The Prospect of Familism in the Global Era: A Study on the Recent Development of the Ethnic-Chinese Business,with Particular Attention to the Indonesian Context

The ethnic-Chinese business is often characterised by a central role of the family both in the structure of the firm and in its corporate culture. This has political, social as well as cultural reasons. The centrality of the family in business has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it enables a fast, efficient and flexible process of decision-making. On the other hand, it often contradicts modern business professionalism. The younger generation of ethnic-Chinese business actors tend to preserve crucial elements of such family-centred characteristics. Yet, globalisation drives them to transform their business style, lessening its dependence on family resources and adopting more-modern professional ideas. Changes in current political situation, religious-cultural trend, demography and education contribute to making possible the transformation.     

Tourism flows between India and Singapore

The tourism industry has become increasingly important as a source of revenue and employment for countries in Southeast Asia. Within the Southeast Asian region, intraregional travel has also seen an upsurge since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. More attention is also being paid to attract other Asian tourists from China, India, Japan and South Korea to the region. Competition to be tourism hubs in the region has seen countries such as Singapore developing an array of incentives to entice inbound foreign tourists to its shores. The aim of this paper is to examine the growing importance of India as a source of inbound tourists for countries in Southeast Asia and in particular Singapore. India is an apt case study because of its long historical and cultural links with the region. Another main motivation for examining inbound tourists from India is India's engagement with the Southeast Asian region through its ‘Look East’ policy. Following from its economic reforms and liberalisation of 1991, India has sought to strengthen economic links with ASEAN member states through a range of economic sectors including tourism. The 1991 Indian economic liberalisation has also created an upsurge of Indian business travellers who are exploring investment and business opportunities in the Southeast Asian region. With India's economic liberalisation of 1991, an expanding middle class has come to view foreign travel as a necessity. In turn, ASEAN member states, such as Singapore in particular, which is heavily dependent on its services sector, including tourism, for revenue, have chosen to regionalise its tourism operations by collaborating and investing in projects in India to woo more Indian tourists. Competition in the tourism sector among ASEAN countries has increased the urgency for Singapore to reinvent itself to attract foreign tourists and implement a number of initiatives to maintain its share of the tourism market. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

RECENT TECHNICAL PAPERS ON BPS DATA

This note discusses a series of papers produced by the USAID-funded STAT project at the Indonesian Statistics Agency (BPS). The project's goal was to help BPS design new activities based on improved statistical techniques, so as to enhance the agency's provision of accurate and timely data, and to increase its openness and transparency through documentation of sources and methods, and soliciting of user feedback. The papers described here document the methodology of certain statistical series, and explore data-related questions. They are aimed mainly at users outside BPS, and cover series on the national accounts, industry, the labour force and agriculture.     

Malmquist indices of productivity growth for Islamic and conventional banks in Malaysia

This paper studies the total factor productivity （TFP） of banks in Malaysia with the emphasis on comparing the relative productivities of Islamic and Conventional banks. The Malmquist index approach is used to decompose productivity growth into technical efficiency and technological change. The productivity growth is measured and decomposed into technical change and efficiency change. The efficiency change is further decomposed into pure efficiency change and scale efficiency. It is found that Islamic banks＇ productivity growth is limited by its lack of technological change compared to its conventional counterparts. Nonetheless, both types of banks are operating at the correct level in terms of scale or size.     

Investigation of the level of consciousness of citizens about the climate change

As of the first periods of history, the fact that human being has benefited from the natural resources and the efforts to improve life conditions has shown a continuous increase and diversification in the direction of technological developments. The fact that improving technological developments within time has provided people to intervene in the nature influentially, the usage of natural resources has reached a critical point in terms of both the environment and living creatures and it has caused to climate changes in conjunction with environmental pollution. This research has been conducted in order to investigate the consciousness level of native people living in different regions of Libya on climate issue. The universe of the research consisted of native people living in Libya, while the sample consisted of 300 Libyans. The scanning method was used in the research. A questionnaire was carried out in order that the levels of consciousness of participants on climate change could be investigated. The information that was obtained from the questionnaires were analyzed in computer environment by using SPSS 20.0 program. As a result, in this research, which was conducted with the aim of determining the level of consciousness about the climate change of Libyan people, there were significant differences about age, gender and education variables, and the people of Libya participating in the survey have been informed about climate change.     

Estimation of food demand in Turkey: method of an almost ideal demand system

In this study, data of the household income and consumption expenditure surveys conducted by the Turkish Statistical Institute for 1994 and 2003 years were used; income, price, and cross price elasticities under six aggregated product groups were estimated within the framework of the an almost ideal demand system approach for food expenditures; and estimation of household consumers’ food demand in Turkey was analyzed. According to the findings obtained, it was established that a price-bound change would appear in the food demand, and elasticities were calculated. Expenditures by product groups and price elasticities were obtained, and the product groups were aggregated as bread and cereals; meat, fish, and poultry; milk and dairy products, oil and egg; vegetables and fruits; various fast food and alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.     

Using a mathematical programming model to examine the marginal price of capacitated resources

Accurate information on dual prices of capacitated resources is of interest in a number of applications, such as cost allocation and pricing. To gain insight we focus on the dual prices of capacity and demand in a single-stage single-product production-inventory system, and discuss their interpretation. In particular, we examine the behavior of two different production planning models: a conventional linear programming model and a nonlinear model that captures queuing behavior at resources in an aggregate manner using nonlinear clearing functions. The classical linear programming formulation consistently underestimates the dual price of capacity due to its failure to capture the effects of queuing. The clearing function formulation, in contrast, produces positive dual prices even when utilization is below one and exhibits more realistic behavior, such as holding finished inventory at utilization levels below one.     

Modeling producer responses with dynamic programming: a case for adaptive crop management

Past research found agricultural producers’ conditional responses during the growing season are important adaptations to weather and other stochastic events. Failing to recognize these responses overstates the risks confronting producers and understates their ability to respond to adverse circumstances. Dynamic programming (DP) provides a means for determining optimal long‐term crop management plans. However, most applications in the literature base their analysis on annual time steps with fixed strategies within the year, effectively ignoring conditional responses during the year. We suggest an alternative approach that captures the strategic responses within a cropping season to random weather variables as they unfold, reflecting farmers’ ability to adapt to weather realizations. We illustrate our approach by applying it to a typical cereal farm in Karak, Jordan. The results show that including conditional within‐year responses to weather reduces the frequency of fallowing by 23% and increases expected income by 9%.     

How does past behaviour stimulate consumers' intentions to repeat unethical behaviour? The roles of perceived risk and ethical beliefs

Repeated unethical behaviour by consumers is a serious challenge for participants in business transactions, including consumers, retailers, and those responsible for market supervision. Due to the inherent risk of such behaviours, we examine perceived risk to uncover the psychological mechanism by which consumers consider past behaviour (PAB) when deciding to repeat unethical behaviour. We divide perceived risk into two categories, material risk (MAR) and nonmaterial risk (NMR), based on two kinds of ethical evaluation and explore their mediating effects in the process through which PAB influences consumers' intentions to repeat unethical behaviour (CIRUB). We check the moderating effect of consumers' ethical beliefs on the relationship between PAB and CIRUB. We use survey data from four typical ethical scenarios to test the proposed structural relationships. Direct positive effects of PAB on consumers' intentions are observed in all four scenarios. NMR has stable, positive mediating effects in all scenarios. MAR is found to have negative mediating effects in two scenarios (switching price tags and using an expired coupon) and a positive effect in one scenario (copying software). However, no effect is observed in the benefiting from a cashier's mistake scenario. Finally, ethical beliefs are proven to positively moderate the relationship between PAB and consumers' intentions in the first two scenarios, but not the last two. This study also discusses the implications of the findings and offers suggestions for future research.