Women and food aid: a developmental perspective

The unique aspect of food aid projects is that food, rather than money, is used for achieving developmental objectives. As food is usually controlled by women, they benefit most from considering it to be of economic value. Poor women seem to be short of resources--time and money--which can be supplemented by food aid. Through its income-transfer effect, food aid can enable women to work fewer hours/day and thus have more discretionary time. It can also provide, directly or indirectly, the cash necessary for women to use skills they already possess to set themselves up in small businesses. Food aid projects achieve their developmental objectives through: the nutritional content of the distributed commodity; the income transfer effect; cooperatives or associations; specific activities associated with the project; community improvement aspects resulting from the project; and provision of budgetary support to release resources for additional developmental activities. There are a number of ways through which food aid exerts its effect on women from a developmental perspective. Consumption of the food aid commodity provides women with an improved diet. Food aid as an income transfer can enable women to have more discretionary time. Providing women with opportunities for income-generating activities is an important aspect of development. Women's cooperatives or associations funded by food aid commodities can provide women with income. Current food aid projects, if properly planned, can be beneficial to women without the incorporation of specific activities or skills training. One way that food aid helps women gain more time is by freeing them from wage employment. Another way is to use the income transfer for the purchasing of consumer goods that reduce their labor.     

New Product Development For Service Companies

It is well known that services differ from manufactured goods in a number of significant ways. Services are largely intangible, produced and consumed simultaneously, heterogeneous and perishable. These differences can lead to changes in service management. Christopher J. Easingwood has investigated how new products development practices in service organizations may reflect these differences. He has profiled practices found in a sample of service companies in the United Kingdom on topics ranging from idea generation to post-launch assessment, together with the strategic role and organizational location of new products. A number of special characteristics of the new product activity in services companies are identified. For instance, the number of new product introductions may be restricted due to customer and staff confusion when faced with a proliferation of service products. Test markets are used primarily to ensure the proper functioning of the service rather than to provide a base for a national sales projection. These and other characteristics appear to be appropriate adaptations to the special features of services. They are part of a pattern that shows some of the ways that service companies have adapted the new product development process to meet unique problems in the service environment.     

Determinants of Relationship Quality and Loyalty in Personalized Services

The study adopts a relationship perspective to examine and better understand customers' interactions with service firms' contact personnel, physical environment and customer environment and their influence on the relationship quality, that is trust and satisfaction, and consequently loyalty. The conceptual model, which integrates relational and evaluative perspectives, is validated in the Asian context of personalized service through findings from a survey of 325 respondents. The findings at the aggregate level indicate that while the physical environment is an important determinant of both trust and satisfaction in personalized service encounters, the customer environment influences only satisfaction but not trust. Service contact personnel's friendliness and knowledge of customers strongly influence relationship quality; while expertise, similarity and disclosure influence trust but not satisfaction. Both relationship trust and satisfaction were found to significantly influence loyalty to the service provider. At the disaggregate level, trust was found to be a stronger predictor of loyalty for high-end service providers while satisfaction was a stronger predictor of loyalty for low-end service providers. The implications for high-end and low-end service providers to enhance loyalty by strategically leveraging on key customer-firm antecedents of relationship trust and satisfaction are discussed.     

Mode of payment in household expenditures

Summary We have studied the choice of mode of payment from a 1987 Dutch household survey. The institutional arrangements of a transaction are a major determinant for the mode of payment, and so is the amount involved. A 10% increase in the sum paid usually leads to a reduction of about 1.3% to 2.3% in the incidence of currency use.Based on De keuze van een betaalmiddel (The Choice of Mode of Payment), (SEO, Amsterdam, 1989), which reports research commissioned by the Postbank, Amsterdam.