Willingness to Pay and the Cost of Commitment: An Empirical Specification and Test

In a static setting, willingness to pay for an environmental improvement is equal to compensating variation. In a dynamic setting, however, willingness to pay may also contain a commitment cost. In this paper we incorporate the dynamic nature of the value formation process into a stated preference study designed to test whether there is an important dynamic component (commitment cost) in stated preference values. The results clearly indicate that stated preference values can contain commitment costs and that these can be quite large: respondents offered the opportunity to delay their purchasing decisions until more information became available were willing to pay significantly less for improved water quality than those facing a now-or-never decision. These results have important consequences for the design and interpretation of stated preference data.     

Are Donor Countries Giving More or Less Aid?

The volume of foreign aid has increased during the last four decades, albeit with interruptions in certain years. Over time, the major recipients have changed: while the share of aid to Asia has diminished since the 1980s, that destined for sub‐Saharan Africa has grown. There is some evidence that, since the late 1990s, debt relief has assumed a larger share of the increased aid flows to sub‐Saharan Africa. The share of technical cooperation—a component of aid that is viewed as being driven by donors—has risen. More recently, there has been an increased emphasis on providing budget support to recipient governments, especially in the form of debt relief. Donor harmonization, national ownership of development plans, and sound policies on the part of the recipients are crucial for the aid to be effective in reducing poverty.     

Constructing migration: Infrastructure,poverty and development in KwaZulu‐Natal

Migration and population movement are probably the most neglected of the significant dynamics behind rural poverty in South Africa. Little is known about how people move from place to place, and much of what we thought we knew may be incorrect. In KwaZulu‐Natal job search is no longer the single dominating reason given for migration. Instead, infrastructure ties with it for first place today, with land close behind. The first article in this two‐part report notes that as many as two thirds of the province's disadvantaged families have broken away from their communities of origin and moved at least once during their lifetimes. Perhaps three million have migrated in the last fifteen years. A second unexpected finding is the predominance of rural‐to‐rural migration. Three quarters of all moves recorded were rural to rural, with many orientated towards advantaged rural areas around small towns and secondary cities. Results show how streams are channelled towards poverty or opportunity, and argue for a review of prevailing concepts of rural‐urban relations which structure delivery efforts. The second article, to follow later, notes that recorded income levels are now higher in some rural destination areas than in the urban shack communities that accommodate rural‐to‐urban migrants. Results of various studies presented show how access to information affects migration patterns, and the article also explores the role of infrastructure as a determining force in the regional distribution of population and as a factor in people's own bootstrap anti‐poverty efforts.     

Job quality in Europe

Promoting job quality and gender equality are objectives of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in spite of a downgrading of the attention given to both in the revised employment guidelines and the relaunch of the Lisbon Process. However, advances on both of these objectives may be important complements to the employment rate targets of the EES, as access to good quality jobs for both sexes is likely to help sustain higher employment rates. While the European Commission has a broad view of the concept of job quality in practice, it relies on a selection of labour market type indicators that say little about the quality of the actual jobs people do. Using data from the 2005 European Working Conditions survey, we analyse job quality along three dimensions: job content, autonomy and working conditions. We conclude that gender and occupational status, along with other job characteristics such as working time and sector, have more influence on an individual's job quality than the country or ‘national model’ they are situated in. Our results also demonstrate the value of developing indicators of job quality that are both gender sensitive and derived at the level of the job rather than the labour market in order to advance EU policy and academic debate on this topic.     

Who's in the driving seat? Managing human resources in a franchise firm

This article reports on the findings of a study within the automotive franchise retail sector which shows how employees' experiences of HRM can, under some circumstances, be influenced both directly and indirectly by third‐party organisations. A model that describes these patterns of influence is put forward. These findings point to the way in which inter‐firm relationships influence the employment relationship from the perspective of both the employer and the employee, and raise questions about the limits of control exercised by HR department policies and activities. The article also contributes to the relatively limited literature on the operation of franchising systems, in particular concerning the role played by HR policies and practices as a mechanism for inter‐organisational control.     

Subsidizing Charitable Giving with Rebates or Matching: Further Laboratory Evidence

We examine two different ways to subsidize charitable giving: by a rebate (returning a portion of the donation to the giver) or by a match (adding additional donations to the giver's donation). In previous experimental research, we have shown that participants give more to charity under the match than under an equivalent rebate. The previous within-subject experimental design required participants to make a series of decisions under both types of subsidy. Each decision consisted of an allocation of an endowment between the subject and a charity chosen by the subject from a specified list. This article examines whether that result is an artifact of the previous within-subjects design: subjects may have failed to fully distinguish the two types of subsidy. In the current article, we report results from a between-subjects design, where participants are required to make only one type of decision—involving rebates or involving matching subsidies. Our results confirm previous findings.