This information-packed guide helps you understand Visual Basic 2005, the next-generation release of the popular Visual Basic programming language. This book aims to make you immediately productive in creating Windows and web applications using Visual Basic 2005 and all of its tools. Perfect for experienced VB6 and novice programmers.

Programming Visual Basic .NET, Second Edition is the complete guide to application development using Visual Basic .NET. Thorough, entertaining, and easy to follow, this book provides a comprehensive and detailed overview of the language, object-oriented programming, and the .NET Framework, and goes even further--you'll learn how to create Windows and Web applications, as well as Web services.

Projections of world food demands hinge critically on the underlying functional form used to predict future demands. Simple functional forms can lead to unrealistic projections by failing to capture changes in income elasticities of demand as consumer becomes wealthier. This paper compares several demand systems in the projection of disaggregated food demand across a wide range of countries with different income levels using a global general equilibrium model. We find that the recently introduced AIDADS system represents a substantial improvement over existing demand systems currently in use in CGE modeling. In particular, our projection results show that for relatively poor regions experiencing rapid income growth, the widely used LES and CDE demand systems tend to over-predict growth in consumer demand, and hence import and output requirements for food products and under-predict that for non-food products, compared to the AIDADS system. On the other hand, for high-income regions with modest income growth, the choice of functional form is less critical.

With Meredith and Mantel's Sixth Edition, you'll not only learn how to select, initiate, operate, and control all types of projects; you'll also learn how to manage risks and uncertainties. Written from a managerial perspective, the text equips you with the quantitative skills, knowledge of organizational issues, and insights into human behavior that you need to do project management effectively

This Ninth Edition of the industry-leading project management “bible” applies its streamlined approach to new, authoritative coverage aligned with the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMI’s PMBOK), the new mandatory source of training for the Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification Exam. Written by one of the best-known authorities on the subject, this extraordinary edition gives a profound understanding of project management

Part of the Project Manager's Spotlight series from Harbor Light Press, this straightforward book offers solutions to real-life risk scenarios. Inside, best-selling author Kim Heldman highlights critical components of risk management and equips you with tools, techniques, checklists, and templates you can put to use immediately. By following a realistic case study from start to finish, you'll see how a project manager deals with each concept. Ultimately, this book will help you anticipate, prevent, and alleviate major project risks

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) goes beyond the typical project management approach to offer a set of proven business practices that can help executives, program managers, and project managers bring projects into alignment with the strategies, resources, and executive oversight of the overall enterprise. Step by step, this book shows how to take a project from the inception of a vision to the realization of benefits to the organization. Project Portfolio Management draws on project management expert Harvey A. Levine’s years of research and distills the knowledge and best practices from dozens of leaders in the field to show how to select and implement the projects that will garner the best results

Project Quality Management by Kenneth Rose offers project managers a specific, succinct, step-by-step project quality management process not found anywhere else. It gives you an immediate hands-on capability to improve project implementation and customer satisfaction in any project domain and will help maintain cost and schedule constraints to ensure a quality project. This user-friendly guide presents tools and techniques that implement the general methods defined in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge published by the Project Management Institute, and augments those methods with more detailed, hands-on procedures that have been proven through actual practice

Offers a definitive study of agricultural labor in California and an overview of the subject in the Southwest. It explores the agricultural industry, immigration, ethnic relations, agribusiness, agricultural workers, and public policy as related to the region and to the agricultural sector of the U.S. economy.

Исследование труда в сельcком хозяйстве Калифорнии с обзором ситуации на юго-западе США. Рассматривается агроиндустрия штата, иммиграция, этнические проблемы, работники сельского хозяйства, и аграрная политика, как в отношении штата, так и для всего сельского хозяйства США.

Little can happen in economic life that does not have distributional impact. Whose interests then count in the economy and in politics? This book addresses that question and explores the determining factors and forces. The author is interested in here in what governs institutional and systemic performance and how we may, objectively and nonpresumptively, analyze and understand the variables governing performance. The underlying motivation is twofold: first, to enable readers to better know what is going on in the economy and the polity; and second, to enable us to better choose and effectuate meaningful and consequential institutional changes. The focus is on human interdependence and how alternative property rights affect its outcome.

Книга Биду-Захариазен "Марсель Пруст - социолог: от аристократического дома к буржуазному салону" отличается своеобразием методологического подхода к исследованию аристократической и буржуазной культуры. Автор (социолог по образованию) предпринимает попытку совместить социологический и литературный анализ и проанализировать серию романов Марселя Пруста «В поисках утраченного времени», рассматривая их как источник информации о взаимоотношении аристократии и буржуазии в период с 1880х по 1920-е годы. В книге показывается, как буржуазия находит «ахиллесову пяту» у аристократии – ее антиинтеллектуализм. Культура становится оружием атаки буржуазии на аристократию.

The objective of the paper is to identify the determinants of access to health care in rural Russia. We started out with the observation that the transition process has affected the provision of social services in the Russian Federation in general, and in rural areas in particular, owing to the overlap with agricultural reforms. Based on this observation we asked how the reduced role of the state and the concomitant decentralization of policy making has affected access of the rural populace to social services. A review of the available literature on this topic resulted in the formulation of the following three hypotheses. Firstly, that income is a determinant of access to health care. Secondly, that informal payments play an important role in determining access, and thirdly that there are large differences in access to health care services between districts. The hypotheses were tested using household data from a survey conducted in two regions of Russia in 2000. The results indicate that in the study regions, contrary to expectations, neither income nor informal payments are important determinants of access. However, there are large differences in out-of-pocket expenditures between districts, indicating that access to health care varies between districts.

Are the way in which governments tax and spend efficient, and are they equitable? These questions are central to public sector economics and this second edition of Public Finance and Public Choice illustrates the controversies which surround them. This new edition continues to focus on both the social optimality and public choice approaches but also includes alternative perspectives. This successful text has been extensively rewritten, offering further microeconomic insight and additional examples of the application of theory. New sections include: The private provision of public goods Privatization The quasi market The EC budget QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) Public debt The impact of the public sector on economic growth. This clearly written, rigorous text offers a complete course in the economics of the public sector. It will be an indispensable text for students studying public economics, and also for students taking technical public policy or public administration courses. Readership: Main market is advanced undergraduates (second/third year undergraduates in UK and Europe) majoring in economics taking a course option entitled Public Economics. A relevant course may also be taught on Politics, Government or Public Administration degrees, entitled Public Finance, or Public Administration.

The subject matter of public finance has evolved a great deal in the last half of the twentieth century. Earlier in the century, when government activity fell within limited and well-defined boundaries, public finance was primarily the study of taxation. As government has grown, public finance economists have become increasingly interested in public expenditures, both from the standpoint of analyzing the actual expenditures of governments and from the standpoint of developing a theory of public expenditures. Public expenditure theory provides a rationale for government activity and can help guide policymakers toward the design of more effective public programs. In the decades since World War II, the study of public finance has been extended to examine the public sector decision-making process to understand how resources are allocated within political institutions. Public policy, after all, is not the product of policy experts but rather is the result of democratic decision making. A complete understanding of the public sector must incorporate an understanding of those political institutions that actually produce public policy. This book attempts to integrate the study of the various aspects of public finance by viewing all the government's activities as a result of the democratic decision-making process. This theme manifests itself throughout the book. For example, the tax system is examined not only in terms of traditional equity and efficiency criteria but also as a product of a democratic decision-making process. The analysis of public expenditures is also developed within the context of the public sector decision-making process that produces expenditure programs. Likewise, government regulations and intergovernmental relations are viewed as products of collective decision making and are analyzed the same way. To provide a foundation for this approach, the book contains three chapters devoted specifically to an economic analysis of political institutions. Thorough coverage of these chapters is not necessary to understand the rest of the book, but, for those who are interested in studying the allocation of resources through political markets in the public sector in the same way that economics analyzes the private sector, these chapters should prove helpful. A distinguishing feature of this book is that it analyzes political institutions in much more detail than do most public finance books and therefore creates a closer tie between economic analysis and public policy.

The unifying theme of this text-that government activity is the result of a democratic decision-making process-is significant for two reasons. First, one’s understanding of public finance will be incomplete unless one understands the process by which democratic decision making has created the existing public sector institutions. Second, unlike the invisible hand of the market that is the result of human action but not of human design, the public sector of the economy is the result of conscious human design, so that every voter plays a part in the process. The better the process is understood, the more likely we are to design public sector institutions that behave as we intended. By analyzing public revenues and expenditures in the United States economy as a product of the democratic decision-making process, the many aspects of public finance can be presented as a unified body of knowledge rather than as a collection of different models of the public sector.

China’s accession to the WTO poses great challenges to the Chinese agricultural sector, especially to the grain producers. Compared with major grain exporters in the world, most grain crops in China are high in production cost and weak in market competitiveness. This can be partly attributed to the fact that Chinese farmers are facing with poorer agricultural production infrastructures and inadequate public investment in agricultural research and extension, which leads to the lower efficiency in private inputs and thus higher private cost per unit of product. After China joining the WTO, protective and administrative measures conflicted with the URAA cannot be utilized as before. Alternative measures should be explored to provide help to farmers to improve competitiveness of their product. Public investment in agricultural research and other production infrastructures should be considered with high priority as one of the policy alternatives.

This paper examines the effects of public investment in agricultural research on the reduction of production cost of major grain crops in China by using crop-specific data for the past 20 year. It is concluded that, increasing public investment in agricultural research, which is well within the ‘green box’ policy framework and allowed by the WTO rules, is a plausible and effective measure to reduce grain producer’s private input and to enhance the competitiveness of grain products. It is also of great significance to sustained food security in China.