Search results

Based on the American antidumping cases against China, the purpose of this paper is to construct an early warning model for Chinese exports.

In order to overcome the drawbacks of the existing early warning models for antidumping, first, the authors screen out six most relevant indices that play a key role in US textile corporations' decision of antidumping petition against China from 2002 to 2006, then design a early warning system for antidumping petition based on panel data logit model.

The regression result indicates that unemployment ratio and import‐penetration ratio significantly influence the antidumping filing decisions; when the other invariables keep the same, with the market share of China textile goods increasing by 1 per cent point, the odds ratio of antidumping petitions against China textiles increases by about 3.7 per cent.

As far as the authors are aware there is no definite research yet about early warning system of antidumping events, and this paper aims to specifically address this issue.

The importance of the security-political strategies of Africa's subregional organisations was accentuated in 2002 with the launching of the African Union's Common African Defence and Security Policy (CADSP), which will include, among other things, the establishment of a Continental Early Warning System and an African Standby Force. From that point on, subregional organisations were to be the building blocks of an all-African approach to security politics. The strategies of these organisations range from the top-down approach of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to the bottom-up approach of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). Taking into account the particular characteristics of Africa's regional conflicts, this article examines the relevance for the CADSP of the approaches to conflict prevention and resolution of the latter two organisations. It analyses, first, the challenges facing the African Standby Force through an examination of ECOWAS's security-political strategy, and, second, the challenges facing the Continental Early Warning System through a look at IGAD's strategies. It suggests that two main issues are of critical relevance for the success of the CADSP. First is the lack of compatibility between the all-African strategy and the strategies of the various subregional organisations. Second is the lack of compatibility between formal processes of integration and trans-state regionalism within the continent. Although formal processes of integration are important, informal processes often play a much stronger role, undermining much of the progress made by the formal processes.

The purpose of this paper is to make an evaluation and early warning prediction using grey prediction models and the index of process ability.

An early warning prediction for food security risk is proposed in this paper. A quality index is constructed and an improved grey prediction model is also presented. The quality index model is applied to measure the level of food quality; then the grey prediction model is applied to predict the trend of quality index for food in the future. A comparison between the predicted trends and standard limit proposed by experts is made to judge the food security risk.

The results in this paper indicate that more attention should be paid to the food security situation and steps should also should be taken to prevent harm to people's health from food.

The method presented in the paper could be used to make predictions for those systems which have the characteristic of small sample and poor information. The combination of grey prediction model and process ability index could also be applied to evaluation and early warning for those systems.

Food quality index is constructed for evaluating food security and an improved grey prediction model is also presented in this paper. The combination of these two models could be applied to make evaluation and warning prediction for food security risk with poor information.

The purpose of this paper is to address the urgent need for guiding the construction of information systems for disease surveillance and early warning, given the latest efforts of the report system of public health information over China.

A system framework for disease surveillance and early warning, based on disease clustering test and cluster detection techniques, geographical information system, network and communication is conceived. Through geographical surveillance analysis of severe acute respiratory syndrome occurring in Beijing in 2003, an application example of the framework is illustrated.

Through approaches such as integrating spatial‐time clustering test and cluster detection algorithms, spatial visualization, computer network, wireless communication, it is feasible to build a systematic, automatic, real‐time surveillance and early warning system for prevention and control of disease.

The present study provides an underlying framework for the development of disease surveillance and early warning system enabling data acquisition, data analysis and alarm publishing.

The framework integrates report system of public health information, GIS and disease clustering test and cluster detection techniques into an application, which will significantly enhance the resilience of healthcare facilities. It is supposed to be implemented in near future and provides fundamental support for nation‐wide disease surveillance and early warning.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often lack adequate accounting systems and may even fail because of accounting inefficiencies. Indeed, accounting can mitigate the course of a crisis and support a troubled SME’s turnaround. Its impact on reorganization success, however, has scarcely been researched so far. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the effects of several accounting parameters, namely, the quality of accounting systems, quality of early warning systems, formal planning, the standard of financial accounting and reorganization planning on the short- and long-term success of court-supervised reorganization.

The impact of accounting on reorganization success is investigated in a sample of all SME bankruptcy cases with ten or more employees (n = 117) in Upper Austria in 2012 including data for short-term survival (in 2016) and long-term survival (in 2019).

This study found evidence that the general quality of accounting systems, the quality of early warning systems and written reorganization plans positively influence the outcomes of the analyzed court-supervised reorganizations of SMEs. In particular, the existence of a reorganization plan significantly increases the short- and long-term reorganization success by ensuring the efficient and effective use of resources in the reorganization process.

This study should increase the awareness of SMEs’ owner managers, consultants, creditors and legislators for the importance of accounting in the context of reorganization. The fact that the effect of accounting on reorganization success is less pronounced in the long-term view indicates the necessity of increasing the strategic focus in SMEs’ accounting instruments.

This study provides new evidence on the impact of specific accounting parameters on the short- and long-term success of the court-supervised reorganization of SMEs. Furthermore, this study points out the high relevance of reorganization plans for SMEs.

The purpose of this study is to provide recommendations for improving the social performance of warnings using mobile services in flash flood prone communities. A warning cannot be considered effective until it is received, understood and responded to by those at risk. This is defined as the social performance of warning communication techniques. Mobile services offer opportunities for improving this, particularly in Bangladesh, but have been underutilised. In this research, characteristics of the warning, mobile services and community are found to influence the social performance.

A framework on the factors affecting the social performance was developed and applied using data collected through interviews at the national and regional level along with focus-group discussions (FGDs) and key informant interviews at the local level in the Sunamganj District, Bangladesh.

The study demonstrated that mobile services are the preferred means of warning communication. Communities strongly preferred voice short messaging service (SMS) and interactive voice response (IVR) because of easier accessibility and understanding of the message. Text-based services [SMS and cell broadcasting service (CBS)] were still found to be acceptable. These should be simple, use symbols and refer to additional sources of information. Further recommendations include mixing push (e.g. SMS and CBS) and pull-based (e.g. IVR) mobile services, utilising local social networks, decentralising the dissemination process and raising awareness.

A limited sample of interviews and FGDs were used.

Concrete recommendations are made for overcoming obstacles related to the effective use of mobiles services.

The suggestions made can contribute to improving the social performance of flood early warning communication.

The conceptualisation of mobile services’ contribution to social performance of flood warning and field-level application.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the conceptual understanding of the process of participation in early warning systems (EWS) through a review of participatory EWS examples in the academic literature. Specifically, this paper asks: who is involved, what responsibilities do participants hold, what activities are they involved in, and what are the associated successes, issues and outcomes?

A total of 30 cases of participation in EWS documented in the academic literature were identified through online searches. Existing concepts in participation (power and responsibility, communication) and people-centred early warning (risk knowledge, monitoring and warning, communication and dissemination and response capability) were used to examine each paper.

Participation was found to take place through a range of activities across all elements of the EWS. Participation also varied in breadth of inclusion, ranging from the general public to selected volunteers. The majority of cases received support and facilitation from other actors, such as government and NGOs, but the extent of power and responsibility held by participants varied greatly within this. Common successes and issues associated with participatory EWS and the potential outcomes are presented, and the opportunities, challenges and gaps in knowledge are discussed.

This paper links participation and EWS literature to form a clearer conceptualisation of participation in EWS in support of future research in the field. It provides unique insights into who participates, their roles and relations with other actors and the outcomes of participation.

The purpose of this paper is to theoretically propose a complex perspective as the third way to understand disasters which is used to describe the Hiroshima landslide disaster 2014 in Japan. In the first half of the paper the complex perspective is explained in detail with comparison to two conventional perspectives on disasters, i.e. hazard approach and vulnerability approach. According to the complex perspective, deaths in disasters are avoidable. In the second half of the paper, Hiroshima landslide disaster is analyzed in line with the complex perspective. Also, how will Hiroshima not repeat such landslide disaster is suggested.

To develop the case study for Hiroshima, a desk-based literature review, a field site visit and five key informant interviews were conducted by the authors in 2016. The authors’ initial analysis based on newspaper reports indicated a failure in the early warning system, evacuation and severity of the hazard. Based on this, the broader literature on traditional perspectives on risk, vulnerability and complexity were mined to understand and theorize the failure in Hiroshima. Then the interviews were conducted in the city of Hiroshima to analyze the disaster from complex perspective.

The authors demonstrated that the Hiroshima Landslide disaster 2014 and its deaths could be explained by complex perspective. Complex perspective brings us the following suggestions not to repeat landslide disaster in Hiroshima. Political leaders at national and local levels must take up responsibilities to set a “goal” for the disaster management system to “reduce deaths.” Also, governmental and non-governmental organizations should make efforts to engage proactively with community through disaster education or through community awareness program to shift the mind set from hito-goto to jibun-no-koto (their story to our story).

Reducing deaths by disasters is essential for the world thus it is UN’s Sendai Goal One. As most contemporary sciences are based on reductionism, disasters have been described as a combination of the related components such as hazards, vulnerability. Although the great contributions from the reductionism to disaster studies, it has been said that integrated disaster management is needed since the reductionism usually give the partially optimized solution to disaster reduction. This study proposes complex approach to find comparatively total optimized solution to disaster reduction, in particular reducing deaths. Although it is based on merely one case study, this paper describes the possibility of different way to reduce deaths by disasters.

Even though Sri Lanka has established Early Warning (EW) mechanisms and Evacuation Procedures (EP) for the communities affected by the coastal disasters, there are several gaps, which hinder effective mechanisms in operation of disaster management practices. These gaps affect both the vulnerable communities and relevant authorities involved in the Disaster Management sector. This paper aims to identify and evaluate those gaps while providing adequate solutions.

For that, questionnaire surveys were carried out with a sample size of 217 via an online survey (117) among the urban level and interviews and telephone interviews (100) with the village level coastal communities. Data analysis was carried out using statistical analysis of questionnaire surveys and grounded theory was used for in-depth qualitative study.

Primary and secondary data obtained from the surveys were categorized under five themes, namely, response to early warning systems, evacuation routes, shelters, drills and training, effect of having a family vehicle, relatives and domestic animals, evacuation of people with special needs and cooperation with local government units. This paper analyses these themes in detail.

While critically evaluating the gaps in existing early warning mechanisms and evacuation procedures, this paper identifies correlations between some of the gaps and recommendations as well. Input from the international academics were also obtained at different forums and have strengthen the findings to overcome the barriers, which hinder successful mechanisms.

This paper aims to explore the concept of early warning signs (EWSs) in offshore-outsourced software development (OOSD) projects at the team level. It also aims to identify the EWSs of failure in the onshore-offshore project context and understand how they are perceived by responsible managers.

A grounded theory approach is followed by gathering data from 19 failed OOSD projects using project managers from client and vendor sides as the key informants.

This study identified 13 EWSs of failure in five categories of trust and team cohesion, common project execution structures, awareness of shared work context, collaboration between teams and onshore-offshore team coordination capabilities. EWSs were found to comprise two components: early warning issues and early signals of failures.

India-based vendors’ data in the study formed the primary weakness of the work regarding generalizability, even though it brought homogeneity to data. Lack of triangulation of failure data through client or vendor peers proved impossible in this research as failure remains a very sensitive topic. Dual composition of EWSs could be applied to institutionalize an early warning tool in projects.

The paper develops an exploratory model of EWSs of failure and project failure in the OOSD project context. The two-component framework of EWSs allows project managers to eliminate false positives while identifying EWSs. It contributes to the information system failure, risk management and information technology offshoring research streams.