Strategic planning and strategic management in Australian organisations

Many planning and organisational aspects of 48 Australian organisations were examined. The empirical information tends to suggest that the process of adopting the strategic management concept is well advanced in some Australian organisations. Irrespective of size and ownership status, some organisations have already adopted strategic planning, and the process of evolution is continuing towards the final stage of strategic management. The increasing environmental volatility and growing international exposure of organisations in Australia and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region will increase the pressure to implement international management systems, including strategic management.     

Agglomeration Effects and the Competition for Firms

A two-region economy consists of a given but different number of immobile workers in each region, and a given number of mobile firms. Firms create jobs where they locate, but there is frictional unemployment. Two sorts of agglomeration effects arise: those from economies of scale in matching, and those from production economies external to the firm. Regions may either be part of a unitary state in which case all regional policies are decided by the central government, or they may be part of a federal state in which case some policies are determined by the regional governments. We characterize the resource allocations in both a unitary and a federal state, and identify the set of instruments that are required to replicate the social optimum in each state.     

An Analysis of Resolution Trust Corporation Transactions: Auction Market Process and Pricing

This article describes the operations of the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), examines the procedures it employs to resolve distressed Savings and Loan scenarios and investigates the pricing of transactions undertaken by the RTC. The RTC has been criticized for allegedly transferring properties to acquirers at "bargain" prices. The transactions involving publicly traded acquirers in RTC sales are examined from an auction theory perspective. Overall, there is little evidence that winning bidders experience stock price gains. There are, however, subsets of bidders for which the outcomes are predominantly negative. The only category of transactions which provide statistically significant gains to acquirers are Insured Deposit Transfers.     

PIMS and BCG: New horizons or false dawn?

Strategic market opportunities arise either because a firm is exceptionally well placed competitively or because it recognizes the opportunity, on the basis of private information, before others. Strategic market analysis must reflect these two possible routes to attractive opportunities. Both the approaches developed by the Strategic Planning Institute (SPI) through its Profit Impact of Market Strategy (PIMS) and the Boston Consulting Group's (BCG) growth/share matrix fail to reflect the full impact of competitive expectations and risk. Analysis of PIMS data should be directed more towards generalities of limited direct economic significance whereas the BCG approach should be used mostly in the context of experience curve effects. Neither approach should dominate a full analysis of the specific nature and critical ambiguities in any strategic option.     

Cautious optimism at the World Food Council

How does the World Food Council assess the changes that have taken place on the food scene since its establishment nine years ago? What is the outlook for structural reform in the agricultural and food sectors? What are their thoughts on the new hunger lobby, and on the growing movement which questions the value of much official aid? How does the Council see the prospects for the next decade? Robin Sharp went to Rome to find out.     

The Investment Performance of Real Estate Limited Partnerships

Real estate limited partnerships have become an increasingly popular form of investment over the past decade. Many investors have been drawn to these investment vehicles because of the high claimed rates of return earned by investors in previous partnerships. However, there has been little analysis of the historical rates of return on these investments other than that provided by the syndicators in offering prospectuses. This paper examines the returns earned by investors in real estate limited partnerships over the past decade. These results are compared with previous studies of the investment performance of real estate. Because of the importance of the tax shield aspects of these investments, we calculate the after-tax rate of return for investors in several marginal tax brackets.     

Declining Union Density in the 1980s: What Do Panel Data Tell Us?

In this paper we analyse data from the 1980—4 WIRS panel for the light they can shed on the causes of the decline in aggregate trade union density in the UK. We argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, intra-establishment union density did, on average, decline between 1980 and 1984. This suggests that a traditional compositional change story is untenable. We proceed to investigate the correlation of intra-establishment change with variables suggested by the various hypotheses advanced to explain declining density over the period. We find some evidence for an influence of intra-establishment compositional changes, but the most statistically significant variables are wages and unemployment. These take the wrong sign, however, to support the business cycle interpretation of falling aggregate union density.     

Concentration change and countervailing power in the U.S. food manufacturing industries

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the countervailing power of grocery retailers has had a restraining influence on increases in seller market concentration in the U.S. food manufacturing industries. We empirically test this notion by examining changing four-firm concentration (ΔCR4) from 1967 to 1987 across 48 processed food product classes. Employing a model developed and tested by Venturini, we measure countervailing power of retailers with the share of market sales of private-label products. For the 20-year period four variables were found to be significant determinants of ΔCR4. However, for the most recent 1977–1987 period, virtually no significant determinants are discovered. Unlike Venturini, no evidence of countervailing power could be detected in the 1980s and only weakly or rarely in the longer period. We suggest that the lax federal antitrust enforcement of the 1980s, measurement problems, or sampling criteria may be responsible for this unexpected outcome.     

Multivariate models of hotel occupancy performance and their implications for hotel marketing

Multivariate models are developed to explain the differential occupancy performance of a sample of 279 English hotels. Following a procedure established in an earlier paper, hotels are first differentiated on the basis of their overall occupancy performance, seasonality, long‐term trend and length of season. Regression models are specified and calibrated to relate each of these dimensions of occupancy performance to the location and other characteristics of the hotels. The four models produce the expected positions of hotels in ‘occupancy performance space’, against which their observed positions can be compared. The application of the models in hotel marketing is discussed and demonstrated. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.