H transport costs pose a significant barrier to development in africa. Causing friction in the movement of labour and goods, transport costs effectively reduce the markets for labour and goods, and for the transmission of knowledge and technologies. Reducing transport costs in contemporary Africa has become even more of a priority, with many countries having reduced tariffs on their internation...

This report summarises the main findings and policy conclusions of the Eurosystem/ESCB Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) since it started operations in July 2006. The objectives of the WDN were i) to identify the sources and features of wage and labour cost dynamics that are most relevant for monetary policy and ii) to clarify the relationship between wages, labour costs and prices both at the firm a...

The concerns regarding the economic insecurity stemming from earnings instability have been gaining momentum in the contemporary political discourse. If earnings instability is as a proxy for risk, for risk-averse individuals, increasing earnings instability bears substantial welfare costs. Using the variance of transitory earnings estimated using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) a...

Agricultural mechanisation, as we know it today, is a relative newcomer to the art and science of profitable farming. It is only since the end of World War I1 that agricultural mechanisation has moved forward to take its place as one of the major factors concerned with profitable agricultural production. This rapid expansion has, together with all the many desirable attributes of mechanisation,...

BACKGROUND Farm-level biosecurity provides the foundation for biosecurity along the entire production chain. Many risk management practices are constantly in place, regardless of whether there is a disease outbreak or not. Nonetheless, the farm-level costs of preventive biosecurity have rarely been assessed. We examined the costs incurred by preventive biosecurity for Finnish poultry farms. M...

We consider a model of a sector in which the same set of oligopolistic firms faces a common labour supply constraint. The wage is given in the short run, adjusting competitively in the longer run. When the costs of job creation are low relative to the degree of output market power, there exists no wage that clears the labour market in the short run, and at some wages there are two equilibria, o...

This paper primarily investigates the issue of labour welfare in Indian industries, and seeks to make a contribution to the debate on labour reforms currently underway in India. It investigates the relative importance of technical change, elasticities of substitution, and labour regulations for labour welfare, proxied by the income shares of skilled and unskilled labour in total costs. Three pr...

Good Labour Relations in Local Government is a legislative imperative that municipalities have to nurture and sustain at all costs. Failure to maintain good labour relations could have a direct impact on the levels and quality of service delivery. If municipal employees embark on endless strikes, this would obviously translate into no delivery of basic services to the communities that so desper...

INTRODUCTION Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery is a well-established, commonly performed treatment for coronary artery disease--a disease that affects over 10% of US adults and is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. In 2005, the mean cost for a CABG procedure among Medicare beneficiaries in the USA was $32, 201 ± $23,059. The same operation reportedly costs less than $2000 to pr...

Like most other parts of the Australian public sector, Australian universities have been required to do more with less over the past decade. A key strategy in reducing costs has been the increased casualisation of teaching. This paper uses a hard/soft model of Human Resource Management as a framework within which to argue that increased casualisation of university teaching has increased the emo...