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The aim of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of internal auditing in municipalities in Israel, as perceived by different groups of users. A model to evaluate effectiveness was developed, followed by the preparation of a self-administered questionnaire of the Likert type. After pilot testing, the questionnaire was despatched. The empirical study was conducted on the majority of Israeli municipalities that possess an internal auditing unit. The respondent groups also included journalists at local newspapers who cover the annual municipality internal auditing reports. The returned questionnaires provided the data used in the research analysis. After factor analysis, the model emerged based on the following components: Independence, Competence, Scope of work, Performance of the internal auditing unit, and the Implementation of corrective action following the internal auditing findings. The respondents were divided into five groups: (1) Staff of the municipality internal auditing unit (2) Councillors - elected by the public (3) Top management (4) Middle level management (5) Journalists. Meetings were also held with the mayors of various municipalities to ascertain their opinions on the results of the data analysis. The research findings revealed major differences in the evaluation of effectiveness between different groups of users. In general, the research shows that the closer the user stands to the internal auditing operation, the higher the evaluation. The implementation of corrective action following the internal auditing findings was rated by all the respondent groups as lower than the other components. Another result is that the internal auditing unit tends to be perceived as less effective in smaller municipalities; for this comparison, municipalities were divided into three categories according to population size. The research has yielded various recommendations for operational change in order to improve the effectiveness of internal auditing in municipalities. The model developed in this study can also serve to evaluate the different aspects of effectiveness of individual internal auditing units in individual municipalities in Israel.

A few days before Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011, he reminded the Egyptian people that ’istiqrār (‘stability’) was his legacy both domestically and internationally. Their choice was between ‘stability’ and ‘chaos’, he threatened. This thesis argues that stability is a mode of governmentality whose power cannot be fully appreciated at the level of political discourse only. Rather, stability as a practice of government is entangled with peoples’ values, aspirations, and the intimate politics of everyday life. In Egypt between the Free Officers coup of 1952 and the January 25th revolution of 2011, ‘stability’ embodied access to both tenured employment and the means to reproduce the conditions of ‘a good life’ in the context of the family. Adequate understanding of stability and its ubiquity as an ideal must take into account the complex ways in which state projects and imaginative appropriation of those projects intersect. The thesis draws on fieldwork in an industrial neighbourhood of Cairo central to political movements of Egypt to analyse the everyday politics surrounding access to tenured employment in the context of the casualisation of labour and deregulation of capital since the inception of neo-liberal reforms in Egypt in 1991. By analysing the politics of labour at a site of strategic interest to the Egyptian regime from Abdul-Nasser to Mubarak, the thesis highlights how adequate understanding of political economy, practices of governing and neoliberalism must include both the shop floor and the home.

This qualitative research seeks to improve our understanding of the relatively under-researched phenomenon of repeat teenage pregnancies, by exploring the underlying factors and meanings that teenagers ascribe to their pregnancies. The study uses a comparative approach to provide a comprehensive psychosocial and economic understanding of the factors leading to repeat teenage pregnancies. This is achieved by exploring both the diverse and similar experiences of two groups of teenagers within different socio-economic environments - one group of 26 respondents from the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Barbados and the other group of 26 respondents from London. The research also capitalises on a unique opportunity to contextualize the welfare dependency/teenage pregnancy discourse. The behaviours, motivations, values and attitudes of young women who become repeatedly pregnant in a Welfare state such as England, are compared with those living in countries with limited state resources and few state benefits. The comparison shows that in the latter case, the lack of state intervention can have the disempowering impact of fostering dependency in many insidious forms. The findings demonstrate the very powerful influence that both intentional and hidden or masked factors can have on a young woman's decision to repeat a pregnancy. The intrinsic relationship between the personal driving forces of the young women and their repeated pregnancies is convincingly highlighted. These driving forces are accompanied by very strong and deep-rooted beliefs in the importance of motherhood and fertility, as well as anti-abortion views. When these factors are added to economic stringency, they provide the fuel for a young woman's journey into repeat pregnancies. The findings therefore caution against a reliance on a mechanistic understanding of both single and repeat teenage pregnancies and emphasise the fact that social, psychological, and emotional processes, as well as the economic influences, are also crucial to our understanding of repeat teenage pregnancies.

This thesis is a theoretical study of relationships between patent races and market structure. The outcome of a patent race can be an important determinant of market structure. For example, whether or not a new firm enters a market may depend upon its winning a patent race against an incumbent firm already in that market. Moreover, market structure can be a major influence upon competition in a patent race. In the example, the asymmetry between incumbent and potential entrant has an effect upon their respective incentives in the patent race. Chapter I discusses models of R and D with uncertainty. We show that, as the degree of correlation between the uncertainties facing rival firms increases, R and D efforts increase under some, but not all, conditions, and the number of active competitors falls. Chapter II discusses the approach of representing patent races as bidding games. We examine a model in which several incumbent firms compete with a number of potential entrants in a patent race, and ask whether the incumbents have an incentive to form a joint venture to deter entry. They do so if and only if the patent does not offer a major cost improvement. In Chapter III we examine the strategic interactions between competitors during the course of a race, in an attempt to clarify (for different types of race) the idea that a race degenerates when one player becomes 'far enough ahead' of his rivals, in a sense made precise. In Chapter IV we examine the evolution of market structure in a duopoly model when there is a sequence of patent races. The nature of competition in the product market is shown to determine whether one firm becomes increasingly dominant as industry leader, or whether there is 'action - reaction' between firms.

This thesis investigates some aspects of the ordering of nuclear spin systems at low temperatures. The thesis is divided into two parts. In part one some nuclear orientation experiments of ⁷⁴As in Fe and ²⁰⁶Bi and Ni and Fe are described. These nuclei are orientated by the large hyperfine field inside Ni and Fe. The orientation is detected by the anisotropy of the emitted gamma-rays and in the case of ⁷⁴As by the destruction of this anisotropy by NMR. Chapter one reviews the theory of the nuclear orientation method. To aid in the interpretation of the ²⁰⁶Bi results, some channelling experiments were done. A review of the method of atom location by channelling is given in chapter two. Chapter three describes the apparatus and technique used. The results of the ⁷⁴AsFe experiments are given in chapter four. In these experiments the magnetic moment of the ground state of ⁷⁴As was measured to be μ = 1.597(3), the sign of the hyperfine field was found to be positive, and the spin-lattice relaxation time was found to be 120(30) s. The results of the ²⁰⁶BiNi experiments are given in chapter five. The hyperfine was found to be 390(15) kOe for both diffused polycrystalline and implanted single crystal samples. The multipolarity mixing ratios of many of the gamma,-rays were found. Reorientation of the metastable state of ²⁰⁶Pb was observed, which had not been expected. On the basis of the channelling experiments, this reorientation has been explained by the theory.

The basic assertion of this thesis is that policy makers' belief systems and economic institutions have to change their structures and contents as the nation's economic developmental stage is upgraded. Put differently, a state's economic performance or achievement of economic objectives will be facilitated if there is no cleavage or conflict among economic policy, economic belief systems, and economic institutions. This means that the utility of the developmental state is valid until a nation's economy is in a take-off position. Persistent developmentalism after this stage will result in developmentalism losing its validity and becoming a main obstacle for further economic development. At this time, more liberalised economic policies which are not only supported by changed belief systems and institutions but also compatible with the neo-liberalising international political economy are needed. In other words, this thesis does not seek to answer the question 'which is the better strategy for economic development between developmentalism and neo-liberalism?' but emphasises the importance of the proper timing of transition from developmentalism to a liberalised and deregulated economy which is compatible with a mature civil society and the neo-liberalising international political economy.

This thesis presents an investigation into the changing institutional form and policy content of the World Bank over the last two decades. It does this by relating the former to the contradictory trajectory of capitalist development at a global level. It is suggested that the noted transitions in the World Bank at the close of the millennium represent a series of reactive mediations to the unanticipated results of neoliberal-style reform. The latter are manifest in uneven development on a global scale, recurrent crises across the global South, and the expansion of local and global struggles that target the limits of development in its capitalist fonn. To build this argument the thesis examines the contradictory essence of capitalist development; the position of the World Bank as an international organisation within the context of global capitalist social relations; and the nature of Bank policy prescription in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, the thesis concretises this analysis through a case study of the Chilean experience of neoliberal-style reforms that closely mirror the World Bank's prescription of "best practice".

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 112-116). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.