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Examines trend rules in conjunction with other well‐known supplementary runs rules to assess their impact when used in control charting. Focuses on a set of 613 trend rules deemed as potential candidates to increase the sensitivity of the control chart. The examined rules are viewed in the light of a stable environment, which determines the false alarm rate, and then in an environment in which the process mean is subjected to drift. Results indicate that there are subsets of trend rules that aid in the detection of out‐of‐control conditions depending on the severity of the drift and the number of zonal‐based supplementary runs rules used.

Expectations play a crucial role in finance, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and fiscal policy. In the last decade a rapidly increasing number of laboratory experiments have been performed to study individual expectation formation, the interactions of individual forecasting rules, and the aggregate macro behavior they co-create. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive literature survey on laboratory experiments on expectations in macroeconomics and finance. In particular, we discuss the extent to which expectations are rational or may be described by simple forecasting heuristics, at the individual as well as the aggregate level.

This chapter discusses how China’s rapid economic development since the 1970s has involved three different periods of administrative reform, stretching out over seven successive five-year plans. The author focusses on leadership style, specifically, the thinking that is expected from leaders in each period of leadership for development, open leadership and innovative leadership. The author discusses that leadership for these reforms comes from the highest levels, the Communist Party of China (CPC), as articulated by successive secretary generals of the CPC, that the purpose of reform is not only to achieve policy goals but also to uphold CPC leadership in China, and that public managers throughout China are assessed by the party as well as the government. The author also provides an excellent case of reform anti-corruption leadership that shows how the CPC deals with complex and entrenched issues through education and strict implementation, leading to punishment of 1.2 million people, including senior officials. The case shows well senior officials setting the general direction, preserving the role of the CPC, achieving results, learning through practice and innovation, trends towards increasing the rule of law, and the use of audits.

Assessing the impact of a quality improvement intervention on an organization is particularly difficult in a high contact service operation where the intangible service encounter is the unit of output. Frequently, accounting or financial data must be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention; however, these data may be problematic with respect to sample size and masking effects due to aggregation. Presents a systems model which describes metaphorically how an unstable process can continue to show no performance gains despite continued input of resources into improvement initiatives. A special type of Shewart control chart, known as the X‐chart, is developed as a methodology for assessing process performance after an improvement programme has been implemented. An X‐chart is used to analyse performance data collected in a real service setting where service quality standards were deployed in the front line phase of the operation. Although traditional analysis of variance concluded that there was no significant improvement in performance, the X‐chart indicates that real performance gains were occurring. The X‐chart provides management with an easy‐to‐use decision tool which can help assess the effectiveness of many different types of organizational change initiatives.

The accounting regulation literature has recently devoted a significant degree of attention to delineating the roles of accounting firms as key professional actors in the transnational policy arena. Such a heightened level of scholarly engagement with firms seems to have shifted the focus away from the roles of the national professional institutes. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of not losing sight of the national professional bodies as important players on the transnational governance scene.

The accounting regulation literature has recently devoted a significant degree of attention to delineating the roles of accounting firms as key professional actors in the transnational policy arena. Such a heightened level of scholarly engagement with firms seems to have shifted the focus away from the roles of the national professional institutes. The aim with this paper is to demonstrate the importance of not losing sight of the national professional bodies as important players on the transnational governance scene.

The paper provides empirical illustrations and discussion of the transforming agendas and strategies of influence pursued by various national professional bodies as they attempt to reinvent themselves to face up to the challenges of the changing regulatory landscape. Specifically, the paper analyses a range of activities where such bodies are seen to be competing with each other as well as partaking in a variety of collaborative initiatives in their quest to gain/maintain the status of a global/regional professional thought leader.

The paper is designed to encourage renewed academic debate on the roles and strategies of national professional institutes and highlight opportunities and venues for future research. The paper is also suggestive of the need to refine conceptual perspectives on professionalization processes operational in transnational settings.

The accounting literature is lacking in terms of contemporary study of national professional bodies as active institutions with global ambition and strategies of influence. This paper addresses such a shortcoming by analysing the strategic intent and actions of a range of such bodies (revealing, in the process, a quite fascinating complex of activity, competition and cooperation) and calling for a renewed focus on national professional bodies as a way of enhancing contemporary understanding of the workings of the “global accounting profession”.

Learning often requires little or no expenditure in income; its real cost is that it takes time. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Since time is scarce, most people normally decide not to learn about many aspects of modern life, but rather to specialise on certain limited areas. When a matter arises outside our specialisation, we tend to follow others whose narratives we trust.

So, learning in many cases arises from social interaction, not from individual study. Consequently, informational contagion is baked into our social and economic systems.

Treating time, not income or wealth, as the ultimate constraint improves analysis of the learning process, clarifying its essential social nature.

A major challenge facing management in developed countries is improving the performance of knowledge and service workers, i.e. the decision and policy makers. In a developing country such as South Africa, with a well‐developed business sector, this need, especially in government, is even more crucial. South Africa has to face many new challenges in the 21st century ‐ growing environmental concerns, massive social and economic inequalities, high occurrences of HIV, low productivity, massive unemployment and the nation’s evolving role in Africa, amongst others. The importance of a sound science and technology policy framework to address these pressing issues cannot be overemphasised This paper discusses the construction of a knowledge‐base from a data repository concerning a South African National Research and Technology (NRT) Audit. This knowledge‐base is to be used as an aid when developing a science and technology policy framework for South Africa. The knowledge‐base is constructed using the cooperative inductive learning team (CILT) approach, which combines diverse data mining tools and human expertise into a cooperative learning system. In this approach, each data mining tool constructs a model of the knowledge as contained in the data repository, thus providing an automated tool to make sense of the knowledge embedded therein. That is, the data mining tools learn from the data in order to obtain new insights. The system also incorporates human domain expertise through the computational modelling of the human subject knowledge. The knowledge, as obtained during team learning, is stored in a team knowledge‐base. Results indicate that the CILT learning team approach can be successfully used to make sense of the vast amounts of data collected and provide a knowledge repository for further decision making and policy formulation.

This paper analyzes variations in the effects of monetary and fiscal shocks on responses of macroeconomic variables, determinacy region, and welfare costs due to changes in trend inflation.

The authors develop the New-Keynesian model, in which the central banks can employ either nominal interest rate (IR rule) or money supply (MS rule) to conduct monetary policies. They also use their capital and recurrent spending budgets to conduct fiscal policies. By using the simulated method of moment (SMM) for parameter estimation, the authors characterize Vietnam's economy during 1996Q1–2015Q1.

The results report that consequences of monetary policy and fiscal policy shocks become more serious if there is a rise in trend inflation. Furthermore, the money supply might not be an effective instrument, and using the government budget for recurrent spending produces severe consequences in the high-trend inflation economy.

This paper's findings are critical for economists and monetary and fiscal authorities in effectively designing both the monetary and fiscal policies in confronting the shift in the inflation targets.

This is the first paper that examines the effects of trend inflation on the monetary and fiscal policy implementation in the case of Vietnam.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyze the effectiveness of long period supplementary zone rules that can simultaneously increase chart sensitivity to small process drift and not significantly increase the false alarm rate.

A stable, on‐target process was simulated and drift induced into the process. The rates of drift varied from 0.03σ to .0003σ per subgroup measurement. A total of 613 different supplementary zone rules were implemented in conjunction with the three‐sigma limiting rule. For each combination, 100,000 observations were simulated and the effect on the false alarm rate and increase in chart sensitivity estimated. An effectiveness measure was developed to relate false alarm rate to chart sensitivity.

A total of 87 rules were uncovered which effectively detected a wide range of process drifts. When the increase in chart sensitivity is discounted by the false alarm rate, 13 rules increased chart sensitivity by over 10 percent. These rules were based on longer rather than shorter rule length.

The effective rules discovered form a nonlinear pattern in the space the examined rules define. This indicates a direction for future research outside the scope of this study. These rules are also easy to implement in existing Shewhart chart applications where the process drifts at an unknown rate.

While supplementary trend rules have been studied in the past, the extension to zone rules has not been made. This study begins to fill that void and indicates the direction for future efforts in the area.