英国旅游业发展战略及借鉴价值研究

英国在旅游发展战略和实施措施上,一直是引导世界旅游潮流的前瞻性国家之一.本文重点分析研究了英国旅游发展中,<公共服务协议>的量化管理与服务;市场推广措施与电子旅游的运作;住宿等级的标准制定与规范化管理;及旅游目的地管理中的可持续性战略.针对中国的旅游业现状,对比分析了中国旅游的不足和英国旅游的可借鉴之处.     

Accounting and finance in UK universities: Academic labour,shortages and strategies

This paper contributes to the literature on change in the higher education sector arising from massification, increased political control, international mobility and competition. Drawing on various data sources and labour shortage models, it considers academic labour in UK accounting and finance academia over the period 2000 to 2012. A disequilibrium between supply and demand is evidenced through the identification of recruitment problems, unfilled vacancies, and retirements. The impact of research assessment on faculty backgrounds is shown to result in inadequate supply of faculty with the required skills. Strategic responses to labour shortages include: increased recruitment efforts, early promotions, enhanced remuneration and reducing restrictions on occupational entry. The consequences and future implications of shortages and strategies are considered. In particular, the decoupling of research and teaching in accounting is challenging the future existence of accounting as an academic discipline. The current generation of accounting academics is also under threat – if they neither excel at research nor are professionally-qualified they risk becoming undesirable.     

UK state pension deferral incentives and sustainability

Pay-as-you-go state pension schemes such as that operated in the United Kingdom face growing pressures from the rising old-age dependency ratio and improvements to life expectancies. Alongside compulsory increases in the statutory retirement age, governments have used incentives to encourage workers to postpone voluntarily their exit from employment, deferring their Basic State Pension in exchange for the additional financial reward of an enhanced pension at a later point in time. The impact of pension deferral upon the sustainability of the state pension system is dependent on the interplay of short-term savings from payment delay and increased subsequent longer-term payments to pension recipients. This article presents a model that simulates the financial effect of deferral uptake on the National Insurance Fund over a 40-year projection under alternative scenarios, including current and revised post-2016 deferral incentives. The findings indicate that the recent change in enhancement rate from 10.4 per cent to 5.8 per cent will significantly impact on state pension sustainability while still providing an incentive to defer. We estimate that any reduction below 4 per cent would result in zero uptake of the deferral option, based on a rational financial choice.     

Enterprise resource planning enabling segmental information reporting practices of UK‐FTSE 100

The ERP impact on management accounting practices has been widely recognised as having a knowledge gap in relation to how it may facilitate Segmental Information Reporting following the International Financial Reporting Standard No. 8’s (IFRS‐8) management approach. This study contributes to filling this gap by investigating the joint effect of the ERP and IFRS‐8 Post‐Implementation Review (PIR) on dimensions: quality, quantity and the reporters’ identity of FTSE‐100 companies in the period 2013–2017. The study found that ERP is significantly and positively associated with the dimensions of segmental information reporting. The implications of this study extend research and the practices of segmental reporting on the importance of ERP in operationalising segmental reporting and in understanding variations.     

Who replies to consultations,and what do they say? The case of broadband universal service in the UK

Over the last decade or so, access to broadband services has become increasingly important. While many in the UK already benefit from the provision of broadband, some, especially those located in more rural and remote areas, do not – they may not be able to access the Internet and when they do, their connection and consumer experience may be poor. After trying to resolve this through a stream of different initiatives, the UK government announced a broadband universal service obligation (USO) of 10 Mbps in late 2015. Ofcom, the telecommunications regulator, launched a consultation in April 2016 and sought the views of interested parties. The consultation attracted considerable interest, but after the submissions from orchestrated campaigns are discounted just over 100 responses remain. But who contributed and what did they say? To explore these two questions, this paper adopts a qualitative approach, using NVIVO, to analyse the responses to the consultation. We show that contributions were highly diverse, reflecting both the complexity of the issue as well as its politicised nature. A lack of agreement among the responses is revealed and divergent views on key issues like the appropriateness of 10 Mbps, whether this should change, how it should be funded or what technologies should be used exist. In this paper, we provide a critical discussion of and derive implications for the broadband USO. We tentatively conclude that those in rural and remote areas that the USO intends to help are caught between two countervailing forces – speed and cost deployment – that interact to ensure that whatever resolution to provide broadband access, some will likely be unhappy.     

Competition and performance in the UK telecommunications industry

Judging by historical and crossnational experience, privatization of British Telecom promises to increase the rate of expansion of telecommunications usage, but also to redistribute services and charges. Public dissatisfaction with these reallocations could recreate the political discord that stunted the early growth of the British telecommunications manufacturing sector, unless the new technology and regulatory institutions substantially alter the economic environment. More intense competition. rather than prospective changes of network ownership, seem to have improved the seem to have improved the manufacturing industry's performance in recent years.     

The empirical relationship between risk and return: evidence from the UK stock market

Previous studies reach no consensus on the relationship between risk and return using data from one market. We argue that the world market factor should not be ignored in assessing the risk-return relationship in a partially integrated market. Applying a bivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity in mean (GARCH-M) model to the weekly stock index returns from the UK and the world market, we document a significant positive relationship between stock returns and the variance of returns in the UK stock market after controlling for the covariance of the UK and the world market return. In contrast, conventional univariate GARCH-M models typically fail to detect this relationship. Nonnested hypothesis tests supplemented with other commonly used model selection criteria unambiguously demonstrate that our bivariate GARCH-M model is more likely to be the true model for UK stock market returns than univariate GARCH-M models. Our results have implications for empirical assessments of the risk-return relationship, expected return estimation, and international diversification.     

UK strategy - the momentum of change

In July 1980, the UK government set into motion a programme of reform for telecommunications. The British Telecommunications Act 1981 maintains British Telecom's exclusive privilege but provides for market entry in network transmission, services and attachments. The process continues with a new Telecommunications Bill, currently being considered by Parliament, which will make shares available to the public and allow for the creation of a new Office of Telecommunications (OFTEL). Jonathan Solomon considers the impact of the new legislation on the UK telecommunications environment.     

The effects of government policies on agricultural input markets

Agricultural policies in most developed countries involve elements of price support. The primary objective appears to be the support of farm incomes, but effects of the policies are more wide ranging than this. The impact of price support on agricultural input markets in the UK is highlighted in this article and it is shown that the main effects of raising farm prices are to increase the wealth of landowners, increase capital intensity and reduce employment and wages of hired labour. These are not generally recognized as primary goals of the CAP. It is suggested that the British government might offset some of these effects through judicious reduction of capital grant rates.