Scanner data offer new opportunities for CPI or HICP calculation. They can be obtained from a wide variety of retailers (supermarkets, home electronics, Internet shops, etc.) and provide information at the level barcode. One advantages using scanner is fact that they contain complete transaction information, i.e. prices quantities every sold item. After clearing unifying product names, products...

Recent decisions by the Spanish national competition authority (TDC) mandate payment systems to include only two costs when setting their domestic multilateral interchange fees (MIF): a fixed processing cost and a variable cost for the risk of fraud. This artificial lowering of MIFs will not lower consumer prices, because of uncompetitive retailing; but it will however lead to higher cardholder...

creating confidence in the stock market through a secure environment is one of the main achievements of stock markets in the world. in the stock markets of developed countries, there are markets which provide confidence and reduce the risks resulting from the fluctuation of share prices. these markets are called “stock transaction choice markets”. while comparing stock transaction choice contra...

This paper analyses the distribution of total aid and aid to the social sectors between 2009 and 2011. Its key findings are four-fold. First, despite the stated objectives of donors, total aid disbursements are broadly neutral, favouring neither the most deprived nor relatively well-off countries. Second, the pattern of social sector aid disbursements follows those for total aid. Third, the aid...

A country may opt for different type of reciprocal trade liberalization leading to either multilateral or bilateral/plurilateral negotiations. If it chooses a multilateral approach, it will focus on the big negotiations table of the World Trade Organization (WTO). If however it prefers to negotiate with a smaller number of partners, it will end up having petite comité rounds with one or several...

Yu-Feng (Diana) Yang, National Sun Yat-Sen University This qualitative study aims to understand how English learners interpret shared space in an online multilateral English blogging context and how their interpretations of shared space contribute to their multilateral exchange experience. Twenty-four Asian learners of English from two different universities—one in Japan and one in Taiwan—parti...