Suchergebnisse

Finds that a state-centered approach provides a better account of the South Korean postwar experience. The state has asssiduously influenced the access to, and cost of available financial resources, going far beyond merely 'getting the prices right'. (Original abstract-amended)

The UK Labour government has recently developed the NHS Plan, which specifies long-term objectives and strategies for the development of the National Health Service. Along with the NHS Plan has come the development of Service and Financial Frameworks (SaFFs). The aim of SaFFs is to overcome the potential agency problem that exists between government and NHS organizations (Heymann, 1988) by enhancing the accountability of local NHS organizations for delivering the outcomes required by the NHS Plan. This study uses a case study to explore how the SaFF has been applied as a new NHS performance measurement tool and identifies issues affecting the usefulness of the SaFF as an accountability mechanism. The findings illustrate how the introduction of SaFFs has allowed the government to introduce additional non-financial/process performance indicators and tougher performance monitoring processes. This study also identifies issues related to the choice, relevance and informational quality of performance indicators. The findings suggest that, given the shortcomings in the SaFF's performance measurement contributions, a key early aim of this new accountability mechanism may be to serve central government's need to deliver a political message to the public. If the SaFF is to develop into an effective accountability mechanism and support the key aims of the NHS Plan, careful selection of performance indicators and adequate information systems will be crucial.

Rice is the most important food crop in Vietnam, providing food more than 90 million people and is considered as an essential source of income for majority of rural populations. Monitoring rice-growing areas is thus important to developing successful strategies for food security in the country. This paper aims to develop an approach for crop acreage estimation from multi-temporal Sentinel-1A data. We processed the data for two main cropping seasons (e.g., winter–spring, summer–autumn) in the Mekong River Delta (MRD), Vietnam through three main steps: (1) data pre-processing, (3) rice classification based on crop phenological metrics, and (4) accuracy assessment of the mapping results. The classification results compared with the ground reference data indicated the overall accuracy of 86.2% and Kappa coefficient of 0.72. These results were reaffirmed by close correlation between the government's rice area statistics for such crops (R 2 > 0.95). The values of relative error in area obtained for the winter–spring and summer–autumn were -3.6% and 6.7%, respectively. This study demonstrates the potential application of multi-temporal Sentinel-1A data for rice crop mapping using information of crop phenology in the study region.

Rice is globally the most important food crop, feeding approximately half of the world's population, especially in Asia where around half of the world's poorest people live. Thus, advanced spatiotemporal information of rice crop yield during crop growing season is critically important for crop management and national food policy making. The main objective of this study was to develop an approach to integrate remotely sensed data into a crop simulation model (DSSAT) for rice yield estimation in Taiwan. The data assimilation was processed to integrate biophysical parameters into DSSAT model for rice yield estimation using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The cost function was constructed based on the differences between the simulated leaf area index (LAI) and MODIS LAI, and the optimization process starts from an initial parameterization and accordingly adjusts parameters (e.g., planting date, planting population, and fertilizer amount) in the crop simulation model. The fitness value obtained from the cost function determined whether the optimization algorithm had reached the optimum input parameters using a user-defined tolerance. The results of yield estimation compared with the government's yield statistics indicated the root mean square error (RMSE) of 11.7% and mean absolute error of 9.7%, respectively. This study demonstrated the applicability of satellite data assimilation into a crop simulation model for rice yield estimation, and the approach was thus proposed for crop yield monitoring purposes in the study region.

Rice is globally the most important food crop, feeding approximately half of the world's population, especially in Asia where around half of the world's poorest people live. Thus, advanced spatiotemporal information of rice crop yield during crop growing season is critically important for crop management and national food policy making. The main objective of this study was to develop an approach to integrate remotely sensed data into a crop simulation model (DSSAT) for rice yield estimation in Taiwan. The data assimilation was processed to integrate biophysical parameters into DSSAT model for rice yield estimation using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The cost function was constructed based on the differences between the simulated leaf area index (LAI) and MODIS LAI, and the optimization process starts from an initial parameterization and accordingly adjusts parameters (e.g., planting date, planting population, and fertilizer amount) in the crop simulation model. The fitness value obtained from the cost function determined whether the optimization algorithm had reached the optimum input parameters using a user-defined tolerance. The results of yield estimation compared with the government's yield statistics indicated the root mean square error (RMSE) of 11.7% and mean absolute error of 9.7%, respectively. This study demonstrated the applicability of satellite data assimilation into a crop simulation model for rice yield estimation, and the approach was thus proposed for crop yield monitoring purposes in the study region.

Rice is the most important food crop in Vietnam, providing food more than 90 million people and is considered as an essential source of income for majority of rural populations. Monitoring rice-growing areas is thus important to developing successful strategies for food security in the country. This paper aims to develop an approach for crop acreage estimation from multi-temporal Sentinel-1A data. We processed the data for two main cropping seasons (e.g., winter–spring, summer–autumn) in the Mekong River Delta (MRD), Vietnam through three main steps: (1) data pre-processing, (3) rice classification based on crop phenological metrics, and (4) accuracy assessment of the mapping results. The classification results compared with the ground reference data indicated the overall accuracy of 86.2% and Kappa coefficient of 0.72. These results were reaffirmed by close correlation between the government's rice area statistics for such crops (R2 > 0.95). The values of relative error in area obtained for the winter–spring and summer–autumn were -3.6% and 6.7%, respectively. This study demonstrates the potential application of multi-temporal Sentinel-1A data for rice crop mapping using information of crop phenology in the study region.