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The purpose of this paper is to test how an individual’s attractiveness to three types of appraisal systems relates to self-rated psychological entitlement and ethics; and constructs rated by others of: conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness.

A sample of 148 students in graduate-level business courses and matching close friends/significant others were surveyed. Data were analyzed using hierarchical regression and path analysis.

Path analysis indicated acceptable fit for the overall model of attractiveness to three appraisal types.

Advocates of forced distribution ranking systems (FDRS) suggest that such systems stimulate a high-talent culture and that achievers and strong performers are attracted to FDRS. In contrast, the findings suggest that FDRS are attractive to individuals with high levels of psychological entitlement and low levels of conscientiousness.

Advocates of FDRS and prior research have indicated that such systems reduce leniency bias and stimulate a high-performance and high-talent culture in which honesty is expected and poor performance is not tolerated. Others have found that high achievers and high performers are likely to find such systems attractive. The present study suggests that one downside of FDRS is its attractiveness to workers with low levels of conscientiousness and higher levels of psychological entitlement, which are two personality traits associated with lower levels of performance and a variety of negative outcomes.

The performance evaluation process is a key step in any management system and constitutes the basis for continuous improvement. Resistance to change is considered as a critical factor in any change management project; so, development of employee performance appraisal systems like all of the change management projects has always faced many challenges. This study seeks to illustrate the two-year experience (2018–2020) and lessons learned by developing an employee performance appraisal system in the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI) as a cultural public sector organization.

This study was carried out by using soft operational research (OR) approaches, using a novel combination of two methods, soft system methodology (SSM) and importance performance analysis (IPA). For this purpose, at the beginning, with the help of the SSM approach, the challenges of implementation was identified, then, using the opinions and experiences of the system's stakeholders, improvement actions were defined and prioritized using the IPA method.

The research findings showed that “coaching development,” “optimizing the forced distribution rating system (FDRS)” and “customizing the system” are the most important improvement actions.

The research has bridged the gap between research and practice in the field of employee performance appraisal system in national libraries.

This chapter is based on the Annual Report on Public Accounts prepared by the Maltese National Audit Office (NAO), Malta’s Supreme Audit Institution. Its objectives are to analyse and classify the reported issues, evaluate their significance and how the findings are reflected in the Public Sector, and assess the adequacy of the communication of these findings through the Annual Report. The research consisted of a qualitative analysis of the Annual Reports for the three years 2007, 2009 and 2011. This analysis was supplemented by unstructured interviews conducted with both NAO and Government officials. Findings report a significant number of issues emerging from different factors. The highest incidence of weaknesses was related to record-keeping and compliance with policies and procedures. Moreover, the interviews with NAO officials showed that the departments were not always taking on board the recommendations made through the Annual Reports, thus indicating a passive attitude towards the reported findings. The results also show that while the Government has its own structures of checks-and-balances to prevent and detect errors, and no internal control system is completely effective, there is still much room for improvement within the Public Sector to ensure that public funds are appropriately utilised. The detection of various issues by the NAO is therefore inevitable, particularly given the complexity and size of the Public Sector. In conclusion, the NAO findings should be more thoroughly examined to reduce the incidence of issues. Furthermore, the way forward should be directed at enhancing the current systems and promoting a more positive relationship between the NAO and auditees.

The paper focuses on the evaluation of a light aircraft spin. The main purpose of this paper is to achieve reliable mathematical models of aircraft motion beyond stall conditions to subsequently predict spin properties based on calculation only. Another vitally significant objective is to verify whether the aerodynamic characteristics determined numerically are coherent with the wind tunnel measurements performed on the dynamically scaled aircraft models.

The analysis was carried out for two certified conventional light aircraft. The first part of the investigation is devoted to the verification of the simplified methods used to identify the aircraft recoverability from spinning steady-state turns and estimate the primary post-stall flight parameters. Then, the spin simulations were executed. The computational results were thereafter compared with the in-flight data recordings.

The study confirms the coincidence between the calculated spinning behaviour and the observed aircraft response during the flight tests. The mathematical models of aircraft spatial motion have been found to be credible for predicting spin properties. The simplified methods are reliable to determine the basic spin performance of light aircraft at the preliminary design stage, whereas the spin simulations enable recognition and comprehensive examination of all spin modes.

The outcomes of conducted calculation and comparisons of computational spin properties with flight test recordings have indicated that the qualitative assessment of spinning motion is enabled at each stage of the designing process.

The paper involves the comparison of the computational results with the recordings of spin in-flight tests and the correlation between calculated and experimentally obtained aerodynamics of light aircraft.

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This paper aims to investigate the effects of descent time spent with flaps extended on fuel burn (FB) and specific range for five different flight path angles (FPAs) ranging between 2.0° and 4.0° for a commercial aircraft.

A large data set of actual flight data (n = 475) of the same type of a frequently used commercial aircraft were investigated by using statistical methods.

The result of the comparison of the highest and the lowest FBs of flight profiles for each FPAs present that the fuel saving was achieved by keeping at as a high airspeed as possible and deploying flaps as late as possible, which is in line with the objective of delayed deceleration approaches. From analyzing the flight profiles, it was proven that delaying deceleration and also descending without flaps or with flap over a shorter time resulted in less FB of 101.1, 70.9 and 94.9 kg for FPA 2.5°, FPA 3.0° and FPA 3.5°, respectively.

This study differs from prior studies because it focused on the effects of the different vertical profiles on FB. Also, the use of real flight data recorder data in the analysis presents the originality of this study.

United States immigration policy is one of the most dynamic and fiercely argued public policy issues today – often including questions of how many and from where. Poor economic conditions overseas, perceptions of a relative abundance of opportunity in the United States, flight from persecution and upheaval, and revolutions in communication and transportation are often cited as the major factors explaining historic and current waves of immigrants (legal and illegal) to U.S. shores (Batchelor, 2004; Borjas, 2004; Porter, 2006). U.S. immigration legislation is also a key factor in determining the numbers and composition of America's new residents. The focus of this chapter therefore consists of the costs associated with providing illegal immigrants with the benefit of free, public schooling within the context of globalization. More specifically, given the broader social, political, and economic parameters of the immigration debate and its meaning, the chapter discusses the legal and educational issues faced in the United States by those undocumented students who desire to attend public schooling, as well as the ways current state and federal laws both empower and discourage them.

The purpose of this paper is to assess both short and long-term influences of public investment on economic growth and test the hypothesis that whether public investment promotes or demotes private investment in Vietnam.

The authors use the approach of autoregressive distributed lag model and Vietnam’s macro data in the period of 1990-2016, to evaluate the short and long-term effects of public investment on economic growth and private investment. The model evaluates the impact of public investment on economic growth and private investment based on the neoclassical theories. The public investment which strongly affects economic growth is also reflected by aggregate supply and demand. Public investment directly impacts aggregate demand as a government expenditure and aggregate supply as a production function (capital factor).

The results from this research indicate that public investment in Vietnam in the past period does affect economic growth in the pattern of an inverted-U shape as of Barro (1990), with positive effects mostly occurring from the second year and negative effects of constraining long-term growth. Meanwhile, investment from the private sector, state-owned enterprises, and FDI has positive effects on short-term economic growth and state-owned capital stock has positive impacts on economic growth in both the short and long run. The estimated influence of public investment on private investment also shows a similar inverted-U shape in which public investment have crowding-in private investment short-term but crowding-out in the long run.

The empirical findings in this study can be used for conducting a more efficient policy in restructuring the state sector investment in Vietnam.

The main contributions in this study are: to evaluate the impacts of public investment on economic growth and private investment, the authors extracted public investment in infrastructure from aggregate investment of state sector (as previous studies used); the authors also uses state-owned capital stock variable including cumulative public investment and state-owned enterprises investment suggesting that this could control for the different orders of integration between the stock and flow variable and improve the experimental characteristics of the equation to a higher degree.