Gift planning in the year 2010: imagine the unimaginable. Part I

Philanthropy in general, and fund raising in particular, is changing. Such change is more radical than most recognize and certainly faster than most organizations are prepared for. Those that anticipate the change and adjust to it have a good chance of thriving. Those that fail to do so will struggle and may become irrelevant.     

Gift exchange in the workplace

Certain altruistic phenomena in the workplace that exceed the bounds of contract theory can be explained within the framework of gift exchange theory. We discuss the application of gift exchange theory to interactions between an employer and an employee as well as between employees themselves. We emphasize the opportunities of gifts to improve coordination and contract efficiency in the workplace and argue that there exists the productive function of gifts. We use the framework of a market for externalities in order to demonstrate that given the inter-related activities of agents a gift exchange between them can lead to Pareto improvement.     

Four reasons why 2018 will be the best post‐crisis year

• ? We head into 2018 in a fairly optimistic mood. The current upswing is more broadly based than any other since the global financial crisis, and – unusually by recent standards – we have entered the new year without any major crisis looming. We see world GDP growth accelerating from 3.0% last year to 3.2% in 2018, which would be the best year for the global economy since the post‐global financial crisis rebound .
• ? There are four key reasons why 2018 is going to be a good one globally: (i) strong trade growth; (ii) muted inflation keeping monetary policy accommodative; (iii) emerging markets staying robust; (iv) resilience to political uncertainty.
• ? The near‐term risk of an abrupt slowdown in China looks limited, while the Eurozone economy continues to stage robust growth which is underpinned by strong fundamentals. A potential fiscal loosening, a weaker dollar and business investment revival bode well for the US. The outlook is bright for economies that are heavily integrated into global manufacturing supply chains or reliant on commodity exports.
• ? Granted, soaring debt is a cause for concern, particularly in some emerging markets, along with high asset price valuations. They warrant close monitoring and are plausible triggers for the next global slowdown. Nonetheless, while such risks could linger or indeed escalate further before correcting, we don't see them as 2018 issues.
• ? The most obvious trigger for any such correction would be a widespread and more aggressive monetary policy normalisation. However, in our view, inflation pressures look set to build only slowly. Add the fact that high debt will make the economy more sensitive to interest rate moves, we expect central banks to normalise with caution and see policymakers doing less tightening that the consensus expectation.

     

都市圈规划:地域空间规划的新范式

作为一种新的地域空间结构,都市圈的规划需要不同于传统的新理念和新方法.文章在论述了都市圈相关概念和萌生背景之后,参考国外都市圈规划案例,总结了都市圈规划异于城镇体系规划的特质要求,并对都市圈规划的理念、方法做了探讨.     

赠与合同中民事法律关系理论的几点研究

赠与合同是一种特殊形态的民事法律关系,它是指赠与人将自己合法财产无偿给予受赠人,受赠人表示接受的双方一致合同。与其他有名合同作比,赠与行为的发生,往往是基于亲属关系、朋友或其他道德上的原因。因此,赠与合同在本质上与其他转移财产合同如买卖、互易合同是完全不同的。本文通过有关赠与合同主体、客体的资格界定;通过对其内容的归类,从民事法律关系角度对赠与合同进行阐述。     

Europe in the year 2000: three pitfalls ahead

This paper analyses three problems facing the EU in the near future: (1) A move towards majority decision-making would impose costs upon the minority and restrict freedom. (2) A European Bill of Rights would give the European Court more centralising power. (3) European determination to strengthen and separate its own military forces within NATO bodes badly for the future of the Organisation.     

英国城乡规划的经验及启示——写在《英国城乡规划》第14版中文版出版之前

英国的规划体系注重经验与惯例的积累,在针对城乡规划的基本矛盾———如何应对未来的不确定性时,采取了指导型的开发规划与自由裁量式的开发控制模式,使得城乡规划有能力去处理多样的需求以及不断变化的问题。当前中国规划体系在面对社会经济转型的过程中仍暴露出许多问题,结合中国国情参考英国经验将有助于中国规划体系的构建和完善。     

Forecasting the resurgence of the U.S. economy in 2010: An expert judgment approach

This paper describes a forecast, performed in December 2008, of the time of the recovery of the U.S. economy from the contraction that began in December 2007. As in two earlier papers, the forecast uses an expert judgment approach, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), within the framework of decision theory, as well as its generalization to dependence and feedback in the form of the Analytic Network Process (ANP). The findings of this paper are that the economy would begin its recovery in July-August, 2010. While forecasting is always hazardous, our 2001 paper successfully forecast the date the recovery began. Since 1920 the validating authority for the turnaround dates has traditionally been the widely recognized National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The Bureau usually releases an official statement with their finding many months after the event (and of course after the forecasts had been done). Our results on the month in which the recovery began in 2001 were confirmed by the NBER in July 2003. We will again await the NBER determination of the time of recovery from the current recession.     

Cross-functional alignment in supply chain planning: A case study of sales and operations planning

In most organizations, supply chain planning is a cross-functional effort. However, functional areas such as sales, marketing, finance, and operations traditionally specialize in portions of the planning activities, which results in conflicts over expectations, preferences, and priorities. We report findings from a detailed case analysis of a supply chain planning process that seemingly weathers these cross-functional conflicts. In contrast to traditional research on this area, which focuses on incentives, responsibilities, and structures, we adopt a process perspective and find that integration was achieved despite formal functional incentives that did not support it. By drawing a distinction between the incentive landscape and the planning process, we identify process as a mediator that can affect organizational outcomes. Thus, organizations may be capable of integration while functions retain different incentives and orientations to maintain focus on their stakeholders’ needs. Through iterative coding, we identify the attributes of the planning process that can drive planning performance—information, procedural, and alignment quality—but also find evidence that achieving alignment in the execution of plans can be more important than informational and procedural quality. In addition to process attributes, we also identify social elements that influenced the performance of the planning process and place the information processing attributes within a broader social and organizational context.     

网络计划在采矿工程中的应用

文章把网络计划管理运用在采矿实际生产实践中,并结合相关软件进行运算,确定好生产工程的最早开始时间、最迟开始时间和总时差,计算出了工程的关键路径。     

徐和谊年末的狂喜

2009年12月9日,我们一踏进北汽集团董事长徐和谊的办公室,已经感觉到了他的兴奋。我记得,他站了起来。“这事儿太大了,”徐对《中国企业家》说,“爆炸性的新闻,现在绝对保密。”     

社会多元化与政府转型情境下的规划模式转变——浅析多伦多新型社会规划

面对当前社会日益多元化的发展趋势,以及政府职能调整为社区发展带来的两难困境,加拿大多伦多市在反思传统社会规划模式局限性的基础上,开创性地进行了新型社会规划模式的探索,为我国城市规划领域中社会规划的发展提供了新的思路和启示.     

Enterprise resource planning: technology acceptance in Thai universities

The primary objective of this paper is to identify the factors associated with computing satisfaction for existing legacy systems and the perceptions of usefulness and ease of use of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for Thai university staff. Questionnaires were used as a means to gain insights and perspective of ERP systems in Thai universities. The results found significant relationships between university tenure and system satisfaction, and that computer experience, age, prior knowledge and education were significantly related to ERP perceptions. Diversity is also required in administration staff to allow new ideas to be recognised and exploited. This study has investigated ERP as a new innovation at a very early stage in Thai universities. This research study has shown that potential adopters of ERP do have uncertainty about a new innovation and this compels them to find out more information about the innovation. Any efforts at persuasion should be staged over a period of time to allow a build-up of knowledge to occur in organisations that implement ERP. ERP training could then focus on explaining the advantages of ERP over the existing system, while providing users with ‘hands on’ experience of an ERP system.     

Hierarchical integration in production planning: Theory and practice

This paper discusses the issue of integrating various decision levels in hierarchical production planning systems. First the theory is briefly reviewed and then two case studies are presented. It is argued that it is not sufficient to have a good decision model at every level of the decision hierarchy. The different models should be carefully integrated. The potential problems resulting from a lack of integration are discussed. These problems are then illustrated in two case studies in order to be able to focus on actual managerial issues. It is shown how different decision levels supported by decision models were integrated in these two applications. Two important features are the crucial role of crossfunctional managerial committees in the integration process and the introduction of slack to avoid disaggregation problems.We do not claim to be exhaustive in presenting the problems related to integration nor do we claim that the solutions to the cases are the best possible ones. We do, however, hope that this paper motivates production managers to take a serious look at their hierarchical planning procedures.