Liberalizing Nirvana: an analysis of the consequences of common pool resource deregulation for the sustainability of Fiji's surf tourism industry

In July 2010, the Fijian government issued a decree that liberalized Fiji's surf breaks and deregulated its surf tourism industry. It did this by canceling licenses that granted resorts exclusive use of surf breaks based on indigenous customary ownership of foreshore and fringing reef fishing areas as common pool resources. This paper analyses the sustainability of surf tourism in Fiji, utilizing a developing framework for sustainable surf tourism. Based on broader sustainable tourism theory and empirical research, the framework considers (1) the impact of economic neo-liberalism, (2) the need for coordinated planning and limits to growth, (3) the advantages of systematic attempts to foster cross-cultural understanding, and (4) the social benefits associated with the development of surfing at the village level. The study found that a lack of regulation is compromising the sustainability of Fiji's surf tourism industry in each of these four dimensions. However, evidence of a growing acceptance of the need for regulation by most stakeholders offers a starting point for a transactive, participative process to find solutions. A fifth element to the framework is recommended for future analyses based on the need for surf tourism to contribute to poverty alleviation in destination communities.     

THE FORMATION OF CONSUMER INFLATION EXPECTATIONS: NEW EVIDENCE FROM JAPAN'S DEFLATION EXPERIENCE

Using a new data set, we investigate the relationship between the inflation experience and expectations of households in Japan, focusing on the post-1995 deflationary era. Our first finding is that inflation expectations increase with age. Second, we find that measured inflation rates also increase with age, although age and inflation expectations continue to exhibit a positive correlation even after controlling for the household-level inflation rate. Analysis suggests that the correlation between age and inflation expectations is driven largely by the correlation between cohort and inflation expectations, which we interpret to represent the effect of historical inflation experience on inflation expectations.     

Burned by Bullying in the American Workplace: Prevalence,Perception, Degree and Impact*

abstract This study assesses the prevalence of workplace bullying in a sample of US workers, using a standardized measure of workplace bullying (Negative Acts Questionnaire, NAQ), and compares the current study's prevalence rates with those from other bullying and aggression studies. The article opens by defining bullying as a persistent, enduring form of abuse at work and contrasting it with other negative workplace actions and interactions. Through a review of the current literature, we propose and test hypotheses regarding bullying prevalence and dynamics relative to a sample of US workers. After discussing research methods, we report on the rates of bullying in a US sample, compare these to similar studies, and analyse the negative acts that might lead to perceptions of being bullied. Based upon past conceptualizations, as well as research that suggests bullying is a phenomenon that occurs in gradations, we introduce and provide statistical evidence for the construct and impact of bullying degree. Finally, the study explores the impact of bullying on persons who witnessed but did not directly experience bullying in their jobs.     

Economic growth under political accountability

We examine the impact of political and criminal accountability on economic growth. Governments seek to maximize their own consumption by extracting rents that are costly to growth. When citizens are able to depose politicians through elections, governments are tightly controlled. The rents politicians are able to extract increase in the length of their term. The effect of the threshold of criminal responsibility on the ability of voters to control politicians is non-monotonic. When tenure in power does not depend on economic performance, rent extraction is limited only by the effectiveness of oversight mechanisms but does not depend on time horizons of the rulers. Accumulation constraint binds only rulers who are neither politically nor criminally accountable.     

Public spending and optimal taxes without commitment

We consider a representative agent, infinite-horizon economy where production requires private and public capital. The supply of public capital is financed through distortionary taxation. The optimal (second best) tax policy of a benevolent government is time inconsistent. We therefore introduce explicitly the constraint that at no point in time the revision of the original tax plan is desirable. We completely characterize the (third best) tax plan that satisfies this constraint, and estimate the difference in tax rate between the second and third best policy for a wide range of parameters. For some of these the difference between the second and third best tax rates is large, and so are the associated rates of economic growth.     

Indeterminacy Arising in Multi-sector Economies

We characterize a large class of constant-returns-to-scale economies with standard Cobb–Douglas production technologies, which, when perturbed to incorporate external effects, exhibit indeterminacy or multiple equilibria. The perturbations are constrained to maintain overall constant returns to scale. We characterize the magnitude of the external effects that yield multiple equilibria in terms of the parameters of the unperturbed economy. We show that it is very easy to construct large and plausible classes of economies that exhibit indeterminacy with constant returns to scale, and with external effects that are arbitrarily small.
JEL Classification Numbers: E00, E3, O40.     

Untersuchung verschiedener Handelsstrategien für Wind- und Solarenergie unter Berücksichtigung der EEG 2012 Novellierung

The new EEG 2012 law opens up for more parties to participate in the trading of wind and solar power, because of the bonus system that now compensates everybody for all market relevant costs, not only the Transmission System Operators. Therefore it can be expected, that the trading of renewable energies by private parties will increase. One of the central questions to be answered is how efficient does a balance responsible party have to be to stay competitive also with a small pool. The quantification of balance costs for different trading strategies is however complex and non-trivial. We propose a methodology in this study that accounts for this fact. Additionally, we analyse and show the requirements and the monetary value of Intra-Day trading for the handling of wind and solar power. The trading strategies proposed in this article make use of an uncertainty band around the forecasts used in the Intra-Day, in order to avoid double trading and thereby reducing the total balancing volume and the associated costs.     

A Study of the Validity of the Moral Ethos Questionnaire and its Transferability to a Chinese Context

This paper begins by comparing and contrasting the Moral Climate Questionnaire (MCQ) and the Moral Ethos Questionnaire (MEQ), and identifies differences in their theoretical orientations. It argues that they seek to measure different things and should not be seen as competing instruments. The MEQ is based on Kohlbergian assumptions, regards the six individual stages of moral development as having equivalents within organisational moral atmosphere, and measures the relative strength of these organisational stages or forces. In validating the MEQ, one problem is its ranks-based questionnaire format, making standard assessments of reliability and validity difficult. The researchers investigated the MEQ's cross-cultural transferability and comprehensibility, by assessing how accurately three groups of 60 undergraduate business students, two Hong Kong Chinese and one Australian, assigned MEQ items to their designated stages. The Australian group met the comprehensibility criterion of 50% stage assignments (hits), but the Chinese did not, with Chinese students using an English version of the MEQ achieving fewer accurate hits than those using an expertly translated Chinese version. The results indicated some lack of cross-cultural transferability and some language-related interpretation differences. Students tended to assign stages 2, 3 and 4 items with greater accuracy than stages 1, 5 and 6, and the paper gives explanations for the lower comprehensibility of the latter. The paper concludes with comments on teaching Kohlbergian concepts to Chinese students and using the MEQ to research Chinese organisations.