poverty alleviation as business strategy evaluating commitments of frontrunner multinational corporations summary in the debate on how to combat poverty the positive role of mncs is frequently mentioned nowadays although doubts and criticism remain facing this societal debate mncs feel the pressure to formulate a position this paper analyzes mncs policies on their poverty alleviating potential frontrunner mncs turn out not to be very outspoken especially not on those issues that have the largest potential to help alleviate poverty placed in the context of other mncs behavior a sector coordinated morality seems important which means that a meso approach to poverty alleviation needs to complement the current global macro and individual company micro focus

civil society collaboration with business bringing empowerment back in abstract strategic partnerships between civil society organizations csos and businesses are widely promoted as important new strategies to encourage corporate citizenship in the global south this study tested these claims by examining 10 cases of collaboration between csos and businesses in brazil india and south africa findings suggest a sobering view of the benefits that civil society organizations and their constituencies can expect from collaboration development impacts may be more likely in sectors clearly linked to business interests such as education and employment generation goals of organizational capacity building are more likely to be satisfied than those of citizen empowerment csos and businesses reap mutual benefits from collaboration but csos tend to shoulder more of the costs businesses can dominate collaborative decision making with negative results for sustainability the paper offers a number of propositions to guide further research and inform collaborative practice empowered civil society collaboration with business is suggested as a more appropriate model than strategic partnership for csos pursuing sustainable development

optimal production run length and warranty period for an imperfect production system under selling price dependent on warranty period abstract this paper extends the extant literature to consider that the selling price of the product sold with warranty policy is a function of the length of the warranty period for an imperfect production system a product under a free replacement repair warranty policy is considered and the lifetime distribution of the product is assumed to be exponentially distributed we seek to maximize the total profit per item through optimal determinations of the production run length and the warranty period based on the proposed mathematical model we will derive some lemmas and the propositions to carry out an efficient solution procedure to determine the optimal warranty period and production run length the numerical examples are given to illustrate the features of the proposed maximizing profit model and to show all of the possible cases of the solution procedure

irreversible investment and knightian uncertainty when firms make a decision about irreversible investment they may not have complete confidence about their perceived probability measure describing future uncertainty they may think other probability measures perturbed from the original one are also possible such uncertainty characterized by not a single probability measure but a set of probability measures is called knightian uncertainty the effect of knightian uncertainty on the value of irreversible investment opportunity is shown to be drastically different from that of traditional uncertainty in the form of risk specifically an increase in knightian uncertainty decreases the value of investment opportunity while an increase in risk increases it

how to deliver foreign aid the case of projects governed by the spanish international agency summary international agencies use two alternative modes of governance to deliver international aid projects under bilateral agreements with recipient governments in house or through incumbent ngos through the lenses of institutional and transaction cost economics this article examines 95 international aid projects delivered in morocco and ecuador by the spanish international agency finding that those projects delivered in house present different features than those projects outsourced through incumbent ngos specifically international aid projects delivered in house involve important investments in specific assets are much more complex and can turn the public agency into a hostage of its own disbursement

the real effects of short selling constraints we use a regulatory experiment regulation sho that relaxes short selling constraints on a random sample of u s stocks to test whether capital market frictions have an effect on stock prices and corporate decisions we find that an increase in short selling activity causes prices to fall and that small firms react to these lower prices by reducing equity issues and investment these results not only provide evidence that short selling constraints affect asset prices but also confirm that short selling activity has a causal impact on financing and investment decisions

can the world cut poverty in half how policy reform and effective aid can meet international development goals abstract poverty in the developing world will decline by about one half by 2015 if the trends of the 1990s persist most of this poverty reduction will occur in asia however while poverty will decline only slightly in africa effective aid could make a contribution to greater poverty reduction in lagging regions even more potent would be significant policy reform in these countries we develop a model of efficient aid in which flows respond to policy improvements that create a better environment for poverty reduction and effective aid we investigate scenarios of policy reform and efficient aid that point the way to how the world can cut poverty in half in every major region

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

product warranty management iii a review of mathematical models a variety of mathematical models have been developed to study different aspects of warranty in this paper we carry out a comprehensive review of these models by classifying them into three categories based on consumer manufacturer and public policy decision maker perspectives

determination of price and warranty length for a normal lifetime distributed product abstract in this paper a decision model is presented for manufacturing firms to determine the optimal price and warranty length to maximize profits based on the pre determined life cycle we consider the free renewal warranty policy under which failed items are renewed free of charge until a specified total operating time has been achieved the expected number of renewals based on the warranty length is derived for a normal lifetime distributed product and the total cost of production and providing warranty is evaluated a solution approach using the maximum principle is described and is applied to two specific types of markets the first type of market considers the case of static sales rate function with a positive discount rate and the second type of market considers the case of separable sales rate function with a zero discount rate a sensitivity analysis is conducted to evaluate the effect of model parameters on the optimal solution some conclusions are drawn based on the sensitivity analysis

targeting aid to the needy and deserving nothing but promises by reallocating aid to where it is needed most and where a productive use is most likely donors could help alleviate poverty in developing countries the rhetoric of donors suggests that this insight has increasingly shaped the allocation of aid we assess the poverty and policy orientation of bilateral and multilateral aid in different ways in addition to presenting stylised facts based on bivariate correlations we apply a tobit model that captures both altruistic and selfish donor motives we find little evidence supporting the view that the targeting of aid has improved significantly most donors provide higher aid to relatively poor countries but so far the fight against poverty has not resulted in a stronger focus on needy recipients with favourable local conditions the estimation results reveal that the policy orientation of aid critically depends on how local conditions are measured in general however donors appear to be less policy oriented than poverty oriented the response of donors to changing institutional and policy conditions in recipient countries turns out to be fairly weak we reject the proposition that multilateral aid is clearly superior to bilateral aid in terms of rewarding poor countries with better policies and institutions

determining the optimal warranty price based on the producer s and customers risk preferences we propose a warranty model for the free replacement fixed period warranty policy that determines the optimal warranty price for a given warranty period we assume a constant failure rate for the product constant repair costs throughout the warranty period and a producer s and customers risk aversion for future repair costs using the exponential utility function and the gamma failure rate distribution we derive the decision model that maximizes the producer s certainty profit equivalent furthermore the sensitivity of the optimal warranty price is analyzed with a numerical example with respect to such factors as 1 the producer s and customers risk preferences 2 their perceptions about the product failure rate 3 the customers loyalty to the original producer in repairing failed products and 4 the customers repair price

keeping a low profile what determines the allocation of aid by non governmental organizations ngos play an important role in international development cooperation but the allocation of ngo aid has rarely been mapped let alone explained based on a representative dataset for 61 important ngos from various oecd countries we analyze the targeting of ngo aid across a large number of recipient countries by jointly considering major determinants of ngo aid in a multivariate regression framework while our results show that ngos are more active in the neediest countries we reject the hypothesis that ngos complement official aid through engaging in so called difficult institutional environments rather they tend to replicate the location choices of official backdonors moreover ngos follow other ngos so that aid gets clustered finally ngos select recipient countries with common traits related to religion or colonial history taken together our findings suggest that ngos keep a low profile rather than distinguishing themselves from other donors and trying to excel under risky conditions

an integrated production inventory model with imperfect production processes and weibull distribution deterioration under inflation abstract this study develops an integrated production and inventory model from the perspectives of both the manufacturer and the retailer the model assumes a varying rate of deterioration partial backordering inflation imperfect production processes and multiple deliveries the elapsed time until the production process shift is assumed to be arbitrarily distributed the discounted cash flow and classical optimization technique are used to derive the optimal solution a numerical example including the sensitivity analysis is given to validate the results of the production inventory model the integrated decision results in lower optimal joint cost compared with an independent decision by the manufacturer and the retailer

an innovative public private partnership new approach to development abstract this paper is focused on the development of new services by nonprofit organizations for groups of companies within a particular sector in industry it is based on a case study of an actual implementation by united nations industrial development organization unido in collaboration with a number of other organizations to upgrade the capabilities of automotive component suppliers in india to enable them to supply to world class manufacturers we draw upon the traditional literature available on new product and service development for firms introducing new products and services for maximizing profit and contrast those approaches with the approach adopted by nonprofit organizations we also carry out a comparative analysis between unido s partnership model and the traditional model to highlight the innovation aspects and advantages of the former from the developmental perspective an attempt is also made to illustrate the pre formation formation and post formation challenges faced by the new cooperation model that envisages the participation of public and private partners

market based corrective actions many economic agents take corrective actions based on information inferred from market prices of firms securities examples include directors and activists intervening in the management of firms and bank supervisors taking actions to improve the health of financial institutions we provide an equilibrium analysis of such situations in light of a key problem if agents use market prices when deciding on corrective actions prices adjust to reflect this use and potentially become less revealing we show that market information and agents information are complementary and discuss measures that can increase agents ability to learn from market prices the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please email journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

aid allocation and poverty reduction the authors derive a poverty efficient allocation of aid and compare it with actual aid allocations they build the poverty efficient allocation in two stages first they use new world bank ratings of 20 different aspects of national policy to establish the current relationship between aid policies and growth onto that they add a mapping from growth to poverty reduction which reflects the level and distribution of income they compare the effects of using headcount and poverty gap measures of poverty they find the actual allocation of aid to be radically different from the poverty efficient allocation in the efficient allocation for a given of poverty aid tapers in with policy reform in the actual allocation aid tapers out with reform in the efficient allocation aid is targeted disproportionately to countries with severe poverty and adequate polices the type of country where 74 percent of the world s poor live in the actual allocation such countries receive a much smaller share of aid 56 percent than their share of the world s poor with the present allocation aid is effective in sustainably lifting about 30 million people a year out of absolute poverty with a poverty efficient allocation this would increase to about 80 million people even with political constraints introduced to keep allocations for india and china constant poverty reduction would increase to about 60 million reallocating aid is politically difficult but it may be considerably less difficult than quadrupling aid budgets which is what the authors estimate would be necessary to achieve the same impact on poverty reduction with existing aid allocations

too close for comfort the impact of official aid on nongovernmental organizations abstract in promoting a new policy agenda bilateral and multilateral donor agencies are keen to finance nongovernmental organisations ngos and grassroots organizations gros on the grounds of their economic efficiency and contribution to good governance this paper reviews the impact of this trend on ngo gro programming performance legitimacy and accountability if finds that much of the case for emphasizing the role of ngos gros rests on ideological grounds rather than empirical verification in addition though the evidence is inconclusive there are signs that greater dependence on official funding may compromise ngo gro performance in key areas distort accountability and weaken legitimacy

is corporate aid targeted to poor and deserving countries a case study of nestle s aid allocation summary empirical evidence on the targeting of private aid is largely lacking even though corporate donors are an increasingly important source of aid we contribute to closing this gap by performing a case study of nestle the allocation of nestle s aid is compared to that of swiss oda and ngo aid testing for both altruistic and selfish aid motivations we conclude that nestle s aid clearly lacks focus in terms of targeting poor countries which appears to be the downside of the strong link between commercial presence and aid moreover according to our tobit estimations nestle grants more aid to recipient countries with stronger democratic but also more corrupt institutions

do corrupt governments receive less foreign aid critics of foreign aid programs argue that these funds often support corrupt governments and inefficient bureaucracies supporters argue that foreign aid can be used to reward good governments this paper documents that there is no evidence that less corrupt governments receive more foreign aid on the contrary according to some measures of corruption more corrupt governments receive more aid also we could not find any evidence that an increase in foreign aid reduces corruption in summary the answer to the question posed in the title is no

dynamic pricing and warranty policies for products with fixed lifetime abstract we consider a repairable product with known market entry and departure times a warranty policy is offered with product purchase under which a customer can have a failed item repaired free of charge in the warranty period it is assumed that customers are heterogeneous in their risk attitudes toward uncertain repair costs incurred after the warranty expires the objective is to determine a joint dynamic pricing and warranty policy for the lifetime of the product which maximizes the manufacturer s expected profit in the first part of the analysis we consider a linearly decreasing price function and a constant warranty length we first study customers purchase patterns under several different pricing strategies by the manufacturer and then discuss the optimal pricing and warranty strategy in the second part we assume that the warranty length can be altered once during the product lifetime in developing a joint pricing and warranty policy numerical studies show that a dynamic warranty policy can significantly outperform a fixed length warranty policy