Women, credit & development: A case study of the Grameen Bank, Bangladesh

The study of the role of women in the process of economic development has had a relatively recent history. Using the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh as a case study this thesis will attempt to determine whether ensuring improved access to credit facilities for landless women will provide more equitable growth in the living standards of a developing country's population. Using in-depth survey data and Grameen Bank annual reports, it is concluded that whilst credit cannot be solely relied upon to aid the development process, it does represent a viable option for governments to allow women a greater participatory role in economic development

Management and Industrial Relations Practices and Outcomes in Australian Workplaces

Poor industrial relations performance can be costly for firms. In particular, employee quits, employee absence, industrial action and substandard relations between management and employees can all be detrimental to the firm. Using the 1995 Australian Workplace and Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS) this paper examines how particular human resource management techniques and industrial relations settings can influence the industrial relations outcomes of Australian workplaces. The results indicate that unions have played an important role in affecting performance outcomes. They also suggest that although particular human resource management techniques can have an influence on performance, there is not a single bundle of human resource management policies that will apply across workplaces to affect all measures of performance in the same way.

Factors Affecting the Industrial Relations Climate in Australian Enterprises*

those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the collaborative partners. The authors would particularly like to thank other members of the survey team, Mark Wooden, Danny Samson, Peter Dawkins, Tim Fry and Pat Foley for the design of the survey and Anita Aherne for her excellent efforts in ensuring the surveys were completed. We would also like to thank Tim Fry and Mark Wooden for comments

Industrial Relations Reform and Business Performance: An Introduction

This paper examines whether there has been a significant trend towards longer working hours in Australia, and whether working arrangements involving long hours are unreasonable. Recent years have seen growing concern with the number of hours many Australians are spending in paid employment. While average hours worked per week have remained relatively stable since the early 1980s, the incidence of both long and short workweeks has increased. Overall, the conclusion is that working long hours is on many criteria, far from unreasonable. It would appear that the majority of long hours workers prefer such arrangements. Attempts to interfere with such preferences through regulation will thus, in most instances, either lead to workers feeling worse off or fail to have any affect on worker behaviour. It is recognised that there are many instances where the hours being worked by individuals are having serious adverse impacts on health and family life and hence may sensibly be judged unreasonable. Nevertheless, it seems that such cases are best dealt with on a case by case basis and not through the imposition of across-the-board limits on hours, which may make far more people worse off than it makes better off.

The Dynamic Performance of Australian Enterprises

This paper investigates the interaction of discretionary investments (R&D, capital investment, training and advertising), innovation, productivity and profitability within a dynamic framework of firm performance. A dynamic and closed model of firm performance is set up, and the resulting empirical model is tested as a series of recursive equations, using a four-year balanced panel data set of Australian firms drawn from the Business Longitudinal Survey. The results indicate that current economic profit has an important role to play in enabling firms to invest, and the findings indicate which of these investments are complements and which are substitutes. The paper explores the impact of these discretionary investments on innovation and total factor productivity performance. Finally, the impact of past discretionary investments both directly and indirectly (that is, via innovation and productivity performance) on current profitability is examined. Past values of these investments have a significant influence on current profit, effectively closing the model. The various results enable the paper to draw a number of other policy conclusions, in particular, some concerns about the potentially negative impact of own-market share on dynamic performance.

Reliance on Income Support in Australia: Prevalence and Persistence

This paper uses new Australian enterprise level data to investigate factors that are associated with cooperative industrial relations climates within major Australian enterprises. Climate is commonly measured along a uni-dimensional scale ranging from adversarial to cooperative and there is a view in the literature -albeit not a consensus- that more cooperative climates are more productive. Our results find that organisations which have well-developed and bilateral channels of communication between managers and employees and those companies that use systematic and analytical methods for making major decisions tend to have the most cooperative climate of relations between management, employees and unions.

Foreign Ownership, Foreign Competition and Innovation in Australian Enterprises

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between innovative effort, measured by R&D intensity, and foreign shareholding and competition. The data set used is a sample of large Australian firms between 1994 and 1997. Previous studies have used aggregate variables to account for these international factors. The theory and analysis are extended to account for the differing attributes of separate geographic regions. The results show foreign shareholding and competition to be important influences in determining the level of innovative activity in Australia. In particular, strong evidence is found of a positive association of revenue earned in Europe and a negative association of Asian shareholdings with domestic innovation levels.

The Rise of Trade Marking in Australia in the 1990s

This paper provides some preliminary analysis regarding the pattern of trade marking by Australian firms using financial information on large Australian businesses from IBISWorld, and matching this with intellectual property information from IP Australia. Existing businesses that have not historically trade marked in every year are now starting to make greater use of trade marks, at least over the period 1995 to 2000. The increase in trade marking appears partly related to other innovative activity in that there is a positive and significant relationship between trade mark counts and patent counts. There is also some evidence that uncertainty surrounding returns on investment has an influence on whether, and how much, firms trade mark. Overall, however, these factors are insufficient to explain the rapid rise in trade mark activity. Instead, the rise has been driven by changing managerial strategy with respect to intellectual property (IP). One possibility for this change is an increasingly competitive environment between firms with IP being increasingly relied upon.