Search

The present paper investigates the ongoing validity of the notion of subordination as selection criteria to allocate the labour protections in the contemporary economic framework. The gig economy is deeply affecting the way of working, transforming the employee in a service provider. This phenomenon is partially due to the progressive shift from a firm-based production model towards a market transaction based one. Although its lawfulness is still unclear, it highlights that the way of working is changing in a way that struggles to fit into the classic legal categories. This is mainly due to the fact that the labour protections are usually bestowed moving from a notion of subordination highly focused on the organisational element. Thus, economic actors suffering from the same economic weakness of the employees, but organisationally independent, struggle to obtain the necessary protections. Moving from those remarks the author suggests rethinking the allocation criteria of the labour protections, adopting economic weakness as the main criterion. This category should encompass all the individuals performing a working activity that are not able to significantly influence its financial outcome. The aim of such reform should be to extend the labour protections to all the subjects needing them. The final part of the paper investigates the possible solutions under the current legal framework. The major finding is that under certain circumstances the gig workers can be qualified as temporary employees not of the platform, but of the contractor. In this scenario, the digital platforms should be deemed as job-placement service providers and, thus, they should comply with the relevant provisions. These include the eventual need of administrative authorisations and the free-of-charge principle, whose violations represent, in several jurisdictions, a criminal offence

In this article, we develop an economic framework for Medicare reform that highlights trade-offs that reform proposals should grapple with, but often ignore. Central to our argument is a tension in administratively set prices, which may improve short-term efficiency but do so at the expense of dynamic efficiency (slowing innovations in new treatments). The smaller the Medicare program is relative to the commercial market, the less important this is; but in a world where there are no market prices or the private sector is very small, the task of setting prices that are dynamically correct becomes more complex. Reforming Medicare should focus on greater incentives to increase competition between Medicare Advantage plans, which necessitates a role for government in ensuring competition; premium support; less use of regulated prices; and less appetite for countless “pay for performance” schemes. We apply this framework to evaluate Medicare for All proposals.

Implementation of reimbursement decisions is important to payers and manufacturers, however, evidence shows that it is highly variable. An economic framework is available to assess its value that has been successfully applied and which has developed over time to produce a more realistic representation of the real world. The framework incorporates the value of information, technology diffusion, and the interaction between the two, to generate a value of implementation. While potentially complex to apply, simple analyses are possible and qualitative lessons identified from its associated literature. Six lessons are identified which highlight the importance of considering pricing, population size, technology diffusion, evidence generation, and cost-effectiveness. Consideration of these issues would help payers and manufacturers to work together in a combined effort to increase the implementation of new technologies and generate greater value to society.

The author makes the argument that many racial disparities in health are rooted in political economic processes that undergird racial residential segregation at the mesolevel—specifically, the neighborhood. The dual mortgage market is considered a key political economic context whereby racially marginalized people are isolated into degenerative ecological environments. A multilevel root-cause conceptual framework, the racism-race reification process ( R3p), is proposed and preliminarily tested to delineate how institutional conditions shape the health of racially marginalized individuals through the reification of race. After reviewing and critiquing the conceptual and theoretical roots of R3p, the key components of the synergistic framework are detailed and applied to clarify extant understandings of the upstream (i.e., macrolevel) factors informing racial health disparities. Using aggregated data from the 1994 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Neighborhood Change Database merged at the mesolevel (i.e., the neighborhood cluster) with microlevel data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, exploratory analysis is presented that links dual mortgage market political economies to ethnoracial residential segregation at the mesolevel and to childhood health inequalities at the microlevel. The author concludes by considering how racial inequality is an artifact of the political economic reality of race and racism manifested from the neighborhood-level down.

When optimising the overall commuting pattern for a city or a region, there are often winners and losers among commuters at the subdivision level. Losers are those who are burdened with longer commutes than before the optimisation. Knowing who or where losers are is of interest to both researchers and policy-makers. The information would help them efficiently locate losers and compensate them. Few, however, pay attention to such losers. By revisiting ‘excess commuting’ in the economic framework, we show that optimising the commuting pattern is comparable to restoring Pareto optimality in commuting. Using Beijing as a case study, we identify and geo-visualise the losers when the city’s bus commuting pattern is optimised. We examine the severity of the loss among the losers, the spatial pattern of the losers and their influencing factors. We find that most losers are located around the epicenter. The severity of the loss is independent of jobs/housing ratio but is associated with the commute distance before the optimisation. Workers whose commute distance is less than the global average are more likely to become losers. Places where losers reside have significantly lower employment density in a few industries than where non-losers reside. A low jobs/housing ratio in individual subareas does not necessarily increase the average trip length of commuters therein. A low jobs/housing ratio of one or several subareas, however, could influence the average trip length of all the commuters in the area. Locating diverse jobs and housing opportunities around or along transit corridors could compensate the losers and reduce the overall commuting cost.

While most studies examine the effect of marketing, innovation, and learning capabilities (often separately) on performance, this study develops a unified model to investigate the combined effect of these capabilities on performance. This study further examines the complementary effect of these capabilities on performance. This study draws on the resource-based view theory to examine 171 manufacturing SMEs. The findings suggest that marketing, innovation, and learning capabilities are positively related to SME performance. In addition, these capabilities interact with one another to create great synergy in achieving SME performance.

Research concerning geographical centers of economic activity has sought to explain patterns of development and interaction in cities. This article presents a new method of defining intraurban centers within a spatial economic framework as a combination of both employment and establishment kernel-smoothed patterns. The method is applied in Phoenix, a postmodern metropolis that has grown by more than a factor of thirty between 1950 and 2005 and is one of the largest and fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States. Centers are found to vary considerably in their sectoral composition and are grouped based on their focus of secondary, retail, or high-order emphasis. A conditional logit model is used to show how each center differentiates with regard to establishment size and sector as well as the importance of center characteristics.

This paper looks at factors explaining gentrification using the neoclassical economic framework. The risk inherent in a move to a lower class neighbourhood is seen as a component of the rent gap that helps preserve working-class neighbourhoods until a tipping point is reached. The factors that affect risk perception and encourage gentrification are placed the context of Ulrich Beck's risk society. The ‘reflexivity’ attribute, the ‘end of fate’—the ‘writing of one's own biography’—bridges the changes in preferences, life style, family formation, and work that contribute to the rise of gentrification.

This article tests the applicability of Treas’s transaction cost economic framework to contexts outside the allocation of bank accounts among married couples in the United States. Using the Japanese Panel Study of Consumer Life, the authors apply logistic regressions among Japanese couples who have joint accounts to predict (a) the chance that the wife has a separate bank account from the joint account and (b) the chance that she has an allowance. The results provide only partial support for the hypotheses based on Treas’s framework. Whereas Treas argues that the potential discontinuity of a marriage has a major influence on a couple’s separate financial arrangement, the study finds no evidence consistent with this argument. Although some of Treas’s hypotheses are well supported when predicting the chance that a Japanese wife has an allowance, the same hypotheses are not supported when predicting the chance that she has a separate bank account.

Among the reforms to Australian industrial relations since the 1980s has been a shift in emphasis away from the traditional centralised system to enterprise-based bargaining. The rhetoric of a decentralised approach to bargaining has focused on negotiated agreements, which result in ‘win-win’ outcomes for the parties involved. However, there is some debate about whether such outcomes are mutually advantageous. In a case study within the manufacturing industry, bargaining processes and outcomes were examined. The bargaining process appeared to follow four distinct stages in which management adopted a flexible approach, enabling the company to adjust strategies as the bargaining proceeded. On examination of the outcomes, a number of problems and issues were revealed in addition to the benefits perceived by management. A major issue related to the fact that management orchestrated the bargaining process so that genuine negotiations could not be said to have occurred. Rather, the process could be best described as pseudo bargaining.

This paper draws together some insights from researchers investigating the sources of firm-level innovation, to provide a basis for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Australia’s national innovation system as it has developed over the last century. This is achieved by synthesizing seven key conclusions from the rapidly growing body of studies of the drivers of innovation, which together offer the potential to ground policy-making in the experience of successful innovating nations.

This paper presents the economic framework supporting the conclusion that US federal programmes, such as the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980, which increase the pay-off from research and development funding (R&D) can be effective agents of economic growth. A review of the literature in this field provides evidence that links investment in research to economic growth. By modifying the traditional Cobb–Douglas production function to include a research and development input, in addition to the capital and labour input, this study defines how multi-factor productivity (MFP) growth is controlled by the interaction of R&D and its commercialization. The combined contribution to MFP growth is defined as the product of the elasticity of output for R&D and the rate of growth of the R&D input. Evidence supporting the importance of the elasticity component for multi-factor productivity growth is presented, and the study then concludes that programmes to increase the elasticity of output for R&D – what is referred to as increasing the pay-off from R&D – may be an effective means of realizing a larger return on the investment in R&D.

The concept of waste is of the utmost importance in determining the regulatory and economic framework for much environmental protection. Its origins, however, reveal a history of considerable disagreement concerning the concretisation of that concept. Recent case law of the European Court of Justice has tended towards the creation of a non-substantive concept of waste. A non-substantive concept of waste carries certain disadvantages and difficulties, including possibly undesirable inclusion of materials subject to recycling/recovery processes. Other elements of the EC concept of waste show divergence between international and European formulations as well as potentially problematic national divergence. The author takes the view that the key environmental problem caused by waste (pollution) is more properly captured by a value concept of waste since this relates directly to the causal mechanisms of pollution. Value concepts of waste are not new and would not include materials undergoing recycling or re-use. Beyond value concepts of waste, there may be grounds for moving away entirely from classification of materials as waste and regulating all substances, waste and non-waste alike, on the basis of their environmental risk.

Pressures on Australian industry for improved international competitiveness have been met with a shift towards decentralized wage determination based on productivity at the enterprise level. The principle of linking wage increases to productivity has received widespread support from government, employer and. union organizations. However, the identification of measures and methods suitable for enterprise wage determination is not well developed. In this paper, an eclectic approach to productivity measzcrement using performance and behavioural indicators is used to develop a model for enterprise wage determination. This model is tested using data collected on key performance and behavioural indicators from one large firm in Tasmania, Australia.

The new human resources (HR) function represents a move away from an administrative, reactionary role towards a more strategic, proactive, planning position. The current research surveyed members o...

Normally the studies concerning the development of pension funds focus on the quantitative dimensions of the phenomenon. Supplementary pensions include a plurality of instruments and various types of pensions. Thus to modify this situation, we need redirect reflection towards a more qualitative approach. Quantitative approach is the consequence of the existence of an ideological clash between a liberal and a social view of welfare problems. Social and economic framework has been modified in the last decades and so there is no reason for keeping the terms of the conflict unaltered. It suggests the need to develop an empirical and flexible approach to the matter. Pension funds will be one of the pivot of a mixed pension system. involving both public and private players with capitalisation and pay-as-you-go system. Defining this process requires a major planning effort by the social partners. Pension funds offer opportunities for shifting relations between social parties onto a level which has never been achieved, but at the same time they require a long-term strategy which also presupposes that different national situations will move towards convergence. The experience of the European Union may perhaps offer a suitable occasion for achieving this objective.

This article provides an economic perspective on the cross-country patterns of intellectual property protection and commodity trade, and the linkages between these patterns. The objectives are to describe the characteristics of countries in relation to the strength of their intellectual property protection and to describe the relationship between the strength of country protection of intellectual property and U.S. exports to these countries. An economic framework for thinking about these relationships is provided, and data are examined for their consistency with the economic interpretations. Findings show that country protection of intellectual property is positively related to the level of country development and that U.S. bilateral exports are positively related to the strength of intellectual property protection in the recipient importing country.

As the world moves towards the twenty-first century, developing nations are confronted with a complex and challenging paradigmatic shift in the way that technological process is becoming embedded in the globalised economic framework of development. There is a perceptible shift taking place from economic power being derived from nationally owned production facilities to economic power being derived from the national location of high value-added activities. As developing countries are opening up, there is a greater incidence, than ever before, to transfer advanced technological processes and know-how to the developing partners as a part of the global networking strategies. As opposed to the earlier strategies, these new networking strategies seek to encourage establishment of locally based research, development and design facilities to meet both the local and inter- ndtional demand for increasingly sophisticated spectrum of products. Developing nations stand to capture and gain from these advantages provided their structures are equipped to bed these new knowledge capacities into their national technology strategies. There is a series of various factor advantages behind these new demands of economic competition. At the heart of capturing value-added advantage from the new economic and technological order lies the whole spectrum of reordering the S&T skill base including the educational system which seeks to develop more strategically informed inter- and multidisciplinary S&T programmes. Entirely different principles of science and technology policies are implied which focus on the development and flow of people embedding national SBcT advance into aligned social and organisational strategies.

This article reviews major developments in employee-employer relations during 1994, concentrating on events that illustrate the directions being taken in Australia. It looks at the attitudes to enterprise bargaining being developed as part of the new system, and contrasts them to some decisions and activities that seem to foster the continuance of a centralized system. The impact of the new industrial relations system is examined as well as the role of the various players—particularly the role of unions in the eyes of the Industrial Relations Commission. This is followed by a brief review of influencial events in the states, and then by a discussion of CRA's action at Comalco to move all workers to staff conditions through individual contracts.

Effective climate change policies, such as the introduction of userfees on carbon dioxide emissions, would have great implications for international economic competitiveness. Such policies can only hope to succeed in tandem with international trade rules that implicitly support them. This contribution proposes the establishment of a joint negotiating group composed of trade and climate negotiators as a way to better address the global warming problem in conjunction with the development of appropriate international economic framework conditions. It is argued that treatment of this issue within the framework of existing institutions alone will not result in the broad-based dialogue and highest-level involvement likely required for successfully ad dressing the climate change/trade interlinkage.

The cost of workplace accidents is only partly covered by insurance. The real cost is at least six times the annual workers compensation bill, which gives a more realistic idea of the size of the problem facing Australian business. Occupational health and safety professionals can achieve only limited results without the full support of top management. It is argued that if man agers had a greater awareness of the legal consequences and cost penalties of work hazards which result in accidents, occupational health and safety pro fessionals would find their work easier. A strategy is given for changing management attitudes.

This paper examines planning delay and identifies the difficulty in establishing an appropriate definition and measure of delay. It then outlines an economic framework for the analysis of delay costs, distinguishing between private costs and the various elements of social cost. It shows that the costs of delay are contingent upon the restrictiveness of planning and should be assessed in relation to the benefits of planning control. Available estimates of delay cost are identified, but are shown to be deficient even as measures of the private cost of delay. Various suggestions are made for the improvement of existing approaches, but it is concluded that the assessment of private and social delay costs requires case-study research which distinguishes between property sectors, locations and different points in the cycle of property development.

This paper summarises the major trends which produced a crisis in the Brazilian Housing Finance System (SFH) during the first half of the 1980s. It constitutes a first effort to contextualise the question within the broader economic framework of recent Brazilian development. It holds the thesis that the crisis was inevitable, due to both the SFH's original operational format and several inconsistent measures adopted piecemeal according to political and economic convenience.

In this paper a general equilibrium model of an intraurban system is presented in which the services sector is explicitly introduced. By restricting the location of the services sector to the city center, three possible land-use patterns are derived from the model: centralized, decentralized, and integrated. By applying the new technique of catastrophe theory into this new urban economic framework, it is shown that the spatial structure which will dominate the intraurban space will depend on the values of two parameters, representing the income level and the unit cost of transporting the central services. When these parameters take certain critical values the urban system may undergo catastrophic structural transitions from equilibrium to disequilibrium or the reverse.

Under the influence of two important developments–major deterioration of public refuse collection in some large cities and growth of a vigorous private solid waste management sector–important changes in the organization of urban refuse collection appear imminent. Since refuse collection has some economic characteristics of public utilities, and because it is a service bearing importantly on public health and safety, a regulated monopoly structure has been advocated for providing this service under private management. This paper analyzes several different modes of organizing refuse collection and concludes that a competitive economic framework is both feasible and desirable. The suggested competitive arrangement, involving direct competition for accounts in high-density areas and competition for contracts in low-density areas, provides for both private profit-making and public nonprofit participation.

The economic framework is often very useful in the analysis of energy – environment problems, but it remains inadequate in a number of significant ways. After a brief review of basic theoretical principles, particularly as applied in cost – benefit analysis, some of the limitations of the economic approach are discussed with reference to selected examples in the energy – environment field. The merits of several alternative approaches to problem analysis and policy formulation are also briefly considered.

In the past few years there has been a considerable shift in the proportion of resources devoted to more operational or manage ment-oriented approaches to criminological research and devel opment. To a large extent this shift, with a few notable exceptions, has been accomplished by the influx of researchers or practitioners from outside the ranks of traditional criminological researchers. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a lack of real under standing of both new and existing methods and approaches and, therefore, a reduction in the degree of acceptance and cooperation between the two groups. By presenting an "economic" approach to a subject of past and present interest and relevance, namely "The Cost of Crime," this paper attempts to begin to alleviate this problem of communi cation as well as to summarize the work done in this area to date. The paper first deals with problem definitions within an economic framework and then proceeds to develop economic guidelines relevant for a policy-maker in the Criminal Justice System. In so doing, it also lays a theoretical structure for evalu ating existing or conducting future research into the cost of crime.