Explaining trade policy in the Middle East and North Africa

This paper examines the evolution of trade policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MNA) countries since the 1960s. It shows that contrary to the current popular perception, until the 1980s MNA countries were generally more open than the rest of the developing world. That situation changed in the 1980s and especially the 1990s as most MNA countries maintained their trade policies, while many other developing countries proceeded with liberalization. The paper develops and estimates a political economy model of trade policy to search for the factors behind the initial relative openness of the region and its reversal. The results show that the pattern is related to the rise and decline of the region's resource rents, which affected the political weight of domestic producers versus consumers. Other factors are also considered, but they all seem to have secondary effects.     

The Relationship Between Paternalistic Leadership and Organizational Commitment: Investigating the Role of Climate Regarding Ethics

One of the important factors influencing perceptions of the existence of an ethical climate is leader behaviors. It is argued that paternalistic leadership behaviors are developed to humanize and remoralize the workplace. In various studies, leadership behaviors and climate regarding ethics were evaluated as antecedents of organizational commitment. In this sense, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between paternalistic leadership behaviors, climate regarding ethics and organizational commitment. Data were obtained from 142 individuals. Results indicated that benevolent paternalistic leadership had a moderate effect on affective commitment and strong effect on continuance commitment. Moreover, it was found that paternalistic leadership had an effect on the perception of an ethical climate. Strong relationship was found between climate regarding ethics and affective commitment; moderate relationship was found between climate regarding ethics and continuance commitment. Finally, results indicated that climate regarding ethics had a mediating effect between benevolent paternalistic leadership and affective commitment. Gül Selin Erben holds MA degree on Human Resources Management. She is a Phd candidate on Organizational Behavior field. She works as a research assistant at the Maltepe University. Ayşe Begüm Güneşer holds MA degree on Human Resources Management and she holds Phd degree on Organizational Behavior.     

The selection bias in court records: settlement and trial in eighteenth‐century Ottoman Kastamonu

Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity to access information about the names, characteristics, and socio‐economic status of individuals and the laws, local customs, and legal institutions of societies. Although researchers have noted various limitations of these records, the problem of selection bias has not been systematically studied. Since litigants would probably settle disputes in which one side is likely to be a clear winner, the cases that go to trial are more likely to be the difficult and uncertain ones that comprise a non‐random subset of all disputes. This article presents a study of selection bias in Ottoman courts in the town of Kastamonu in northern Anatolia, from the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Disputes are categorized by type and the distribution of court participants is studied according to composition, gender, and socio‐religious status. A regression analysis is run to determine the factors affecting the likelihood of cases being tried in court. The results indicate that the cases that ended up in court were selected systematically. If the selection bias is ignored, research based on Ottoman court records may be seriously flawed in its ability to yield general conclusions.     

AN EMPIRICAL GROWTH MODEL FOR MAJOR OIL EXPORTERS

This paper develops a long‐run output relation for a major oil‐exporting economy where the oil income‐to‐output ratio remains sufficiently high over a prolonged period. It extends the stochastic growth model developed in Binder and Pesaran (1999) by including oil exports as an additional factor in the capital accumulation process. The paper distinguishes between the two cases where the growth of oil income, g^o, is less than the natural growth rate (the sum of the population growth, n, and the growth of technical progress, g), and when g^o ≥ g + n. Under the former, the effects of oil income on the economy's steady growth rate will vanish eventually, while under the latter oil income enters the long‐run output equation with a coefficient which is equal to the share of capital if it is further assumed that the underlying production technology can be represented by a Cobb–Douglas production function. The long‐run theory is tested using quarterly data on nine major oil economies. Overall, the test results support the long‐run theory, with the existence of long‐run relations between real output, foreign output and real oil income established for six of the nine economies considered. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Direct and Indirect Exporting and Productivity: Evidence from Firm‐Level Data

This paper examines the separate productive impacts of direct and indirect exporting to further our understanding of the mechanisms underlying learning‐by‐exporting effects by utilizing a method that allows us to check the robustness of the results to the selection on unobservables. We found that the productivity effects of exporting are mainly associated with direct exporting, indicating that knowledge spillover, and thus, productive impact of exporting grows with increased interaction with international firms and consumers. Indirect exporters are unlikely to be able to efficiently exploit the productive capacity of foreign technology and knowledge. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Trust types,distrust, and performance outcomes in small business relationships: the pharmacy–drug warehouse case

This study attempts to investigate the linkage among trust types, distrust, and relationship performance outcomes in the context of long-term supply agreement-type alliances between small business dyads. The results suggest a significant positive relationship among goodwill trust and risk-taking tendency, cooperation, satisfaction, and conflict resolution and a negative relationship between goodwill trust and transaction costs. Competence trust is found to have a positive relationship with cooperation, conflict resolution, and satisfaction and a negative relationship with transaction costs. However, no significant relationship is found between competence trust and risk-taking tendency. Distrust, on the other hand, is found to have a negative relationship with cooperation, satisfaction, and conflict resolution and a significant positive relationship with transaction costs with no effect on risk-taking tendency.     

A participatory assessment of agro-ecosystem sustainability in Abesard,Iran

Participatory approaches have emerged in developing countries as an integrated and holistic system approach for assessing the agro-ecosystem sustainability. The aim is to integrate and apply knowledge about natural and social aspects of agro-ecosystems, taking into account their long-term, uncertain and non-linear relationships. The purpose of the study described in this paper was to assess the sustainability of the agro-ecosystem of Abesard in Tehran Province. A participatory landscape/lifescape appraisal (PLLA) method was used within an agro-ecological framework to assess the farmers’ sense of agricultural sustainability based on different categories of sustainability (better-off, average and poor). Results indicated that a majority of farmers think of sustainability solely as an economic issue, followed by sustainability being a combination of ecological and social concerns. Regarding the indicators of sustainability, results revealed that for farmers in the poor group, resilience and stability were critical criteria, whereas for better-off farmers, stability, reliability and resilience were generally important. However, the average group of the farmers was placed between the two groups. Overall, it was concluded that the economic status of households has an influence on the sustainability of their agro-ecosystems and that improvement of their economic situation promotes agricultural sustainability. It could also be concluded that PLLA has the potential to integrate socio-economic (lifescape) and environmental (landscape) dimensions for analysing the sustainability of agro-ecosystems.     

A column generation-based approach to solve the preference scheduling problem for nurses with downgrading

The demand for nurses in virtually all western countries has been outpacing the supply for more than a decade. The situation is now at the point where the rules for good practice are being stretched to the limit and patient care is in jeopardy. The purpose of this paper is to present several ideas for maximizing the use of the available staff and to quantify the resultant benefits. Two approaches are investigated for substituting nurses with higher level skills for those with lower level skills when there is sufficient idle time to do so. Idle time is usually due to scheduling constraints and contractual agreements that prevent a hospital from arbitrarily assigning nurses to shifts over the week.When the substitution is skill-related, as it is here, it is often called downgrading. The models that we develop are for preference scheduling, which means that individual preferences are taken into account when constructing monthly rosters. There are several reasons for doing this in today's environment, the most important is the need to boost staff morale and increase retention. The problem is modeled as an integer program and solved with a column generation technique that relies on intelligent heuristics for identifying good candidate schedules. The computations show that high quality solutions, as measured by the reduction in the need for non-unit nurses as well as the degree to which preferences are satisfied, can usually be obtained in a matter of minutes.