China's foreign trade marketing strategy: Problems and prospects 1

It has been seven years since the open door policy was officially instituted by the People's Republic of China. During this time, changes have taken place within Chinese society and China's dealings with the rest of the world. In this paper, the authors evaluate the problems and prospects for China's foreign trade marketing strategy. They make recommendations in five policy areas: (1) export promotion; (2) the mix of exports; (3) a systems approach to trade; (4) joint ventures stressing value‐added labour and (5) the role of assembly technology. Each strategy is identified and discussed in terms of its future prospects in the development of China's trade.     

The relative efficiency of king's,ecclesiastical, and lay estates in Domesday Essex, 1086

In the Domesday survey of 1086, information on the inputs and output of most production units in the English economy was carefully collected by questionnaire survey and verified in court. In this paper, Essex estate data are used to assess whether similar production functions describe production for the three major classes of production unit in the economy – king's, ecclesiastical, and lay estates. A data envelopment analysis is undertaken to determine whether production on one class of estate was more efficient than on the others. The evidence suggests that production processes and management performance were similar on the three classes of estate.     

Breaking the cycle of marketing disinvestment: using market research to build organisational alliances

Many marketers find their programmes fall victim to disinvestment, both financial and psychological. While most marketers are avid students of consumer psychology, they tend to overlook the dynamics of organisational psychology, just as the literature on market orientation often fails to emphasise the organisational identity politics and power struggles that frustrate marketing. Discussions of market orientation focus on leadership and team‐building issues, favouring highly visible cases of organisational success at the expense of analysing common factors in marketing failure, many of them grounded in organisational psychology. Allied with knowledge of organisational epistemology, market research can be used as a critical resource in marketers' internal marketing programmes to strengthen market orientation. Ongoing collaborative market research can build positive organisational alliances that contribute to the internal support needed to sustain a successful marketing programme. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Is Post-Communist Health Spending Unusual?

What factors determine a country's spending on health? And what factors determine the share of spending financed by the public sector? Taking these factors into account, is post-communist health spending unusual? For the OECD economies, we find that per capita health spending is strongly related to per capita income, with an elasticity of about 1.5. The elasticity for developing economies is close to one. Spending is also positively related to the elderly dependency rate, but the relationship is weaker than a static comparison of spending by the elderly and non-elderly would suggest. Even though health spending as a share of GDP in the post-communist countries of eastern and central Europe is below the OECD average, there is evidence of above normal health spending in most countries when we control for income and demographics. For Hungary, the ‘excess’ spending reached over three percentage points of GDP in 1994. For the OECD sample, four development indicators account for half the variation in the public sector share of total health spending. Political variables help explain the remainder. If the post-communist countries converge to the market economy pattern, the share of public financing will fall, yet still remain well above half.     

Managing employee expectations during acquisitions

There is a wide body of evidence that suggests that the management of 'human factors' in post‐acquisition implementation is important and, where it is badly managed, helps to explain why up to half of acquisitions are not deemed to be successful. A central feature in this process is the management of employee expectations. Using research insights drawn from the management and formation of expectations in recruitment and from breaches of the psychological contract, this article reports on research in organisations subject to a takeover within two years of the field work. Detailed findings on two of these cases are used to explore the dimensions of dual expectations in such circumstances. It is suggested that employees in acquired companies have concerns that become expectations concerning both themselves ('me') and their work group ('us'), ranging from immediate job and employment worries on transfer to longer‐term status and behavioural and cultural concerns in the 'new' organisation. These expectations will vary over time and have different facets according to the seniority of the employee, the degree of integration sought by the acquirer and the extent to which expectations formed are proven to be realistic and realisable. The two cases analysed reveal different aspects of unmet expectations in acquisitions. Seven factors were identified as influential in shaping employees' expectations in acquisitions: quality of communication, believability of information, trust in management action, credibility of leadership, fairness of action, consistency of action and communication and logic of management action or behaviour.     

Capitalism, profits and innovation in the new techno-economic paradigm

Innovative profits (of the kind conceptualized by Schumpeter) are today being increasingly created through international corporate networks for technological development. Such profits through innovation are encouraged by newer more flexible organizational forms, and further encouraged (unlike in the conventional perspective on profits and on the incentive to innovate) by knowledge flows between firms. Our empirical evidence, based on US patent data, shows that multinational companies are currently more likely to develop abroad technologies which are less science-based, and less dependent upon tacit knowledge. However, within the science-based industries firms may generate abroad some technologies which are heavily dependent on tacit knowledge, but normally in fields that lie outside their own core technological competencies. We find some evidence of a convergence in corporate technological diversification across large firms, facilitated by the now common spread in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) as an integrator of formerly separate technological systems. This has led smaller firms to diversify, but giant firms to consolidate activity around those technologies that have become most interrelated.