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This work contains an exposition and analysis of Brazilian economic thought as found in books, specialized periodicals in the field of economics, and governmental writings between 1945 and 1964. A systematization of that thought is offered along with a reproduction of the debates held between the distinct currents of economic thought within the country. The economic thought covered herein has been politically engaged in the discussion of the Brazilian process of industrialization. The key organizing concept that gives unity to our account is that of "developmentalism", seen as the ideology of transforming Brazilian society through an economic project of state-supported industrialization as a way to overcome underdevelopment. In the introductory section and serving as a link between economic theory and Brazilian thinking, an exposition is made of the basic elements of ECLA'S analysis, which served as the major theoretical support to the opposition to liberalism in Brazil. The main body of the work is divided into two parts. In Part I a description is made of the essential features of the five major currents of thought found in the period covered by this study, i.e., three variables of developmentalism (private sector, "non-nationalist" public sector, and "nationalist" public sector), neo-liberalism (to the "right" of developmentalism), and the socialist current (to its "left"). In each current of thought emphasis is given to the work of their most representative economists, with special reference to the thought of Eugenio Guidin, Roberto Simonsen, Roberto Campos and Celso Furtado. A chapter is added to cover Ignacio Rangel's thinking. In Part II of the work an account is given of the evolution of the developmentalist controversy and an assessment is made of its historical determinants. For that purpose, a periodization has been selected on the basis of the movement of economic ideas. The key concept adopted, i.e. the idea of an "idealogical cycle of developmentalism", as well as the entire organization of the text, aim to explain the historical significance of Brazilian economic thought in its connections with the movement of Brazilian history itself.

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Data envelopment analysis (DEA) represents a new and innovative way of measuring performance in the public sector. First suggested by Farrel (1957), linear programming techniques have made it possible to measure technical efficiency through the estimation of non-parametric production frontiers. DEA measures technical efficiency, it does not need information on prices or costs and produces a single efficiency criterion using data purely on measured volumes of inputs and outputs, including qualitative ones. The type of DEA programme used in this thesis is one suggested by Banker (1984) allowing for variable returns to scale in the construction of the production frontier. It is argued that DEA is superior to other attempts to measure the performance of public sector organisations. It has been traditional to use partial productivity ratios to measure efficiency and these have recently become popular in the public sector as 'performance indicators'. Other techniques used are regression analysis and the estimation of econometric production frontiers. It is demonstrated that DEA has a number of advantages over these methods. This is not to say that DEA does not have its drawbacks or that there are not practical problems with its use. These have been explored through the conduct of two case studies, one of Post Office Counters and the other of the Area Electricity Boards. Themes explored during the course of the case studies are as follows. How useful is DEA as a performance measurement tool in the context of Post Office Counters. Can more information on efficiency be yielded by clustering the datasets into smaller groups which have a. common factor and re-estimating the frontier. How robust is the DEA isoquant given that it is a frontier constituted on the basis of maximum observations and is susceptible to outliers, and can this be overcome. Also undertaken in this thesis is one of the first British studies using DEA in a dynamic context. The case study of Counters was conducted using data that was derived from 1281 Crown Post Offices for a 13 week period from September-November 1989. The input used was labour (in hours) and the outputs were a quality variable (average waiting time) and the outputs were ten different categories of transactions. The results were examined for the whole of Counters and on a regional basis. In the study of the Area Electricity Boards a time-series approach was taken on a pooled data set for 12 AEBs from 1969-88. Three inputs and four outputs were used. Technical efficiency between AEBs is compared, the change in efficiency over time is examined and conclusions reached about the implications for regulation now they have been privatised.

In this dissertation the internal workings of a colonial settler society are examined· through employing elements of post-colonial theory and whiteness studies. Specifically, the dissertation focuses on the construction of a hierarchical social order in the German colony of German Southwest Africa during the period 1884-1914. It is argued that Gennan colonial rule was underpinned, and informed by a polarised Self and Other dichotomy which distinguished between the European colonisers and the colonised indigenous Africans. The employment of dichotomous categories of identification, based on notions of imagined racial and cultural difference, allowed for the mapping of colonial society and was central to political and discursive practices of social control. Furthermore, this dichotomy justified and informed relations not simply between the colonisers and the colonised, but also amongst the colonisers themselves. The presence of settlers whose cultural practices and behaviour did not match with the nonns attributed to the idealised settler undennined the demarcation of difference. As a consequence undesirable settlers were increasingly perceived by the colonial authorities and interest groups as posing a threat to social control and the future stability of the Southwest. In particular, the dissertation examines the resulting discursive and political strategies of social engineering and identification which sought to include or exclude settlers from settler society based upon an assessment of their economic capacity and cultural competency as measured against the existing categories of identification. What emerged was an increasingly exclusionary settler society. The dissertation is based on extensive archival material from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin as well as a wide range of printed Sources. It allows for an insight into strategies of social control, power and the establishment of social privilege in a settler society. It investigates a construction of a specifically Gennan version of whiteness in a colonial context which enables an insight into the ways in which sections ofthe middle class conceived of Germanness and whiteness. As the lines of cultural and racial difference became increasingly confused, the categories of Black and White were under constant negotiation and re-construction and whilst the category ofthe Black remained an absolute, the category of the White collapsed into a system of gradations of whiteness.

The purpose of this study is to profile and conceptualize the contemporary energy predicaments confounding Southern Africa. We examine the dynamics of the structural interplay between the main attributes of the energy demand function and growth within the analytical framework of the political economy of development as it has evolved over time in Southern Africa. The study thus provides new perspectives on key energy policy issues thereby facilitate a deeper understanding of the real nature and root cause of the now epidemic "energy crises" affecting both 'modern' and 'traditional' fuels. It also seeks to advance the debate on how the African energy policy process can effectively be reoriented so as to foster a sustainable development agenda where issues of the environment, equity and provision of basic needs for human survival are placed at the centre stage of development. We argue that the on-going "energy-crises" in Southern Africa constitutes a complex development management dilemma ingrained in its structural state of underdevelopment whose genesis lies in the manner in which it was colonized the process by which it was simultaneously incorporated and marginalised onto the fringes of the global capitalist economy and the regional economic subsystem of migrant labour centered on RSA. Manifestations of these conditions are mirrored in the now rampant 'African Crises' of accumulation whose components have variably included: sharp rise in imported fuel costs; poor TOT; foreign exchange liquidity squeeze; mounting foreign debt; population explosion; unbridled urbanization; land-use conflicts; and deforestation. The immensi ty of the energy challenge posed by these structural condi tions has been heightened and made more apparent by the effects of (i) oil price criSis; (ii) onslaught of RSA's "Total strategy" for the destabilisation of the SADCC region and (iii) reliance on inappropriate imitative development policies promulgated on the now discredited modernization paradigm. We contend that the modernization paradigm, upon which conventional energy analysis and policy hypotheses are currently propagated, cannot be relied upon in matters relating to Africa's energy analysis no less than in general economic development. The intellectual poverty of this dominant paradigm lies in its failure to adequately incorporate the African energy question by way of offering definitive hypotheses to expedite the articulation and in depth understanding of the nature of the energy problem let alone assist in its better management. In spite of evidence which supports a robust positive correlation between energy use and growth, there still lacks an unambiguous statistical base with which to support claims of a 'rock-steady' unidirectional causality linkage from GOP to energy. We demonstrate that GOP is not the sole determinant of energy demand and that the energy-GOP interplay is a two-way process. In addition to measurement and conceptual problems affecting conventional planning tools,its derived hypotheses are founded on modern fuels which account for only 10-30% of national balances of the majority of SADCC states. The danger with this partial analysis is that it presents a highly fragmented and misleading picture of the African energy system. Indeed, when traditional fuels are brought into the reckoning the majority of the available conventional hypotheses crumble. Moreover, such a partial analysis exposes energy policies to the risk of missing out important synergistic effects such as fuel-mix, inter-fuel substitution and other demand attributes thereby rendering any polices dangerously unsound and unsafe. Thus, reliance on these hypotheses has contributed to the misplacement of the policy process by nurturing unwarranted misconceptions about the nature of the energy problem facing Africa and thus the definition of key issues requiring attention. We conclude that the southern African region has undergone a particular development process which has bestowed its energy system with unique sets of demand and supply attributes. These differ from those of the West and thus profoundly alter the aim of energy analysis and policy objectives. Because energy is not an energy management issue, but a development management problem, lasting solutions must be sought from within the development purview. We underscore the theme that because energy-GDP interplay is a two-way process coupled with the fact that development and underdevelopment are two sides of the same coin , the energy issue cannot be quarantined from the wider recalcitrant of Africa's 'crises of development'. Thus, it is not possible to comprehend let alone seek solutions to such deeprooted and intertwined development dilemmas without a systems analysis of the political economy of development as it has evolved over time. We contend that it is this structural focus that has been a major missing component in past energy policy debates which the present thesis attempts to plug. In addition to informing planners and decision makers of new developments af~ecti~g the~r energy ~y~tems, the planning process must inter ~ aam . at determ~n~ng the extent of socio-economic transformat~ons necessary to improve the security of energy supplies, .living standards of the population at large, bridge technologlcal gaps and minimize environmental damage of energy development.

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Risk and uncertainty have a vital impact on any business, but are particularly influential in the shipping industry. Although risk and uncertainty constitute the life-blood that courses through the veins of business, decision makers typically , attempt to reduce the risks , to which their decisions are subject. This is because there inevitably exists a level of risk which the decision maker is unwilling to accept. In May 1985 a new method of risk reduction in shipping became available through the introduction of BIFFEX - the Baltic International Freight Futures , Exchange. Participants in shipping can now hedge against their risks in the physical market by, taking a, position on the new futures market. This adds a new dimension to the situation as it existed before the introduction of BIFFEX, when the hedging of market risk was undertaken solely by holding alternative forms of physical contract. Typically, decision makers in shipping have formulated hedging strategies on the basis of ad hoc, inconsistent and subjectively judgemental criteria. This work is concerned with the optimization of the risk reduction process by integrating the different forms of market investment in a portfolio context. ,_ The methodology used is based on Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). This provides a formal structure for the deduction of a subjectively optimal portfolio, in the sense that it yields the 'best' risk/return, trade-off in line with a decision maker's own attitude to risk. Previously, MPT has been applied solely to the determination of optimum portfolios of stocks and shares. The theory is, therefore, refined in accordance with the requirements of shipping. Similarly, the theory has previously only been applied to investors who are 'risk averse'. In this work, it is expanded to include those investors who are 'risk prone' or 'risk neutral'. The objective of the thesis is thus the successful implementation of MPT to allow the deduction of a subjectively optimal portfolio of shipping market investments.

This thesis is set within the general context of retailing geography. It discusses the salient structural and locational changes that have occurred within the post-war urban retailing environment, and attempts to assess their impact on the inner-city low-income consumer. The first part provides a review of the major findings of past studies of post-war retail change and consumer behaviour, and illustrates that a major deficiency of this literature is the tendency to briefly introduce, but inadequately consider, the implications of recent retail change on the low-income consumer. The essential problem which is addressed in the second part of the thesis is to assess the extent to which post-war retail change has affected the quantity and quality of inner-city shopping opportunities within the chosen study area, Greater Reading. This assessment is largely based on information obtained from surveys conducted by the author, namely a general retail inventory and detailed quality and price surveys. A comprehensive up-to-date description of the inner-city low-income consumer's food shopping behaviour does not exist within the present geographical literature. Accordingly, the third section specifically aims to provide a detailed description of this group's food shopping behaviour at a time of rapid retail change. A repertory grid survey was completed to identify the factors of importance to the low-income consumer, and these formed the focus of a major survey of consumer behaviour. The results of this research highlight both a number of salient similarities and differences amongst the low-income consumer population. The importance of ethnic status and age on the spatial and non-spatial aspects of food shopping behaviour are clearly evidenced. It is argued that such contrasts have major implications for the future planning of inner-city retailing opportunities. In the final part, positive directives for the planning of future inner-city food shopping facilities are discussed, which should help improve the low-income consumer's access to high quality opportunities. This is achieved by the reintroduction of relevant results obtained from the empirical research, and a detailed analysis of the present retail planning process via secondary sources of information including government policy notes and documents, structure plans and local newspapers.