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During the 1990s a growing number of firms have been encouraging continuous improvement (CI) in all aspects of working life, and some impressive results have been achieved. However, the process of implementing CI is long and challenging. Companies need to know what progress they have made, and the outcome of any interventions, in order to consolidate and further develop CI. The CIRCA CI self‐assessment tool is a research‐based tool which helps users to make an objective assessment of CI in their company. It is designed to be used by any organisation regardless of size, industry, length of time working with CI, and the particular approach taken. The tool went through several phases of development, culminating in a paper‐based Version 3.0 in 1997. Since then further development and testing of the tool has taken place in the UK and abroad, and future plans include an electronic version.

Teachers, school managers and governors are now more publicly accountable than ever. They are expected to know how their school is performing and how to improve that performance. Target setting is a key tool in the drive to raise standards, and has been implemented at every level of the education system.This book explores target setting from both the teacher's and pupil's viewpoint, and investigates the role of assessment in successful teaching and learning. It shows that it is possible to develop a whole-school target setting policy co-ordinating the use of targets for individual pu

An institution that has shown great promise in addressing the revitalization of declining central cities is Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). These private governments provide supplemental municipal services such as sanitation, security, and marketing to independent businesses in underserved commercial areas. By 1999, 44 U.S. states had legislation that enables and dictates the formation process and structure of BIDs. The surprising element of this legislation is the wide variation in approval needed to form a BID over a proposed geographical area. Some states require as little as 20 percent approval of proposed members and others as much as 75 percent approval to allow formation of a BID. This variation in state statutes likely influences the use of BIDs. Results highlight that relatively easier state enabled collective action positively impacts the creation of BIDs, the limited effects of tax expenditure limitations on the formation of BIDs and the positive impacts that new development has on the number of BIDs per state.

In this paper, we introduce FIT, a STREP Project sponsored by the European Union starting in 2006. The overall objective of FIT is to develop, test and validate a self-adaptive e-govemment framework based on semantic technologies that will ensure that the quality of public services is proactively and continually fitted to the changing preferences and increasing expectations of e-citizens. We give a brief overview on the FIT scenario and indicate where and how we plan to utilize Semantic Web technologies. Copyright © 2006, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

This paper studies an election game between two politicians, in which each provides income transfers to special‐interest groups in return for political contributions. It is shown that a move to a more inefficient form of transfers may lower the total excess burden created by these transfers, because the politicians are induced to reduce their provision of transfers. For the case in which the income transfers are indirectly provided as trade protection to import‐competing industries, a switch from production subsidies to tariffs as the form of protection reduces the equilibrium level of excess burden and makes both politicians better off.