Thirty years ago, the international development community was in a state of high excitement. The perfect market-affirming solution to poverty in developing countries had apparently been found – microcredit, also known as microfinance. This involved giving micro-loans to the poor that allowed them to establish a range of very simple self-employment ventures that would generate income.
After failing to come to agreement with Apple to enable mobile phone payments, six of Australia’s biggest financial institutions this week signed on with Android Pay. The service will go live in Australia in the first half of 2016.
Both Android Pay and its competitor Apple Pay allow consumers to pay for purchases using a card-linked mobile phone by tapping their phone in the same way you would tap your card at the point of sale. The services also work with smart watch devices, and in the case of Apple Pay, by holding the fingerprint on the phone.
Jeff Bezos may not have gone where no man has gone before, but in successfully landing its New Shephard rocket back on Earth, his rocket company Blue Origins has pipped ahead of rivals in the race to make space commercially viable. It’s a significant coup in the latest incarnation of the space race. In addition, it may have given pause to Elon Musk, the founder of rival SpaceX.
The latest ABS labour force statistics show a steady trend developing. Both the unemployment rate at 6.1% and the participation rate at 65% have remained stable since March 2015. This smooth trend bodes well for Australia as a whole.
Modern society is characterised by mass manufacturing, mass investment, and mass consumption, which give rise to “mass wrongs” – and the need for a system of mass redress. Reports of harm to underpaid employees, users of payday lending and financial advice, shareholders and consumers has seen the rise of the redress or resolution scheme, which diverts disputes from the courts into a quasi-administrative/ alternative dispute resolution mechanism.
Conventional wisdom on supporting entrepreneurship is that governments should support start-ups and small businesses to spur job creation and economic growth. The basis for the rationale is on the premise that small firms make up the highest number of companies in developed countries, and that they are the biggest providers of jobs.
However, the reality is that the majority of small firms actually do not grow. In fact they fail, and in doing so can destroy employment opportunities.
Virtually everyone lives and works in a team, but there is a tension between what is good for the group and what is good for the individual. Within a group, competitive individuals do better, but cooperative groups as a whole do better.
Organisations tend to reward individual performance such as sales or production but this can be counterproductive because it tends to produce very competitive groups. An alternative is to reward group performance but this carries the risk of free riders, shirkers, or loafers, who ride on the coattails of others.
A work-life-family balance is highly valued by most workers and employers now realise they need to offer flexible arrangements such as reduced hours, flexi-time or telework (working from home).
Workplace flexibility is particularly important to working parents whose childcare needs may not fit well with standard work hours.
To date, it has proved difficult to know how satisfied employees are with their level of balance, and it has been similarly challenging for employers to assess balance in their organisations, with some disputing the usefulness of the term.
Back in September, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that marked a major turning point in the role that behavioral science plays in helping the federal government achieve policy goals.
The order, which directs federal agencies to incorporate insights from behavioral science into their programs, may turn out to be one of the most important acts of his second term. That is certainly the view of Cass Sunstein, a Harvard legal scholar and coauthor of the bestselling book on behavioral economics, Nudge.
Feeling ill? Well, staying at home would seem to be the sensible course of action. Yet for many, going to work while sick has become the norm, even a necessity in the face of the pressures placed on us by the organisations, which employ us.
In many cases, illness is no longer a valid reason for not working; rather, it is something that people must put up with and get over. Sick days are for wimps.
