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This paper summarises a diagnosis of some human resource management (HRM) activities in 12 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of the Canadian consulting engineering industry. Data were collected by means of thorough interviews with the persons assuming the main HRM responsibilities in these SMEs. These interviews were structured by the use of an exhaustive questionnaire covering the main HRM activities. The employment and maintenance activities analysed in this paper are human resource planning, job analysis, recruitment, selection, induction, compensation and performance appraisal. This study has three major objectives. First, it provides descriptive data on the use of these HRM activities in SMEs of the consulting engineering industry. Second, it evaluates the level of development of these activities in light of the normative HRM body of knowledge. Finally, it summarizes the major obstacles faced by the persons assuming these HRM responsibilities. The results underline the adaptive capacities of the SMEs but they also suggest the pertinence of improving some of their HRM activities.

Keywords: Gestion des ressources humaines (GRH), Pratiques de GRH, Petites et moyennes entreprises (PME), Gestion de projets (GP), Diagnostic, Sociétés-conseils, Ingénierie

This research bears on the answers provided by 2278entrepreneurs in 14 countries about their motivation to establish a new enterprise. Preliminary statistical analysis revealed important differences in the way entrepreneurs answer motivation questions (38 of them) and, even more important, in the way certain nationalities gauge the relative importance of motivation factors. To correct these answering modes, the original data were recoded and reclassified according to the personal equation statistical method. Ascending hierarchical classification of the recoded data reveals that motivations are grouped according to three broad regional entities : the Anglo-Saxon Block, the Scandinavian Block, and the Mixed Block which comprises developing countries for the most part. Seven main motivation factors emerge from the rotated Varimax factor analysis of the recoded and reclassified data : need for social recognition, need for selfdevelopment, need for money, needfor independence and autonomy, communitarianism, need forescape, and opportunism. The distribution of these factors and of the the underlying variables suggests clearly that entrepreneurial motivations cut across national boundaries and transcend cultural systems of countries. The results indicate that the motivation to become an entrepreneur in a given country is primarily determined by metacultural factors that transcend the immediate socio-economic environment.

In this study, we test the hypothesis that domestic public debt affects economic growth through its impact on the activity of the banking system. For this purpose, we estimate a simultaneous equations model based on a panel of 20 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000-2010. The results suggest that the holding of government securities has encouraged banks to take on more risk and to increase their loans to the private sector, especially in the presence of weak institutions. However, this beneficial impact of domestic public debt did not significantly influence economic activity as the African financial system has played a limited role in stimulating private investment and economic growth.

AbstractThis paper examines the impact of US firms on technological competitiveness in Europe between 1955-75 through a dynamic application of the eclectic theory of international trade and production. It looks at the improvement in the trading performance of European countries, and finds that in certain larger countries and sectors that indigenous firms also improved their position. This is further found to be related to the transfer of technology from the US to Europe, and its diffusion to European firms where this has taken place.

Reflexivity is central to initial teacher education programs. However, students find it difficult to “enter into reflective practice.” This contribution qualitatively investigates the priorities to give to a reflective intervention, deployed throughout the training, by identifying, for each year of training, the training needs and the relationship to knowledge of future primary school teachers. If all students request pragmatic content, differences were observed (depending on the year of training) in terms of student perception of reflexivity and its usefulness, identity, relationships with trainers and peers, learning, emotions, and perception of competence. Hence, it seems necessary, in the first year, to work on the meaning of the profession and initial conceptions; in the second year, to invest in emotional regulation and to scaffold the reflective approach; and, in the last year, to support the students’ needs for emancipation.

Keywords: training needs, besoins de formation, reflexivity, réflexivité, pre-service teachers, futurs enseignants

AbstractWe develops in this paper a nonlinear vector autoregressive model to study stock market interdependences. Among the innovations of this work, we introduce a structural break in the conditional variances-covariance's matrix of multivariate GARCH process. We consider a BEKK expand with shocks to volatility transmission across markets. The purpose of these amendments is to respond to several biases in the measurement of volatilities and correlations between markets: a primer bias is the shocks to volatility persistence over estimating; second, heteroskedasticity and omitted variables bias in market cross-correlation estimates. We use a sample of 11 markets from Europe, North America, and Asia with weekly data of market indices between 1985 and 2006. Several interesting results are obtained with this model: the reduction of shocks to volatility persistence, price and uncertainties transmission from U.S. market to European and Asian markets, regional transmission phenomenon in Europe and Asia, apart from the U.S. crash of October 1987, all crises are not always contagious. At last but not the least, it is not clear that financial liberalization isolates markets from instability and contagion, although the integration is a good tool for market efficiency. Crises and contagion phenomenon can be market equilibrating process.

AbstractUsing a Faucher-Dales approach to migration phenomena, the authors sketch a plausible scenario of the pattern of migration of French Canadians to the United States as regulated by the size of the differential economic rent. Making use of all available data, the authors show that this approach would appear to be vindicated to the extent that the scenario it suggests is compatible with the available estimates of the migration flows.

AbstractThe financial model presented in the article attempts to further integrate capital budgeting into the firm's overall financial planning policy. Although it is an extension and generalization of Bernhard and Weingartner's previous models, it differs from these works by some basic assumptions related to both the objective function and constraint set.First, the objective function stresses the growing role of managerial discretion as opposed to the common assumption of maximizing shareholders' wealth. In particular we assume that managers wish to maximize the size of the firm under their control at the end of some future time horizon. Since net cash flows of the investment projects selected are sources of future investment funds, the managers try to keep the shareholders' dividends to a minimum level, sufficient enough however to pacify them.Secondly, the model constraints embody the complete set of financial instruments available to the corporation managers: in a sense, this enlarges the previous models' short-term external financing facilities by considering simultaneously the alternative long-term external financial instruments, namely equity and bond issues. In the latter case, the refunding features are incorporated in the constraints. The constraints also imply that managers prefer steady growth of net cash flows through time. This contrasts with the usual maximization approach which has been shown to favor long-term investment projects with somewhat more erratic net cash flows.The derivation of the Kuhn and Tucker conditions for the model allows us to show the impact of the opportunity cost of the various instruments on that of the liquidity requirement and the investment projects selection criterion. Finally, the duality properties also highlight the reciprocal relationships existing between the various opportunity costs, both internal and external.