Research and development expenditure in the business sector as indicator of knowledge economy: the Portuguese experience

The objective of the paper is to help to understand recent changes in the structure of R&D activities, by analyzing data on the expenditure of the business sector in research and development (R&D). The results are framed in an international context, through comparison with indicators from the most developed countries, divided by technological intensity and economic activity. The study reveals that the indicators of Portuguese R&D expenditure in the business sector are closely linked both to fiscal policy and to high foreign direct investment in knowledge-intensive industries. It also links these indicators to phenomena such as the abundance of skilled labor in pharmaceutical industries and the government intervention in some sectors of the economy (namely health and rail transportation).

The effects of the informal sector on construction

Most construction sectors around the world have a high percentage of output being produced informally. In developing countries informal construction activities can account for as much as 80% of employment (Farrell 2004). In general, the informal sector equates to a significant percentage of country’s GDP — 40% in developing countries and 18% in the OECD high-income countries. The informal sector in construction is not well understood and difficult to measure and is thriving both in the developed and developing world. Construction industries are made up of a large number of small firms and a small number of large firms. Many small firms are less likely to be able (or to want to) afford the bureaucratic demands of a nation’s fiscal and legal system. This evasion means a reduction in tax income for the government, and also leads to inaccurate estimates of the true value of construction output. Some national statistical agencies factor in an estimate of the size of the informal sector, but without effective measurement, there is no guarantee that the estimate is a fair one. The message from the paper is that the informal sector in construction is likely to grow. We need to understand the sector and recognise its impact on construction.

Family hardship and cultural values: child labor in Malian artisanal gold mining communities

This paper contributes to the debate on child labor in small-scale mining communities, focusing specifically on the situation in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the child labor now widespread in many of the region’s small-scale mining communities is a product of a combination of cultural issues, household-level poverty and rural livelihood diversification. Experiences from Komana West, a subsistence gold panning area in Southern Mali, are drawn upon to make this case. The findings suggest that the sector’s child labor “problem” is far more nuanced than international organizations and policymakers have diagnosed.

Is child labor harmful? the impact of working as a child on adult earnings

This paper explores the question: is working as young laborer harmful to an individual in terms of adult outcomes in income? This question is explored through the utilization of a unique set of instruments that control for the decision to work as a child and the decision of how much schooling to acquire. These instruments are combined with two large household survey data sets from Brazil that include retrospective information on the child labor and schooling of working-age adults: the 1988 and 1996 PNAD. Estimations of the reduced form earnings model are performed first by using OLS without controlling for the potential endogeneity of child labor and schooling, and then by using a GMM estimation of instrumental variables models that include the set of instruments for child labor and schooling. The findings of the empirical investigations show that child labor has large negative impact on adult earnings for both male and female children even when controlling for schooling. In addition, the negative impact of starting to work as a child reverses at around age 14. Finally, different child labor activities are examined to determine if some are beneficial while others harmful with the finding that working in agriculture as a child appears to have no negative impact over and above the loss of education.

Surplus Labor in Indian Manufacturing: Evidence from the Annual Survey of Industries

In this paper we analyze state level data for total manufacturing constructed from the Annual Survey of Industries for the period 1986-2000 using the nonparametric method of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). We assess the extent of surplus labor in the manufacturing sector in the individual states in India. The study also investigates whether the same states show the maximum incidence of surplus labor every year in the sample period and if there any evidence that the extent of surplus labor in manufacturing has been reduced or eliminated in the post-reform era. Our study shows the presence of considerable measure of surplus labor in all of the years in a majority of the states. Things have worsened rather than improved after the reform. Also, the regional distribution of surplus labor has remain fairly unchanged with the same states performing inefficiently both before and after the reform.

Collective bargaining in the Federal sector: where we are: where we may be going: implications for managers.

Mode of access: Internet.

Understanding fact finding and arbitration in the public sector.

Mode of access: Internet.

Child labor and the republic.

"The papers in this volume are reprinted from the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. XXIX, no. 1, January, 1907, in which they were originally published as the Proceedings of the third annual meeting of the National Child Labor Committee."

Minimum wage and maximum hour provisions in the public sector /

"December 1980."

The determinants of training produced in the private sector /

Prepared under contract OAS 74-2621 with Georgia State University.

Uses of frontier efficiency methodologies and multi-criteria decision making for performance measurement in the energy sector

Guest editorial Ali Emrouznejad is a Senior Lecturer at the Aston Business School in Birmingham, UK. His areas of research interest include performance measurement and management, efficiency and productivity analysis as well as data mining. He has published widely in various international journals. He is an Associate Editor of IMA Journal of Management Mathematics and Guest Editor to several special issues of journals including Journal of Operational Research Society, Annals of Operations Research, Journal of Medical Systems, and International Journal of Energy Management Sector. He is in the editorial board of several international journals and co-founder of Performance Improvement Management Software. William Ho is a Senior Lecturer at the Aston University Business School. Before joining Aston in 2005, he had worked as a Research Associate in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include supply chain management, production and operations management, and operations research. He has published extensively in various international journals like Computers & Operations Research, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, European Journal of Operational Research, Expert Systems with Applications, International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Production Research, Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, and so on. His first authored book was published in 2006. He is an Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology and an Associate Editor of the OR Insight Journal. Currently, he is a Scholar of the Advanced Institute of Management Research. Uses of frontier efficiency methodologies and multi-criteria decision making for performance measurement in the energy sector This special issue aims to focus on holistic, applied research on performance measurement in energy sector management and for publication of relevant applied research to bridge the gap between industry and academia. After a rigorous refereeing process, seven papers were included in this special issue. The volume opens with five data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based papers. Wu et al. apply the DEA-based Malmquist index to evaluate the changes in relative efficiency and the total factor productivity of coal-fired electricity generation of 30 Chinese administrative regions from 1999 to 2007. Factors considered in the model include fuel consumption, labor, capital, sulphur dioxide emissions, and electricity generated. The authors reveal that the east provinces were relatively and technically more efficient, whereas the west provinces had the highest growth rate in the period studied. Ioannis E. Tsolas applies the DEA approach to assess the performance of Greek fossil fuel-fired power stations taking undesirable outputs into consideration, such as carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide emissions. In addition, the bootstrapping approach is deployed to address the uncertainty surrounding DEA point estimates, and provide bias-corrected estimations and confidence intervals for the point estimates. The author revealed from the sample that the non-lignite-fired stations are on an average more efficient than the lignite-fired stations. Maethee Mekaroonreung and Andrew L. Johnson compare the relative performance of three DEA-based measures, which estimate production frontiers and evaluate the relative efficiency of 113 US petroleum refineries while considering undesirable outputs. Three inputs (capital, energy consumption, and crude oil consumption), two desirable outputs (gasoline and distillate generation), and an undesirable output (toxic release) are considered in the DEA models. The authors discover that refineries in the Rocky Mountain region performed the best, and about 60 percent of oil refineries in the sample could improve their efficiencies further. H. Omrani, A. Azadeh, S. F. Ghaderi, and S. Abdollahzadeh presented an integrated approach, combining DEA, corrected ordinary least squares (COLS), and principal component analysis (PCA) methods, to calculate the relative efficiency scores of 26 Iranian electricity distribution units from 2003 to 2006. Specifically, both DEA and COLS are used to check three internal consistency conditions, whereas PCA is used to verify and validate the final ranking results of either DEA (consistency) or DEA-COLS (non-consistency). Three inputs (network length, transformer capacity, and number of employees) and two outputs (number of customers and total electricity sales) are considered in the model. Virendra Ajodhia applied three DEA-based models to evaluate the relative performance of 20 electricity distribution firms from the UK and the Netherlands. The first model is a traditional DEA model for analyzing cost-only efficiency. The second model includes (inverse) quality by modelling total customer minutes lost as an input data. The third model is based on the idea of using total social costs, including the firm’s private costs and the interruption costs incurred by consumers, as an input. Both energy-delivered and number of consumers are treated as the outputs in the models. After five DEA papers, Stelios Grafakos, Alexandros Flamos, Vlasis Oikonomou, and D. Zevgolis presented a multiple criteria analysis weighting approach to evaluate the energy and climate policy. The proposed approach is akin to the analytic hierarchy process, which consists of pairwise comparisons, consistency verification, and criteria prioritization. In the approach, stakeholders and experts in the energy policy field are incorporated in the evaluation process by providing an interactive mean with verbal, numerical, and visual representation of their preferences. A total of 14 evaluation criteria were considered and classified into four objectives, such as climate change mitigation, energy effectiveness, socioeconomic, and competitiveness and technology. Finally, Borge Hess applied the stochastic frontier analysis approach to analyze the impact of various business strategies, including acquisition, holding structures, and joint ventures, on a firm’s efficiency within a sample of 47 natural gas transmission pipelines in the USA from 1996 to 2005. The author finds that there were no significant changes in the firm’s efficiency by an acquisition, and there is a weak evidence for efficiency improvements caused by the new shareholder. Besides, the author discovers that parent companies appear not to influence a subsidiary’s efficiency positively. In addition, the analysis shows a negative impact of a joint venture on technical efficiency of the pipeline company. To conclude, we are grateful to all the authors for their contribution, and all the reviewers for their constructive comments, which made this special issue possible. We hope that this issue would contribute significantly to performance improvement of the energy sector.

Informational institutions in the agrifood sector:meta-information and meta-governance of environmental sustainability

In the agrifood sector, the explosive increase in information about environmental sustainability, often in uncoordinated information systems, has created a new form of ignorance ('meta-ignorance') that diminishes the effectiveness of information on decision-makers. Flows of information are governed by informal and formal social arrangements that we can collectively call Informational Institutions. In this paper, we have reviewed the recent literature on such institutions. From the perspectives of information theory and new institutional economics, current informational institutions are increasing the information entropy of communications concerning environmental sustainability and stakeholders' transaction costs of using relevant information. In our view this reduces the effectiveness of informational governance. Future research on informational governance should explicitly address these aspects.

Cultivating Subjectivities: The Class Politics of Convivial Labor in the Interstitial Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

Assessing the evolution of sustainability reporting in the mining sector

Since the 1990s several large companies have been publishing nonfinancial performance reports. Focusing initially on the physical environment, these reports evolved to consider social relations, as well as data on the firm`s economic performance. A few mining companies pioneered this trend, and in the last years some of them incorporated the three dimensions of sustainable development, publishing so-called sustainability reports. This article reviews 31 reports published between 2001 and 2006 by four major mining companies. A set of 62 assessment items organized in six categories (namely context and commitment, management, environmental, social and economic performance, and accessibility and assurance) were selected to guide the review. The items were derived from international literature and recommended best practices, including the Global Reporting Initiative G3 framework. A content analysis was performed using the report as a sampling unit, and using phrases, graphics, or tables containing certain information as data collection units. A basic rating scale (0 or 1) was used for noting the presence or absence of information and a final percentage score was obtained for each report. Results show that there is a clear evolution in report`s comprehensiveness and depth. Categories ""accessibility and assurance"" and ""economic performance"" featured the lowest scores and do not present a clear evolution trend in the period, whereas categories ""context and commitment"" and ""social performance"" presented the best results and regular improvement; the category ""environmental performance,"" despite it not reaching the biggest scores, also featured constant evolution. Description of data measurement techniques, besides more comprehensive third-party verification are the items most in need of improvement.

Labour flexibility and gender in the service sector: A study of employment practices in law and accounting firms

In seeking to increase the flexibility of their use of employee time, employers can pursue strategies based on the employment of casual and part-time workers (numerical flexibility) or strategies based on ad hoc variation of the working hours of permanent employees (working time flexibility). Patterns of flexibility strategies and their implications are examined in the context of a highly feminised sector of work-clerical and administrative employment in law and accounting firms. We consider whether, as is often assumed, working time flexibility strategies are generally better for employees because they avoid the substitution of core, high quality jobs with the peripheral, relatively insecure employment often associated with casualisation. Analysing data drawn from a survey of law and accounting firms, we argue that there are three distinct flexibility strategies adopted by employers, and that the choice of strategy is influenced by the size of the firm and the extent of feminisation. The quality of employment conditions associated with each strategy is investigated through an analysis of the determinants of training provision for clerical and administrative workers. Rather than an expected simple linear relationship between increasing casualisation and decreasing training provision, we find that firm size and feminisation are implicated. Larger firms that tend to employ at least some men and use a combination of working time and numerical flexibility strategies tend to provide more training than the small, more fully feminised firms that tend to opt for either casualisation or working time flexibility strategies. This suggests that, from an employee perspective, working time flexibility may not be as benevolent as is often thought.