Kazakhstan's wheat system: priorities, constraints, and future prospects

This paper provides an overview of Kazakhstan's wheat system following independence and identifies policies and constraints currently influencing the operation and development of the system. It also looks at the factors affecting production decisions, including the current operating environment, intra-sectoral linkages, and overall macroeconomic conditions and identifies several alternative sources of productivity growth that can potentially improve the current and future competitiveness of Kazakhstan's wheat producers. The paper emphasizes that the wheat system cannot operate in isolation from the rest of the economy. Regaining lost levels of productivity can only be accomplished with some level of coordinated policy linking the priorities of the wheat system with those of the agricultural sector and the economy as a whole.     

Book reviews

Assessing the Value of Your Training: The Evaluation Process from Training Needs to the Report to the Board
Leslie Rae, 2002. Published by Gower Publishing Ltd, Aldershot, Hants, UK. ISBN 0 566 68535 6. £49.50, 240 pages.     

The college graduate and his first job

To determine MBA graduates' subjective responses to their first jobs and the areas of their greatest dissatisfactions, the authors queried a group about ten factors: advancement opportunity, challenging work, responsibility, salary, supervision, location, job prestige, training programs, fringe benefits, and security.     

Towards an ethics platform for tourism

Ethical distinctions inform all human actions and decisions. On inspection, however, dominant paradigms in tourism scholarship are imbued with the myth of objectivity and thus ignore the ethical dimension. Since the four platforms of scholarship were first published in 1990, a representation of one of the most value-based concepts of this time, sustainable development, has been embraced; a fifth platform has emerged to dominate the rhetoric of tourism praxis. However, this paper argues that a sixth platform, an ethics platform, is needed to interrogate the morality of the positions taken in policy, planning, development, and management. These platforms are proposed against a background of environmental ethics and global political economy.     

论ISO 9000标准认证后的质量体系改进

质量体系改进是提高质量体系符合性、适用性和有效的多种措施，质量体系改进是长期的活动，从质量体系这日起就应坚持不断改进。质量体系改进是ＩＳＯ９０００族标准的要求，是企业长期发展的需要，通过认证的质量体系仍是不完善的，所以要进行质量体系改进活动。质量体系改进应持续做好培训教育，深入进行过程分析，认直开展质量体系审核和管理评审。     

Resource Utilization and Economies of Size in Secondary Schools

This paper identifies the determinants of costs per pupil in English secondary schools. A distinction is made between the short run and the long run in order to estimate the separate effects on costs per pupil of short‐run variations in school output and school size. A school’s capacity utilization rate is used to indicate short‐run deviations in output from pupil capacity, and pupil capacity is used as an indicator of school size to capture scale effects on costs per pupil. The statistical analysis uses both published and unpublished data for secondary schools in England. Two separate analyses are undertaken, one for grant‐maintained schools alone and the other for all schools. A separate analysis is undertaken for grant‐maintained schools since cost data are available only for schools in this sector. Staff hours per pupil is used as a proxy for costs per pupil for schools as a whole. The main finding is that costs per pupil and staff hours per pupil are both highly significantly negatively related to both school size and the capacity utilization rate of schools. A range of other variables are also estimated to have a significant effect on costs per pupil in secondary schools. The main finding is that there is scope for reducing the costs of schooling in the secondary schools sector in England.