Journal of Knowledge Management, Economics and Information Technology

Using data envelopment analysis and Malmquist index decompositions this paper focuses on the impacts of the Great Recession on the efficiency and productivity changes of U.S. publicly funded prestigious research universities in comparison to their lower level comprehensive university counterparts. Do elite research relative to comprehensive universities have more political clout and resources to better ward off the financial impacts and production demands of the? Results, based on ten academic years from 2004-05 through 2013-14, are somewhat mixed, but indicate that research universities have a technological edge that acts as the primary advantage driver to total productivity gains over their counterparts. However, comprehensive universities outperform research universities in both managerial and scale gains. Overall, there is significant variability among both groups of universities in their adjustments to the dramatic recessionary forces imposed upon them. While the paper greatly improves upon three previous studies, there remains the question of how publicly funded and managed U.S. universities will continue future adjustments to the some of the lingering and more permanent effects of the recession.

  Differential Recessionary Impacts on U.S. Research Relative to Comprehensive University Efficiencies and Productivities: 2004-2014 Panel Data Estimates (734.2 KiB, 1,562 hits)

Paper aims at defining the value, taking conceptual ideas from the service economy, and at designing main conceptual criteria for correcting of routine approach in economics. It is built as a theoretical questioning and debate, starting with reminding certain issues from the Mercantilist and Physiocrat economic thought. The servicity view is thus reasoned, i.e. the respect to the actual service brought to the whole socio-economic and natural environment, being a part of a larger research. The actual context of the debate is given by the knowledge society in the post-industrial era. The results indicate theoretical clarifying, bringing a renovating interpretative view of value, particularly concerning the Physiocrat roots of value and productivity, as well as new questions to be answered, in a heterodox approach, containing the reserve of new horizons to be developed and applied in concrete circumstances.

  Relative Value and Principles of Servicity (540.9 KiB, 2,516 hits)

This paper proposes to eliminate a routine in the economic thinking, claimed to be responsible for the negative essence of economic developments, from the point of view, of the ecological implications (employment in the planetary ecosystem).

The methodological foundations start from the natural origins of the functionality of the human economic society according to the originary physiocrat liberalism, and from specific natural characteristics of the human kind.

This paper begins with a comment-analysis of the difference between natural and artificial within the economy, and then explains some of the most serious diversions from the natural essence of economic liberalism. It shall be explained the original (heterodox) interpretation of the Classical political economy (economics), by making calls to the Romanian economic thinking from aggravating past century. Highlighting the destructive impact of the economy – which, under the invoked doctrines, we call unnatural – allows an intuitive presentation of a logical extension of Marshall’s market price, based on previous research.

Besides the doctrinal arguments presented, the economic realities inventoried along the way (major deficiencies and effects, determined) demonstrate the validity of the hypothesis of the unnatural character and therefore necessarily to be corrected, of the concept and of the mechanisms of the current economy. The results of this paper consist of original heterodox methods presented, intuitive or developed that can be found conclusively within the key proposals for education and regulation.

  Artificial Economy (733.5 KiB, 3,387 hits)