The welfare costs of unreliable water service

Throughout the developing world, many water distribution systems are unreliable. As a result, it becomes necessary for each household to store its own water as a hedge against this uncertainty. Since arrivals of water are not synchronized across households, serious distributional inefficiencies arise. We develop a model describing the optimal intertemporal depletion of each household's private water storage if it is uncertain when water will next arrive to replenish supplies. The model is calibrated using survey data from Mexico City, a city where many households store water in sealed rooftop tanks known as tinacos. The calibrated model is used to evaluate the potential welfare gains that would occur if alternative modes of water provision were implemented. We estimate that most of the potential distributional inefficiencies can be eliminated simply by making the frequency of deliveries the same across households which now face haphazard deliveries. This would require neither costly investments in infrastructure nor price increases.     

Technology and the services sector: The hidden competitive challenge

Information technology has always played an important role in the services sector of the U.S. economy. In recent years, however, services industries have stepped up their acquisitions of computers, telecommunications equipment, and other such products dramatically. As a result, the broad segment of the economy that can be classified as services providers now owns about 84% of the total U.S. stock of information technology items. Moreover, relative to goods-producing industries, a much larger proportion of the services sector's capital budgets is spent on information technology, revealing a significantly greater dependence by services on such technology as a factor of production. This reliance underscores technology's strategic importance in the United States' competitive challenge. With services now the predominant mode of economic activity in the United States, a productivity payback from information technology is absolutely essential to keep the economy on a longer term path of sustainable growth.So far, the services sector has little to show for its spending binge on technology. Quite simply, massive investments in information technology have failed to boost national productivity growth in the present decade. Furthermore, with manufacturing productivity now on the rebound, problems in the services sector loom increasingly large in the United States' broader competitive struggle. It is certainly not too late. New and creative applications of information technology could still enhance the productivity performance of the services sector's predominantly white-collar work force. Until that payback begins to occur, however, the role of technology spending will be under growing suspicion [3, 8, 9].In what follows, an attempt is made to provide a detailed industry-by-industry assessment of services sector spending on information technology. By way of background, the broad contours of capital formation in services industries are first examined over the post-World War II era.     

ANALYZING CULTURAL STEREOTYPES IN MULTINATIONAL BUSINESS: UNITED STATES AND AUSTRALIA

As U.S. business becomes more international, so does U.S. management education. Executive development programmes offer courses in the U.S. and abroad to managers from many nations. As part of the transfer of U.S. management methods, the concepts, techniques and beliefs taught in these programmes may not be easily accepted, especially by foreign managers. Careful examination of cultural differences in attitudes and opinions is a necessary step in the successful transfer of management technology. This paper compares U.S. and Australian managers' values, attitudes, beliefs and opinions on a wide range of topics using a modified version of Schein's Public Opinion Questionnaire. Our findings suggest that there are common business management views as well as national differences among managers in the U.S. and Australia.     

Health Information Technology and Financing's Next Frontier: The Potential of Medical Banking

Calls to action for widespread adoption of electronic health records have come from a broad spectrum of the private and public sectors. The problem, to date, is not that information does not exist, as much as that the data have not been organized around the patient. An integrated Personal Health Record is a patient- or family-centered technology designed to capture not only the contacts with health care providers, but also personal information on insurance, diet, and personal preferences that a physician's health record will not capture. Medical banking, based on a new technology platform called the Integrated Health Card, is emerging as a solution to the problem of collecting and combining information from the electronic health record with personal health information. It may also be the only way for fledging health savings accounts to enable the price and quality transparency of the medical market that has been called for repeatedly in this decade. In analyzing the political and patient applications of widespread adoption of this new innovation, the positive contributions to social welfare are very likely to outweigh the negative.     

China's Mysterious Gas

Car sales in China are booming,but gasoline consumption seems to be stuck in the slow lane.Chart 1 illustrates this apparent mystery(it shows sales of petroleum and oil products,since.we do not have data on retail gasoline sales).     

The Political Ecology of Design and Technology Education: An Inquiry into Methods

At the beginning of this new century, design and technology educators face a serious dilemma: Practice conventional modes of design and technology, which have consumed proponents in Canada, England, Germany, and the US, or model design for sustainable lifestyles. Our conventional design, problem solving and technological methods embody a liberal, political ecology and in effect, these methods – our practices – are not sustainable. Using the political ecology of Nike shoes as an example, I describe ecological footprints, resource streams, and wakes as effective metaphors for sustainable practice. In contra-distinction to technocentric methods, I argue for modelling ecocentric processes rooted in political ecology and cultural studies. Attending to the political ecology of design and technology means nothing less than remodelling the design of lifestyles and reducing production and consumption in our practice.     

Regional location of multinational corporation subsidiaries and economic development contribution: Evidence from the UK

The regional location of multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries in their host country and their associated entrepreneurial output and networking activities are likely to affect their economic development contribution, measured in terms of technology and management know-how transfers; enhancement of innovativeness of other firms; and company spinoffs. This theme has considerable research and public policy value. We investigate the issue drawing from a large-scale study of 264 MNC subsidiaries based in the UK. The findings show that activities in developed regions are associated with higher economic development contribution than those in less developed regions. Moreover, entrepreneurial output and networking with partners external to the MNC system positively affect economic development contribution. Key implications of this study are that entrepreneurship critically influences economic development contribution, underlying the importance of the MNC subsidiary research stream; and that the policy practice of supply-side measures fostering entrepreneurial output and embeddedness in local networks seems to be appropriate to pursue.     

ENTERPRISE WITHOUT UNIONS: THE MANAGEMENT OF EMPLOYEE RELATIONS IN NON-UNION FIRMS

Employee relations in non-union settings remain largely uninvestigated by industrial relations researchers. This article examines the management of employee relations in establishments in high technology industries in the Southeast of England - a sector and locality frequently identified with high levels of non-unionism. Moreover, high technology firms are frequently seen as exemplars of new human resource management techniques designed to substitute for unions. Our data from postal and interview surveys of 115 establishments suggests that HRM is only one, and by no means the dominant, approach to managing employee relations in high technology establishments.