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This paper aims to investigate the wear behaviour of different materials for cylinder liners and piston rings in a linear reciprocating tribometer with special focus on the wear of the cylinder liner in the boundary lubrication regime.

Conventional nitrided steel, as well as diamond-like carbon and chromium nitride-coated piston rings, were tested against cast iron, AlSi and Fe-coated AlSi cylinder liners. The experiments were carried out with samples produced from original engine parts to have the original surface topography available. Radioactive tracer isotopes were used to measure cylinder liner wear continuously, enabling separation of running-in and steady-state wear.

A ranking of the material pairings with respect to wear behaviour of the cylinder liner was found. Post-test inspection of the cylinder samples by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) revealed differences in the wear mechanisms for the different material combinations. The results show that the running-in and steady-state wear of the liners can be reduced by choosing the appropriate material for the piston ring.

The use of original engine parts in a closely controlled tribometer environment under realistic loading conditions, in conjunction with continuous and highly sensitive wear measurement methods and a detailed SEM analysis of the wear mechanisms, forms an intermediate step between engine testing and laboratory environment testing.

There has been almost no scholarly work on the challenges of money laundering in sovereign states that use the US dollar as their currency of choice. This study aims to break the silence by highlighting how money laundering thrives in these situations mainly due to lack of or weak regulation of the US dollar by both the adopting states and the USA.

The research depended on various secondary data sources. It is an adapted academic version of a shorter piece for a professional magazine for professionals in the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Field.

Preliminary findings show that due to the lack of regulation of the US dollar in dollarized economies, unscrupulous politicians, organized criminal gangs and multinational corporations among others can use a variation of the Black Market Peso Exchange (BMPE) to counteract money laundering controls and launder ill-gotten gains from crimes such as corruption, transnational crimes and tax evasion. Furthermore, ordinary citizens, migrant workers and small businesses avoiding stringent exchange rates are also using the black market, posing a further challenge to the law enforcement authorities.

The practical implications of this paper relate to how the mutations of money laundering techniques, as they are adopted by criminals, to operate in different conditions are making it difficult not only to dictate but also to address using traditional AML techniques.

BMPE has far reaching social consequences. Hence, this study is significant to instigate a search for solutions and for further detailed studies into the money laundering techniques in countries that do not have a sovereign currency.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to discuss the unique challenges faced by countries that have adopted the US dollar for domestic use. The paper also shows how dollarization is a modest reminder that money laundering technique such as the BMPE can evolve to counter the legislative and regulatory environment of the various jurisdictions in which they are laundered.

In this paper, we examine the comparative advantage of Korea and China while focusing on their technology level. The three digit SITC (Standard International Trade Classification) data is classified by technology level and the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) is derived from 1992-2009 by using UN COMTRADE data. For careful interpretation of the comparative advantage and technology levels, we also examined intra-industry trade and unit values of bilateral Korea-China trade, and semi-conductor industry technology. We found that the revealed comparative advantage has moved from low technology products to high technology products in Korea. China still maintains a comparative advantage in low technology products such as textiles and clothing, but at the same time, China’s high and medium-high technology products have recently gained a comparative advantage. The perception that China only has a comparative advantage for labor intensive products with low technology should be changed based on our analysis. However, China’s advancement in technology should not be overestimated. When comparing the unit value of basic materials of Korea’s and China’s exports, we found that Korea’s export product prices are on average higher than that of China’s, although the gap is reducing. A wider technology gap between Korea and China still exists in the semi-conductor industry, which is one of the most advanced high technology industries throughout the world.

This study aims to examine the trend of industrial competition between the US and China, which is the most crucial determinant in the future development of the global economy. For decades, the global economy has strengthened the global production network based on the division of labor between countries. Thus, the ripple effect of competition between the two countries should be analyzed in terms of the global production network. Therefore, this study uses the product space model, which explains the development process of industries with comparative advantage by country. We constructed the model based on the products of HS 4-digit code for the 2010–2019 period. The analysis results on the trend of the industrial competitiveness of major countries are as follows. First, the current industrial competitiveness of China is concentrated on low-tech industries. In the case of high-tech items, China shows a tendency of lower export sophistication compared to major manufacturing powerhouses such as Germany, the US, Japan, and Korea. Second, with respect to the possibility of a future industrial structure upgrade evaluated by density, the trend of China overtaking other manufacturing powerhouses is observed. As implied by the product space model, the advancement of the industrial structure through active participation in international trade enhances the industrial competitiveness. Therefore, the outcome of US-China industrial competition depends on who ensures more openness and industrial complexity.

This paper analyses the importance of leadership and culture in combating corruption in Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan.

This paper is based on the comparative analysis of the effectiveness of the anti-corruption measures in the studies of six selected countries/regions in this special issue of Public Administration and Policy. The contributors in this special issue were invited because of their publications on combating corruption in the six countries/regions.

The critical variable ensuring the effectiveness of combating corruption is the strong political will of the leadership in changing the culture of corruption in the country/region by implementing a zero-tolerance policy toward corruption, as shown in Singapore and Hong Kong. In New Zealand’s case, leadership plays a less important role because of the population’s emphasis on equality and egalitarianism and its reliance on the Ombudsman and Serious Fraud Office to curb corruption. However, the corrupt leadership of Tanaka Kakuei in Japan, Najib Rajak in Malaysia, and Chen Shui-bian in Taiwan, demonstrates clearly their insidious impact of consolidating their kleptocratic rule in these countries/regions.

As the role of leadership and culture in combating corruption has not been given sufficient attention in the literature, this paper attempts to rectify this neglect by demonstrating that the political leaders in Singapore and Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent, New Zealand, have succeeded in minimising corruption while their counterparts in Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia, have failed to do so.

Despite the fact that there being a large literature on simulation, there is as yet no generic paradigm or architecture to develop a three-dimensional (3-D) simulator which depends on autonomous intelligent objects. This has motivated us to introduce a 3-D simulation system based on intelligent objects for Physics Experimentation. We formulated the system’s components as an object-orientation model. So, the entities in every experiment’s work cell are modeled by characterizing their properties and functions into classes and objects of the system hierarchy. Intelligent objects are realized by developing a knowledge base (KB) that captures a set of rules/algorithms that operate on 3-D objects. Rules fall into two categories: action and property rules. In the simulation layer, the student is allowed, by using the virtual system, to stroll throughout the Physics laboratory in light of a walking model. Student gets to a simulation region to do an experiment through the detection of mathematical collision. From software engineering perspective, the proposed system facilitates the Physics experiment through making the specification of its applicable parts more modular and reusable. Moreover, a major pedagogical objective is achieved by permitting the student tuning parameters, fixing component of a device then visualizing outputs. This provides student well interpretation by viewing how distinct parameters affect the outcomes of the experiment. With the objective of student performance measuring, we utilized an exploratory group relying upon pre- and post-testing. The application results demonstrate that the simulator contributes positively to student performance in regard to practical Physics.

This paper aims to explore the international response to the discovery and development of gas fields in the East Mediterranean basin.

The study applies key concepts into a framework and explores the strategies used by nations for developing their influence in the region.

The key nation states (the USA and Russia) and the supranational EU are notable in their divergent approaches to obtaining access to and influence regarding the gas fields.

The development of the strategies used by the international rivals for access to the resources available from the offshore oil fields is set to be an area for further study.

This paper offers insight into a developing rivalry over energy security, which will a platform for further investigation throughout the exploitation of the “New Gulf” gas fields.

Money laundering continues to emerge as a transnational phenomenon that has harmful consequences for the global economy and society. Despite the theoretical and practical magnitude of money laundering, international business (IB) research on the topic is scarce and scattered across multiple disciplines. Accordingly, this study aims to advance an integrated understanding of money laundering from the IB perspective.

The authors conduct a systematic review of relevant literature and qualitatively analyze the content of 57 studies published on the topic during the past two decades.

The authors identify five streams (5Cs) of research on money laundering in the IB context: the concept, characteristics, causes, consequences and controls. The analysis further indicates six theoretical approaches used in the past research. Notably, normative standards and business and economics theories are dominant in the extant research.

The authors review the literature on an under-researched but practically significant phenomenon and found potential for advancing its theoretical foundations. Hence, the authors propose a 5Cs framework and a future agenda for research and practice by introducing 21 future research questions and two plausible theories to help study the phenomenon more effectively in the future.

In practical terms, the study extends the understanding of the money laundering phenomenon and subsequently helps mitigating the problem of money laundering in the IB environment, along with its harmful economic and societal impacts.

The authors offer an integrative view on money laundering in the IB context. Additionally, the authors emphasize wider discussions on money laundering as a form of mega-corruption.

The media has even been very critical of some East Asian countries’ use of digital contact-tracing to control Covid-19. For example, South Korea has been criticised for its use of privacy-infringing digital contact-tracing. However, whether their type of digital contact-tracing was unnecessarily harmful to the human rights of Korean citizens is open for debate. The purpose of this paper is to examine this criticism to see if Korea’s digital contact-tracing is ethically justifiable.

This paper will evaluate Korea’s digital contact-tracing through the lens of the four human rights principles to determine if their response is ethically justifiable. These four principles were originally outlined in the European Court of Human Rights, namely, necessary, proportional, scientifically valid and time-bounded (European Court of Human Rights 1950).

The paper will propose that while the use of Korea’s digital contact-tracing was scientifically valid and proportionate (albeit, in need for improvements), it meets the necessity requirement, but is too vague to meet the time-boundedness requirement.

The Covid-19 pandemic has proven to be one of the worst threats to human health and the global economy in the past century. There have been many different strategies to tackle the pandemic, from somewhat laissez-faire approaches, herd immunity, to strict draconian measures. Analysis of the approaches taken in the response to the pandemic is of high scientific value and this paper is one of the first to critically engage with one of these methods – digital contact-tracing in South Korea.