Search results

The construction industry is widely recognized as one of the most hazardous sectors in the world. Despite extensive research on safety management, a critical issue remains that insufficient attention is devoted to safety practices in rural areas. Notably, accidents frequently occur during the construction of rural self-built houses (RSH) in China. Safety management tends to be overlooked due to the perceived simplicity of the construction process. Furthermore, it is essential to acknowledge that China currently lacks comprehensive laws and regulations governing safety management in RSH construction. This paper aims to analyze the behavior of key stakeholders (including households, workmen, rural village committee and the government) and propose recommendations to mitigate safety risks associated with RSH construction.

This paper applies evolutionary game theory to analyze the symbiotic evolution among households, workmen and rural village committee, in situations with or without government participation. Additionally, numerical simulation is utilized to examine the outcomes of various strategies implemented by the government.

Without government participation, households, workmen, and rural village committee tend to prioritize maximizing apparent benefits, often overlooking the potential safety risks. Numerical simulations reveal that while government involvement can guide these parties towards safer decisions, achieving the desired outcomes necessitates the adoption of reasonable and effective strategies. Thus, the government needs to offer targeted subsidies to these stakeholders.

Considering that during the construction phase, stakeholders are the main administrators accountable for safety management. However, there exists insufficient research examining the impact of stakeholder behavior on RSH construction safety. This study aims to analyze the behavior of stakeholders about how to reduce the safety risks in building RSH. Thus, the authors intend to contribute to knowledge in this area by establishing evolutionary game model. Firstly, this study carried out a theoretical by using tripartite evolutionary game to reveal the reasons for the high safety risk during building RSH. Practically, this research points out the important role of households, workmen and rural village committee in improving safety management in rural areas. Besides, some suggestions are proposed to the government about how to reduce construction safety risks in rural areas.

Currently, countries worldwide are struggling with the virus COVID-19 and the severe outbreak it brings. To better benefit from open government health data in the fight against this pandemic, this study developed a framework for assessing open government health data at the dataset level, providing a tool to evaluate current open government health data's quality and usability COVID-19.

Based on the review of the existing quality evaluation methods of open government data, the evaluation metrics and their weights were determined by 15 experts in health through the Delphi method and analytic hierarchy process. The authors tested the framework's applicability using open government health data related to COVID-19 in the US, EU and China.

The results of the test capture the quality difference of the current open government health data. At present, the open government health data in the US, EU and China lacks the necessary metadata. Besides, the number, richness of content and timeliness of open datasets need to be improved.

Unlike the existing open government data quality measurement, this study proposes a more targeted open government data quality evaluation framework that measures open government health data quality on a range of data quality dimensions with a fine-grained measurement approach. This provides a tool for accurate assessment of public health data for correct decision-making and assessment during a pandemic.

Researchers have generally compared council-manager municipalities against mayor-council forms when seeking to measure the efficiency gains envisioned by early twentieth century reformers. Many studies have used per capita expenditure levels of municipalities as a proxy for efficiency, associating lower spending levels with greater efficiency. This study utilizes the “Adapted Cities Framework” advocated by Frederickson, Johnson, and Wood (2004) which classifies municipalities into five, rather than two, institutional types to analyze per capita expenditure data from a national survey of 1,000 small municipalities. Using OLS regression and other statistical analyses, the authors demonstrate that there is a significant difference between the per capita expenditure levels of the five city types. As municipalities more closely conform to the pure reformed councilmanager model of government, higher per capita expenditure levels are evidenced.

This paper proposes that if a political system is more like to facilitate a unified government, to establish a strong executive body and to respond to the needs of the majority, financial reforms are more likely to emerge from the policymaking process and produce positive results. On the contrary, political systems that discourage those governing features are less likely to produce reforms. This chapter compares financial reform processes in China, Taiwan and New Zealand. All of them performed low level of financial reforms in the early 1980s but resulted in different situations later. In the mid-2000s, New Zealand heralded the most efficient and stable financial system; while Taiwan lagged behind and China performed the worst. Evidence showed that China’s authoritarian system may be the most superior in forming a unified government with a strong executive, but the policy priority often responds more to the interests of a small group of power elites; therefore the result of financial reform can be limited. Taiwan’s presidential system can produce greater financial reform when the ruling party controls both executive and legislative bodies, but legislative obstructions may occur under a divided government. New Zealand's Westminster system produces the most effective and efficient financial reform due to its unified government and a strong executive branch with consistent and stable supports from the New Zealand Parliament.

Political risk is a complex phenomenon. This complexity has incentivized scholars to take a piecemeal approach to understanding it. Nearly all scholarship has targeted a single type of political risk (expropriation) and, within this risk, a single type of firm (MNCs) and a single type of strategic mechanism through which that risk may be mitigated (entry mode). Yet “political risk” is actually a collection of multiple distinct risks that affect the full spectrum of foreign firms, and these firms vary widely in their capabilities for resisting and evading these risks. We offer a unified theoretical model that can simultaneously analyze: the three main types of political risk (war, expropriation, and transfer restrictions); the universe of private foreign investors (direct investors, portfolio equity investors, portfolio debt investors, and commercial banks); heterogeneity in government constraints; and the three most relevant strategic capabilities (information, exit, and resistance). We leverage the variance among foreign investors to identify effective firm strategies to manage political risk. By employing a simultaneous and unified model of political risk, we also find counterintuitive insights on the way governments trade off between risks and how investors use other investors as risk shields.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the positive development experienced in the telecom sector since 2001 when neutral licensing was granted to the Global System Mobile Communication operators (MTN, Vmobile, Globacom and Mtel) to operate for five years.

Discusses the unified licensing regime in Nigeria.

At its expiration a new licensing order; unified licensing regime was introduced by the Nigeria Communication Commission to replace the neutral license. The introduction of the unified licensing means an advancement in the country's information and communication technology (ICT) development. This technological advancement will make the nation e‐ready in the communication arena and further help to shrink the international divide.

The paper proviedes insights into how unified licensing has acted as a facilitator for ICT empowerment and national development in Nigeria.

In 2001, the first municipal consolidation occurred in over 100 years in Michigan between two cities and one village in Michigan's rural Upper Peninsula, forming the City of Iron River. The three units of government combined to have a population of 3,391 within the newly incorporated boundaries. Driving the consolidation was continual population loss and erosion of the economic tax base of the individual municipal governments since the 1960s. This study sought to assess whether, five years after the consolidation, the governments had saved money as compared to a peer group of governments in Michigan. The findings indicate that the new city of Iron River was able to provide some evidence of cost control and savings following the consolidation.

The former municipality of Metropolitan Toronto was Canada’s largest government and a unique body. It was abolished on 31 December 1997 and a new unified City was ushered in on 1 January 1998. It consists of all the former municipalities of the Metropolitan Council and has reduced the former two‐tier system to a single tier. There was considerable opposition initially to the establishment of a unicity by local politicians and the citizenry at large. This has to be seen against a background of general opposition to some of the policy decisions of the Ontario Provincial Government at that particular point in time. Despite the opposition, legislation was enacted establishing the new City. The councillors initially elected in late 1997, the top management team of the Council and virtually all the residents have since accepted the decision on unification and have committed themselves to building the new City. The transition team appointed by the Province and the political and management component of Toronto have done considerable groundwork in developing the unified City to meet present and future challenges locally, regionally and internationally. The amalgamation of the municipalities has resulted in savings of $150 million resulting from inter alia, reduction of departments and divisions, staff, information technology systems, office space, consolidating of the corporate fleet and the City Service Boards. It should be noted that amalgamated programmes only constituted 27 per cent of the budget of the new City. However, coincidental with the amalgamation process was the implementation of the “Who Does What” policy introduced by the provincial government and the Council had to take on significant additional responsibilities. Provincial assistance was provided by way of a one‐off grant of $50 million and a $200 million loan. Consequently, any actual savings achieved initially will have to be viewed in this context.