Children in Zimbabwe after the long crisis: Situation analysis and policy issues

Children in Zimbabwe suffered badly during the long crisis from circa 1990 to 2008 as the economy and social services collapsed, under-five mortality, maternal mortality and malnutrition rose, the number of orphans increased 20-fold and thousands of children experienced psychosocial trauma. Recent household surveys in Zimbabwe show that most indicators of child welfare remain at or below where they were 25 years ago. Many effects of the crisis on children are long term, even permanent, including prenatal and early childhood malnutrition, orphanhood, traumas from witnessing or being victims of violence, and disrupted education. This article analyses the Government of Zimbabwe's two most recent national development plans in relation to children's needs and rights as expressed in major international declarations. Suggestions are made for focusing on re-establishing basic services to break the cycle of harm to children, build children's capacities and deal with past traumas.     

Decision support for disaster management

Disaster response and recovery are crucial phases of disaster management. Decision-support systems used in disaster management must cope with the complexity and uncertainty involved with the scheduling and assignment of differentially-skilled personnel and assets to specific tasks. Operational constraints—such as workload and labor requirements, precedence constraints, resource availability, and critical deadlines among others—make timely and appropriate task assignment and sequencing difficult. Failure to assign personnel in an efficient and effective manner may result in unnecessary fatalities and significant additional loss of property as well as damaging the reputation of the disaster management organizations. Therefore, this paper proposes a decision-support system for disaster response and recovery using hybrid meta-heuristics.     

INTRA‐HOUSEHOLD EXPERIMENTS: A SURVEY

Experiments with family groups are rare, but since many decisions are taken at the household level or occur within the household it is an important area to investigate. This paper provides a survey of the recent experimental work on intra‐household decision‐making. I discuss some of the challenges involved in doing experiments with couples and families and consider major areas that remain yet to be explored. While general themes from the research are still emerging, four results repeatedly occur: (1) the absence of efficiency in intra‐household decisions; (2) joint decisions that are not a convex combination of individual decisions; (3) individual behaviour is affected by opportunities for hiding actions from spouses and (4) deviations from standard models of microeconomics in line with those seen in the anomalies literature of individual decision‐making.     

Corporate sustainable actions through United Nations sustainable development goals: The internal customer's response

Designing sustainable corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy utilizing the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) framework to deal with consumption in a sustainable and responsible fashion is increasingly a requirement in emerging economies. This paper examines sustainable social initiatives (SIs) via a CSR model and social lens as part of the SDG framework for multinational enterprises (MNEs), to determine the perception of the internal customer and stakeholder (i.e., the employee) alongside their identification and voluntary engagement in their organization's SIs. The study examines internal customers (as the employee) of two MNEs who reside in a developed country and two developing countries from emerging economies. The findings indicate that identification with the SDG‐based SIs selected by MNEs for this study mediates the relationship between perception of their organization's perceived CSR and engagement in these initiatives, for employees in developing countries (and emerging markets) but not the developed country. This suggests the importance that internal employees “identify” with SDG‐based SIs in emerging markets in particular and builds on significant managerial implications for MNEs in these markets alongside their voluntary work with nonprofits as part of their SIs and CSR strategy. The findings also confirm the importance of MNEs adopting SIs that are not only relevant to the global United Nations SDG framework but also relevant to the actors, collaborators, and nonprofit organizations involved in these SIs, including stakeholders and in particular the internal customer (i.e., employee) who volunteer their time to implement these SIs in the communities where MNEs reside.     

Accountability and the New Commercial Agenda

Accountability is examined in the light of an emerging commercial agenda. Specific to this agenda are new business strategies which involve a loosening of accounting controls. It is this loosening of accounting controls which presages some shift away from hierarchical accountability and opens up the opportunity for lateral accountability. However, the authors show how hierarchical accountability orientates managers towards surveillance of "decisions" within a dyadic structure of superior-subordinates. It is argued that, given this orientation, managers are likely to subvert practices which develop in the name of lateral accountability into acting as a "supplement" for more intensive surveillance. To guard against this danger the authors explore an "image" of business drawn from concepts of community, affiliation and self-audit to replace the prevailing "stakeholder-decisions" model.     

SUPPLY RESPONSE IN THE AUSTRALIAN EXTENSIVE LIVESTOCK AND CROPPING INDUSTRIES: A STUDY OF INTENTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS*

Most of the supply elasticity estimates reported for Australian agriculture are derived from equations estimated using time series data and incorporating ad hoc assumptions about price expectations. The authors' aim is to compare previously obtained supply elasticity estimates with those derived using theoretically more acceptable survey data on both producers' intentions and price expectations. Surveys were conducted in three regions in N.S.W., namely, the Southern Tablelands, the South-West Slopes and a portion of the Western Division centred on Cobar. The results of the research show that there are no major differences between the supply elasticities derived using the traditional time series approach and those obtained using the survey data. This finding is reassuring, given the cost of collecting survey data.     

Testing competing models of loss aversion: an adversarial collaboration

This paper reports an ‘adversarial collaboration’—a project carried out by two individuals or research groups who, having proposed conflicting hypotheses, seek to resolve their dispute. It describes an experiment which investigates whether, when individuals consider giving up money in exchange for goods, they construe money outlays as losses or as foregone gains. This issue bears on the explanation of the widely observed disparity between willingness-to-pay (WTP) and willingness-to-accept (WTA) valuations of costs and benefits, which has proved problematic for contingent valuation studies. The results of the experiment are broadly consistent with the hypothesis that money outlays are perceived as losses.     

Japanese industrial development Lessons for South Africa?

This paper is critical of the scenario planning approach which attempts to offer a formula for development for South Africa in the 1990s based upon the success of Japan, amongst other economic ‘winners’. It is argued that the complexities and debates surrounding Japanese modernization make the application of ‘lessons’ extremely problematical. Points of controversy arising out of the two ‘miracle’ periods of Japanese economic growth, the Meiji era of the nineteenth century and post World War Two era, are examined in some detail. The Tokugawa legacy, Japanese ethics and in particular Confucianism, capital formation and investment spurts, the agricultural contribution, militarism and economic gains from warfare, the role of the state, the zalbatsu and business structures, dualism, labour supplies, export performance and finally education are all factors central to the debate on causes of economic growth in Japan. The paper concludes with some suggestive and very tentative ideas about ‘lessons’ for South Africa.     

Economics and Biological Evolution

The employment of insecticides raises the relative fitness of resistant insects; the use of antibiotics applies selection pressure in favour of resistant strains of bacteria; lower limits on fish net mesh size raises the advantages of smaller adults. These are some of the many examples of the unintended impact of human activity upon biological evolution. Often this evolution has economic significance, as it does in the examples quoted. This paper examines some of the principles involved and provides a preliminary analysis of the extent to which the economically optimal inducement of evolution differs from that arising when changes in selection pressures are not anticipated. Thanks are due to Jenny Ligthart and other participants at the 1994 EAERE conference in Dublin and especially to two referees of this journal for their helpful comments.