Does poverty lead to non-fatal unintentional injuries in rural Vietnam?

The aim of this study was to identify associations between poverty at the household level and unintentional injury morbidity. A cohort consisting of 24,874 person-time episodes, representing 24,776 people living in 5,801 households (classified into rich, middle income and poor by local authorities in 1999) was followed during 2000, in order to identify and assess non-fatal unintentional injuries. Incidence rate ratios were calculated using a Poisson regression model. The results showed that poverty was a risk factor for unintentional injuries generally. When looking at different types of injury, poverty was a risk for home, work and "other" injuries, protective for school injuries, while the risk of traffic injuries was not affected. The results also showed that communes in mountainous areas were at higher risk for home, work and other injuries. Overall, poverty was associated with unintentional injury morbidity. However, the relationship varied by sex, age and type of injury. Specifically, poverty increased the risk for children and elderly people being injured at home, and for adults (15-59 years) being affected by work injuries.     

Measuring service experience: Applying the satisfaction with travel scale in public transport

It is argued that favorable customer service experiences are crucial for the success of a company's offering, and research on the subject is growing rapidly. However, instruments for measuring service experience are not readily available. This study applies and validates the Satisfaction with Travel Scale (STS) for measuring the service experience in public transport. The results confirm that service experience is multidimensional, consisting of a cognitive dimension related to service quality and two affective dimensions related to positive activation, such as enthusiasm or boredom, and positive deactivation, such as relaxation or stress.     

Time-consistent fiscal policy and government cash-flow

This short paper provides an interpretation and some extensions of Lucas and Stokey's results on optimal fiscal policy. The discussion relies heavily on the concept of government cash-flow, which is related but not equal to the budget surplus. Time-consistency of the optimal policy requires that a positive cash-flow is used to buy up some debt of each maturity (and contingency).     

Headquarter Reliance on Accounting Performance Measures in a Multinational Context

Headquarter (HQ) reliance on accounting performance measures (APMs) is studied in a European multinational organization. European MNCs typically manage their foreign operations as a portfolio of relatively independent national businesses (Bartlett and Goshal, 1989). In line with previous work on APMs in a limited country setting (Govindarajan, 1984; Brownell, 1987), the HQ relies less on APMs in monitoring domestic units that face environmental instability. However, in the case of geographically dispersed foreign subsidiaries, the HQ emphasizes APMs more when dynamism increases. The financial control pattern towards foreign subsidiaries is similar to Egelhof s (1988) findings in a broad sample of MNCs. This contrasting result is consistent with the greater cost and difficulty of using information-intensive alternatives to APMs for units that are geographically and culturally distant from the HQ. There is no indication that tight APM-based management would have a negative impact on work conditions of managers facing instability, but foreign managers find it more difficult to accept the evaluative framework if high reliance is placed on APMs when their environment is dynamic.     

Asymmetrie und Divergenz internationaler Handelsabkommen

Zusammenfassung  Der Welthandel ist seit 1980 deutlich rascher gewachsen als die internationale Produktion. In welche Richtung bewegen sich die internationalen Handelsbeziehungen? Ist es zu einer st?rkeren Regionalisierung des Handels gekommen? Welche Rolle spielen dabei Pr?ferenzhandelsabkommen? Georg Koopmann, 63, Dipl.-Volkswirt, ist Senior Economist am Institut für Au?enhandel und Wirtschaftsintegration der Universit?t Hamburg und Research Associate am Hamburgischen WeltWirtschaftsInstitut (HWWI). Lars Vogel, 30, Dipl.-Volkswirt, ist Gesch?ftsführer der Ludwig-Erhard-Stiftung Bonn.