DEVELOPMENT PRESSURES AND HERITAGE IN THE PERTH CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT, 1950–90

This article examines the remaking of Perth's Central Business District (CBD) during the 1950–90 period. It traces the establishment of a modernist development ethos in Perth's planning, outlines the inadequacy of the City's planning regulations, and analyses the impact on St George's Terrace, the city's main commercial thoroughfare. The City Council was largely incapable of restraining excessive development and the extension of its system of plot ratios encouraged manipulation to increase the height of developments. Several important historic buildings were demolished because there were no legal means of safeguarding the city's heritage until 1990.     

Local interests or centralized targets? How China’s local government implements the farmland policy of Requisition–Compensation Balance

The Requisition–Compensation Balance of Farmland (RCBF) is a strict policy in China aimed at controlling farmland conversion and replenishing farmland loss caused by urban expansion through a set of top-down quotas. These conflict with local interests, since land conversion from agriculture to construction is a key tool by which local governments attract investment and raise fiscal revenue. How should local authorities respond to this centralized policy? This paper presents a framework “quantity–quality–productivity–environment” to investigate local governments’ coping strategy and the holistic performance of the RCBF. The empirical study indicated that local jurisdictions placed economic and financial growth first and continued expropriating farmland on a large-scale, including land of high quality, for development. However, impelled by compulsory quotas and supervision from governments at higher levels, local authorities would partly replenish the quantity loss through farmland exploitation, regardless of the quality of the new cropland and the possible environmental impact. Consequently, fast requisition and unqualified compensation undermined the capacity of regional agricultural output. We suggest that the RCBF is not capable of guaranteeing food security, whilst farmland supplementation threatens the local environment.     

Temporal stability of preferences and willingness to pay for natural areas in choice experiments: A test–retest

The main objective of this paper is to test the temporal stability of stated preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) values from a Choice Experiment (CE) in a test–retest. The same group of participants was asked the same choice tasks in an internet-based CE, conducted twice with a time interval of one year without interviewer interference. We examine choice consistency at individual choice task level and transferability of the underlying indirect utility function and associated WTP values. The results show that choices are consistent in 57 percent of the choice occasions. Comparison of the choice models over time shows that the estimated preference and scale parameters are significantly different, suggesting that choice behaviour changed between the two surveys. Differences between marginal WTP estimates for individual choice attributes are statistically significant only at the 10 percent level. However, we show that this can result in significantly different WTP values for policy scenarios. The instability of estimated mean WTP values for different policy scenarios asks for caution when including WTP values in cost-benefit analysis.     

Preferential trade agreements and manufactured goods exports: does it matter whom you PTA with?

This article explores two questions. First, do preferential trade agreements (PTAs) affect manufactured goods exports of developing countries? Second, does it matter for developing countries whom they sign the PTAs with? We find that the answer to both questions is yes. Using bilateral manufactured goods exports data from 28 developing countries during 1978–2005; we find that South–South PTAs have a significantly positive effect on manufactured goods exports. In contrast, no such effect is detected in the case of South–North PTAs. We confirmed the robustness of these findings to estimation methodology, sample selection, time period, zero trade flows and multilateral trade resistance.     

Lone Mothers: What is to be done?

This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal labor market exacerbates the problem, causing material hardship for many lone mothers and their families. The policy solutions proposed lie along a spectrum, ranging from those that seek to enable all lone mothers to take employment to those that aim to let mothers choose whether to take employment or care for their children themselves. Other policies discussed concern ways to value and support caregiving, improve the low-wage labor market for women, and provide a set of income supports that would both boost income and provide time to care for children.     

R&D,trade in intermediate inputs,and the comparative advantage of advanced countries

This paper examines the accumulation of physical capital versus knowledge (R&D) capital as a determinant of advanced countries’ comparative advantage. I show that advanced countries are abundant in R&D resources, specialize in knowledge-intensive stages of high-technology industries, and outsource labor-intensive stages of the industries to labor-abundant countries. In contrast, global data on production and trade cannot support the conventional view that advanced countries specialize in and export capital-intensive goods. My results indicate that the accumulation of knowledge capital plays a vital role in explaining advanced countries’ comparative advantage.     

A new energy model to capture the behavior of energy price processes

Owing to the vague fluctuation of energy prices from time to time, a new energy model, which considers both the mean-reverting behavior and the long memory property, is proposed in this paper. Since the problem of estimating parameters, in discrete time for this model, plays a central role in forecast inference, the problem of estimating the unknown parameters has been dealt with for the fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process observed discretely. The asymptotic properties of these estimates are also provided. The numerical simulation results confirm the theoretical analysis and show that our method is effective. To show how to apply our approach in realistic contexts, an empirical study of energy in China, namely Daqing crude oil, is presented. The empirical results seem reasonable when compared to the real data.     

Dynamic advertising and pricing with constant demand elasticities

In this paper we analyze a stochastic dynamic advertising and pricing model with isoelastic demand. The state space is discrete, time is continuous and the planing horizon is allowed to be finite or infinite. A dynamic version of the Dorfman–Steiner identity will be derived. Explicit expressions of the optimal advertising and pricing policies, of the value function and of the optimal advertising expenditures will be given. The general results will be used to analyze the case of impatient customers. Furthermore, particular time inhomogeneous models and homogeneous ones with and without discounting will be examined. We will study the social efficiency of a monopolist's optimal policies and the consequences of specific subsidies. From a buyer's perspective, our analysis reveals that waiting – when looking at (immediate) expected prices – is never profitable should two or more units be available. But we will also prove that the sequence of average sales prices is monotone decreasing. Moreover, the techniques applied to solve the discrete stochastic advertising and pricing problem will be used to solve a related deterministic control problem with continuous state space.     

International dimensions of management: The trans-national efficacy of a venture development model

Entrepreneurship is commonly held to be a vital force in the US and other economies. Yet, little is known regarding the efficacy of entrepreneurial efforts developed in one country but attempted elsewhere. In response to calls for testable theoretical models, scholars have begun to investigate empirically the attendant phenomena associated with the venture development process. This article describes efforts to test in another nation a nine-stage entrepreneurial process model of venture development derived and validated in the USA. While some development stages appear to exist similarly across borders, others may not be present. Further, the sequence of stages in the US-derived model may differ when compared internationally.     

The effect of climate change on the fall foliage vacation in China

Fall foliage season has been a favorite time for sightseeing activity for centuries around the world. The dates of fall foliage coloration for Acer mono maxim at two stations (Beijing and Xi'an) with more than 30 years of records were collected. Time-series analysis showed a strong overall delay of the timing of the fall foliage vacation season. The trend for later fall foliage vacation season averaged 4–5 days/decade. Regression analysis revealed that the air temperature in September or October is decisive for the annual timing of the fall foliage vacation season. A warming of 1 °C led to a delayed beginning, best date and the end of fall foliage vacation of 5.3 days, 3.5 days and 3.7 days respectively. The beginning of fall foliage vacation season started to delay in the 1990s. Sudden delay in the best date of fall foliage vacation season of Beijing and Xi'an took place in the early 2000s and 1990s respectively. For the end of fall foliage vacation season, an abrupt delay occurred in the early 2000s. This has implications for tourists and the tourism industry with reference to the timing of trips and their promotion.