DEREGULATION OF INDONESIA'S INTERREGIONAL AGRICULTURAL TRADE

In January 1998 a significant policy reform deregulated agriculture in Indonesia. It sought to eliminate distorting local monopolies, monopsonies, trade restrictions, interisland maximum shipment quotas and other barriers that effectively lowered farmgate prices. Many of these had been constructed to benefit the Soeharto family and their business cronies. The reform also sought to lower local taxes and levies targeted at agriculture. This paper demonstrates that deregulation eliminated many of the distorting taxes and levies, and dismantled many (but not all) local monopolies, monopsonies and quotas. Farmers typically now receive a higher percentage of the destination market price. Many also receive significantly higher real prices for their products, although this differs dramatically across commodities. Local governments complained about local revenues lost through the reforms. Detailed budget analyses reveal that deregulation did not substantially harm local government budgets; instead, other factors caused a decline in the local-source revenue contribution to local budgets.     

Modalities of Microfinance Delivery in Asia and Latin America： Lessons for China

I. Introduction Microfinance, the provision of small size loans and other financial services to low income households, is often seen as the key innovation of the last 25 years in terms of means of reaching out to the poor and vulnerable. There is extensive experience in microfinanceprovision in both Asia and Latin America, but as yet relatively little use of the approach in China. In Section, this paper assesses different approaches to microfinance delivery using a simple threefold distincti…     

Economic impacts of adjacency and green-up constraints on timber production at a landscape scale

Although many different forest certification standards exist, harvest adjacency and green-up regulations are common to most certifying bodies. This study develops a means for evaluating trade-offs associated with implementation of nth-order adjacency and green-up constraints on a 1.7 million ha landscape in Oregon in the US. Depending on the type of adjacency structure and delay between harvests, the opportunity cost of the restrictions, estimated by the change in discounted sum of producer and consumer surplus in the regional log market, ranged from 0.25% to 66% (or US $60 million to $15.3 billion) of the unconstrained value. Increasing green-up delays beyond 30–40 years had little effect on estimated opportunity cost of the modeled restrictions.     

When auction meets fixed price: a theoretical and empirical examination of buy-it-now auctions

Recently fixed pricing and auctions have been brought together in a new pricing format that offers bidders the option of prematurely ending an auction at a fixed price. The growing popularity of auctions presents an interesting pricing decision for managers: whether to sell at a fixed price, in a regular auction, or through a buy-it-now auction. This paper studies eBay’s buy-it-now auction and answers the following research questions: why is fixed price used at traditional auctions, will buy-it-now increase the seller’s profit, how is an optimal price determined, and how is the buy-it-now decision influenced by key factors such as the customer’s cost of participating in the auction, the seller’s reserve price, and the number of potential customers. Our results show that when customers make endogenous participation decisions according to their participation costs, buy-it-now auctions can increase both customers’ utility and sellers’ profit. Endogenous participation has important implications for seller’s pricing decisions such as price formats and levels. Depending on the level of the posted price, the resulting price format could be either fixed price, buy-it-now auction or pure auction. Therefore, the seller needs to be careful and take into account market conditions when posting a price at auctions. We empirically test the model assumptions and predictions using data collected from eBay.

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Domain-Specific Consumer Involvement in the U.S. Wine Market

An 18-item multidimensional scale was developed to measure wine consumer involvement level impact on behavior and consumption dynamics. Data were collected at wine tasting events in Portland, Oregon, U.S., yielding a final sample size of 101 respondents. Male wine consumers do not display a higher level of involvement with wine as a product than females, and neither do consumers 45 years and older in comparison with younger consumers. Consumers with high education and income levels do not use these as a basis of their involvement level with wine. Price is not more frequently used by low involvement wine drinkers in the wine purchasing decision.     

Cogeneration in a nitrogen fertilizer complex

The generator is powered by a natural gas fired turbine. Exhaust gases with supplemental firing are used to produce 41 40 kPa steam. Overall energy efficiency is 84 percent.     

Creating corporate advantage

What differentiates truly great corporate strategies from the merely adequate? How can executives at the corporate level create tangible advantage for their businesses that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts? This article presents a comprehensive framework for value creation in the multibusiness company. It addresses the most fundamental questions of corporate strategy: What businesses should a company be in? How should it coordinate activities across businesses? What role should the corporate office play? How should the corporation measure and control performance? Through detailed case studies of Tyco International, Sharp, the Newell Company, and Saatchi and Saatchi, the authors demonstrate that the answers to all those questions are driven largely by the nature of a company's special resources--its assets, skills, and capabilities. These range along a continuum from the highly specialized at one end to the very general at the other. A corporation's location on the continuum constrains the set of businesses it should compete in and limits its choices about the design of its organization. Applying the framework, the authors point out the common mistakes that result from misaligned corporate strategies. Companies mistakenly enter businesses based on similarities in products rather than the resources that contribute to competitive advantage in each business. Instead of tailoring organizational structures and systems to the needs of a particular strategy, they create plain-vanilla corporate offices and infrastructures. The company examples demonstrate that one size does not fit all. One can find great corporate strategies all along the continuum.     

A discrete event simulation to model the cost-utility of fingolimod and natalizumab in rapidly evolving severe relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis in the UK

Objective: Two disease-modifying therapies are licensed in the EU for use in rapidly-evolving severe (RES) relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS), fingolimod and natalizumab. Here a discrete event simulation (DES) model to analyze the cost-effectiveness of natalizumab and fingolimod in the RES population, from the perspective of the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, is reported.

Methods: A DES model was developed to track individual RES patients, based on Expanded Disability Status Scale scores. Individual patient characteristics were taken from the RES sub-groups of the pivotal trials for fingolimod. Utility data were in line with previous models. Published costs were inflated to NHS cost year 2015. Owing to the confidential patient access scheme (PAS) discount applied to fingolimod in the UK, a range of discount levels were applied to the fingolimod list price, to capture the likelihood of natalizumab being cost-effective in a real-world setting.

Results: At the lower National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) threshold of £20,000/quality-adjusted life year (QALY), fingolimod only required a discount greater than 0.8% of list price to be cost-effective. At the upper threshold of £30,000/QALY employed by the NICE, fingolimod was cost-effective if the confidential discount is greater than 2.5%. Sensitivity analyses conducted using fingolimod list-price showed the model to be most sensitive to changes in the cost of each drug, particularly fingolimod.

Conclusions: The DES model shows that only a modest discount to the UK fingolimod list-price is required to make fingolimod a more cost-effective option than natalizumab in RES RRMS.