Fiscal transfers for biodiversity conservation: The Portuguese Local Finances Law

Biodiversity loss is a serious and ongoing global environmental problem. Economic instruments in biodiversity policies can contribute towards reconciling the conservation costs encountered at local level with the benefits of biodiversity conservation at higher levels of governance, from regional and national levels up to the global level. This paper outlines the theoretical foundations of fiscal transfers in conservation policies and also offers a concise account of existing international experience and future prospects. The recently amended Portuguese Local Finances Law (LFL) of 2007, with its groundbreaking new article on the promotion of local sustainability, is analysed in terms of the significance of fiscal transfers for municipal budgets. It is compared with its predecessor law, highlighting changes in fiscal revenues for selected municipalities in the country in relation to their designated conservation areas. The analysis shows that these ecological fiscal transfers can be significant for those municipalities with a large proportion of land under protected status. However, because it also introduces a considerable number of changes to the Portuguese fiscal transfer scheme, the ecological impact of the new LFL is difficult to grasp due to the presence of several crossover effects. The results obtained offer significant insights both for improving the Portuguese LFL and for designing new ecological fiscal transfer schemes.     

Familiness,business strategy and stakeholder engagement: The internationalisation of Spanish olive oil mills

Based on social capital theory and the family-firm context, this paper studies familiness' composition and the result of the overlap of the family and firm systems, analysing their influence on the internationalisation strategies of family firms. In this relationship, the stakeholder engagement becomes at the same time an antecedent and a result when developing family businesses' strategies, being one of the most relevant the internationalisation strategies. Prior research focused on familiness as the result of proxy variables such as the percentage of ownership and management in family hands, or business size, instead of as psychological variables resulting from shared organisational culture and social interactions. Through a qualitative study based on 12 interviews of general managers and/or export managers of Spanish family olive oil mills, this study asserts that the level of familiness influences internationalisation strategies, the reasons underlying a business becoming international and its commitment to activities abroad being the role of stakeholders crucial in those interactions. The higher the level of familiness, the more likely the family business internationalisation and the higher their levels of international commitment. Additionally, the higher the concern about their stakeholders, the higher their levels of international commitment. The family businesses' concern for their stakeholders and their international commitment share a reciprocal relationship. The results regarding the relevance of familiness as social capital resources in sustaining competitive advantages support the decision to promote, develop and nurture social capital when a family business goes international.     

Compensation Dispersion Between and Within Hierarchical Levels

This paper studies the dispersion around the expected compensation of workers before and after controlling for hierarchical positions in cross-section data samples. From data for Spanish managers, we find that this dispersion decreases with education and work experience before entering the current job and increases with job tenure. This finding contrasts with previous research that finds a positive association between compensation dispersion and education and work experience. We explain the new finding through a model of learning that separates compensation dispersion between jobs and within jobs (hierarchical positions). The model takes advantage of the information revealed when workers are promoted to their current hierarchical positions and allows for more robust tests of learning theories.     

Determinants of performance of independent financial advisors

This paper examines the performance of independent financial advisors (IFAs) in terms of their involvement in innovation activities, participation in business networks and open innovation as a strategy to cope with difficult market conditions caused by the recent economic downturn. Performance is assessed on the basis of average sales growth for years 2010–2012. The results of the study suggest that IFAs’ involvement in innovation activities, participation in networks and open innovation enhances business performance. The managerial implications are that IFAs may be able to achieve higher sales growth by participating in networks and engaging in innovation activities. The originality of this paper is that it provides an empirical assessment of possible strategies to support sales growth in small financial service sector firms facing volatile market conditions.     

Finding Closest Targets in Non-Oriented DEA Models: The Case of Convex and Non-Convex Technologies

This paper draws attention for the fact that traditional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models do not provide the closest possible targets (or peers) to inefficient units, and presents a procedure to obtain such targets.It focuses on non-oriented efficiency measures (which assume that production units are able to control, and thus change, inputs and outputs simultaneously) both measured in relation to a Free Disposal Hull (FDH) technology and in relation to a convex technology. The approaches developed for finding close targets are applied to a sample of Portuguese bank branches.     

Estimation in the first-order moving average model through the finite autoregressive approximation: Some asymptotic results

To estimate α in the model y_t = u_t+αu_t?1, we consider a proposal by Durbin (Biometrika, 1969). It consists in fitting an autoregression of order k to the data, and deriving from there an estimate α^. The probability limit and the variance of the limiting normal distribution of α^ are presented and discussed in detail, when the sample size T → ∞, but k remains fixed. The differences between the resulting values and those corresponding to the maximum likelihood estimator are exponentially decreasing functions of k. Several modifications of the estimator are discussed and found consistent, but asymptotically inefficient.     

The European Union: Economic prospects,structural reforms and enlargement

On the eve of enlargement of the European Union from fifteen to twenty-five Member States, this article focuses on economic developments in 2003 and prospects for 2004 and 2005 in the European Union, especially in the euro area, the state of play on structural reform, before concluding with some reflections on enlargement.