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In the 21st century, multilingual tools are gaining importance as increasingly diverse user groups from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds seek access to equally diverse pieces of information. The authors of this paper believe that most current forms of multilingual information access are inadequate for this role, and that a new form of multilingual thesaurus is required. The core of this paper introduces their pilot thesaurus InfoDEFT as a possible model for new online thesauri, which are semantically structured, encyclopedic and multilingual. The authors conclude that while the manual construction of such thesauri is labour intensive and hence costly, pilot thesauri can be used as training sets for artificial learning programmes, thus increasing their volume considerably at relatively little extra cost.

Corruption was a serious problem in Singapore during the British colonial period and especially after the Japanese Occupation (February 1942–August 1945) mainly because of the lack of political will to curb it by the incumbent governments. In contrast, the People’s Action Party (PAP) government, which assumed office in June 1959 after winning the May 1959 general election, demonstrated its political will with the enactment of the Prevention of Corruption Act (POCA) in June 1960, which strengthened the capacity of the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) to combat corruption effectively. Indeed, Singapore’s success in curbing corruption is reflected in its consistently high scores on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) from 1995 to 2012 as the least corrupt country in Asia. Singapore was ranked first with Denmark and New Zealand in the 2010 CPI with a score of 9.30. Similarly, Singapore has been ranked first in the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) annual surveys on corruption from 1995 to 2013. Why has Singapore succeeded in minimizing the problem of corruption when many other Asian countries have failed to do so? What lessons can these countries learn from Singapore’s experience in combating corruption? This chapter addresses these two questions by first describing Singapore’s favorable policy context, followed by an identification of the major causes of corruption during the British colonial period and Japanese Occupation, and an evaluation of the PAP government’s anti-corruption strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive review of the monetary model of exchange rate determination which is the main theoretical framework on analyzing exchange rate behavior over the last 40 years. Furthermore, we test the flexible price monetarist variant and the sticky price Keynesian variant of the monetary model. We conduct our analysis employing a sample of 14 advanced economies using annual data spanning the period 1880–2012.

The theoretical background of the paper relies on the monetary model to the exchange rate determination. We provide a thorough econometric analysis using a battery of unit root and cointegration testing techniques. We test the price-flexible monetarist version and the sticky-price version of the model using annual data from 1880 to 2012 for a group of industrialized countries.

We provide strong evidence of the existence of a nonlinear relationship between exchange rates and fundamentals. Therefore, we model the time-varying nature of this relationship by allowing for Markov regime switches for the exchange rate regimes. Modeling exchange rates within this context can be motivated by the fact that the change in regime should be considered as a random event and not predictable. These results show that linearity is rejected in favor of an MS-VECM specification which forms statistically an adequate representation of the data. Two regimes are implied by the model; the one of the estimated regimes describes the monetary model whereas the other matches in most cases the constant coefficient model with wrong signs. Furthermore it is shown that depending on the nominal exchange rate regime in operation, the adjustment to the long run implied by the monetary model of the exchange rate determination came either from the exchange rate or from the monetary fundamentals. Moreover, based on a Regime Classification Measure, we showed that our chosen Markov-switching specification performed well in distinguishing between the two regimes for all cases. Finally, it is shown that fundamentals are not only significant within each regime but are also significant for the switches between the two regimes.

The results are of interest to practitioners and policy makers since understanding the evolution and determination of exchange rates is of crucial importance. Furthermore, our results are linked to forecasting performance of exchange rate models.

The present analysis extends previous analyses on exchange rate determination and it provides further support in favor of the monetary model as a long-run framework to understand the evolution of exchange rates.

Classical unit root tests are known to suffer from potentially crippling size distortions, and a range of procedures have been proposed to attenuate this problem, including the use of bootstrap procedures. It is also known that the estimating equation’s functional form can affect the outcome of the test, and various model selection procedures have been proposed to overcome this limitation. In this chapter, the authors adopt a model averaging procedure to deal with model uncertainty at the testing stage. In addition, the authors leverage an automatic model-free dependent bootstrap procedure where the null is imposed by simple differencing (the block length is automatically determined using recent developments for bootstrapping dependent processes). Monte Carlo simulations indicate that this approach exhibits the lowest size distortions among its peers in settings that confound existing approaches, while it has superior power relative to those peers whose size distortions do not preclude their general use. The proposed approach is fully automatic, and there are no nuisance parameters that have to be set by the user, which ought to appeal to practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of two types of reciprocity (restricted reciprocity and generalized reciprocity) on customers’ trust in social commerce (s-commerce) and trust performance (purchase intention and word-of-mouth intention). Furthermore, this study examines how individual and contextual moderators (personal shopping experience and community shared language) could impact the trust development process.

This study adopted a survey method and obtained data from 287 users in a customer-to-customer (C2C) s-commerce platform. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the research hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that two types of reciprocity positively affect trust in s-commerce. Customers’ trust performance is significantly affected by trust in s-commerce. Additionally, shopping experience in s-commerce is found to positively moderate the relationship between restricted reciprocity and trust in s-commerce.

The findings help to understand the nature and role of reciprocity in influencing trust and trust-related behaviors in the context of C2C s-commerce. The research also helps to explore the individual and contextual moderators that impact the effect of reciprocity on trust development.

The results offer a comprehensive view of trust building strategies for s-commerce practitioners, including shoppers, vendors and managers of s-commerce platforms.

This study is among the first few research studies that offers a theory-based conceptualization of reciprocity in C2C s-commerce and provides empirical support for the impact of reciprocity on customers’ trust in C2C s-commerce. In addition, this study devises a broader view of reciprocity based on restricted and generalized exchange principle to represent the interaction of vendor–shopper and shopper–shopper, respectively.

The aim of this study is to examine whether China’s exchange rate follows an equilibrium process and consequently to answer the question of whether or not China’s international competitiveness fluctuates in consistency with equilibrium.

The theoretical background of the paper relies on the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis, while the econometric methodology is mainly based on a nonlinear two-regime Threshold Autoregressive (TAR) unit root test.

The main finding is that China’s price competitiveness was not constantly following a disequilibrium process. The two-regime threshold model shows that PPP equilibrium was confirmed in periods of relatively high – compared to the estimated threshold – rate of real yuan appreciation. Moreover, it is implied that the fixed exchange rate regime cannot ensure external balance since it can neither establish equilibrium in the foreign exchange market, nor confirm that China’s international competitiveness adjustment follows an equilibrium process.

The results do not imply that China acts as a currency manipulator. However, a main policy implication of the paper is that China should continue appreciating the yuan to establish external balance.

This paper is the first which accounts for a nonlinear two-regime process toward a threshold, which is defined to be the rate of change in China’s international competitiveness. Consequently, the paper draws attention to the role of China’s international competiveness in accepting the PPP hypothesis.

The starting‐point of the article is the inconsistency between the established practice of acceptance in many cases, of economic policy (i.e. progressive taxation, national insurance policies) and the theoretical rejection of interpersonal comparisons of utility who see it as an unscientific value judgement. The inconsistency is explained by identifying three groups of theorists: (1) those who thought of comparability as a value judgement and unacceptable for economic policy considerations (positivists), (2) those who agreed with the positivists, on the normative nature of comparability but accepted it as a basis for economic policy, and (3) those who thought of it as part of a scientific economics. The implication was that, despite the dominance of positivist methodology in other sub‐fields, the historical experience points to the difficulty of applying positivist methodology to the issue of comparability. If the inconsistency is thus due to the inappropriateness of the positivist approach, the only possible solution is the explicit abandonment of this approach at least in matters related to the collective aspects of economics.

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) is certainly one of the latest buzzwords and is the subject of great interest and also great controversy. Organizations need to shake themselves out of complacency to close competitive gaps and achieve superior performance standards ‐ the reason why many have embarked on huge BPR projects. In view of the high risks associated with radical change, there are, however, many problems associated with BPR. For some BPR is going off the rails before it is properly understood, and many BPR exercises are not delivering the goods. Sometimes, organizations are expecting “quick fixes”, thus displaying their lack of understanding of a complex system. It is unreasonable to expect quick results when so much change is involved, especially when these business processes involve not only machines, but also people. Many believe, such as Mumford, that the management of change is the largest task in re‐engineering. Many people perceive re‐engineering as a threat to both their methods and their jobs. Owing to this recognition, many authors concentrate on the need to take account of the human side of re‐engineering, in particular the management of organizational change.

A fundamental change in the planning and delivery of new housing projects has taken place in the last years, with the focus shifting towards adding value to projects based on a better understanding of housing preferences. This issue becomes even more critical when it is intended to the provision of affordable houses for low and middle income groups. This paper describes a model designed to help developers and housing users to achieve their expectations regarding quality, affordability and including also reasonable profits. Developed through a “methodological pluralism”, this study identifies people-oriented variables and assumptions. The model was developed based on a case study in the city of Guayaquil-Ecuador, and information obtained from field work research was used to test it. The study examines implications and limitations of the model for inclusion of housing preferences considering local conditions and cultural values. The different parts of the model along with data requirements for each part are described. The paper concludes with findings regarding the identification of most preferred attributes by housing users and the use of alternatives methods to incorporate additional value into projects, translated into more appealing profits for developers and the provision of better and more affordable houses for users.

This paper proposes a new theoretical framework to explain enterprise unionism and conducts the first systematic comparative study of union structure in nine Asian countries. Our framework emphasizes political dynamics and the role of the state in labor relations and argues that the initial period of the collective bargaining era constituted a critical juncture (state labor policy) that occurred in distinctive ways in different countries and that these differences played a central role in shaping the different union structures in the following decades. The nine countries are mainly divided into three groups, depending on the type of state labor policy: enforcement of enterprise unionism; centralization/laissez-faire (non-enterprise unionism); and dual unionism/gradual transition (middle-ground). Governmental data were used for the study. A clear correspondence between state labor policy and union structure in each of these groups was found. We believe that our framework significantly enhances our understanding of the Asian cases. Future research should explore the validity of the proposed framework through comparative studies of Latin American cases where enterprise unions have also been observed.