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This paper aims to investigate bank credit policies and uncover yacht building finance assessment factors from bank credit policies toward the yacht industry.

This study’s questionnaire attempts to identify survey respondents’ degrees of awareness through difference analysis, and then uses entropy weighting and gray relational analysis to discover priority ranking order of bank credit assessment considerations from the perspective of Taiwan’s banking sector.

The research findings show that yacht builders have to review their ship financing application methods and improve shortcomings to meet banks’ credit granting requirements.

Banks emphasize yacht builders’ repayment ability to protect their depositors and shareholders.

The development of the current European economic area maritime cabotage market occurred when, at a policy level, the European Union forced the opening of its member-states cabotage markets to Community shipowners and extended this openness, in 1997, to the european free trade area countries. A two-tier cabotage market emerged, where a European economic area legislative framework co-exists with the legislative acts of each member-state. With such a unique background, this paper aims to investigate both the European economic area member-states and the rest of the world cabotage regimes and identify a list of reasons and policy measures used to implement cabotage policies.

By means of a desk research methodological approach, this paper analyses, from a geographical perspective, different countries’ cabotage policies and classifies them, and identifies in a systematically way a set of reasons and policy instruments that support each of chosen policies approach.

The outcome indicates that only a few countries promote free liberalised cabotage services and that most countries favour protectionist cabotage policies, whose governments can control the number of foreign vessels participating in these trades. Cabotage regimes have been categorised and the reasons behind both policies and respective policy instruments have been identified.

Quite often, researchers only focus on the cabotage policies of the European economic area countries, the USA, Australia, Japan and South Korea. This paper value rests on its ability to incorporate cabotage policies from other African, Asian and Latin American countries and to update existing information on the subject. Overall, this paper paves the way to broaden the cabotage knowledge.

The main purpose of the study was to identify the key elements that characterize successful grant proposals and the relative importance of issues that constitute difficulties and concerns in preparing the proposals. The study aimed, in particular, to explore grantsmanship perceptions based on the experiences of researchers in Thailand who had, or had not yet, successfully been awarded domestic and/or international research funding.

Anonymous online questionnaires were distributed to researchers in biomedical and public health fields in Thai academic institutes. The online survey asked the anonymous participants to complete a questionnaire comprising both multiple-choice and open-ended questions.

About 19% of 300 respondents had received both domestic and international research grants, and 60% of domestic research grants. The top 5 issues in grant applications were: (1) choosing a topic that matched the grant opportunity, (2) feasibility of research design and methods, (3) suitable research design and methodology, (4) model and theoretical justification, and (5) ethical considerations. Significant differences in perceptions among researchers were found for the feasibility of research design and methods and proposing a reasonable and justifiable budget.

The information derived from this analysis reflected the perceptions of the researchers and may or may not correlate with those of grant agency reviewers. The results of this study may be insightful and instructive for other researchers and form the basis for training and mentoring researchers in informed and effective grantsmanship, particularly novice researchers with limited or no experience in grant proposal writing. This study particularly reflected grantsmanship perceptions among researchers in Thailand. It may also serve to exemplify lessons learned for researchers in other low-income and middle-income countries (LMIC) exposed to similar settings and situations applying for research grants.

This study aims to investigate the impact of social grants on rural household welfare in a village located in one of the poorest provinces in South Africa – KwaZulu Natal Province. Actually, since the inception of democratic rule, the South African government has turned to social grants to address the issues of poverty, income inequality and to improve household welfare. The coverage of social grants has increased substantially with more than 17 million (about 34% of the population) South Africans being recipients of social grants. Despite having relatively well-developed social security system, poverty levels in rural parts of South Africa remains very high.

This study uses a cross-sectional households survey data conducted in Hlokozi village. A propensity score matching technique, which accounts for non-random selection of households, is applied.

The results reveal that social grants have a significant and positive impact on rural household welfare. Specifically, the nearest neighbour matching estimates suggest that the causal effect for social grants on household welfare is the region of about R5,830. Consistent with the nearest neighbouring method, the results obtained using the Kernel matching method show that social grants are significant in improving rural household welfare.

While there are a number of studies that have shed some light on how social grant reduces poverty in South Africa, there are some gaps. Firstly, only a few studies have interrogated the impact of social grants on household welfare. Secondly, most of these studies have relied on descriptive analysis, and finally, besides poverty being high in rural areas, research on the impact of social grants on rural household welfare remains thin.

A primary goal of the Collaboration and Resources for Encouraging and Supporting Transformations in Education (CREST-Ed) program was to increase the number of highly qualified, minoritized teachers committed to teaching in minority-serving, high-need school districts. This study's purpose was to evaluate the CREST-Ed program's impact on teacher residency outcomes using multiple sources of program evaluation data collected during the five-year grant.

This study of a federal Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grant at Georgia State University (GSU), a minority-serving institution (MSI) and research university, shows teacher residency programs can improve the diverse teacher pipeline. The grant, CREST-Ed, provided professional development schools (PDS) support for four urban and 23 rural school districts through partnerships with GSU, Albany State University (ASU) and Columbus State University (CSU).

The study findings suggest that teacher preparation grants can be leveraged to recruit traditionally minoritized teachers of color to increase the diverse teacher pipeline and strengthen PDS partnerships.

Both urban and rural PDSs could benefit from teacher residency programs like the CREST-Ed model that catered to the unique needs of each school and partnership district.

With the accelerated technological advancement, innovation has become a critical factor, which affects the core competitiveness of a company. However, studies about the relationship between internal stock option mechanisms and innovation productivity remain limited. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the impact of stock options and their elements design on innovation output from an internal mechanism perspective.

Using a sample of 302 stock option incentive plans announced and implemented between 2006 and 2016, this study uses the propensity score matching and difference-in-difference model to find out whether the implementation of stock options improves the innovation outputs of enterprises.

Based on the statistical analysis, it is concluded that: stock options can stimulate corporate innovation; a stock option may drive innovation outputs through two ways, performance-based incentives and risk-taking incentives, with the latter one playing a more dominant role and the risk-taking incentives of stock options, could be optimised when the non-executives granting proportion is larger, the granting range is limited, the incentive period is longer, the exercisable proportion is increasing, the price-to-strike ratio is lower and relatively loose performance assessment criteria are applied.

The conclusion reached in the study may provide valuable information to listed firms in designing and implementing the stock option plans.

As a collective paradigm of leadership emerges in the literature, many community leadership programs still align with leader-centric perspectives. The Kansas Leadership Center’s Leadership Transformation Grant is an exemplar of developing collective leadership in the civic arena. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to present the findings of a community-engaged, qualitative research study on the impact of collective leadership development on the practice of civic leadership and (2) to discuss relevant implications learned from reflections on the methodology for the practice of community-engaged research.

This study is a form of engaged research (Van de Ven, 2007) and is consistent with the principles of community-based research (Strand, Marullo, Cutforth, Stoecker, & Donohue, 2003). I took an exploratory approach to this study because the knowledge intersection of collective leadership, civic leadership and leadership development is still emerging and understudied. I explored the individual, group and systems levels as three components of a complex adaptive system (Uhl-Bien, Marion, & McKelvey, 2007). To better understand the dynamic relationship between individual, group and system in this grant team, I employed a three-phase study including methods of deliberative civic engagement, open-ended survey and interview.

Findings illustrate the effectiveness of the grant program on developing a shared language and leadership framework and clarifying leadership goals for participants. Implications include the importance of collective leadership development opportunities that center adaptive challenges and convene participants across levels of leadership and sectors. Additionally, the findings highlight the need to consider authority, identity and culture as central components of the practice of leadership. Reflections on the community-engaged methodology demonstrate the value of learning about leadership practices from the community practitioners to inform community leadership development interventions. Implications include approaching research as iterative and pushing back on academic norms that provide tension in engaged work.

Little research crosses all three boundaries of collective leadership, leadership development and civic leadership literature. This intersection focuses on understanding how collective leadership can contribute to enhancing the practice of civic leadership. The current study is situated within this knowledge gap and explores (1) the experiences of members of a civic group who have (2) participated in leadership development that (3) aligns with a collective leadership paradigm and are (4) trying to make progress on an adaptive challenge.

“The U.N. once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnership involving governments, international organizations, the business community and civil society. In todayʼs world we depend on each other.” Kofi Annan, UN Secretary (1999).

Citizen engagement can promote value creation in urban development projects. This potential stems from the granting of decision-making authority to citizens, labeled citizen enfranchisement in this study. Citizens are focal stakeholders of urban development projects and enfranchisement grants them an explicit say on such projects. Despite this potential for enhanced value creation, there remains limited understanding about how project organizations enfranchise stakeholders in the front end of urban development projects.

In this research, we designed a multiple-case study to analyze two novel citizen engagement processes in Northern-European cities. In these processes, citizens were enfranchised in ideating, designing, and making selections on urban development projects. We followed a multimethod approach to data collection. The collected datasets include document data, interview data and observation data.

Our findings demonstrated a distribution and redistribution of decision-making authority throughout the phases of the citizen engagement processes. Citizens’ voices were amplified throughout the project front end, although episodes of decision-making authority held by the cities took place periodically as well. By granting explicit decision-making authority to citizens, citizen enfranchisement facilitated a more democratic urban development process, promoting value creation.

In contrast to the earlier research, the findings of our study illustrate citizen engagement taking place at so-called higher levels of stakeholder engagement. In particular, our study reveals a granting of de facto decision-making authority to citizens, also known as citizen enfranchisement. These findings contribute to the earlier research on stakeholder engagement in projects, where the influence of stakeholder engagement has often been considered symbolic or limited.

This study evaluates the impact of government social protection interventions on households’ welfare in South Africa.

The study uses survey data comprising 393 observations and the multinomial logistic regression technique to analyse the effect of government interventions on households’ welfare. For robustness purposes, a negative binomial regression model is also estimated whose results corroborate the main results from the multinomial regression model.

The study’s findings show that government economic interventions through social protection significantly reduce the likelihood of a decrease in household income or consumption. COVID-19 grant/social relief of distress grant, unemployment insurance, tax relief and job protection and creation are all significant in sustaining household income and consumption.

The findings have policy implications for social development. Specifically, the findings support the use of government social protection as a safety net for low-income groups in South Africa.

The study presents preliminary evidence on the effectiveness of several measures used to ameliorate the COVID-19-induced recession within the South African context.