This paper examines the validity of Wagner's hypothesis in Kuwait looking specifically at government expenditures in health, education and infrastructure. Using time series analysis, the paper has found a long-run equilibrium relationship between GDP growth and the specified government expenditures. It, however, only found one causal relationship between development expenditures and GDP growth. As such, the paper proposes an expansion in government spending on development projects and reevaluates budget allocation in health and education.

We introduce Inayatullah's Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) method from the field of futures studies into the domain of design patterns. We develop a brief case study that shows how we have integrated CLA with patterns in a collaborative research project studying the Emacs editor. We then apply the method to explore the way the design pattern discourse as a whole is evolving. We discuss implications for future research and innovation, outlining several scenarios for the use of design patterns in large-scale distributed collaboration.