PAYING FOR CROSSRAIL : THE BUSINESS CASE

A new railway is being planned across London. Incremental fares revenue will only pay about a quarter of the £10 billion¹ expected cost, so the Greater London Assembly (GLA) is considering 'alternative funding mechanisms'. These include new taxes on businesses that are presumed to benefit from the scheme. Taxes would deter the very investment Crossrail is supposed to support. The GLA would do better to change the scheme to reduce the need for subsidy and strengthen the business case.     

A continuous time approach to the pricing of bonds

This paper develops an arbitrage model of the term structure of interest rates based on the assumptions that the whole term structure at any point in time may be expressed as a function of the yields on the longest and shortest maturity default free instruments and that these two yields follow a Gauss-Wiener process. Arbitrage arguments are used to derive a partial differential equation which must be satisfied by the values of all default free bonds. The joint stochastic process for the two yields is estimated using Canadian data and the model is used to price a sample of Government of Canada bonds.     

FROM EXPERIENCE: Balancing the Product Development Process: Achieving Product and Cycle-Time Excellence in High-Technology Industries

Most companies' product development process (PDP) is inefficient and slow. Consequently, products are often late-to-market, over cost and not well-aligned with customer's needs. Because it involves all levels of the organization and crosses all functional boundaries, the PDP is very difficult to control. Unbalanced control is at the root of many of the symptoms of a troubled PDP. Michael T. Anthony and Jonathan McKay investigate the four primary unbalanced PDP behaviors exhibited by organizations and present four balancing mechanisms to correct these flaws. In their view, a balanced PDP contains a structured development methodology and project reviews at specific, high-impact points that involves top management appropriately while still allowing empowerment of the project teams.     

Inter-farm,inter-regional and farm-non-farm income distribution: The impact of the new cereal variaties

HYVs affect distinct aspects of income distribution. Among farmers, the technology on balance most readily benefits the small; but public policy - on prices, credit, irrigation, nutrients, mechanisation, crop-breeding - has skewed gains towards larger owners. Between landed and landless the latter gain, as HYVs — unless subverted by inappropriate mechanization — raise and smooth wages and employment. The evidence on rich and poor regions lightens the prevailing gloom; and agronomic features of newer HYVs fit them well for some long-neglected, ill-watered areas. As for city and country, urban price policies, etc., have diverted some gains from HYVs towards less-poor urban consumers (and their employers). However, natural scientists are sufficiently independent of policy-makers to produce — with proper socio-economic support - research that steers benefits from HYVs towards the natural gainers from more food, labour-intensively grown: the rural poor.     

A bell system view of videotex

Within the last few years videotex has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, but as frequently is the case with novel services that are still evolving, a precise definition of videotex is somewhat difficult to obtain. To some people the term videotex applies to a wide variety of time-shared computer services for the home and business market, while to others, the term videotex is very specific perhaps best exemplified by the UK Prestel service. In its most narrow and specific meaning, videotex is a subset of online, time-shared computer services. It utilizes the home TV set for display to access a large, central database of frames of general information in colour with graphics. The database is organized in a tree fashion, and the main target is the home market.