As public administration programs extend their online education offerings to reach more time- and place-bound students, and as accredited institutions become interested in documenting teaching and learning effectiveness, the degree to which online students are successful as compared to their classroom counterparts is of interest to teaching faculty and others charged with assessment. By comparing student performance measures and assessments of learning experience from both online and traditional sections of a required graduate public administration research methods course taught by the same instructor, this paper provides evidence that student performance as measured by grade is independent of the mode of instruction. Persistence in an online environment may be more challenging in research methods classes than in other public administration classes. Furthermore, participation may be less intimidating, and the quality and quantity of interaction may be increased in online classes. 

A sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is a state-owned investment fund composed of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, property, precious metals, or other financial instruments. Sovereign wealth funds invest globally. Most SWFs are funded by foreign exchange assets.

Some sovereign wealth funds may be held by a central bank, which accumulates the funds in the course of its management of a nation’s banking system; this type of fund is usually of major economic and fiscal importance. Other sovereign wealth funds are simply the state savings that are invested by various entities for the purposes of investment return, and that may not have a significant role in fiscal management.

The accumulated funds may have their origin in, or may represent, foreign currency deposits, gold, special drawing rights (SDRs) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) reserve positions held by central banks and monetary authorities, along with other national assets such as pension investments, oil funds, or other industrial and financial holdings. These areassets of the sovereign nations that are typically held in domestic and different reserve currencies (such as the dollar, euro, pound, and yen). Such investment management entities may be set up as official investment companies, state pension funds, or sovereign oil funds, among others.

There have been attempts to distinguish funds held by sovereign entities from foreign-exchange reserves held by central banks. Sovereign wealth funds can be characterized asmaximizing long-term return, with foreign exchange reserves serving short-term “currency stabilization”, and liquidity management. Many central banks in recent years possess reserves massively in excess of needs for liquidity or foreign exchange management. Moreover it is widely believed most have diversified hugely into assets other than short-term, highly liquid monetary ones, though almost no data is publicly available to back up this assertion. Some central banks have even begun buying equities, or derivatives of differing ilk (even if fairly safe ones, like overnight interest rate swaps).[citation needed]

Contents
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1 History

1.1 Early SWFs

2 Nature and purpose
3 Concerns [...]

Direct government regulation
Regulation is a fundamental technique or tool of legal governance. Although citizens may not always be aware of their presence, among other things regulations govern the price and standards of a wide variety of goods and services they consume, as well as the quality of water they drink and the air they breathe.
There are numerous definitions of regulation, but a good general one is offered by Michael Reagan, who defines it as ‘a process or activity in which government requires or proscribes certain activities or behaviour on the part of individuals and institutions, mostly private but sometimes public, and does so through a continuing administrative process, generally through specially designated regulatory agencies’ (Reagan 1987). Thus, in this view, regulation is a prescription by the government which must be complied with by the intended targets; failure to do so usually involves a penalty, sometimes financial but also often involving incarceration and imprisonment.
This type of instrument is often referred to as ‘command and control’ regulation since it typically involves the government issuing a ‘command’ to some target group in order to ‘control’ their behaviour. ‘Control’ also sometimes refers to the need for governments to monitor and enforce target group activity in order for a ‘command’ to be effective.
This type of regulation is very common in both social and economic spheres in order to encourage ‘virtues’ and discourage ‘vices’, however those are defined at the time. Thus criminal law, for example, is a kind of regulatory activity, as are common laws and civil codes, which all countries have and which states develop and implement, usually relatively non-controversially (May 2002; Cismaru and Lavack 2007). Although much less significant in terms of [...]

As public administration programs extend their online education offerings to reach more time- and place-bound students, and as accredited institutions become interested in documenting teaching and learning effectiveness, the degree to which online students are successful as compared to their classroom counterparts is of interest to teaching faculty and others charged with assessment. By comparing student performance measures and assessments of learning experience from both online and traditional sections of a required graduate public administration research methods course taught by the same instructor, this paper provides evidence that student performance as measured by grade is independent of the mode of instruction. Persistence in an online environment may be more challenging in research methods classes than in other public administration classes. Furthermore, participation may be less intimidating, and the quality and quantity of interaction may be increased in online classes.

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