Dollarization and the relationship between EMBI and fundamentals Latin American countries

This paper presents empirical evidence on the interrelationship that exists between the evolution of the Emerging Markets Bonds Index (EMBI) and some macroeconomic variables in seven Latin American countries; two of them (Ecuador and Panama), full dollarized. We make use of a Cointegrated Vector framework to analyze the short run effects from 2001 to 2009. The results suggest that EMBI is more stable in dollarized countries and that its evolution influences economic activity in non-dollarized economies; suggesting that investors confidence might be higher in dollarized countries where real and financial economic evolution are less tied than in non-dollarized ones.

Dollarization and the relationship between EMBI and fundamentals Latin American countries

This paper presents empirical evidence on the interrelationship that exists between the evolution of the Emerging Markets Bonds Index (EMBI) and some macroeconomic variables in seven Latin American countries; two of them (Ecuador and Panama), full dollarized. We make use of a Cointegrated Vector framework to analyze the short run effects from 2001 to 2009. The results suggest that EMBI is more stable in dollarized countries and that its evolution influences economic activity in non-dollarized economies; suggesting that investors confidence might be higher in dollarized countries where real and financial economic evolution are less tied than in non-dollarized ones.

Innovatiivisuuden merkitys yrityksessä ja alueellinen innovaatioympäristö

Innovaatioista on viime aikoina tullut entistä tärkeämpiä kilpailukyvyn lähteitä kansantalouksille sekä niiden sisällä toimiville alueille. Innovaatiotoiminta on nostettu yhdeksi keskeisimmistä tekijöistä yritysten sekä alueiden välisessä kilpailussa. Tässä tutkimuksessa selvitetään, ovatko innovatiiviset yritykset menestyneet muita saman toimialan yrityksiä paremmin ja mikä on ollut alueellisen innovaatioympäristön osuus niiden menestyksessä tai menestymättömyydessä? Tutkimuksessa perehdytään ensin aihealueeseen teoriatiedon sekä aiempien tutkimustulosten avulla. Tutkimuksen empiirisessä osuudessa mukana on ollut yhteensä 36 eteläsavolaista yritystä, jotka toimivat yhteensä seitsemällä eri toimialalla. Jokaisessa yrityksessä on käyty paikan päällä tekemässä syvähaastattelu. Yritysten menestystä mitattiin kasvua, kannattavuutta sekä pääomarakennetta kuvaavien tunnuslukujen avulla. Tunnuslukujen perusteella saatuja tuloksia syvennettiin haastattelujen tuloksilla. Tutkimuksessa havaittiin, että innovatiiviset yritykset olivat menestyneet hieman muita yrityksiä paremmin, mutta ero vertailuryhmien välillä ei ollut kovin suuri. Lisäksi havaittiin, ettei innovatiivisuus takaa yritykselle hyvää menestystä, vaan lähinnä antaa vain mahdollisuuden poikkeukselliseen menestymiseen. Innovaatioympäristönä Etelä-Savoa pidettiin yritysten innovaatiotoimintaa tukevana, mutta myös kehitettävää löytyi. Alueellisen innovaatioympäristön tärkeimpinä kehityskohteina nousivat esiin julkisten innovaatiopalveluiden sekä yritysten välisen yhteistyön toimivuus ja innovatiivisen miljöön luominen alueelle.

Privatization, cooperation and costs of solid waste services in small towns

This paper analyzes the cost implications of privatization and cooperation in the provision of solid waste services for a sample of small municipalities. In conducting this empirical analysis, a survey is first designed and administered to municipalities in the Spanish region of Aragon, and then an estimation of the determinants of service costs is undertaken, considering the possible endogeneity of delivery choices. Our findings indicate that cooperation is more effective than privatization in saving costs. Both production forms can enable small municipalities to cut costs by exploiting scale economies. However, the fact that inter-municipal cooperation involves lower transaction costs and is less likely to be affected by competition problems would seem to account for the fact that it is a more effective way of reducing costs.

The farthest need the best. Human capital composition and development-specific economic growth

We provide robust and compelling evidence of the marked impact of tertiary education on the economic growth of less developed countries and of its the relatively smaller impact on the growth of developed ones. Our results argue in favor of the accumulation of high skill levels especially in technologically under-developed countries and, contrary to common wisdom, independently of the fact that these economies might initially produce lower-technology goods or perform technology imitation. Our results are robust to the different measures used in proxying human capital and to the adjustments made for cross-country differences in the quality of education. Country-specific institutional quality, as well as other indicators including legal origin, religious fractionalization and openness to trade have been used to control for the robustness of the results. These factors are also shown to speed up technology convergence thereby confirming previous empirical studies. Our estimates tackle problems of endogeneity by adopting a variety of techniques, including instrumental variables -for both panel and cross-section analyses- and the two-step efficient dynamics system GMM.

Why do municipalities cooperate to provide local public services? An empirical analysis

Intermunicipal cooperation is being increasingly adopted in various countries as a part of local service delivery reforms. This paper draws on survey data from Spain’s municipalities to examine the reasons underpinning the decisions of local governments to engage in intermunicipal cooperation and privatisation. Our empirical analysis indicates that small municipalities prefer to rely on cooperation for reducing costs, while their larger counterparts prefer to privatise the delivery of services. By cooperating, scale economies can be achieved with lower transaction costs and fewer concerns for competition than is the case via private production.

Urban transport governance reform in Barcelona

The unusual mixed public-private structure of the urban bus market in the metropolitan area of Barcelona provides an interesting context in which to analyze the management challenges and opportunities of the partial privatization of public services. Initiatives used by the public regulator to promote competition for contracts, such as short term concessions to private contractors and the removal of entry barriers, have considerable potential for improving efficiency and quality. The growth in the share of routes managed by private firms in recent years shows that privatization is a credible threat that may well stimulate improved performance among public managers. The type of reform implemented in Barcelona is of interest to all metropolitan areas large enough to operate under constant returns to scale regimes, and suitable for potential concessions of routes in segregated areas inside the metropolitan area, so as not to miss out on the benefits of economies of density.

Observation and Observing in Economics

Two themes are generative for revealing and understanding the history of observation in economics. First, we argue for the importance of noting that observation is an activity as well as a result, and second that observation is no more identical with quantification than observing is with measuring. These two themes enable us to discuss different historical dimensions of the ways in which economists have observed their economies and so enlarge our understanding of their observational practices. These problematics especially help in delineating the intricate, multilayered, and active interactions between the observer and the observed that take place in all social science observation, and from which our pictures of the economic world emerge.

Medical nutrition in oncology : potential solution for managing malnutrition in cancer patients in Switzerland

The objective of this study is to: - Describe the cancer related complications, prevalence and economic burden of cancer; - Provide the review of the studies that have been done until now proving that specialized nutrition; can improve quality of life (QoL), shorten the length of hospital stay and reduce overall cost of patients care; - Describe different types of specialized nutritional support and tools/ guidelines used for nutritional screening; - Justify the use of specialized nutrition as an integral part of cancer treatment [Author, p. 6] [Contents] 3. General overview of cancer. 4. Specialized nutritional support and nutritional screening. 4.4 European guidelines for nutritional screening [Screening tools: Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST); Nutritional Risk Screening (NRS-2002); Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA)]. 5. Implementation of nutritional support in Swiss hospitals as an integral part of oncology treatment. 5.1 Nutritional guidelines used in Switzerland. 5.2 Status of prevention of malnutrition in cancer patients in Swiss hospitals. 5.3 Malnutrition in Swiss hospitals: medical costs and potential economies. 5.4 Recommendations for implementation of nutritional guidelines and nutritional support in Swiss hospitals.

Is Transnational Private Regulation Potentially an Effective Means of Promoting Collective Industrial Relations?

This paper asks whether collective industrial relations can be promoted by means other than seeking change in public policy. Recent research points to the increasing significance of transnational private regulation (TPR) in developing economies. There is an emerging consensus that market incentives to improve wages and conditions of work can have a modest positive effect on measurable outcomes like hours of work, and health and safety. However, it appears that TPR has little impact on the capacity of workers to pursue such improvements for themselves via collective action. The paper takes a closer look at the potential of TPR to enhance worker voice and participation. It argues that this potential cannot be properly evaluated without understanding how local actors mobilise the social and political resources that TPR provides. The case studies presented show how different TPR schemes have been used by unions in Africa as a means to pursue the interests of members. The authors found that the scale of the impact of TPR in all of the contexts studied depended almost entirely on the existing capacities and resources of the unions involved. TPR led to the creation of collective industrial relations processes, or helped unions to ensure that certain enterprises participated in existing industrial relations processes, but did virtually nothing to enhance the political and organisational capacity of the unions to influence the outcomes of those processes in terms of wages and conditions of employment. The paper concludes that the potential of TPR to promote the emergence of collective industrial relations systems is very low.

Exploring the link between flexible working and organizational performance

The expansion of flexible work experienced since the 1980s in developed economies is consistent with a more generic trend towards organizational flexibility, which many authors see as essential in order to compete in the dynamic global environment (Volberda, 1998). From this point of view, the changing demands of the environment have forced organizations to seek the ability to adapt rapidly and effectively as a means to be successful or even to survive. In the quest for flexibility, every area of the organization has been scrutinized in order to render it as ¿agile¿ as possible. In the human resources arena, this analysis has led to the definition of diverse ¿flexible working practices¿ (FWP) that describe a wide range of employment practices, which differ from the traditional full-time job with a fixed salary and a permanent contract. These practices have been described using other terms, such as ¿alternative¿ (Polivka, 1996; Powell & Mainiero, 1999), ¿non-standard¿ (Kalleberg, 2000), or ¿atypical¿ (De Grip, Hoevenberg, &m Willems, 1997), which coincide in denoting their divergence from the most traditional forms of employment. This article will show that quite different practices have been embraced by the common term ¿flexible working practices.¿ Subsequently, the results of empirical research regarding the implications for organizational performance of a number of flexible practices will be commented on.

Russian Enterprise Restructuring - the Effect of Privatisation and Market Liberalisation on the Performance of Large Enterprises

The fundamental question in the transitional economies of the former Eastern Europe and Soviet Union has been whether privatisation and market liberalisation have had an effect on the performance of former state-owned enterprises. This study examines the effect of privatisation, capital market discipline, price liberalisation and international price exposure on the restructuring of large Russian enterprises. The performance indicators are sales, profitability, labour productivity and stock market valuations. The results do not show performance differences between state-owned and privatised enterprises. On the other hand, the expansion of the de novo private sector has been strong. New enterprises have significantly higher sales growth, profitability and labour productivity. However, the results indicate a diminishing effect of ownership. The international stock market listing has a significant positive effect on profitability, while the effect of domestic stock market listing is insignificant. The international price exposure has a significant positive increasing effect on profitability and labour productivity. International enterprises have higher profitability only when operating on price liberalised markets, however. The main results of the study are strong evidence on the positive effects of international linkages on the enterprise restructuring and the higher than expected role of new enterprises in the Russian economy.

Regional heterogeneity in wage distributions. Evidence from Spain.

Regional differences in real wages have been shown to be both large and persistent in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as in the economies of other countries. Empirical evidence suggests that wage differentials adjusted for the cost of living cannot only be explained by the unequal spatial distribution of characteristics determining earnings. Rather, average wage gap decomposition reveals the important contribution made by regional heterogeneity in the price assigned to these characteristics. This paper proposes a method for assessing regional disparities in the entire wage distribution and for decomposing the effect of differences across regions in the endowments and prices of the characteristics. The hypothesis forwarded is that the results from previous studies obtained by comparing average regional wages may be partial and nonrobust. Empirical evidence from a matched employer-employee dataset for Spain confirms marked differences in wage distributions between regions, which do not result from worker and firm characteristics but from the increasing role of regional differences in the return to human capital.

Empirical analysis of solid management waste costs: Some evidence from Galicia, Spain

This paper analyses the factors that determine solid waste service costs. The empirical analysis is based on information derived from a survey conducted in a sample of Galician municipalities. The results reveal economies of scale in municipalities of fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, such that cooperation between these municipalities could lead to cost savings. It also appears that private delivery is not cheaper than public delivery. Finally, designating a larger proportion of the total waste volume to recycling does not imply greater costs.