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Air freight transportation is an increasingly important element in the production supply chains of both developed and less-developed countries. This chapter looks at the particular features of air freight transportation that pertain to the developing world. In doing this, it is borne in mind that much of the trade involves international interactions with developed countries and this affects the technology and costs involved. The markets for the transportation of flower products is given particular attention.

This chapter presents a multi-criteria portfolio model with the expected return as a performance measure and the expected worst-case return as a risk measure. The problems are formulated as a single-objective linear program, as a bi-objective linear program, and as a triple-objective mixed integer program. The problem objective is to allocate the wealth on different securities to optimize the portfolio return. The portfolio approach has allowed the two popular financial engineering percentile measures of risk, value-at-risk (VaR) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) to be applied. The decision-maker can assess the value of portfolio return, the risk level, and the number of assets, and can decide how to invest in a real-life situation comparing with ideal (optimal) portfolio solutions. The concave efficient frontiers illustrate the trade-off between the conditional value-at-risk and the expected return of the portfolio. Numerical examples based on historical daily input data from the Warsaw Stock Exchange are presented and selected computational results are provided. The computational experiments prove that both proposed linear and mixed integer programming approaches provide the decision-maker with a simple tool for evaluating the relationship between the expected and the worst-case portfolio return.

This chapter discusses the social mobility and the political consequences of three education events in Hong Kong: the extension of free and compulsory schooling in 1978, the construction of universities after the Tiananmen repression amid popular unrest, and the creation of two-year degree programs after Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region. The chapter shows the repercussions of these events for civil society organizations and political parties. The chapter first reviews the historical context for state-society relations created by the current Special Administrative Region and the former British Crown Colony. It presents two alternative perspectives on the impact of higher education for civic development and social mobilization, perspectives rooted in neo-functionalist and in neo-Weberian sociologies of education. Next, the chapter discusses the actors and agents of political change in Hong Kong. Inferences are drawn about the social integration of new immigrants from Mainland China, as well as the opportunities for women and for lower-income students, based on analysis of 35 years of Hong Kong Census data (1971–2006). The chapter concludes by raising questions about the future ability of governments and parties to define the postsecondary policy agenda, an agenda that now threatens to escape from government control and become a flash-point of popular mobilization.