Self‐help in housing and chengzhongcun in China's urbanization

This article focuses on the housing issues of rural migrants arising from urbanization, with particular reference to chengzhongcun, a topic with considerable impact on policymaking. An attempt is made to understand the underlying rationale of self‐help in housing and the important role of chengzhongcun in sheltering rural migrants in the context of China's rural‐urban dichotomy. As demonstrated in this study, chengzhongcun accommodate, with little in the way of government resources and assistance, millions of rural migrants because of their social accessibility and affordability. While not denying their social problems, we argue that chengzhongcun in fact act as an innovative and positive agent to promote urbanization in present day China by housing massive numbers of rural migrants and assimilating them into cities. Current government policies towards chengzhongcun have generated a wide range of interest conflicts and confrontations. The consequences of such conflicts show that the government policies were problematic and unworkable, as they violated basic market principles as well as citizen rights. Policy strategy towards the redevelopment of chengzhongcun must acknowledge their credibility in the Chinese road to urbanization and requires more thoughtful and prudent consideration of migrants' demands for affordable housing.     

R&D strategy and Australian manufacturing industry: an empirical investigation of emphasis and effectivness

This research investigates the degree of emphasis placed by the Australian manufacturing industry on Research and Development (R&D) strategy as well as on other organisational strategies such as marketing, HRs (HR), technology, and operations at the functional level. The research extends further to investigate whether the emphasis on R&D strategy differs with contextual factors such as firm size, firm’s generic strategy, type of market, firm’s life cycle stage, etc. A mail survey was carried out to collect information from manufacturing firms across Australia. This was followed by an on-site interview of some of the senior managers of manufacturing firms from three Australian states: South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.The study found that although the emphasis on R&D strategy has received a high priority in the past few years, it has not been as effective as the operations strategy and the technology strategy. The operations strategy has been accorded the highest importance in the past few years and this will continue in the future. The study also indicated that firms, which adopt a differentiation generic strategy, put more emphasis on R&D than the firms, which adopt cost leadership and focus generic strategies. The results did not indicate any evidence of a relationship between firm size and the R&D strategy although large firms are found to put more emphasis on operations and marketing strategies. Relatively higher emphasis was placed on the R&D strategy by businesses: at the growth stage; involved in the manufacture of consumer goods as opposed to industrial goods; involved in exports with a higher sales growth in export markets; and having a higher growth rate relative to their industry.     

Getting the Most Out of a Mandatory Subordinated Debt Requirement

Recent advances in asset pricing—the reduced-form approach to pricing risky debt and derivatives—are used to quantitatively evaluate several proposals for mandatory bank issue of subordinated debt. We find that credit spreads on both fixed- and floating-rate subordinated debt provide relatively clean signals of bank risk and are not unduly influenced by nonrisk factors. Fixed-rate debt with a put is unacceptable, but making the putable debt floating resolves most problems. Our approach also helps to clarify several different notions of “bank risk.”     

Rural traffic management: The Burrator Reservoir experiment

The introduction of traffic management schemes has been one response of the National Parks to the problem of ever-increasing car-borne visitors and the consequent damage caused to the rural environment. By reviewing these schemes and by determining and explaining attitudes towards one particular traffic management experiment, the paper aims to deduce lessons for future policy. The analysis, based on two visitor surveys, suggests that the likelihood of success is improved when schemes are integrated, containing both ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’ elements. Since public perceptions are also found to be pivotal to its success, appropriate marketing of a scheme is vital. The paper concludes, however, that to achieve the fundamental objective of greater accessibility with less mobility, a more wide-ranging marketing effort is required intended to engender a sea change in attitude towards both the car and public transport.     

Is the Optimal Labor Income Tax Progressive in a Unionized Economy?*

This paper concerns optimal nonlinear labor income taxation in an economy with union wage setting and endogenous hours of work. The purpose is to study the determinants of tax progression. We show that the optimal degree of progression of the labor income tax depends on the extent to which the government can influence the wage rate via tax policy as well as on its ability to redistribute income across individuals. In addition, the argument for progressive labor income taxation depends on whether hours of work are chosen by the employed themselves or the union.