Common good leadership in business management: an ethical model from the Indian tradition

While dominant management thinking is steered by profit maximisation, this paper proposes that sustained organisational growth can best be stimulated by attention to the common good and the capacity of corporate leaders to create commitment to the common good. The leadership thinking of Kautilya and Ashoka embodies this principle. Both offer a common good approach, emphasising the leader's moral and legal responsibility for people's welfare, the robust interaction between the business community and the state, and the importance of moral training of leaders in identifying and promoting the common good. We argue that the complex process of re‐orientating corporate priorities towards the common good requires alertness and concerted effort if both business and society are to truly benefit. As Ashoka said: ‘A good deed is a difficult thing’.     

Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman

This article traces the movement of the concept of ‘defensible space’ from New York City in the 1970s, where it was developed by the Canadian architect/planner Oscar Newman, to London in the 1980s and into design interventions in British public housing in the 1990s, through British geographer Alice Coleman, who acted as an especially powerful transfer agent. In focusing on this urban design ‘concept’ on the move we contribute to existing scholarship on policy mobility and city building in a number of ways. First, we explore an instance of the movement/mobility of a planning concept in a historical period (the recent past) largely overlooked to date. Secondly, we demonstrate that this movement was the result of a disaggregated series of expert knowledge transfers and localized translations of pre‐policy expert knowledge, generated through university‐based research work and networks. We theorize this instance of urban planning mobility by way of the interlinked insights offered by the sociology of science and policy‐mobilities literatures. As this is an instance of university research shaping public policy it also offers an opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of ‘evidence‐based policy’ and the impact agenda in contemporary higher education.     

Divining directions for development: a cooperative industry–government–public sector research approach to establishing R&D priorities

This paper discusses the limitations of many fiscal and related methods of encouraging increases in R&D as a tool for establishing research priorities. It suggests that any 'national' rather than industry–specific approach is likely to be ineffective in stimulating the R&D needed for the development of all industries. This is particularly the case in countries such as Australia and New Zealand where many decisions about R&D investments are made overseas, in the headquarters of the multinational firms that dominate most sectors of the economy. Instead, the paper suggests that an industry development approach currently being used in Australia, the Action Agenda approach, be modified to include a broader range of players, notably the public sector R&D community and an industry's 'users', to think about and establish R&D priorities which will underpin progress in the industry as a whole rather than being restricted to individual firms. The proposal rests on the results of AEGIS empirical research (surveys and interviews) into the dynamics of innovation in different 'product systems' (broader than sectors) in Australia which indicates the broad range of players that need to be included both in the analysis of innovation and in policies for stimulating the research which can assist innovation.     

RECENT FINANCIAL AND ACCOUNTABILITY CHANGES IN GENERAL PRACTICE: AN UNHEALTHY INTRUSION INTO MEDICAL AUTONOMY?

Recently General Medical Practice has been inundated with a range of financial and accountability changes. These imposed changes have been welcomed with considerable resentment by General Practitioners (GPs hereafter). This paper explores some of the key historical and contextual reasons for this resentment. The conclusion is that it is traceable to firstly, the nature of these reforms, which are seen as irrelevant at best or, at worst, run counter to the values and concerns of GPs, and secondly, and related to this, to the perceived inappropriate intrusion into medical autonomy by a Government whose forbears were previously enabling such freedom.     

Dynamic Relationships in the Market for Ocean Grain Freighting Services

A vector autoregressive model containing ocean grain freight rates, grain shipments, idled tonnage, new carrier deliveries and fuel prices is used to evaluate dynamic linkages in the ocean grain transport market. Dynamic relationships are of particular importance in ocean freighting months because freighting services are often contracted several months before shipment. In addition, such markets may be slow to adjust to shocks because of significant short-run fixities in shipping services. Ocean grain freight rates are found to be responsive to fuel prices and new ship deliveries, but are not affected by demand shocks. Ship idling rates are found to be sensitive to fuel prices, grain shipments and freight rates. Significant adjustment lags are revealed.     

Asymptotic analysis for optimal investment and consumption with transaction costs

We consider an agent who invests in a stock and a money market and consumes in order to maximize the utility of consumption over an infinite planning horizon in the presence of a proportional transaction cost . The utility function is of the form U(c) = c^1-p/(1-p) for p > 0, . We provide a heuristic and a rigorous derivation of the asymptotic expansion of the value function in powers of , and we also obtain asymptotic results on the boundary of the no-trade region.Received: July 2003, Mathematics Subject Classification (1991): 90A09, 60H30, 60G44JEL Classification: G13Work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants DMS-0103814 and DMS-0139911.     

How Large are the Welfare Gains from Technological Innovation Induced by Environmental Policies?

This paper examines whether the welfare gains from technological innovation that reduces future abatement costs are larger or smaller than the Pigouvian welfare gains from optimal pollution control. The relative welfare gains from innovation depend on three key factors—the initially optimal level of abatement, the speed at which innovation reduces future abatement costs, and the discount rate. We calculate the welfare gains from innovation under a variety of different scenarios. Mostly they are less than the Pigouvian welfare gains. To be greater, innovation must reduce abatement costs substantially and quickly and the initially optimal abatement level must be fairly modest.