The application of a Markov Chain in educational planning

Mathematical models can assist educators in the preparation of their educational plans and their potential in this regard is being increasingly realized. As a result, models have found application at all levels at which planning is conducted.This paper examines the potential of one model—the Markov Chain—which is capable of predicting enrolments for an education system.The model is applied to the New South Wales State Government education system between 1947 and 1961 and the projected enrolments compared to the actual enrolments in those years.Some success is achieved but it appears as if the data rather than the model are responsible for this. The limitations of the Markov Chain approach are discussed and present research and directions listed.     

Towards a functional framework for measuring national innovation efficacy

In an increasingly globalised economy, the ability to draw in innovations and ideas from elsewhere and build on them to create value at home has become a powerful facility for economic growth. Since some places are better at adopting and adapting borrowed ideas than others, the function of ‘innovation through adoption’ deserves more attention at both scholarly and policymaking levels. Based on such beliefs, this paper elaborates the notion of ‘innovation through adoption’ and develops it further to advance the notion of ‘innovation efficacy’. The latter is interpreted here as the efficiency and effectiveness of innovation systems in terms of accessing, anchoring, diffusing, creating and exploiting innovations. This notion is further illustrated in a measurement tool based on a composite index, which we name the ‘Innovation Efficacy Index’.The ultimate contribution of the paper lies in its aim to shift the traditional focus of attention from a fixation with developing and exploiting new knowledge locally to the prospect of value creation through accessing, anchoring or diffusing knowledge acquired from elsewhere.     

A model of the national health service for structural analysis and planning

A model of the NHS linking indicators of “need” and demand for health care services, provision and availability of health care facilities, use made of these facilities and outcome of the care provided through the medium of sets of regression equations is described. Problems of obtaining suitable indicators or measures of these attributes are discussed. The structure of interactions between these facets of the NHS revealed by the model and application of the model to prediction of the impact of policy changes are illustrated.     

Identifying temporal relationships in educational planning

Planning is the first activity in the management of any organization or system. The whole process of planning is built around the specification of a set of key variables and the associated achievement levels. In any plan the target levels of the key variables are sought to be achieved by means of the provision of various inputs by the organization or system. One of the underlying fundamental aspects of planning concerns the temporal relationships between the key variables and the organizational inputs. These temporal relationships are important because the achievement of the key variables, within a specified period of time, depends on how well the organizational inputs are matched with these variables. Hence, identifying such temporal relationships becomes necessary. This paper describes the use of multivariate time series analysis in identifying temporal relationships in the planning of an education system. The implications of such an identification are also pointed out.     

Mathematical programming applications in educational planning

The specific aim of this article is to examine recent developments in the applications of mathematical programming techniques to problems encountered in educational planning. Applications are given for selected problems at national, state, regional and local levels of planning and the implications of this work for educational research methodology is noted. Special attention is given to applications at the microanalytic or school district level, since most applications in this domain are of recent origin and have been developed in disciplines other than education, e.g. industrial engineering, econometrics, public administration, business and operations research.Applications are discussed in light of their relationship to theoretical and empirical research on educational production functions. The final section contains some directions and implications for future research which are discussed in terms of recent developments in socio-economic and public sector planning and the emerging major research needs in educational policy planning.     

Demand and supply elements in educational planning

Educational targets are usually determined by one of the conventional planning approaches without adequate prior knowledge of the behavioural relationships concerning the educational market. The insight into the functioning of the relevant demand and supply factors within the framework of an educational market can effectively serve as the groundwork and consistency check for any planning exercise. After reviewing various concepts regarding the structure of educational market, a demand and supply system of education is developed in the paper. Apart from the consideration of the relevant demand and supply factors, a novel concept of education's price is introduced. Empirical tests of this system are carried out for Africa, Asia and Latin America for two periods of time with encouraging results. Some basic conclusions can be drawn from these results particularly with regard to the changing impact of the demand and supply factors, the link between economic growth and income distribution through education, and the co-existence between the excess demand for education and unemployment.     

Towards a contingency theory of corporate planning: a systematic literature review

A major research stream examines corporate planning in its context by drawing on the contingency approach, which forms a major theoretical basis for the fields of strategic management and management control. This research paper provides a comprehensive review of this research stream and identifies important contingency factors, recurring results, and commonalities with the theoretical basis of the contingency approach. It reviews 195 studies that investigate the context factors of corporate planning at the organizational level of analysis and were published in ranked academic journals since 1967. This review contributes three findings to a contingency theory of corporate planning. First, this research stream is highly fragmented, replication of findings is scarce, and the cumulative growth of knowledge is restricted. My review shows that 866 different causal models link 30 context factors and 54 design aspects of the corporate planning system, and yet 498 of these causal models are only addressed in one single study. Second, the majority of contingency studies employ the selection fit approach and cross-sectional data. The more rigorous tests of contingency hypotheses, interaction fit and system fit approaches based on longitudinal data, are relatively scarce. Third, this review highlights consistent results across divergent research settings and designs. Thus, it identifies four important context factors of a corporate planning system: (a) management and planning philosophy, (b) organizational size, (c) environmental uncertainty, and (d) task interdependence. This comprehensive set of context factors facilitates the development of a more pronounced contingency theory of corporate planning.     

Cooperation as a coordinating factor of national planning and local initiative

The present communication relates to the planning of agricultural production. The paper is divided into two sections: the first part deals with general problems, the second with the planning situation as it relates to Israel. It is argued that only the individual owner is capable of realizing optimum returns. However, the central problem of agricultural planning is that of coordinating the general needs of the national economy with the individual farmer, since there is not always an identity of interest between the former and the latter.

The second section of the paper provides a discussion of Israeli production targets, the relevant economic factors, the organization needed for implementing the programs.     

A taxonomy of manpower—educational planning models

In the last decade the literature has recorded several works concerned with the applications of network flow-like models to the area of manpower planning, and specifically the management manpower training program to assure that supply will meet the demand. Because the system which these models attempt to describe and/or decisions which they prescribe are rather complex in the real world, each of these models has imbedded in them certain simplifying assumptions. On the other hand, each incorporates different aspects of what is real. This paper develops a taxonomy of the landmark developments in this area. The taxonomical schema is then used to unify the models in consideration of the decision factors used. The schema envisions a general model containing all the factors which are explicitly or implicitly considered in the existing literature as being germane. The schema lends itself to both the identifying of those models which might be of interest and not available in the literature on the one hand and it shows in bold relief the similarities and differences between existing models.     

Inter-threshold resource planning for public higher educational systems

Efforts to design comprehensive systems of long-range resource planning for public colleges and universities in the United States are frustrated in the sense that most states follow a social demand approach to educational planning. Literally thousands of decision makers—including students, parents, formal administrators and faculty members-affect the overall behavior of the system. Nevertheless, more and more states are creating centralized higher educational coordinating agencies to conduct long-range planning and to recommend policies for the future development of the higher educational system. This paper describes research which has attempted to link together three decision thresholds in the resource planning process. These are (a) academic departments or colleges which are combined into (b) a total college or university, which is one part of (c) a state system of higher education containing several colleges and universities.     

Project 1990: educational planning at the metropolitan level

The fragmentation of metropolitan areas into large numbers of relatively small school districts has rendered long range educational planning highly unreliable when conducted at the district level. This article discusses a cooperative planning venture which was undertaken by the forty school districts in the Buffalo, New York metropolitan area. The planning organization is described and the general procedures for making student population projections, expenditure projections and revenue projections are reported. Although the article focuses on methodology, findings of general interest are reported including organizational alternatives which were generated. The project was financed with funds appropriated under Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.     

Agent based-stock flow consistent macroeconomics: Towards a benchmark model

The paper moves from a discussion of the challenges posed by the crisis to standard macroeconomics and the solutions adopted within the DSGE community. Although several recent improvements have enhanced the realism of standard models, we argue that major drawbacks still undermine their reliability. In particular, DSGE models still fail to recognize the complex adaptive nature of economic systems, and the implications of money endogeneity. The paper argues that a coherent and exhaustive representation of the inter-linkages between the real and financial sides of the economy should be a pivotal feature of every macroeconomic model and proposes a macroeconomic framework based on the combination of the Agent Based and Stock Flow Consistent approaches. The papers aims at contributing to the nascent AB-SFC literature under two fundamental respects: first, we develop a fully decentralized AB-SFC model with several innovative features, and we thoroughly validate it in order to check whether the model is a good candidate for policy analysis applications. Results suggest that the properties of the model match many empirical regularities, ranking among the best performers in the related literature, and that these properties are robust across different parameterizations. Second, the paper has also a methodological purpose in that we try to provide a set or rules and tools to build, calibrate, validate, and display AB-SFC models.     

Family planning in a life-cycle model with income risk

Several US states have recently restricted the access to abortions. We study fertility intentions and how family planning and abortions are used as mechanisms to control fertility among couples facing income risk. We formulate and estimate a life-cycle consumption-saving model with uninsurable income risk and imperfect contraceptive control that matches fertility behavior in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) well. We use the estimated model to investigate how family planning and abortions are used to control fertility in our model. Our simulations suggest that income risk affects family planning and that abortion is used to control fertility due to the presence of income risk. This indicates that the availability of abortions might play a role as an insurance mechanism.     

Beyond workaholism: Towards a general model of heavy work investment

Although the term workaholism is widely used, little consensus exists about its meaning, and there is a great need for further theoretical and methodological advancement. We attempt to address this need by introducing the concept of Heavy Work Investment (HWI), and viewing workaholism as only one of its subtypes. Furthermore, we propose a model consisting of four main components: HWI, its possible predictors, its types, and its outcomes.In this model, using Weiner's (1985) attributional framework, we differentiate between situational and dispositional types of HWI, each with its own subtypes, as based on the predictors of such an investment. For example, financial-needs-based and employer-directed are situational subtypes, whereas workaholism and work-devotion are dispositional subtypes. Based on the proposed HWI model, we compare dispositional investors with situational investors.Finally, the measurement of HWI, as well as future research directions (study of situational investors, research across time and cultures, and exploration of inter-generational similarity/difference) is also discussed.     

Uncertainty and synergy: Towards a formal model of corporate strategy

In this paper an attempt is made to integrate the twin concepts of synergy and environmental uncertainty in a unifying framework for the analysis of corporate strategy in the large corporation. Environmental uncertainty and synergy considerations are considered to be the fundamental determinants in strategy formulation, the firm's strategy reflecting a choice between potential synergistic gains and increased vulnerability to environmental threats. A formal model of corporate strategy is developed explaining strategic behaviour as a function of opportunities for synergistic gains and level of environmental uncertainty. The empirical relevance of the model is demonstrated by utilizing data from four major studies of corporate strategy in the USA, the UK, France and West Germany.     

配电网规划模型研究

文章介绍了配电网规划的特点、规划步骤及优化策略。对加入分布式电源后的配电网规划进行优化,可提高配电网运行质量。     

数据挖掘技术在推广教育规划中的应用研究

采用数据挖掘技术来分析武汉某所职业技术学院的入学者在推广教育课程中的选课偏好和课程完成率之间的关系.将2003年至2008年的入学者在推广教育课程中的选课记录用三种数据挖掘算法进行分析.研究结果作为在推广教育规划中课程设置的一个参考.