Corporate accountability and human rights disclosures: A case study of Barrick Gold Mine in Tanzania

Analysis and debate on the roles of accounting in human rights issues is an emerging topic of research. This study draws attention to certain human rights dilemmas arising from investment initiatives of transnational corporations within the Tanzanian socio-political and economic context. Evidence is provided on how accounting operates in resolving such dilemmas through an examination of foreign direct investment episodes where the state has agreed contracts with transnational corporations in the mining sector of Tanzania. The study finally considers the possibility of corporate governance reforms informed by accounting ideas in order to promote realisation of human rights alongside other interests.     

Country image formation,stability, and change: a longitudinal assessment of consumers’ image of Azerbaijan

In 2012, Azerbaijan hosted the Eurovision Song Contest. For this emerging tourism-oriented country, the cultural mega-event represented a unique opportunity to present itself to a broad international public and construct a positive country image. The present longitudinal study explores how consumer images of Azerbaijan as a country were formed and changed as a result of the nation’s hosting of this event. By measuring the same respondents’ country image evaluations before and after the event, the present findings shed light on consumers’ processes of country-image formation and illuminate the event’s impact on Azerbaijan’s country image.     

Africa in the 1990s and beyond: Alternative prescriptions and projections

This article examines the origins, dimensions and implications of Africa's crisis. It draws attention to the impact of historical experiences, the distortions and disarticulations of that experience, and to the coalitions, contradictions, crises and conflicts inherited at independence. It looks at postcolonial alignment and realignment of social and political forces, the crisis of accumulation and power, and the implications of the region's marginal location and role in the global division of labour and power. Calling for a need to transcend the manifestations of the African predicament, the article looks at regional and international responses to the crisis. It concludes by prescribing the need for a fundamental political restructuring, the empowerment of the people and their communities and organizations, a socially sensitive structural adjustment programme, and the recomposition of the content and context of politics and social relations.     

Purchasing's contribution to supply chain emission reduction

Does environmental purchasing and supplier management (EPSM) help to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the supply chain and, thereby, mitigate climate change? And, if so, under which conditions? Taking these two questions as a starting point, we hypothesize that heightened environmental protection efforts targeting the upstream value chain should lead to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the buying companies' supply chain. We continue to delineate three contingency factors that might affect the relationship between EPSM and supply chain GHG emissions: The power of the buying firm over supply chain partners, prior experience in EPSM, and materiality of environmental supply chain management in a certain industry. We collect longitudinal data from 260 companies and analyze them using hybrid panel data analysis. We find that the increase of EPSM leads to a significant reduction of the GHG emission intensity of buying firms’ supply chains and that this reduction is stronger for companies operating in industries where emission management is more material.     

Is the Patent System an Even Playing Field? The Effect of Patent Attorney Firms

The patent system underpins the business model of some of the fastest-growing companies. Used appropriately, it should support frontier technologies and nurture new firms. Used perniciously, it can stifle innovation and protect established technological behemoths. We analyze patent examination decisions at the American, European, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese patent offices and find evidence that patent attorneys have a surprisingly significant role in the patent system. Our results suggest that some forces within the examination system maintain the uneven playing field by allocating monopoly rights to inventors with better access to influential attorneys, rather than leveling it by favoring inventors with better, nonobvious ideas. Attorney quality is most important, vis-à-vis invention quality, in less codified and more rapidly changing technology areas such as software and ICT.     

Is monetary policy effective in dampening fiscally induced exchange market pressures? Evidence from Ghana

Episodes of currency crises in Ghana over the recent past were examined. We also address two fundamental questions using VAR framework. First, how does fiscal policy relate to exchange market pressures (EMPs) in Ghana? Second, whether persistent fiscal slippages hinder the effective use of interest rate as monetary policy tool to influence undesirable exchange rate fluctuations? We found sterilization interventions to be more effective than interest rate as a monetary policy tool in moderating tensions in foreign exchange market. Higher recurrent expenditure was generally associated with higher EMP, while capital expenditures tend to assuage EMP. We recommend strong policy coordination between the fiscal and monetary authorities to ensure macroeconomic stability.     

The Stability of Monetary Unions: Lessons from the Breakup of Czechoslovakia

In 1993, Czechoslovakia experienced a two-step breakup. On January 1, the country disintegrated as a political union, while preserving an economic and monetary union. Then, the Czech–Slovak monetary union collapsed on February 8. This paper analyzes the economic background of the two breakups from the perspective of the optimum currency area literature. The main finding is that the Czech and Slovak economies were vulnerable to asymmetric economic shocks, such as those induced by the economic transition. In particular, the stability of Czechoslovakia was undermined by the low correlation of permanent output shocks, low labor mobility, and higher concentration of heavy and military industries in Slovakia. J. Comp. Econom., December 1999, 27(4), pp. 753–781. Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI), University of Bonn, Walter-Flex-Strasse 3, 53113 Bonn, Germany, and Center for Economic Research, Tilburg University, Netherlands; Academia Istropolitana Nova, Bratislava, Slovakia, Central European University, Nador u. 9, 1051 Budapest, Hungary, and Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), Stumpergasse 56, 1060 Vienna, Austria.     

Labour market institutions in open economy: Sectoral reallocations,aggregate adjustments,and spillovers

We introduce frictional unemployment in a multiworker heterogeneous firm model with a dynamic matching process, one‐ and two‐sector equilibria, and international markets. A change in labour market policies transforms the share of exporters and affects average productivity. The closure of equilibrium with or without sectoral arbitrage plays an important role in generating macro‐level outcomes for employment subsidies. Unemployment benefits, on the other hand, make unemployment and openness rise, independently of sectoral reallocations. We also find that simultaneous implementation of labour market policies remove potential gain in the trade share, and, when it comes to unemployment benefits, may even be detrimental.     

On the structure of Pareto optimal cake partitions

We study Pareto optimal partitions of a “cake” among n players. Each player uses a countably additive non-atomic probability measure to evaluate the size of pieces of cake. We present two geometric pictures appropriate for this study and consider the connection between these pictures and the maximization of convex combinations of measures, which we studied in Barbanel and Zwicker [Barbanel, J.B., Zwicker, W., 1997. Two applications of a theorem of Dvoretsky, Wald, and Wolfovitz to cake division. Theory and Decision 43, 203–207].     

Second order longitudinal dynamic models with covariates: estimation and forecasting

In this paper, we propose an extension to the first-order branching process with immigration in the presence of fixed covariates and unobservable random effects. The extension permits the possibility that individuals from the second generation of the process may contribute to the total number of offsprings at time \(t\) by producing offsprings of their own. We will study the basic properties of the second order process and discuss a generalized quasilikelihood (GQL) estimation of the mean and variance parameters and the generalized method of moments estimation of the correlation parameters. We will discuss the asymptotic distribution of the GQL estimator by first deriving the influence curve of the estimator. For the fixed effects model we shall derive a forecasting function and the variance of the forecast error. The performance of the proposed estimators and forecasts will be examined through a simulation study.