Produce Marketing and Retail Buying Practices

Produce suppliers have raised concerns over retailer demands for slotting fees and other promotional allowances. These business practices have long existed in packaged goods trade, but are new to produce, which suppliers attribute to recent retail consolidation. Others argue that these allowances are consistent with the a competitive market, which is confronted with an enormous number of new products, most of which fail. Questions on the applicability of existing antitrust laws has limited their use. Eventually, the situation may rectify itself as more retailers adopt new business strategies that obviate the need for slotting fees and allowances.     

Union organizing in Britain: a survey of policy and practice

Analysis of the reasons for trade union decline in developed economies has pointed to their failure to invest in effective methods of recruitment as a contributory factor. This article presents survey and case research to examine the extent to which union failure in recruitment and organizing has been rectified in the United Kingdom. The evidence indicates a varied but nevertheless substantial re-direction of union effort towards recruitment since the mid-1990s and is used to identify the characteristics of 'recruiting unions' which have invested more heavily and adopted more ambitious recruitment targets. Recruiting unions are found to be those which are receptive to learning new approaches to recruitment from overseas and which have relatively advanced arrangements for the representation of women and minorities in their internal systems of government.     

Disability and self-employment: evidence for the UK

This article examines the self-employment decision for disabled and nondisabled workers in the UK. Using Labour Force Survey (LFS) data, it is found that self-employment may provide an important means by which those with work-limiting disabilities can accommodate their impairment.     

When Marketing Dare Not Speak Its Name: Understanding Market Orientation in Chinese NGOs

ABSTRACT

The market orientation construct has proven to be of value to profit-seeking firms. It ought to be of value to NGOs too. Some previous research has been done to facilitate understanding of market orientation in NGOs, but the methodologies used have mostly been quantitative, and nothing is known about the market orientation of Chinese NGOs. To address this research gap, a qualitative case study methodology was used to develop a deeper understanding of how market orientation is practiced among NGOs in Hong Kong (China). Mapping with previous studies, the research found that three factors together explained the varying degrees of market orientation in the NGOs studied: senior management factors, organizational and institutional factors, and structural and system factors. But more importantly, an NGO’s funding base was found to moderate the relationship between these antecedents and an organization’s market orientation. The more that the NGO relies on public funding or a small number of funders the weaker the influence of the antecedents on market orientation. The more that the NGO relies on private funders, a diversified group of funders, or self-funding, the stronger the influence of the antecedents on market orientation, and the closer its understanding of market orientation is likely to be to that of a commercial entity. The article finishes with a substantive theoretical model for market orientation in the Chinese NGO context.     

The Millennium Peak in Club Convergence: A New Look at Distributional Changes in The Wealth of Nations

This paper proposes an easy‐to‐use nonparametric indicator for club convergence, or convergence within clusters of countries: it measures whether the modes of the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita distribution become more pronounced over time. Relying on changes in the critical bandwidth for unimodality, the indicator is a dynamic extension of concepts from often‐used multimodality tests. Its evolution suggests the new empirical result of a ‘millennium peak’ in club convergence in the worldwide GDP per capita distribution. The club convergence movements of the 1980s and 1990s, when groups of poor and rich countries converged to two separate points, was followed by a de‐clubbing movement after the turn of the millennium. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

农业基金渐入佳境

25年前，在美国投资农业或许是最具风险的投资之一，但是目前的情况已反转，该领域的投资已经跻身风险最低的投资项目之列。