Are people in the SADC region willing to pay more tax to fund public healthcare?

ABSTRACT

For Africa to develop and achieve sustainable development, African governments have to prioritise spending on public health. However, the current spending data shows that health spending is a continuing struggle for African countries. Many researchers have the view that African governments have to collect more tax to spend enough on public healthcare. The question here is what extent people are willing to pay more tax to increase spending on public healthcare? Employing a multilevel regression model on Afrobarometer survey data, this paper examined to what extent individual and country level factors influence people’s willingness to pay more tax to increase spending on public healthcare in 12 Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states. This study found that peoples’ trust in their government is an important determinant of willingness to pay more tax, while factors such as the country’s quality of democracy, economic condition, and current per capita health expenditure have no influence.     

Lend me your wallets: the effect of charismatic leadership on external support for an organization

We argue that charismatic leadership can influence external support for the organization, particularly in making the company more attractive to outside investors. Two studies were conducted to test this general hypothesis. First, an archival study demonstrated that the stock of companies headed by charismatic leaders appreciated more than the stock of comparable companies, even after differences in corporate performance were controlled. It was also found that the effect of charismatic leadership was heightened under more difficult economic conditions. Second, an experiment was conducted in which the salience of charismatic leadership was manipulated, along with information about the prospects for an organization's turnaround. Results showed that appeals from a charismatic leader led to increased investment in the firm, and the leader's influence was greater when the prospects for an organizational turnaround were more difficult. It was also found that an endowment of stock enhanced the influence of charismatic appeals and that charismatic leadership may have affected the general risk propensities of followers. These findings were interpreted in terms of an external perspective on leadership, illustrating how leaders can manage the firm's economic and social environment. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Victory margins and the paradox of voting

This paper addresses a simple question: why do people vote? Though simple, this question remains unanswered despite the considerable attention it has received. In this paper, I show that purely rational–instrumental factors explain a large fraction of turnout variations, provided that the effect of the margin of victory on implemented policy is considered. I extend Myerson's models of elections based on Poisson games, and show that, when platforms are responsive to vote shares, the predictions of the model become consistent with several stylized facts, including the secular fall in turnout rates in the US.     

Time Inhomogeneous Multiple Volatility Modeling

Price variations at speculative markets exhibit positive autocorrelationand cross correlation. Due to large parameter spaces necessaryfor joint modeling of variances and covariances, multivariateparametric volatility models become easily intractable in practice.We propose an adaptive procedure that identifies periods ofsecond-order homogeneity for each moment in time. To overcomethe high dimensionality of the problem we transform the multivariateseries into a set of univariate processes. We discuss thoroughlythe implementation of the adaptive technique. Theoretical andMonte Carlo results are given. We provide two applications ofthe new method. For a bivariate exchange rate series we comparethe multivariate GARCH approach with our method and find thelatter to be more in line with the underlying assumption ofindependently distributed innovations. Analyzing a 23-dimensionalvector of asset returns we underscore the case for adaptivemodeling in high-dimensional systems.     

浙江省民营企业集群式营销探讨

民营企业集群已成为浙江省区域经济快速发展的主流模式之一。与大型企业、跨国公司一起,已成为参与市场竞争的主角。因此,市场营销理论应用领域已从单个企业营销逐步延伸到民营企业集群式营销。民营企业集群式营销是民营企业集群成长的关键,浙江省民营企业集群的快速发展与其营销管理创新是分不开的。为了提高浙江省民营企业集群营销管理水平,本文着重探讨了浙江省民营企业集群营销战略、策略制定及组织实施问题。     

Testing weak-form market efficiency: Evidence from the Istanbul Stock Exchange

The random-walk version of the efficient market hypothesis is tested for the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) using its composite, industrial, and financial index weekly closing prices. The results obtained from three of the tests indicate that all three series are a random walk, but a nonparametic test provides some evidence against a random walk.     

The Impact of the Implementation of Technology Education on In-Service Teacher Education in South Africa (Impact of Technology Education in the RSA)

In this article the impact of technology education, as a new learning area (subject) in the curriculum, on in-service teacher education in South Africa is described in order to ascertain the extent of the impact. The research on which this article is based draws on a variety of experiences and observations in the field at grassroots level (in particular an outreach project in rural communities). The envisaged impact of technology education on South African schools, communities, teacher educators and teachers, the range of in-service teacher education that is required, and the impacts in urban and rural areas are discussed. Finally a number of concluding remarks are made about the extent of the impact of the inclusion of technology education in the new National Curriculum Statement and whether the situation has changed since the implementation of a pilot technology education project in 1998. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

农民养老问题亟待解决

农村现行的家庭养老、土地养老、集体养老正在弱化,巩固家庭养老的基础地位,强化土地保障功能,辅之以社区扶持,推行多层次养老保险,符合中国国情和农村生产力发展水平,是解决农村养老问题的必然选择.     

The approximation capabilities of the minflex-Laurents,translog, and generalized Leontief forms

This paper compares the approximation capabilities of the minflex-Laurents translog and minflex generalized Leontief cost functions with their translog and generalized Leontief counterparts in Monte Carlo experiments. The minflex Laurent specifications generally provided closer approximations to underlying technical and economic parameters. Imposition of nonlinear restrictions on some of the parameters of the minflex Laurent models yielded measurable improvement in estimated elasticities of substitutions, returns to scale, and rates of technical change.The refereeing process of this paper was handled through E. Appelbaum.     

The saving–investment correlation puzzle is still a puzzle

A number of simulation studies claim to have solved the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle by demonstrating that a high time-series correlation between saving and investment naturally arises from business cycle shocks. This paper uses panel data of saving and investment controlled for business cycle shocks to empirically test the significance of cyclical shocks — productivity, fiscal and the terms of trade shocks — in explaining a high saving–investment correlation. The estimation results reveal that conventional aggregate shocks only partially explain the high saving–investment correlation. Moreover, country differences in the size of the GNP and the non-traded sector do not significantly affect the saving–investment correlation. The saving–investment correlation puzzle remains a puzzle after all.