NTT SANDALWOOD: ROOTS OF DISASTER

For decades the government of Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT) province has exploited the sandalwood sector, to the detriment of the growers of the trees. Severe depletion of the stock of sandalwood in the province has been the result. This paper documents NTT policies toward the sector, which it argues have been both inefficient and inequitable, and offers a detailed approach for reform. It also examines the political economy of these policies, and argues that the case of sandalwood provides an example of the dangers of decentralisation of economic authority in the absence of local democracy.     

Statistical Inference under Symmetry

We explore the consequences of adjoining a symmetry group to a statistical model. Group actions are first induced on the sample space, and then on the parameter space. It is argued that the right invariant measure induced by the group on the parameter space is a natural non-informative prior for the parameters of the model. The permissible sub-parameters are introduced, i.e., the subparameters upon which group actions can be defined. Equivariant estimators are similarly defined. Orbits of the group are defined on the sample space and on the parameter space; in particular the group action is called transitive when there is only one orbit. Credibility sets and confidence sets are shown (under right invariant prior and assuming transitivity on the parameter space) to be equal when defined by permissible sub-parameters and constructed from equivariant estimators. The effect of different choices of transformation group is illustrated by examples, and properties of the orbits on the sample space and on the parameter space are discussed. It is argued that model reduction should be constrained to one or several orbits of the group. Using this and other natural criteria and concepts, among them concepts related to design of experiments under symmetry, leads to links towards chemometrical prediction methods and towards the foundation of quantum theory.     

Employment and privacy: A problem for our time

The employment application form is a major source of information about candidates for many companies. It is also a potential source of infringement by the company upon the privacy of the individual. Although September 1984 saw the passing into law of the Data Protection Act, the U.K. has not been in the forefront of civil rights where employees and personal information are concerned. During an extended interview with members of a personnel department of a major company, several issues relating to privacy issues were revealed and these are discussed in the paper. Although these interviews were carried out before the new law came into effect, they do show that this and many similar organisations may experience problems over compliance. This is particularly likely in the computerisation of personnel records and employees' access to their personal information. Michael Newman is Lecturer in Accountancy at the University of Manchester and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut. He has been awarded a grant by the Economic and Social Research Council, U.K. for his project The Introduction of Information Systems into Organisations, 1985/87. He is one of the authors of Accountants' Roles in Industrial Organizations and Access to Information. He has also published several articles.Gloriana Marks de Chabris is Junior Accountant at Price Water House (Accountants).     

State regulation of accounting practices and municipal borrowing costs

This article examines the association between state regulation of accounting practices and municipal borrowing costs. The results demonstrate that stringent accounting regulations do have an effect on borrowing costs after abstracting the effects of other explanatory variables. The direction of the observed effect is difficult to assess due to presence of multicollinearity in the model. However, lower borrowing costs are suggested by the analysis.     

The effectiveness of contractual and trust‐based governance in strategic alliances under behavioral and environmental uncertainty

Research summary: We examine the interplay of behavioral and environmental uncertainty in shaping the effectiveness of two key governance mechanisms used by strategic alliances: contractual and trust‐based governance. We develop and test hypotheses, using a meta‐analytic dataset encompassing over 15,000 strategic alliances across 82 independent samples. We find that contractual governance works best under low to moderate levels of behavioral uncertainty and moderate to high levels of environmental uncertainty, while it is detrimental to alliance performance when both types of uncertainty are low or high. Trust‐based governance is most effective at high levels of behavioral uncertainty and low levels of environmental uncertainty. It suffers a large loss of usefulness at high behavioral uncertainty as environmental uncertainty increases. Managerial summary: Strategic alliances allow firms to gain greater efficiency and create value. Yet, many such alliances fail because they are not able to deal with the twin challenges posed by behavioral and environmental uncertainty. Findings from our meta‐analysis imply that under conditions of high behavioral uncertainty and low‐to‐moderate levels of environmental uncertainty, the use of trust‐based governance alongside contractual governance might enhance the latter's effectiveness. The combined effectiveness of contractual and trust‐based governance under high levels of both behavioral and environmental uncertainty is not obvious. When both behavioral and environmental uncertainty are high, contractual governance hurts alliance performance while trust‐based governance does not function at its best either. Under these conditions, it might be better for firms to turn to hierarchy or vertical integration. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How did you get up and running? Taking a Bourdieuan perspective towards a framework for negotiating strategic fit

This article suggests a theoretical framework for illustrating significant iterative processes that need to be strategically managed when entering a new field or changing a social position within a field. Applying a process-relational perspective, the framework theoretically underpins what propels individuals to change their behaviour conceptualized as constructing a strategic fit between personal structure and fields. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and capitals as a lens the analysis reveals how capital transformations eventually can lead to a social construction of this temporary strategic fit. The article argues that the performance of habitus expresses temporary field specific social positioning as a social materialization of macrostructures (gender, age, class, etc.). This suggested framework is applied to conceptualizing how nascent entrepreneurs successfully negotiate entrepreneurial processes. It is concerned with a small aspect: how to physically start a business (its registration and the start of trading). In this context, the article unpacks how the transformation of capitals mediates nascent entrepreneurs’ social positioning. This article contributes to the growing ‘social turn’ research situating entrepreneurial processes within social relations and context and the emerging Entrepreneurship as Practice field. It offers practical implications for business support and research directions.     

Effective rates of protection revisited for Indonesia

This paper calculates nominal and effective rates of protection for Indonesian tradables sectors in early 2008, and compares these figures with previous calculations for 1987 and 1995. Such a review is overdue. Many non-tariff barriers to imports and exports have been abolished, though new import restraints on rice and sugar are notable exceptions to this trend. Import tariffs have been lowered, particularly through regional preferential trade arrangements. We account for such arrangements in two different ways. Export taxes persist in certain natural resources sectors, but most rates have been reduced. We find that more than half of the effective support provided to tradable products sectors now comes from subsidies on fuels, fertiliser, electricity and liquefied petroleum gas, rather than from trade policies per se. Duty drawbacks and exemptions for exporters boost the effective rate of protection for tradables sectors overall by a small fraction of 1%, and for no input–output sector by more than 3%.