AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE BSE SCARE

The economic aspects of the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in British cattle herds are investigated. On balance, a non-interventionist approach is most likely to be the least-cost method of dealing with the BSE problem, where costs include the risks of humans contracting Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). There is no case for compensating farmers for the historic cost of building up infected herds.     

The world bank in Africa: Historical reflections on the African present

This paper offers a historical commentary on the World Bank's influential report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. A very broad perspective is adopted, partly to identify the main points of connection between historians and development economists, and partly because the Report, though widely commented on, has not been addressed directly by historians of Africa. The principal aim of the paper is to show how Africa's past bears upon its present by linking the economic history of the continent to its contemporary development problems. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part deals with some of the unstated assumptions underlying the Report. The second part focuses on the World Bank's assessment of the current “crisis” in Africa, and offers a long-run interpretation of the relationship between population, resource use, institutional change, and political incorporation. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the dangers of excessive specialization among experts, and by pressing the case for reuniting history and development economics.     

Teaching International Business Across Multiple Modes of Delivery: How to Maintain Equivalence in Learning Outcomes

The drivers of globalization are changing how, where, and when international business (IB) is being taught, and increasing student diversity. Concomitantly, education is becoming an important contributor to GDP in developed economies. Today, the same course may be taught at home to domestic and in-bound international students, in host countries, online, and through blended learning techniques. The increasing variety of modes of delivery raises an important question, however—how to deliver the same material in different contexts and achieve the same learning outcomes. This article examines the changing face of IB education and presents a case study on how this question has been answered at one Australian university.     

Mapping views of the future in a small group

This article describes specific approaches to interviewing, questionnaire design, and seminar organisation and focuses on the process designed to explicate the conceptual frameworks used by the individual group members in their everyday decision making.     

Groupware: Future directions and wild cards

Groupware is a perspective on telecommunications and computing that emphasizes the business team as “user,”; rather than the individual. This perspective and its associated products and services are riding a major wave of change: the trend toward business teams (small, cross‐organizational, ad hoc, task‐focused, time‐driven, cohesive work groups) as a primary mode of operation for the organization of the future. In this paper, I will explore future directions for the groupware perspective in the marketplace and the business teams wave. Current product classes will be presented, along with the experiences of early users of groupware. In addition to overall trends and future directions, possible wild cards will be introduced and discussed.     

Exotic Passport Options

The Vanilla Passport Option is an insurance against trading loss. In this paper, we add various exotic features to the Vanilla contract and price the resulting financial products. The assumptions that we make are the same as the Black-Scholes ones and the resulting pricing equations are Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman type equations or parabolic free boundary PDE's which can be solved via finite difference methods.