BOOK REVIEW: Stuart Smyth, Peter W.B. Phillips, William A. Kerr, and George G. Khachatourians. Regulating the Liabilities of Agricultural Biotechnology.

Agribusiness,

Business Process Risk Management, Compliance and Internal Control: A Research Agenda

Integration of risk management and management control is emerging as an important area in the wake of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and with ongoing development of frameworks such as the Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework from the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO). Based on an inductive methodological approach using literature review and interviews with managers engaged in risk management and internal control projects, this paper identifies three main areas that currently have management attention. These are business process risk management, compliance management and internal control development. This paper discusses these areas and identifies a series of research questions regarding these critical issuesRisk management; Internal control; Business processes; Compliance; Sarbanes-Oxley Act; ERP systems; COSO; COBIT

Costs and Benefits of Full Dual-Frame Telephone Survey Designs

Assesses the cost, sample composition, weighting, and substantive effect on survey results involved in interviewing respondents by cell phone, including those with landlines. Includes demographic profiles of cell phone-only, landline-only, and dual users

Financing social policy in the presence of informality

We present a framework for the analysis of tax and benefit policy in countries with significant informality. Our framework allows us to jointly analyse the effects of various taxes and benefits on incentives for firms and workers to be informal and evade taxation. We find that payroll taxes and targeted minimum income guarantees targeted to households without formal employment are particularly harmful to labour formality and participation in the modern sector labour force. Conversely, Bismarkian benefits targeted to formal sector workers and basic benefits targeted to low income households represent the least distortionary way to redistribute. Attempts to use holes in the VAT to “protect” the poor are generally ineffective and open the avenues for rent seeking. We also find that a uniform value added tax and a corporate income tax represent the least distortionary way to raise revenues. The information generated from a simple VAT can be used, given the appropriately designed tax administration, to enhance the probability of detection of informal activities. Distributional issues are best handled by social policy measures and the personal income tax. Indeed, given the gainers and losers from tax reforms, social policies and intergovernmental transfers will be needed to ensure the political acceptance of the reforms. The precise mix of taxation and social policy will vary given different country characteristics and institutiona