The elusive NHS consumer: 1948 to the NHS Plan

Since the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, patients have never been fully-fledged consumers of healthcare; they have never held personal economic power with which to express their needs and preferences to service providers. Nonetheless, the history of the NHS has demonstrated an ever-increasing policy interest in the needs of individual patients and in the responsiveness of services to these needs. Following the collapse of the postwar consensus which gave birth to the welfare state, successive governments have pledged to give priority to consumer needs, but have struggled to realise this priority in practice.Professional and state paternalism in defining patient needs and choices have endured. current policy emphasis on 'patient and public involvement' and 'partnership working' sustains a top-down bureaucratic approach but tempers practice with input from all stakeholders in local health economies. There is much to do to make the culture of the NHS genuinely responsive to consumer needs.     

炫酷改装车

BRABUS把奔驰升级为巴博斯 爱好汽车的朋友们,一定听过这样的一句话:"德国人的血管里流淌的不是血液,是汽油!"如此博得全球汽车业认同的,不仅是众所周知的德国豪车品牌,更有其体系成熟的改装文化.成立于1977年的德国品牌BRABUS(巴博斯)正是其中的先驱者. 巴博斯自创立之初,便专门真对奔驰汽车进行定制改装.早在1992年,巴博斯便在奔驰600型轿车上搭载了509马力/375千瓦的巴博斯6.9升V12发动机,使改装后车速可高达300公里.自此,巴博斯开始了其顶级12缸发动机的研发与制造.时至今日,巴博斯的产品涵盖了引擎移植、引擎性能加强、空气动力性能提升、高质量合金轮毂、动感与舒适兼具的悬挂系统、高性能制动系统以及各种高品质的个性化内饰改装服务.     

SME Development Policies in Different Stages of Transition

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Managerial discourse and the link between theory and practice: From ROI to value-based management

Building on Thrift's (2005) concept of the cultural circuit of capitalism using critical discourse analysis, the paper investigates the influence of management accounting concepts on practice. The paper proposes that the way that academic theories in management accounting affect practice depends on the origin of the early texts, the extent to which the texts become discourses and the relative institutional support for the discourse. The approach is illustrated by focusing on three particular management accounting concepts: return on investment (ROI), value-based management (VBM) and strategic management accounting (SMA) and empirically contextualised through the case history of GEC/Marconi. The paper explains that, whilst ROI and VBM have, to varying degrees, become part of managerial discourse, SMA has remained a loose collection of academic texts and has had a negligible impact on managerial discourse and practice.     

Doha Merchandise Trade Reform: What Is at Stake for Developing Countries?

The LINKAGE model of the global economy and the latest GlobalTrade Analysis Project (GTAP) database (version 6.05) are usedto examine the impact of current merchandise trade barriersand agricultural subsidies and possible reform outcomes of theWorld Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Doha DevelopmentAgenda. The results suggest that moving to free global merchandisetrade would boost real incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa proportionatelymore than in other developing countries or in high-income countries,despite the terms of trade loss in parts of that region. Particularattention is given to agriculture, as farmers constitute thepoorest households in developing countries but the most assistedin rich countries. Net farm incomes would rise substantiallyin Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing country regions,alleviating rural poverty. Partial liberalization could movethe world some way toward those desirable outcomes, the moreso the more developing countries themselves cut applied tariffs,particularly on agricultural imports.     

The growth of China and India: implications and policy reform options for Malaysia

This study explores the trade‐related impacts of rapid growth of China and India on the Malaysian economy and evaluates policy options to better position Malaysia to take advantage of these changes. Higher growth in China and India is likely to raise Malaysia's national income and to expand Malaysia's natural resource and agricultural exports, while putting downward pressure on exports from some manufacturing and service sectors. Increases in the quality and variety of exports from China and India are likely to increase substantially the overall gains to Malaysia. The expansion of the natural resource sectors and the contraction of manufacturing and services reflect a Dutch‐disease effect that will raise the importance of policies to facilitate adaptation to the changing world economy and improve competitiveness. Most‐favoured‐nation (MFN) liberalisation would increase welfare, and, by increasing competitiveness, raise output and exports of key industries. Preferential liberalisation with India and completely free trade with China would provide greater market access gains than MFN reform, but neither would be as effective in increasing income as MFN liberalisation, and free trade agreements would lead to greater competitive pressure on many of Malaysia's industries than MFN liberalisation. Increased investments in education and infrastructure could boost manufacturing and services sectors in Malaysia, while improving trade logistics would benefit sectors with high transport costs, including the agricultural and resource‐based industries.     

Allocating U.S. Department of Homeland Security funds to States with explicit equity, population and energy facility security criteria

Allocation of funds to states and local governments by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been challenged for relying too heavily on the U.S. Patriot Act formula that contains set-asides for each state. Yet, DHS's recent efforts to include more vulnerability/risk information have been criticized for lacking transparency. Using only off-the-shelf data and an off-the-shelf optimization model, which is a compromise between politically grounded formulas and complex analyses supported by massive data manipulations, the authors maximize need (defined and represented here as funds to protect electrical-generating capacity) subject to explicit constraints based on political equity and population size but introduce risk-related criteria as well in the form of ease of securing the facilities and public perception of risk. The model results closely approximate the DHS allocations at the state level when electricity generation and its retail price are maximized subject to moderate set-asides for political equity and population size. The advantages of this approach are that the results are transparent and sensitivity analysis is relatively easy to do. The advantages and disadvantages of the approach presented here are compared with more sophisticated alternatives.