Top dogs have set the agenda for peace: international social position and peace attitudes

Everybody agrees that peace is good, but not on how to achieve it. The Y2K study contained many questions on peace proposals, as well as on prospects for East/West and North/South peace. It ranked these proposals by popularity and studied how the social positions of the 1967 respondents and their countries affected what proposals were preferred and their predictions on peace or war. It now turns out that, neither centre, nor periphery got it quite right. In the former East, the people set the agenda and removed the iron curtain. In the West, however, the top dogs set the agenda, with military intervention, even called ‘peace enforcement’, high on it. Recent political and military developments indicate that ‘peace’ is likely to remain ‘peace between top dogs’; there will be few advocates for putting severe conflicts and violations of human rights in the periphery (e.g. Burundi and Sudan) high on the peace agenda.     

Post-Industrial Society: The myth of the service economy

There is a popular view of the current pattern of change in developed societies, a view typified by Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, that recent economic growth has been increasingly concentrated in the collective provision of services rather than in individual consumption of material goods, and that this change of economic focus from goods to services is a trend which will continue into the future. The author argues, using UK data, that the trend is in fact away from the expenditure on services and towards expenditure on goods. The growing employment in the tertiary sector, previously used as an indicator of the growth of the service economy, emerges here as a manifestation of the division of labour—a process which increases the efficiency of production of material goods—while the final production of services, using automatic machinery and “direct labour”, will increasingly take place in the home.     

Identification of critical operational performance measures— a research note on a benchmarking study in the transportation and distribution sector

In this paper the results presented are of an empirical benchmarking study investigating which operational performance measures in the transportation and distribution sector are the most important for financial performance. In the existing literature, the selection of operational performance measures is mostly derived from strategy, using interviews and discussions with management. The main contribution of this paper is to show how an application of benchmarking can identify the relative importance of different operational performance measures and to set standards for those measures.$g0     

Fluctuations in innovations overtime

This paper first explains the concept of innovation life cycles and their relationship to leading sectors of the economy. It then briefly describes the relationship between innovation life cycles and long waves in macro-economic development, and presents a chronology and characterisation of the four phases of the long wave derived from Schumpeter. Various phases of the long wave could be expected to have different effects on the propensity to innovate, and this propensity probably varies also between new industries and existing established industries, as well as between product and process innovations. A list ef 80 major innovations is classified by sector and date, to provide a preliminary empirical validation of the hypotheses advanced on the varying influence of the successive phases of the long wave on different types of innovation. Finally, the author's findings are compared with those of Mensch and Schmookler.     

How interethnic marriages affect the educational attainment of children: Evidence from a natural experiment

The allocation of Moluccan immigrants across towns and villages at arrival in the Netherlands and the subsequent formation of interethnic marriages resemble a natural experiment. The exogenous variation in marriage formation allows us to estimate the causal effect of interethnic marriages on the educational attainment of children from such marriages. We find that children from Moluccan fathers and native mothers have a higher educational attainment than children from ethnic homogeneous Moluccan couples or children from a Moluccan mother and a native father.