Resource price trends and development prospects

If natural resource prices follow exogenous paths, then future resource price changes must be reflected in current measures of resource depletion, as shown by Vincent et al. (1997). This result is extended to the measurement of income and saving in a small resource exporting economy. A precise formula for net (genuine) saving is derived when resource prices grow exogenously at the international interest rate. Empirical results are presented for over 100 countries and a dozen resource commodities, using historical real price trends to forecast future prices. Reductions in saving in excess of 1% of GNI are observed for over 20 countries.JEL Classification: F18, Q01, Q32, Q56 Correspondence to: Kirk HamiltonKatharine Bolt: The opinions expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the World Bank. The financial support of the Swedish International Development Agency is gratefully acknowledged.     

Engineering and the First World War: A case study of the Lancashire cotton spinning machine industry

This paper investigates the impact of the First World War on one of the major British engineering industries - that of cotton textile machinery. From 1915 all the important firms came under direct Government control and were required to give priority to munitions manufacture. The consequent decline in machinery output combined with the disruptions to international trade drastically reduced exports. Since Britain was the foremost supplier to the world market, the growth of cotton manufacturing was directly affected. The varied response to this in the different markets forms the central focus of our study.     

THE DESIGN AND DIFFUSION OF IMPROVED COOKING STOVES

The poorer half of the world's people have long relied for theirenergy needs on woodfuels. Since the oil shocks of the 1970s,pressure on forest resources has increased and the costs oftraditional use of woodfuels have been growing—to thehouseholder, in cash or collection time, and to society in inefficientenergy use, deforestation, and local and global harm to healthand the environment. Modern, efficient stoves can alleviatesome of these problems; programs to design and disseminate themwould seem a worthwhile pursuit for development activity. But do such programs in fact warrant the investment? Why haveso many failed to catch on as expected? The authors find thatprograms have been most successful when targeted to specificareas where woodfuel prices or collection times are high. Fieldtesting, consumer surveys, and involvement of local artisansfrom the outset have been critical to the ultimate adoptionof the stoves. With these elements in place, external supportfrom governments and donors can be useful; lacking them, subsidiesmay succeed only in distributing stoves that ultimately molderaway unused. This article's review of what makes for successand failure is instructive for the design of stove programsin particular, and of development projects that propagate improvedmethods and technologies in general.      

Investing exhaustible resource rents and the path of consumption

Abstract.  We set out dollar‐valued net national product for an economy with a wasting essential stock (oil deposit). We take up 'maintaining capital intact' and locally unchanging consumption. The percentage change in 'net investment' or 'genuine savings,' relative to the market rate of interest, denotes whether current consumption is rising, constant, or declining. JEL classification: O13, Q28, F0     

Website development by nonprofit organizations in an emerging market: a case study of Thai websites

• Nonprofit organizations are pertinent players in making the world a better place. Their websites aid in fulfilling their socially beneficial missions by being a platform to present themselves, to interact with stakeholders around the world, and to perform e‐transactions to raise funds. This interdisciplinary research explores nonprofit websites in Thailand, an emerging market, to determine their progress through an adapted e‐business stage model. A manual website decoding process was used to determine the development of websites, within the sector. On average, almost three‐quarters of the websites offered interactivity and just less than half conducted online transactions, but internationally connected organizations in Thailand were significantly more likely to do so. The findings suggest that while nonprofit websites in Thailand are progressing, there is significant lag between local Thai websites and those that have international connections. While the model successfully provided new data for understanding nonprofit websites in less developed markets, it may need to be modified in future studies.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Capital Accumulation and Resource Depletion: A Hartwick Rule Counterfactual

How much produced capital would resource-abundant countries have today if they had actually followed the Hartwick Rule (invest resource rents in other assets) over the last 30 years? We employ time series data on investment and rents on exhaustible resource extraction for 70 countries to answer this question. The results are striking: Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, and Gabon would all have as much produced capital as South Korea, while Nigeria would have five times its current level. A specific rule for sustainability – maintain positive constant genuine investment – is shown to lead to unbounded consumption.     

An Enforcement-Coalition Model: Fishermen and Authorities Forming Coalitions

The paper sets up a four-stage enforcement model of fish quotas. The purpose of the paper is to show how the level of enforcement set by the authorities affects the way fishermen form coalitions. We show that a high level of control effort yields less co-operation among fishermen, while in the case of low control effort, coalitions are somewhat self-enforcing. The paper further discusses how the optimal enforcement level changes when the coalition formation among authorities changes: centralised, partly centralised and decentralised authorities. We show that decentralised authorities set a lower level of control effort compared to the centralised authorities. The theoretical results are illustrated by simulations of the Baltic Sea cod fishery.The authors acknowledge valuable comments and suggestions from Frank Jensen and Niels Vestergaard.     

Cross-functional interface and disruption in CRM projects: Is marketing from Venus and information systems from Mars?

Because of the inherently cross-functional nature of customer relationship management, the use of cross-functional teams in CRM project implementations is virtually mandatory to achieve critical marketing and sales objectives. This study examines the effects of functional membership as well as team and individual performance evaluations on project members' perceptions of disruption and cooperation during CRM project implementations. The results show that IS project members are more likely to perceive internal volatility and manifest interfunctional conflict and less likely to perceive interfunctional cooperation than project members from either sales/marketing or general management. We also find that team performance evaluations are negatively associated with disruption and positively associated with cooperation, while individual evaluations are negatively associated with internal volatility.     

Price Acceptance for Organic Milk in Beijing,China

This study examines Chinese consumers’ acceptance and price willingness to pay for organic fluid milk. We used questionnaire data gathered in 2014 to analyze the impact of price and milk knowledge, as well as consumer age, gender, education and income on organic milk choice. The results indicate that: 1) young females with a strong educational background have shown the strongest consumption desire for organic milk; 2) those who shop for the family tend to support organic milk and are willing to pay more for the milk; 3) shoppers with more disposable income are willing to pay a premium price for organic milk.