Microeconomic determinants of spatial mobility in post-apartheid South Africa: Longitudinal evidence from the National Income Dynamics Study

Migration, important for many areas in development, is strongly related to employment. Debate over labour supply in developing countries frequently hinges on labour migration. This paper examines the determinants of spatial mobility of working-age adults in South Africa, using the first nationally representative longitudinal survey – the National Income Dynamics Study – for 2008–10. The paper outlines the unique advantages of these data for the study of individual mobility – data that open the possibility of a new research project. Specifically, it asks how policy-relevant programmes, such as social transfers and housing assistance, affect migration. This paper finds, on balance, that transfers are negatively correlated with subsequent relocation. Previous migration is also predictive of future migration and both are tightly related to attrition, while there is an increasing but strongly non-linear relationship between income and mobility. Further, we highlight potential pitfalls – including attrition, and definitional difficulties – in the study of migration and illustrate possible solutions.     

Method Support of Information Requirements Analysis for Analytical Information Systems

Due to specific characteristics of analytical information systems, their development varies significantly from transaction-oriented systems. Specific method support is particularly needed for requirements engineering and its information-related component, information requirements analysis. The paper at hand first evaluates the state of the art and identifies necessary method support extensions. On this basis, method support requirements for information requirements engineering are identified. The survey is structured along the five core activities of traditional requirements engineering. It reveals a need for further research especially on information requirements elicitation, validation, and management. It further contributes to a discussion of aspects that should be considered by any method support. Due to comparatively long life cycles of analytical information systems, the introduction of a process perspective is discussed in order to ensure the continuous elicitation, documentation, and management of information requirements.     

Asset versus consumption poverty and poverty dynamics in rural Ethiopia

Several studies have shown conceptually that assets form a more robust basis for identifying the poor than do flow variables like expenditures or income. Asset‐based poverty classification can be used to distinguish structural from stochastic poverty and can enable projection of poverty dynamics through time. Nonetheless, little work has empirically compared poverty measurement based on assets and expenditures to indicate the practical implications of the choice of poverty measure. This article uses panel data (between 1994 and 2004) from Ethiopia to generate asset‐ and expenditures‐based poverty classifications. Asset dynamics are then explored to test for the existence of multiple asset index equilibria that could constitute evidence of poverty traps. Results provide evidence of multiple equilibria and show that the asset‐based poverty classifications predict future asset and expenditures poverty status more accurately than expenditures‐based measures. The findings confirm that the asset‐based measure could be used to more carefully target poverty interventions.     

Strategic Management in Hybrid Organizations

Many public service organizations have to deal with rapidly changing environments. Government offers less financial security than in the past and stimulates organizations to develop a market orientation. The focus of this article is explaining the shape of strategic management in public service organizations that have merely a public orientation (task organizations) and organizations that combine a public orientation with a market orientation (hybrid organizations). On the basis of four case studies it is concluded that task organizations also move in the direction of hybrid organizations. Strategic management in hybrid public service organizations is a dynamic process in which changing the organization context, i.e. metagovernance, seems to be the predominating dimension of strategic management.     

Uncertainty causes rounding: an experimental study

Rounding is a common phenomenon when subjects provide an answer to an open-ended question, both in experimental tasks and in survey responses. From a statistical perspective, rounding implies that the measured variable is a coarsened version of the underlying continuous target variable. Since the coarsening process is non-random, inference from rounded data is generally biased. Despite the potentially severe consequences of rounding, little is known about its causes. In this paper, we focus on subjects’ uncertainty about the target variable as one potential cause for rounding behavior. We present a novel experimental method that induces uncertainty in a controlled way, thus providing causal evidence for the effect of subjects’ uncertainty on the extent of rounding. Then, we specify and estimate a mixture model that relates uncertainty and rounding. The results suggest that an increase in the exogenous level of uncertainty translates into higher variance of the subjects’ beliefs, which in turn results in more rounding.     

Special and Differential Treatment of Developing Countries in the WTO: Moving Forward After Cancún

The issue of special and differential treatment (SDT) for developing countries in the WTO has become a source of tension in North‐South trade relations. The absence of an effective SDT regime clearly contributed to the failure of the Cancún Ministerial meeting of the WTO. This paper argues for a new approach that puts the emphasis on efforts to improve the development relevance of WTO rules and create mechanisms which allow greater differentiation across WTO members in determining the applicability of WTO disciplines; complemented by non‐discriminatory liberalisation of trade in goods and services in which developing countries have an export interest. The former is key in allowing the WTO to expand its reach to new ‘behind the border’ policies; and the latter is important to establishing a development dimension in multilateral trade negotiations.     

A Theory of Gradual Coalition Formation

We study noncooperative multilateral bargaining games, based on underlying TU games, in which coalitions can renegotiate their agreements. We distinguish between models in which players continue to bargain after implementing agreements ("reversible actions") and models in which players who implement agreements must leave the game ("irreversible actions"). We show that renegotiation always results in formation of the grand coalition if actions are reversible, but that the process may otherwise end with smaller coalitions. On the other hand, we show that the grand coalition cannot form in one step if the core of the game is empty, irrespective of the reversibility of actions.