Responsibility Cost Control System in China: The Han Dan Experience

This study undertakes a longitudinal analysis of the ethical management practices of Sri Lankan companies by comparing the results from a survey conducted in 2003. During this period regulatory developments have taken place within Sri Lanka and internationally aimed at improving the level of corporate governance. Based upon this survey data we conclude that progress has been made in ensuring that ethical management practices are more homogenous and standard practice across companies. Internationalized companies remain the ones that are more aware of the environmental consequences of their actions, although few companies, unfortunately, recognize this as an issue of concern.     

Fiscal policies, environmental pollution and economic growth

This paper develops a model of endogenous economic growth with special consideration to the role of productive public expenditure and environmental pollution; and analyses the properties of optimal fiscal policy in the steady state growth equilibrium. We consider the level of consumption as the source of pollution. Government allocates its tax revenue between pollution abatement expenditure and productive public expenditure. Optimum ratio of productive public expenditure to national income is equal to the competitive output share of the public input, when productive public expenditure is depicted as tax revenue minus abatement expenditure. However, the proportional income tax rate exceeds the competitive output share of the public input. There is no conflict between the social welfare maximizing solution and the growth rate maximizing solution in the steady state growth equilibrium. The unique steady state growth equilibrium appears to be a saddle-point when the growth rate is above a critical level and the steady state equilibrium growth rate in the market economy is not necessarily lower than the socially efficient growth rate.     

An analysis of delayed formal and interlinked informal credit in agriculture

A model of interlinked credit-product contracts between small farmers and large farmers when the small farmer faces delay in getting formal credit and the large farmer does not, has been developed. The small farmer remains on the reservation income level, and his reservation income is inversely related to the length of the delay. However, this does not hamper the productivity of the small farmer. The large farmer extracts the surplus through the interlinked contract and this surplus is positively related to the length of the delay. Interlinkage and non-inter-linkage equilibria become identical if the small farmer gets the formal credit at the beginning of the crop cycle. Various subsidy policies worsen the distribution of formal credit.     

OPTIMALLY UNIFORM COMMODITY TAXES IN A NON LINEAR DEMOGRAPHIC DEMAND MODEL

This paper derives a sufficient condition for optimally uniform commodity taxes within the demographically generalized RNLF'S demand functional form framework. This paper, besides admitting child subsidies, allows for non linear equivalence scales and demographically varying utility and demand functions. The derived condition is shown to yield some recent uniformity results as special cases.     

Representative dissonance: India’s Self and Western Image

Western media have often been criticized for portraying Third World destinations through a colonial prism via images of primitiveness and exoticism. Contrastingly, some destinations have begun to resist those representations with media campaigns of their own. The purpose of this study was to critically construe the differences between ways that India is represented in American tourism media and how it is represented by the Indian government itself. The findings revealed that these two representations are different in ways that reflect the colonial nature of international tourism and the postcolonial stage of India’s nationalism. Moreover, the study of representative dissonance is proposed as a tool for understanding the conflicting ideological forces that shape destination images.     

Volunteer tourism and “The White Man’s Burden”: globalization of suffering,white savior complex,religion and modernity

While many volunteer tourism studies have acknowledged the significance of volunteer tourism and challenged conventional understandings of socio-economic change in the Global South, the ways in which ideas about globalization of suffering and religion and modernity flow through volunteer tourism and development discourses are rarely spoken about. Utilizing postcolonialism and whiteness studies theoretical framework, this study intends to take volunteer tourism research into a different trajectory by arguing that much like imperialism is operationalized through different kinds of institutional power (agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank), similarly volunteer tourism exerts power and exploits the Orient as the West’s pleasure periphery. Taking the case of Mother Teresa, this study also argues that Christian ideologies, which were so dominant during the colonial days, continue to pervade the structures and institutions in society with similar hegemonic connotations of privilege based on religion and race. Future tourism scholars should investigate these remarkable yet somewhat ignored issues in contemporary volunteer tourism practices.     

Estimating Purchasing Power Parities from Household Expenditure Data Using Complete Demand Systems with Application to Living Standards Comparison: India and Vietnam

This study departs from the previous literature on purchasing power parity (PPP) by proposing a demand system based methodology for calculating the PPP that takes account of consumer preferences and allows for the substitution effect of price changes. The methodology is used to calculate the PPP between the Indian Rupee and the Vietnamese Dong. The study allows for regional variation in preferences and price changes both inside the country and between countries. It proposes and applies a methodology for constructing prices from unit values after adjusting them for quality and demographic effects. The adjusted unit values are used as prices in the demand estimations, and the demand parameter estimates are used to calculate both spatial prices within each country and the PPP between the two countries within a consistent framework. The study illustrates the usefulness of preference consistent methods to calculate the PPP by applying the PPPs to compare living standards between India and Vietnam. The significance of the results follows from the fact that the levels of living comparisons are quite sensitive to the PPP used in converting the Rupee expenditure into Vietnamese Dong. The present results on food PPPs question the relevance of the PPPs from the ICP project in cross‐country welfare comparisons especially in a period of high food inflation.     

Skilled–unskilled wage inequality,product variety,public input and increasing returns: A static general equilibrium analysis

The paper develops a four sector small open economy model with two traded final good sectors, a public intermediate good producing sector and a nontraded good sector producing varieties of intermediate goods. There are three primary factors: capital, skilled labour and unskilled labour. Industrial sector producing a traded good uses capital, intermediate goods and skilled labour as inputs. Intermediate goods producing sector also uses capital and skilled labour. Public input producing sector and the agricultural sector producing the other traded good use capital and unskilled labour as inputs. It is shown that, if production technologies are the same for the agricultural sector and the public input producing sector and if the scale elasticity of output is very low, then an increase in capital stock (unskilled labour endowment) raises (lowers) the skilled–unskilled wage ratio. However, an increase in skilled labour endowment does not produce any unambiguous effect. On the other hand, an increase in the tax rate on industrial output and/or an increase in the price of the agricultural product, armed with the same set of assumptions, lowers the skilled–unskilled wage ratio.     

Global talent management by multinational enterprises post-COVID-19: The role of enterprise social networking and senior leadership

Multinational enterprises' (MNEs') workforce is made up of people from diverse backgrounds and different locations around the globe. The cross-border transfer of knowledge, skills, and best practices among MNE employees is important to maintain global standards and competitiveness. In the post-COVID-19 period, there is a greater need to exchange knowledge in the changing business environment. The purpose of this study is to examine the issues related to MNEs' global talent management, post-COVID-19. The study investigates the use of enterprise social networking applications for better knowledge exchange and tries to understand the moderating role of senior leadership team support in facilitating the usage of enterprise social networks for cross-border collaboration and talent management. After reviewing the literature and relevant theories, we developed a conceptual model, which is then validated using the SEM technique with 347 respondents from 12 MNEs. The study reveals the importance of using enterprise social networks for cross-border knowledge exchange in the post-COVID-19 period.     

Meaning-oriented consumption: A systematic review and research agenda

The quest for finding meaning in life is central to human existence. Evidence supporting consumption as a source of meaning in life is scant and lies in discrete studies across multiple disciplines. We call consumption that engenders a sense of meaning in life ‘meaning-oriented consumption’. In this paper we conduct a systematic literature review of 102 papers, using the Scientific procedures and rationales for systematic literature reviews (SPAR-4-SLR) (Paul et al. (2021). International Journal of Consumer Studies, 45(4)). We draw on the theory of meaning in life to arrive at a theoretically grounded conceptualization of meaning-oriented consumption. We discuss the antecedents and consequences of meaning-oriented consumption, categories and processes that make consumption meaningful. We gather insights into the relationship between hedonic and meaning-oriented consumption. Finally, we identify knowledge gaps in theory, context, constructs and methodology. This review identifies several consumption contexts and situations that offer potential for marketers to design meaningful offerings.