New development: Implementing and evaluating government strategic plans—the Europe 2020 Strategy

ABSTRACT

This article examines the implementation of the Europe 2020 Strategy. The authors analysed the strategic and management plans of the European Commission’s directorates-general (DGs) to identify the main and dominant discourses in the documents. The supplementing or supplanting of the simple strategy framework of the early years by a political framework after 2014 can be seen as caused by an interaction between rational management evaluation on one hand and political values and will on the other.     

The Care Economy in Post-Reform China: Feminist Research on Unpaid and Paid Work and Well-Being

ABSTRACT

As China embarked on the path of economic and social reforms, social provisions from the Maoist era were dismantled, and care responsibilities shifted back from the state to the household. Rural–urban migration, a steep decline in fertility, and increasing longevity have led to changes in the age structure of the population both overall and by region. Using seven different surveys, the eleven contributions in this volume study the distributive consequences of post-reform care policies and the impact of unpaid care responsibilities on women’s and men’s opportunities and gender inequality. Overall, reduced care services have created care deficits for disadvantaged groups, including low-income rural elderly and children. The shifted care burden has also limited women’s ability to participate fully in the market economy and has contributed to rising gender inequalities in labor force participation, off-farm employment, earnings, pensions, and mental health outcomes.     

The Influence of Personality Traits and Demographic Factors on Social Entrepreneurship Start Up Intentions

The sheer impact of the recent global financial turmoil and scandals (such as Enron and WorldCom) has demonstrated that unbridled commercial entrepreneurs who are allowed to pursue their short-term opportunities regardless of the consequences has led to a massive depreciation of the wealth of nations, social livelihood and environmental degradation. This article suggests that the time has come for entrepreneurs to adopt a more integrative view of business that blends economic, social and environmental values. Social entrepreneurs present such a proposition through their deep commitment towards the social vision, appreciation of sustainable practices, innovativeness, ability to build social networks and also generate viable financial returns. It could be expected that social entrepreneurs often possess certain distinct personality characteristics which define their behaviours/actions. Personality traits are partly developed by innate nurturing, socialization and education. These tacit traits are also formed values/beliefs held and play an important role in driving social entrepreneurial decision making. Thus, personality traits may influence the intentions and the manner in which the individual acts. We hold that if social entrepreneurship is to be effective and impactful, business and management education can facilitate the development of these critical personality traits. Thus, this study primes at determining the personality traits that influence social entrepreneurs’ start-up intentions. It also reinforces the findings that personality traits do influence entrepreneurship in general. This study examines the influence of the Big Five personality traits on social entrepreneurship dimensions. The findings reveal that agreeableness positively influences all dimensions of social entrepreneurship, whereas openness exerts a positive influence on social vision, innovation and financial returns. Methodologically, this study develops valid and reliable scales for social entrepreneurship and verifies the adopted Big Five personality measure of Schmit et al. (Pers Psychol 53:153–193, 2000) using the five-point Likert scale. The implication of this study is that element of appreciation of social responsibility, sustainability and character development needs to be integrated within the business education curriculum to support social entrepreneurs in realizing genuine value and impact to the causes and communities they serve. Future business leaders also need to be equipped with entrepreneurship skills, while exuding independent and reflective thinking in the pursuit life-long learning. The originality of this study lies in its focus on personality traits on social rather than commercial entrepreneurship. It is hoped that the findings will trigger a paradigm shift towards greater social entrepreneurship through education by nurturing sustainable development values in future business graduates.     

State and territory in post revolutionary Cuba: some critical reflections on the development of spatial policy

And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really does, so in historical struggles one must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality (Marx, edn 1973, 421).     

Comparisons of aggregation procedures for interaction data: An illustration using a college student international flow table

Various approaches for developing regional schemes on the basis of geographic interaction data are discussed, using a 46 × 46 international flow table of college students as an example. The hierarchical clustering procedure employed by Masser and Brown to study movement data for London and Liverpool is compared with that utilized by Slater to analyze internal migration in several nations and is found to be more successful in the sense of explained interaction, a criterion Masser and Brown maximize in a stepwise—not necessarily optimal—manner. Slater's method, however, appears to be less subject to chaining—the sequential growth of a cluster— and more productive of distinct subgroups. It can also be interpreted as the fitting of a tree structure to a dissimilarity matrix. Both techniques are shown to yield highly significant functional regions, by comparing their results with those obtained through a large number of random partitionings of the 46 nations. The substantial value of the Ford-Fulkerson network flow algorithm in optimal partitioning and hierarchical clustering is discussed. This algorithm can also be used to define nodal in- and out-migration regions—i.e. collections of nations that have fewer people entering or leaving them as a whole than their nodal nations. To determine functional regions, the flow table is first doubly-standardized to have all row and column sums equal. Nodal regions—which cannot be hierarchically ordered—are found through study of the unadjusted flows themselves. Political, linguistic and geographic influences explain many of the international groupings obtained.     

The impact of group formation in a cooperative learning environment

Research indicates that cooperative learning (CL) has the potential to increase accounting student satisfaction without impairing the learning of technical material (Lancaster, K., & Strand, C. (2001). Using the team-learning model in a managerial accounting class: An experiment in cooperative learning. Issues in Accounting Education, 16(4), 549–567). This study investigates whether instructor-formed heterogeneous groups produce a more effective CL environment than student self-selected groups by measuring individual academic performance and perceptions. Results indicate the presence of a treatment interaction, implying that the best group composition may not be the same for all students. In some circumstances, higher ability students had statistically higher performance in more homogeneous groups. Lower ability students did better (not significant) in heterogeneous groupings. The majority of students gave high ratings to the impact of CL on learning and development of team skills. Students were only mildly interested in increasing the time spent in groups, indicating that they value both traditional teaching methods and CL.     

Credit constraints and growth gains from governance

This paper contributes to the governance literature by analyzing the specific mechanisms through which governance affects economic growth: The credit channel. Specifically, it investigates the growth impact of governance on industries with different levels of dependence on external finance. Better governance mitigates credit market imperfections by increasing transparency and accountability and reducing government-policy distortions, promoting productive investment and entrepreneurship development, with a disproportionate impact on sectors that depend on external finance. This paper indeed finds that countries with well-functioning governments are better at providing growth and investment environments for the expansion of industries that rely heavily on external finance and the formation of new establishments in these industries, when controlling for financial development. These results are robust to possible reverse causality, different specifications, subsamples and outliers.     

An evaluation of the educational testing service major field achievement test in business

Increasingly, the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business and other accrediting bodies have been requiring evidence that universities are fulfilling their missions. One approach involves the use of professionally developed, standardized achievement tests such as the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Major Achievement Field Test in Business (MFAT-B). We studied MFAT-B performance for its relationship to GPA and to measures of general intellect to determine if the pattern of associations made sense, given that the test is intended to reflect business knowledge. As expected, a significant, moderately large correlation was observed involving Business Core GPA and MFAT-B performance, but contrary to expectations, other GPA's and measures of intellectual aptitude predicted the test scores equally well. Finally, no gender-based differences in MFAT-B performance were evident, but significant improvements in the test scores were found as a function of whether extra course credit was offered as an incentive.     

Extracting inflation expectations and inflation risk premia from the term structure: A joint model of the UK nominal and real yield curves

This paper analyses the UK interest rate term structure over the period since October 1992, when the United Kingdom adopted an explicit inflation target, using an affine term structure model estimated using both government bond yields and survey data. The model imposes no-arbitrage restrictions across nominal and real yields, which enables interest rates to be decomposed into expected real policy rates, expected inflation, real term premia and inflation risk premia. The model is used to shed light on major developments over the period, including the impact of Bank of England independence and the low real bond yield ‘conundrum’.