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This article suggests that the currency crisis in South East Asia triggered off the present banking crisis. However, the banking crisis would not have happened if it had not been preceded by a deregulatory banking industry trend in the region during the previous decade. This trend allowed banks to invest in risky illiquid assets. Moreover, such investments were subsidised by deposit insurance funds. The IMF and BIS proposals to cure the banking instability in South East Asia are shown to be inadequate because they rely too much upon depositor and government monitoring rather than the need to constrain bank risk‐taking behaviour ex ante. This paper proposes a return to comprehensive banking regulation to prevent a reoccurrence of similar crises in the future.

Banks in the South Asian region are the fulcrum of economic growth and development as they provide means to development credit and working capital, trade and infrastructure finance and are seen as custodians of the trust in the financial system. This paper aims to study the nature of banking sector linkages for the region.

The dependence structure between deposits and lending rates individually for the banks of the South Asian countries are studied using time invariant and time varying family of copula functions. The degree of connectedness is further studied by Diebold and Yilmaz methodology.

Results indicate poor levels of banking integration in the region as the dependence parameter for both deposits and lending rates was around 0 for the sample countries, thereby confirming poor banking sector integration in the region.

Policymakers of the region are interested in the co-movements of the interest rates to understand the cross-sector risk management and any systemic risk pressures for the regional economies. Corporates in these countries are scouting out for competitive borrowing rates to lower their cost of capital.

Rationale for examining the banking sector linkages is that the South Asian countries are at different stages of economic growth and development and this region in particular is the fastest growing region in the world and has largely increased its trade integration with the world albeit having lowest levels of intra-regional trade integration.

This is a first of a kind of studies to examine the banking sector linkages in South Asia.

This chapter presents a South American perspective on the environmental and financial sustainability of energy integration incorporating recent financial lessons from the United States and Europe. An illustrative project called UNASUR-GRID is presented to highlight new thinking on funding ecologically sensitive development (post-carbon electricity generation) and regional energy sovereignty via a new regional development bank for the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) called Bank of the South, Banco del Sur (BDS) ^1,2 . Sustainable BDS finance rules are presented that aim to break the link between development funding, environmental damage, and sovereign debt owed to banks outside the region, tapping into alternative finances to buffer the region against changes in global financial flows from core nations in the Great Recession.

The author attended presidential meetings of MERCOSUR and UNASUR supplementing this with presidential declarations comparing these with ongoing development planning from IIRSA, also interviewing a COSIPLAN representative. He also cooperated (as an independent researcher) with the Ecuadorian Central Bank research group called ‘New Architectures for Regional Finance’ (NAFR) and conducted technical interviews at South American energy institutes specialising in integration.

Development finance must reflect changes in both energy supply and demand while replacing fossil fuel inputs in electricity generation. Demand planning is necessary to attain sovereignty over a post-carbon electricity supply while maintaining dependability.

Successful energy cooperation is more than just energy infrastructure (UNASUR-GRID), cross-border confidence building is also required, reinforced by commercial treaties for energy exports and imports. Public and private national and regional energy companies need real incentives to trade internationally (improving competition) or renationalisation of supply and distribution may be necessary.

Highly original, this chapter incorporates government, UN and civil NGO inputs into primary research. BDS policy sources include government, ministerial and presidential speeches with interviews and participation in meetings with social movements. For indigenous ecological and social economic concepts such as Sumak Kawsay, the author has travelled extensively in South America and was an active participant at the first World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the 2010 Rights of Mother Earth (World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, 2014) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, along with ecologists and tribal representatives.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of urban design master plan projects in the Australian context of Brisbane. It first reviewed the general ramifications of urban design projects on property markets. The local impacts of two major projects were then analysed and compared. A limited statistical analysis was conducted to investigate whether local price growth could be attributed to the projects or resulted from generally buoyant market conditions.

The paper adopted a largely descriptive approach. It first reviewed the theoretical outcomes urban design projects should deliver. It then looked at the specific details of two distinct urban design projects in Brisbane and descriptively assessed their impact on adjacent local housing markets. It then compared relative aggregated location price growth to isolate discernable project price effects. Finally, the paper anecdotally selected some master designed properties and considered whether their prices were excessive compared to average location rents.

The paper found conflicting evidence to support the view that urban design projects significantly lifted aggregated location prices. On the one hand, aggregated project location price growth was relatively muted. Other generic demand factors and local differences in housing stock quality swamped project effects. On the other hand, at the individual property level, there was some anecdotal evidence to suggest premiums were paid for urban designed homes. The paper indirectly suggests, then, that any price impacts of urban design projects are subject to rapid distance decay.

The paper conducted only a limited historical review of revitalisation and urban design. A systematic individual, project‐adjacent, property price analysis was not conducted. Rather, the aggregated dwelling price analysis and anecdotal rental review suggested, albeit inconclusively, that the effects of urban design are spatially restricted to the immediate vicinity of projects.

Investors should note likely price impact of planned infrastructure projects is spatially restricted to the immediate environs of the project.

The paper combines an overview of urban design and property market analysis.

Organisational Development, Organisational Behaviour, Leadership Change.

Master of Business Administration, postgraduate studies, middle or senior managers on open programmes.

The case focuses on the dilemma that Douglas Lines, Nedbank’s Divisional Executive for Strategic Business Unit, South Africa, faced when a new sense of urgency was required to cultivate a culture of collaboration in Nedbank to overcome their silo-mentality.

Examine the current and recommend the preferred culture of Nedbank to enable collaboration; critically analyse and evaluate the suitability of the current structure recommend restructuring; insight into how contextual leadership contributes to collaboration in organisations; present judgement of strategies in initiating and enhancing collaboration to overcome silo-mentality.

A DVD is available with link and password. Teaching Plan and slides are available. The four learning outcomes are posed as questions for groups to discuss and model answers are provided as well as linking them to relevant literature.

CSS 7: Management Science.

South Bank University Library was one of the first to install a CD‐ROM network and has recently changed from the Optinet system to Ultranet. Access to the CD‐ROM LAN from the University's VAX‐based WAN is now possible using a Logicraft Omniware server.

This study aims to examine the determinants of bank stability based on three measures of bank stability while accounting for key bank-specific, macro-finance and structural variables. The aim is to underscore key indicators of stability that can be tracked by analysts, bank managers and regulators, especially in small economies such as Fiji.

The sample comprises a balanced panel of seven banking and financial institutions over the period 2000-2018. For consistency of data and similar functions in terms of deposit and loans, this paper considers five commercial banks and two credit institutions in Fiji. A fixed-effect method of regression is applied, to control for bank heterogeneity. The dependent variable is bank stability, which is based on three measures – the Z-score, the risk-adjusted return on assets and the risk-adjusted equity to assets ratio.

It is noted that bank size, funding risk, credit risk and Herfindahl-Hirschman index are positively associated with bank stability. In the extended model, both inflation and economic growth are positively associated with bank stability, although only inflation is statistically significant. Moreover, factors having a negative association with bank stability are the liquidity risk, the net interest margin and the remittances inflow. Additionally, the domestically generated political crises of the years 2000 and 2006 and the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 are negatively associated with bank stability.

This study empirically examines the determinants of bank stability in Fiji’s banking sector. Unlike previous studies, this study considers three measures of stability, with z-score as the dominant measure and as explanatory variables, bank-specific, macro-finance and structural variables. The bank-specific data used in the study were hand-picked from the disclosure statements of banks and macro-finance data were extracted from the World Bank Indicators. The study underscores pertinent factors associated with bank stability in the small island economy of Fiji, which can be of interest to analysts, bankers, regulators and researchers in this domain.

The banking sector stability depends in large part on the size of non-performing loans (NPLs). Hence, the factors which explain the problem loans are very useful information for banks. Notably, studies in this regard with respect to the small developing countries’ banking sector have received less attention. Therefore, this study aims to examine the determinants of NPLs with a case of Fiji’s banking sector, over the period 2000-2013.

The balanced sample consists of the entire banking sector (five commercial banks and two non-bank financial institutions). First, the authors estimate a base model which comprise bank-specific indicators that are related to bank management and then they extend the estimations to include macroeconomic/structural factors such as economic growth, inflation, changes of the real effective exchange rate, unemployment, remittances, political instability and external events like the global financial crisis. The estimations are done using pooled OLS, the random effects and the fixed effects regression methods.

The results show that the following indicators have negative association with NPL and are statistically significant with the conventional levels: return on equity, capital adequacy requirement, market share based on assets, unemployment and time. On the other hand, the net interest margin has a positive and statistically significant association with NPL.

Subsequently, the stability of the banking sector in small developing countries such as Fiji is largely dependent on banks’ profitability, solvency, size in terms of market share and the presence of a learning curve and keeping a close tab on the interest rate spread between loans and deposits.

The paper highlights the specific factors determining NPL in small developing economy of Fiji.

This study is the first to examine specific factors determining NPLs with respect to small developing economies in the Oceania region.

Using data drawn from interviews with staff at South Bank Polytechnic in 1985, the attitude of non‐professional staff to automation, the ways in which they can prepare for such a move, and the effect of automation on job satisfaction are all considered. The prospect of automation is disturbing to non‐professional staff; reassurance needs to be given by a systems librarian who is interpersonally as well as technically skilful. Automation training must emphasise jobs and purposes rather than technology and hardware; it should allow for different learning styles, be conducted informally in small groups, and include hands‐on experience. Automation will succeed best where participative management is practised, but no single approach to automation will work in every environment; the manager′s job is to find the “best fit” between the organisation and the style of automation adopted.

The Geac 8000 Library System from Canada, installed at two sites of the Polytechnic, is based on a minicomputer offering 64K Bytes of memory for each site and 96K shared memory. The description of this fully online system using Informer Keyboard/VDUs for cataloguing and for online circulation control using attached lightpens, includes file handling, issue procedures, catalogue interrogation and the keys available for searching — class number, author, title, ISBN, ISSN, barcode, subject headings. Ways of browsing through the files starting with uncertainly spelt authors is also described in relation to the way library readers use the public terminals provided in the library. These offer limited access and do not allow unauthorised alterations to records. Lost badges and books, reservations provision, access to user data, generation of notices to readers are all described in varying detail. Reliability and precautions against failure are outlined. The procedures for restart without data loss after power failure, and the provision of portable barcode to allow continued operation of the loans system, give the necessary back up to cover most eventualities. The system will most likely be extended to include further Geac modules after a suitable period of consolidation.