Gentrification in Spain and Latin America — a Critical Dialogue

Major social and political transformations such as the shift towards neoliberal urban policies have widely altered the contemporary structuring of metropolitan areas in Spain and Latin America. One key consequence is the recapture of city centres by wealthy tenants and the eviction of poorer households, a phenomenon usually designated by the term gentrification. In comparison to the comprehensive documentation of gentrification in the Anglophone environment, few scholars have paid attention to this phenomenon in this area of the world so far. This article responds to this gap, providing an exhaustive revision of the debates about gentrification occurring in Spain and Latin America during the last decade and tracking two theoretical motivations. First, it stresses the necessity of characterizing gentrification discourses in Spain and Latin America, preparing a conceptual appropriation and contextualization of the term itself. Second, it confirms that gentrification in Spain and Latin America varies substantially from processes observed in the Anglophone world. As a result, the review develops insights into emancipating and challenging debates that remain useful for the mainstream gentrification discourse too. Addressing this, it proposes a reconsideration and repoliticization of gentrification through the territorial and linguistic lens of Spanish and Latin American researchers.     

The Constitutional Political Economy of Public Deficits: The Spanish Case 1

This paper makes an argument for the reshaping of the current design of the Spanish budgetary system, pivoting around its legal submission to the balanced-budget rule. Based on a political economy approach to budgeting within the present context of the European Monetary Union, it is argued that such a rule is sorely needed in order to make the traditional Spanish model compatible with the new institutional technology presently developing in the European Community which deals with fiscal policy.     

Using eye-tracking to model attribute non-attendance in choice experiments

We investigate revealed attribute attendance in discrete choice experiments using eye-tracking. A simple theoretical framework is proposed in which choices are a function of visual attention. Consistent with the existing literature, the assumption that participants use all the available information to make their decisions does not hold. The results also illustrate that model fit and predictive power are greatly increased by using visual attendance measures as regressors. The use of eye-tracking technology has value for measuring revealed attention and to benchmark with existing choice models.     

Transparency,Value Creation,and Financial Crises

This article reports the findings of the authors' recent study of the impact of the level of corporate transparency on shareholder value creation during periods of financial crisis. Their sample consists of the companies comprising Spain's IBEX 35 stock index during the ten‐year period 2000–2010. The study uses three different measures of earnings management (EM) as inverse indicators of the quality of disclosure and carries out fixed effects regressions that adjust for firm and industry characteristics, two periods of financial crises, and the passage of time. The main findings of the study are that (1) companies with lower disclosure quality have generated less value for their shareholders over long time periods and that (2) the shareholders of companies that were more aggressive in managing their earnings experienced greater wealth destruction during the two financial crises of the last decade. Given the still unfolding impact of the recent global financial crisis, as reflected in the current debt crisis in Western European countries, the authors' study reinforces the importance of the current debate over the benefits and costs of increasing the regulation of financial markets, especially in the areas of transparency and disclosure requirements.     

When institutional change outruns the change agent: The contested terrain of entrepreneurial microfinance for those in poverty

We argue that institutional change moves through stages punctuated by recurring attempts to formally redefine the boundaries and logics of organizational fields that institutional entrepreneurs initially establish. With a grounded theory model, we demonstrate that institutional change in microfinance started with dominant development logic, shifted to market logic, and got stuck in a conflict over regulatory logic. We show how the role of the entrepreneur can change markedly over time while the institutional change process continues unabated. We present institutional entrepreneurship as an evolving phenomenon and suggest that the interplay between institutional entrepreneurs and established organizational fields is highly nuanced.     

The Effect of Customer‐Centric Green Supply Chain Management on Operational Performance and Customer Satisfaction

This study explores the links of implementing customer‐centric green supply chain management (GSCM) with its antecedent factors (i.e. customer pressure) and performance outcomes (i.e. operational performance and customer satisfaction). Data for this study were obtained through a survey of 126 automobile manufacturers in China. Results suggest that customer pressure has a positive effect on the implementation of customer‐centric GSCM, which, in turn, leads to multiple operational performance improvements (i.e. flexibility, delivery, quality and cost). While production flexibility and cost appear to have no significant impact on customer satisfaction, product quality and delivery are significantly and positively associated with customer satisfaction. On the practical front, this paper provides guidelines for managers in implementing customer‐centric GSCM to respond to customer pressures and improve firm performance, and for policy‐makers to encourage partner‐focused GSCM efforts in environmental policy. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Analysing Production Technology and Risk in Organic and Conventional Dutch Arable Farming using Panel Data

This paper compares the production technology and production risk of organic and conventional arable farms in the Netherlands. Just–Pope production functions that explicitly account for output variability are estimated using panel data of Dutch organic and conventional farms. Prior investigation of the data indicates that within variation of output is significantly higher for organic farms, indicating that organic farms face more output variation than conventional farms. The estimation results indicate that in both types of farms, unobserved farm‐specific factors like management skills and soil quality are important in explaining output variability and production risk. The results further indicate that land has the highest elasticity of production for both farm types. Labour and other variable inputs have significant production elasticities in the case of conventional farms and other variable inputs in the case of organic farms. Manure and fertilisers are risk‐increasing inputs on organic farms and risk‐reducing inputs on conventional farms. Other variable inputs and labour are risk increasing on both farm types; capital and land are risk‐reducing inputs.     

A quantitative analysis of trade policy responses to higher world agricultural commodity prices

The worldwide spike in prices of agricultural commodities in 2007–2008 elevated food security and social stability issues to the forefront, especially in many food-deficit countries. In order to mitigate the global food commodity price pressure on domestic markets, several major exporting and importing countries, mostly developing economies, adopted trade policy changes such as export bans (or raising export restrictions) or reducing import tariffs during the same period. This paper estimates the potential impacts of these policies on the world prices and trade of major agricultural commodities using a set of multi-country, multi-commodity, and partial-equilibrium models. Our findings suggest that over all, the trade policy responses in various countries increased the prices of all agricultural commodities, although the impact on the total net trade varies by commodity. The simulation results show that the overall impact of trade policy distortions on the world rice price is most significant at 24%, followed by wheat (14%) and barley (9%). In general, the poorer food-deficit countries/regions, which have limited power to manipulate their trade policies, experienced higher price increases compared to those major trading countries that adopted policy interventions. Also, the developing countries that are net importers which did not implement trade policy interventions experienced significant welfare losses resulting from interventions implemented by other major trading countries.