Daniel E. May

Exploring economic and social-psychological factors in explaining farmers' willingness to participate in cooperative alliances

Cooperative alliances are considered as useful business strategies to reduce costs and to increase negotiation power. However, these alliances are not common in some regions of the UK. The paper proposes a new multivariate model based on the theory of planned behaviour to test the hypothesis that the importance that farmers attribute to cooperative alliances is determined by economic and social-psychological variables. Evidence supporting this hypothesis was found from a sample of ex-sugar beet farmers of the West Midlands of the UK. This finding provides an additional explanation for the cooperation failure in this country.

Identifying Determinants of Residential Property Values in South London

Identifying Determinants of Residential Property Values in South London This paper advances the academic work conducted on identifying some of the determinants of residential property values in different countries. Such determinants might include positive factors such as access to amenities, or negative factors such as high voltage overhead transmission lines (HVOTL). The objective explored here is to extend this research in the UK by considering the particular case of residential property values in South London. A number of determinants is considered, grouped and a model which explains the effect of the determinants on value is produced. The elasticities between property values and the distances from different determinants were also analysed to help highlight relationships between the determinants and residential property values. The results showed a relationship between residential property values and the determinants, and a relationship between the determinants themselves.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE NETWORKS UNDER GLOBAL TREATY STABILITY

The stability of international trade networks has been investigated using the pairwise stability concept. This concept is suitable to study the formation of bilateral agreements. However, it cannot be used to determine the stability of global trade agreements. This article proposes an alternative stability concept that can be adopted to determine the stability of global agreements such as the Doha agreement. This concept is named in this paper Global Treaty Stability.

Inefficient stable international trade networks

A recent study in the area of international trade networks found that global free trade (GFT) is pairwise stable. This finding has led to the conclusion that bilateralism is a building block for GFT. The current article uses an alternative stability concept to show that international networks other than GFT are the only stable networks when governments are politically biased. The main implication of this finding is that the use of bilateral agreements as a political tool to reach GFT can in fact lead to inefficient stable networks.