The use of RAS and related models in manpower forecasting

With the increasing availability of statistics describing the occupational structures of different industries manpower forecasters are beginning to develop more sophisticated models. The economic rationale of such models has tended to be obscured by the mathematics involved and an understandable eagerness to put the data to use in forecasting. In addition, the systematic testing of the explanatory power of these models has been neglected where it has not been hampered by the shortage of data series. The RAS model has featured prominently in manpower discussions and this paper attempts an evaluation of its predictive ability and economic interpretation subject to the limits imposed by the data available for the British engineering industry. It is argued that such a model plays a useful initial role in the development of models for sectoral manpower forecasting but must lead on to a more sensitive treatment of the labour market and the decision problem of investing in human capital.     

Understanding Policy Transfer: A Multi-Level, Multi-Disciplinary Perspective

At the same time that comparative and international political scientists have been confronting the problems of analysing state behaviour under conditions of uncertainty, state-centred political scientists are attempting, somewhat belatedly, to deal with the increasing complexity and uncertainty which underpins modern governance. Yet despite similar research agendas these disciplines have continued to speak past each other. This article contends that policy transfer analysis can provide a context for integrating some key concerns of these disciplines. Further, we argue that the process of policy transfer should be examined through a structure and agency approach with three dimensions: global, international and transnational levels, the macro-level and the interorganizational level. This three-dimensional model employs the notion of a policy transfer network as a middle-range level of analysis which links a particular form of policy development (policy transfer), microdecision making in organizations, macrosystems and global, transnational and international systems. It is hoped that this approach will stimulate an empirical research agenda which will illuminate important policy developments in domestic and world politics.     

Finding the levers, finding the courage: lessons from cost containment in North America

"Learning" is broader and more complex than simply the orderly acquisition of new knowledge. At least as important is the evolution of the background of assumptions and beliefs held by the community, or its principal decision makers, and implicit in its institutions and policies. These may bear only a loose relation to evidence or knowledge narrowly defined. The pressures of cost escalation over the past twenty years, and the attempts at containment in the U.S. and Canada, have added substantially to our knowledge of how the health care system works. Containment is possible, and the successful mechanisms, thus far, are quite specific. But the results of these attempts and (in the U.S.) the continued escalation have also significantly shifted the broader set of assumptions in the community about appropriate priorities and policies in health care. Attitudes towards physician supply, variations in practice patterns, capitated practice, and for-profit organization, for example, have changed radically, although the supporting evidence has not. But cost pressures have created an audience which wants to hear, whose background assumptions provide a different "fit" for the evidence.