International subcontracting involving LDCs

An increasing number of LDCs for which international subcontracting has been an accepted practice can be seen to be progressively tied to the internationalization of production and marketing.     

Media allocation model using nonlinear benefit curves

An integral part of planning advertising campaigns involves the selection of those media vehicles that maximize the effectiveness of the advertising effort. This article describes a media allocation model designed to provide the media planner, responsible for a particular advertising campaign, with relevant information for use in selecting the most appropriate media vehicles and in determining the number of insertions in each vehicle. It is based on the derivation of nonlinear benefit curves for candidate media vehicles that can be derived from commercially available response data and from subjective estimates gathered from media planning experts. When tested in an actual advertising campaign, the results serve to provide relevant information that can make the media allocation decision a more objective one.     

Planning a mature economy in the USSR

Conclusion Few of the techniques of planning we have now been considering were available to the Soviet economist during the period of intensive industrialisation; those which were available were worked out only in elementary form. In any case, the gap between the goals of the politicians and the assumptions of the economists was so great that little dialogue was possible. The politicians, and the politically-minded economists, undertook the elaboration of their own system of planning and their own ruleof-thumb methods of quantifying their goals to make them operational. In doing this, they acquired a rich fund of valuable experience about the problems of development through central planning; the lessons from this experience, both successful and unsuccessful, could save resources in other economies where central planning is being used for development. Unfortunately, it is information about formal mechanisms for planning and financial control which has until now tended to be communicated from the Eastern bloc to the developing countries, rather than a realistic account of problems and achievements. For the developing countries, the further question exists: now that the new techniques for planning are available, can they be coupled with planning for a high rate of growth in conditions of rapid social change? If so, some of the successes of Soviet-type central planning may be achieved at less cost.For previous articles in this series, see Economics of Planning, Vol. 5, 1965, No. 1–2, pp. 74–86, Vol. 6, 1966, No. 1, pp. 53–67.