5,556 research outputs found

    Promoting decentralised and flexible budgets in England: Lessons from the past and future prospects

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    The UK has traditionally been viewed as a classic example of a unitary state in which central institutions dominate decision making. The recent Labour Government sought to counter this convention through devolution to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London and administrative decentralization to the English regions. This article examines New Labour’s efforts to promote sub-national policy discretion and fiscal autonomy via the Regional Funding Allocations (RFA) process. Findings are subsequently drawn upon to offer insights into the difficulties the Coalition Government is likely to face in its endeavor to decentralize functions and budgets to local authorities and communities. The paper addresses two central questions (i) Can New Labour’s attempt to promote decentralized and flexible budgets in England be viewed asevidence of a transition to a more fluid, multi-level form of governance? (ii)What lessons can be harnessed from the RFA experience in taking forward the Coalition government’s plans to promote fiscal discretion at the sub-national tier? It concludes that there are deep-rooted barriers in Whitehall that may limitthe freedoms and flexibilities pledged to local government and could undermine efforts to decentralize

    Understanding the role of performance targets in transport policy

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    The measurement of performance in the public sector has become increasingly important in recent years and it is now commonplace for transport organisations, and local and national governments, to publish performance goals for service supply and quality. Such commitments, when time referenced, are known as targets. This paper explain how changes in management style, consumer rights legislation, contractual obligations and other factors have combined to make management-by targets increasingly common in the public sector. The advantages and disadvantages of management-by-targets are illustrated through discussion of the processes and experience of setting transport targets in UK national transport policy. We conclude that while some of the targets have had a significant impact on policy makers, managers and their agents, the effects have not always been as intended

    Supporting group maintenance through prognostics-enhanced dynamic dependability prediction

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    Condition-based maintenance strategies adapt maintenance planning through the integration of online condition monitoring of assets. The accuracy and cost-effectiveness of these strategies can be improved by integrating prognostics predictions and grouping maintenance actions respectively. In complex industrial systems, however, effective condition-based maintenance is intricate. Such systems are comprised of repairable assets which can fail in different ways, with various effects, and typically governed by dynamics which include time-dependent and conditional events. In this context, system reliability prediction is complex and effective maintenance planning is virtually impossible prior to system deployment and hard even in the case of condition-based maintenance. Addressing these issues, this paper presents an online system maintenance method that takes into account the system dynamics. The method employs an online predictive diagnosis algorithm to distinguish between critical and non-critical assets. A prognostics-updated method for predicting the system health is then employed to yield well-informed, more accurate, condition-based suggestions for the maintenance of critical assets and for the group-based reactive repair of non-critical assets. The cost-effectiveness of the approach is discussed in a case study from the power industry

    A methodology for measuring the sustainability of car transport systems

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    Measuring the sustainability of car fleets, an important task in developing transport policy, can be accomplished with an appropriate set of indicators. We applied the Process Analysis Method of sustainability assessment to generate an indicator set in a systematic and transparent way, that is consistent with a declared definition of a sustainable transport system. Our method identifies stakeholder groups, the full range of impacts across the environmental, economic and human/social domains of sustainability, and those who generate and receive those impacts. Car users are shown by the analysis to have dual roles, both as individual makers of decisions and as beneficiaries/sufferers of the impacts resulting from communal choice. Thus car users, through their experience of service quality, are a potential force for system change. Our method addresses many of the well-known flaws in measuring transport sustainability. The indicator set created is independent of national characteristics and will be useful to transport policy practitioners and sustainable mobility researchers globally. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd

    Hedge Effectiveness Forecasting

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    This study focuses on hedging effectiveness defined as the proportionate price risk reduction created by hedging. By mathematical and simulation analysis we determine the following: (a) the regression R2 in the hedge ratio regression will generally overstate the amount of price risk reduction that can be achieved by hedging, (b) the properly computed hedging effectiveness in the hedge ratio regression will also generally overstate the amount of risk reduction that can be achieved by hedging, (c) the overstatement in (b) declines as the sample size increases, (d) application of estimated hedge ratios to non sample data results in an unbiased estimate of hedging effectiveness, (e) application of hedge ratios computed from small samples presents a significant chance of actually increasing price risk by hedging, and (f) comparison of in sample and out of sample hedging effectiveness is not the best method for testing for structural change in the hedge ratio regression.out of sample, post sample, hedging, effectiveness, forecasts, simulation, Agricultural Finance,

    Does Accessibility Planning address what matters? A review of current practice and practitioner perspectives

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    'Accessibility' has become commonplace in transport planning and as such there is a plethora of interpretations of what accessibility means, what constitutes a good measure of accessibility, and how this might be applied in practice. This paper presents an overview of approaches to measuring accessibility and presents a case study of Accessibility Planning in England — one approach to formalising the concept of accessibility. Results of semi-structured interviews with local authority officers are discussed to establish whether current approaches, allow their desired outcomes to be met. This approach demonstrates where there might be gaps between measured or modelled accessibility and the perceptions of the individuals. Findings suggest that while the process is deemed useful in raising the profile of accessibility issues, measures of accessibility do not necessarily easily translate into quantifying benefits of those improvements that are perceived by practitioners to improve accessibility and reduce transport disadvantage

    The Relative Performance of In-Sample and Out-of-Sample Hedging Effectiveness Indicators

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    Hedging effectiveness is the proportion of price risk removed through hedging. Empirical hedging studies typically estimate a set of risk minimizing hedge ratios, estimate the hedging effectiveness statistic, apply the estimated hedge ratios to a second group of data, and examine the robustness of the hedging strategy by comparing the hedging effectiveness for this "out-of-sample" period to the "in-sample" period. This study focuses on the statistical properties of the in-sample and out-of-sample hedging effectiveness estimators. Through mathematical and simulation analysis we determine the following: (a) the R2 for the hedge ratio regression will generally overstate the amount of price risk reduction that can be achieved by hedging, (b) the properly computed hedging effectiveness in the hedge ratio regression will also generally overstate the true amount of risk reduction that can be achieved, (c) hedging effectiveness estimated in the out-of-sample period will generally understate the true amount of risk reduction that can be achieved, (d) for equal numbers of observations, the overstatement in (b) is less that the understatement in (c), (e) both errors decline as more observations are used, and (f) the most accurate approach is to use all of the available data to estimate the hedge ratio and effectiveness and to not hold any data back for hedge strategy validation. If structural change in the hedge ratio model is suspected, tests for parameter equality have a better statistical foundation that do tests of hedging effectiveness equality.out-of-sample, post sample, hedging, effectiveness, forecasts, simulation, Agribusiness, Agricultural Finance, Demand and Price Analysis, Farm Management, Financial Economics, Marketing, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Risk and Uncertainty,

    Developing Dementia-Friendly Tourism Destinations: An Exploratory Analysis

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    Dementia is emerging as a global issue. Increases in life expectancy create an older population structure with accompanying health needs but also high lifestyle expectations. For example existing generations have come to expect to be able to participate in leisure and tourism activities in later life, which can be constrained by the onset of dementia. Leading healthy lifestyles and engaging in tourism activities are viewed as fundamental to remaining active and contributing to slowing the progress of dementia. This study is the first to examine the challenges and implications of the growing scale of dementia and the business opportunities this may create for destinations wishing to achieve dementia-friendly status. The paper reports results from an initial scoping study with tourism businesses in a coastal resort in the United Kingdom with such ambitions to assess the nature of the issues that arose from a series of face-to-face interviews
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