence of nonlinear mean reversion in some of the countries that we examine, linear mean reversion in others and no mean reversion in some countries. For all countries we examine, there is strong evidence of the need for the volatility of interest rate changes to be highly sensitive to the level of the short‐term interest rate. Out‐of‐sample forecasting performance of one‐factor short rate models is poor, stemming from the inability of the models to accommodate jumps and discontinuities in the time series data.     

REGIME-SWITCHING IN AUSTRALIAN SHORT-TERM INTEREST RATES

This paper applies a generalized regime-switching (GRS) model of the short-term interest rate to Australian data. The model allows the short rate to exhibit both mean reversion and conditional heteroscedasticity and nests the popular generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) and regime-switching specifications. It is shown that empirical estimates of many popular interest rate models provide curious results which imply that innovations to the short rate process are extremely persistent, and that the short rate is potentially non-stationary. The source of these curious results, which are also present in US and European interest rates, is identified in the context of the GRS model, which is shown, via specification and forecasting tests, to capture the features of Australian short-term interest rate data better than existing models. The stochastic process of short-term interest rates in Australia is compared with evidence from the US and Europe, highlighting a number of important differences.