Nowadays, states spend more attention, time, and money on performance measurement and evaluation in the public sector than ever before (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 1996; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2000, p. 87; Power, 1997). Results-based management is the talk of the day at all levels of the public sector: local, regional, national, and even supra national. Schools a...

Robotic process automation or intelligent automation (the combination of artificial intelligence and automation) is starting to change the way business is done in nearly every sector of the economy. Intelligent automation systems detect and produce vast amounts of information and can automate entire processes or workflows, learning and adapting as they go. Applications range from the routine to...

In this paper we have attempted to examine aspects of the competitive selection process, firms’ entry, survival and exit, in an important sector of Chinese manufacturing, looking in particular for changes resulting from the latest stage of reform, dubbed the transition to the “socialist market economy”. These dynamic processes may be becoming increasingly important for the continuing growth of ...

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. We present an antenna shower formalism that includes helicity dependence for massless partons. The formalism applie...

Coordinate atypical representation of the orthosymplectic superalgebra osp(2/2) in a Hilbert superspace of square integrable functions constructed in a special way is given. The quantum nonrelativistic free particle Hamiltonian is an element of this superalgebra which turns out to be a dynamical superalgebra for this system. The supercoherent states, defined by means of a supergroup displacemen...

In this report we discuss the design of cross-directional controllers which are guaranteed to be robustly stabilizing while incorporating a quadratic programme for steady state performance. The report is loosely based on the technical report of Akkermans (2003) who proposes using the multivariable circle criterion to guarantee closed-loop stability of cross-directional controllers in the presen...

Although the link between improved infrastructure services and economic growth is uncertain, it is clear that reforms aimed at creating competition and regulating natural monopolies establish an environment conducive to private sector participation, incentives for companies to strive for efficiency savings that can ultimately be passed on to consumers, and greater provision of services (such as...

In line with a number of other countries, Norway has decided to base their ICT solutions in the public sector on a common ICT architecture. This article discusses some challenges related to this work. The theoretical basis for the discussions is our understanding of information infrastructures, which we claim offers a fruitful perspective to the building of ICT architectures. Of particular rele...

An important element of resource management and conservation is an understanding of the tradeoffs between marketed products such as timber and measures of environmental quality such as biodiversity. In this paper, we develop an integrated economic – ecological spatial optimization model. The integrated model incorporates dynamic forest sector harvesting, oil and gas sector development, coarse f...

The total debt of the oil and gas sector globally stands at roughly $2.5 trillion, two and a half times what it was at the end of 2006. The recent fall in the oil price represents a significant decline in the value of assets backing this debt, introducing a new element to price developments. In common with other episodes of retrenchment induced by rapid declines in asset values, greater leverag...