Governmental budgeting as ex ante financial accounting: The United Kingdom case

For many years now the academic governmental-budgeting literature has concentrated almost exclusively on the politics and economics of the budgetary process at the expense of the mechanical foundations. Consequently, we see an interesting but insulated discussion about political involvement and about the strengths and weaknesses of planning models. What we do not see is a discussion of the accounting perspective. This paper offers such a discussion. It explains local government budgeting as “ex ante financial accounting” and offers some important implications of this re-interpretation.     

Mapping and analysing virtual outcrops

Laser scanning is a very efficient way to generate realistic, high-resolution digital models of 3-D geological outcrops. This paper discusses the methodologies involved in the creation and analysis of virtual outcrops, based on laser scanner data. The visualisation of the laser scanner data as a photorealistic 3-D object is described. Geological features picked out on the virtual outcrop (e.g. fractures, faults or bedding planes) can be extrapolated outward, into space, and inward, into the subsurface, using tension surfaces.     

The importance of seasonal variability and tactical responses to risk on estimating the economic benefits of integrated weed management

Seasonal variability is an important source of risk faced by farmers and, regardless of an individual's attitude to risk, there are options to tactically adjust production strategies as the outcomes of risk become known. The objective of this article is to measure the economic benefits of alternative approaches to managing weeds, one of the most serious production problems in Australian cropping systems. A bioeconomic model that combines weed biology, crop growth and economics is developed to value the effects of seasonal variability and the role of tactical responses and sequential decision making in determining an optimal integrated weed management strategy. This shows that there are substantial differences in the measured long‐term benefits from deterministic and stochastic simulations. It is concluded that, for research evaluation of technologies that involve complex biological and dynamic systems, ignoring the impacts of seasonal variability, responses to risk and sequential decision making can lead to an incorrect estimate of the economic benefits of a technology. In this case study of optimal weed management strategies in Australia, the size of the error is high.     

Graduate Engineers and British Trans-National Business: Elite Human Resource Or Technical Labourers?

Bryn Jones, Peter Scott, Brian Bolton and Alan Bramley discuss the results of their cross-sectoral study of manufacturing firms in the UK. They find that policy of treating graduate engineers as an elite human resource is mostly confined to consortia having international cooperative links and to companies with ‘central interventionist’ HRD policies. the high degree of decentralisation characteristic of UK-owned companies, however, combined with the disproportionate recruitment of non-engineer managers, restricted the career development of engineers. All four authors are from the University of Bath. Bryn Jones and Peter Scott are from the School of Social Sciences. Brian Bolton and Alan Bramley are from the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering and the School of Mechanical Engineering.     

The expert system: constructing expertise in an IT/management consultancy

Despite widespread uncertainty, if not scepticism, about the precise nature of the expertise that consultants bring to bear in their client engagements, organisations continue to employ consultants in large numbers, especially in information technology-related projects. Drawing on a participant observation study of IT/management consultancy practice, this paper seeks to explore the different ways in which consultants are seen as experts in the light of the pressures of the consultancy market place. The ongoing construction of consultancy expertise through the interaction of consultants and their clients with an array of elements, including technical knowledge, skilled practice, individual and collective experience, and commercial interests is discussed. It is suggested that, rather than being a relatively-enduring property of individuals, based on their mastery of a body abstract knowledge or their skills at managing the perceptions of their clients, the precarious and multi-faceted character of their expertise means that consultants are continuously engaged in its active construction through their situated practice.     

The professional background of company law pressure groups

In a recent article, Jones (1995) notes that witnesses before the nineteenthcentury government committees played a pivotal role in the initiation of company accounting recommendations and, ultimately, in subsequent legislation. However, very little is known about these witnesses, particularly in relation to their professional occupations/affiliations and the degree to which different professions were represented before various parliamentary committees. Research on these questions will improve our knowledge and understanding of nineteenth-century influences on company law reform. This preliminary study indicates that the representation of different professional groups varied between committees. Furthermore, certain professions and interest groups tended to be better represented than others throughout the nineteenth century. Finally, accounting recommendations of witnesses appeared to vary across different professions.     

Fluctuations in convex models of endogenous growth, II: Business cycle properties

Using ideas from the endogenous growth literature, we present a model of the endogenous determination of productivity growth based on individual worker decisions about human capital investment. We calibrate a version of the model to match long run growth facts from the US and study the business cycle properties of this model. This approach offers improvements along several dimensions over standard exogenous growth methodologies. Most importantly, our stochastic endogenous growth model generates much greater serial correlation in output growth and labor supply volatility relative to its real business cycle counterpart. We conclude that using the extra discipline of reproducing the trend productivity growth features of the data endogenously constitutes an important missing component from the real business cycle approach.