Destination attractiveness and travel intention: the case of Chinese and Indian students in Queensland,Australia

Destination attractiveness is an important stream of literature. Australia has been recognized as one of the world’s most attractive destinations. This study looked into international students’ perceptions of Australia as an attractive international tourism destination as well as their travel intention. A sample of 252 Chinese and Indian international students participated in the study. Students’ perceived destination attractiveness and how it influenced their travel intention, pleasure of travel and place attachment were investigated. The study also looked into perception differences between Chinese and Indian students using t-test and hierarchical regressions.     

Applying Total Quality Management to Education and Training: a US Case Study

An organisation implementing quality improvement processes should incorporate these concepts and principles in the design and delivery of its training products and services. Here the authors describe an approach to achieving this incorporation. Four pillars of quality were rendered operational through ten instructional components implemented in two university courses. Outcomes of the application of these components include: a highly experiential and interactive course, a focus on performance outcomes, and a course customised to the needs of learners.     

Fulfilling its promise? Strategic public procurement and the impact of equality considerations on employers’ behaviour in Scotland

ABSTRACT

Public administration is an important force influencing equality in today’s society. Like budgetary choices, public procurement has increasingly gained attention as a means to promote equality. Yet, there are important gaps in knowledge, especially regarding how equality requirements in public procurement affect company behaviour. This paper sheds first light on the impact strategic public procurement has on employers’ behaviour. Based on empirical research, this paper highlights that companies perceive a limited prevalence of equality stipulations in Scottish public procurement practices and raises doubts about the impact of public procurement practices to create a successful business case for equality.     

Road connectivity,population, and crop production in Sub‐Saharan Africa

This study adopts a cross‐sectional spatial approach to examine the relationship between transport infrastructure, population location, and agricultural production in Sub‐Saharan Africa using new data obtained from geographic information systems (GIS). We find that both population and agricultural production are spatially concentrated near large cities, with 41.4% of population and 23.6% of agricultural production (in value terms) within 2.5 hours travel time to large cities. Taking into account agroecological and other factors, we find a statistically significant association between travel time and agricultural production. Using coefficients estimated for Mozambique, we simulate the effects of hypothetical increases in road investments on travel times and agricultural production, suggesting that improvements in road infrastructure could facilitate a substantial increase in agricultural production.     

Do active fund managers care about capital gains tax efficiency?

This study investigates the tax efficiency of actively managed equity funds by conducting a previously unaddressed natural experiment. Specifically, we examine whether asset sales were timed to take advantage of the introduction of a substantial discount to realized capital gains when the holding period was at least 1 year. Institutional equity fund management in Australia is principally focused on the pre-fee and pre-tax performance surveys of leading asset consultants. Given this industry setting, our study is important because tax efficiency is not accounted for directly in the reported performance numbers, and is thus opaque. We find that active fund managers overall have significantly increased the proportion of long-term capital gains realized after the change in taxation code, although there are significant variations across funds. We also find that active fund managers realize more long-term gains on both large capitalization and low volatility stocks.     

Attribution of investment performance: an analysis of Australian pooled superannuation funds*

This paper evaluates the market timing and security selection capabilities of Australian pooled superannuation funds over the eight‐year period from January 1991 to December 1998. Evaluation of both components of investment performance is surprisingly scarce in the Australian literature despite active investment managers engaging in both market timing and security selection. The paper also evaluates performance for the three largest asset classes within diversified superannuation funds and their contribution to overall portfolio return. The importance of an accurately specified market portfolio proxy in the measurement of investment performance is demonstrated. This paper employs performance benchmarks that account for the multi‐sector investment decisions of active investment managers in a manner that is consistent with their unique investment strategy. Consistent with U.S. literature, the empirical results indicate that Australian pooled superannuation funds do not exhibit significantly positive security selection or market timing skill.     

Trading behaviour and the performance of daily institutional trades

Using a unique database of daily trading activity, the present study examines the ability of active Australian equity managers to earn superior risk‐adjusted returns. We find evidence of superior trade performance, where performance is a function of stock size. Our findings indicate that active equity managers are able to successfully exploit private information more readily in stocks ranked 101–150 by market‐cap, where the degree of analyst coverage, information flows and market efficiency are lower than for large‐cap stocks. We also find evidence of manager specialization. Our evidence provides further support of the value of active investment management in Australian equities.     

Qualitative methods and the pursuit of economic understanding

In this paper, I describe the qualitative methods deployed in a series of investigations examining post-disaster recovery following Hurricane Katrina. I argue that qualitative methods, particularly ethnographic field interviews, are essential tools in contexts that the interpretive frameworks (mental models) of the research subjects play a dominant role in shaping broader patterns of social coordination. Given the importance, Austrian economists attribute to non-deterministic learning as the source of endogenous change and discovery in contexts of genuine uncertainty; I argue that this underutilized set of tools ought to be considered particularly valuable.