Who determines the trade-offs between agricultural production and environmental quality? An evolutionary perspective from rural eastern China

We explore the evolutionary nature of interactions between government policy, farm decision-making and ecosystem services in Shucheng County, Anhui Province, 1950–2015. Analyses of ecological, social and economic trends are complemented by interviews with local farmers. Since the Household Responsibility System started in 1980, there has been a trade-off between rising levels of provisioning services and falling levels of regulating services with evidence that critical thresholds have been passed for water quality. Using a Framework for Ecosystem Service Provision, we argue that farmers have acted only as ecosystem service providers and have not influenced the policies that have brought about the trade-offs. Over the period, ecological degradation is best described as an example of ‘creeping normalcy’ where cumulative conventional actions by individual farmers produce unsustainable losses in regulating services. The Chinese government should act to balance the various ecosystem services through valuation and national policy. In this respect, there is a need for agencies that can provide place-based advice to farmers that will allow them to maintain productivity levels while pursuing restorative actions. Even with new policies, the draw of urban employment, high production costs and an ageing population threaten the viability of farming in these marginal agricultural areas.     

The management of people across cultures: Valuing people differently

Ethnocentric and parochial human resource systems have been called into question as obstacles to globalization. This is addressed here by examining the way value is attached to people in organizations across cultures. Western managers and HR practitioners who work with affiliates in non‐Western emerging countries should particularly be aware of differences in “locus of human value.” Policies and practices developed in the West along instrumental lines see people primarily as a means to an end. This may be directly opposed to a humanistic view of human value that sees people as having a value in themselves. To provide support for these assumptions, an exploratory study across seven nations was carried out. Its findings indicate potentially important implications for global HRM policies and practices. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Recent Developments in Modelling Nonstationary Vector Autoregressions

In this paper we review some recent developments in the modelling of nonstationary vector autoregressions (VARs) which we feel have great potential for furthering applied researchers understanding of the relationships linking the variables making up a VAR. The developments surveyed are the use of model determination criteria in selecting lag length, trend order and cointegrating rank, causality testing in vector error correction models, FM-VAR estimation of levels VARS, common trends and cycles analysis, permanent and transitory decompositions, impulse response asymptotics, and the links between cointegrated VARs and structural models. The techniques are illustrated by applications to the modelling of U.K. equities, dividends and interest rates.     

Analyst information production and the timing of annual earnings forecasts

We investigate whether the reputation-herding theory or the tradeoff theory explains variation in the timing of individual analysts’ forecasts. Using forecast accuracy improvements, forecast boldness, and the price impact of forecasts as measures of forecast quality, we find that in the information discovery phase that precedes an earnings announcement, earlier forecasts have higher quality than later forecasts. We also find a similar pattern in the information analysis phase that begins with the earnings announcement date. Our findings suggest that consistent with the herding theory, analysts who are more capable participate early in discovering and analyzing information, and therefore earlier forecasts in the information discovery and analysis phases are of higher quality than later forecasts in that phase.     

Cost Management in Sri Lanka: A Case Study on Volume,Activity and Time as Cost Drivers

Despite its theoretical superiority, the activity-based costing (ABC) model has had only moderate success in replacing the traditional volume-based absorption costing models in complex organizations worldwide. Even in organizations that have launched ABC projects, the implementations often do not sustain. In response to this general lack of enthusiasm worldwide for ABC, accountants developed the time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) model as an alternative cost allocation model. This paper presents a comparison of the TDABC model with ABC, and considers if this alternative cost allocation model (1) is easier to implement from an international perspective and (2) provides comparable cost information for decision making. We use a case study in a country outside the model's country of origin to understand the similarities and differences in absorption costing systems that use ‘volume,’ ‘activities,’ and ‘time’ as the drivers of indirect cost allocations. We also use the case study to ascertain if any country‐specific factors impede ABC implementation. We conclude the following: the TDABC model has similar implementation complexities to ABC if modelling conditions are strictly adhered to; these complexities are independent of country‐specific factors; and in its simplest form, the model generates the same decision information errors of traditional costing.