To fund or not to fund …

A local government practitioner and a marketing academic consider the claims for marketing as a new organising principle for local government. They scrutinise the most frequent objections to the concept of marketing in this context and demonstrate that these have little or no force. This is especially true concerning the emerging paradigms of relationship marketing and Webster's development of the marketing concept. The authors conclude that a marketing philosophy underlies much of the new approach to local government service provision, and set out some of the characteristics which local government marketing needs to have.     

An econometric analysis of trends in fertility rates

Some regression models are used to test the hypothesis that changes in fertility rates have been caused by changes in socioeconomic conditions. The model is applied to four groups of countries and the conclusion is that no simple relationship exists between fertility changes and environmental changes. This conclusion is at variance with results derived from cross‐section studies and suggests not that there is no relationship between socioeconomic and fertility changes, but only that the relationship may be more complex than that considered in previous models.