Coping with Ambiguity: Reconciling External Legitimacy and Organizational Implementation in Performance Measurement

This article reports the results of a study of the implementation of performance measurement in 74 UK public sector organizations. Performance measurement is often imposed on organizations by external stakeholders and those charged with implementation have to reconcile the demands of competing interests. These interests reflect the complex relations that 'street-level' public organizations engage in. The authors use institutional theory to make sense of how these relations, and the competing demands of performance measurement, are managed.     

The regulation of science-based claims in advertising

This paper analyzes the effects of scientific information dissemination on consumer and producer behavior. The first section draws heavily from evidence on the ready-to-eat cereal market during a period in which information developed about the health benefits of fiber cereal consumption. Although producers were initially prohibited from advertising these benefits, the regulatory ban against advertising was lifted during the period we study. Our results indicate that advertising was an important source of information leading to increased fiber cereal consumption and product innovation. The second part of our paper discusses the potential for deception if science-based claims are allowed. In the final section we consider a number of regulatory proposals that have been raised in the context of health claims for food products. We evaluate these proposals against the three goals of encouraging the dissemination of truthful information and discouraging the dissemination of deceptive or misleading information and their ability to keep pace with the changing science.     

Rich and Poor Countries in Neoclassical Trade and Growth

A neoclassical growth model provides an explanation for a 'poverty trap', 'club convergence', or 'twin peaks', in terms of specialisation and international trade. The model has many countries with identical linearly homogeneous technologies for producing three goods using capital and labour. With diverse initial endowments, initial equilibrium has unequal factor prices and two diversification cones. With savings out of wages, following Galor (1996), there may easily be multiple steady states. Poor countries converge to a low steady state while rich countries converge to a high one, even though all share identical technological and behavioural parameters.     

A Multi-Objective and Multi-Design Evaluation Procedure for Environmental Protection Forestry

A unique and important application of a comprehensive and practical multi-objective evaluation framework is presented which goes far beyond traditional cost-benefit analysis (CBA). It is characterized by transparency which is not always the case for methods beyond CBA. The application is geared to the evaluation of environmental protection forestry with several alternative designs. The framework suggested consists of five key steps integrating orthodox cost-benefit analysis and the analytical hierarchy process developed by Saaty (1980). It is shown to be a flexible framework which can coherently function with a mixture of both monetary and physical units of measurement. The framework is applied to a consideration of alternative designs for the Three Norths Shelter Belt (TNSB) in China.