Structural funds and sustainable development the SQM approach

The question of how to achieve greater levels of sustainable development is intrinsically linked with the discussion concerning new forms of governance. Structural funds have become most influential in promoting sustainable development and appropriate forms of governance across the EU. They have been very important in introducing new innovative forms of co‐ordination in many countries and have encouraged the mobilization of new political actors. Structural Funds can be considered as a most interesting laboratory for the development of new governance patterns, which are urgently needed for coping with accelerated change and increasing complexity. Multi‐level governance in the spirit of subsidiarity will not be possible without flexible objective‐oriented management approaches instead of the rigid attribution of competences. This requires new conceptual approaches, procedures, and instruments. ‘SQM—Sustainable Quality Management®’ is a coherent system for the conception, support, monitoring and evaluation of sustainable development processes. A series of pilot projects in the last five years have shown its potential and utility. The SQM system includes concepts, methods and operational tools that have proved to be applicable and comprehensible in different European cultures. Internet‐based SQM software tools support every step in the policy cycle. Sustainable development is conceived as an overarching principle that governs the management of processes and covers all policy principles postulated by the EU. In the use of a common framework over the whole policy cycle and the coherent implementation of basic principles there is the promise of achieving better orientation towards sustainable development and considerable efficiency gains.     

Likelihood Methods for Controlled Calibration

Abstract.  This paper presents the use of likelihood-based methods for controlled calibration. Recent results on higher-order asymptotics are exploited to obtain confidence regions for the output of the calibration process. A general likelihood-based approach is presented, and several types of calibration problems are tackled within this framework. The methods provide simple and accurate solutions which may have some potential usefulness for applications. The results are illustrated with reference to widely used models.