A New Creation or an Image and Likeness? The Maltese Experience of Establishing Local Government in a Centralized Micro-State

Small states vary among themselves as to whether they have significant local government systems. While government in Malta has been historically a very centralized activity, a network of local councils was established in the early 1990s as part of a more general public sector reform movement. Unlike some other small states, Malta has strong political parties, and they have played an important part in the affairs of the local councils as well as of the central government. Their establishment has therefore done little to reduce political polarization or promote decentralist values, as was hoped when they were first established.     

Machinery of Government in Small States: Issues,Challenges and Innovatory Capacity

Small states present particular challenges to designers of political and administrative systems, and far too often their governing patterns have been imposed by former colonial powers. There are nonetheless excellent examples of efforts to design systems which are appropriate to the needs of the small states themselves. This is explored in relation to the pattern of ministries and departments, the use of executive committees, the structure and size of legislatures, head of state/head of government arrangements, and a range of other machinery-of-government issues. Consideration also is given to factors which can be exploited to develop innovative capacity in small states, and some areas for further research are suggested.     

管理学百年回顾与展望——第4届“管理学在中国”学术研讨会述评

在第4届"管理学在中国"学术研讨会上,围绕"管理学:百年回眸与世纪展望"的大会主题,学者们重点针对以下2个话题进行了研讨:西方管理理论的发展回顾与展望、管理学在中国的发展回顾与展望。此外,通过专题论坛的形式,学者们还围绕以下4个方面的话题进行了专题研讨:管理哲学、领导研究、政府与非营利组织管理、商业组织管理。针对上述话题的研讨情况进行了综述和点评。     

Insularity and Governance: The Case of French Polynesia

Insularity, smallness and remoteness help explain specific tendencies noted in the governance of French Polynesia, a partially self-governing French overseas territory in the South Pacific, with a population of 220,000. Professional relations tend to become personalized, and impersonal and impartial procedures are hard to apply. The market for experts is small: some people are able to claim a monopoly on some type of expertise and then defend it by every means. Solidarity is vertical, not horizontal, which makes for a fragile democracy.     

The Future of HRD Research: A SWOT analysis by five leading scholars in the field

This article presents a review of the 11th International Conference on Human Resource Development Research and Practice across Europe through the lens of global mobility. The conference was held in Pécs, Hungary in June, 2010 and the four authors who participated in the conference present their own narratives as agents of global mobility, examine the theme of global mobility in the various aspects of the conference, and conclude with reflections on the factors that supported the learning environment at the conference.     

Human Resource Development in Asia – Thriving on dynamism & change: Reflections from 2006 Asian HRD conference

This article discusses the experiences of the conference management team and the host (Universiti Putra Malaysia -UPM) of the Fifth Asian Conference of the Academy of Human Resource Development, held in Putrajaya, Malaysia from 2 to 5 December 2006. In reviewing the conference, the following sub-topics are used for organizing the contents of the article: HRD in Malaysia; conference theme & overview; participations/country representations and paper streams; keynote addresses; conference assessment; and conclusions. At the end, brief perspectives of the next Asian HRD conference to be held in China are also provided.     

Event-driven production scheduling in SME

One common problem among Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) is to don’t have at disposal formal and simple approaches for production scheduling, especially in case of an event that introduces the requirement of a re-planning. The paper approaches this kind of event-driven re-scheduling problems at the arrival of a new order, when some jobs are under processing, some operation have already finished and other jobs are waiting to be loaded on a machine. For a simple application in a SME, to the operations already started and completed for a job a processing time equal to zero is assigned; the operations already started but not yet completed are interrupted and considered as operations that must be executed for the remaining part of their processing time; all the other jobs are considered for the event-driven job-shop re-scheduling problem. A validation of the procedure in a realistic application is presented.     

Statutory Bodies: How Distinctive and In What Ways?

This article sets the organizational scene for the symposium. It does this by addressing statutory bodies, first in terms of their distinctive statutory foundations, and thereafter with reference to arrangements which they have in common with other types of organizations. Their distinctiveness results from the required legislative action, coupled with forms of political maneuvering and policy analysis. Their other features include their structures, ownership, work, legal power and relationships. Overall, they are legitimate, purposeful and responsible entities with a need to respond to various integration and autonomy arenas in which they are located.     

The Prioritization of Island Nations as Refuges from Extreme Pandemics

In this conceptual article with illustrative data, we suggest that it is useful to rank island nations as potential refuges for ensuring long-term human survival in the face of catastrophic pandemics (or other relevant existential threats). Prioritization could identify the several island nations that are most suitable for targeting social and political preparations and further investment in resiliency. We outline a prioritization methodology and as an initial demonstration, we then provide example rankings by considering 20 sovereign island states (all with populations greater than 250,000 and no land borders). Results describe each nation in nine resilience-relevant domains covering location, population, resources, and society according to published data. The results indicate that the most suitable island nations for refuge status are Australia, followed closely by New Zealand, and then Iceland, with other nations all well behind (including the relatively high-income ones of Malta and Japan). Nevertheless, some key contextual factors remain relatively unexplored. These include the capacity of the jurisdiction to rapidly close its borders when the emerging threat was first detected elsewhere, and whether or not large subnational islands should be the preferred focus for refuge design (e.g., the Australian state of Tasmania, the island of Hokkaido in Japan, or the South Island of New Zealand). Overall, this work provides conceptual thinking with some initial example analysis. Further research could refine the selection of metrics, how best to weight the relevant domains, and how the populations of prioritized island nations view their nation's selection as a potential refuge for human survival.     

Practical Implications of Preference‐Based Conference Scheduling

Conference scheduling involves organizing presentations into sessions which are assigned to time periods and rooms. This includes assuring a feasible utilization of time periods and rooms, and avoiding individual schedule conflicts. The problem increases in complexity by considering the preferences of presenters: for time periods, for rooms, etc. A greater level of complexity comes from considering the preferences of conference attendees, which we define as preference‐based conference scheduling (PBCS). This article provides a structure on which PBCS problems are founded, including empirical demonstration of solution techniques. In addition, real‐world strategic planning issues of flexibility and preference detail are explored.     

面向中国管理实践的组织与人力资源管理:反思与探索——首届“中国人力资源管理论坛(2012)”观点评述

全球化和知识经济时代动荡复杂的环境,对中国企业的组织形态和人力资源管理模式形成了严峻挑战。同时,近年来主流西方管理理论在中国遭遇的"水土不服",也需要中国管理学界在深刻反思的基础上积极探索中国式管理之路。基于对组织和人力资源管理领域回应现实课题和理论创新的双重要求,2012年5月26～27日在南开大学商学院召开的首届"中国人力资源管理论坛(2012):组织创新与人力资源管理变革"学术研讨会上,与会学者就中国人力资源管理的挑战和学科建设方向、人力资源管理研究的方法论、战略人力资源管理、组织行为与领导力、组织学习与变革等专题进行了深入研讨。鉴于此,在介绍诸多学术观点的基础上,对相关问题进行简要评述。     

EVALUATING ECONOMICS RESEARCH IN EUROPE: AN INTRODUCTION

This paper introduces a symposium of EEA‐funded studies that evaluate economics research in Europe. The paper considers some general issues in evaluations, paying special attention to the problem of selecting journal weights, and notes some special features of the individual studies. Despite their very different approaches, the same group of institutions tend to appear at the top of all lists, though individual ranks are sensitive to the choice of more or less elitist journal weights. All the studies show that the gap between economics research in Europe and the United States is narrowing, but remains very wide. (JEL: A10, J44)     

行政服务中心流程再造的影响因素:浙江实证

公共服务变革是一个从大政府小服务到小政府大服务的流程再造过程,行政服务中心是这一过程的重要载体.通过对浙江57家行政服务中心1009个部门/窗口负责人的问卷调查,运用多元线性回归方法探讨现阶段行政服务中心流程再造的主要影响因素.研究表明,流程绩效受到策略规划、企业家素质、窗口状况、信息化、部门合作、中心管理、互联互通等多方面因素的共同影响,公共服务再造的结果绩效主要受中心管理、企业家素质、部门合作、窗口发展等因素的影响.实证表明,浙江行政服务中心的发展正处于公共服务变革从第二阶段到第三阶段的过渡期,即前台整合、后台开始整合的阶段,第二阶段扎实的流程改造方面的努力(审批制度改革等)获得回报,流程规则步入正轨,但结果绩效相对较小且面临进一步突破的瓶颈.此外,还得到个别反常识的结果.     

Capital views: highlights of perspectives in medical management 1994

Washington, D.C., where health policy is currently being debated, served as an appropriate backdrop May 4-7 for the College's annual "Perspectives in Medical Management" conference. Some of its federal buildings served as classrooms for those interested in learning the legislative process through participation in the "Health Policy Institute," which was held simultaneously. Although it is impossible to report on all that transpired during the four-day conference, this article will briefly describe the comments of a few of the speakers.     

Approximation of knapsack problems with conflict and forcing graphs

We study the classical 0–1 knapsack problem with additional restrictions on pairs of items. A conflict constraint states that from a certain pair of items at most one item can be contained in a feasible solution. Reversing this condition, we obtain a forcing constraint stating that at least one of the two items must be included in the knapsack. A natural way for representing these constraints is the use of conflict (resp. forcing) graphs. By modifying a recent result of Lokstanov et al. (Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms, SODA, pp 570–581, 2014) we derive a fairly complicated FPTAS for the knapsack problem on weakly chordal conflict graphs. Next, we show that the techniques of modular decompositions and clique separators, widely used in the literature for solving the independent set problem on special graph classes, can be applied to the knapsack problem with conflict graphs. In particular, we can show that every positive approximation result for the atoms of prime graphs arising from such a decomposition carries over to the original graph. We point out a number of structural results from the literature which can be used to show the existence of an FPTAS for several graph classes characterized by the exclusion of certain induced subgraphs. Finally, a PTAS for the knapsack problem with H-minor free conflict graph is derived. This includes planar graphs and, more general, graphs of bounded genus. The PTAS is obtained by expanding a general result of Demaine et al. (Proceedings of 46th annual IEEE symposium on foundations of computer science, FOCS 2005, pp 637–646, 2005). The knapsack problem with forcing graphs can be transformed into a minimization knapsack problem with conflict graphs. It follows immediately that all our FPTAS results of the current and a previous paper carry over from conflict graphs to forcing graphs. In contrast, the forcing graph variant is already inapproximable on planar graphs.     

PRICE‐LEVEL CHANGES AND THE REDISTRIBUTION OF NOMINAL WEALTH ACROSS THE EURO AREA

We show that unexpected price‐level movements generate sizable wealth redistribution in the Euro Area (EA), using sectoral accounts and newly available data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. The EA as a whole is a net loser of unexpected price‐level decreases, with Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain losing most in per capita terms, and Belgium and Malta being net winners. Governments are net losers of deflation, while the household (HH) sector is a net winner in the EA as a whole. HHs in Belgium, Ireland, Malta, and Germany experience the biggest per capita gains, while HHs in Finland and Spain turn out to be net losers. Considerable heterogeneity exists also within the HH sector: relatively young middle class HHs are net losers of deflation, while older and richer HHs are winners. As a result, wealth inequality in the EA increases with unexpected deflation, although in some countries (Austria, Germany, and Malta) inequality decreases due to the presence of relatively few young borrowing HHs. We document that HHs' inflation exposure varies systematically across countries, with HHs in high‐inflation EA countries holding systematically lower nominal exposures.     

Future trends in world trade (A review of the Lima target)

In March 1975, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization held an important conference at Lima to discuss ways of speeding up the industrialization of developing countries. Various targets were formulated by the conference to achieve further growth in the developing areas of the world, which could have far-reaching implications not only for the developing countries, but also for the developed. The whole structure of world trade could be radically changed by the year 2000 and, as the authors of this article argue, the likely growth of various industries could be altered significantly over the next 25 years.     

Can there be a domain-specific knowledge base in HRD? Reflections on the Lille symposium

A conversation recently began amongst senior human resource development scholars from around the world that focused on the prospects for theory development in human resource development (HRD). The opening event in the form of a panel discussion was held at the European HRD conference in Lille, France, in May 2008. This article summarizes and discusses contributions made by the panel participants.     

Epidemiologic Evidence for Chloroprene Carcinogenicity: Review of Study Quality and its Application to Risk Assessment

This article evaluates the quality and weight of evidence associated with epidemiologic studies of cancer among occupational cohorts exposed to chloroprene. The focus is on liver, lung, and lymphohematopoietic cancers, which had been increased in early studies. Literature searches identified eight morbidity/mortality studies covering seven chloroprene-exposed cohorts from six countries. These studies were summarized and their quality was assessed using the 10 criteria suggested by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The limitations within this literature (primarily the early studies) included crude exposure assessment, incomplete follow-up, uncertain baseline rates, and uncontrolled confounding by factors such as smoking, drinking, and co-exposure to benzene and vinyl chloride. Four cohorts were studied by the same group of investigators, who reported no overall increased associations for any cancers. This four-cohort study was by far the most rigorous, having the most comprehensive exposure assessment and follow-up and the most detailed documentation. This study also contained the two largest cohorts, including an American cohort from Louisville, Kentucky, that ranked at or near the top for each of the 10 quality criteria. There was evidence of a strong healthy worker effect in the four-cohort study, which could have hidden small excess risks. Small increased risks were suggested by internal or company-specific analyses, but these were most likely caused by uncontrolled confounding and low baseline rates. Overall, the weight of evidence does not support any substantial link between chloroprene exposure and cancer, but inconsistencies and a lack of control for major confounders preclude drawing firmer conclusions.