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The governance of financial markets is approached at various levels. National regulators are charged with the responsibility for maintaining a system of regulation for the purpose of ensuring stability and confidence in the financial markets. This has to be done according to ascertainable standards. Within the European Union, directives and regulations provide a framework for approximating practices within its member states. At the international level, organisations such as the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have developed standards and guidelines with the view to harmonising practices among relevant states.

This paper aims to present the authors' opinions about the impacts of globalization on real estate profession and some essential changes of real estate business service.

The arguments are based on the authors' interpretation and first‐hand experience of the contemporary business environment. A case study example to illustrate the changing requirements for professional real estate services in mainland China is provided.

Economic globalization creates new opportunities in real estate market, product and service. It has the effect of blurring geographical and product boundaries. Real estate is increasingly integrated with the financial market. Global capital has transformed local property market practices. Real estate professionals have to re‐orientate themselves so that they can move up the service value‐ladder and avoid being marginalized under intense competition in a global market.

Re‐orientation of professional practices involves an expansion of one's geographical and market knowledge beyond the home boundary. It also requires a dramatic change of mind‐set, work attitude, social awareness and lifestyle.

The paper proposes a competence model. Professionals should sell “competence”, which is built on “service proper” (knowledge and skills) and “service infrastructure” (technology and organization).

China, Japan, and South Korea have been discussing and investigating, through communiqués and their governmental research institutes, the feasibility of a free trade agreement (FTA) among them. Separately, Japan and Korea have announced that they will finalize an FTA by the end of 2005. A China and Korea FTA may follow. For all three countries, and for Korea particularly, a tripartite FTA, termed here FEAFTA (Far Eastern Asia Free Trade Agreement), will be the best arrangement to truly reduce trade barriers in all sectors including agricultural industry. Statistical analysis shows that trade and gross domestic product (GDP) (particularly for Korea) will increase substantially. The trade talk background, trade negotiations, trade issues, and the impacts of such an FEAFTA are discussed.

This paper aims to understand the implication of night soil selling at the public toilets for the shared interests between colonial state and business in nineteenth-century Hong Kong. More specifically, this paper attempts to look at the ways the toilets were sustained by the sharing interests over night soil profits between state and business sector.

It is argued from the political economy perspective that the night soil profit determined the public toilet development.

The successful emergence of the modern state of colonies was generally attributed to colonial modernization, a force that was widely recognized for having introduced hygienic modernity. It was easily assumed that the public toilets would be provided by colonial government. Instead, sanitary problems during the early colonization of this colony were addressed by the privately-owned public pail toilets provided by big Chinese landowners through the selling of night soil. Based on this quasi-commercial mode, these toilets, which served as night soil collection points, were certainly inefficient; they however survived for half a century into the early twentieth century.

The paper challenges the long-established assumptions of binary relations and hierarchical public roles that put them into zero-sum competition of capacity. It rather argues that the interests aligned with each other.

The purpose of this paper is to calculate regional contents in the exports of the major regional blocs to the world, Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP), and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), respectively, to find the backward trade linkages between them instead of normal forward linkages.

To calculate “a region” content in intermediate and value-added exports, this paper uses OECD’s inter-country input-output table (ICIOT), and tries to decompose the contents of trade. Using the information of ICIOT, Koopman et al. (2014) and Wang et al. (2013) decompose gross exports of a country’s exports.

TPP is a loosely tied bloc featured by openness to the Asia-Pacific region. Trade linkages between members are stronger in RCEP than those in TPP, particularly in the trade of intermediate goods. Trades in RCEP are closely connected to exports to TPP, but the opposite direction is not clear.

First of all, the recent base year of the data on value added in trade is 2011, which can be regarded as a little bit out of date. Therefore, it should be cautious in interpreting the results in that it may not reflect the characteristics of current trade. Second, this paper uses ICOIT instead of world input-output table.

A large portion of trades in RCEP and TPP is triggered by a global production network (fragmentation, vertical specialization), different from traditional trade focusing on inter-industry trade or competition between countries. Thus, the formation of TPP or RCEP is predicted to stimulate trade of the other instead of discriminating nonmember countries.

In particular, the authors have special concern in the backward linkages between RCEP and TPP, the distinct characteristics of the two regional blocs and, finally, major countries’ preferences of the one over the other and industrial conflicts toward TPP or RCEP even in an economy.

Although this paper uses the approach by Baldwin and Lopez-Gonzalez, this paper is the first research on the analysis of the export contents in major trading blocs in the Asia-Pacific region.

Looks at the world airline industry, from 1978 to 1998, from a strategy perspective. Traces the strategic developments and the strategy responses of the key airline players that have had a profound impact on the shape and direction of the industry. These include the deregulation of the industry, the nature and extent of competition, the emergence of brand/differentiation based competition, and airline alliance developments, strategies and their implications. Also provides a glimpse of what the future will hold for the world airline industry, including the prospects of increased global market concentration and the emergence of mega consortia, comprising lead airlines from key regions of the world, on the global stage. These global consortia, which will marginalise other players, will also compete against each other on the basis of branding/differentiation.

With increasing demand of localization service in challenging environments where Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals are considerably weak, a powerful approach, the collective detection (CD), has been developed. However, traditional CD techniques are computationally intense due to the large clock bias search space. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop a new scheme of CD with less computational burden, in order to accelerate the detection and location process.

This paper proposes a new scheme of CD. It reformulates the problem of GNSS signal detection as an optimization problem, and solves it with the aid of an improved Pigeon-Inspired Optimization (PIO). With the improved PIO algorithm adopted, the positioning algorithm arrives to evaluate only a part of the points in the search space, avoiding the problems of grid-search method which is universally adopted.

Faced with the complex optimization problem, the improved PIO algorithm proves to have good performance. In the acquisition of simulated and real signals, the proposed scheme of CD with the improved PIO algorithm also have better efficiency, precision and stability than traditional CD algorithm. Besides, the improved PIO algorithm also proves to be a better candidate to be integrated into the proposed scheme than particle swarm optimization, differential evolution and PIO.

The novelty associated with this paper is the proposition of the new scheme of CD and the improvement of PIO algorithm. Thus, this paper introduces another possibility to ameliorate the traditional CD.

In the growing field of electronic commerce there are various influences that can lead to online purchase decisions. An understanding of these influences can lead to greater electronic marketing effectiveness. The purpose of this article is to analyze and compare the effect of internet experience, proclivity of use, and perception of risk on the likelihood of purchasing online in three different countries.

The empirical study includes a survey‐based design in which responses to a questionnaire completed by 492 multinational consumers are analyzed in structural equations modeling using LISREL.

Results suggest a positive relationship between consumer usage and experience of the internet and the likelihood of making online purchases. There is further indication that the perceived risk of buying online has a negative effect on consumers' purchase likelihood. Moreover, perceived risk tends to partially mediate the relationships between internet usage and purchase likelihood, and between experience and purchase likelihood. Overall, results from a three‐country study indicate that extent of ongoing internet usage, long‐term experience, and perceived risk are important antecedents to purchasing goods via the internet.

In the growing field of electronic commerce there are various influences that can lead to online purchase decisions. The results suggest marketers should modify their e‐marketing strategies to address specific conditions in consumer behavior that arise at the cultural, socioeconomic, and other levels of individual countries. Differences in levels of experience in using the internet, proclivity to use the internet, and perceptions of risk regarding the internet, influence the likelihood to purchase goods online. Generally, managers should minimize the perception of risk that potential consumers feel online. Consumers in different countries process e‐commerce constructs differently, perhaps because of different rates of technology diffusion.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of the gamification of virtual assembly planning on the user performance, user experience and engagement.

A multi-touch table was used to manipulate virtual parts and gamification features were integrated into the virtual assembly environment. An experiment was conducted in two conditions: a gamified and a non-gamified virtual environment. Subjects had to assemble a virtual pump. The user performance was evaluated in terms of the number of errors, the feasibility of the generated assembly sequence and the user feedback.

The gamification reduced the number of errors and increased the score representing the number of right decisions. The results of the subjective and objective analysis showed that the number of errors decreased with engagement in the gamified assembly. The increase in the overall user experience reduced the number of errors. The subjective evaluation showed a significant difference between the gamified and the non-gamified assembly in terms of the level of engagement, the learning usability and the overall experience.

The effective learning retention after training has not been tested, and longitudinal studies are necessary. The effect of the used gamification elements has been evaluated as a whole; further work could isolate the most beneficial features and add other elements that might be more beneficial for learning.

The research reported in this paper provides valuable insights into the gamification of virtual assembly using a low-cost multi-touch interface. The results are promising for training operators to assemble a product at the design stage.