Modelling the relationship between defense spending and economic growth for the Fiji Islands

The goal of this paper is to examine the nexus between GDP and military expenditure. We model this relationship within a multivariate framework by including exports in the model. We use the recently developed bounds testing approach to cointegration and find that there is a long run relationship among the variables when GDP is the endogenous variable. Normalizing on GDP and using four different estimators, we find that in the long run both military expenditure and exports have a positive impact on GDP. Finally, using the Granger causality test, we find that there is evidence for military expenditure Granger causing exports and exports Granger causing GDP, implying that military expenditure indirectly Granger causes GDP in the short run. In the long run, we find that both military expenditure and exports Granger cause GDP for Fiji. Our findings are consistent with the Keynesian school of thought, leading us to derive some policy implications.

An empirical investigation of the relationship between government revenue and expenditure : the case of the Fiji Islands

Purpose – Understanding the relationship between government revenue and government expenditure is important from a policy point of view, especially for a country like Fiji, which is suffering from persistent budget deficits. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between government revenue and expenditure for Fiji.

Design/methodology/approach – The Johansen test for cointegration and Granger causality test are used to conduct the empirical analysis.

Findings – The key findings are that: government revenue and government expenditure in both the aggregate and disaggregate sense are cointegrated; in the short-run government expenditure Granger causes government revenue in an aggregate sense, departmental expenditure Granger causes aggregate revenue, and there is bidirectional causality running between government expenditure and customs duties; and in the long-run there is evidence of fiscal synchronization, implying that expenditure decisions are not made in isolation from revenue decisions.

Research limitations/implications – This fiscal synchronization has not been able curb the current account deficit in Fiji. Moreover, the confirmation of the spend-tax attitude of the government does not bode well for the level of investments and skilled human capital in Fiji as this may perpetuate tax increases in the future. Given that the Fiji Government is currently trying to rein in the escalating level of fiscal deficit, it is an opportune time for them to engage in extensive expenditure reforms.

Originality/value – The findings of this paper should allow policy makers to make informed decisions. Furthermore, the paper is different from others because apart from examining the revenue and expenditure in an aggregate sense, it also considers the different components of revenue and expenditure.

An empirical study on the relationship between intellectual ability and an understanding of the legal process in male remand prisoners

Research conducted in Australia and around the world in the last decade has shown that people with significant intellectual impairments are over-represented in all areas of the criminal justice system. They are particularly over-represented in remand populations appearing before court. Previous research has suggested that as many as one-quarter of offenders facing sentencing in court have difficulty in understanding court procedures and it is suspected that a majority of these individuals suffer a significant intellectual impairment. The purpose of this study was to establish whether remandees with significant intellectual impairments (IQ < 70) have an accurate understanding of the court system. Seventy-four remand prisoners took part in the study. Remandees with an IQ of less than 70 demonstrated a significantly poorer understanding of the court system than those remandees with an IQ of 70 and above. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to the need for law reform and diversionary practices for this population of remandees.

Exploring the relationship between media coverage and participation in entrepreneurship : initial global evidence and research implications

Using a set of variables measured in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) study, our empirical investigation explored the influence of mass media through national culture on national entrepreneurial participation rates in 37 countries over 4 years (2000 to 2003). We found that stories about successful entrepreneurs, conveyed in mass media, were not significantly associated with the rate of nascent (opportunity searching) or the rate of actual (business activities commenced up to 3 months old) start-up activity, but that there was a significant positive association between the volume of entrepreneurship media stories and a nation’s volume of people running a young business (that is in GEM terminology, a business aged greater than 3 but less than 42 months old). More particularly, such stories had strong positive association with opportunity oriented operators of young businesses. Together, these findings are compatible with what in the mass communications theory literature may be called the ‘reinforcement model’. This argues that mass media are only capable of reinforcing their audience’s existing values and choice propensities but are not capable of shaping or changing those values and choices. In the area covered by this paper, policy-makers are committing public resources to media campaigns of doubtful utility in the absence of an evidence base. A main implication drawn from this study is the need for further and more sophisticated investigation into the relationship between media coverage of entrepreneurship, national culture and the rates and nature of people’s participation in the various stages of the entrepreneurial process.

Relationship between workplace reform and workforce participation

This thesis sought to advance understanding of the politics of workplace reform, explaining the respective roles of management and employees and how they relate. The literature on workplace reform usually argues that reform is predicated on greater workforce participation in managerial decisions. More specifically, different approaches to workplace reform can be aligned to different forms of participation. Thus quality management can be associated with direct forms of participation, institutional workplace reform may depend on representative forms, and best practice may require a combination of both. This thesis uses empirical evidence to explore this alignment between the different approaches to workplace reform and forms of participation. The period chosen for empirical study is approximately 1985-1992 - an era of rapid innovation in workplace reform for Australian manufacturing. Three workplaces were chosen for intensive study from automotive component manufacturers because that industry was itself a laboratory for workplace reform and also because these firms exemplified different approaches to competitiveness and reform. Three approaches to workplace reform - quality management, institutional workplace reform, and best practice - were distinguished to capture the range of Australian practice at that time. Similarly two approaches to workplace participation were distinguished - direct and representative - to reflect the range of observable practices at that time and to represent competing philosophies. Direct participation illustrated an approach founded in managerial context of the political status quo, whilst representative forms were considered to permit a pluralist shift of power to enable employees to manage in place of management. The three case studies depict companies sharing the competitive crisis of their industry. From this stems the impetus for workplace reform. At this point the firms diverged in their choice of competitive strategies for workplace reform. The case studies reveal, at the superficial level, a match between the chosen approaches to workplace reform and forms of participation. Basically, quality management is associated with direct employee participation, institutional workplace reform with collective bargaining and representative consultative committees, and best practice with both. However when the implementation of reform and participation are examined this match becomes less significant. One firm, Auto Air, achieved highly effective outcomes in both reform and participation. Another firm, Auto Electrical, failed in both. The thesis concluded that the relationship between forms of participation and reform is less significant than the effective implementation of policy. Unitarist or pluralist approaches to power distribution count less than managerial capacity to integrate successive reform initiatives and their commitment to workforce participation hi change.

On the relationship between stock prices and exchange rates for India

In this paper, we apply several variants of the EGARCH model to examine the role of depreciation of the Indian rupee on India's stock market returns using daily data. Our findings suggest that volatility persistence has been high; depreciation of the rupee has increased volatility; and asymmetric volatility confirms that negative shocks generate more volatility than positive shocks. We also find that an appreciation of the Indian rupee over the 2002 to 2006 has generated more returns and less volatility.

The effect of organisational culture perceptions on the relationship between budgetary participation and managerial job-related outcomes

We examine the impact of managers' perceptions of their organisational culture (OC) on the relationship between budgetary participation (BP) and managerial job-related outcomes, operationalised as managerial performance and job-related tension (JRT). Does the relationship between BP and job-related outcomes would depend on managers' perceptions of innovation and attention to detail? Data supported predictions that increasing BP would lower JRT for managers perceiving a high emphasis on innovation within their OC, regardless of their perceptions of an emphasis on attention to detail. When managers perceived low innovation, however, their perception of level of attention to detail had a significant effect on the relationship between BP and JRT. More specifically, increasing BP was found to decrease JRT for managers who perceived low innovation and low attention to detail. For managers who perceived low innovation and high attention to detail, however, this effect was attenuated. Finally, the positive relationship between BP and managerial performance was not found to he affected significantly by managers' OC perceptions.

Analytical relationship between family history and genetic and environmental risks, with application to female breast cancer

It is well established in genetic epidemiology that family history is an important indicator of familial aggregation of disease in a family. A strong genetic risk factor or an environmental risk factor with high familial correlation can result in a strong family history. In this paper, family history refers to the number of first-degree relatives affected with the disease. Cui and Hopper (Journal of Epidemiology and Biostatistics 2001; 6: 331-342) proposed an analytical relationship between family history and relevant genetic parameters. In this paper we expand the relationship to both genetic and environmental risk factors. We established a closed-form formula for family history as a function of genetic and environmental parameters which include genetic and environmental relative risks, genotype frequency, prevalence and familial correlation of the environmental risk factor. The relationship is illustrated by an example of female breast cancer in Australia. For genetic and environmental relative risks less than 10, most of the female breast cancer cases occur between the age of 40 and 60 years. A higher genetic or environmental relative risk will move the peak of the distribution to a younger age. A more common disease allele or more prevalent environmental risk factor will move the peak to an older age. For a proband with breast cancer, it is most likely (with probability ge80%) that none of her first-degree relatives is affected with the disease. To enable the probability of having a positive family history to reach 50%, the environmental relative risks must be extremely as high as 100, the familial correlation as high as 0.8 and the prevalence as low as 0.1. For genetic risk alone, even the relative risk is as high as 100, the probability of having a positive family history can only reach about 30%. This suggests that the environmental risk factor seems to play a more important role in determining a strong family history than the genetic risk factor.