Fiscal Adjustment, The Real Exchange Rate and Australia's External Imbalance

This article examines issues of relevance to Australia's external imbalance. We investigate the sharp fiscal consolidation over the past five years and examine why it did not reduce the current account deficit. We show that a disproportionate part of the fiscal consolidation was achieved by cutting public investment spending, and we discuss some of the negative consequences of such cuts. We compare the macroeconomic behaviour of six OECD countries which have recently increased net government savings. It has been a common experience that an increase in net government saving has not been associated with a reduction in the current account deficit. For Australia, we establish that the link between fiscal consolidation and a smaller current account deficit was severed by a private sector investment surge. This leads us to examine the behaviour of the relative price critical to the allocation of this investment between the traded and non-traded sectors - the real exchange rate. Over the medium term, we argue that a substantial real depreciation is necessary as part of the adjustment required to stabilise the ratio of net external liabilities to GDP.     

Segmenting university alumni using a person‐centered methodology

Higher education leaders in the United States increasingly rely on relationships with alumni to advance multiple institutional goals. Scholars have traditionally relied on variable‐centered approaches to understand associations among alumni experiences, personal attributes, and support behaviors. Departing from this tradition, this study draws on a person‐centered approach, latent class analysis, to segment groups of alumni by their non‐monetary support behaviors. We define non‐monetary support as engaging in actions outside of charitable giving that advance institutional objectives. Drawing on past literature, we conceptualize alumni non‐monetary support behaviors as falling into 4 categories: (a) volunteerism: charitable preferences, (b) political advocacy: social change preferences, (c) multimode engagement: charity and social change, and (d) disengagement: nonsupport. Relying on an alumni survey from a research‐intensive university in the United States, our analysis found support for a 4‐class model of alumni supporters and nonsupporters. These groupings include the classes of Political Advocates, Apolitical Recruiters, Super Engaged Alumni, and Disengaged Alumni. Using cross‐tabulation analysis, we explore attributes of each class by age, gender, and involvement in religious, political, and volunteer organizations in college. We find that groups of alumni exhibit the same patterns of engagement while they were students. For example, students who were engaged in political action in college are those who are likely to become Political Engagers as alumni. Students who volunteered in college and stayed clear of politics emerge as Apolitical Recruiters after college. Super Engaged Alumni are those who were engaged in multiple domains in college. Implications for advancement practice are discussed.     

Returns to specialization,competition, population,and growth

Using an expanding-variety endogenous growth model with purposive human capital accumulation, this paper provides an alternative explanation of why we may observe an ambiguous correlation between product market competition (PMC) and economic growth, and between population and economic growth rates. Our explanation is based on the notion of ‘returns to specialization’. Under the model's assumptions, PMC and economic growth are ambiguously correlated when returns to specialization are decreasing, whereas population growth and productivity growth are ambiguously correlated when returns to specialization are increasing. From a theoretical point of view, these results are explained by the presence or absence of an ‘increasing production-complexity’ effect associated to the use of a larger number of intermediate-input varieties in the same production process.     

Managing Challenging Organizational Change: Introducing active labour market policies in Italian public employment agencies

Abstract

Managing organizational change in the public sector is extremely challenging when adverse conditions hamper the introduction of novel organizational practices. This study builds on the case of the implementation of active labour market policies in in Italy, in an attempt to help explain the process of managing organizational change in the public sector. The case study shows how, despite contrary conditions that originate from the political context, the interplay between designed policy interventions, initial conditions, and features of the policy process can result in effective change of employment service practices.     

New Financial Architectures and Legal Infrastructures: Toward a Corrected and Compensated International Monetary System

The international monetary system features a powerful subsystem of nations with an organized polyarchic economy—in other words, a market economy adjusted and balanced by government authorities to protect the market against forces operating within it but failing to abide by the rules (as in the defense of fair competition), in which excessive asymmetry runs the risk of toppling the system. The central bank is the body guaranteeing both stability and the system. However, globalization prevents the central banks from controlling the massive flows of derivatives. In the absence of a supranational authority, the only remedy realistically feasible today lies in the network of informal agreements among the leading economic powers—the G-7, G-8, and G-20 countries. These countries, on the one hand, intervene on a case-by-case (or crisis-by-crisis) basis and, on the other, strive to bring chaotic corrective and compensatory measures into a market dominated by “turbocapitalism” to ward off future crises. Their actions thus strengthen legal infrastructures and the information flows that ensure transparency and involve financially sound nations, weak nations, international organizations, assorted classes of operators, and major private institutions.     

Leadership and organizational learning's role on innovation and performance: Lessons from Spain

Leadership style has been traditionally emphasized as one of the most important individual influences on firm innovation. Scholars are now paying growing attention to the possibility that the collective capability of organizational learning plays a key role in determining innovation. We propose that leadership style, an individual feature, and organizational learning, a collective process, simultaneously and positively affect firm innovation. A structural equation model and data from 408 large firms in four sectors supported our hypotheses. Organizational learning had a stronger direct influence on innovation than CEO transformational leadership for our sample; however, leadership had a strong, significant influence on organizational learning, indirectly affecting firm innovation. Additionally, innovation positively and significantly influenced performance. Organizational learning also positively affected performance, but interestingly mainly through innovation.     

New strategic goals and organizational solutions in large R&D labs: lessons from Centro Ricerche Fiat and Telecom Italia Lab

The issue of corporate R&D management has become particularly relevant during the last decade, since many industrial sectors experienced growing complexity in their research areas and increasing constraints in budgets devoted to R&D activities. This paper discusses the cases of the ICT and automotive sectors, exploring the changes in managerial procedures and strategies that two of the largest corporate research centres in Italy (Telecom Italia Lab and Centro Ricerche Fiat) adopted during a delicate phase of transition.
Both cases are characterized by a growing pressure towards the effective integration of short-term and long-term perspectives, i.e. towards a balance between valorization of research results and competencies, and exploration of new technological trajectories. The solutions adopted by the two organizations are explored and discussed. Specifically, while TiLab focused on the promotion of controlled spin-off companies, CRF has been very active in local technology transfer, especially in favour of SMFs.     

Development Policy Lending, Conditionality, and Ownership: A Dynamic Agency Model Perspective

Is the World Bank's Development Policy Lending likely to enhance ownership and have greater effectiveness than structural adjustment? We specify a dynamic common agency model in which a government considering economic reform faces domestic opposition from interest groups. The dynamic specification, which is original in the context of policy reforms supported by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), is essential to allow the strength of special interest groups to arise endogenously during the reform process. We show that conditionality may alter the country's political equilibrium and lead to higher social welfare. However, under certain circumstances which depend on country‐specific circumstances, conditional assistance could lead to lower social welfare. Thus, for conditionality not to be inconsistent with ownership, its design must be appropriate to the country circumstances and directly affect the domestic political constraint.     

GSS for Multi-Organizational Collaboration: Reflections on Process and Content

Multi-organizational collaboration has become the norm for modern organizations as they seek to survive and prosper in increasingly turbulent times. These collaborations can take many forms, but face problems due to different management styles, different cultures, and different operating modes of the participant organizations. These differences usually cause difficulties for the multi-organizational teams that are set up to make the collaboration operational. Group Support Systems (GSSs) is one possible way of supporting these multi-organization collaboration teams (MCTs). This paper builds and describes a conceptual framework that highlights the critical characteristics of these teams and how GSS might support their activities. The framework is based on a detailed analysis of three case studies using three different GSSs.     

The psychosocial behaviour of young Spanish smokers

This paper studies the psychosocial behaviour of Spanish smokers between the ages of 14 and 18, with the aim of identifying the factors associated with both the decision to consume tobacco and the quantities to consume. To that end, a Type II Tobit model is used, which is estimated by using data drawn from the Spanish Surveys on Drug Use in the School Population corresponding to 1994, 1996, and 1998. The results show that the two decisions are strongly associated with a number of psychosocial determinants. In particular, evidence was found that the probability of smoking and the quantity consumed are positively related to variables such as the age of the adolescent, his/her disposable income, or education failure. The estimates also show that the realization of informative campaigns about the risk of tobacco and other substance abuse reduces both the proportion of smokers and the number of cigarettes consumed.