Changing healthcare systems in Asia

Outline of key changes in healthcare systems in Asia including company developments and trade union action

Changing care services and labour markets

Changes in the nature of funding, in the care sector, are influencing the development of a social care labour market. Migration plays a role in ensuring the provision of care workers in many European countries

Economic crisis and public services: note 1, December 2008

The paper examines the impact of the economic crisis on public services, including government reponses and implications for companies operating in public services

Challenges to Slovakia and Poland health policy decisions: use of investment treaties to claim compensation for reversal of privatisation/liberalisation policies

Investment treaties, and possibly the EU Treaty itself, are being used by multinational companies Penta and Eureko to try and force the Slovak government to pay compensation for reversing health privatisation and liberalisation policies. Similar action has been used against the Polish government by Eureko to win compensation worth nearly 2 billion Euros and a policy commitment to further privatisation

The abolition of the General Teaching Council for England and the future of teacher discipline

With the abolition of the General Teaching Council for England in the 2011 Education Act, this article considers the future of teacher discipline in England. It provides a critique of the changes to the regulation of teacher misconduct and incompetence that draws on a Foucauldian framework, especially concerning the issue of public displays of discipline and the concomitant movement to more hidden forms. In addition, the external context of accountability that accompanies the reforms to teacher discipline are considered including the perfection of the panoptic metaphor presented by the changes to Ofsted practices such as the introduction of zero-notice inspections. The article concludes that the reforms will further move teachers from being occupational professionals to being organisational professionals marking them apart from comparable professions in medicine and law

Producer choice and technical unemployment: John E. Tozer's mathematical model (1838)

The paper presents Tozer's study of the effects of the mechanization of productive activities on employment as an effort to devise a mathematical model, as an analytical method that would be more general and robust than Ricardo's numerical examples. The contradictory nature of this achievement is emphasized: while with the help of algebra Tozer made significant progress in model building in economics, it is argued that his contribution to a deeper understanding of the phenomenon under study is much less satisfactory, due to the difficulties he faced in his effort to incorporate consumption and demand into a classical analytical framework

Investment in new power generation in New South Wales: Comments by Public Service International Research Unit, University of Greenwich, London

This report comments on the prospects for new generation investment in New South Wales, in particular, what the role of the public sector should be

The 2006 reviews of the electricity and gas directives

This report reviews the investigations by DG TREN and DG Competition into the electricity and gas markets of Europe

Chattels: I have bought it all for you

Outlines the ways by which personal property can be acquired through the gift of chattels, referring to case law including the Court of Appeal rulings in Re Cole (A Bankrupt) and Re Kirkland, and through the declaration of trust, with reference to the Chancery Division ruling in Rowe v Prance. Compares this to the use of constructive trusts or proprietary estoppel to secure assets and considers the need to prove detrimental reliance

Single machine scheduling with general positional deterioration and rate-modifying maintenance

We present polynomial-time algorithms for single machine problems with generalized positional deterioration effects and machine maintenance. The decisions should be taken regarding possible sequences of jobs and on the number of maintenance activities to be included into a schedule in order to minimize the overall makespan. We deal with general non-decreasing functions to represent deterioration rates of job processing times. Another novel extension of existing models is our assumption that a maintenance activity does not necessarily fully restore the machine to its original perfect state. In the resulting schedules, the jobs are split into groups, a particular group to be sequenced after a particular maintenance period, and the actual processing time of a job is affected by the group that job is placed into and its position within the group