The Impact of Economic Shocks in the Rest of the World on South Africa: Evidence from a Global VAR

The substantial change in South Africa’s trade patterns over the past two decades has affected the impact of economic shocks in major world economies on South Africa. To investigate the effect, we use a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model with time-varying trade weights to account for changing international trade linkages. We show that the long-term impact of a shock to Chinese GDP on South African GDP is much stronger in 2009 than in 1995, due to the substantial increase in South Africa’s trade with China since the mid-1990s. At the same time, the importance of the U.S. economy to South Africa diminished considerably. The results indicate one of the possible reasons why the recent global crisis did not affect South Africa as much as it affected developed economies. It also stresses the increased risk, to the South African and other economies, should China experience slower GDP growth.     

Does co-creation impact public service delivery? The importance of state and governance traditions

Co-creation in public service delivery requires partnerships between citizens and civil servants. The authors argue that whether or not these partnerships will be successful depends on state and governance traditions (for example a tradition of authority sharing or consultation). These traditions determine the extent to which co-creation can become institutionalized in a country’s governance framework.     

An integrative model for competency development in organizations: the Flemish case

The prominent role of competency development in enhancing the success of employees and organizations has drawn the attention of practitioners leading them to introduce competency development as a central part of their human resource practices. Unfortunately, this strong managerial interest has not been fully translated into the academic world, creating a gap between theory and practice. The main purpose of this study is to fill this gap by exploring the nature of competency development in 22 Flemish organizations through a longitudinal multiple case study design. By using a grounded theory approach, a framework has emerged mapping out the different steps of competency development in the participating organizations. As such, this study can be an important first step toward closing the gap between practice and theory concerning competency development in organizations.     

我国石油天然气会计准则国际趋同分析

为规范石油天然气行业特殊的交易或事项，美国等国家和国际会计准则理事会（IASB）都发布了专门的石油天然气会计准则或采掘业会计准则。我国于2006年2月发布了《企业会计准则第27号一石油天然气开采》会计准则，对当前我国石油天然气开采业财务会计发展中的热点、难点问题进行了规范。本文通过对比分析油气新准则与美国FASB制定的相关准则和国际财务报告准则第6号（IFRS6）的差异，认为我国油气新准则基本实现了与美国相关准则的趋同，但与IFRS6还需要多方面的协调。     

ASP模式在企业信息化中的应用

本文首先介绍了ASP（应用服务提供商）的基本概念与特征，以及与传统IT运营模式相比具有的优势。其次指出了国内ASP发展遇到的一些问题，并提出了一些解决对策。最后给出了一个案例说明ASP的实际应用。     

Employee Mental Illness: Managing the Hidden Epidemic

While the high prevalence of mental illness in workplaces is more readily documented in the literature than it was ten or so years ago, it continues to remain largely within the medical and health sciences fields. This may account for the lack of information about mental illness in workplaces (Dewa et al. Healthcare Papers 5:12–25, 2004) by operational managers and human resource departments even though such illnesses effect on average 17 % to 20 % of employees in any 12-month period (MHCC 2012; SAMHSA 2010; ABS 2007). As symptoms of mental illness have the capacity to impact negatively on employee work performance and/or attendance, the ramifications on employee performance management systems can be significant, particularly when employees choose to deliberately conceal their illness, such that any work concerns appear to derive from issues other than illness (Dewa et al. Healthcare Papers 5:12–25, 2004; De Lorenzo 2003). When employee non-disclosure of a mental illness impacts negatively in the workplace, it presents a very challenging issue in relation to performance management for both operational managers and human resource staff. Without documented medical evidence to show that impaired work performance and/or attendance is attributable to a mental illness, the issue of performance management arises. Currently, when there is no documented medical illness, performance management policies are often brought into place to improve employee performance and/or attendance by establishing achievable employee targets. Yet, given that in any twelve-month period at least a fifth of the workforce sustains a mental illness (MHCC 2012; SAMHSA 2010; ABS 2007), and that non-disclosure is significant (Barney et al. BMC Public Health 9:1–11, 2009; Munir et al. Social Science & Medicine 60:1397–1407, 2005) such targets may be unachievable for employees with a hidden mental illness. It is for these reasons that this paper reviews the incidence of mental illness in western economies, its costs, and the reasons why it is often concealed and proposes the adoption of what are termed ‘Buffer Stage’ policies as an added tool that organisations may wish to utilise in the management of hidden medical illnesses such as mental illness.     

Explaining the Relation Between Job Insecurity and Employee Outcomes During Organizational Change: A Multiple Group Comparison

We develop and test a mediation model linking job insecurity to affective commitment and psychosomatic complaints via two distinct theoretical mechanisms: fairness and energy depletion. Analyses were based on 6,268 Belgian bank employees facing organizational change. Results from structural equation modeling showed that fairness and exhaustion partially mediated the association of job insecurity with affective commitment and psychosomatic complaints, respectively. Multiple group analysis showed that the relation between job insecurity and fairness gradually decreased across the three change stages, and that the exhaustion process was most prominent amid the change. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

浅议《证券投资基金法》对证券市场的影响

2004年6月1日正式实施的《证券投资基金法》是继《证券法》之后规范我国证券市场的又一部重要法律,具有十分重大的现实意义和深远影响。本文就《证券投资基金法》对中国证券市场的影响、重大意义以及现实存在的问题进行初步探析。     

Not a man of solid principles. The relevance of Edgar Bauer’s polemical portrait of Karl Marx in his 1843 novella Es leben feste Grundsätze!

Abstract

The protagonist of Edgar Bauer’s 1843 novella Es leben feste Grundsätze! is a young intellectual named “Karl”. It can hardly be doubted that Bauer’s novella is a polemical character study of Karl Marx: the rather demeaning picture of “Herr Karl” belongs to the heat of controversy between Marx and die Freien, the Berlin Young Hegelians, after the end of their participation in the Rheinische Zeitung in late autumn 1842. So far, Bauer’s novella has never been used as a potential source to shed light on the deeper causes of animosity between Marx and die Freien.     

More strategies, more Nash equilibria

We show in this paper that for the class of two-player games with compact real intervals as strategy spaces and continuous and strictly quasi-concave payoff functions there exists a monotone relation between the size of strategy spaces and the number of Nash equilibria. These sufficient conditions for our theorem to hold are shown to be tight.