City centre regeneration in the context of the 2001 european capital of culture in Porto, Portugal

In 2001, the city of Porto hosted the European Capital of Culture event. 'Porto 2001' was a year-long programme of arts, cultural events and urban regeneration activities. The purpose of this article is to discuss the city centre regeneration operation conducted in conjunction with the European Capital of Culture initiative in Porto. My objective is to extract a set of lessons learned that can be useful to other cities pursuing the same designation and strategy. The key finding is that despite rich and well-participated cultural events, too much emphasis was put on attracting public investment to regenerate the public space, replacing infrastructures, and modernizing cultural facilities. This was done at the expense of institutional capacity building and boosting civic creativity.     

The Organisation of Wage Bargaining in Divisionalised Firms

This paper analyses the organisation of wage bargaining in multiproduct firms since it affects the distribution of power between workers and firms. We assume that each firm has two plants and chooses who bargains the wage with the workers: either the head of the firm or the manager of each plant. Similarly, in each firm, its workers choose whether they set up plant unions or a single union.     

Public policy and technical change in Latin American agriculture

The article analyses and interprets the modernization and technical change of Latin American agriculture over the past two decades. The innovation process is analysed through eight case studies of various products in a variety of countries and method of production. Through these empirical studies, the authors provide a general interpretation of technical change and the public policy process in Latin American agriculture.     

Estimation of Area Elasticities from a Standard Profit Function

This article demonstrates that both crop area and output elasticities can be calculated from a profit function. A Chambers/Just profit function (which includes land allocations as quasi-fixed factors) is used to derive shadow price equations for each crop area allocation. Jointly solving these shadow price equations for crop area makes it possible to calculate individual crop area elasticities. A profit function is specified to represent agricultural producers in the state of Iowa. Shadow price equations are jointly estimated with output supply and input demand equations. From these estimated equations, we derive the individual crop area response and output response to a change in prices.     

Internal labour flexibility from a resource-based view approach: definition and proposal of a measurement scale

The dynamic nature of current competitive environments has motivated managers to identify sources of flexibility based on the organisation's human resources. In this regard, internal labour flexibility emerges as a valid strategy to counteract environmental changes, based on the adaptability of the organisation's current workforce to face non-routine circumstances and events that require creativity and initiative. However, despite recent interest in the notion of internal labour flexibility, there is no commonly accepted definition of this term. Currently, there are several competing definitions of the construct, along with a variety of operationalisations. Some integration of these approaches is needed to ensure that our knowledge of internal labour flexibility grows cumulatively. In this study, we have sought to address some of these limitations by theoretically conceptualising and empirically validating a scale to measure internal labour flexibility from the resource-based view (RBV). The application of structural equation modelling to a sample of 226 Spanish firms confirmed the suggested dimensionality of the internal labour flexibility scale, which distinguishes between employees' intrinsic flexibility, skill malleability, behavioural malleability and relational flexibility. Tests of reliability and validity confirmed the appropriateness of this measurement scale.