1,721,081 research outputs found
Reforming Fiscal and Economic Management in Afghanistan
No full textThe paper cover two broad themes in the
recent reform of fiscal and economic management in
Afghanistan. The first part, The Journey So Far, sets out
the impressive policy and institutional reforms that the
Interim and Transitional Administrations have made since the
Bonn conference in November 2001. It provides some details
of the challenges faced by the Ministry of Finance, and very
particularly the complexities of managing intensive donor
interest and significant volumes of development assistance,
while balancing the need for responsiveness to donor
priorities with a concern to build institutional strengths
of the public sector. The section notes the complexity of
the vested interests that had built up within the
administration during the Soviet and Taliban periods, and
the need to revive, while simultaneously reforming, the
fiscal management processes. The second part, Current
Priorities, explores the fiscal and economic management
tasks that the Ministry of Finance is now confronted with.
The section opens with a review of the strategic options for
structuring the Ministry of Finance, and the additional
challenges and opportunities presented by the new
constitution. The revised budget law is perhaps the most
significant and far-reaching of the institutional reforms
planned. The significance of the municipalities as a
potential platform for enhanced service delivery to an
increasingly urbanized population is also noted
Results, Performance Budgeting and Trust in Government
No full textThe book identifies four categories of
performance budgeting, namely direct performance budgeting,
performance informed budget (PIB), opportunistic performance
budgeting and presentational performance budgeting. While
the Conference papers often refer to performance budgeting
broadly defined, much of the book focuses on PIB, the most
common category of performance budgeting adopted to date,
making the argument that this is likely to be the most
applicable in many Latin American countries. The book
combines two seemingly diverse governance topics, adopts
contrasting analytic styles to address these, and seeks to
draw out their inter-connections, with particular reference
to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) and Latin American countries. The first topic is PIB,
which is discussed largely from the practical perspective of
policy makers and practitioners, reflecting that it is a
major public administration reform that has been underway
for several decades. The second topic is the trust of
citizens and firms in government. This book is divided into
seven chapters. Chapter one provides an overview of PIB,
building on two decades of experience and lesson-learning,
and sets out the key themes that provide the basis for the
discussions in the subsequent chapters. Chapter two
introduces the concept of trust in government, particularly
in OECD and Latin American countries, and explores why this
matters for development. Chapters three, four, and five
explore key dimensions of PIB, including the institutional
foundations, the production of performance information, and
the uses of performance information. Chapter six considers
the impact of performance improvement on trust in government
in OECD and Latin American countries. Chapter seven provides
a guide for practitioners on PIB
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Public officials and their institutional environment - an analytical model for assessing the impact of institutional change on public sector performance
Get PDFTo perform well, public officials must be confident enough about the future, to be able to see a relationship between their efforts, and an eventual outcome. Their expectations are shaped by their institutional environment. If the rules are not credible, or are unlikely to be enforced, of if they expect policies to be contradicted, or resources to flow unpredictably, results will be uncertain, so there is little point in working purposefully. The authors present an analytical framework, used to design a series of surveys of public officials'views of their institutional environment, and to analyze the information generated in fifteen countries. They describe how survey results help map public sector's strengths, and weaknesses, and offer an approach to identifying potential payoffs from reforms. The framework emphasizes how heterogeneous incentives, and institutional arrangements are within he public sector. It emphasizes how important it is for policymakers to base decisions on information (not generalizations) that suggests what is most likely to work, and where. In building on the premise that public officials'actions - and hence their organization's performance - depend on the institutional environment in which they find themselves, this framework avoids simplistic anti-government positions, bur doesn't defend poor performance. Some public officials perform poorly, and engage in rent seeking, but some selfless, and determined public officials, work hard under extremely difficult conditions. This framework offers an approach for understanding both bad performance, and good, and for presenting the results to policymakers in a format that leadsto more informed choices, about public sector reform. Types of reforms discussed include strengthening the credibility of rules for evaluation, for record management, for training, and for recruitment; ensuring that staff support government policy; preventing political interference, or micro-management; assuring staff that they will be treated fairly; and, making government policies consistent.Public Health Promotion,Decentralization,Educational Sciences,Enterprise Development&Reform,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Educational Sciences,National Governance,Governance Indicators,Poverty Assessment,Health Monitoring&Evaluation
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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