International Comparisons of Australia's Infrastructure Performance

International benchmarking has played a key role in the reform of Australia's infrastructure industries by promoting indirect or yardstick competition, in highlighting the need for further reform and building a consensus for implementing necessary changes. The international benchmarking of infrastructure performance by the Bureau of Industry Economics (BIE) between 1991 and 1996 did much to focus attention on the need for change. The BIE examined the performance of eight infrastructure industries relative to international best practice: electricity, rail freight, telecommunications, the waterfront, road freight, coastal shipping, aviation and gas supply. Performance comparisons concentrated on indicators of price, service quality, labour productivity and capital productivity. This paper reviews and summarises the performance comparisons the BIE undertook over the last three years of its infrastructure benchmarking program. The BIE international benchmarking program provides a useful role model for other countries wanting to seriously pursue reform of their infrastructure industries.     

Cultural Inertia and Uniformity in Organizations

We analyze aspects of the structure of organizational culture.We show that old and culturally uniform organizations are proneto cultural inertia, that is, they are reluctant to adopt adifferent culture in response to a change in the environment.Cultural uniformity can be beneficial because the associatedinertia ex post protects and therefore ex ante encourages culture-specificinvestments by agents. We also explore the model's implicationsfor such issues as cultural uniformity within an organization,cultural heterogeneity across organizations, the destabilizingeffect of growth and mergers, and the conflicts arising in themanagement of culture.     

我国跨国公司融资问题分析

我国跨国企业资本结构不尽合理，资产负债率总体水平偏低，而且呈稳中趋降的趋势。造成这一现象的根本原因是我国跨国企业在融资顺序的选择上倾向于股权融资而忽视债权融资，存在明显的股权融资偏好，这与融资优序理论相悖。本文以跨国企业为研究对象，从我国跨国企业融资行为及其导致的资本结构存在的问题入手，通过对这种现象产生的原因的深入分析，对我国跨国企业融资结构优化提出了几点建议。     

浅谈企业标准化管理的创新

标准化管理是企业管理的重要基础工作,由于国内外市场竞争的压力,我国企业对标准化管理更加重视。但是如何开展标准化活动才能适应经济全球化的趋势,参与国际竞争,很多企业对此并不十分清楚。作为我国国民经济重要支柱的工业企业要提高核心竞争能力,实现可持续发展,必须对标准化管     

Evaluating universal primary education in Uganda: School fee abolition and educational outcomes

This paper analyzes the effect of lifting primary school fees on educational attainment in Uganda. After the abolishment of school fees in 1997, the enrollment rate more than doubled. Two decades later, we know little about the effect of the policy on educational attainment. With recent data on eight cohorts exposed to free education, we analyze the impact of the policy on years of completed primary school, completion of primary school, and transitioning to secondary school. We use a straightforward regression analysis with cohort dummies and household fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that lifting school fees had no effect on the years of primary school achievement and the likelihood of primary school completion. We find some weak evidence that the likelihood of those who completed primary education to start secondary school increased after Universal Primary Education.     

The Economic Relevance of Environmental Disclosure and its Impact on Corporate Legitimacy: An Empirical Investigation

In determining its environmental disclosure strategy, a firm's management faces a tension between responding to the information needs of financial markets and maintaining its legitimacy within the community. In this paper, relying on information economics and legitimacy theory, we explore how firms resolve this tension. Results show that a firm's environmental disclosure enhances the quality of analysts' information context, which ultimately allows them to make better forecasts. Moreover, financial analysts seem to be able to decipher environmental information, discounting discourses that are inconsistent with a firm's underlying environmental performance. We find also that a firm's environmental disclosure serves another purpose, as it influences how its other stakeholders (beyond financial ones) perceive its legitimacy. Such enhanced legitimacy reduces the information uncertainty faced by financial analysts. Our results suggest also that both economic‐based environmental disclosure and sustainable development and environmental disclosure are useful to analysts in making their forecasts and enhance a firm's legitimacy. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Semitractability of optimal stopping problems via a weighted stochastic mesh algorithm

In this paper, we propose a Weighted Stochastic Mesh (WSM) algorithm for approximating the value of discrete‐ and continuous‐time optimal stopping problems. In this context, we consider tractability of such problems via a useful notion of semitractability and the introduction of a tractability index for a particular numerical solution algorithm. It is shown that in the discrete‐time case the WSM algorithm leads to semitractability of the corresponding optimal stopping problem in the sense that its complexity is bounded in order by with being the dimension of the underlying Markov chain. Furthermore, we study the WSM approach in the context of continuous‐time optimal stopping problems and derive the corresponding complexity bounds. Although we cannot prove semitractability in this case, our bounds turn out to be the tightest ones among the complexity bounds known in the literature. We illustrate our theoretical findings by a numerical example.     

Private Property or Several Control: A Rejoinder

Following Mises’s foundational paper, ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth’, first published in 1920, writers in the Austrian tradition have argued that socialism is impossible, because under socialism there would be no private property in the means of production, and without that private property economic calculation could not take place. In the article ‘Economic Calculation: Private Property or Several Control?’, published in this journal in 2015, I argued that this was mistaken. Not private property, but several control, was required for economic calculation, and since several control is consistent with public ownership, this argument for the impossibility of socialism fails. Another article, ‘Private Property and Economic Calculation: A Reply to Andy Denis’, by Bylund and Manish, published in this issue of the Review of Political Economy, defends the traditional interpretation of Austrian reasoning, contending that my argument fails. My rejoinder re-states the issues, addressing, and, ultimately rejecting, the Bylund and Manish critique.     

基于DEA-Malmquist指数的皖江城市带利用外资研究

皖江城市带承接产业转移示范区已获国务院批准,外资的流入已成必然趋势,但对外资利用的效率与潜力成何种趋势,以及区域内部各市利用情况的差异性。文章运用DEA—Malmquist指数分析法,从宏观、微观效率和潜力三个层面对整体与各市分别客观评价,得出皖江城市带在利用外资效率方面呈增加趋势,但规模效率是影响总体效率的关键,合肥、芜湖、马鞍山和滁州在利用外资效率和潜力方面较好。