FISCAL STRUCTURES AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE

Our paper systematically examines the effects of fiscal structure on economic growth. We find that for developing countries, debt-financed increases in government expenditure retard growth and tax-financed increases stimulate growth, while for developed countries, debt-financed increases in government expenditure do not affect growth and tax-financed increases lower growth. We impose the government budget constraint on the regression equations so that the precise changes in fiscal policy can be identified (e.g., the effect of a debt-financed increase in health expenditure), employing a pooled cross-section, time-series sample and fixed- and random-effect methods. (JEL 04, E6)     

The Client Group Preferences of Diploma in Social Work Students: What are they, do they change during programmes and what variables affect them?

Correspondence to Dr Raymond Jack, Reader in Social Work, Anglia Polytechnic University, East Road, Cambridge CB1 1PT Summary Social work is undergoing fundamental changes in terms of theway it is organized and how it is practised. If, in this shiftingscenario of occupational deconstruction, the output of socialwork education is to be relevant to the workforce needs of welfareagencies—no matter how organized—it is importantto know more about the client group preferences of social workstudents and what factors influence them. This longitudinalstudy inquired into student preferences at the beginning andend of three Diploma in Social Work programmes and its findingssuggest that the sociodemographic characteristics of studentsare less demonstrably influential than previous experience andplacement experience whilst on the programmes. In addition,students attribute far less influence to lectures and tutorialsas change agents than they do to placements, service users orother students. The implications of this for social work educationare discussed.     

Making the Tacit Explicit

Tacit knowledge is both a ubiquitous and puzzling notion, related to the idea of hidden assumptions. The puzzle is partly a result of the conflict between the idea that assumptions are in the mind and the apparent audience‐relativity of the "fact" of possessing an assumption or of the tacit knowledge that is articulated. If we think of making the tacit explicit as constructing a certain kind of inference repairing explanation for a particular audience "on the fly" we come closer to an explanation of what happens when we "make our tacit knowledge explicit." We can account for our capacity to construct such statements for particular audiences by reference to our non‐conceptual capacities to understand others. This approach avoids problematic assumptions about shared representations that are common in cognitive science, and the equally problematic notion that tacit knowledge is sentence‐like content that we retrieve when we articulate something based on our tacit knowledge.     

WHY DO WORKERS JOIN UNIONS? THE IMPORTANCE OF RENT SEEKING

Union status models ignore the fact that rent-seeking prospective members have an incentive to bid up entry costs so that higher union wage gains make union jobs more costly to obtain. The standard presumption that higher union wages cause firms to substitute toward higher quality workers is shown to be incorrect under most plausible assumptions; the observed positive correlation between wage gains and the propensity to join a union underestimates the size of the true supply response. The union/nonunion wage differential reveals more about the social cost of unions than the gain to an individual worker from union membership.     

Insensitivity to the Value of Human Life: A Study of Psychophysical Numbing

A fundamental principle of psychophysics is that people's ability to discriminate change in a physical stimulus diminishes as the magnitude of the stimulus increases. We find that people also exhibit diminished sensitivity in valuing lifesaving interventions against a background of increasing numbers of lives at risk. We call this psychophysical numbing. Studies 1 and 2 found that an intervention saving a fixed number of lives was judged significantly more beneficial when fewer lives were at risk overall. Study 3 found that respondents wanted the minimum number of lives a medical treatment would have to save to merit a fixed amount of funding to be much greater for a disease with a larger number of potential victims than for a disease with a smaller number. The need to better understand the dynamics of psychophysical numbing and to determine its effects on decision making is discussed.     

The Quality Dimension. Evaluating Quality of Service and Quality of Life in Human Services

Correspondence to Stephen P. Osborne, Public Sector Management Research Centre, Aston Business School, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET. Summary This paper addresses the issues, for those involved in planningand managing human services, of evaluating the quality of suchservices as part of the service provision process. It beginsby examining the nature of quality itself and moves on to lookat the links between quality of life and quality of servicein human services. It then assesses existing models of evaluationwhich might be applied and highlights their strengths and limitations. The paper argues that many of the models have their roots inareas outside of direct service provision and consequently arenot appropriate for implementation in this context. It concludesby reviewing some principles to guide the evaluation of servicequality by service managers, and suggests how these might beapplied in practice to the evaluation of the quality of humanservices.     

RESPONSE EFFECTS IN MAIL SURVEYS

A variety of response effects that had been found previouslyin interview surveys were tested in a mail survey of a heterogeneouslocal population. These included experiments on question orderresponse order, no-opinion filters, middle-response alternatives,and acquiescence. The results generally supported earlier findingsbased on student samples which had shown that order efects wereeliminated in self-administered surveys but that question-formeffects occurred as in interview surveys. One question-ordereffect, however, was found in the mail survey, and a type ofresponse-order effect (a primacy effect) that had not been previouslytested also occured. Interactions between education and responseeffects that had sometimes been found in interview surveys werenot present in the mail survey.