A Question of Integrity: Variants of Bt Cotton,Pesticides and Productivity in Pakistan

Bt cotton remains one of the most widely grown biotech crops among smallholder farmers in lower income countries, and numerous studies attest to its advantages. However, the effectiveness of Bt toxin, which depends on many technical constraints, is heterogeneous. In Pakistan, the diffusion of Bt cotton occurred despite a weak regulatory system and without seed quality control; whether or not many varieties sold as Bt are in fact Bt is also questionable. We utilise nationally representative sample data to test the effects of Bt cotton use on productivity. Unlike previous studies, we invoke several indicators of Bt identity: variety name, official approval status, farmer belief, laboratory tests of Bt presence in plant tissue, and biophysical assays measuring Bt effectiveness. Only farmer belief affects cotton productivity in the standard production model, which does not treat Bt appropriately as damage‐abating. In the damage control framework, all Bt indicators reduce damage from pests. Biophysical indicators have the largest effect and official approval has the weakest. Findings have implications for impact measurement. For policy‐makers, they suggest the need, on ethical and productivity grounds, to improve variety information and monitor variety integrity closer to point of sale.     

Perpetuating traditional influences: Voluntary disclosure in Malaysia following the economic crisis

Prior research on listed companies in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore during and before the 1997 financial crisis has reported a significant association between ownership structure and the extent of voluntary disclosure in annual reports. We examine data for Malaysia after the 1997 financial crisis to assess whether the regulatory reaction to the crisis increased the awareness of disclosure as a tool of corporate governance and reduced the influence of insider domination on voluntary disclosure. We contrast director ownership and government ownership as determinants of voluntary disclosure in Malaysian company annual reports. Additionally, we include consideration of proprietary costs by testing whether industry competitiveness has an impact on voluntary disclosure.We find that director ownership is significantly associated with the extent of voluntary disclosure while government ownership, new governance initiatives and industry competitiveness are not significant in pointing companies towards greater transparency. We conclude that, despite the upheaval of the economic crisis, traditional influences of director ownership and family domination of the board outweigh the effect of government-backed accountability initiatives in determining the extent of voluntary disclosure.     

Risky Business or Competitive Power? Supplier Involvement in Japanese Product Design

Notwithstanding the alleged risks of outsourcing design work, leading manufacturers in the Japanese automotive industry collaborate closely with their key suppliers. Despite widespread recognition of the effectiveness of these close-knit supplier networks, however, little research exists on the factors that affect the purchase of design work from suppliers. S. Nazli Wasti and Jeffrey K. Liker fill this gap by exploring the factors that affect Japanese automotive firms' purchase of design work from their component suppliers. Using data from a survey of 122 Japanese automotive component suppliers, their study addresses two key questions. First, what factors lead Japanese buyers to involve some suppliers heavily in design while giving others relatively little control over design decisions? And second, does the Japanese practice of involving suppliers in design offer performance benefits? The study focuses on first-tier suppliers of parts, assemblies, and complete subsystems (e.g., audio, fuel and emissions, heating and air conditioning). The study does not include suppliers of raw materials and chemicals, assembly and processing equipment, indirect materials, tooling and dies, computers and software, or engineering and business consulting services. The study breaks down the broad concept of supplier involvement in design work into three measurable elements: the extent to which the supplier influences decision-making during the early stages of product development; the amount of control the buyer retains over the design; and the frequency of design-related communication between the buyer and the supplier. Factors that have a positive effect on the level of supplier involvement among the companies studied include technological uncertainty of the component and the supplier's in-house technical capabilities. For companies in the study, the level of competition in the supplier market has a negative effect on the degree of supplier involvement in design. The responses indicate that supplier involvement offers performance benefits for both the supplier and the buyer. For the supplier firms studied, increased involvement in the design process permits greater focus on design for manufacturability (DFM). And of course, supplier-generated design improvements clearly benefit the buyers, allowing these firms to capitalize on the experience and the insight that their suppliers have regarding the parts that they supply.     

Resource allocation at an income-sharing community: An application of Elinor Ostrom's commons framework

Elinor Ostrom's framework for commons management is used here to analyse ethnographic material from long-term fieldwork in an income-sharing community in the United States. By requiring participants to pool labour and share resources for survival and well-being, income-sharing communities align with Ostrom's allocation design for common-pool resources. These communities can figure as a node within the hybrid and polycentric networks designated by Ostrom for equitable and effective commons management, which requires both effective institutional arrangements and shared social capital among system participants. While a case is made for analysing resource-sharing practices at these communities with Elinor Ostrom's framework, shortcomings and possible future directions are indicated.     

Short-run energy-economy interactions in Egypt

This paper discusses the short-run adjustment mechanism of the Egyptian economy to changes in the domestic price of oil. The effects of oil price increases have been analysed in the framework of a short-run macroeconomic model with an explicit treatment of energy. The results suggest that a reduction in petroleum use induced by a rise in the price of oil will impose difficult adjustment problems for the economy in the short run in terms of increase in inflation, fall in the share of wage income and sharp output losses. The analysis also indicates that energy demand management through appropriate petroleum pricing strategy cannot bring about desirable impacts on the economy unless efforts are made to reduce cost pressures originating from other energy sectors.     

The international petroleum exchange model: Reference results and validation

The author describes the IPE model and compares its main results with the data for 1970–1978. The model's results are close to the actual consumer-import demand for those years. The model's forecasts of the future demand for oil imports, over the next 20 years, are considerably lower than the forecasts produced by some other studies.     

Does credit composition matter for current account dynamics? Evidence from Turkey

Based on a dynamic approach using the Kalman filter we depict effects of time-varying interactions between different components of credit stock on the current account in the Turkish Economy for the period 2002Q3–2014Q3. We decompose the credit stock into consumer and non-financial corporate sector credit and show empirically that both types of credit stock have negative effects on the current account dynamics.     

Board of directors’ quality and firms’ debt financing: the moderating effect of insider ownership – evidence from Omani firms

This study aims to examine the direct effects of board of directors’ quality and insider ownership on firms’ capital structure and the moderating effect of insider ownership on the relationship between board of directors’ quality and firms’ capital structure. The sample of this study consists of the time period 2005–2011. The final sample consists of 535 firm-year observations of public nonfinancial firms listed on the Muscat Securities Market (MSM). The hypotheses are tested using a random effects model. The results reveal that the coefficient sign on the board of directors’ quality is as predicted, but the coefficient sign is insignificant. Further, the results show that insider ownership is positively associated with leverage at the significant level of 10%, suggesting that the inside substantial shareholders employ higher leverage. With regard to the moderating effect of insider ownership, the findings show that the effect of the board of directors’ quality-leverage relationship becomes negative and stronger with increasing insider ownership.     

Implications of high food prices for poverty in Pakistan

The study estimates the impacts of rising world food prices on poverty in rural and urban areas of Pakistan. Household income and expenditure data for 2004/2005 is used to estimate compensated and uncompensated price and expenditure elasticities using the linear approximation of the almost ideal demand system. Taking the unexpected component of higher domestic food prices in 2007/2008, own and cross price compensated elasticities are used to derive the changes in the quantity consumed, food expenditure and impacts on poverty assuming the food crisis happened in 2004/2005. The results indicate that poverty increased by 34.8%, severely affecting the urban areas where poverty increased by 44.6% as compared to 32.5% in rural areas. The estimates show that 2.3 million people are unable to reach even one‐half of poverty line expenditures while another 13.7 million are just below and 23.9 million are just above the poverty line. In the short run, it is important to ensure food availability to these people. In the long run, the policy environment of subsidizing urban food consumers by keeping wheat prices lower than the international price, needs to be reconsidered to provide the right incentives to increase food availability.     

Predicting Counterproductive Work Behavior from Guilt Proneness

We investigated the relationship between guilt proneness and counterproductive work behavior (CWB) using a diverse sample of employed adults working in a variety of different industries at various levels in their organizations. CWB refers to behaviors that harm or are intended to harm organizations or people in organizations. Guilt proneness is a personality trait characterized by a predisposition to experience negative feelings about personal wrongdoing. CWB was engaged in less frequently by individuals high in guilt proneness compared to those low in guilt proneness, controlling for other known correlates of CWB. CWB was also predicted by gender, age, intention to turnover, interpersonal conflict at work, and negative affect at work. Given the detrimental impact of CWB on people and organizations, it may be wise for employers to consider guilt proneness when making hiring decisions.