Price transmission and market integration: vertical and horizontal price linkages for salmon

Relationships between prices are of interest when testing for market integration as well as analyses of supply chains. A feature that has received little attention is that if two supply chains are linked by market integration at some stage, then the whole supply chain will be linked. Furthermore, the leading price in such a system can be in one supply chain and will not be revealed in market integration studies or analysis of a single supply chain. An empirical analysis is provided for the supply chains for salmon which originates in Norway and the United Kingdom and is then sold at retail level in France as smoked salmon. We find a high degree of price transmission in both supply chains, as well as integrated markets.     

风下之乡——沙巴

请先试做一道选择题：到马来西亚旅游你会选择（A）吉隆坡、云顶高原（B）马六甲（C）东马沙巴。如果你的选择是（A）、（B），那你是传统的游客；如果你选了（C），那么恭喜你，你就是下一阶段最会玩大马的人！     

'HOME IS NOT SO VERY FAR AWAY': CALIFORNIAN ENGINEERS IN SOUTH AFRICA, 1868–1915

This article describes the fate of Californian engineering and technology in South Africa during the years around the Jameson Raid. In theory, progress promised many things: commercial development, scientific and social enlightenment, free markets and rule of law. But in South Africa, these tools of progress came together in ways that differed from Californian engineers' own frontier experience. While mining flourished agriculture remained undeveloped. And both, far from producing the society imagined by Californians, furthered imperial goals.     

Predicting total health care costs of medicaid recipients: An artificial neural systems approach

Although medical treatment costs have escalated beyond the reach of many Americans, a thorough total cost model is essential before implementing cost containment strategies. This study offers a prediction model of the total treatment cost for a Mississippi Medicaid patient. Artificial neural systems (ANS) are proposed as a methodology for the prediction of health care costs of postmenopausal women who are Medicaid recipients. The results of the neural networks along with traditional regression analysis are presented. Artificial neural systems overcome many of the problems associated with the estimation of this model, such as the identification of the appropriate functional form and dealing with both qualitative and quantitative aspects of these large claims databases. Neural networks are shown to provide superior forecasts. In addition preliminary results for the presentation of significance tests of individual causal variables using neural networks is presented.     

Trade liberalization and intersectoral labor movements

This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization episodes on movements of labor across sectors. The aim is to assess empirically whether increased trade openness leads to increased structural change and, if so, to what extent. Results for a set of 25 liberalization episodes suggest weakly negative effects of liberalization on the extent of intersectoral labor shifts at the economy-wide 1-digit level of disaggregation. We do uncover increased sectoral change after liberalization at the 3-digit level within manufacturing, although the estimated effects are statistically weak and small in magnitude. The effects of liberalization on labor shifts differ across individual countries, in a way related to the scope and depth of reforms.     

Zero Stamp Tax？

In March of 2008 the"Two Sessions"proved to be very vital for the Chinese people;many proposals were discussed,includ- ing several hot issues that have received concern from citizens across the country.Certainly the first proposal would attract a lot of attention.At the annual session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference(CPPCC),the first proposal put forward by     

Using Payment Behaviour Data for Credit Risk Modelling

In this paper we evaluate payment scores in two contexts; that of predicting future payment behaviour and that of corporate failure prediction. The assessment of the ability and willingness of a firm to pay its creditors, and the likely timeliness of payments, are a major focus of both credit risk analysis (from the trade credit perspective) and government policy, although the latter issues have not been much studied in the academic literature. While failure prediction models are traditionally used as indicators of payment behaviour in the UK, payment behaviour prediction models are estimated and made available in the USA by the leading credit reporting agencies and the predictive abilities of such scores in the UK context are, therefore, worthy of consideration.We also consider the contribution that payment behaviour scores can make to predicting corporate failure. An important question is whether the availability of payment behaviour scores increases the overall information content of the credit report or merely re-packages information represented elsewhere. We find that payment behaviour data can be used to predict successfully future payment behaviour in a trade credit context, and can add incrementally to the predictivity of corporate failure models.