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The war against tuberculosis, which has been commenced under the auspices of HIS MAJESTY THE KING, if energetically prosecuted, must in the end result in placing that dread disease under a control similar to that which, among the more enlightened nations, is being gradually but surely established over many of the preventible diseases which have been the scourges of the human race. The establishment of Sanatoria, and the great extension of the more rational and scientific methods of treatment which the existence of such institutions will of necessity bring about, should lead to the saving of the lives of great numbers of sufferers who, under the old conditions, would have drifted inevitably to death. Cure is good, but prevention is better than cure, and it must not be thought that the war can be successfully carried on upon curative lines alone. It is now well known that there is a special predilection or idiosyncrasy in those who are attacked by tuberculosis; and, while relaxing no efforts to find and apply curative measures, attention to such enormously important factors as the nature and quality of the food supply and general hygienic conditions, must be fully maintained. A far more effective control than that which at present exists must be established over the milk and meat supplies of the people, so that the ingestion of the poison by those who are specially susceptible may as far as possible be prevented. Particularly will it be necessary to ensure that the supplies of milk and other food to the Sanatoria which are to be established shall be uninfected, and that they shall also be pure and of good quality. At the present time those terms are certainly not generally applicable to the supplies of most of our hospitals and large institutions, and it should be one of the first duties of those who will be concerned in the management of the new Sanatoria to see that no exception can be taken to the food supplied to the inmates.

This paper aims to investigate the long-term impact of shareholder activism on Brazilian listed companies.

This study uses a sample of 194 companies in 2010, 2012 and 2014 and a two-stage data envelopment analysis to generate an efficiency score based on corporate governance, ownership structure and financial characteristics of companies. In the second stage, the study applies a bootstrap truncated regression to identify whether there is a relationship between the efficiency scores and a company-level activism index.

The results show a negative correlation between the efficiency scores and the activism index, suggesting that activist shareholders tend to target less efficient companies. A time analysis over the period 2010-2014 does not offer evidence of impacts of activism on changes of the efficiency scores.

Activist shareholders target less efficient companies. Shareholder activism increased after regulation that facilitated shareholder voting and required greater company transparency was introduced.

The two-stage nature of the procedure used in the analysis ascertains that this result is not spurious, assuring data separability between productive resources and contextual variables. This study contributes to the scarce literature on activism in emerging markets.

The purpose of this study is to assess motivational factors in the internationalisation of Portuguese hotel firms.

The epistemological approach that supports the development of this study is based on a deductive strategy. A comprehensive multi-case study was performed in which theoretical propositions were tested prior to further development.

The results of this study reveal that the internationalisation process of Portuguese hotel companies was triggered by managers’ entrepreneurial attitudes and international vision that in themselves embraced a combination of particular resources and competencies.

Noteworthy are study’s contributions to international entrepreneurship as an individual act within existing social networks established by managers and the management team as a result of previous business experiences. The impact of this overall entrepreneurial profile on firms’ behaviour is also of interest. Limitations of the study relate to its cross-sectional nature and the number of interviewees.

The integration of economic paradigms with behaviour theories and the resource-based view to understand how and why Portuguese hotel companies engage in international endeavours is a major contribution of this study.

The concept of smart city has recently become more topical in academic and policy discussions. This idea is considered a complex, non-consensual subject since its definition has not yet been agreed upon by most authors in the relevant fields. The need to identify and measure smart city indicators has also given rise to many different evaluation procedures. However, the available frameworks have yet to overcome challenges in structuring and measuring all the evaluation parameters of the cities in question. Thus, methods still need to be developed and applied that can structure criteria used to assess smart city success.

This study sought to show cognitive mapping's tangible usefulness as an expedient tool for strategic analysis, using smart cities as a complex object of study. To this end, various cognitive maps were constructed and compared using the Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA) approach.

Cognitive mapping's advantages and limitations in the strategic visualization research context are analyzed and discussed.

The authors know of no prior work reporting comparative analysis of this methodological approach in the same research context.

We survey board practices in Brazil. Brazilian companies are commonly controlled by family groups or through shareholders agreements. Controlling shareholders hold a very large portion of voting shares, much more than the minimum necessary to retain control. There is widespread evidence of shareholder expropriation, legal protection is weak, and stock issuance has been halted by low valuations and tax avoidance. Half of the boards are either too small or too big. Board committees are ineffective. Board procedures are rarely formalized and board members and CEOs are not evaluated in most cases. Most board members are not shareholders. No more than 21 percent of board members are independent and only 2 percent of them are elected by independent shareholder groups. It is likely the improvements in board structure and procedures will be restricted to large public corporations with foreign stock ownership while most companies avoid going public.

This study aims to examine the association between corporate governance mechanism and firm performance measured by return on assets (ROA). The question is whether an effective corporate governance mechanism is able to increase the firm performance of Bursa and Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) Klang Valley, Malaysia. The main purpose of this study is the in-depth analysis of the corporate governance mechanism and construction industry Malaysia via Bursa and CIDB.

Following the primary and secondary data comparative approach, data are collected from 46 listed construction companies and 250 CIDB-registered SMEs for the financial year 2015. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation test are reported, and model estimation is performed using logistic regression.

The empirical outcome shows that the corporate governance mechanism is significant in case of the CIDB Malaysia-registered SMEs. While, it has insignificant impact on firm’s performance for Bursa Malaysia.

This paper offers evidence specifically for Bursa and CIDB Malaysia construction industry. It can also provide guidance to the board of directors for the subscription of shares under the corporate governance measures at Bursa Malaysia. The findings also suggest that CIDB should increase awareness regarding institutional investment to assist the securities market to develop further.

This study gives an indication about corporate governance, specifically for the CIDB-registered SMEs and Bursa Malaysia. It also discusses the matter of firm performance under the light of corporate governance.

A review essay on Nancy Churchman’s, David Ricardo on Public Debt. London: Palgrave, 2001. This is a fair minded, temperate and well-written essay on Ricardo’s treatment of the “National Debt” as it is known in the British literature. It hangs together, despite prior publication of the majority of the chapters, very well – only Chap. 5 (dealing with Ricardo’s motives, and the imputation of personal financial interest) is unmistakably a journal article.

On rent, Seligman's claim is based on the fact that in the first edition of the Essay on the External Corn Trade (1815) Torrens conceives rent as a ‘net surplus’, which is undoubtedly true, but not in itself very significant: Adam Smith had already written of rent as surplus produce,¹⁸ and following Smith the same conception is to be found in a number of authors, for instance in Spence's 1807 tract Britain Independent of Commerce, which Torrens certainly knew, having written The Economists Refuted against it in 1808. Spence in fact speaks of rent as ‘the surplus produce paid to [the class of land proprietors] under the denomination of rent’ (Spence, 1807, p. 17).¹⁹

The purpose of this paper is contribution to estimate the potential of wind energy in Douala in Cameroon, by modeling and predicting the regime of wind. The paper deals with the analysis and comparison of seven numerical methods for the assessment of effectiveness in determining the parameters for the Weibull distribution, using wind speed data collected at Douala International Airport in Cameroon, in the period from September 2011 to May 2013, obtained by meteorological equipment belonging to the Laboratory of Energy Research of the Institute of Geological and Mining Research.

By using ANOVA, root mean square error and chi-square tests to compare the proposed methods, this study aims to determine which methods are effective in determining the parameters of the Weibull distribution for the available data, in an attempt to establish acceptable criteria for better usage of wind power in Douala, which is the economic capital and ought to have prominence in the use of renewable sources for electricity generation in Cameroon.

The study helps to determine that moment, empirical and energy pattern factor methods used to determine the shape parameter k and the scale parameter c of the Weibull distribution present a better curve fit with the histogram of the wind speed. This fact is clearly validated by means of the statistical tests. But, all the seven methods gave excellent performance. Then, k reaching levels ranging from 3.5 to 5.5 and c range from 1.7 to 2.4.

Then as far as we are concerned, for a significant contribution, it could be more effective to have a model for prediction of wind characteristics using wind data collected per hour, one at least three years. A comparison of results obtained from lots of other methods (seven in this case) is necessary before an efficient discussion. Standard deviations and errors between measured and predicted data must also be presented.

Seligman noted four topics that Rogers investigated in this pamphlet: the principles that regulate the exchange value of commodities; the wage theory; the incidence of taxes on agricultural products and an analysis of the economic consequences of a commutation of the tithe. This last topic Rogers treated mathematically. Seligman asserted that the appearance of Malthus's Principles of Political Economy in 1820…[gave] rise to an active discussion on some of the fundamental topics in dispute between Ricardo, Say and Malthus…. Most of the essays of the time, however, were concerned with the discussion of the nature and measure of value, and of these the majority based themselves on the theory advocated by Ricardo and McCulloch. (1903, pp. 351–352)