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This article compares the design and content of domestic and foreign programs for teaching public administration and management. At the Master's level, curriculum designers, irrespective of location, emphasize organization theory, personnel, policy analysis, and microeconomics. However, domestic programs place much more emphasis on research methods and budget management. International programs place more emphasis on public law and management information systems. At this time, neither domestic nor international programs report much required training in leadership, bargaining, or institutional design.

This article reviews the principal methods economists and benefitlcost analysts use in evaluating research. These methods usually involve computing impacts using market information, mone tizing the impacts, and then comparing the value of the impacts with the cost of research. Two principal measures are common in the literature: surplus measures (consumers' surplus, producers'surplus, and combinations thereof) and productivity measures (average or marginal contributions of research and development [R&D] at firm, industry, national, or international levels). Given known time streams of benefits and costs, internal rates of return to R&D investments are then computed The article notes both the standard technical difficulties with these approaches and the political and organizational difficulties in using them.

This paper evaluates the merits of five different taxonomies for RD (2) effective budgeting; (3) policy formulation; and (4) political persuasion. Informational criteria refer to the quality, quantity, and costs of information acquisition and access. Effective budgeting criteria concern the ability of a taxonomy to facilitate getting as much R&D output as possible for given levels of budget and to help choose good trajectories of research over time. Policy formulation criteria refer to promotion of serious public policy debate about S&T issues, neutrality when used by adversaries and advocates in policy debate, and deterrence of reflexive arguments about the value of the taxonomy being used. Political persuasion criteria concern such things as the ability to hold old constituencies and create new ones, the ability to avoid too much blame for hard allocation decisions, the ability to convince research sponsors to allow agency requested levels and distributions. The evaluation reveals no clear dominance among taxonomies and suggests R&D agencies need new taxonomies less than they need a rapid response capability to array budgets, obligations, and outlays in terms meaningful to different sponsors and audiences.

This article examines competing strategies for supporting and utilizing applied social science and the policy sciences in public decisions and program operations. It argues that tension and conflict are the normal, expected state of affairs between decision makers and the social science and policy science communities. This is so because of very different strategic perspectives governing the scientific standing, decision utility, and political "morality"of applied social research and policy research. The article suggests conflict can be dampened, but never completely eliminated, by two things: (1) sequential research designs that simultaneously produce both partial scientific truths and information useful to decision makers, and (2) more attention to overall quality control and utilization possibilities. However, such improvements require changes in the incentive and value systems of social scientists, policy scientists, and decision makers. The engineering of change m these three communities is itself a formidable unsolved problem.

In this paper I estimate the efficiency of a federal agency's basic research support for chemistry. Efficiency here means output per dollar of agency investment. There are two outputs —citations and apprentices, those being trained by work on a project. I use a random sample of 93 NSF chemistry projects to find determinants of efficiency. The data on each project come from recorded agency-investigator transactions required by NSF's standard operating procedures. Differences in efficiency result from differences in resources available to the projects, the characteristics of researchers, and characteristics of the research environment. Overall, statistical modeling shows that there are strong interactions between inputs. Purely linear, additive models show poorer results than models with interaction terms. Some inputs such as an investigator's scientific experience and the labor intensity of projects affect citation and apprentice efficiency positively, but in an interactive way. For example, the marginal impact of investigator experience on citation efficiency depends on the level of labor intensity. However, some inputs considered highly important by funding agencies and the scientific community do not turn up as consistently significant, e.g., the quality of departments. The results suggest that the input-output structure of research projects is complex. Thus, quantitative analysis needs to be sensitive to the potential importance of interactions and non-linearities.

This article explains the kind of policy research appropriate for strategic decisions on the university research system. It describes the system’s operating environment over the next decade and enumerates six important policy issues: finance, access to new facilities and equipment, competition and specialization, concentration of federal resources, faculty research productivity, and research transmission and use. The author argues that comparative research on systems in other countries would have high payoff and that evaluating large-scale state and federal natural experiments in new ways of doing research would help in designing a more cost-effective research system.

In this paper we consider some problems that arise when a nation attempts to implement a strategy of stable deterrence over time. The problems arise when a nation's planners make strategic inferences based on an adversary's ambiguous signals of intent and action. A necessary condition for inferring an opponent's strategic objectives is good technical intelligence. We explore some alternative intelligence models and their effect on national response. It appears that even small improvements in the content and timing of intelligence information received by a nation pursuing stable deterrence would help constrain a noncooperative adversary and open new channels of communication.

This essay examines the arguments and evidence used in two recent models of the urban crisis—Edward C. Banfield'sThe Unheavenly City and Jay W. Forrester'sUrban Dynamics. Although Banfield's model is sociological and Forrester's is economic and physical, both imply that not much can be done to alleviate urban problems and that positive programs may make them worse. The authors of this critique contend that the articulation of argument and evidence is inadequate to support the implication. They advocate that promising current programs be refined on the basis of evidence and experience and that policymakers continue to search for efficient new programs through social experiments.

The purpose here is (a) to develop a theory of the monopoly firm seeking to maximize profit but subject to a constraint on its rate of return and (b) to apply the model to one particular regulated industry -- the U. S. telephone industry.

The paper focuses on the dilemmas the political decision maker faces in conveying his intended conduct of national crises, particularly coping with rapidly escalating actions in limited warfare, and on the problems the military agencies have in adapting to the intended conduct. The hand-played game involved 16 participants who were concerned with a RED team representing interests of adversaries to the U.S., a BLUE team representing U.S. and its possible allies, and a CONTROL team acting as game manager and as the world environment exterior to the crisis principals. The BLUE team was structured into 4 sections; a supreme political authority, BLUE POLITICAL; a military command level equivalent to the National Military Command Center, and 2 military headquarters equivalent to those of SAC and NORAD. During the gaming, political decisions did not produce consistent military actions nor were military sections able to adapt promptly to political constraints. Political leaders were often deficient in adapting policies to command-control constraints that emerged during interactions with the subordinate military sections. These failures are regarded as arising from differences in responsibilities in perceptions, and in operational styles among the different agencies.

The Viet Cong believe that an efficient, centrally managed organization is a major tool of revolutionary war. Their organization is complex, but it has been effective. In this study the decision-making and behavior of the Viet Cong main and local force units operating in one Delta province, Dinh Tuong are analyzed. The period is 1964-1966. Using captured documents and interviews with ralliers, defectors, and prisoners, a portrait of how units make and execute tactical decisions and of how they supply themselves are described.

Gaming techniques used in examining three hypothetical European crises occurring in the late 1960s are described. The aims in this gaming were to identify some of the political and military constraints that affect national decisionmaking during crises; to discern whether or not common patterns of action appear in different crises; and to infer military requirements in crises. On the basis of the recent gaming experience, observations and judgments are advanced about: (1) The effects of our three game structures on decisionmaking, and the quality and quantity of decisions in these games compared with decisions in real crises; (2) the escalation of violence in the games as opposed to that in real crises; (3) the impact of internal and external information flows on our game decisions; and (4) typical questions identified by these plays as deserving further study.

Analysis indicates that among the less-developed countries, the Philippines is not a nation in a general massive social crisis. Classical metaphors about the polity and economy of less-developed countries are misleading when applied to the Philippine experience. The country has a stable democracy, has a modernizing economy growing at a real rate of 6 percent, and does not appear particularly susceptible to revolution from either the right or the left. None of this means, however, that the country is performing spectacularly or that it has no problems. However, appropriate, specific policy responses will depend on a much closer articulation of information systems with decisionmaking. (Author)

The study examines alternative statistical models that try to assess the causal factors involved in insurgent control in Central Luzon. A comparison is made of several models that incorporate the operations of the insurgent organization as well as socio-economic variables. All of the formal models suggest that what insurgents do -- their terror and coercion -- is a stronger explanation of current insurgent control than is the socio-economic status of the population.

A statistical study of conditions related to control of barrios in Central Luzon by Huk rebels. Using several different models, results showed that Huk actions--their terror and coercion--as measured by killings, was a stronger explanation than social conditions. Contrary to the findings of earlier studies, the proportions of Pampangans and of sugar growing were negatively related to Huk control. Tenancy was a factor--land ownership was negatively related to Huk control--but not a dominant one. The findings are borne out by a survey of 1550 Filipinos, showing that persons in Huk areas had about the same attitudes as those elsewhere (but nonresponse was 50 percent, compared with 33 percent elsewhere). Appended extracts from interviews with 12 Huk prisoners suggest a split between at least two factions, idealistic Maoists and simple criminals

Restricted research budgets, expanding claims for resources, and steeply escalating costs have increased the demand for methods that establish or predict the efficiency or productivity of expenditures on basic research. Irvine and Martin (I-M) have recently advocated head-to-head efficiency comparisons of research performers using publications and citations. This paper (1) criticizes the I-M approach from the perspective of economics and policy analysis; (2) illustrates the natural production function extension of the I-M approach; (3) demonstrates, by worked out examples, the feasibility of such an extension along with its pitfalls; and (4) argues that combined econometric-bibliometric modeling can be used to improve research allocations with only modest increases in agency “transaction” costs. The paper presents a prototype efficiency analysis using recent NSF data for the behavioral and neural sciences.