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This paper aims to provide a typical example of accounting for the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) in underdeveloped cities, especially for the Poyang Lake area in China. The accounting can increase public understanding and trust in climate mitigation strategies by showing more detailed data.

The paper uses the “Global Protocol for Community-scale greenhouse gas emission inventories (GPC)” method, a worldwide comparable framework for calculating urban CO₂e emission (CE). The empirical case is an underdeveloped city, Nanchang, in China.

The results show the total CE of Nanchang, containing the electricity CE of Scope 2, grew rapidly from 12.49 Mt in 1994 to 55.00 Mt in 2014, with the only recession caused by the global financial crisis in 2008. The biggest three contributors were industrial energy consumption, transportation and industrial processes, which contributed 44.71-72.06, 4.10-25.07 and 9.07-22.28 per cent, respectively, to the total CE. Almost always, more than 74.41 per cent of Nanchang’s CE was related to coal. When considering only the CEs from coal, oil and gas, these CEs per unit area of Nanchang were always greater than those of China and the world. Similarly, these CEs per gross domestic product of Nanchang were always bigger than those of the world. Thus, based on these conclusions, some specific countermeasures were recommended.

This paper argues that the CO₂e accounting of underdeveloped cities by using the GPC framework should be promoted when designing climate mitigation policies. They can provide more scientific data to justify related countermeasures.

This paper aims to analyze the impact of transaction costs in portfolio optimization in Peru. The study aims to compare the transaction costs structure applied in Peru with respect to the ones applied in the USA, and over a few dimensions.

The paper opted for an empirical study analyzing the cost of rebalancing portfolios over a set period and dimensions. Stocks have been carefully selected using Bloomberg terminals, and portfolio designed then rebalanced using VBA programming. Over a few dimensions as type and number of stocks, holding period and trading strategy, the behavior of these different transaction costs has been compared. The analysis has been done for four different portfolios.

The paper provides empirical insights about how a retail investor actively trading in Peru can pay up to 14 times more in transaction costs than trading the same portfolio in the USA. These comparatively high transaction costs prevent retail investors to trade in the Peruvian stock market while fueling illiquidity to this market.

The paper deals with a limited amount of Peruvian stocks. Researchers are encouraged to test the proposition further, including other dimensions.

The paper includes implications for any retail investor that wants to invest in Peruvian stocks, giving an insight about how expensive it is to actively rebalance a portfolio in Peru.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how much it costs to actively invest on the stock market in Peru.

This paper aims to assess the long-run drivers and short-term dynamics of real house prices in Sweden for 1986Q1 to 2016Q4. More specifically, the author examines the extent to which real house prices are determined by affordability, demographics and asset price factors.

The author conducts a cointegration analysis and applies a vector autoregression model to examine the long- and short-run responsiveness of Swedish real house prices to a number of key categories of fundamental variables.

The empirical results indicate that house prices will increase in the long run by 1.04 per cent in response to a 1 per cent increase in household real disposable income, whereas real after-tax mortgage interest and real effective exchange rates show average long-term effects of approximately – 8 and – 0.7 per cent, respectively. In addition, the results show that the growth of real house prices is affected by growth in mortgage credit, real after-tax mortgage interest rates and disposable incomes in the short run, whereas the real effective exchange rate is the most significant determinant of Swedish real house appreciation.

The impact of the two lending restrictions been implemented after the financial crisis – the mortgage cap in October 2010 and the amortization requirement in June 2016 – are ineffective to stabilize the housing market. This suggests that macroprudential measures designed to ease pressure on housing prices and reduce risks to financial stability need to focus on these fundamentals and address the issues of tax deductibility on mortgage rates and the gradual implementation of debt-to-income limits to contain mortgage demand and improve households’ resilience to shocks.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effects of human resource management (HRM) practices on firm outcomes at the firm level in Vietnam.

The paper employs a fixed-effects framework for the estimation using a panel sample of manufacturing firms from small- and medium-sized enterprise surveys between 2009 and 2013.

The paper finds that, on average, a firm that provides the training for new workers gains roughly 13.7, 10 and 14.9 percent higher in output value per worker, value added per worker and gross profit per worker, respectively, than the counterpart. Moreover, an additional ten-day training duration for new employees on average leads to a 4.1 percent increase in output value per worker, a 3.0 percent rise in value added per worker and a 3.0 percent growth in gross profit per worker. The paper also uncovers that a marginal 10 percent of HRM spending results in about 2 and 1.6 percent rises in output value per worker and value added per worker, respectively.

Using the case of Vietnam, this paper shows the important roles of HRM practices in explaining firm outcomes.

This paper aims to evaluate the progressivity of health-care financing in Egypt by assessing all five financing sources individually and then combining them to analyze the equity of the whole financing system.

Lorenz dominance analysis and Kakwani progressivity index were applied on data from 2010/2011 Household Income, Expenditure, and Consumption Survey and the National Health Accounts 2011 using Stata to evaluate the progressivity of each source of health-care finance and the financing system overall.

The data show that Egypt’s health-care system, which is largely financed by out-of-pocket (OOP) payments, is slightly regressive, with an overall Kakwani index of −0.079. The overall regressive effect was the result of three regressive sources (OOP payments, an earmarked cigarette tax and direct taxes), one proportional finance source (social health insurance) and two slightly progressive sources (indirect taxes and private health insurance). This shows that the burden of financing health care falls more on the poor. These results signal the need for reform of health-care financing in Egypt to reduce dependence on OOP payments to achieve more equitable financing.

The paper seeks to augment the literature on health-care financing in Egypt by calculating specific progressivity estimates for all five sources of financing the Egyptian health-care system and analyzing the overall equity of this financing system. It will, therefore, provide a benchmark for monitoring the equity of finance in the Egyptian health-care system in future studies and allow one to assess the impact of implemented financing reforms in the future on the level of progressivity of health system financing.

The purpose of this paper is to show how data analytics can be used to identify areas of potential cost savings for category managers of installation-level services. Using integrated solid waste management (ISWM) as a test case, the authors also examine the impact of small business set-asides on price and contractor performance.

The authors use data analytics, specifically sequential regression, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and ordered logistic regression to investigate the influence of service- and contracting-related variables on price and contractor performance.

The authors find that service- and contracting-related variables influence price. Specifically, they identify that a service-related variable, number of containers, significantly affects price, and that two contracting-related variables, one type of small business set-aside and the number of offers received, also significantly affect price. The authors quantify the price premiums paid for using various types of small business set-asides.

Although the findings were significant, the authors believe that the robustness of the conclusions could be enhanced if the Air Force captured more data. Additional observations would increase the generalizability of the results.

This empirical experiment demonstrates that detailed analyses are required to gain insights into services’ price drivers to craft more appropriate category management strategies for installation-level services.

This empirical study shows how historical data can be used to assess price drivers of installation-level services. It is also one of the first to quantify the impact that small business set-asides have on price.

There appears to be no empirical-based method in the literature for estimating if an engineering change proposal (ECP) will occur or the dollar amount incurred. This paper aims to present an empirically based approach to address this shortfall.

Using the cost assessment data enterprise database, 533 contracts were randomly selected via a stratified sampling plan to build two regression models: one to predict the likelihood of a contract experiencing an ECP and the other to determine the expected median per cent increase in baseline contract cost if an ECP was likely. Both models adopted a stepwise approach. A validation set was placed aside prior to any model building.

Not every contract incurs an ECP; approximately 80 per cent of the contracts in the database did not have an ECP. The likelihood of an ECP and the additional amount incurred appears to be statistically independent of acquisition phase, branch of service, commodity, contract type or any other factor except for the basic contract amount and the number of contract line item numbers; both of these later variables equally affected the contract percentage increase because of an ECP. The combined model overall bested current anecdotal approaches to ECP withhold.

This paper both serves as a published reference point for ECP withholds in the archival forum and presents an empirically based method for determining per cent ECP withhold to use.

This paper aims to assess the consumption of dairy products in Kuwaiti children, and develop and validate a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire to measure dairy product consumption.

This cross-sectional study was based on a sample of child–parent dyads (n = 150). A dietary assessment questionnaire on local dairy products consumed by preschool and preadolescent children was developed. Serving and portion sizes were evaluated on the basis of the guidelines of the United States Department of Agriculture and the American Academy of Pediatrics to calculate median intake levels of three age groups (3-5, 6-8 and 9-11 years).

All children met or exceeded the recommended daily servings of dairy products for their age and sex. Dairy product intake was often from processed dairy including milk-based desserts, flavored milk and cheese. Compared to boys, girls consumed more yogurt (15.5 per cent vs 14.2 per cent, p = 0.001) and milk-based desserts (15.5 vs 14.3, p = 0.001). In boys, flavored milk contributed more to the total dairy intake than in girls, especially in 6-8-year-olds (21.8 per cent vs 18.9 per cent, p = 0.021). Weight status was not associated with dairy product intake in either sex.

This is the first study that quantifies dairy product consumption in Kuwaiti children and provides insight into sex-specific trends in dairy product selection. The findings of this study may help in investigating relationships between dairy product consumption in children and disease risk factors, and are important for the development of local dietary guidelines for children.

This paper aims to shed light on the Egyptian socio-economic and political conditions seven years post the 2011 revolution.

The authors depended on secondary data and information gathered from scholars and from domestic and international institutions as well. Additionally, the authors distributed 390 Likert-scale questionnaires among respondents to test their perceptions regarding the safety, social, political and economic conditions in Egypt seven years post the 2011 revolution.

The research findings confirmed that there was an agreement among participants that the safety conditions in Egypt improved during the past seven years post the 2011 revolution, and there was a general agreement among participants that the political conditions in Egypt became more stable lately. The economic and social cost presents a challenging status to the current decision maker.

Finally, authors came up with recommendations aiming to find solutions for certain economic and political problematic issues. The main research limitation is that the representative sample was confined only to the two main governorates in Egypt: Cairo and Giza.

Finally, the study is of a value, as it could be considered a road map to policy makers. Moreover, the findings provide a set of policies for governments to undertake tenable actions to accelerate development and economic growth.

Recent legislation resulted in an elevation of operating and support (O&S) costs’ relative importance for decision-making in Department of Defense programs. However, a lack of research in O&S hinders a cost analyst’s abilities to provide accurate sustainment estimates. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate when Air Force aircraft O&S costs stabilize and to what degree. Next, a parametric O&S model is developed to predict median O&S costs for use as a new tool for cost analyst practitioners.

Utilizing the Air Force total ownership cost database, 44 programs consisting of 765 observations from 1996 to 2016 are analyzed. First, stability is examined in three areas: total O&S costs, the six O&S cost element structures and by aircraft type. Next, stepwise regression is used to predict median O&S costs per total active inventory (CPTAI) and identify influential variables.

Stability results vary by category but generally are found to occur approximately five years from initial operating capability. The regression model explains 89.01 per cent of the variance in the data set when predicting median O&S CPTAI. Aircraft type, location of lead logistics center and unit cost are the three largest contributing factors.

Results from this research provide insight to cost analysts on when to start using actual O&S costs as a baseline for estimates in lieu of analogous cost program data and also derives a new parametric O&S estimating tool designed as a cross-check to current estimating methodologies.