The Beginnings of the New Supra Insus Rice Intensification Program: The Case of the North Coast of West Java and South Sulawesi 1

In 1987 the Indonesian government introduced a new rice intensification program, Supra Insus, because production was not keeping pace with demand growth. This paper examines the operation and effectiveness of Supra Insus in West Java and South Sulawesi, and identifies some constraints to the program's success. These include inadequate resources and heavy administrative workloads which hamper the efforts of agricultural extension personnel; consequent slow development of necessary skills among farmers; delays in implementing organisational improvements to the program; complex procedures for formulation and ratification of credit proposals; institutional and other barriers to the adoption of some technologies; and conflicts between program administrators and regional governments on credit policy. The practice in South Sulawesi of harnessing traditional forums to the purposes of the program may offer a model for other areas. Further research is needed to evaluate the program's economic performance.     

Public Revenue‐Expenditure Nexus in South Africa: Are there Asymmetries?

This paper re‐examines the government revenue and expenditure relationship in South Africa using Enders and Siklos' Threshold adjustment and Granger causality tests. The paper allows for structural breaks in the unit root and cointegration tests. The results indicate the absence of any asymmetries in both the threshold autoregression and momentum threshold autoregression specifications of adjustments in the South African's budgeting process. The estimated symmetric error‐correction models provide support for the fiscal synchronization hypothesis of government revenues and expenditures for long‐run and short‐run dynamic equilibrium. These findings indicate that the South African fiscal authorities should try to maintain or even improve the control of their fiscal policy instruments to sustain the prudent budgetary process.     

Organizational Cultural Intelligence: A Competitive Capability for Strategic Alliances in the International Construction Industry

Cultural intelligence (CQ) on the organizational level is an organization's capacity to reconfigure its capability to function and manage effectively in culturally diverse environments and to gain and sustain its competitive advantages. This study aims to present a model, examining how organizational CQ through competitiveness framework might potentially affect the strategic alliancing ability of contracting firms operating abroad. The research involves a questionnaire survey conducted with the contracting firms. The research findings support the contracting firms leveraging their cultural intelligence as their main cross‐cultural competence for establishing and increasing the performance of international strategic alliances.     

Managed competition

People don't like change. That includes materiel managers, administrators, and clinical providers. Managed competition or managed care will work if, and only if, the American professions and the American public recognize the value of highly educated and qualified clinical and nonclinical providers and if the health care industry responds in kind.     

Assessing the impact of crime on the economic performance: the case of central america

Crime is obviously a menace to economic growth and progress, but to acutely understand the enormity of its impact on economic performance for effective policy action, requires a credible means of measurement. Given the crime notoriety of the most of Central America and the struggling state of their economies, this article attempts to discern from econometric evaluation and analyses, the calculable economic impact of crime on the region’s economic progress. From analyses of results, we find the model to be credible and useful following its provision of a much more accurate degree to which crime affects economic performance in Central America, which we find critical to guide policy measures.