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Radio frequency identification (RFID) provides a useful tool for the prescreening or detection of goods and containers moving across the border and for controlling the trade of illicit materials and preventing or mitigating the effects of terrorism. Although anti-terrorism measures are important in today’s dangerous world, RFID tools, if misused, may violate the WTO trade rules. Whenever goods or container control measures using RFID are proposed, their contents, objectives, and rationale must be published, and WTO members must be notified through the WTO Secretariat and allowed to make comments. WTO members should not take such measures that are designed or applied in a discriminatory manner and those measures must be adopted only under necessary situations and to the extent necessary. These measures must reduce the incidence and complexity of import and export formalities, and there should not be substantial penalties for minor breaches of the requirements under the measures. If the measures require country-of-origin information in RFID tags, they must apply in the same way to like products, and they must not cause unnecessary inconveniences or unreasonable cost. If the measures deal with containers in international transit, they must be reasonable, consider the conditions of the traffic, and guarantee transit through the most convenient routes for international transit.

A container control measure designed to restrict the flow of fissionable materials or their derivative materials, traffic in arms, ammunition, and implements of war, or traffic in military supply goods and materials may be justified, even if it violates some of the GATT rules. In addition, a measure established in time of war or other emergency in international relations or based on the United Nations Charter and designed to maintain international peace and security can also be justified. As a last resort, WTO members may request a waiver from GATT and TBT Agreement obligations for container control measures that include RFID.

Superpowers must be careful not to use RFID to practice power politics and create regulations to deal with national security and anti-terrorism issues that do not conform to international law. The key question is how to maintain a balance between the two inalienable values of free trade and national security in this era of globalization, harmonization, and terrorism .

Research suggests that children in Hong Kong are at an elevated risk of emotional problems. Authoritarian parenting, a common parenting style in Hong Kong, is a critical factor associated with childhood mental health problems. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of the 6As Positive Parenting Program (6As) in modifying parenting attitudes, reduction of parenting stress and increasing self-efficacy in positive parenting, among a sample of 82 Hong Kong parents. 6As focuses on prevention by instilling positive parenting beliefs and principles, thereby reducing reliance on authoritarian and related parenting styles.

The program was evaluated using a controlled pre-post-treatment design. Outcome measures were the Chinese Child-rearing Beliefs Questionnaire, Parental Stress Scale, Parenting Self-efficacy Scale and participant feedback. ANOVA and correlation were utilized to detect treatment effects and relationships between the degree of change among measures and subscales.

Relative to the control group, the 6As Positive Parenting Program significantly changed parents’ parenting attitudes, reduced parenting stress and increased self-efficacy in positive parenting. In sum, 97.6 percent of the participants agreed that the program is a good fit for the Hong Kong culture.

A larger sample would have been desirable for this study. One factor that limited analyzable data was that some of the participating organizations enrolled participants into the program who did not meet research inclusion criteria. Furthermore, the size of groups varied from 5 to 16 participants, which may have produced different group dynamics that added variability to outcomes. Future 6As parenting program research should attempt to standardize group size or to directly compare the effectiveness of smaller vs larger groups. Furthermore, as noted earlier, the research was conducted during the primary school application period, which may have heightened the parenting stress for parents of younger children.

The results suggest that an enhanced belief in authoritative, autonomy and training strategies could reduce parental stress and shift parents’ attitude toward a more positive approach in child-rearing.

There is considerable need for a holistically designed parenting training that is culturally credible and sensitive.

Findings suggest that positive parenting can enhance the parent–child relationship and reduce parental stress. The results support governmental, non-governmental organizational and community focus on positive practices for parenting training in Hong Kong.