On the proportionality of EU spatial ex ante coexistence regulations

The EU is currently struggling to implement coherent coexistence regulations on genetically modified (GM) and non-GM crops in all member states. While it stresses that any approach needs to be “proportionate to the aim of achieving coexistence”, very few studies have actually attempted to assess whether the proposed spatial ex ante coexistence regulations (SEACERs) satisfy this proportionality condition. In this article, we propose a spatial framework based on an existing landscape and introduce the concept of shadow factor as a measure for the opportunity costs induced by SEACERs. Our empirical findings led us to advance the proposition that flexible SEACERs based on pollen barriers are more likely to respect the proportionality condition than rigid SEACERs based on isolation distances. Particularly in early adoption stages, imposing rigid SEACERs may substantially slow down GM crop adoption. Our findings argue for incorporating a certain degree of flexibility into SEACERs by advising pollen barrier agreements between farmers rather than imposing rigid isolation distances on GM farmers. The empirical questions of proportionality and flexibility have been largely ignored in the literature on coexistence and provide timely information for EU policy makers.     

Building competences for new customer value creation: An exploratory study

Recent marketing literature suggests companies to become market driving (proactive business logic, changing the rules of the market) instead of market driven (reactive business logic, customer-led). This transformation implies that companies are able to boost their capacity to create new customer value. Based on survey data of business-to-business markets, we advance a tentative model that links competence development to new customer value creation. Although exploratory in its nature, our study exhibits that companies should build three types of competences: marketing practices for external knowledge absorption, general organizational competences and supply chain/network competences. Using cluster analysis, we are able to further link these competences to the capacity of new value creation. Four clusters are detected with different degrees of expertise in new value creation and each displaying their own profile of competences. Becoming market driving requires an integrated and balanced view on marketing practices.     

Evaluating offshore and domestic production in the apparel industry: The small firm’s perspective

This paper extends the existing literature on the potential advantages and drawbacks of domestic and offshore manufacturing strategies to a small firm perspective. The advantages of offshore production to the large corporation have received much attention in recent years, particularly with regards to the apparel industry. The key advantages of offshore production are obvious for the large firm: cost reductions and increased productivity through labour market differentials. Little is known however about the viability and attractiveness of this strategy for the small apparel firm. The high number of small apparel firms who continue to produce in their domestic market, despite labour market differentials, suggests that the cost advantages of producing offshore may not be as critical for the competitive advantage of many of these small firms. Four case studies of small New Zealand apparel firms are used to substantiate and expand on themes developed from the literature.     

Entrepreneurship in the Street Food Sector of Vietnam—Assessment of Psychological Success and Failure Factors

We tested the hypothesis that process characteristics of action strategies were related to entrepreneurial success in microbusinesses in the urban informal sector of Vietnam. The process characteristics were divided into four strategies: critical point planning, complete planning, opportunistic, and reactive. Success was defined as a combination of economic and subjective measures. A survey was done in Hue and Hanoi (Vietnam) among 102 street food vendors. With 62 vendors of this sample, we held in-depth interviews, which were used to test our hypotheses. The results showed that seventy percent of the business owners did not plan much. Opportunistic and planning strategies were most highly related to success, and a reactive strategy was related to failure. The latter replicates other studies in other developing countries.     

School Staff Autonomy and Educational Performance: Within‐School‐Type Evidence

In this paper, we show the effect of school staff autonomy on educational performance. The value‐added compared to the existing body of literature is that we employ variation in autonomy within the same country and within the same school type in order to reduce the omitted variable problem. To fully capture the informational advantage of local actors, we define autonomy as the operational empowerment of the school's direction and teachers. The Flemish secondary school system in Belgium is analysed because it displays unique within‐school‐type variation in school staff autonomy. This variation originates from autonomously operating school governing bodies that can group multiple schools and are free to delegate responsibilities to the school staff. This variation is likely exogenous because it is mainly driven by approximately random variation in characteristics and composition of the school boards. Combining detailed school‐level and pupil‐level data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 study with a semi‐parametric hierarchical model, we find a strong positive effect of school staff autonomy on educational performance. The result is shown to be robust to problems of reverse causality and simultaneity.     

Multiplicative-error models with sample selection

This paper presents a simple approach to deal with sample selection in models with multiplicative errors. Models for non-negative limited dependent variables such as counts fit this framework. The approach builds on a specification of the conditional mean of the outcome only and is, therefore, semiparametric in nature. GMM estimators are constructed for both cross-section data and for panel data. We derive distribution theory and present Monte Carlo evidence on the finite-sample performance of the estimators.     

Analysis of marketing mix interaction effects and interdependencies: a normative approach

This paper gives a general, theoretical treatment of the interdependency between price and communication expenditures. We analyze how interaction effects (for example the impact of communication on the sales sensitivity to price changes) affect the optimal marketing mix structure (for example the impact of communication expenditures on the optimal price). Moreover, necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for the optimal price to be independent of the communication expenditures and/or for the optimal communication expenditures to be independent of price. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the proportionality of EU spatial ex ante coexistence regulations: Reply

Desquilbet and Bullock (2010) criticize some aspects of our analysis of the European Union’s (EU) spatial ex ante coexistence regulations (SEACERs) of genetically modified (GM) and non-GM crops presented in Demont et al. (2009). We argue that, besides misinterpreting some of our original arguments, the authors propose a policy analysis framework which is inconsistent with the main goal of the EU’s SEACERs. Their example incorrectly suggests that SEACERs play an additional role of regulating non-GM crop supply on the market. This would be inefficient from a policy economics perspective, especially in an open economy where global trade is taken into account. Therefore, we argue that analyzing flexibility of SEACERs in a market framework could lead to erroneous conclusions and in that case a simple farm level analysis such as presented in Demont et al. (2009) is preferred.     

Some theoretical results on forecast combinations

This paper proposes a framework for the analysis of the theoretical properties of forecast combination, with the forecast performance being measured in terms of mean squared forecast errors (MSFE). Such a framework is useful for deriving all existing results with ease. In addition, it also provides insights into two forecast combination puzzles. Specifically, it investigates why a simple average of forecasts often outperforms forecasts from single models in terms of MSFEs, and why a more complicated weighting scheme does not always perform better than a simple average. In addition, this paper presents two new findings that are particularly relevant in practice. First, the MSFE of a forecast combination decreases as the number of models increases. Second, the conventional approach to the selection of optimal models, based on a simple comparison of MSFEs without further statistical testing, leads to a biased selection.