Whether you’re a current project manager seeking to validate the skills and knowledge acquired through years of practical experience or a newcomer to the PM field looking to strengthen your resume, the PMP certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI) provides you with the means to do so. This new edition of the best-selling PMP: Project Management Professional Study Guide covers the 2005 updates to both the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and the PMP exam. Author Kim Heldman presents the material in a clear and accessible manner, taking you through the process groups in their logical order so you understand the parts and the whole equally well

Economic analysis condemns market intervention in favour of farmers as inefficient, if not also ineffective, and therefore well worth reform. Practical experience, however, indicates that such lessons are hard to learn and implement. Part of the reason appears to be that economic analysis seldom clearly identifies the real costs and benefits of reform, and seldom explains these sensibly to the relevant constituencies.

Furthermore, economic analysis rarely explains why the protectionist measures were adopted in the first place, or explores the dependencies that these policies generate. Without these explanations, and without reform strategies that take full account of them, policy reform will continue to be reluctant, slow and frequently counterproductive. This paper reconsiders the evolution of farm policies and the economic assessment of their costs and benefits, and draws conclusions as to the general shape of reforms likely to reconcile economic efficiency with political acceptability. In so doing, it re-phrases conventional economic arguments in terms which seem to accord better with sensible intuition, which may prove more accessible and credible to policy makers and advisors. It concludes with a substantial challenge to the agricultural economics profession.

This paper is concerned with the timing of an agricultural policy reform under uncertainty. The focus is on the opportunity cost of giving up the option to wait when implementing a policy reform. Including the option value in applied policy analysis can help explain why conventional analyses may find observed policies to be Pareto-inferior. Furthermore, it explains why otherwise profitable policy reforms may be delayed. The theoretical model is applied to Norwegian agricultural policy anticipating a prospective WTO agreement. It is argued that the option value should be incorporated into applied policy analysis when high uncertainty prevails.

Agricultural policy reform has been an important source of change in the Chinese agricultural sector. The reforms led to productivity growth and helped China in pursuing its self-sufficiency goal especially in the grain sector. To analyse whether observable productivity growth stems from technologically induced components, or from the market induced parts, a multi-input-multi-output model is derived using an econometric distance function framework. A decomposition allows to distinguish allocative effects, scale effects, technological change, and technical efficiency change. Data on farms in Zhejiang from 1986 to 1999 are used to analyse the impact of policy reform.

Книга « Коммуникация в политических кампаниях: изнутри и снаружи » исследует все детали проведения политических кампаний глазами ученого и политического консультанта. Книга представляет уникальный подход к анализу коммуникации в кампаниях, исследуя этот лабиринт с точки зрения внутреннего и внешнего взгляда на этот процесс. Как и во многих публикациях в этой области, изучаемая проблема в данной книге рассматривается в широком контексте. Здесь обсуждаются теории и принципы проведения кампаний, включая такие узловые вопросы, как политическая социализация, роль денег, этика и критические события. Книга построена таким образом, что будет интересна всем специалистам в области политической коммуникации, государственной политики и коммуникации в политических кампаниях.

В книге « Коммуникация в политических кампаниях: принципы и практики » Дж. Трент и Р. Фиденберг исследуют принципы и практики коммуникации применительно к политическим кампаниям. Книга представляет собой обширный анализ коммуникации в политических кампаниях на основе исторического и современного опыта политических кампаний на всех уровнях. Авторы книги признают, что выборы являются центральным звеном демократии, а коммуникация в политических кампаниях – это эпистемологическая база кампаний.

Existing models of contagious currency crises are summarized and surveyed, and it is argued that more weight should be put on political factors. Towards this end, the concept of political contagion introduced, whereby contagion in speculative attacks across currencies arises solely because of political objectives of countries. A specific model of membership' contagion is presented. The desire to be part of a political-economic union, where maintaining a fixed exchange rate is a condition for membership and where the value of membership depends positively on who else is a member, is shown to give rise to potential contagion. We then present evidence suggesting that political contagion may have been important in the 1992-3 EMS crisis.

This book examines how electoral laws, the timing of election, the ideological orientation of governments, and the nature of competition between political parties influence unemployment, economic growth, inflation, and monetary and fiscal policy. The book presents both a thorough overview of the theoretical literature and a vast amount of empirical evidence.

This paper surveys the recent literature on the theory of macroeconomic policy. We study the effect of various incentive constraints on the policy making process, such as lack of credibility, political opportunism, political ideology, and divided government. The survey is organized in three parts. Part I deals with monetary policy in a simply Phillips curve model: it covers credibility issues, political business cycles, and optimal design of monetary institutions. Part II deals with fiscal policy in a dynamic general equilibrium set up: the main topics here are credibility of tax policy, and political determinants of budget deficits. Part III studies economic growth in models with endogenous fiscal policy.

Observed fiscal policy varies greatly across time and countries. How can we explain this variation across time and countries? This paper surveys the recent literature that has tried to answer this question. We adopt a unified approach in portraying public policy as the equilibrium outcome of an explicitly specified political process. We divide the material into three parts. In Part I, we focus on median-voter equilibria that apply to policy issues where disagreement between voters is likely to be one-dimensional. We thus study the general redistributive programs which are typical of the modern welfare state: redistribution between rich and poor, young and old, employed and unemployed, resident of different regions, and labor and capital. In Part II we study special interest politics. Here the policy problem is multi-dimensional and we focus on specific political mechanisms: we study legislative bargaining, lobbying, and electoral competition, as well as the possible interactions between these different forms of political activity. Finally, Part III deals with a set of questions that can be brought under the label of comparative politics. Here we deal with policy choice under alternative political constitutions; we model the rationale for separation of powers and contrast the stylized features of congressional and parliamentary political systems, focusing on their implications for rent extraction by politicians, redistribution and public goods provision.

What determines the size and form of redistributive programs, the extent and type of public goods provision, the burden of taxation across alternative tax bases, the size of government deficits, and the stance of monetary policy during the course of business and electoral cycles? A large and rapidly growing literature in political economics attempts to answer these questions. But so far there is little consensus on the answers and disagreement on the appropriate mode of analysis.

Combining the best of three separate traditions--the theory of macroeconomic policy, public choice, and rational choice in political science--Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini suggest a unified approach to the field. As in modern macroeconomics, individual citizens behave rationally, their preferences over economic outcomes inducing preferences over policy. As in public choice, the delegation of policy decisions to elected representatives may give rise to agency problems between voters and politicians. And, as in rational choice, political institutions shape the procedures for setting policy and electing politicians. The authors outline a common method of analysis, establish several new results, and identify the main outstanding problems.

This major text will have an enormous impact on students and professionals in political science as well as economics, redefining how decision makers on several continents think about the full range of macroeconomic issues and informing the approaches of the next generation of economists.

Modern capitalism, from neo-liberalism to deregulation, has come to dominate national and international political economy. This major book addresses this convergence and provides a comprehensive overview of the implications for future capitalist diversity. Leading international contributors consider important questions. Is the preference for free markets a well-founded response to intensified global competition? Does this mean that all advanced societies must converge on an imitation of the United States? What are the implications for the institutional diversity of the advanced economies? How do we now evaluate the systems and institutions in East Asia? Political Economy and Modern Capitalism provides a practical and wide-ranging analysis of the public policy choices facing governments and business around the world. It will be invaluable reading for students and researchers of political economy, comparative politics, political science, political sociology, public policy, and administration.

В книге "Политические партии - новые концепции и новые вызовы" несколько авторитетных ученых представляют критический анализ (концептуальный и эмпирический) наиболее значительных проблем, с которыми сталкиваются политические партии в современных демократиях. С критических позиций они оценивают классические концепции и типологии, на основе которых проводились исследования партий в последние десятилетия, исследуют новые вызовы, стоящие перед партиями сегодня.

Коллектив ученых, представляющих британскую школу культурных исследований (cultural studies), развивает новые подходы к изучению проблематики «популярной культуры» в русле (нео)грамшианской методологии. По мнению авторов, теории массовой культуры в духе Франкфурсткой школы, с одной стороны, и обращенный в прошлое поиск аутентичной культуры народных классов, с другой, равным образом неудовлетворительны. Значение «популярной культуры», как и значение категорий «народ» и «народное» в принципе неустойчиво и (пере)определяется в конкретных исторических и социальных обстоятельствах. В книге делается акцент на необходимости изучения форм «популярной культуры» в контекстах социальных отношений, в рамках которых данные формы производятся или воспринимаются. Помимо обсуждения теоретических вопросов (взаимодействие «популярной культуры» и государства, удовольствие и идеология в «популярной культуре» и др.), книга содержит детальные эмпирические исследования конкретных культурных форм и практик.