The export of manpower from Pakistan to the Middle East, 1975–1985

This article summarizes the major findings of recent research undertaken on: (1) Pakistani migration to the Middle East, and (2) on international labour migration in the Middle East and North Africa. The export of manpower from Pakistan for temporary employment in the Middle East has risen dramatically since the oil boom of the mid-1970s. As a consequence, remittances, which constitute the major gain from migration, have become an important source of foreign exchange, amounting to almost 80% of total merchandise export earnings by 1980/ 1981. The direct beneficiaries of these remittances are a million or so migrant households, whose average premigration income was somewhat above the national average household income. Remittances have enabled these households to significantly increase current consumption and purchase assets with the potential of improving their future income stream. Domestic labour has also benefited to the extent that migration has contributed to rising real wages in recent years.Migration has not, however, been an unqualified gain for the economy as a whole. The major cost has been the decline in productivity caused by the departure of quality labour among manual skills and professional categories, both of which cannot be easily replaced. It seems that, on balance, Pakistan has benefited from this labour export. Prospects for continuing migration on a substantial scale remain good for the near future, provided, of course, that projected growth rates of oil exporters materialize. The net benefits for the economy from migration in the coming years will primarily depend upon the extent to which scarce skills can be speedily replaced and remittances utilized to build productivity-increasing assets.     

Competition and Price Discrimination: Evidence from the Parking Garage Industry

We study the relationship between competition and price discrimination through an empirical examination of hourly price schedules in the parking garage industry. We find that the degree of price schedule curvature decreases with competition, implying a greater proportionate drop in low‐end prices than in high‐end prices when competition intensifies. Our findings suggest that competition constrains a firm's capacity to exercise price discrimination, confirming the classic textbook theory. We also offer possible explanations for our findings, including a search cost explanation, for which we find some support in the data.     

When do Non‐Family CEOs Outperform in Family Firms? Agency and Behavioural Agency Perspectives

Family firms represent a globally dominant form of organization, yet they confront a steep challenge of finding and managing competent leaders. Sometimes, these leaders cannot be found within the owning family. To date we know little about the governance contexts under which non‐family leaders thrive or founder. Guided by concepts from agency theory and behavioural agency theory, we examine the conditions of ownership and leadership that promote superior performance among non‐family CEOs of family firms. Our analysis of 893 Italian family firms demonstrates that these leaders outperform when they are monitored by multiple major family owners as opposed to a single owner; they also outperform when they are not required to share power with co‐CEOs who are family members, and who may be motivated by parochial family socioemotional priorities.     

How many educated workers for your economy? European targets,optimal public spending,and labor market impact

This paper studies optimal taxation schemes for education in a search-matching model where the labor market is divided between a high-skill and a low-skill sector. Two public policy targets - maximizing the total employment level and optimizing the social surplus - are studied according to three different public taxation strategies. We calibrate our model using evidence from thirteen European countries, and compare our results with the target from the Europe 2020 Agenda for achievement in higher education. We show that, with current labor market characteristics, the target set by governments seems compatible with the social surplus maximization objective for some countries, while being too high for other countries. For all countries, maximizing employment would imply higher educational spending than that required for the social surplus to reach its maximum.     

Mapping accessibility in Belgium: a tool for land-use and transport planning?

This paper compares the spatial structure of car accessibility to towns and to railway stations during peak and off-peak hours in Belgium for the country’s 2616 municipalities. A clustering method is applied. It is shown that in a highly urbanised country, the situation is far from being spatially equitable in terms of accessibility, and some areas are more favoured than others. Congestion increases spatial inequalities, differently according to absolute or relative measures of change. By means of examples, this paper shows that even simple accessibility indicators could be useful to support decisions taken by planners and politicians (e.g. as regards the development of residential, industrial and business park areas). Maps indicate the spatial inequalities in terms of accessibility to urban centres and transport nodes, and the impact of congestion on these inequalities. The absolute and relative time losses due to congestion affect different areas in different ways. The location of new developments further increases the congestion problem and the spatial disparities. This paper also insists on the caution that should be adopted when measuring and interpreting “accessibility”, its measurements, its inputs, its temporal changes in absolute and relative terms as well as the need for spatially disaggregated data.     

Influence through ignorance

An individual (the leader) with free access to information decides how much public evidence to collect. Conditional on this information, another individual with conflicting preferences (the follower) undertakes an action that affects the payoff of both players. In this game of incomplete but symmetric information, we characterize the rents obtained by the leader as a result of his control of the generation of public information. These rents capture the degree of influence exerted by a chairman on a committee from his capacity to keep discussions alive or call a vote. Similar insights are obtained if the leader decides first how much private information he collects, and then how much verifiable information he transmits to the follower.     

Branding and relationships: Customer and supplier perspectives

This paper explores and investigates the role of branding within financial services. Specifically, the study aims to assess the importance of branding and its associated elements including brand image and brand experience in the relationships that exist between consumers and their financial brands. It aims to achieve this through research, which identifies gaps between the managerial and consumer perspectives on branding in relationships in retail financial services. It is well established that the characteristics of services are different from those of manufactured goods and that service personnel play a central role in the services experience. Moreover, the concept of relationship marketing within services proclaims the importance of one-to-one relationships between businesses and customers as well as relationships between consumers and their brands. Drawing from the fields of brand management, relationship marketing and services marketing, this research aims to investigate the perceptional differences between consumers and suppliers in relation to the importance of branding in financial service relationships. The research findings indicate that brand experience appears to be far more salient than brand image in shaping and building meaningful and lasting brand perceptions and promoting customer retention.     

Fee-for-service payments and consultation length in general practice: a work–leisure trade-off model for French GPs

This article presents an adaptation of the labour supply model applied to the independent medical sector. First, we model simultaneous General Practitioner (GP) decisions on both the leisure time and the consultation length for two payment schemes: fixed fees and unregulated fees. The objective of this econometric study is to validate the theoretical prediction that doctors under unregulated fees may make choices about the length of patient consultations independent of their personal leisure decision. Indeed, according to our empirical results, the bidirectional link between leisure choice and consultation length – verified with fixed fees – does not hold any longer under unregulated fees. Our findings can be seen as a necessary but not a sufficient condition to legitimize unregulated fees in general practice.