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An objective method of pricing, where the cost of each component of a product is determined separately, is relevant to the pricing of loans in banking. Relevant factors in this case are a “real rate” of interest, an inflation premium, administrative expenses, a maturity factor and an allowance for credit risk. All these can be accounted for in the pricing of retail loans. This systematic approach enhances the loan pricing procedure and offers an objective way for an institution to establish and monitor the risk level of its portfolio of earning assets. From data it is clear that banking has priced its retail loans well and this brings the evolution of new pricing techniques into question.

Viewing customers on the basis of age groupings is valuable in terms of product development, promotion and evaluation of delivery systems. The close association between customer age and product usage suggests a life cycle rather than a strict segmentation approach to marketing. A bank must realise that financial needs change as a customer matures, and anticipate and provide for these changing needs in order to build a solid customer base. Research into the users of 31 retail banks in a Midwestern US state indicates that there is a greater chance of success in promoting certain products to a particular age group, and that product usage tends to support the assumption that user age is a primary factor in bank product selection.

Since most of the revenues of a bank are from interest on the loan portfolio, there is always considerable pressure to generate new loans. Certainly, the volume of new loans is an important statistic in the evaluation of lending officers. However, a major concern of senior management is that an increase in loan generation should not be accomplished by a decrease in credit standards. An objective framework for including loan loss experience in the evaluation of individual loan officers is provided.

Three distinct product areas exist for banks — deposit gathering, customer services and loans. Up until now loans have scarcely been marketed. If they have, they have not been viewed in the context of what would create an optimal product mix. Yet a bank's loan mix is a major portion of its product mix and has the same dimensions of width, breadth and consistency as any other product line. It appears that a significant amount of difficulty in developing effective loan mix strategies has been due to the lack of a system to predetermine loan quality objectively. Management's attitude towards risk, the type of community and future economic conditions all play major roles in determining a suitable loan mix. Loan mix strategy should begin with a recognition of attainable goals and end with a defined programme to co‐ordinate the efforts of marketing staff and the loan department. The optimal loan mix will suit customer needs and return the desired levels of profits.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

THE centenary celebration is that of the apparently prosaic public library acts ; it is not the centenary of libraries which are as old as civilization. That is a circumstance which some may have overlooked in their pride and enthusiasm for the public library. But no real librarian of any type will fail to rejoice in the progress to which the celebration is witness. For that has been immense. We are to have a centenary history of the Public Library Movement—that is not its title—from the Library Association. We do not know if it will be available in London this month; we fear it will not. We do know its author, Mr. W. A. Munford, has spent many months in research for it and that he is a writer with a lucid and individual Style. We contemplate his task with a certain nervousness. Could anyone less than a Carlyle impart into the dry bones of municipal library history that Strew these hundred years, the bones by the wayside that mark out the way, the breath of the spirit that will make them live ? For even Edward Edwards, whose name should be much in the minds and perhaps on the lips of library lovers this month, could scarcely have foreseen the contemporary position ; nor perhaps could Carlyle who asked before our genesis why there should not be in every county town a county library as well as a county gaol. How remote the days when such a question was cogent seem to be now! It behoves us, indeed it honours us, to recall the work of Edwards, of Ewart, Brotherton, Thomas Greenwood, Nicholson, Peter Cowell, Crestadoro, Francis Barrett, Thomas Lyster, J. Y. M. MacAlister, James Duff Brown and, in a later day without mentioning the living, John Ballinger, Ernest A. Baker, L. Stanley Jast, and Potter Briscoe—the list is long. All served the movement we celebrate and all faced a community which had to be convinced. It still has, of course, but our people do now allow libraries a place, more or less respected, in the life of the people. Librarians no longer face the corpse‐cold incredulity of the so‐called educated classes, the indifference of the masses and the actively vicious hostility of local legislators. Except the illuminated few that existed. These were the men who had the faith that an informed people was a happier, more efficient one and that books in widest commonalty spread were the best means of producing such a people. These, with a succession of believing, enduring librarians, persisted in their Struggle with cynic and opponent and brought about the system and the technique we use, modified of course and extended to meet a changing world, but essentially the same. Three names we may especially honour this September, Edward Edwards, who was the sower of the seed; MacAlister, who gained us our Royal Charter ; and John Ballinger, who was the person who most influenced the introduction of the liberating Libraries Act of 1919.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Using a meta-regression analysis, we quantitatively review the empirical literature on the relation between effective tax rate (ETR) and firm size. Accounting literature offers two competing theories on this relation: The political cost theory, suggesting a positive size-ETR relation, and the political power theory, suggesting a negative size-ETR relation. Using a unique data set of 56 studies that do not show a clear tendency towards either of the two theories, we contribute to the discussion on the size-ETR relation in three ways: First, applying meta-regression analysis on a US meta-data set, we provide evidence supporting the political cost theory. Second, our analysis reveals factors that are possible sources of variation and bias in previous empirical studies; these findings can improve future empirical and analytical models. Third, we extend our analysis to a cross-country meta-data set; this extension enables us to investigate explanations for the two competing theories in more detail. We find that Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, a transparency index and a corruption index explain variation in the size-ETR relation. Independent of the two theories, we also find that tax planning aspects potentially affect the size-ETR relation. To our knowledge, these explanations have not yet been investigated in our research context.

ALL who have visited Liverpool for any length of time have affection for her. She lies alongside a noble river, watched over by the lofty Liver building and the perhaps more architecturally perfect offices of the Mersey Dock authorities. Even in these days, when the very largest ships have been diverted to Southampton, splendid vessels come from and go to the ends of the earth almost daily. The river is the essential fact about Liverpool; she was born of the river and her waterfront is one of the world's rendezvous. As a city she compares favourably with any English town, and perhaps excels most in her few splendid buildings, amongst which the new and rapidly growing Cathedral takes first rank.