The Contribution of Structured Activity and Deliberate Play to the Development of Expert Perceptual and Decision-Making Skill

The developmental histories of 32 players in the Australian Football League (AFL), independently classified as either expert or less skilled in their perceptual and decision- making skills, were collected through a structured interview process and their year-on-year involvement in structured and deliberate play activities retrospectively determined. Despite being drawn from the same elite level of competition, the expert decision-makers differed from the less skilled in having accrued, during their developing years, more hours of experience in structured activities of all types, in structured activities in invasion-type sports, in invasion-type deliberate play, and in invasion activities from sports other than Australian football. Accumulated hours invested in invasion-type activities differentiated between the groups, suggesting that it is the amount of invasion-type activity that is experienced and not necessarily intent (skill development or fun) or specificity that facilitates the development of perceptual and decision-making expertise in this team sport.

Prudent Budget Planning and Budgetary Process Effectiveness: The Canadian Federal Government’s Experience (Working Paper 47)

In 1994, the Liberal government introduced a structured approach to prudent budgeting to provide the fiscal discipline needed to meet its debt reduction targets in which explicit prudence factors were introduced into the fiscal framework to reduce the amount of fiscal flexibility available for allocation in each annual budget. Although that framework was successful in contributing to the elimination of persistent budgetary deficits, this paper advances three linked arguments: • that additional but undisclosed prudence factors were also introduced into the fiscal framework to attenuate the political risk of missing budget targets; • that these undisclosed prudence factors are one cause of a number of unintended budgetary outcomes that put the effectiveness of the budgetary process at risk; and • that there is nothing inherently politically partisan about the Liberal’s approach to prudent budget planning and, changes to terminology and display notwithstanding, the present Conservative government has continued to apply most elements of that framework in its budgets. Moving from a single-year budget target to one that is expressed as a cumulative total over the election cycle is discussed as one option that would help preserve the merits of prudent budgeting.