Towards A New Approach to Development Management1

Abstract: Since attaining political independence African countries have achieved significant improvements in a number of social welfare indicators. However, the record of socio-economic development in Africa is generally poor both in absolute terms and in comparison with other regions of the world. Various reasons have been given for Africa's poor development record. This paper suggests that approaches to development management so far adopted in Africa are inadequete, and it propose the conceptual elements for a new approach to development management. Résumé: Depuis leur accès à I'indépendance, un certain nombre d'indicateurs de bien-être social des pays africains se sont très nettement améliorés. Toutefois, les résultats concernant le développement socio-économique de l'Afrique est, en règle générale, médiocre en chiffres absolus et si on le compare avec d'autres régions du monde. Pour expliquer ces résultats, divers raisons ont été avancées. Ce document donne à penser que les approches adoptées jusqu'ici en Afrique, touchant la gestion du développement, sont inadaptées à la situation. L'auteur propose donc des éléments conceptuels pour une nouvelle approche de la gestion du développement     

Can you handle failure?

Handling failure and blame is key to managerial success. But roughly 70 % of Americans have a personality type that tends to react inappropriately when things go wrong. Some people are extrapunitive, always pointing a finger at someone else. Others are impunitive, denying there's a problem or that they played any role. And still others are intrapunitive, heaping too much blame on themselves and seeing disasters where none exist. Fortunately, there are ways to fix such flawed responses. The first step is to cultivate self-awareness; several personality tests can help you assess your interaction style. Next, deepen your political awareness to better understand what messages others are receiving. Once you've identified your bad habits, you can move toward more-adaptive responses. Dattner and Hogan describe several strategies that can benefit any of the personality types. You should make sure to listen and communicate well, reflect on the situation and the people involved, think carefully before acting, and look for lessons when mistakes do happen. Using detailed examples, the authors illustrate how people with the various personality types are apt to react to specific failures and explain what they might do differently. They also offer insights to help you recognize when your bosses, peers, or subordinates fit into one of the problematic categories and suggest ways to influence their behavior. The taxonomy and tactics they present will help you approach failure with an open mind and react in a balanced, constructive way.     

An optimization approach for brass casting blending problem under aletory and epistemic uncertainties

A critical process in brass casting is the determination of the materials and their quantities to be added into the blend. The reason of being critical is the uncertainty about metal percentages in scrap raw materials. In this paper, the aleatory and epistemic uncertainties, which are modeled by using probability and possibility theory, respectively, have been handled simultaneously in a blending optimization problem for brass casting and a solution approach that transforms the possibilistic uncertainties into probabilistic ones is proposed. A numerical example is performed by the data supplied from MKE brass factory in Turkey. The results of the example have showed that the proposed approach can be effectively used for solving blending problem including aleatory and epistemic uncertainties in brass casting and other scrap based production process.     

Farmers’ Preferences for New Environmental Policy Instruments: Determining the Acceptability of Cross Compliance for Biodiversity Benefits

This paper addresses the issue of farmers’ views concerning the perceived legitimacy of environmental cross compliance as a governance mechanism. Recent work on the theory of regulation emphasises the importance of the legitimacy ascribed to a regulation in determining the effectiveness with which it can be implemented. The current study outlines a rationale for why this motivational question should receive attention in economic studies of policy design and reports the results of a survey of 102 arable farmers in East Anglia, UK, which investigated the level of support for the principle of cross compliance for biodiversity objectives. It was found that two attitudinal factors, referred to as ‘Stewardship Orientation’ and ‘Technological Beliefs’, were by far the most significant in determining the acceptability of cross compliance in the sample, and that structural and socio‐demographic factors were considerably less important. The study also identified clusters of farmers according to their overall attitudinal orientation. Of the five groups thus categorised, four appeared on average likely to reject cross compliance as a general principle, leaving only the most ‘Environmental’ cluster in support. The policy implications are discussed and some conclusions drawn.     

'They Used To Go to Eat, Now They Go to Earn': The Changing Meanings of Seasonal Migration from Puruliya District in West Bengal, India

This article uses migrant workers' testimonies to analyse whether and how much the act of migrating seasonally for wage work has contributed to changing social relations. We investigate changes in the meaning of this kind of migration to workers involved in it over their working lives. The emergence of peasant capitalism in West Bengal from the 1970s resulted in more days work and higher wages for migrant workers. This made it possible for wage workers to view migration as a way of earning and accumulating a useful lump sum, rather than simply surviving through food payments during the period of work, as had taken place in the past. However, there was no general move away from the compulsion to earn a wage through hard manual labour. Through the testimonies, we explore the ambivalence of migrant workers towards changes in the relations of production at home and at the destination workplace.     

WTO渔业补贴谈判提案评析

自世贸组织多哈部长会议将渔业补贴问题列为谈判议题以来,各国就此提案分歧很大。在谈判中,关于渔业补贴议题所形成的几大主流提案也屡经演变,本文将其分为形成对立集团阶段,探讨具体方案阶段,以及有限的融通阶段并对各阶段的主要提案进行评析。     

跨国公司在华品牌本土化战略和启示

在中国市场，企业的产品竞争正逐渐演变为品牌竞争，品牌战略已成为企业占有市场的有效途径。跨国公司凭借其品牌优势所实施的品牌本士化战略在中国市场的竞争中居于有利地位，而国内企业在品牌战略的一些错误做法导致其在竞争中远远地落在跨国公司后面，实施正确的品牌扩张策略已是刻不容缓.     

Decomposing poverty changes into vertical and horizontal components

Variations in aggregate poverty indices can be due to differences in average poverty intensity, to changes in the welfare distances between those poor of initially unequal welfare status and/or to emerging disparities in welfare among those poor of initially similar welfare status. This note uses a general cost‐of‐inequality approach that decomposes the total change in poverty into a sum of indices of each of these three components. This decomposition can serve inter alia to integrate horizontal and vertical equity criteria in the poverty alleviation assessment of social and economic programmes. The use of these measures is briefly illustrated using Tunisian data.