A mathematician on Capital Budgeting

Priority-setting and capital budgeting. Allocating a budget often involves the comparisons of diverse projects whose benefits are difficult to directly estimate and then compare. Organizations also often confuse budget items defined by accounting conditions with actionable projects. A good budgeting process is built by creating useful "decision units," robust measurement criteria and a group process for obtaining inputs and finally ranking projects. Such budgeting processes are equally useful in private corporations and governmental organizations. I have developed such ranking processes for Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, ChevronTexaco. Included in the projects are rankings to allocate yearly budgets for contaminated site cleanups, repair priorities for oil pipelines and capital project rankings for electric utilities.

From John Kadvany

If you buy one productivity software next year be it this one

MindManager 8


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Can Growth be achieved by decree and loans

The Growth Support Project for Mali aims at (1) improving the investment climate as much as possible in order to increase total factor productivity (TFP) and foster growth, with a particular focus on small and medium enterprises and on key sectors, (2) expanding the availability of the infrastructure base, and (3) promoting business innovation through financial and non financial services. There are four project components. Project Component 1 - Investment Climate and Institutional Strengthening --helps (1) implement the key recommendations that emerge from the recent investment climate assessment and improve the country's legal and regulatory framework in key areas so as better performances are reflected in the Doing Business indicators; and (2) strengthens both policymaking and operational capabilities in key sectors with a high growth contribution potential. Project Component 2 - Infrastructure Support for Growth-- seeks to improve economy-wide and sectoral total factor productivity by enhancing available infrastructure. It develops an industrial zone, improves the Bamako airport, supports the expansion of the telecommunications network, and (iv) supports infrastructure improvement for tourism and mining. Project Component 3 - Financial and Non-Financial Services for Innovation and Development-- increases term financing for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and to provides quality business development services to MSMEs, including supply chains, so that they can innovate, develop and as to increase their output and productivity. Component 4 - Project Coordination, Monitoring and Evaluation-- ensures not only effective and coordinated implementation across various institutions involved, but also so ensure that both intermediate and final results sought are obtained

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