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Since 2015, China has made efforts to reform its intellectual property rights (IPR) system to better protect and stimulate innovation. These reforms are a result of the demand for more stringent intellectual property (IP) protection from China’s domestic, innovative industries and a measure to ease the pressure exerted by its foreign trading partners, particularly against the background of the US-China trade dispute that started at the beginning of 2018. This paper summarizes these reforms and their implications.

This paper combines a variety of sources, including academic articles, government websites, news reports, industry surveys and expert opinions, to offer insights in China’s IPR system and its recent reforms.

This paper summarizes and discusses (1) the state’s law amendments, including the 2015 amendment of the “Law on Promoting the Transformation of Scientific and Technological Achievements”, the second amendment of the “Anti-Unfair Competition Law” with regard to trade secret protection, the fourth amendment of the “Patent Law”, and the legislations and regulations addressing the criticisms of the US administration over China’s so-called “forced” technology transfer policies; (2) the establishment of the specialized IP courts and tribunals since 2014; (3) the restructuring of the State IP Office; and (4) the issuing of an “Outline for Building an IPR Powerhouse (2021–2035)”.

This paper highlights China’s efforts to make its IPR system stronger and more just. It also discusses international observers’ reactions and pinpoints specific areas for further improvement.

Testing a total of five hypotheses, the paper contributes to overall comparison of the two regimes, as it scrutinises whether these improvements have helped regulate this sector. Although it appears that, for the first time, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) had a more timely effect than US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), multiple parameters must be taken into consideration. The banking system has additional rules that may affect financial statements, such as the Basel Accord which sets many policies closely related to the IFRS, such as deferred tax credits. In this way, this paper aim to enrich the results of these decisions, and illuminate aspects of amendments to IFRS and US GAAP in light of the crisis. Focussing on the financial sector, the author sought to critically evaluate their reactions, and to question some of their fundamental rules in practice. This is vital for accounting researchers and analysts, allowing for the first time to compare IFRS performance between Europe and the US, and make better investment evaluations.

The study sought to detect whether IFRS and US GAAP protected firms from abnormal sales arising from the outbreak of the crisis, whether the reclassification option under IFRS was an answer to the crisis, and whether IFRS and US GAAP succeeded in regulating shadow banking through their amendments. Therefore, it processes five hypotheses. In order to detect the effects of the crisis on accounting regimes, the analysis focused only on companies from the financial sector composed of the banking industry, insurance companies and shadow banking. The author included firms from Australia, Germany, Greece, the UK and the US, and collected information on 679 financial institutions for the period 2009–2013. The author settled on these time frames because the author aimed to capture IFRS performance surrounding the crisis effects in 2008 and the amendments that followed. In this way, the author applied quantitative methods using only numerical data over a given period.

The results suggest that the reclassification option was successful, helping firms to perform better amid the crisis, indicating that the manipulation of the crisis was appropriate. It seems therefore that US GAAP should have activated this option for US firms. However, the US may not have hurried to act because its banking sector seemed to recover more quickly than in Australia and Europe. Either way, both regimes need to consider speculative market cases that might have appeared during the crisis, as the author have detected cases of abnormal returns. Finally, concerning regulation of the shadow banking sector, the results seem to be encouraging only with regard to the latest improvements and only for all countries examined.

The project contributes to debate on the reactions of both IFRS and US GAAP during and after the economic crisis. For this, it addresses several questions to investigate the performance of the financial sector under both regimes, identifying possible additional effects and considerations. More specifically, it answers if the fair value orientation actually contributes to the financial crisis through contagion effects, while it addresses additional questions. Have these two global accounting regimes succeeded in overcoming the consequences of the crisis? Have amendments and the introduction of new standards to IFRS and US GAAP achieved regulation of shadow banking? Which of the two has performed better? As aforementioned, the analysis focused only on companies from the financial sector composed of the banking industry, insurance companies and shadow banking firms from Australia, Germany, Greece, the UK and the US, for the period 2009–2013.

This paper aims to understand the discrepancy between Germany’s immediate positive response to the so-called “Europe 2015's refugee crisis“ and the strict asylum legislation adopted in Germany in the following year.

The discrepancy is attributed to external and internal forces. The external force is Germany’s obligation to adhere to the Common European Asylum System. The internal force is the role of the different policy actors. The paper focuses on the role of the media as an example of a private policy actor. Through adopting the theory of the social construction of target populations, the paper studies how the media constructs “asylum seekers”, the target of the new asylum legislation. The role of the media is analyzed using the methodology of qualitative content analysis of a selected number of newspaper articles.

The majority of the studied articles problematized receiving and hosting refugees and focused on the reason behind migration differentiating between asylum seekers fleeing conflict areas and all others who might be abusing the asylum channel. The findings of the content analysis, as such, resonate with the amendments that focused on facilitating the integration of accepted “refugees” but restricted further entry. As such, it could be argued that these findings explain the influence of the media on the amendments and as such provide an explanation to the discrepancy between the initial response and the amendments.

The analysis focused on one newspaper. The findings, as such, are not representative. The aim is only to provide an example of how the German media dealt with the refugee crisis and to suggest using the theory chosen by the paper to analyze the link between asylum legislation and the construction of asylum seekers. To understand how asylum legislation is influenced by how asylum seekers are constructed, more studies are needed. Such studies could analyze the role played by other media outputs and/or the role played by other policy actors in constructing the target of the policy.

The media’s response is based on analyzing a sample of newspaper articles published by a German newspaper following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. Accordingly, the findings represent an original endeavor to understand how the media reacted to the crisis.

This article aims to identify management practices that evidence how internal control have been considered essential, from the edition of the State Constitutional Amendment no. 75 of 2012, within the public administration of the executive branch of the State of Ceará, during the period 2012–2021.

The study relates the identified management practices to COSO (The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations) methodology “Internal Environment” component categories. The research is classified as basic, exploratory and bibliographic, on the theme of internal control in scientific articles published between 2015 and 2021, and documental, carried out through official documents, including the 27 Brazilian constitutions.

Existence of management practices that corroborate the essentiality of internal control in Ceará.

The study is limited to evidencing the control practices implemented in Ceará, not evaluating them as to their quality.

Contributions on control on constitutional-legal bases for other Brazilian Federation States.

Possibility of introducing the research theme into various branches of scientific knowledge, such as political science and contributing to public organizations to implement policies with the proper application of resources for the benefit of society.

The originality of the research is in demonstrating the essentiality of internal control in the State of Ceará, from the edition of management acts performed by the executive branch, based on Constitutional Amendment 75 of 2012, which did not become a dead letter of the law, enabling other states of the federation to do the same.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the amendments to International Accounting Standard (IAS) 39 and the introduction of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 9 enhanced the readability, and thus the quality and usefulness of risk disclosure information.

Readability analyses are performed on companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) from 2005 to 2021. The sample period includes the period when companies disclosed information according to IAS 39 (2005–2017) and IFRS 9 (2018–2021).

The results of the analyses show risk disclosures for JSE-listed companies to be complex and difficult to understand. Furthermore, risk disclosures have become longer and less readable with the introduction of amendments to IAS 39 and the introduction of IFRS 9.

This study uses readability measures as a proxy for the complexity and usefulness of risk disclosures. The amount of utility a user of financial statements derives could be dependent on other factors such as the quality of disclosure, individual user background and perceptions.

The results have valuable implications for the various stakeholders that make use of the information contained in financial statements. Stakeholders such as regulators and standard setters should carefully assess how accounting standards change to ensure that one of the key objectives of the IASB, namely, to provide information that is relevant, reliable and understandable, is met.

The results of this study contribute to the discourse on the usefulness of companies’ risk disclosures. Though, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to compare the readability of risk disclosures from an emerging market perspective, the results can be applied to other countries using IFRS to assess the readability of risk disclosures.

With the aim of monitoring the existing regulations that are applicable to community of owners facing delinquency, in view of the importance of this issue for the achievement of the Urban Agenda, the present study aims to analyse the most stringent and controversial measures available for the community of owners facing delinquency from a comparative perspective.

The present work addresses the recent legislative amendments that have taken place at national level in this field in several countries and analyses to what extent they have addressed the delinquency problem faced by community of owners.

The current paper shows that, in the end, legal certainty, the prospective legal and economic effects on mortgage lending and constitutional concerns are the underlying reasons behind the reluctance to implement some stringent measures to face delinquency. It also shows that recent amendments concerning alternative dispute resolution mechanisms are a missed opportunity.

Community of owners plays a key role in cities for the achievement of the Urban Agenda, so the periodical contributions from co-owners are paramount to the proper implementation of urban regeneration, energy efficiency and accessibility policies. To this end, the paper analyses existing regulations that are applicable to community of owners facing delinquency, which may increase in the coming years due to the current socioeconomic context.

This paper builds on existing research and goes one step further by addressing the recent legislative amendments that have taken place recently at national level in this field. These measures may serve as an inspiration to other EU legal systems.

It is commonly known that numerous incidents of container security failure are detected on a daily basis for which nobody is held legally liable. This state of affairs is essentially due to the shippers providing erroneous information, either inadvertently or by design. However, none of the stakeholders such as the carrier, the port operator, the inland transporter or the dry port operator are saddled with the legal responsibility of verifying the correctness of the information provided by the shippers or moving against them legally for misrepresentation of facts.

This paper discusses the issue of container security from a legal perspective with a specific focus on the liability for security failure. While discussing the reasons for non-development of a globally standardized legal regime for container security, this paper also endeavors to suggest possible solutions for the abysmal state of affairs.

This state of affairs persists despite the shipper being saddled with the additional responsibility of providing documentary evidence of verified gross mass of the cargo stuffed in the container by International Maritime Organization.

There is apparently no visible legal action that appears to have been taken against the culprit responsible for the security failure. Thus, the loopholes in the existing legal regime are exploited by all concerned for commercial reasons.

The purpose of this paper was to explore individual- and firm-level antecedents of the ability of a manufacturing firm's personnel to collaborate and integrate knowledge for organizational resilience practices.

The authors apply hierarchical regression analysis to study a sample of 192 European industrial equipment manufacturers. Data for each firm are collected from surveys of two key informants in each firm, as well as from public sources.

Firms' personnel’s ability to integrate information and knowledge for organizational resilience practices was positively related with the extent of the head of manufacturing's network of personal contacts inside the firm. This effect was stronger in firms with more formalized job descriptions and clearly defined roles. The head of manufacturing's orientation to teamwork and cooperation impacted this ability only in firms that did not financially incentivize cooperation. The authors also found that cooperation incentives and role formalization directly relate to firms' personnel’s ability to integrate information and knowledge for organizational resilience practices.

The study proposes to study organizational resilience practices through a transactive memory systems lens. The study is also the first to link characteristics of individual managers to firm-level resilience practices by examining the antecedents of firms' ability to integrate information and knowledge to recover from operational disruptions. Furthermore, the study serves to enhance the knowledge of resilience practices by examining the role of firm-level antecedents and their interplay with characteristics of individual managers.

The purpose of this study is to identify the factors relating to the integration and compliance of Building Control (Amendment) Regulations 2014 (BC(A)R 2014) in large Irish construction organisations.

To achieve the aim, a mixed method approach is adopted, initially, providing a critique of the literature review, followed by a combination of 7 semi-structured interviews and 30 questionnaires from industry practitioners.

Findings demonstrate that BC(A)R has had a significant positive effect on the industry, eliminating previous bad practice, by increasing the accountability for professionals signing-off on new buildings, and highlights the emphasis on certification in successfully achieving practical completion on projects.

The findings provide further justification on the need for compliance, and integration, of BC(A)R in the Irish construction sector, offering further evidence, where needed, on the benefit of its adoption.

The originality and value of this research lies in the limited number of studies in the area, particularly in the context of large Irish construction projects, which this study aims to fulfil.