Procurement policy: The missing element in financial management education

This study emphasizes the need to include purchasing, or procurement, as a topic in the graduate-level public administration curriculum. It notes the absence of purchasing research in mainstream public administration journals and in leading public financial management textbooks. The study also reports the results of a survey mailed to the purchasing directors of the 46 largest U.S. counties outside Florida. The survey was designed to familiarize academians and practitioners with various administrative, legal, structural, and procedural dimensions of county procurement policies. Areas of greatest deficiency are those dealing with protest and appeals procedures and contract monitoring, and to a lesser extent procedures for declaring an emergency, entering into intergovernmental purchasing agreements, and contracting with minority businesses. The most comprehensively-covered elements are those delineating award authority, small purchase authority, methods of soliciting bids, definitions of emergencies and professional services, and procedures for contracting professional services.     

Letter to the Committee on Fellowships

Abstract

Thailand has historically been important to the West, especially the United States, as a stable capitalist link in the Pacific rim area of economic activity. When the political stability of the area was upset in the late 1940s and early 1950s, private and public American organizations responded with new techniques known as the green revolution, whose objective was to increase agricultural production and thus decrease the chances of revolution. It is important to stress that at this stage the long-term dangers of regional instability were more important to the development of the green revolution as a policy than were any specific American economic interests in Thailand.     

Budgetary Politics and Veto Players

In this article we examine whether and how the policy‐oriented coalition building and the gridlock model of legislative choice explain changes in the allocation of German budgetary items between 1961 and 1994. The policy‐oriented coalition‐building approach suggests that only policy‐connected budgetary actors can make changes in the budgetary composition, while the location of the status quo is essential for budgetary modifications according to the gridlock model. We also draw the attention to the identification of the set of relevant budgetary veto players and their preferences by distinguishing between models of the government, the political parties of the Bundestag, and the two of them. We test the predictive power of these approaches and conceptions in a competitive manner and control for macroeconomic and other political factors that might influence changes in the budgetary allocation. Our findings show that the gridlock model better explains budgetary changes, and that the government is responsible for decreasing, but the political parties of the Bundestag majority are decisive for increasing the size of budgetary items. We conclude that identifying the relevant veto players and using these more sophisticated approaches on budgetary decision making provide significant insights into the political reasons for changing the allocation of the German budget.     

Loperamide as a Potential Drug of Abuse and Misuse: Fatal Overdoses at the Medical University of South Carolina

Loperamide is an over‐the‐counter, μ‐opioid receptor agonist commonly used as an antidiarrheal agent. Loperamide was thought to have minimal abuse potential due to its low bioavailability and limited central nervous system activity; however, there have been increasing reports of loperamide misuse in supratherapeutic doses to achieve euphoria and/or avoid opioid withdrawal. A literature review suggests a rise in loperamide abuse was inevitable, with substantial increases in reported cases over the last decade. Five fatal cases of toxic medication use where loperamide was listed as a primary or contributory cause of death were identified at the Medical University of South Carolina. The characteristic autopsy demographics and findings are described, and the mechanisms of abuse and toxicity of loperamide are reviewed. Loperamide overdoses are a growing concern from both a forensic and clinical standpoint, and the frequency of reported cases will likely increase as awareness grows within the medical and toxicological communities.