Freerider behaviour and the public finance of R&D activities in enterprises: the case of the Spanish low interest credits for R&D

This paper analyses the freeriding behaviour in the case of public finance for R&D activities in enterprises. It will start with a brief discussion about the concept of freeriding and its importance to justify public support measures and offers a review of the methods, indicators and results reflected in the evaluation studies.In the second part of the paper, the impact of the Spanish low interest credits for R&D projects for individual firms will be analysed. A profile of the “freerider firms” will be offered, defined as those supported firms whose innovative efforts do not depend on public aid and probably would or could have carried out the same level of innovative activities without public support. Moreover, the paper presents some evidence that firms with a freerider behaviour show a lower level of goal achievement related to their technical and commercial objectives and consider the learning effects as less important than the other firms. This could suggest, indirectly, that freeriders generate fewer externalities available for the production system as a whole—than the non-freerider firms.     

School-linked and school-based health services: A renewed call for collaboration between school psychologists and medical professionals

Health care and education reform provide opportunities to build systems that promote rather than retard collaboration between school psychologists and medical professionals. School-linked and school-based health services (SLSBHS) are a family of approaches that provide medical, social, and mental health services to students through school settings. These services have potential to provide more than acute care or first-aid services. SLSBHS provide medical care to uninsured children, students with chronic medical needs, at-risk children, and the overall school population. However, there are usually not enough funds to hire new staff members in most school districts. Expanding the roles of current school staff, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, and implementing creative fiscal strategies are necessary to develop SLSBHS. Interdisciplinary collaboration may be the largest hurdle to developing SLSBHS. As such, school psychologists and medical professionals may need to rethink their professional roles and develop new techniques of interdisciplinary consultation to fulfill the potential of SLSBHS.     

Current access to health information in Zambia: a survey of selected health institutions

OBJECTIVE: To assess the current situation of access to information by health staff at selected central, provincial, district hospitals and health centres in Zambia. METHODS: Government and non-governmental institutions were visited in the Lusaka Urban District and nine rural districts in the North-Western, Western and Central Provinces of Zambia in 2001. Thirty interviews were held with provincial and district health directors, medical doctors, nurses and clinical officers in district hospitals and rural and urban health centres. In 2006, a follow-up visit was undertaken to the health centres in the Lusaka Urban District in Lusaka Province and the Sesheke District in the Western Province. RESULTS: There is limited access to health information for health workers in Zambia. In hospitals and health centres, where there is access, it is usually provided in an ad hoc manner without a central policy from the government. In all the places visited, there was also an overwhelming expressed need for different types of information relating to the professional or personal needs of health care workers. CONCLUSIONS: The study found that access to information was very poor. There were some excellent examples of local initiatives showing that, even under difficult financial and infrastructural circumstances, it was feasible to improve health workers' access to information by using low technology, information access initiatives. These existing local initiatives deserve to be scaled up, while new initiatives should be adopted to improve access to information in a much more structured way. Of paramount importance is the formulation and implementation of an information policy that will guarantee the provision of health information to Zambian health workers.     

The new role of rechargeable batteries

With the era of high energy fossil fuels coming to an end and the increasing importance of electrical energy, a better way of storage has to be found. The old classical batteries do not meet the demands of the society to come and enormous research and development efforts are being invested to find new ways of chemical storage of electrical energy.     

Assessing instructional conceptions: A task-based approach

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the labour market effects of two rather different forms of vocational education, full‐time education with practice periods that have no employment status versus dualized education with an emphasis on continuous on‐the‐job/in‐service training and employee status for the apprentice. Although most developed countries know both forms of vocational education, these usually have clearly different positions in a qualitative (standardization of curricula and degrees) and a quantitative (cohort shares) sense. The Netherlands present an interesting case, because in this country both systems coexist and contribute largely to the vocational training of each new generation. That provides a good opportunity for investigating differences in the labour market effects of these ‘treatments’ in vocational education. In this article, differences in labour market careers (i.e. the chances of getting promoted or getting unemployed) between graduates from full‐time vocational education and from the dual system are explored, using event history analysis. The results show that graduates from full‐time tracks have higher chances of getting promoted. However, the period of transition to the labour market is very unstable, involving job shifts and periods of unemployment. Graduates from the dual system on the other hand experience a more stable period of labour market entry. At the same time their careers often involve many dead‐end jobs, from which no promotion takes place. Moreover, they have difficulty in transfering their skills to other sectors than the sector for which they are trained.     

Teachers' views of teenage sexual morality

This paper examines the discourses of morality drawn on by secondary school teachers in England to describe their attitudes to pupils' developing sexual identities. Although teachers recognized their own formative role in the sexual socialization of pupils and identified homophobic attitudes among boys, they were ambivalent about how far they could intervene in homophobic bulling in school. However, they failed even to recognize the widespread misogynistic bullying of girls by boys as a problem. Teachers expressed anxieties about girls' ownership of sexual knowledge and sexual agency while perceiving boys to be sexually immature and less ‘responsible’. We explore possible reasons for teachers' neglect of misogynistic bullying and their labelling of girls as sexually precocious. We argue that the discourses shaping teachers' attitudes to sexual morality and sex education were largely embedded in a form of liberal individualism that impeded them from confronting the structurally reproduced relations of gender domination.     

Innovating Education Through the Use of New Technologies: Reflections from the Field (Part 1)

Abstract

A series of in‐depth interviews was conducted with a sample of 65 experts on the challenges and opportunities of introducing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) into education. Interviewees were chosen for their expertise in the field, and the interviews reflect mainstream ideas and concerns on learning and learning support of the future, challenges and emerging changes at the organizational level of the educational institution, and new tasks and responsibilities for educational policy makers.     

Instructional metacognitive knowledge: A qualitative study on conceptions of freshmen about instruction

Many studies have pointed to the limited direct effectiveness of instructional interventions and one explanation of this has drawn attention to the importance of 'instructional metacognitive knowledge'. In this exploratory study, instructional metacognitive knowledge of university freshmen is addressed by means of a survey covering: (a) instruction in general, (b) instruction in two different environments, and (c) specific delivery systems and concrete instructional interventions. While some differences appeared in the answers on different sets of questions, also large similarities were found. The results show students' knowledge about instruction to be mainly affected by their instructional experiences. The students' view is 'reactive' and places instructional agents at the core of the instructional process. The findings provide additional support for the importance of correspondence between learners' and teachers' views on instructional interventions if forms of support for students' learning are to be effective.