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The purpose of this study is to identify the critical success factors to international ship finance centre (ISFC) and to understand the reasons behind ship financing decision by shipowners and their views on the potential of Shanghai to become an ISFC in the near future.

Survey questionnaire and follow-up interviews were conducted. The survey of this study was conducted by firstly sending online questionnaire with interview questions via email and then carrying out interview either on telephone or in-person with the interview questions to collect factual data and views from individual interviewees.

This study identified governmental support and stable policy, sound and favourable legal system, advanced maritime cluster and dynamic source of finance as critical success factors which can help Shanghai to evolve into an international maritime centre with dual function as an ISFC which is a synthesis with the maritime sector of an international finance centre.

This paper is known to be the first to link international maritime centre with ISFC.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how far plans to “modernize” hospital management in China are converging toward a global model of new public management (NPM) or represent a distinctive pathway.

This paper draws on a systematic review of available secondary sources published in English and Chinese to describe both the nature and trajectory of hospital management reforms in China.

In China, while public hospital reforms bear many of the hallmarks of the NPM, they are distinctive in two key respects. First, the thrust of current reforms is to partially reverse, not extend, the trend toward marketization in order to strengthen the public orientation of public hospitals. Second is a marked gap between the rhetoric and reality of empowering managers and freeing them from political control.

This paper develops a framework for understanding the drivers and obstacles to hospital management reforms in China that is useful for managers, clinicians and policy makers.

In China, few authors have considered NPM reform in relation to healthcare. This paper contributes in better understanding current reforms taking place in China’s expanding healthcare sector and locates these within broader theoretical and policy debates.

Many people in developing countries are suffering from serious diseases, such as HIV and tuberculosis. On the other hand, drug patents impact the availability of the drug for patients. Pharmaceutical technology transfer is widely used by domestic and foreign pharmaceutical enterprises because it promotes the availability of the drug for patients. The purpose of this paper, which is on drug technology transfer, is mainly to discuss how to solve the conflict between drug patent protection and public health from the perspective of the law, but not from the perspective of economics. To fill this gap, the authors introduce a model in the prescription drug market and analyze how a foreign manufacturer that produces brand name drugs authorizes a domestic enterprise that produces common drugs.

In this paper, the authors consider a situation that if the patent holders are provided a certain amount of compensation, then whether compulsory licensing would be an effective tool to promote competition and improve the availability of drugs. Furthermore, they also consider three different cooperation mechanisms, namely, fixed-fee contract, royalty contract and two-part tariff contract, under the case of technology transfer and give the condition of which contract would be better under different scenarios.

It is found that the product differentiation and the agent behavior of doctor in the domestic market have a deep impact on the foreign enterprise’s decision on technology transfer. If both fixed-fee contract and royalty contract are permitted, foreign enterprise will choose different transfer contracts under different conditions. Under two-part tariff contract, it is equivalent to a fixed-fee or royalty contract under certain conditions. Furthermore, all contracts can improve patients’ benefits, while the royalty contract and the two-part tariff contract would reduce importer’s social welfare under certain conditions.

Prescription drugs can treat many acute diseases and improve people’s quality of life. On the other hand, it requires investment in pharmaceutical research and development and is hard to afford the drug for the people living in poverty. This paper tries to solve the problem by introducing three cooperation contracts. The authors consider an innovative drug company and a regular drug company. The regular drug company can improve the quality of its drug by signing a technology transfer agreement with the innovative company. Three contracts are discussed in this paper; they are fixed-fee contract, royalty contract and two-part tariff contract. The authors examine the impact of different contracts on the companies’ profit, patients’ benefit and social welfare. It is found that quality differentiation of drugs and doctor behaviors can have large impacts on the company’s decision about technology adoption as well as contract choice strategies. In all of the three contracts, patients’ benefit improves, while the profit of the two companies and social welfare can increase or decrease under different contracts.

This study aims to investigate the efficiency changes of 23 major Asian container ports for the period from 2000 to 2007. In addition to assess the general trend, it also attempts to decompose the overall efficiency change into technological efficiency change, technical efficiency change and scale efficiency change to help port authorities to devise operational strategies.

The Malmquist index method is used, which is derived from data envelopment analysis. In this model, technological improvement comes from using state-of-the-art technologies, technical improvement is from rationalizing of port inputs and scale efficiency is from adjustment of port operational scales.

On average, the investigated ports have improved their efficiencies by 14.3 per cent. Such efficiency gains can be attributed to a 41 per cent increase in pure technical efficiency, a 47.5 per cent increase in scale efficiency and a 30.5 per cent decrease in technological efficiency. The scale efficiency contributes the most to the overall efficiency improvement, while technical and technological effects seem to have less impact. The fact that technological efficiency has little variance seems to suggest that this source of efficiency gain may not bring substantial competitive advantage.

The sample period is 2000-2007, so the impact from the Asian financial crisis or the economic downturn was not covered. Also, the port throughputs data do not separate shipment and transhipment.

This study provides valuable suggestions to improve efficiency for container ports along the “Maritime Silk Road.”

The purpose of this paper is to offer the latest empirical findings of the difficulties and challenges in teaching New Senior Secondary (NSS) Liberal Studies in Hong Kong from the perspective of pre-service teachers.

This qualitative study is based on Danielewicz’s critical pedagogy framework for identity development. A sample of four pre-service teachers were recruited from the last cohort of final-year bachelor of education students at the University of Hong Kong. They were invited to engage in dialogues of enquiry, through which they recount their teaching encounters during their teaching practices. Emphasis would be put on two relevant pedagogical principles, including deliberation and reflexivity, which are of particular relevance to the case of Liberal Studies.

Challenges revealed the dispositions of conformist learning among the students, manifested in forms of misquoted information and the populist sentiments mirrored from mainstream media, which cost teachers extra efforts to facilitate inquiry-based learning. Adopting deliberation and reflexivity as pedagogical principles, student–teachers responded with attempts to reconnect daily life experiences to teaching, bringing back the social context of knowledge and seeking synergy between traditional and liberatory teaching methods.

This study is drawn from a relatively small sample of pre-service teachers and may run the risk of over-generalization. Moreover, this study tends to neglect other factors such as classroom dynamics, school culture, colleagues’ rapport and students’ responses.

Given the novelty of Liberal Studies as a compulsory subject under the NSS curriculum and its specificity in Hong Kong education system, the amount of literature devoted to this area has been inadequate; among the available studies, the majority tend either to focus on the macro level, addressing the broader narratives of education policies and curriculum studies (e.g. Fung and Yip, 2010; Cheung and Leung, 1998) or to discuss the topic with exclusive reference to political transition and post-colonialism in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Morris and Chan, 1997). Studies on the micro level have generally paid little attention to the dynamics of Liberal Studies teaching, focusing instead on its relationships with other aspects such as private tutoring (Chan and Bray, 2014) and cultural representations of religion in Liberal Studies textbooks (Jackson and Han, 2016); pedagogical studies on the subject remain a minority.

The purpose of this study is to examine the associations between attitudes to academic achievement and post university success using perceptions of attractiveness, gender, ethnic identity, personality, and social acceptance as antecedents.

An online questionnaire was completed by male (N=116) and female (N=126) university students from various cultural backgrounds. To evaluate the proposed relationships, multiple regression analysis was used.

The findings suggest that attractiveness is related to attitudes to academic achievement and success through its association with social appeal and acceptance. Ethnic identity is also related to both academic achievement and post university success. Personality is not positively related to academic achievement. Finally, social acceptance is positively related to academic achievement for males and to success for females.

Whilst the survey targeted students from various cultural backgrounds studying in Australia, it did not look at university students from other countries. A cross‐cultural perspective could reveal further differences in attitudes.

This study links attractiveness and academic achievement theories. The findings have implications for tertiary institutions and suggest academics and policy‐makers to vigorously promote core personality and values such as intelligence, communication skills, and sincerity, rather than allow superficial values such as attractiveness to be placed at the centre stage of students' endeavour.

Prior studies have examined the relationship between budgetary slack and short-termism of management within a profit-seeking business environment. The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamics of slack resources in relation to quality performance of heath care services delivered by a publicly funded organization.

A longitudinal regression analysis of resource utilization, productivity and the quality of health care services delivered is performed to reveal evidence about the underlying dynamics of heterogeneous slack resources. It attempts to study slack resources in the case of a “mega” health care service provider based in Hong Kong.

The results suggest that the organization’s cost containment culture, with a strategic focus on productivity measures, has augmented cost effectiveness; however, not all slack resources would enhance quality performance.

This study of a mega health care service provider complements the prior studies of slack resources and points out the challenges of proactively managing any slack resources toward quality performance beyond productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the turnover (or stability in employment) of village clinicians in rural China over the past decade. The authors also want to provide quantitative evidence on the individual characteristics of the clinicians who provide health care to villagers in rural China and whether we should expect these individuals to be interested in continuing to supply quality health care in China’s villages in the coming years.

This paper uses data from a survey of rural China’s village clinicians conducted in five provinces, 25 counties, and 101 villages in 2005 and 2012. This paper also uses qualitative data from interviews with 31 village clinicians. Using a mixed methods approach, this study describes the turnover of village clinicians and the main factors that impact the career decisions of clinicians.

Turnover of China’s village doctors, while not trivial (about 25 percent of village doctors exited their field between 2005 and 2012), is still not overly high. Only five out of 101 villages did not have village clinicians in 2012. Of those that lost village doctors between 2005 and 2012, nearly all of them still had a village doctor in 2012 (either taken over by another local clinician or the position was taken by a newcomer). The authors find that three main sets of factors are correlated with the career decisions of village clinicians: village clinicians’ opportunity cost, the profitability of running a village clinic, and commitment to the field of medicine. In general, clinicians who left the village faced a much higher opportunity cost, had been running a clinic that was not profitable, and had fewer ties to the field of medicine. Newcomers over the same period had higher levels of education, went to higher profit clinics between 2005 and 2012, and had a stronger commitment to the field.

This study makes use of a data set with a large and nationally representative sample to provide a new perspective to better understand clinician turnover at village clinics, the career decisions of clinicians, and the implied trends for the quality and access to rural health care services in the future.

This paper aims to examine rice farmers' selection of adaptation strategies to cope with and offset the effects of climate change and the determinants of those selections in Rajshahi, a severely drought-prone district of Bangladesh.

Farm-level micro data were obtained from 550 rice growers in the 2010-2011 farming season. A multinomial logit (MNL) model was utilised to assess the determinants of adaptation strategies practised by farmers in response to climate change.

Results from the MNL model indicate that gender, age, education of household heads, household assets, annual farm income, farm size, tenure status, farmer-to-farmer extension, access to credit, access to subsidy, and access to electricity, all affect farmers' selection of adaptation strategies for climate change.

This is the first study of its kind to analyse the determinants of adaptation strategies for climate change by farmers in drought-prone areas of Bangladesh. This study provides direction for policy makers in order to strengthen the adaptation strategies of farmers and guide policies accordingly. These strategies have the potential to minimise the adverse effects of climate change.

Research has shown that when the original and the sale prices were displayed in a horizontal direction, with the sale price to the right (“Original price of $349.99/Sale price $239.99”), consumers are more likely to initiate a subtraction task to calculate the amount of the discount; and this subtraction effect would lead to better consumer value perception than if the sale price was to the left. However, fewer scholars have questioned whether the subtraction effect would still operate if the reference-price ads line up in a vertical direction? The aim of this research is to understand how different formations of reference-price ads may affect consumers' price perception and buying intention. Interestingly, positive effects on buying intention and value perceptions disappeared when buyers were shown a dollars-saved cue, rather than the lineup of original and sale prices.

Three experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses.

The results of the experiments demonstrate that when the sale price is displayed above the original price, consumers' price perception and buying intention are higher than what is placed below it.

When written horizontally, Mandarin and Japanese language text are almost always written left-to-right, with multiple rows progressing downward, as in standard English text. Notably, the right-to-left written form for Mandarin and Japanese language only happens by writing in a vertically and multiple-columned context. In particular, the format of reference-price ads in our research is considered to be a generally single column text only. Therefore, its writing system has almost no difference from the English one. However, our hypothesis does not apply to the Arabic world due to the right-to-left nature of the Arabic writing system.

Our results may inform consumers whether their cognition, which influences them not to make irrational decisions, is in turn influenced by sale price display location. Consumers should be reminded that next time they see the smaller number (sale price) they should not be too excited and forget to properly consider the original price. They should think more and consider the distance to the shop or the quality of the product before buying anything. If a product is sold in two different shops and the farther one displays the sale price above the original price but the nearer one displays the sale price below the original price, prolonging the decision time enables consumers to decrease their buying costs, such as the cost of fuel.

This is one of the first studies to discuss the influence of the price location in a vertical direction on price perception and buying intention.