Search

Significant changes are introduced in Czech and Russian Enterprise management as part of the economic reforms, particularly in enterprise goals and decentralization of managerial authority. This paper reviews major aspects of this new managerialism and hints that there may be a "theory of convergence" in the making in communist countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to furnish a computational scheme for a class of programming problems with nonlinear constraints. The algorithm is sequential in nature, producing a sequence of feasible solutions whose limit points are optimal solutions of the original problem. Further, with a view to accelerating convergence we suggest two variants of the solution procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the generation of an additional constraint or cut for integer programming introduced by Ralph Gomory, there is a certain parameter whose value is customarily chosen so that one of the original variables has a zero coefficient in the cut-equation. In this paper we consider alternative values of the parameter and refer to any linear combination of the original source equation and this cut as a "generalised cut." Attention is then focused, as customary, on those cuts of this type for which the original variable has a zero coefficient. In particular, we show how to determine values for Gomory's parameter so that only a subset of the feasible solutions to the cuts used by Gomory's method of integer forms are feasible for the generalized cuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines welfare in Western industrial societies from the standpoint of convergence theory. It is empirical in approach and makes no attempt to deal with the conceptual and theoretical problems relating to convergence. Briefly, the aim of the article is to ascertain the extent to which Western industrial societies are similar, or in the course of development have become more similar, with regard to welfare. Convergence theory may be said to postulate that the imperatives of industrial technology and economic development constrain societies towards a common institutional pattern. If the essence of convergence theory is that the standardizing influences stemming from the nature of industrial technology are more influential in shaping institutions than ideology and political action, then welfare is a good area in which to examine this hypothesis. However, the "welfare state" is too wide a concept to be a viable tool for cross-national comparison. In this article a much narrower concept of welfare has been employed and the term is used to designate statutory programmes designed to provide citizens with social security and education.

A callback policy must balance the reduced yield (and higher cost) from additional callbacks against the benefits of a more representative final sample. This study provides evidence on the rate at which sample values converge on their estimated population distribution as the number of callbacks increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]