Regional Productivity Differentials: Explaining the Gap

Issues of productivity and competitiveness at a regional level have increasingly been a focus for both academic and policy concern. Significant and persistent differences in productivity are evident both in the UK and across Europe as a whole. This paper uses data relating to individual business units to examine the determinants of regional productivity differentials across British regions. It demonstrates that the substantial differences in regional productivity can be explained by a fairly limited set of variables. These include industry mix, the capital employed by the firm, business ownership and the skills of the local labour force. Also important are location-specific factors including travel-time from London and population density. Taken together, these factors largely explain regional productivity differentials. The analysis extends those studies that have identified but not quantified the role of different ‘productivity drivers’ in a systematic fashion or that have focused on only a limited set of drivers. It has important policy implications particular in relation to the role of travel time and possible effects of density and agglomeration.Regional competitiveness; Productivity; UK; Regional development; business-data analysis;

Country-level Business Performance and Policy Asymmetries in Great Britain

The HM Treasury identifies key ‘drivers’ of business performance and productivity differentials, which include skills, investment and competition. This paper presents an empirical investigation into the effects of these drivers on business-level productivity per employee across England, Scotland and Wales in order to identify whether spatial differences in the influence of these drivers exist. We adopt the Cobb-Douglas production function approach and our results suggest that, after taking account of sector specific effects, productivity differentials do exist between businesses across Great Britain and that policy instruments do potentially enhance productivity. The results indicate that these key drivers are equally applicable across countries of Great Britain. However, there is evidence to suggest that scale effects for labour and capital do differ across England, Wales and Scotland and that policy makers should be aware of these asymmetries.Productivity per employee; HM Treasury’s key drivers; scale effects

What drives the end user to build a feral information system?

A Feral Information Systems (FIS) is any technological artefact (e.g. spreadsheets) that end users employ instead of the mandated Enterprise System (ES). ES proponents suggest that the installation of an ES will boost productivity. However, Production Possibility Frontier theory provides insights as to why the introduction of an ES may instead suppress an end user\u27s productivity. Structuration Theory offers insights that explain how certain end users may have access to powerful resources. Rather than submitting to the ES, the end user can employ FIS to block or circumvent aspects of the ES. Further, the concept of life chances helps explain why individuals may or may not develop the core skills required to construct an alternate to the ES, the FIS. In relation to the ES usage, an end user may adopt one of four Modes of Operation, namely: Submit, Dismiss, Hidden, or Defiant.<br /

Key issues in rural health: perspectives of health service providers in Queensland

The Centre for Rural and Remote Area Health (CRRAH) held interactive research workshops in eight towns in Southern Queensland. The purpose of the workshops was to determine what health providers considered were major issues affecting their service and for these results to inform future research strategy of CRRAH. Over 150 organisations identified as either providing health services or having a significant interest in health provision in one or more of the targeted towns were invited to attend. The workshops used the nominal group technique to identify what the participants considered were key health issues in the geographical area in which they worked. These issues were then prioritised by the participants. Thematic analysis of the issues generated a ranking of themes by importance. Results were compared with a similar exercise undertaken in 2003. Participants from organisation directly involved with health care were complemented at the workshops by representatives from local government, the police service and church groups. A total of 85 participants representing 47 services and 41 different organisations attended the eight workshops. Issues generated by the participants were pooled into seventeen themes. Workforce issues were by far the major concern of health providers. Recruitment and retention of health workers were a major concern. The other four highest ranked themes across all workshops were mental health, access to health services, perceptions and expectations of consumers of health services and interagency cooperation. Aged care was an additional theme that generated a lot of concern at several of the workshops. The workshops provided important information to CRRAH for developing research strategy. Additionally, several new alliances among health providers were developed which will support sharing of information and resources. The workshops enabled rural and remote organisations to meet and identify the key health issues and supported research planning. Much need alliances among health providers were forged and collaborative research avenues are being explored. The workshop forum is an excellent means of information exchange

Student entrepreneurial propensities in the individual-organisational-environmental nexus

While there is a consensus that universities contribute to entrepreneurship and innovation, it is not clear how different educational environments contribute to different students’ desires to start up a business, and it is even less clear how different universities contribute to entrepreneurship activities in a particular place. This study improves understanding of entrepreneurship education and the university-based entrepreneurship ecosystem at the individual, organisational and environmental levels by examining organisational contexts and individual students’ social contexts, including motivations towards and perceptions of graduate start-ups. Applications of logit and ordered logit regression analyses to a unique student-level dataset across two universities in one city-region demonstrates the importance of the university, gender and a series of home and employment experiences as determinants of the propensity to start up a business, while economic factors change attitudes towards setting up a business

Indexation et navigation dans les contenus visuels : approches basées sur les graphes

La première partie de cette thèse concerne l’indexation des documents vidéo en scènes. Les scènes sont des ensembles de plans vidéo partageant des caractéristiques similaires. Nous proposons d’abord une méthode interactive de détection de groupes de plans, partageant un contenu couleur similaire, basé sur la fragmentation de graphe. Nous abordons ensuite l’indexation des documents vidéo en scènes de dialogue, basée sur des caractéristiques sémantiques et structurelles présentes dans l’enchaînement des plans vidéo. La seconde partie de cette thèse traite de la visualisation et de la recherche dans des collections d’images indexées. Nous présentons un algorithme de plongement d’un espace métrique dans le plan appliqué à la visualisation de collections d’images indexées. Ce type de visualisation permet de représenter les relations de dissimilarité entre images et d’identifier visuellement des groupes d’images similaires. Nous proposons enfin une interface de recherche d’images basée sur le routage local dans un graphe. Les résultats d’une validation expérimentale sont présentés et discutés.This thesis deals with the indexation and the visualisation of video documents and collections of images. The proposed methods are based on graphs to represent similarity relationships between indexed video shots and images. The first part of this thesis deals with the indexation of video documents into scenes. A scene is a set of video shots that share common features. We first propose an interactive method to group shots with similar color content using graph clustering. We then present a technique to index video documents into dialogue scenes based on semantic and structural features. The second part of this thesis deals with visualisation and search in collections of indexed images.We present an algorithm for embedding a metric space in the plane applied to collections of indexed images. The aim of this technique is to visualise the dissimilarity relationships between images to identify clusters of similar images. Finally, we present a user interface for searching images, inspired from greedy routing in networks. Results from experimental validation are presented and discussed

Characteristics of Effective School Principals: A Mixed-Research Study

In this multi-stage mixed analysis study, the views of 615 college students enrolled at two Hispanic-serving institutions in the Southwest were obtained concerning characteristics of effective school principals. Through the method of constant comparison (qualitative phase), 29 dominant themes were determined to be present in respondent-identified characteristics of effective school principals: Leader, Communication, Caring, Understanding, Knowledgeable, Fair, Works Well With Others, Listening, Service, Organized, Disciplinarian, Good Attitude, Patience, Respectful, Helping, Open-Mindedness, Motivating, Professional, Flexible, Being Visible, Honest, Good Role Model, Responsible, Builds Relationships, Involving, Consistent, Friendly, Focus on Schools, and Experience in the Classroom. An exploratory factor analysis revealed that these 29 themes represented five meta-themes. Then these themes (quantitative phase) were converted into numbers (i.e., quantitized) into an interrespondent matrix that consisted of a series of 1s and 0s and were analyzed to determine whether participants’ themes differed as a function of sex, ethnicity, college status, and first-generation/non-first-generation status. Statistically significant differences were present between undergraduate and graduate students, between males and females, between Hispanics and Whites, and between first-generation and non-first-generation college students. Implications are discussed