From Government to Governance: Small and Medium Enterprise Policy Development in New Zealand 1978 to 2008 : A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University Wellington, New Zealand

Widespread recognition of the importance of SMEs and their contribution to the economy means that successive New Zealand governments, between 1978 and 2008, placed increasing emphasis on SME policy. SME policy developed over time from being an incidental outcome of general economic policy to targeting particular SME sectors and engaging stakeholders and SMEs themselves in this process. Few studies have examined how this policy process evolved, and this research addresses the deficit by providing a critical overview of New Zealand SME policy development between 1978 and 2008. It examines how SME policy in New Zealand developed over the thirty-year period, identifying the main influences (or inputs) in SME policy development, and what policy outputs were set in place. The approach draws on business history methods and utilises primary sources, such as archival documentation, media reports, contemporary SME research and interviews with participants who played key roles in the development of SME policy. Historical analysis facilitates the examination of the range and diversity of SME policies used over the period under review. The research provides an overview of the external domestic and international influences that shaped and informed SME policymaking processes, and the challenges of meeting the often contradictory nature of government objectives in the socio-economic domain. It shows how over time the social cohesion policy objective, although still underplayed, became more pronounced. Principal inputs into SME policy are found to be the economic and stakeholder contexts, both set in an overall institutional environment. Whereas in the early period the economic context was the primary input into SME policy, by 2008 the input of stakeholders (researchers, academics, industry associations, chambers of commerce, among others) was more significant. The research concludes that, as attitudes and economic thinking changed, so too did SME policy and the way policy developed. A shift to the entrepreneurship paradigm contributed to a fundamental recalibration of approaches – from direct SME support such as the Small Business Agency, to predominantly indirect contextual support. SMEs were no longer considered ‘little big businesses’ but complex and heterogeneous enterprises and the role of stakeholders became more noticeable. Understanding how SME policy has altered over three decades assists researchers, policymakers and other SME stakeholders by contextualizing the evolution of thinking and approaches. As an outcome of this study, stakeholders will have additional clarity to help them contribute to the ongoing development of New Zealand SME policy

When paying the piper gets the 'wrong' tune : the impact of fixed payments on case management, case trajectories and 'quality' in criminal defence work

Do changes to the structure and level of legal aid payments significantly affect the trajectories of criminal cases? Do these changes make a difference to how defence lawyers handle cases, how they negotiate with prosecutors and how clients are advised to plead? In recent years, Scotland has made major changes to the remuneration structures for criminal defence work. This paper reports on a research study examining the impact of one of these changes: the move to 'fixed payments'. It seeks to contribute to international knowledge about the relationship between legal aid payment regimes and criminal case trajectories. Furthermore, are there any important consequences for clients, or, are changes simply absorbed by lawyers, or neutralised by other developments? The paper explains that the objective of the fixed payments policy (to encourage greater 'efficiency' in the criminal process) was contradicted by other consequences, which were unexpected by the architects of the policy

Demonstrating Positive Obligations: Children's Rights and Peaceful Protest in International Law

Recently there has been a significant increase in the involvement of children and young people in protests across the globe. As a result of this increase, children have directly influenced political change but have also faced threats to their safety. This raises distinct children’s rights issues, and the trends identified necessitate both conceptualizing protest involvement from a children’s rights perspective, and critically examining the manner in which the law — at both a national and international level — has approached the involvement of children in such activities. This Article examines the positive obligations of States and argues that children should be recognized as a distinct, valid, and sometimes vulnerable group that has the right to protest and the right to be facilitated in doing so

Continued fraction solution of Krein's inverse problem

The spectral data of a vibrating string are encoded in its so-called characteristic function. We consider the problem of recovering the distribution of mass along the string from its characteristic function. It is well-known that Stieltjes' continued fraction provides a solution of this inverse problem in the particular case where the distribution of mass is purely discrete. We show how to adapt Stieltjes' method to solve the inverse problem for a related class of strings. An application to the excursion theory of diffusion processes is presented.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure

Human Capital and Economic Growth in Pakistan

Pakistan’s economy has grown faster on average than many other low- and middleincome countries over the past two decades. But several countries in Southeast Asia have fared even better. This paper focuses on factors that explain Pakistan’s relative growth performance. In addition to more traditional factors believed to determine growth, this paper looks particularly at the role of differences in the quality of human capital. The cross-country empirical results suggest that accumulation of physical capital and improvements in the quality of institutions have the largest pay-offs in terms of achieving higher growth, but that better education and health care also have a significant impact. Investment in these areas will increase the possibility of Pakistan entering a virtuous cycle of high growth and improved living conditions for the population.

Measurement: everywhere and nowhere in secondary mathematics

School mathematics is commonly structured into number, algebra, geometry and statistics. This raises the issue of where to place ideas within the topic of measurement since some aspects of measurement (such as measuring length or area) have a geometrical component, while other aspects of measurement (such as time or money) are about number. Furthermore, when actual measures are unknown, relationships between measures can be expressed – and this is one of the roots of algebra. Additionally, probability can be thought of as a form of measure (of uncertainty) and the various measures of data variation, such as standard deviation, can also be viewed as a form of measurement. All these considerations mean that the placing of measurement in the mathematics curriculum can be problematic for curriculum designers and policy makers; and equally tricky for teachers to teach in the most effective way. Informed by a review of the research basis for teaching key ideas in secondary school mathematics, this paper argues that measurement is both everywhere and nowhere in secondary mathematics; that is, measurement occurs across the topics that comprise secondary school mathematics, but the ideas of measurement are so scattered that the teaching of measurement in secondary school mathematics may lack some focus that might store up problems for learners as they progress with mathematics