Measuring natural resource scarcity

One fundamental index of world social welfare is the availability of natural resources relative to population. In recent years, social, policy, and even physical scientists have been unable to reach consensus on whether natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce. The prevailing pessimistic view of the 1970s has been strongly challenged in the 1980s by resource-population optimists such as Julian Simon. In this paper, we argue that one source of failure to reach consensus is the fundamental ambiguity of available measures of natural resource scarcity. Surveying measures such as unit extraction cost, relative price, and the reserves-to-production ratio, we discuss difficulties of interpretation. Some of the problems identified may yield to further research, but others appear irremediable.     

Demographic,employment and development trends: the need for integrated planning

"The authors contend that problems associated with rapid demographic growth in developing countries have to be tackled through comprehensive population and human resource planning. Linkages between population and development are especially close in the area of labour markets. Following a discussion of the impacts of demographic factors on labour supply, labour demand and migration, the article proposes a practical framework in which population and human resource development plans may be operationalised. The concluding section briefly discusses the emerging area of population policy formulation and implementation."     

Production planning in practice

The changes and pressures facing the manufacturing and engineering industries today are increasing the importance of effective aggregate manpower and production planning. Several different theoretical optimisation models to tackle this problem have been described in detail in the literature but there have been few applications of them in practice.The reasons for this are many but include: the difficulty in expressing managements' conflicting and mixed objectives in an objective function; the necessity to oversimplify real life systems to enable these methods to be used; the simplistic approach to manpower planning used in these models; the difficulty in gaining managements' acceptance and finally the fact that what management actually wants is a tool to assist them in planning and decision making.What is being used by many managements is a case-study deterministic simulation model. Many companies are adopting this type of model for all types of planning and twelve out of twenty-seven companies visited in a research project described in this paper were using this type of model for aggregate manpower and production planning. It is proving to be an effective management tool and is being readily accepted principally because modern specialised financial modelling languages are enabling these models to be built, understood and used by non-specialist managers.