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The research is aimed at understanding the dynamic of Sino-African relations starting with the 1960’s. The article elaborates on the thesis that Sino-African diplomatic and economic ties have tended to fluctuate over time. Regardless of all fluctuations however, the overall relationship has strengthened. The strengthening trend is linked to multiple factors which include the dependency of local economies in relation to Chinese financial resources, the Chinese aim of gaining access to raw materials vital for a number of industrial processes but also by a constant anti-Western discourse that caught on to the African elite for quite some time. Some of the economic effects of these historic diplomatic ties are also presented.
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Excavations in the main courtyard of the “Hellenistic” House in Nea Paphos in 2016, Polish excavations, revealed a small circular pool with immured tops of Dressel 6A amphorae in the wall surrounding it and a circular imprint in the middle of the floor. The paper undertakes a discussion of possible form and function, putting forward a tentative interpretation based on a study of parallels that we are dealing with an ornamental pool, a popular furnishing of wealthy Roman house gardens, functioning perhaps as a fishpond (piscina) or a tank with water constantly running in and out, with a labrum or columnar pedestal standing in the middle.
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When adopting the recommendations of the Lisbon Agenda or Strategy, the European states have decided that in order to make the European Union a space of competitiveness and greater social cohesion and a model of sustainable economic growth, research-development and innovation (RDI) must become the main pillar of the member states common policies. Consequently, the European Council recommended more investment in research and development, setting the collective EU target of raising research investment to 3% of the GDP, namely 1% from public funds and 2% from private sector. The current economic and financial crisis and the pressure it poses on resources, public or private, ]has limited to some extent the achievement of these objectives. The investments might not increase as anticipated or they might even decrease. However, several states have understood that, in times of crisis, the investment in research and innovation might bring tremendous gains in terms of new technologies, human capital and knowledge or, in other words, gains in economic competitiveness. This paper aims at providing a comparative analysis of the Romanian situation using the statistical indicators of the knowledge economy, those related to RDI financing and also to RDI results for the short period of time when financing has increased as a result of applying the objectives set out by the Lisbon Strategy. We underline the fact that without financing there is no research and innovation and without policies to support RDI the delays in development cannot be recovered. The final part of the paper provides several recommendations aiming at improving the RDI policies in Romania in accordance with post-2010 Lisbon Strategy.
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This paper aims at providing the comparative analysis of corporate governance rankings, generated by major multiple-criteria decision making tools, of fifty-six firms listed as of 2014 in Borsa Istanbul Corporate Governance Index (BIST XKURY). Normally, Capital Market Board requires each BIST XKURY company to have an annual corporate governance rating provided by a licensed rating company. The rating is essentially the weighted average of four components of “shareholder relations” (%25), “transparency and disclosure” (%25), “board of directors” (%35), and “stakeholder relations” (%15). What these ratings lack is the comparative positioning of each company based on their relative distance to the best and worst performing companies. For the purpose of comparatively assessing alternative corporate governance rankings, this study makes use of four major multiple-criteria decision tools, namely; Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Vise Kriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR), and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA). The study initially produced an overall average of annual corporate governance rating for each company over their lives in the index from the inception of the index in 2007 to 2014. The lists created by the selected methods exhibit conflicting rankings. The rankings produced by TOPSIS and AHP methods are rather similar to the ranking based on the raw, unprocessed ratings. The inconsistent rankings draw attention to the exercise of caution in generalizing the findings of any method, as other methods have the potential to generate contradicting lists.
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The Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 plunged countries into a Great Recession and focused the world’s attention on the global stock markets. The global contagion has a major impact on global stock markets, with the U.S. DJIA falling to 6,547.05 on March 9, 2009 from a high of 14,164.53 on October 9, 2007, with a loss of more than 54%. Other stock markets also had a precipitous drop during the financial crisis. However, some equity markets have recovered while others have not. This paper looks at how global markets compared in their recovery. This paper also investigates the advanced countries’ recovery relative to the emerging and developing countries in the aftermath of the financial crisis and their ability to climb back to the pre-financial crisis levels. Analysis is provided for 31 stock indexes from January 2005 to March 2013. In 2013 the majority of analysed stock markets recovered from the crises regardless of if they belong to the group of developed or emerging markets.
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Pakistan is a developing economy and business groups are key players of the Pakistan’s economy. Previous research evidence shows that in the emerging economies group affiliation creates value for the firms. This study is intended to empirically investigate to know that whether group affiliated (GA) firms perform financially better than non-group affiliated firms or not? GA firms in emerging economies can have better financial performance by sharing tangible and intangible resources at group level. The financial ratio is used to compare performance of affiliated and non-group affiliated firms by using the data of 70 textile firms listed at Karachi Stock Exchange(now Pakistan Stock Exchange) covering a period from 2008 to 2012. Based on mean values of return on assets (ROA), results of the study show that GA firms have higher financial performance than non-group affiliated firms in each year and over all five years.
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This study deals with the changes in the meaning of genocide during the past seven decades. It discusses the circumstances of the origin of the legal concept in the works of Raphaël Lemkin and in the international legal documents of the United Nations, and analyzes the political and social concepts of genocide explicated in the years of 1970 and 1980. From the fact that the legal provision of the 1948 Genocide Convention has not been applied in judicial decisions for decades, some experts have come to the conclusion that it should be renewed. During the past three decades, several alternative concepts were coined (such as „democide”, „politicide”, „holodomor”, etc.). These conceptual experiments, however, were not successful.
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Brey, Thomas: Die Kriegsvergangenheit als schwere Bürde für die Zukunft Kroatiens und Serbiens = Südosteuropa Mitteilungen, 2017, No.4-5. 68-85.p.
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Intra-European temporary student mobility increased substantially in the 1990s. Notably, the ERASMUS programme has been viewed as a “success story”; and many students have come to the conclusion that “learning from contrasts” within Europe is highly valuable. Available data is too poor to clearly establish whether intra-European temporary student mobility has grown in the early years of the 21st century at more or less the same pace as in the 1990s - or whether the growth of intra-European temporary student mobility may have slowed down in the recent past. In any event, the Bologna Process has not worked as an accelerator of intra-European student mobility.
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Az elmúlt két évtized magyar külpolitikájáról
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Helmut Kohl és Közép–Európa
Central Europe as a region played an important role in Helmut Kohl's carreer and politics. At the beginnings of his chancellorship, from 1982 he pursued Ostpolitik, a policy of detent between East and West, wich was initiated by his predecessors, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt.
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The article discusses a new Late Neolithic burial investigated in the Upper Neman region in 2014. A flat grave in the Corded Ware culture’s range was found at the multi-period Drazdy 12 site in Western Belarus. e special features of the burial and grave goods correspond to the characteristics of the local ‘corded’ groups as well as the Middle Dnieper culture. Some characteristics could have originated in the Globular Amphora culture’s traditions. Based on the typological criteria, the burial was dated to the second half of the 3rd millennium BC.
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István Tisza, along with most of the Hungarian political elite was well aware that the country would inevitably suffer damage in the war. In case of a victory, it would have to put up with even more foreign nationals, and upon defeat the empire would fall apart.After a lost war, Saint Stephen’s Hungary was inevitably doomed. However, fate could have been somewhat less tragic. For the subsequent events, the state of the civil democratic revolution of 1918 can partly be held accountable. But the main responsibility lies with István Tisza’s Hungary, and the government in power from August 1919.
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Tíz év meghatározó jelentőségű még egy olyan nagy múltú szervezet életében is, mint az 1878-ban Országos Régészeti és Embertani Társulat néven alakult, majd 1970-től mai nevén működő Magyar Régészeti és Művészettörténeti Társulat. Társadalmi megítélése, vállalt szerepe, tudományközvetítő jelentősége szempontjából különösen fontos a – törvényi, technikai, informatikai és egyéb – körülmények változásai közepette eltelt évtized. Át kell gondolni tevékenységének célkitűzéseit, sorra venni lehetőségeit, átgondolni megőrzésre méltó hagyományait, továbblépni működésének kevésbé sikeres elemein. Mindez nem megy eszmecserék, viták, útkeresések nélkül. Szerénytelenség nélkül állíthatjuk, hogy ezen évtized alatt a patinás társulat próbálkozásai során nemcsak kereste, hanem reményeink szerint meg is találta helyét a kor megváltozott igényeihez igazítva. A régészeti szakosztály személyi összetétele és létszáma is változott. Az elmúlt és várható eseményekről pedig az ezen időszak alatt létrehozott – bár további fejlesztéseket igénylő – honlapunkról, illetve közösségi oldalunkról bárki tájékozódhat. Rendkívül fontosnak érezzük a fiatal nemzedék bevonását az aktív társulati életbe. Ennek érdekében alapítottuk 2011-ben az „Ad astra…” díjat, amelyet pályázati munka révén lehet kiérdemelni.
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This paper analyses the returns to education in Ecuador based on cross-sectional data collected by a National Survey at the individual- and canton-levels in 2005 and 2015. The multilevel analysis provides the methodological framework that allows capturing the regional peculiarities of data as well as addressing the high regional economic heterogeneity. The two level- random intercept and random slope models are used to examine the impact of individual-level and canton-level characteristics on the labour income. In subsidiary, the paper explains the proportion of variance in individual- level income that is explained by canton- level characteristics.
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There is more than one definition for ‘migration’. Depending on how one handles the definition of the approach also changes. Reaching a consensus on a perfect definition of migration is almost impossible, since it has too many aspects to consider. In a very broad sense, migration can be defined as the process of the movement and the adaptation of people who move from one place to another for a set of reasons, including but not limited to fulfilling their needs, over a specific period of time (Brown & Moore, 1970). Whichever the definition of migration is taken into account, it is an event that changes almost everything both in the lives of migrating people and the people on the route. In a way, understanding the diachronic changes in history is achieved by looking at the migrations; people arriving at a place tend to change and cause some changes in the culture of the people that dwell in that place which creates a “Demographic Whirlwind” which can be both an opportunity or a threat (Morland, 2014, p. 8).
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The first round of talks regarding the negotiations of a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons (their use, production, ownership, etc.) took place on March 27–31, 2017, at the UN Headquarters in New York under the presidency of Ambassador Elayne Whyte Gómez of Costa Rica. The second, and final round of talks, during which the finalization and adoption of the proposed convention is expected, should take place in New York from June 15 to July 7, 2017. The aforementioned first round was preceded by an organizational meeting in New York on February 16, 2017, in the presence of representatives of more than 100 countries, at which the provisional agenda and the rules of procedure for the general meeting of the UN General Assembly were agreed. According to these rules, a two-thirds majority is necessary for decisions on important questions and a simple majority of all present members is required for procedural issues. In contrast to consensus decision-making, which is valid, for instance, for the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, no country present at the UN conference can veto an adopted decision.The first round of negotiations was attended by around 130 countries, and representatives of several organizations, such as the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and a number of non-governmental organizations, as well as surviving victims of the US-caused nuclear explosion in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are called Hibakusha in Japan. All countries that own nuclear weapons, as well as a large majority of Alliance states, including the Czech Republic, and partner countries relying on nuclear protection, especially protection by the US, boycotted the meeting. From the Alliance states, only the Netherlands attended, and from the European Union states, the already mentioned Netherlands, and also Austria, Sweden and Ireland participated. From the partner countries, Japan was present.
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This paper reassesses the relationship between working capital management (WCM) and firm performance in the Nigerian context. The study is motivated by the limited insights available on the impacts of WCM on firm performance in the country. To date, most studies from Nigeria have been largely descriptive and focused on a small sample size that is non-representative of the population. In addition, there are limited rigorous statistical analyses involved in such studies. This paper addresses the methodological limitations apparent in prior literature and provides a better understanding of the relationship between WCM and firm performance, revealing how firms can manage their operations more profitably. The paper adopts a panel data regression analysis on a sample of 75 non-financial firms listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange from 2007 to 2015. The results of the analyses showed that WCM variables have an inconsistent relationship with the measures of performance adopted, which were return on assets and Tobin’s Q. Specifically, accounts receivable management and inventory management were negatively associated with the return on assets, while accounts payable management, cash conversion cycle and cash conversion efficiency were positively associated with return on assets. Additionally, accounts receivable management and inventory management were positively associated with Tobin’s Q, whereas accounts payable management, cash conversion cycle and cash conversion efficiency were negatively associated with Tobin’s Q. These results were found to be robust using quantile regression. The results of the quantile regression showed inconsistency across the various quantiles used (0.10, 0.25, 0.50 and 0.75). These findings have two important implications. The first is that WCM variables influence the performance of firms. The second is that the mixed findings partly indicate that firms and managers must understand and formulate WCM policies that reflect their peculiar conditions.
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