Many performance measures, such as the classic Sharpe ratio have difficulty in evaluating the performance of mutual funds with skewed return distributions. Common causes for skewness are the use of options in the portfolio or superior market timing skills of the portfolio manager. In this...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a linear programming based method for evaluating performance of comparable production units such as firms. Although the method is already extensively applied in many areas of economics, its use in environmental economics and related fields remains limited. The...

The Commitment to Development Index of the Center for Global Development rates 21 rich countries on the “development-friendliness” of their policies. It is revised and updated annually. In the 2004 edition, the component on foreign assistance combines quantitative and qualitative measures of...

n the late 1990s, Knowledge Management (KM) and Communities of Practice (CoPs) seemed inseparable. CoPs appeared to offer the key to reversing the failure of some of the earlier technologically based attempts to manage knowledge. However, the original CoP concept was built around a very...

As commercial organisations face up to modern pressures to downsize and outsource they have begun to realise that they have lost knowledge as people leave and take with them what they know. This knowledge is increasingly being recognised as an important resource and organisations are now taking...

Knowledge is the key to gaining and sustaining competitive advantage. Driven by a change in consumer needs towards “comprehensive service solutions”, more and more services are offered through networks. By so doing, individual firms can concentrate on their distinctive competencies and by...

Within the Knowledge Management context, there is growing interest in computer support for group knowledge sharing and the role that Communities of Practice play in this. Communities of Practice are groups of individuals with a common purpose and who share some background, language or...

This paper explores Knowledge Management (KM) practices for use with portal technologies in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The aim is to help NGOs become true Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). In order to deal with more donors (at the top) and more beneficiaries (at the bottom), NGOs...