Pitfalls in planning: Contrasting perspectives on mental health and corporate planning

Planning is a management activity that has been linked to high quality services, organizational growth, and in austere times, to organizational survival. The present study was undertaken to identify the critical barriers that inhibit or derail effective planning. It was predicted that human service and corporate managers would generally agree about the most and least important planning pitfalls in their systems. Discrepancies would be related to differences in the structural characteristics of organizations in the two sectors. Rankings made by 57 senior mental health administrators of the most and least important pitfalls in planning were contrasted with those of 159 corporate executives. Substantial agreement between the two groups of executives was found.     

Trade liberalization and factor prices: An application to the U.S. manufacturing sector

The effects of a trade policy on the prices of productive factors have important policy implications, particularly with regard to trade liberalization and protection. This paper examines the empirical evidence of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem for 16 major U.S. manufacturing industries. The theorem asserts that international trade reduces the prices of scarce productive factors and hence decreases their shares of income. The elasticities of prices of finished goods with respect to factor prices are estimated and then rearranged in the form of the row stochastic P-matrix in accordance with the proposition of Uekawa. The inverse of this matrix seems to confirm the weak version of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem.