A comparative study of performance appraisals,incentives and rewards practices in domestic and multinational enterprises in the country of Brunei Darussalam

Very little work in the past has focused on the comparative analysis of human resource management (HRM) practices between domestic and multinational enterprises (MNEs). The majority of the work in this area has instead concentrated on comparing the HRM practices utilised by the subsidiaries of MNEs, and has mostly been conducted in the context of developed countries. In this paper, we examine how the HR practices of appraisals, rewards and incentives are offered, explained and monitored in domestic enterprises (DEs) versus MNEs, and how they are similar or different in nature. This paper is based on primary data collected from a cross-section of firms operating in the country of Brunei Darussalam – a context within which no previous work of this nature has been undertaken. An analysis reveals several interesting results: HR practices are more advanced and better structured in MNEs that conduct performance appraisals (PA) more frequently than DEs, and their feedback system is also rapid; incentives and rewards systems in MNEs follow market ethos and principles; the HR directors and employees of MNEs are more receptive to PA than those in DEs whilst, in contrast to DEs, incentives and rewards systems in MNEs follow market ethos and principles. Furthermore, with regard to size, younger firms are more likely to be following market principles in terms of explaining incentives and rewards systems to their employees, whilst older firms claim that working for them carries social and psychological benefits for employees.     

Human resource management in multinational and domestic enterprises: A comparative institutional analysis in Southeast Asia

This article looks at the relative impact of context on the role of senior managers. It compares HR directors of domestic enterprises (DEs) with those of multinational enterprises (MNEs), within an emerging market setting, based on a survey of HR directors in Brunei. We found that, with the exception of some aspects of selection and recruitment, HR directors of MNEs accorded a higher priority to strategic tasks but were more reluctant to delegate. This study confirms the importance of MNEs in pioneering more modern and integrated approaches to people management but also demonstrates the limitations to the extent where they might act as evangelists of new practices that are adopted by their local peers. In contrast, local firms were more likely to concentrate their attention on administrative, rather than strategic, issues. We draw out the implications of our findings for theory and practice.     

Intensidad en empleo a largo plazo del crecimiento del producto sectorial en Túnez

Se examina la capacidad a largo plazo de Túnez de generar empleo. Con datos de panel de 15 sectores económicos de 1983–2010, los autores estiman sus elasticidades producto‐empleo a largo plazo utilizando el estimador de media grupal. Según sus resultados, la política económica debería orientarse a los sectores más intensivos en empleo: servicios y manufacturas exportadoras. Destaca la incapacidad del sector minero de absorber mano de obra, por lo que la inversión en el mismo no será productiva; asimismo, el crecimiento sin empleo a largo plazo de la hotelería y restauración induce a pensar que deberían fomentarse más las actividades paraturísticas que las turísticas.     

Consideration of technological and environmental heterogeneity in cost efficiency analysis

In order to evaluate and compare the efficiency levels across banking industries, we adopt the meta-frontier model that can assess the technological difference among countries. Given the importance of country specific conditions, we include in our analysis the different specificities of each country to incorporate the technological as the environmental differences in the evaluation of banking efficiencies. Using data on the banking industries of several countries in the MENA region, over the period 1991–2011, the results of the efficiency scores corrected by the technological and environmental gap led us to conclude that Egyptian banks are the most efficient in terms of cost compared with banks in other countries. Egyptian banks enjoy a very favourable banking technology. Our results support the hypothesis that traditional techniques of efficiency analysis based on the efficiency scores of a specific and pooled frontier tend to mystify efficiency levels and may incorrectly identify efficient banks. This paper contributes to the efficiency literature by incorporating technological and environmental heterogeneities in the evaluation of efficiency. This helps to characterize the production process of a bank and provides common standards by which the efficiencies of banks in different countries can be compared in a meaningful way with each other.     

Migration and employment interactions in a crisis context

This article analyses how a crisis impacts labour markets in origin countries through migration channels. For this purpose, we develop a novel dynamic general equilibrium model with a focus on the interlinkages between migration, the labour market and education. The main innovation of the paper is the retrospective modelling in general equilibrium of the impact of an economic crisis to isolate the impact of migration on local unemployment. The impact of the crisis on education decision is captured through endogenous returns to education. The simultaneity of the crisis in Tunisia and its partners worsened the labour market situation mainly through the increase in labour supply. The main result of this study is that migration is indeed one of the main determinants of the unemployment increase and that remittances have a higher impact than the variation of emigration flows. The low skilled bear the highest costs in terms of unemployment and wage decline.     

The Middle-Eastern marriage pattern? Malthusian dynamics in nineteenth-century Egypt

Malthus predicted that fertility rises with income and that people regulate fertility via regulating marriage. However, evidence on the Malthusian equilibrium has been mostly confined to Europe and East Asia. We employ Egypt's population censuses of 1848 and 1868 to provide the first evidence on the preindustrial Malthusian dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa. At the aggregate level, we document rural Egyptian women having a high fertility rate that is close to the Western European level, combined with low age at marriage and low celibacy rate, that are closer to the East Asian levels. This resulted in a uniquely high fertility regime that was probably offset by the high child mortality. Next, we provide individual-level evidence on the positive correlation between fertility and income (occupation). We find that the higher fertility of rural white-collar men is attributed to their marriage behaviour, and not to marital fertility. Specifically, white-collar men's higher polygyny explains 45 per cent of their fertility advantage, whereas their higher marriage rate and lower wife's age at marriage explains 55 per cent. Therefore, polygyny was an additional factor that led to a steeper income–fertility curve than in Western Europe by enabling the rural middle class to out-breed the poor.     

Measuring and explaining the efficiencies of the United Arab Emirates banking system

Using newly collected data from a survey distributed to all banks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this article measures economic efficiency in the banking industry, namely allocative, technical, pure technical and scale efficiency. Employing a nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, the study estimates the efficiency for a cross section of the UAE banks in 2004. The results indicate that the dominant source of inefficiency in the UAE banking is stemming from allocative inefficiency rather than technical inefficiency. Furthermore, the main source of the relatively small size, technical inefficiency in the UAE banking industry is not the scale inefficiency but rather pure technical inefficiency. The results further indicate that the UAE banks are able to use their input resources more efficiently when they have more branches, and that newer banks are performing better than older banks on average. Moreover, the results also show that short experiences of employees affect efficiencies negatively and government ownership tends to reduce efficiency (as the government shares increase in the bank, the efficiency scores get lower). Finally, the most interesting results have to do with finding higher average efficiencies in banks that employ more women, more managers and less national citizens of the UAE.     

Mandatory disclosure,greenhouse gas emissions and the cost of equity capital: UK evidence of a U-shaped relationship

This paper examines the effects of disclosing greenhouse gas (GHG) information mandatorily on the cost of equity capital (COC) using a longitudinal unbalanced panel database of the United Kingdom's FTSE 350 firms for the period 2011–2016. We use a nonlinear panel quantile regression (PQR) model to examine the relationship between GHG disclosure (GHGD) and COC in the United Kingdom. This technique was supplemented by conducting a two-step generalised method of moment (GMM) estimation to address any concerns related to the potential existence of endogeneity problems. Our findings suggest that high-level GHGD appeared to be negatively associated with COC up to a certain level, which is known as the turning point; then, any increase in GHGD is likely to increase the COC. This means that the nonlinear association between GHGD and COC is evidenced in our study and takes a U shape. Likewise, our findings are associative of a moderating effect of the 2013 carbon disclosure regulation (CDR) on the GHGD–COC nexus. We argue that mandatory GHGD and GHG risk are linked so that those companies that are associated with higher GHG risk have a tendency to be better disclosers. Consequently, we urge regulators to design GHGD regulations in a way that mirrors corporate environmental risk and leads to a lower COC in order to align the interests of corporations with those of the society at large.