Predicting job satisfaction and workers’ intentions to leave at the bottom of the high value agricultural chain: evidence from the Ethiopian cut flower industry

While there is a large body of research focusing on working conditions in labour-intensive industries, none has yet considered how workers themselves perceive their own working conditions. This paper draws on a sample of workers from the cut flower sector industry in Ethiopia to examine the extent to which workers are satisfied with their jobs and to explore the relationship between job satisfaction and intention to leave. Results suggest that a positive evaluation of extrinsic organizational rewards (wage, job security and healthy environment) contributes to workers’ job satisfaction. Dissatisfied workers report higher intentions to leave their job in the flower farms. In addition to low levels of job satisfaction, having alternative livelihood strategies is a key determining factor in the intention to leave. Interestingly, being a member of an informal savings net organized at the work floor mitigates the intention to leave. The paper ends with some implications for managers and policy-makers, along with limitations and suggestions for future research.     

Planting Seeds for Social Dialogue: An Institutional Work Perspective

How to get workplace social dialogue started at the bottom of Global Value Chains remains a difficult question. Drawing from institutional work literature, we investigate how local unions, supplier and buyer worked together to start the process of social dialogue in the anti‐union context of pineapple plantations in Costa Rica. The process unfolds along four phases each involving specific sets of institutional work. The study highlights the evolving brokerage role of the international buyer and the importance of balancing compliance and commitment approaches to build the foundation for workplace social dialogue.     

Narrow and scientific replication of ‘The slave trade and the origins of mistrust in Africa'

Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) argue that slave trades led to a culture of mistrust in Africa. They regress self‐reported trust from the 2005 Afrobarometer surveys on ethnicity‐specific historic slave exports. Individuals from ethnic groups that experienced high levels of slave exports are less trusting. Causality is demonstrated by instrumenting slave exports using the historic distance of each ethnic group to the coast. Our narrow replication yields identical results. The scientific replication repeats the analysis with Afrobarometer survey data from 2008, which includes two new countries and more ethnic groups. Our replication confirms the results of Nunn and Wantchekon. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Poverty targeting, resource degradation and heterogeneous endowments—a micro-simulation analysis of a less-favored Ethiopian village

Persistent and widespread poverty in less-favored areas (LFAs) is attributed to fragile natural resources and poor markets. Limited assets may keep households outside the reach of poverty policies targeted at LFAs. We explored in a stylized manner the role of heterogeneous household assets for (1) policies aimed at poverty reduction; (2) within-village income inequality; and (3) soil erosion. With a farm-household micro-simulation model we analyzed for each household in a remote Ethiopian village three sets of policies: technology improvement, infrastructure investment, and off-farm employment through migration or cash for work (CFW) programs. Combating poverty with a single policy, migratory off-farm employment reduces the poverty headcount most. Because of self-selection, CFW programs performed best in terms of reaching the poorest of the poor. CFW also reduced within-village income inequality most, while a price band reduction increased income inequality. Only technology improvements resulted in a trade-off between poverty and soil erosion. Price band and off-farm employment policies reduced erosion while outperforming technology improvements in terms of poverty reduction. We found that combining two policies was most helpful in assisting poorer households to overcome the limitations of their asset endowments. A CFW program combined with reduced price bands yielded most in terms of poverty reduction and income inequality. This policy complementarity is, however, less important for better-endowed households. Reducing the reliance of households on agriculture offered a win-win situation of reducing poverty and maintaining natural resources. Combining policies helped to overcome asset limitations, to target policies to the poorest households and to reduce income inequalities.     

The Signal of Applying for a Job Under a Vacancy Referral Scheme

We investigate the signalling effect related to participation in active labor‐market programs. To this end, we conduct an experiment in which human resources professionals make hiring decisions concerning fictitious job candidates who apply either under a job‐vacancy referral system or directly. We provide first causal evidence for a substantial adverse effect of referral on the probability of being hired. In addition, we find that employers perceive referred candidates as being less motivated than other candidates.     

Do Non‐profit Organizations Manage Earnings toward Zero Profit and Does Governmental Financing Play a Role?

Prior research has documented earnings management in for‐profit settings. Non‐profit organizations are thought to pay less attention to the bottom line and earnings management research has therefore focused on the manipulation of expenses in order to improve efficiency ratios or taxable income, not reported earnings per se. Considering an institutional setting characterized by the absence of such ratios and the presence of important subsidies, management of the actual bottom line is analyzed in light of these subsidies. The results suggest that organizations drive their results toward zero profit, which is intensified by increased governmental funding when unmanaged results are positive. The relation between downward earnings management and the presence of subsidies is particularly evident for organizations whose accumulated reserves are high. Copyright © 2012 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The dark side of discounts: An inaction inertia perspective on the post‐promotion dip

After a product has been on promotion, the sales of that product may temporarily decrease. This post‐promotion dip is normally explained in terms of forward buying or stockpiling. This article offers a third explanation in terms of brand switching. The results of two experiments show that after missing a discount on their regular brand, consumers may switch to another brand. Switching behavior is much more pronounced when a large discount is missed in comparison to when a small discount is missed. This finding is consistent with recent social psychological research on inaction inertia, and the results are discussed in relation to this phenomenon. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Beyond Kyoto, plan B: A climate policy master plan based on transparent metrics

Many scholars analyze the Kyoto–Copenhagen process, and offer corrective suggestions for identified flaws in the present design. Based on various proposals in the literature, this article adopts a global master-plan perspective, leaving executive architecture to sovereign participants. Transparent, flexible and fair top-down rules must synchronize the numerous bottom-up initiatives while addressing the diversity of national circumstances in the drastic transformation of the world's energy economies.Plan B refutes absolute emission reduction targets on old or speculative baselines. It criticizes global tax and permit trade instruments for being ineffective, inefficient and unfair when uniformly applied on a tremendous differentiated world. Plan B is built on three annually observed variables measuring percentage progress against rolling baselines (the variables' values in the previous year): the ratio of net climate tax revenues to GDP, the commercial energy intensity of GDP, and the carbon intensity of commercial energy use. The three variables together indicate countries' progress affecting emissions per person, a metric that must converge to lower bands when climate change is addressed seriously. Long-term scenarios of global convergence “funnels” serve as guidance to frame near-term actions rich and poor countries individually propose to take. The global regime is common for all countries, and is ranked by GDP per person to determine whether a nation is a donor or a beneficiary in a Global Climate Transfer Fund. Fund payments and drawing rights depend on that ranking but also on the performances of the countries in realizing committed progress. The transparent mechanisms of the design and of the fund persuasively invite countries to participate in a fair, self-enforcing agreement.     

Milk in the city: profiles and development paths for urban dairy holders in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

Demand for dairy products is growing fast in urban areas. Due to poorly developed rural infrastructure, urban dairy farms are pivotal in making milk available and affordable in towns and cities. Yet current supply fails to meet the increasing demand. In order to formulate fit interventions that can expand urban dairy production, a detailed understanding of urban dairy systems is needed. Using a cluster analysis approach, we profile 304 urban dairy farms in Mekelle, Northern Ethiopia, along three dimensions: input efficiency, market integration, and resilience towards demand seasonality. Our results suggest five distinctive farm types: surviving farms, processing female farms, young male entrepreneurs, established output-efficient farms, and established output-input-efficient farms. We observe large discrepancies in terms of dairy enterprise’s productivity, profitability, and suitability in future urban policy planning. For each of the identified dairy systems, we sketch potential intervention approaches that can feed into more tailored dairy development programmes.     

Big is efficient: Evidence from agricultural cooperatives in Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, there is a renewed interest in agricultural cooperatives as an institutional tool to improve the welfare of smallholder farmers. One of the pathways through which cooperatives benefit their members is scale economies. However, the establishment of cooperatives in Ethiopia seems to pay little attention to the size of the organizations. This article aims at investigating the effect of size on cost efficiency of agricultural cooperatives. More specifically, the purpose is to examine whether a single cooperative can serve a given number of farmers at a lower cost than two or more smaller cooperatives could. We employ the concept of cost subadditivity to compare the cost efficiency of large versus small cooperatives, and by extension unilateral actions. We estimate a flexible production technology using cross‐sectional cooperative‐level data. Findings show that costs would drop by 78% to 181% if farmers join hands in relatively large rather than small cooperatives.