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The paper published below was prepared by Taylor Ostrander for Frank Knight’s course, Economic Theory, Economics 301, during the Fall 1933 quarter.

The purpose of this second part of this special issue is to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of Soviet society. It is not possible to analyse such a society in all its complexities within the space of one study. There are, however, some economic relations which determine society's major features. We believe that commodity‐production relations in the Soviet Union are of this type.

A LEICESTER firm of shoe manufacturers recently cut down its basic patterns from between 30 and 40 to six. The effect was to increase production by 2,400 pairs a week and reduce work in progress and the stock of material in hand by a third. There has also been an increase in the earnings of operatives and a saving of a week in the time between planning and despatching orders.

This study aims to identify the relationship between different maintenance practices and productive efficiency in continuous process productive plants as well as the moderating effect of good training practices.

The empirical data were drawn from a database containing 609 observations of 29 productive units. Scales were validated using the Q-sort method. The panel data technique was used as the analysis methodology, with the inclusion of fixed effects for each productive plant.

Maintenance practices can effectively contribute to increasing the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of firms. Application of predictive maintenance practices should be considered as the primary training tool.

This study used a secondary database, limiting the research design and data manipulation.

The article provides practitioners with an analysis of maintenance practices by category (predictive, preventive and corrective), and the impact of each practice on the OEE of continuous process productive plants. Moreover, it explores the importance of training for extracting more results from maintenance practices.

Companies are investing in new technologies, but it is also essential to invest in training people. There is a demand for Industry 4.0 through the introduction of upskilling and reskilling programs.

This study used practice-based view (PBV) theory to explain how maintenance practices help firms achieve greater OEE. Furthermore, it introduced training practice as a moderating variable in the relationship between maintenance practices and OEE.

And let the quantities of the different factors owned by the different individuals be represented by the symbol Qik. That is, the quantity of the first factor owned by the first individual will be Qi1k1, for the first factor owned by the second individual, Q i2k1, for the second factor and the first individual Q i1k2, and so on to QiN for the nth factor and the Nth individual.⁷

THE present economic climate is forcing everybody to be cost conscious. Such staggering sums are being poured out for defence needs, with their unpleasant corollary of high taxation, that the smallest gleam of light is welcomed amid the encircling gloom.

This note offers new archival insight into a 1925 polemical exchange between Frank Knight and John Maurice Clark that was hosted in the pages of Journal of Political Economy. Although the exchange centered on the effects of overhead costs on marginal productivity theory and the so-called adding-up theorem, it also provided significant elements to assess the methodological differences between two of the most representative American economists of the interwar years.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate clinical departments' performance per clinical sector in the context of the Greek public hospital care system.

The sample consisted of 96 internal pathology and surgical clinical departments in 15 hospitals in Greece and their technical efficiency was assessed by the use of data envelopment analysis. The proposed model used the number of nursing staff, medical specialists and department beds, pharmaceutical expenditure and clinical leadership job satisfaction as inputs while the number of hospitalized patients was selected as an output. Clinical leadership job satisfaction was captured by the use of a specialized questionnaire. The methodology applied investigated variations in technical efficiency in the presence or absence of job satisfaction. The model proposed an efficiency improvement through the possible reduction of inputs (input oriented) variable returns to scale.

Processing the results revealed variations in the way clinical leadership job satisfaction affects efficiency assessments per clinical sector. The impact of job satisfaction is verified for the surgical sector and rejected marginally for the pathology sector. Applied methodology results proposed reductions in pharmaceutical expenditure, human resources and available beds. These are indications towards implementing rational economic and human resources management and productive factors development.

This research effort uses job satisfaction as a quantitative variable to assess efficiency, focusing on clinical efficiency per clinical sector. In all efforts to restrain health expenditure, measuring clinical department efficiency is critical for health policy makers.

Notes the real estate development process involves three major groups – a consumer group, a production group and a public infrastructure group. Comments that a major limitation shared by all groups is that each has a cash cycle enterprise which must remain solvent to survive. Concludes that the best risk management device for the producer group is through research so that the development product fits as closely as possible the needs of the tenant or purchaser, the values of the politically active collective consumers and the land use or the ethic of the society.

This chapter is intended to address efforts to improve management control systems and processes, including budgeting, accounting and reporting, within the context of a responsibility framework in government. The theory of management control is explored and then management control reform in the U.S. federal government is assessed in terms of progress towards meeting the objectives of the theoretical model. Then, the U.S. experience is compared with the efforts to reform management control in Italian local governments.