Pro-poor growth and social protection in South Africa: Exploring the interactions

This study evaluates the impact of South Africa's long-term economic growth on household poverty and inequality between 1995 and 2005. We find a decline in aggregate levels of poverty, but increasing levels of inequality. The evidence suggests that the growth model provides substantial redistributive income support to the poor through the social grant programme, whilst offering few returns to those in the middle of the distribution.     

RIGID PRICES: EVIDENCE FROM U.S. SCANNER DATA

This article uses weekly scanner data from two small U.S. cities to characterize time and state dependence of grocers' pricing decisions. In these data, the probability of a nominal adjustment declines with the time since the last price change. A store's price for a particular product typically goes through several price changes in rapid succession before settling down. We also detect state dependence: The probability of a nominal adjustment is highest when a store's price substantially differs from the average of other stores' prices. However, extreme relative prices typically reflect the store's recent changes instead of changes in average prices.     

The effect of culture on perception and cognition: A conceptual framework

Researchers are increasingly recognizing the role of culture as a source of variation in many phenomena of central importance to consumer research. This review addresses a gap in cross-cultural consumer behavior literature by providing a review and conceptual analysis of the effects of culture on pre-behavioral processes (perception and cognition). The article highlights a series of important perceptual and cognitive differences across cultures and offers a new perspective of framing these differences among cultures—that of “culturally conditioned” perceptual and cognitive orientations. The article addresses several theoretical issues and suggests directions for future research as well as managerial implications.     

Consumption dynamics and demographics of Canadian wine consumers: Retailing insights from the tasting room channel

This study facilitates a better understanding of the socio-demographics and consumption dynamics of wine consumers using the retailing ‘platform’ of the winery tasting room with them as visitors to it in a wine region environment. The overall aim was to gain some insights on gender and age generation-related consumer behaviour, wine type preferences, and their link to retail channel behaviour. Systematic random sampling yielded a total of 659 useable surveys collected at various tasting rooms in the Niagara Peninsula Wine Region in Ontario, Canada. Specific differences exist in the wine consumption behaviour and wine type preferences of males and females and between generational cohorts, specifically Millennial and older consumers. Whereas females and males do not differ much in quantity consumed and spend on wine, they do differ greatly in wine type consumption with females drinking significantly more white and males more red wine. Wine type consumption was shown to be moderated by not only classical demographic variables, but also by the retail outlets preferred for wine purchase. Females buy more of their wine from foodservice on-trade retail outlets such as restaurants, while Millennials frequent the tasting room channel much less than older consumers. There are strong indications that the higher the wine tourism activity level, the higher the wine consumption (usage) level of the consumers. It is possible to direct marketing strategies at wine consumers in accordance with their gender and lifecycle stage as far as certain behavioural and sensory aspects of the product is concerned. The winery tasting room is the most obvious retail channel vehicle to reach people with high tourism activity factor levels who also happen to be the high usage consumers in the wine market.     

Shopping motives,store attributes and shopping enjoyment among Malaysian youth

Youth shoppers are an emerging age group that is recognized as a meaningful market segment, yet there is lack of extant shopping enjoyment research explicit to the cohort especially in Malaysia context. This study endeavors to measure shoppers' shopping enjoyment and to explore the effect of both internal and external factors in influencing their shopping enjoyment levels. Shopping motives as the internal contributor is personal-specific while store attributes serve as the external aspect is regarded as situational-specific. By employing hierarchical multiple regression analysis, it was found that anticipated utility dimension from shopping motive variable and enhancement dimension from store attribute variable explained the variance in shopping enjoyment. Narrowing to the two variables identified, anticipated utility (β=0.198) from shopping motives was having more influential power than enhancement derived from store attributes (β=0.163) in explaining shopping enjoyment. The findings assist retailers in enhancing the perceived value of customers.     

JobKeeper: An Initial Assessment

We present details of the design and implementation of the 2020–2021 JobKeeper program and review the literature on its impacts. JobKeeper stimulated the macroeconomy and restrained job loss in the downturn. But because the program was not narrowly targeted, the cost per job saved was high and the impact most likely regressive. However, it would not have been possible to devise and implement a more targeted program in the available time, and as it was, JobKeeper was arguably implemented later than needed for maximum effectiveness. We therefore recommend that Australia consider establishing a short-time work program for use in future recessions.