The development of the Gulf region’s air transport networks – The first century

This paper employs the concepts of centrality, intermediacy and proximity to explain the evolution of air transport networks in Asia and applies them to the region surrounding the Arabian Gulf. In doing so the paper provides a structured, historical account of the development of air transport in a region that occupied a central place for important trade routes for thousands of years. The paper argues that there has been a “principal axis shift” so that the role of the region is no longer defined as an intermediate section of the east-west routes. Indeed, the region has come to re-occupy a central place in trade and travel flows serving a fundamentally changed global aviation network building upon the economic and social development within the region.     

PERCEPTIONS A L'EGARD DES PRATIQUES EN GESTION DES RESSOURCES HUMAINES ET DE I'IMPORTANCE RELATIVE DES FONCTIONS ENSEIGNEMENT,RECHERCHE ET SERVICES A LA COLLECTIVITÉ: UNE ÉTUDE DESCRIPTIVE CHEZ DES PROFESSEURS D'ADMINISTRATION DES UNIVERSITÉS QUÉBÉCOISES***

This exploratory study concerns a group living a special situation inside the academic teaching profession: the business or management professors. Using a sample (N = 229) of management teachers coming from all Quebec universities, this study outlines the profile of their perceptions with regard to some practices in Human Ressource Management (H.R.M.) affecting them in different steps of their academic career. We are also interested in their perceptions about the relative importance of teaching, research and collectivity services. The results point out some apparently more problematic practices in H.R.M.: reception, control of sabbatical year of training and and finally fairness of wages. It also brings out, that the respondents, while giving teaching the highest score, would wish to be granted a significant reduction of time allowed to this activity in order to be able to concentrate their energy on research, which obtains the second higher score, above the collectivity services score. Nevertheless, the perceptions relative to the balance wanted in research vary significantly (p < 0,01) according to level of diplomes and tenure of the respondents; the implications of these results on the management of teaching resources are discussed.     

Work‐related attitudes and job characteristics of expatriates in Saudi Arabia

This study investigates the influence of job satisfaction, job autonomy, job variety, task identity, feedback, and employee demographics on organizational commitment among self‐initiated expatriates (SIEs) in Saudi Arabia. An examination of a sample of 481 SIEs reveals that only job satisfaction and job variety are related to organizational commitment. The rest—job characteristics and demographics—are unrelated to organizational commitment. The findings and the anomalies of the findings are discussed. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Euro Area——Fiscal Squeeze,Export Boost

Some euro-area countries face a sharp fiscal squeeze- but they are in the minority Low real interest rates and a more competitive euro should benefit the core group of countries We expect the ECB to stay on hold until Q2-2011 and have lowered our 2011 growth forecast     

The integration of sustainability within value management practices: A study of experienced value managers in the GCC countries

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) comprises the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom of Bahrain, and the states of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. These countries are fairly similar in terms of socioeconomic, commercial, and infrastructural development. Disappointingly perhaps, their thriving construction industries continue to score poorly in terms of sustainability. Although value management (VM) has been proposed as a potential mechanism for delivering sustainable construction projects in some countries, this idea has not yet been widely put into practice around the world. The aim of this article is to investigate this potential in the GCC countries through interviewing 17 experienced value managers from the GCC. The primary conclusion, derived from the viewpoints of these value managers, is that such an endeavor might be unviable at present, largely due to a lack of awareness with regard to sustainability issues in the GCC. Proposals are therefore provided to assist in a successful integration of sustainability into VM practices in the GCC region.     

Diversification,corporate governance and firm value in small markets: evidence from New Zealand

We find that diversified firms in New Zealand are associated with a value discount of 19–42 per cent relative to single‐segment (undiversified) firms. Although several competing explanations have been offered in the literature, we find that the strength of corporate governance explains between 15–21 per cent of this discount. Specifically, board size, busyness of directors, CEO ownership and whether or not compensation of directors includes equity‐based components collectively explain a large part of the reported discount. Our results from companies trading in New Zealand complement recent findings in the US by not only confirming the existence of a diversification discount but also emphasizing the role of poor governance in destroying shareholder wealth by pursuing a value‐destroying corporate strategy. All our results hold after controlling for potential endogeneity in the decision to diversify and the choice of corporate governance structure by employing two‐way fixed‐effects and dynamic‐panel generalized method of moments regression techniques.