Between 1916 and 1941, Henry Ford embarked on an effort to decentralize the production facilities of the Ford Motor Company. One component of this effort was an experiment in which he located seventeen small factories, called Village Industries, in rural areas throughout southeastern Michigan. These factories were designed to utilize water power in the production of sub-assembly parts for Ford's main assembly plants and were intended to provide jobs for rural residents. Ford endeavored to develop a sense of “field and factory” in these plants by training rural workers in the latest technological advances, allowing them release time to farm their fields, and paying them “city” wages. The Ford experiment is important for, despite a significant body of literature calling for the decentralization of industry during this period, there were few efforts that were comprehensively implemented, few which included rural areas, and even fewer that were totally financed by the private sector.
Alternative devices for efficient pricing in multiproduct monopoly situations Two rules for the efficient pricing of monopoly firms have been widely discussed in the literature. The marginal-cost rule was the center of controversy in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Ramsey rule’ was the fashionable topic of the last decade. Both rules require substantial information for their implementation. Mainly because outside regulators lack such information, the marginal-cost rule has lost its popularity. Information to implement the Ramsey rule may be even harder to come by. However, as this chapter shows, the information requirement to implement both rules can be lowered substantially by setting appropriate performance indices for public-enterprise managers. A combination of two features distinguishes the public enterprise from other economic institutions: (1) it is mainly financed by the revenues derived from the sale of its products in markets, which makes it differ from ordinary public administration, and (2) it differs from private capitalistic enterprises by virtue of public (state) ownership. This hybrid position of public enterprises gives rise to two natural starting points for a normative analysis. First, what can be gained by decentralizing part of the administration via public enterprises? Second, what advantages can public enterprises hold over private firms? If there are such advantages, they must have a restricted domain, because otherwise the hybrid would dominate its parents. To be the superior institutional setup, public enterprises first have to be feasible. This is of major relevance for the decision to turn a government administration into a public enterprise. If the administration's output consists of pure public goods with no possibility to exclude, a public enterprise simply is not feasible.
Isolation of the real roots of a polynomial equation is the process of finding real, disjoint intervals such that each contains exactly one real root and every real root is contained in some interval. This process is quite important because, as J. B. J. Fourier pointed out, it constitutes the first step toward the solution of general equations of degree greater than four, the second step being the approximation of roots to any desired degree of accuracy. In the beginning of the 19th century F. D. Budan and J. B. J. Fourier presented two different (but equivalent) theorems which enable us to determine the maximum possible number of real roots that an equation has within a given interval. Budan's theorem appeared in 1807 in the memoir Nouvelle methode pour la resolution des equations numeriques [10, p. 219], whereas Fourier's theorem was first published in 1820 in Le Bulletin des sciences par la Societe Philomatique de Paris, pp. 156, 181 [10, p. 223]. Due to the importance of these two theorems, there was a great controversy regarding priority rights. In his book (1859) Biographies of distinguished scientific men, p. 383, F. Arago informs us that Fourier deemed it necessary to have recourse to the certificates of early students of the Polytechnic School or Professors of the University in order to prove that he had taught his theorem in 1796, 1797 and 1803 [10]. Based on Fourier's proposition, C. Sturm presented in 1829 an improved theorem whose application yields the exact number of real roots which a polynomial equation without multiple zeros has within a real interval; thus he solved the real root isolation problem. Since 1830 Sturm's method has been the only one widely known and used, and consequently Budan's theorem was pushed into oblivion. To our knowledge, Budan's theorem can be found only in [16] and [61 whereas Fourier's proposition appears in almost all texts on the theory of equations. We feel that Budan's theorem merits special attention because it constitutes the basis of Vincent's forgotten theorem of 1836 which, in turn, is the foundation of our method for the isolation of the real roots of an equation [1], a method which far surpasses Sturm's in efficiency [2], [3]. In the discussion which follows we present separately, and without proofs, the classical theorems by Fourier and Budan and we indicate how they lead to the corresponding real root isolation methods. Some empirical results are also presented for comparison.
Abstract This article presents three protocols for obtaining maximum flow in a network by using distributed computation. Each node in the network has memory and processing capabilities and coordinates the algorithm with its neighbors by means of control messages. In the order presented, each protocol employs less communication than the previous one, but requires more time and node computation.
In Saskatchewan, the community colleges, as introduced in lQ73, were heralded as being unique.Politicians, government civil servants and others stressed the unique philosophy and principles upon which these new institutions were to be based.This dream of something new, yet readily applicable to Saskatchewan, caught the imagination of many Saskatchewanians along with a good number of people outside Saskatchewan.Lifelong learning, access to educational opportunities and the worthiness of learning were to become the pillars for enhancing peoples' personal growth and development.These colleges would facilitate the decentralization of learning opportunities to rural Saskatchewan.The learner would determine the location, the type of services and programs offered through community colleges.These colleges would be autonomous within the designed system in order to accommodate the particular demands of individuals, organizations and communities.The college would be the community and the community would be the college.Government and its agencies would work in support of this idea.iii Colleges have operated for nearly ten years.In these years there has come to be a certain emptiness about colleges, their philosophy and how this philosophy has been implemented.This unique system was to have accomplished so much, but by the end of the first decade, there even appeared to be confusion over what the original philosophy was, what it meant and how it was to be carried out.The original architects of the Saskatchewan community college system were interviewed to determine their vision and thinking related to community colleges for Saskatchewan.Other people linked to this ideal were subjected to the same process.An extensive literature search supplemented the interviews and provided further background and explanation for the development of community colleges.
Cultural policy in Sweden. During the ‘70’s, Sweden adopted a genuine cultural policy evolving along the following main criteria : major opportunities for self-expression, creative and community development, decentralization and financial efforts in favour of the underprivileged. Since State finance does not reach the local level, the implementation of such a policy remained within the exclusive terms of reference of local govemment. This accounts for wide discrepancies among boroughs. The 80ties witness a cut in public expenditure with serious effects on cultural policy which had not yet reached its full development and still lacked strong local structures. Therefore, future cultural policy is as yet uncertain. It will largely depend on societal options taken : privatization and commercialization or cultural welfare and creativity.
In the American governmental system, local governments have a fairly high degree of autonomy in their relations with state and federal governments. This is one reason that local governments play such an important role of financing and delivering human services. Moreover, the many agencies, both private and public, which deliver these services at the local level, have a high degree of autonomy in carrying out their missions and in relating to each other. In such a decentralized context, the working relations among human service agencies are critical to the effective delivery of the services they provide. The coordination of these organizations and their services is a complex and pervasive issues. This paper will describe and compare two complementary studies of the same substantive area, coordination of transportation provided by human service agencies in the United States.