Tourism development and behavioural changes: evidences from Ratanakiri province,Kingdom of Cambodia

This research paper presents the findings of a research undertaken in Ratanakiri province, Kingdom of Cambodia (Under the RETA 6190 ADB TA project on ‘Preventing the Trafficking of Women and Children and Promoting Safe Migration in the GMS’), with the aim to evaluate the impact of an airport rehabilitation project. It highlights the role that infrastructure development, with a focus on tourism-related projects, can play in a remote rural area and its consequences on local population, especially ethnic minorities. For remote areas, tourism is considered as an accelerating influence on globalisation and in-migration, which, in turn, are seen as the main factors affecting remote local communities to modify behaviours changing from valuing utility to valuing exchange. The rapidity of these cultural changes increase rural depopulation and the vulnerability of human beings to a range of negative situational factors, including loss of land, erosion of community structures and coping mechanisms, and as well as exploitative practices such as debt bondage, prostitution and human trafficking.     

Understanding consumers' perspectives on food labelling in India

This study aims at identifying the factors influencing consumers' perception on food labelling and its impact on food purchase decision making, through personal interviews of 631 respondents using a structured questionnaire. To analyse the consumers' perceptions on food labelling, factor analysis has been carried out to identify the underlying dimensions among a set of food labelling attributes using the principal component analysis. Based on factor analysis, four sets of components/factors have emerged, that is, (i) serving method; (ii) quality and nutrition; (iii) production and storage; and (iv) product identification, which explain 66.271% of the variance. Logit regression analysis indicates that among the socio‐demographic indicators, the estimated coefficients for gender, education, income and location of residence are statistically significant. Similarly, information on quality and nutrition, production and storage processes, and basic information of the product is found to be significant, implying that these factors are more likely to influence the use of food labels in making informed purchase decisions by the consumers. The findings of the study give practical insights on food labelling issues for the food processors and policy makers.     

COMPOSITE AREA LINKED SYSTEM FOR PROPERTY TAX REFORM IN INDIA*

In India, property tax is presently levied on the basis of the rent-based rateable valuation system. Various official Commissions and Committees and professional experts have, over the last four decades, commented upon the inadequacies of this system, which, among other things, are the absence of an open market in land and rental transactions, the non-availablility of professionally trained valuers and the subjective nature of assessments in a corruption-prone administrative environment. As to the direction of future reforms, there have been two schools of thought - one, advocating for amendment of current rent control laws; and the other, favoring a new system of local taxation, delinked both from the capital value and rental value systems which are difficult to administer in India. This paper highlights the findings of a policy-oriented research study commissioned by the Ministry of Urban Development for the design and evaluation of such a system.     

Misalignment of the Baht and its Trade Balance Consequences for Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s

This paper examines Thailand's pre‐crisis exchange rate policy, focusing on the degree of the country's real exchange rate misalignment pre‐crisis and its consequent effects on Thailand's trade balance with its two large trading partners, the US and Japan, in the 1980s and 1990s. Defining misalignment as the difference between actual and ‘equilibrium’ exchange rates, we estimate three key ‘equilibrium’ exchange rates of the Thai baht: (a) the real effective equilibrium exchange rate of the Thai baht against its twenty‐two major trading partners; (b) the bilateral real equilibrium exchange rates of the baht against the US dollar; and (c) the bilateral real equilibrium exchange rate of the baht against the Japanese yen.     

On the Evolution of Mobile Platform Ecosystem Structure and Strategy

Platforms have become a core fundament of many technology industries. Platforms not only enable new products and services but have also been shown to influence strategies, shape business models, and even transform entire industries. Platforms play a particularly important role in the mobile ecosystem. The success of smartphones has led to an intense battle of mobile platforms, each looking for ways to become the system of choice for mobile device manufacturers, mobile network operators, and mobile application developers. Drawing on theories of platform markets, strategic networks, and business ecosystems, this paper uses a visualization approach to study the evolving global interfirm structure and examines strategies used in the mobile platform ecosystem over the past five years. We identify important differences between mobile platform strategies and discuss their implications for both mobile ecosystem participants and the future of the app economy.     

Domestic Energy Consumption and Country’s Income Growth: A Quantitative Analysis of Developing and Developed Countries Using Panel Causality,Panel VECM,Panel Cointegration and SURE

Journal of Quantitative Economics - The present study is an attempt to test the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for developed and developing counties. For this purpose,...     

“My Country’s Future”: A Culture-Centered Interrogation of Corporate Social Responsibility in India

Companies operating and located in emerging economy nations routinely couch their corporate social responsibility (CSR) work in nation-building terms. In this article, I focus on the Indian context and critically examine mainstream CSR discourse from the perspective of the culture-centered approach (CCA). Accordingly, five main themes of CSR stand out: nation-building facade, underlying neoliberal logics, CSR as voluntary, CSR as synergetic, and a clear urban bias. Next, I outline a CCA-inspired CSR framework that allows corporate responsibility to be re-claimed and re-framed by subaltern communities of interest. I identify such resistive openings via interrogations of culture (I focus on oft-cited Gandhian ethics here), structure (State policy, organizational strategy, and global/local flows), and agency (subaltern reframing of institutional responsibility, engagement with alternative modes of agency, and deconstructive vigilance).