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Social scientists writing in the development field often simply assume that public education expenditure in developing countries has been largely ineffective. Reasons offered in support of this assumption include uncertain goals and unsystematic implementation of programmes, lack of training of administrators, poor quality teachers and facilities, educators bound by tradition, systems modelled upon those of industrialised nations, and in some cases even graft and corruption. Although the above may reflect reality in many nations, full acceptance of these conditions as universal may severely restrict both necessary and useful analysis of the delivery of educational services in the developing world.

For the past two decades, economists, political scientists, and other public policy analysts have repeatedly lamented the lack of attention afforded the expenditure side of fiscal policy. Such concern has prompted numerous studies which have examined in great detail budgets of individual countries. Despite this renewed interest, surprisingly little has appeared in the area of comparative expenditure development. Cross‐country comparisons have traditionally employed cross‐section analyses while ignoring, except in rare instances, comparisons of time series data.

The book is part political polemic, part loosely logical philosophy, and (very small) part economic analysis. Despite its dramatic prose, many of the author's arguments are unconvincing, annoyingly redundant, very weak in their use of history, and highly selective in their empiricism. Stating what a chapter will do and then concluding at the end it has done so when the evidence in between is either weak or is based on circular reasoning is actually a common practice. Numbers are virtually non-existent despite many statements which suggest some quantitative work has been done.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Introduction Economics has been defined and re‐defined several times in the past, and even within the dominant scientific orientation of the discipline, there are currently a number of alternative definitions. One of the definitions, which has been gaining increasing popularity in recent years is “economics as the science of choices.” This definition focuses on the fundamental objective of the discipline as currently formulated, namely, the optimum allocation of resources through appropriate choices, or in other words, the development of economic engineering based on science. We will use the concept of choices as the convenient point of entry into the exploration of the nature of economic reality, or its ontology.

The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multicriteria decision support system that has been successfully applied to numerous decision-making situations, has been applied to patient assessment. The AHP was used with Timeslips™, a group storytelling program that encourages creative expression among dementia patients, to determine the optimal scale for pre and post assessment among the nine most common agitation and anxiety scales. The AHP used the six criteria identified by qualitative assessment of the nine scales: (1) validity/reliability, (2) observation period, (3) training required, (4) time to administer, (5) most appropriate administrator, and (6) accessibility/cost. The AHP indicated that the Overt Agitation & Anxiety Scale was optimal for use with Timeslips; the process and results are discussed.

Some studies assess impairments in emotional functioning of offenders using measures of emotional intelligence (EI). Such measures were developed for use in general populations, and may not be suitable for offender samples. This study explores the factor structure of a commonly used trait EI measure for a sample of adult male offenders, and comments on its usefulness as a measure of emotional functioning for this group. We find that, although the SSREI can be indicated to be multi‐dimensional, the exact nature of its factors remains unclear for forensic samples. We conclude by suggesting that the social contexts and encounters that provoke emotion may be different for offenders and non‐offenders, and that there is a need to develop a trait EI measure specific to forensic populations.