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Meeting the Challenges for Franchising in Developing Countries: The Vietnamese Experience

While business format franchising is the industry standard for developed countries, it remains an aspiration for many developing countries. Despite the attraction for developing countries of systems, training, and support and despite the economic and regulatory infrastructure being in place for the development of business format franchising, a range of commercial and socio-cultural factors may conspire to prevent its full expression. This paper addresses franchising development in Vietnam, a developing country. It considers strategies to bridge the gap between Vietnamese franchise practice and franchising best practice. It proposes that in Vietnam's current state of development, the product and trade name model may be the appropriate starting point with a move to the business format model only when, and in places where, the socio-cultural, commercial, and economic factors and the legal environment can accommodate more sophisticated business format franchise arrangements.     

加强铁路企业财务管理工作的措施探讨

财务管理工作的好坏将对企业的生存和发展产生直接而重要的影响.做为铁路企业,在市场竞争日益激烈的条件下.要想在市场经济中立于不败之地,就必须采取切实可行的措施,加强财务管理工作,使企业在发展中必然占据先机,从而底赢得更大的发展空间     

Employment and Exchange Rates: The Role of Openness and Technology

Real exchange rate movements are important drivers of the reallocation of resources between sectors of the economy. Economic theory suggests that the impact of exchange rates should vary with the degree of exposure to international competition and with the technology level. We show that both the degree of openness and the technology level mediate the impact of exchange rate movements on labour market developments. According to our estimations, whereas employment in high-technology sectors seems to be relatively immune to changes in real exchange rates, these appear to have sizable and significant effects on highly open low-technology sectors. The analysis of job flows suggests that the impact of exchange rates on these sectors occurs through employment destruction.     

要素价格变化如何影响研发强度——基于地区研发强度分解数据的实证研究

本文主要从中国经济发展和资本深化背景下工业企业研发投入依然乏力这一基本问题出发,从中国要素市场存在的价格扭曲入手分析了劳动力价格相对资本价格的低估对于地区工业部门研发投入所产生的影响,并通过对地区工业研发强度指标的分解,从产业结构与产业链层级两方面检验了要素市场价格扭曲对地区工业研发强度所产生的影响。结果表明,中国经济中普遍存在着劳动力价格低估的要素价格负向扭曲,这种扭曲的存在不仅阻碍了地区产业结构与产业链层级的升级调整,同时也弱化了要素禀赋结构变化所引发的资本深化对于产业结构与产业链层级的促进效果,是导致中国工业企业的R&D投入强度并未呈现出与资本深化相一致的增强趋势的重要制度根源。     

Estimating technology in the postal sector: a Bayesian approach

The aim of this article is to study the technology of the sector represented by the Spanish national post-office and telegraph service, Sociedad Estatal Correos y Telégrafos, S.A. trading as Correos, and denominated as such hereafter. Concretely, we analyse economic efficiency (technical and allocative) and scale economies of the production units (cost centres) of Correos. To do this, we employ a methodology based on an input distance function which is the dual of the cost function. Moreover, and applying duality theory, we develop an economic model to assess the effect of postal infrastructures on the operators’ costs. In order to carry out the empirical model, Bayesian econometrics is applied to estimate the parameters in the input distance function and the technical and allocative efficiency terms.     

Research on China’s export structure to the US: Analysis based on the US economic growth and exchange rate

Due to the rapid appreciation of RMB, the consistent declining of the US economy and other uncertain factors, China’s export volume to the United States has declined. The paper first chooses six industries to divide them into three groups based on per capita possession of capital, then employs the monthly data from 2001 to 2008 to carry out EG two-step cointegration test, and finally analyzes the impacts of the US economic growth and the exchange rate variability on different export industries. Empirical results show that the labor-intensive industries are most susceptible to fluctuations brought by economic growth and real exchange rate, while those industries with higher per capita possession of capital are less susceptible to external factors. In the short run, the export of labor-intensive products gives an advantage to China’s foreign trade development, but in the long-run, these industries will be affected greatly by various uncertain factors and the advantages of China’s labor-intensive export industries will disappear with the shift of the international division. Therefore, the only way to guarantee the dominant position of China’s foreign trade is to develop capital and technology intensive export industries and upgrade export structure.     

韩国灾难管理体系研究——从“岁月”号事故看韩国灾难管理系统及政策

本篇文章探讨韩国灾难管理体系并分析体系内存在的问题,探索未来的灾难体系发展方向。并希望灾难频发的中国政府也能够借鉴韩国灾难管理体系,探索制定灾难政策的发展方向。     

MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION OF FACTOR MODELS ON DATASETS WITH ARBITRARY PATTERN OF MISSING DATA

In this paper we modify the expectation maximization algorithm in order to estimate the parameters of the dynamic factor model on a dataset with an arbitrary pattern of missing data. We also extend the model to the case with a serially correlated idiosyncratic component. The framework allows us to handle efficiently and in an automatic manner sets of indicators characterized by different publication delays, frequencies and sample lengths. This can be relevant, for example, for young economies for which many indicators have been compiled only recently. We evaluate the methodology in a Monte Carlo experiment and we apply it to nowcasting of the euro area gross domestic product. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.