Post-Conflict Reconstruction and the Challenge to International Organizations: The Case of El Salvador

Countries in post-conflict transitions have to reconcile the development challenge with the additional burden of reconstruction and national reconciliation. This paper first describes the peculiarities of these countries which make them clearly different from those pursuing normal development. Second is a discussion of the challenges that these transitions pose on the countries involved and on the international organizations that support them. Third, the paper illustrates through a discussion of El Salvador—by all standards a success story—how the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations had to adapt to meet the challenges of post-conflict reconstruction. The paper concludes with some policy recommendations.     

Volatility behavior of exchange rate future contracts

The increasing globalization of economies and the concurrent increase in the risk of currency exposure has stimulated the development of new instruments to allow both investors and traders to hedge their currency risk. The expansion of these derivatives, however, has raised some concerns. This paper studies the determinants of the dynamics of exchange rate future contracts as a means to identify the sources of such concerns. By using a mean-exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (M-EGARCH) model for five different future contract lengths and six developed economies, it is found that an M-EGARCH(1,1) effectively describes the exchange rate futures' daily dynamic. Sign, size, and persistence effects on the volatility of future contracts are all significant, thus providing important information to both policy makers and market participants.     

Identifying Ecotourists in Belize Through Benefit Segmentation: A Preliminary Analysis

Understanding the perceived benefits of nature-based or ecotourism is an important step in providing products usable to the visitor and in developing a sustainable tourism policy. There are few published studies segmenting the nature-based tourism market using a benefit segmentation approach. This study, based on a sample of visitors to Belize, a widely known ecotourism country, identifies tourist segments, based on a multivariate analysis. Ecotourists' comprised less than 20 of the random sample of visitors taken during the tourist season. Ecotourists differed from other segments in terms of social-demographic and trip characteristics, but had similar levels of activity participation. The results suggest several implications for nature-based product promotion and development, and implementation of a sustainable tourism policy.     

Knowledge acquisition and corporate entrepreneurship: Insights from Spanish SMEs in the ICT sector

The contingent perspective on the corporate entrepreneurship–performance relationship has focused mainly on the influence of factors either environmental or internal to the organization. Only recently have researchers turned their attention to the relational context and specifically to inter-organizational alliances’ potential to influence this relationship. Our paper analyzes how knowledge acquisition from alliances affects the corporate entrepreneurship–performance relationship in a sample of Spanish SMEs from the Information and Communication Technology sector (ICT). The results obtained show that both corporate entrepreneurship and knowledge acquisition have a positive influence on performance but that the moderating effect of knowledge acquisition on the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and performance is negative and it varies depending on the level of knowledge-based resources of the firm.     

Optimal designs for generalized linear models with biased response

This paper is concerned with the search for locally optimal designs when the observations of the response variable arise from a weighted distribution in the exponential family. Locally optimal designs are derived for regression models in which the response follows a weighted version of Normal, Gamma, Inverse Gaussian, Poisson or Binomial distributions. Some conditions are given under which the optimal designs for the weighted and original (non-weighted) distributions are the same. An efficiency study is performed to find out the behavior of the D-optimal designs for the original distribution when they are used to estimate models with weighted distributions.     

Estimation of poverty measures with auxiliary information in sample surveys

The analysis of poverty measures has been receiving increased attention in recent years. This paper contributes to the literature by developing percentile ratio estimators based on the pseudo empirical likelihood method. In practice, variances of poverty measures could be not expressible by simple formulae and consequently other techniques should be used in the variance estimation stage. Assuming percentile ratios, resampling techniques are investigated in this paper. A numerical example based on data from the Spanish Household Panel Survey is taken up to illustrate how suggested procedures can perform better than existing ones. The effect of a model-misspecification on the proposed estimators is also evaluated by using simulated populations.     

Understanding Society: health,biomarker and genetic data

Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study includes a wide range of health measures, and in particular biomarker and genetic data. This makes it a unique resource for research on the economics of health. We review the main features of the biomarker data, how they are collected, and evidence on data quality. We also discuss examples of how these data have been used in economic research to date.     

Maritime connectivity and agricultural trade

Seaborne shipping is the dominant mode of transport in international trade in agricultural products, and an increasing part of seaborne agricultural trade is carried in containers. Furthermore, the majority of world containers are moved through liner shipping services, that is, regular transport services provided by global shipping companies which comprise a dense network connecting ports and countries around the world. Using a theoretically consistent gravity equation and a novel identification strategy based on the use of intra-national trade flows, this paper investigates the effect of liner shipping connectivity on international trade in agricultural products. The results show that liner shipping connectivity has a positive and statistically significative effect on agricultural trade. Moreover, this positive effect can be observed for the majority of the agricultural products analysed and is also identified for countries at different stages of development. These findings appear especially relevant in terms of the objective of increasing less developed countries' participation in global agricultural trade.     

Industry,management capabilities and firms' competitiveness: An empirical contribution

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge of strategic factors that explain the competitive position reached by firms in their activity sector. We have used a survey carried out in 1999 on 287 executives that belong to the service sector in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. We have analysed the differential factors that distinguish the strategic performance of competitive vis‐à‐vis non‐competitive firms, by jointly assessing the variables representative of the sector (five competitive forces defined by Porter) and variables of an internal feature. Finally, we have moved the level of analysis from the industry to the firm; specifically, we have focused on managerial capabilities due to the significant role played by managers in the strategic decision‐making process. The use of cluster analysis to classify firms depending on their degree of competitiveness and the application of the See5 induction algorithm of rules and decision trees to determine the differential factors that distinguish competitive from non‐competitive firms, provide a methodological framework for the most significant contributions of this work. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Do You Use English in Your Daily Life?” Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions of Their Extramural Use of English

The aim of this research is to analyse the students’ perceptions about their extramural use of English, comparing undergraduates studying their degree in English (EMI) with those studying theirs in their native language (non-EMI) within a span of five academic years. Data collected from a Spanish University suggest that the students´s interest and perception of their possibilities of working abroad in English differ. Results also reveal key differences in the use of extramural English and suggest that exposure to reading books or watching English-language films will eventually contribute to the formation of global mindset in students. The trend of the importance of English during a five year span is also considered, for both strands of students. This study makes a contribution in the field of teaching in international business settings for high education institutions.