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This paper investigates the impact of education on output of rice farming households in Vietnam.

Given the literature review, this paper specifies three empirical models (i.e. linear constant coefficient model, partially nonlinear model and linear varied coefficient model) with variables that well describe the mechanism through which education affects output. The data were collected from 901 rice farming households randomly selected out of ten provinces and city in the Mekong River Delta (MRD) of Vietnam. The models are estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS) and Robinson's (1988) double residual estimators.

Estimates of the empirical models show that seed, fertilizer, labor and farm size have significant impacts on output of rice farming households while pesticide and herbicide do not. Education is also found to have a positive effect on output of rice farming households because it helps them better manage farms of larger size via combining various inputs in a more desirable way.

This paper confirms the positive impact of education on agricultural output, which implies that policies aiming to provide better education to rural people will greatly enhance their income as well as trigger long-term economic and agricultural growth.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize library and information science (LIS) as fragmenting discipline both historically and by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory about the organization of sciences and Fuchs’ (1993) theory about scientific change.

The study combines historical source analysis with conceptual and theoretical analysis for characterizing LIS. An attempt is made to empirically validate the distinction between LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies.

The origin of fragmentation in LIS due the contributions of other disciplines can be traced in the 1960s and 1970s for solving the problems produced by the growth of scientific literature. Computer science and business established academic programs and started research relevant to LIS community focusing on information retrieval and bibliometrics. This has led to differing research interests between LIS and other disciplines concerning research topics and methods. LIS has been characterized as fragmented adhocracy as a whole, but we make a distinction between research topics LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies.

The paper provides an elaborated historical perspective on the fragmentation of LIS in the pressure of other disciplines. It also characterizes LIS as discipline in a fresh way by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory.

The United Nations' Principles of Responsible Management Education initiative aspires to transform the relationship between business and society by ensuring that the next generation of business leaders are shaped by management education that conceptualises businesses as generators of sustainable value. Simplistic economic models overemphasize the role of narrow profit maximization on the part of firms in generating broader economic wellbeing. More nuanced views of the relationships between firms and the societies in which they operate, such as those that allow for market power in product and labour markets, for the presence of externalities in the production of goods and services, for a role of the state in the provision of public goods, and for the existence of market failures more generally, offer profoundly different advice to aspiring practitioners of responsible management. This article proposes an introductory economics curriculum for management students that gives due emphasis to these more nuanced perspectives and thus equips aspiring business leaders with the skills they will need to build profitable enterprises that also fulfil the objective of generating sustainable value as envisioned by the Principles of Responsible Management Education.

This article aims to analyze the impact that the inclusion of students with disabilities has on the achievement of their schoolmates and to analyze the impact that this inclusion has on the achievement of the students with disabilities themselves.

The author begins investigating how the inclusion of students with disabilities in regular schools affects achievement of schoolmates. To answer this research question, the author explores the natural variation in time in the number of students with disabilities and use data from National Exam of Upper Secondary Education (Enem). Then, the author investigates how the inclusion affects achievement of the students with disabilities themselves and uses propensity score matching methodologies and, again, data from Enem.

The results show that an additional percentage point in the proportion of students with disabilities would reduce schoolmates' writing scores by a 0.0031 standard deviation. In other subjects, the author finds weak or none evidence of a significant peer effect. In addition, using Propensity Score Matching methodologies, the results show that the mean scores are up to 44% of a standard deviation, which is higher among students with disabilities enrolled in regular schools compared to those who are enrolled in special schools. In summary, the evaluation is that inclusion policies achieve the goal of improving the performance of students with disabilities but such policies have a small and adverse side effect.

For this reason, the present study proposes to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing the impact of the inclusion of students with disabilities on both groups. In addition, this paper contributes to the empirical literature of peer effect with an analysis of the peer effect of students with disabilities per competency. Finally, the article is important given the existence of few articles in Brazil on the topic of education and people with disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to consider recent field evidence to analyse what online public services citizens need, explores potential citizen subsidy of these specific services and investigates where resources should be invested in terms of media accessibility. The authors explore these from a citizen-centric affordability perspective within three exemplar developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Bank and United Nations in particular promote initiatives under the “Information and Communication Technologies for Development” (ICT4D) to stress the relevance of e-Government as a way to ensure development and reduce poverty. The authors adopt a contingency value approach to determine directly reported citizens willingness to pay for digital public services. Hence, our focus is mainly upon an empirical investigation through extensive fieldwork in the context of sub-Sahara Africa. A substantive survey was conducted in the respective cities of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Lagos (Nigeria) and Johannesburg (South Africa). The sample of citizens was drawn from each respective Chamber of Commerce database for Ethiopia and South Africa, and for Nigeria a purchased database of businesses, based on stratified random sampling. These were randomly identified from both sectors ensuring all locations were covered with a total sample size of 1,297 respondents. It was found, in particular, that citizens were willing to pay to be able to access digital public services and that amounts of fees they were willing to pay varied depending on what services they wish to access and what devices they use (PCs or mobile phones).

The authors adopt a contingency value approach to determine directly reported citizens willingness to pay for digital public services. A survey was conducted in the respective cities of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Lagos (Nigeria) and Johannesburg (South Africa). The sample of citizens was drawn from each respective Chamber of Commerce database for Ethiopia and South Africa, and for Nigeria a purchased database of businesses, based on stratified random sampling. These were randomly identified from both sectors ensuring all locations were covered with a total sample size of 1,297 respondents.

The findings suggest that by understanding citizen needs, demands and how they can benefit from online public services could drive decisions related to what public services need to be prioritised for economically active citizens, potentially explore citizen subsidy of these specific public services which will have a trickle-down benefit to poorer citizens by reducing the pressures on traditional channels of public service delivery and investigate where resources should be invested in terms of media to access online services. Willingness to pay between the top online public services showed no statistically significant difference among all respondents.

The research focused on economically active digitally savvy citizens in the major capital cities in each of our selected countries. While these are not representative of the population at large, our intention was to understand what citizen-led government services would look like from the perspective of this group, with an insight into the value they place on these online services and their ability to access them. Technology diffusion starts with the early adopters (Rogers, 2010), and here the authors have focused on those that are likely to be early adopters.

Poor fiscal capacity, namely, the amount and type of resources a state has at its disposal, not only has an impact on economic wellbeing, but particularly relevant in this case, also has an impact on the quality of government (Baskaran and Bigsten, 2013). Thus, e-government is one way in which developing countries can focus on developing good governance and strengthening civil society to improve the quality of government and motivate citizens to participate in the political process.

The economic performance of African countries has been viewed with pessimism, consistently considered to be the poorest continent (Harrison et al., 2014). Recent studies have empirically shown that new information technologies have contributed to longer term economic growth in African countries and stress the need for government to further invest in developing telecommunications infrastructures and internet access (Donou-Adonsou et al., 2016). However one of the major constraints and challenges for developing countries is the limited fiscal capacity and ability to mobilise fiscal resources to finance the provision of public services, which is essential for economic development (Ali et al., 2015).

The authors contribute to the World Bank and United Nations initiatives to promote ICT for Development’ (ICT4D) the relevance of e-government as a way to ensure development and reduce poverty. If online services are of no benefit, even if they are more convenient and lower cost, they are unlikely to be used. Accessing digital public services directly addresses the needs of economically active citizens and can also facilitate the steps towards an improved quality of government and interaction with civil society. The study has contributed to an insightful understanding of the value, cost and benefits of citizen-led e-Government in this respect.

Building on the literature of hybrids in the context of public organizations, this paper aims to discuss under which conditions hybrids can adequately provide “critical services”, a subset of public services characterized by their simultaneous exposure to externalities, socio-economic cohesion and legitimacy concerns.

The authors collect indications from two stylized examples, prisons and defense, to develop propositions as a step toward assessing the potential role of hybrids as alternatives to direct public provision or full privatization in the delivery of critical services.

This paper examines the conditions under which hybrid arrangements outperform the polar cases of public bureaus and full privatization in the delivery of a specific subset of public goods that the authors identify as “critical services”.

The authors suggest that there might be comparative advantages in relying on hybrid arrangements rather than the usual solutions of fully private or fully governmental provision. However, they also submit that these advantages are conditional to the capacity of hybrids to reconcile competing interests to achieve socio-economic cohesion, to combine capabilities dispersed among partners to benefit from positive externalities and to satisfy legitimacy concerns with respect to the role of government.

Data has become a factor of production. This occurs when history enters the era of big data, in which technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and blockchain are used to collect, manipulate, mine and process data. Data is a special product of labor, a sub-derivative of other production factors.

The data factor has a dual attribute: being physical (technical) and social. The social attribute of the data factor can not only materialize the technical attribute but also amplify it. In other words, the data has a multiplication effect on the allocation efficiency of other production factors. The social attribute of the data is brought out via the technical attribute as the medium. From a technical perspective, this medium is strongly adhesive, and after being bonded with other factors of production, it will only lead to a physical reaction and not change the nature of other factors.

However, once these two attributes interact with each other, especially when data is combined with capital, the most adhesive factor in the market economy, a series of new social relations will then be produced based on the technical attribute, resulting in significant adjustments in social relations, involving both positive and negative externalities.

Therefore, to get a scientific understanding of the dual attribute and its interaction effects on the data factor, it is necessary to take the following steps. We should promote institutional design that amplifies the positive externality, with a focus on facilitating public data sharing and improving the value of commercial data development. Also, we need to strengthen institutional arrangements that prevent and control the negative externality by emphasizing data supervision based on data types and levels as well as the rule of law.

The paper aims to analyse the social responsibility concept and to explore its role in the implementation process of the tourism sustainability concept. The intention is to explore the way in which the social responsibility concept is implemented in the tourism and analyse how it contributes to its sustainability.

In this interpretivist research, the authors implemented a qualitative strategy using the following methods: content, critical and comparative analyses of the results reported in available scientific studies, categorization, causal analysis and mental mapping. The authors identified 14 thematic categories of research on the tourism social responsibility. For the causal description, the authors used driving force, pressure, state, impact, response (DPSIR) method.

The results include identification of the categories of the research topics concerning tourism social responsibility as well as categories of the approaches to the implementation of the social responsibility into the practice of the tourism sector. The causal description of this implementation process is elaborated in the form of the DPSIR model. The created mental map shows the specific facets of the social responsibility concept applied to the diverse tourism subsectors.

The main contribution lies in basic overview of the conceptual (theoretical) and instrumental (practical) base for implementation of the social responsibility concept into the tourism, providing in this way a critical analysis of examples of the social responsibility practice in the key tourism subsectors. The examination of the causal analyses in the form of DPSIR model as well as employment of the content analyses in the form of mental map represent innovative approach to the tourism responsibility research.

This study aims to explore the spatial externalities of apartment vacancy rates on housing rent by considering multiple vacancy durations.

This research uses smart meter data to measure unobservable vacant houses. This study made a significant contribution by applying building-level smart meter data to housing market analysis. It examined whether vacancy duration significantly affected apartment rent and whether the relationship between apartment rent and vacancy rate differed depending on the level of housing rent.

The primary finding indicates that there is a significant negative correlation between apartment rent and vacancy duration. Considering the spatial externalities of apartment vacancy rates, the apartment vacancy rates of surrounding buildings did not show any statistical significance. Moreover, quantile regression results indicate that although the bottom 10% of apartment rent levels showed a negative correlation with all vacancy durations, the top 10% showed no statistical significance related to vacancies.

This study measures the extent of spatial externalities that can differentiate taxation based on housing vacancies.

The findings indicate that landlords have asymmetric information about their buildings compared with the surrounding buildings, and the extent to which price adjusts for long-term vacancies differs depending on the level of apartment rent.

This paper aims to report on a case study concerning the development of sustainable energy partnerships involving engineering faculty and undergraduate students at the University of Girona, Catalonia, Spain.

Faculty were motivated to seek partnerships with public and private entities in the local area for the purposes of realising mutually beneficial outcomes. The educational programmes of future engineers, when sustainability is considered, are analysed. Education for sustainable development has to include multidisciplinary active learning as a desirable competence. Active learning can be obtained when problems are based on real life because they are most motivating for students. Constructive alignment component is obtained because learning objectives are linked with learning activities related to the needs of public and private entities.

Through the provision of technical expertise, the adoption and success of renewable energy projects was facilitated on the one hand, while final year undergraduate students benefited in terms of hands-on experience in helping to bring these projects to life, drawing on the knowledge and skills they had acquired throughout their degree programmes. These works are addressed to students by faculty members with the aim of developing and promoting renewable energies. Outcomes from partnerships surpassed expectations; not only were different benefits realised as were initially hoped for, but this success led to partnerships being sustained over time.

Fossil fuel-based energy systems are associated with a myriad of negative environmental and social externalities. It is difficult to overstate the importance of transitioning towards alternative low carbon energy sources for climate change mitigation which are less centralised compared to the status-quo for energy security and energy independence. By actively facilitating the development of decentralised renewable energy sources in Catalonia, the projects reported herein are of significant value in social environmental and educational terms.