Title: The subsidy policy applied by the city of Přelouč in sport Objectives: The main objective of this thesis is to describe the policy of the city of Přelouč in the support of sport, sports funding at the local level with the description of individual funding opportunity, building sports infrastructure in the long run focusing on receiving grants for sport. Methods: In this diploma thesis the method of mixed research is used consisting of work with documents related to grants provided to selected sports facilities in the city. Further personal or written interviews and questioning with representatives of the city of Přelouč and villages in the district of the city and with sports facilities managers. Results: The result of the thesis is a text that contains information about the support given by the city into the sports infrastructure, description of the areas of financing with an emphasis on subsidies. The city of Přelouč fixed the sport as one if its policy priority and within the budget allocates to sport around 1%. Over the last ten years, the city of Přelouč realized with the help of state and Europe grants three large projects for the expansion of the sports infrastructure. The city creates sports conditions for the village inhabitants in the urban district where the situation is not at...

This master thesis deals with the assessment of fiscal policy in the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic and the United States. The goal of this work is to evaluate the effect of fiscal expansion on the real economy and the country's debt. The first part deals with the theoretical definition of fiscal policy. The next section describes the main macroeconomic indicators of selected countries. The final section is devoted to assessing the effectiveness of specific fiscal stimulus and evaluating their impact on unemployment, the growth rate of GDP and public debt.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of History, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 280-305).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf [316]-346).

Thesis (M.Hous.M.)--University of Hong Kong, 1995. / "December 1994". Includes bibliographical references (leaves 108-112). Also available in print.

Thesis (doctoral) - Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-218).

In recent years, several schools have addressed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 by focusing on promoting skill acquisition in reading and math, often overlooking physical education (PE) as a significant part of a child's education. The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated health and physical education (HPE) program on student achievement. This study was grounded in action-based learning theories. The research question examined differences in posttest scores, adjusted for pretest differences, from 204 freshman students enrolled in a Biology-1 class at an urban high school. Students in Group A were enrolled in Biology-1 and an HPE class that incorporates Biology-1 content. Students in Group B were enrolled in Biology-1 but were not in a HPE class; thus, they did not participate in the integrated HPE program. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to determine whether the integrated PE program increased student achievement in Biology-1. The findings showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups (p < .05). The Biology-1 students who participated in the integrated HPE program scored significantly higher on the Biology-1 state test than the Biology-1 students who did not participate in the integrated HPE program. These results may influence educational decisions regarding the use of HPE by encouraging serious consideration of an integrated HPE program, which could enhance student achievement, thus promoting positive social change.

Suboptimal public policy formulation and implementation often result from traditional representative democratic practices. Increasing government fragmentation, eroding trust among policy actors, and an increasingly complex policy making environment contribute to this problem. Collaborative decision making is considered to be a pragmatic alternative by its advocates. The purpose of this research was to explore the claim that process dynamics lead participants to prefer collaborative approaches to decision making among local and regional transportation plans in a western state. The conceptual framework was the diversity, interdependence, and authentic dialogue (DIAD) theory-based model of collaboration in decision making. The research questions focused on collaboration participants' perspectives of public decision making, variability of views among collaboration groups, and preferences for collaborative approaches to public decision making. This study employed Q methodology and a 45-statement Q sample about public decision making structured with a 2 X 3 Fisherian research design. Fifty-four Q sorts were collected from two groups of DIAD theory-based collaborative participants and one group of collaborative support professionals. Ten first-order factors were identified among these three groups and used in a second-order factor analysis to identify the higher order views of collaborative, personal-public, and professional-public decision making. Key findings were that study participants support collaborative approaches to public decision making. Study results provide collaboration facilitators with insight into participant views of decision making. The implications for social change are the generation of the deliberative capacity fundamental for democratic societies and increasing civic capacity-building.

Borrowing money is a core instrument of governments to fund goods with high front costs andlong-term benefits. Scholars have, however, primarily associated public debt with shortsighted policies by office-seeking politicians. The three essays in this dissertation investigate the determinants and outcomes of popular preferences for investment-oriented public debt using novel voting, survey, and budgetary data. The first essay asks: Is a community more amenable to borrowing when its time horizon shortens?Existing theories argue that individuals with shorter time horizons, like seniors, have a higher inclination towards borrowing because they overvalue current consumption and discount future costs. I verify this assumption by studying how population aging affects support for debt-funded investments. Using novel data sets on U.S. state and local bond referendums over six decades, I show that, conversely, aging decreases support for debt-funded investments. Contrary to mainstream predictions, an original conjoint survey experiment further demonstrates that seniors do not have a greater preference for policies with longer repayment maturities and shorter benefit periods. Rather, aging lowers support for investments by increasing fiscal conservatism and shifting consumption away from capital-intensive goods. The effect of aging varies depending on which age groups cohabit with seniors. In particular, aging communities experiencing an influx of nonrelative children show greater opposition to new investments, while increased contact with relative children has no detectable effect on their support for investments. These findings suggest that population aging can complicate the construction of political coalitions over investments, particularly in communities with diverse age distributions. The second essay inquires: Do popular preferences affect how governments fund policies? Policy funding is often presented as technical and hardly influenced by voters. I study this assumption by investigating the effect of population aging on U.S. municipal budgets between 1970 and 2017 with the use of data on municipal finances and mayors’ characteristics. In contrast, I find that aging increases appetite for consumption-oriented policies, leading to more short-term budgeting. When a municipality’s population ages, it substitutes current expenditures for capital spending, shortens its debt maturity, and favors liquid revenues over long-term borrowing. Ultimately, this translates into lower indebtedness and higher property tax revenues. In contrast, its expenditure levels and distribution between policies remain stable as seniors’ fiscal conservatism constrains surges in spending, and seniors’ interest in property values limits cuts in municipal amenities. The effects of aging are not uniform, as municipalities ruled by elderly mayors implement debt policies more aligned with seniors’ preferences. These results contradict the dire budgetary predictions associated with aging and show that seniors’ ideological and economic motives can counterbalance their distributional demands. They also illustrate that the preferences of minorities are better represented when they elect politicians who resemble them. The last essay questions: Do voters care about how a policy is funded? Even if citizens can grasp the technicalities of public finances, policy funding may still not matter to them. Indeed, the Ricardian equivalence argues that people are indifferent about whether a policy is funded by debt or taxation because they internalize the future costs of debt repayment in their bequests. Using a novel dataset of 22,000 local referendums and two original conjoint survey experiments, I demonstrate that, conversely, voters prefer financing policies by small tax increases rather than borrowing. My surveys also reveal that respondents discriminate against policies with longer repayment periods. This result contradicts both the Ricardian equivalence’s assumption that people are indifferent to how policies allocate costs over time and the premise that people overlook future borrowing costs. Time preferences are important to explain opinions regarding debt and taxation, as each funding method distributes costs and benefits differently over time. Specifically, people’s resistance to long repayment periods lowers support for debt-funded projects. Variations in preferences between debt and tax remain after accounting for their temporal differences. My analyses indicate that preferences do not vary by policy content or relative to personal financial investments, although conservative individuals display greater support for borrowing than liberals.

Introduction: Cerebrovascular events are a major cause of mortality, disability and healthcare resource use. Despite this, there is a lack of reliable information on their costs and outcomes, particularly related to transient ischaemic attacks (TIA) and minor stroke. Such information is vital to inform decisions about local and national service provision, and to provide reliable estimates for use in cost-effectiveness analyses. Aims This thesis estimates the costs and outcomes of stroke and TIA using data from a population-based study undertaken in a population of over 91,000 individuals in Oxfordshire (the Oxford Vascular Study – OXVASC). In addition, the thesis aims to estimate the short-term cost-effectiveness of two secondary stroke prevention programmes evaluated in a study nested within OXVASC. Methods: Using multiple methods of case ascertainment, 1,282 patients were identified as having suffered a stroke or TIA, of which 1,199 (723 stroke and 476 TIA) patients consented to the study. Follow-up of patients took place at 1, 6, 12 and 24 months, with data collected on patients’ disability, medication usage, living arrangements, and quality of life. Healthcare resource use information was derived from hospital and primary care records, and priced using published unit costs. Findings: Stroke patients had higher case-fatality rates than TIA patients (15% vs. 1%; p<0.001), with 5-year life expectancy being one year longer for TIA patients. For stroke and TIA survivors, the risk of disability remained higher, at around 30% at each of the four follow-ups, than at baseline (17%; p<0.001 for all follow-ups). After standardising for age and gender, average quality of life for stroke and TIA patients combined was significantly lower than English population norms (p<0.001 for all follow-ups). However, when quality of life was compared to population norms by event type, quality of life differences between TIA patients and English population norms no longer remained statistically significant. Important predictors of quality of life included event severity, baseline disability and recurrent vascular events. Total costs were considerably higher 1-year after the initial stroke or TIA than for the year preceding it and, except for day cases, increases were observed for all resource-use categories. Five years after the index event, stroke patients incurred costs of £16,923 (95% CI: 15,149 to 18,858) per patient, significantly higher than those incurred by TIA patients, at £13,904 (95% CI: 11,488 to 16,657; p=0.019). In multivariate analyses, event severity was found to be a significant predictor of inpatient care resource use and costs, as were the presence of recurrent vascular events, especially stroke and coronary events. For non-hospitalised patients, results showed that urgent outpatient specialist assessment and treatment reduced the 90-day risk of fatal or disabling stroke (0.4% vs. 5%, p<0.001) compared with less urgent assessment and treatment. In terms of resource usage, patients who were assessed and treated urgently had lower recurrent stroke hospitalisation (2% vs. 8%; p=0.001), and reduced overall number of days in hospital (average reduction of 4 days; p=0.017). These reductions in hospital resource usage generated savings of £643 per patient assessed and treated urgently in an outpatient clinic (p=0.028). Conclusion: Despite the impact of stroke on death, disability and healthcare resource use, there is a lack of reliable information on costs and outcomes, especially for TIA and minor stroke. Through the use of a population-based study, the gold-standard study design when assessing the incidence and outcomes of TIA and stroke, this thesis provides healthcare decision makers and researchers with a wealth of data on the resource use patterns, costs and outcomes of TIA and stroke patients, and their main predictors.