Framing the Sources of Image of a Local Area through Outcome-Based Dynamic Performance Management

This article investigates the place image concept. It aims to frame major factors impacting on the image of a local area and to suggest associated measures. The adoption of a dynamic approach enables the exploration of four major factors: the level of tourism development, the fit of contextual attributes, the strength of identity, and the level of synergy between public and private sectors. The emerging conceptual model identifies twelve performance indicators driving interdependencies between outputs and outcomes. Such a model eventually is applied to the “Taormina-Etna district” – located in Sicily (Italy) – with the intent to discussing its effectiveness.

     

生态村发展及其生态整体设计

生态村（Ecovillage）作为一种新兴的可持续社区模式在20世纪末期在欧美发达国家蓬勃兴起。介绍了生态村的产生背景、概念和发展特征,在相关研究的基础上,基于以社区精神为核心的社会、经济、环境整体可持续性关系,提出了生态村的“生态整体设计”体系。     

Contemplative Methods Meet Social Sciences: Back to Human Experience as It Is

The aim of this paper is to trace a pathway connecting contemplative knowledge and practices with the social sciences. Contemplative knowledge and practices offer material for reflection in social science even concerning their very foundation. I'll found an opportunity for meshing our disciplinary tools with this knowledge as I introduced it in a health promotion program. The result will be a transdisciplinary confluence of different lines of inquiry contributing to a new perspective of self and social action. First of all I will give a definition of contemplative knowledge and practices. Then, I will make a bridge between the contemplative approach and the social sciences, showing the contribution that symbolic interactionism can play. I will illustrate the perspective drawing on an action research program called Auriga aimed at smoking cessation and reduction among health professionals. The aim of this paper is focused on the specification of the conceptual background in which such kind of program has been developed. Finally, I outline some implications it could represent for what might be called transformative sociology. I believe that contemplative knowledge could contribute to disentangle some of the unanswered questions and concerns in the social sciences, once they dismiss for a while their scientistic perspective. The secular redefinition of tools mainly belonging to the wisdom traditions represents an innovation that can reshape what we intend by the self and experience, contributing to what is called the “social transformation from within,” a pragmatic and wise approach to change at any level.     

Kuznets Prize for Makoto Hirazawa and Akira Yakita

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Kuznets Prize for Makoto Hirazawa and Akira Yakita     

The Role of Family Ties in the Labour Market. An Interpretation Based on Efficiency Wage Theory

By casual empiricism, it seems that many firms take explicit account of the family ties connecting workers, often hiring individuals belonging to the same family or passing jobs on from parents to their children. This paper makes an attempt to explain this behaviour by introducing the assumption of altruism within the family and supposing that agents maximize a family utility function rather than an individual one. This hypothesis has been almost ignored in the analysis of the relationship between employers and employees. The implications of this assumption in the efficiency wage models are explored: by employing members of the same family, firms can use a (credible) harsher threat — involving a sanction for all the family’s members in case of one member’s shirking — that allows them to pay a lower efficiency wage. On the other hand, workers who accept this agreement exchange a reduction in wage with an increase in their probability of being employed: this can be optimal in a situation of high unemployment. Moreover, the link between parents and children allows the firm to follow a strategy that solves the problem of an individual’s finite time horizon by its making use of the family’s reputation.     

The Cost of Well-Being

It is by now common knowledge that in switching from GDP to alternative, multidimensional, measures of collective well-being one can provide a better account of a country’s socio-economic conditions. Such a gain, however, comes at the price of losing output-to-input type of link between well-being and the resources necessary to make it available. Since well-being measures are not meant to be only an exercise in documentation, but also to inform policies and priorities, we propose a method to build a measure of well-being in the form of a single index, as for GDP, which takes into account: (1) the social and environmental costs, not considered in the GDP, and (2) the use of conventional resources (capital and labour), not considered in the currently available multidimensional measures of well-being. We use a Data Envelopment Analysis type of model, integrated with Principal Component Analysis, to evaluate OECD countries’ relative efficiency in providing well-being. Our results show that the costs of producing well-being have a large and significant impact on the resulting index of well-being. Therefore, high efficiency in providing well-being and high income cannot be considered a proxy to each other. In addition, it is shown that countries react differently to the different costs of well-being: poor countries are, on average, more efficient in terms of conventional inputs (labour and capital), while rich countries have higher efficiency indices relative to social and environmental costs. The close to zero correlation between GDP and well-being indices for rich countries provides new support to the “Easterlin paradox”.     

Expectable Changes in the System of National Accounts

Abstract. The Statistical Commission of the United Nations will approve in 1993 a revised version of the System of National Accounts (SNA). According to a preliminary draft - carried out jointly by experts of UN, EUROSTAT. OECD, IMF and the World Bank - the SNA will maintain the main concepts, classifications and accounting framework: the SNA and the European System of Integrated Economic Accounts (ESA) will converge. Some changes could enlarge the size of the GDP, above all the inclusion of software and some other nonmaterial assets in the capital formation. GDP could also encompass the value of the production of criminal business such as gambling, cigarette smuggling, drug trade and illegal entertainment. Balance sheets will be presented beside the accounts of production, income distribution and use, accumulation and finance. The accounting framework will be enlarged with satellite accounts to enlighten more deeply the environmental economy, the income distribution, the health service, the welfare state. By and large, the new System of National Accounts will continue to serve as a tool for measuring the economy's performance.     

以生态文明观发展小城镇的都市农业

当前中国小城镇都市农业存在诸多问题:农用耕地不断减少,土地资源浪费严重;农业污染严重;农业劳动力素质、收入偏低;区位优势和产业优势明显,但交通运输能力有限;农业资金投入不足,缺少相应的政策法规指导;农业旅游业档次不高,缺乏特色等.因此要加强土地保护和综合利用;保持生态环境的可持续发展;重视人才培养,全面提升整体素质;开发农业旅游业,加强基础设施建设;增加农业资金和科技投入;制定规划法规加强管理,挖掘地方特色.     

Country institutional environments and international strategy: A review and analysis of the research

We review and analyze the growing body of literature that addresses the institutional context of international strategy. By examining articles in eleven major journals from January 2008 to July 2020, we identify six major categories of international strategies and implementation approaches: market entry and internationalization, political strategies, multinational technology and innovation, multinational corporate social responsibility, multinational headquarters and subsidiary relationships, and international human resources management. A parallel analysis of the relevant institutional variables categorizes institutions into eight types: economic institutions, political institutions, regulatory institutions, normative institutions, administrative institutions, cultural/cognitive institutions, demographic institutions, and knowledge institutions. These eight categories allow us to contextualize the institutional environment in which the six international strategies and implementation approaches are employed. Our review identifies important progress in international strategy research that has yielded a greater understanding of institutional impact on multinational activities. Yet, it also reveals that many areas of international strategy research remain fragmented, highlighting the need for future research and suggesting new directions for such investigations. Our analysis concludes by identifying knowledge gaps in each of the six strategy categories and making a series of suggestions for relevant future research.     

The relevance of educational poverty in Europe: Determinants and remedies

This paper explores the degree of educational poverty in European countries using data from OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This research adopts the class of additive multidimensional poverty measures proposed by Alkire & Foster (2011) and investigates the degree of educational poverty in terms of incidence, breadth, depth and severity. Also, we analyse the impact of students’ characteristics and school-level factors on the probability of being educational poor in various learning dimensions. The findings reveal that between 2006 and 2015 the incidence of educational poverty became more relevant in many European countries, while most of them experienced a reduction of poverty depth and severity. Therefore, several policy scenarios are simulated in order to highlight the school factors that can be activate to alleviate the risk of educational poverty in the European countries that experienced the highest incidence of educational poor student.