The real new economy

During the soar-and-swoon days of the late 1990s, many people believed that information technology, and the Internet in particular, were "changing everything" in business. A fundamental change did happen in the 1990s, but it was less about technology than about competition. Under director Diana Farrell, the McKinsey Global Institute has conducted an extensive study of productivity and its connection to corporate IT spending and use during that period. The study revealed that information technology is important--but not central--to the fate of industries and individual companies. So if information technology was not the primary factor in the productivity surge, what was? The study points to competition and innovation. In those industries that saw increases in competitive intensity, managers were forced to innovate aggressively to protect their revenues and profits. Those innovations--in products, business practices, and technology--led to the gains in productivity. In fact, a critical dynamic of the new economy--the real new economy--is the virtuous cycle of competition, innovation, and productivity growth. Managers can innovate in many ways, but during the 1990s, information technology was a particularly powerful tool, for three reasons: First, IT enabled the development of attractive new products and efficient new business processes. Second, it facilitated the rapid industrywide diffusion of innovations. And third, it exhibited strong scale economies--its benefits multiplied rapidly as its use expanded. This article reveals surprising data on how various industries in the United States and Europe were affected by competition, innovation, and information technology in the 1990s and offers insights about how managers can get more from their IT investments.     

Resettlement: Zimbabwe's first step

More than a year after independence, the main changes in agriculture in Zimbabwe have been minimum wage legislation, a high maize price accompanied by an exceptionally good growing season, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) reinstallation and food programmes and the small beginnings of resettlement (and larger numbers of squatters). Certain food subsidies also affect rural areas although their greatest benefits accrue to those with urban incomes and urban diets. In addition the ‘former tribal trust lands’ are subject to increasing politicization as the newly elected district councils flex their muscles, providing at the same time an apparent attempt at decentralization and local participation with greatly increased expectations of assistance from the state. The future is uncertain, but it is evident that while the standard of living for the majority in rural areas remains so starkly low, the government will be forced to contend with sharply polarized forces, both within and outside the state apparatus, that seek to speed or dissipate the rate of change.     

Evaluation of Efficiency in Primary Health Care Centres: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis

The aim of this paper is to analyse one of the principal problems in primary health care management: the evaluation of efficiency in primary health care centres. Given the special characteristics of measuring outcome in primary care it is necessary to evaluate the performance of centres from a quality perspective too. The methodology used, DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis), allows us to introduce quantitative and qualitative variables in a sample of primary care centres in a Spanish province. Once the efficiency of the different centres is known, we investigate the sensitivity of the methodology to changes in the definition of outputs used.     

Power,Intergroup Conflicts and Social Stratification in the United States: What has the Global Crisis Taught us?

Abstract

Drawing on early sociological analyses of how power and intergroup conflicts can affect the development of modern economies, this paper investigates how the recent Global Crisis (GC) has affected the stratification of the US society. The paper argues that the consumerist society has reinforced the historical stratification of social identities with white men in high-paid, high-social status managerial and financial occupations at the top, and black women in low-paid, low-status service occupations at the bottom. This paper calls for a deconstruction of the neoliberal individual into a unique combination of identities in a stratified capitalist society in order to reveal how social stratification has evolved during the GC. The paper finally concludes on the importance of heterogeneous identities in reflecting the diversity of societal and economic interests in order to address the issues of financial stability and sustainability at the corporate and societal levels.     

Hospital economic impact from hemostatic matrix usage in cardiac surgery

Objective:

Improved health outcomes can result in economic savings for hospitals and payers. While effectiveness of topical hemostatic agents in cardiac surgery has been demonstrated, evaluations of their economic benefit are limited. This study quantifies the cost consequences to hospitals, based on clinical outcomes, from using a flowable hemostatic matrix vs non-flowable topical hemostatic agents in cardiac surgery.

Research design and methods:

Applying clinical outcomes from a prospective randomized clinical trial, a cost consequence framework was utilized to model the economic impact of comparator groups. From that study, clinical outcomes were obtained and analyzed for a flowable hemostatic matrix (FLOSEAL, Baxter Healthcare Corporation) vs non-flowable topical hemostats (SURGICEL Nu-Knit, Ethicon–Johnson &; Johnson; GELFOAM, Pfizer). Costing analyses focused on the following outcomes: complications, blood transfusions, surgical revisions, and operating room (OR) time. Cardiac surgery costs were analyzed and expressed in 2012 US dollars based on available literature searches and US data. Comparator group variability in cost consequences (i.e., cost savings) was calculated based on annualized impact and scenario testing.

Results:

Results suggest that if a flowable hemostatic matrix (rather than a non-flowable hemostat) was utilized exclusively in 600 mixed cardiac surgeries annually, a hospital could improve patient outcomes by a reduction of 33 major complications, 76 minor complications, 54 surgical revisions, 194 transfusions, and 242?h of OR time. These outcomes correspond to a net annualized cost consequence savings of $5.38 million, with complication avoidance as the largest contributor.

Conclusions:

This cost consequence framework and supportive modeling was used to evaluate the hospital economic impact of outcomes resulting from the usage of various hemostatic agents. These analyses support that cost savings can be achieved from routine use of a flowable hemostatic matrix, rather than a non-flowable topical hemostat, in cardiac surgery.     

The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists

Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.     

Inside innovation persistence: New evidence from Italian micro-data

This paper contributes the analysis of the persistence of innovation activities, as measured by different innovation indicators and explores its past and path dependent characteristics. The study provides new insights on the role of R&D investments in innovation persistence and analyses differentiated patterns of persistence across product and process innovation, by accounting for complementarity effects between the two types of innovative behaviour. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 451 Italian manufacturing companies observed during the years 1998–2006. Results highlight the relevance of innovation persistence. The highest level of persistence is found for R&D-based innovation activities, witnessing the actual presence of significant entry and exit barriers. Moreover, we obtain more robust evidence of persistence for product innovation than for process innovation when complementarity effects between the two types of innovation are accounted for.     

Finance, governments, and trade

We study how financial transactions may respond to exogenous variation in trade opportunities not only directly, but also through policy channels. In more open economies, governments may find it more difficult to fund and enforce public policies that substitute private financial transactions, and more appealing to deregulate financial markets. We propose a simple theoretical model of such policy-mediated relationships between trade and financial development. Empirically, we document in a country panel dataset that, before the 2007–2008 crisis, financial market volumes were robustly and negatively related to the share of government consumption in GDP in regressions that also include indicators of financial regulation and trade openness, and we seek support for a causal interpretation of this result in instrumental variable specifications.