Management of estuarine beaches on the Amazon coast though the application of recreational carrying capacity indices

The purpose of this paper is to determine the Recreational Carrying Capacity of three estuarine beaches (Colares, Marudá and Murubira) on the Amazon coast of Brazil, based on the combined assessment of natural conditions and visitor facilities. In the final analysis, the carrying capacity of Colares beach was estimated to be 1089 visitors per day, and that of Murubira beach, 238 visitors per day. At Marudá beach, however, the inadequate quality of the water resulted in an RCC of zero, indicating that the beach should not be visited for recreational use. The results of this study may provide a valuable diagnostic tool for the development of future state and municipal coastal management programs. We believe that the procedures adopted in this study are applicable to other estuarine beaches on the Amazon coast, as well as in other estuarine beaches elsewhere with similar natural characteristics.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Economic Transformation and the Return to Human Capital - The Case of Hungary, 1986-1996

Millions of East-Europeans started businesses during the transformational recession but, according to a wide-spread interpretation, many of them did so only temporarily and 'unwillingly' under the threat of unemployment. The paper looks at the relevance of the 'disguised unemployment approach to entrepreneurship' using regional data.It first examines how net flows into self-employment were affected by corporate labour demand in Hungarian and Romanian regions. Second, it looks at the responses of self-employment and unemployment to increases in labour demand at later stages of the transition. Finally,.it makes attempts to measure the 'wage push' of selfemployment. The evidence suggests that self-employment and unemployment were guided by rather different forces In Hungary. By contrast, the Romanian agriculture absorbed a non-trivial proportion of the potential unemployed following the unique land reform and the introduction of a restrictive UI system. The data suggest larger flows into self-employment in regions hit hard by the transition shock but they do not indicate net flows from self-employment back to paid employment in the few Romanian regions where labour demand was rising between 1993 and 1996. The pool of private farmers failed to behave as a 'reserve army' in this period and did not have strong influence on wage claims at the enterprise sector.

A global review of the expansion of multinational healthcare companies

There are some common patterns of expansion among healthcare multinational companies throughout the world. Many are diversifying away from just delivering healthcare to providing health insurance and other financial infrastructure

Economic Cooperation and Regional Integration in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS)

Following a brief survey of the various economic cooperation programs and initiatives in which countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) - particularly Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Myanmar and Vietnam (CLMV) - are engaged, this paper examines the extent to which GMS economies have coveraged and become integrated, among themselves but also with other ASEAN countries. Preliminary evidence of stakeholders' involvement in selected subregional cooperation initiatives in also presented. Although all GMS countries have experienced rapid growth over the past 15 years, no evidence is found that participation of CLMV in subregional cooperation and integration initiatives has led to a narrowing of the gap between the least and most developed GMS and ASEAN countries. While significant progress has been made in reducing poverty, within-country inequality also increased during that period. In addition, while intra-GMS and intra-ASEAN trade both increased, trade of Cambodia and Lao PDR with other GMS or ASEAN countries remain small. If the various subregional cooperation frameworks are to significantly reduce the development gap among members, activities more directly aimed at this objective may need to be emphasized. Re-thinking institutional arrangements for regional cooperation at both the national and subregional/regional levels may be considered in order to facilitate participation of a more representative set of stakeholders in the prioritization of activities and to ensure synergies between the various initiatives can be captured.GMS, subregional trade and investment, regional integration, ASEAN, bilateral agreements, economic cooperation, stakeholder participation.

Examining the trip experience on competitive advantage creation in tourism

Researchers thanked for the support by Directorate of Research and Community Service. Directorate General of Strengthening Research and Development. Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education of Indonesia for the funding in year 2019.Purpose: This study aims to examine the trip experience on competitive advantage creation in Indonesia tourism. Trip experience includes transportation, accommodation, tour guide, and tourism activities. Design/Methodology/Approach: The research population consists of all international tourists who visited Indonesia through Soekarno Hatta International Airport (Jakarta) and Ngurah Rai International Airport (Bali). The questionnaire was constructed in English and translated into Arabic and Mandarin. Convenience sampling techniques were used to collect data. Out of 500 questionnaires distributed, only 415 were valid and used for analysis. Partial Least Square by SMART-PLS 3.0 software was used for data analysis. Findings: Result shows that transportation, accommodation and tourist activities are positively significant factors on tourist loyalty and mediated by tourist satisfaction. Whereas, tour guides have positively but not significant influence on tourist loyalty and mediated by tourist satisfaction. Practical implications: The study provides a practical implication which requires a close relationship of state governments and tourism companies in order to have good cooperative and coordination to competitive advantage creation. Originality/Value: As this study is based on recent studies on tourism destination in competitive advantage creation it brings a new insight of analyzing the two cities of highest tourists visits in order to understand the condition of overall Indonesian tourism.peer-reviewe

An Active Server Pages (ASP) Approach in Ecotourism Rating Expert System

The environment is the backbone of tourism products. Profitability in tourism depends on maintaining the attractiveness of the tourist destinations. Malaysia is a tropical wonderland that is substantially rich in a variety of ecological pursuits and certainly of much tourist potential. Hence, the status of the environment plays a critical role if the industry is to sustain itself. The ecotourism concept emphasises the maximisation of the ecological interest areas. This aspect, while having vast potential for further development and exploitation, has not received adequate attention in Malaysia. All ecotourism sites must be planned, guided and exploited in a monitored and controlled manner for effective and efficient management. A systematic expert rating system is developed to maintain a certain level of standards based on different levels of categorisation to ensure the sustainability of ecotourism sites in Peninsular Malaysia. The expert system developed uses a web-based information sharing platform in line with the existing legislation on safety, health and environment. The system is designed and developed on a back-end on-line database, which will keep record of all successful transactions. This paper presents an efficient model using Active Server Pages scripting method to manage and deliver the ecotourism rating expert system

Greening Historic DC: Challenges and Opportunities to Incorporate Historic Preservation into the District\u27s Drive for Sustainable Development

This paper focuses primarily on the District of Columbia, a city with a robust past and a bold agenda for a sustainable future. However, it may not be obvious why historic preservation - a movement typically concerned with aesthetics - can play an integral role in a city\u27s sustainability initiative. Therefore, this paper first sets forth the basic argument why historic preservation can be a tool to promote sustainable development. Part II examines the scientific data indicating that historic preservation is a green building practice. Next, Part III posits that investment in historic districts is an investment in sustainability. Then, Part IV gives an overview of the recent efforts by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to bolster this argument, including the National Trust\u27s collaboration with the U.S. Green Building Council, which has yielded significant changes to the LEED rating system. The remainder of this paper focuses on the efforts of the District. This paper identifies challenges and opportunities for the city\u27s historic preservation program as the city commits to a sustainable future

The importance of Lifestyle entrepreneurship: A conceptual study of the tourism industry

The purpose of the paper is to explore and discuss the emergence of lifestyle entrepreneurship. The article addresses the question of the relationship between entrepreneur’s life quality and enterprise growth. The purpose is to conceptualize this relationship and to learn more about lifestyle entrepreneurship. Tourism serves as a case industry to illustrate both relevant research in the field of lifestyle entrepreneurship and a conceptual framework to examine the relationship between entrepreneurial activities and perceived life quality. The paper delivers a literature review on entrepreneurship and certain forms of entrepreneurship and conceptualizes lifestyle enterprise’s growth.

A Multi-Engine Approach to Answer Set Programming

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a truly-declarative programming paradigm proposed in the area of non-monotonic reasoning and logic programming, that has been recently employed in many applications. The development of efficient ASP systems is, thus, crucial. Having in mind the task of improving the solving methods for ASP, there are two usual ways to reach this goal: $(i)$ extending state-of-the-art techniques and ASP solvers, or $(ii)$ designing a new ASP solver from scratch. An alternative to these trends is to build on top of state-of-the-art solvers, and to apply machine learning techniques for choosing automatically the "best" available solver on a per-instance basis. In this paper we pursue this latter direction. We first define a set of cheap-to-compute syntactic features that characterize several aspects of ASP programs. Then, we apply classification methods that, given the features of the instances in a {\sl training} set and the solvers' performance on these instances, inductively learn algorithm selection strategies to be applied to a {\sl test} set. We report the results of a number of experiments considering solvers and different training and test sets of instances taken from the ones submitted to the "System Track" of the 3rd ASP Competition. Our analysis shows that, by applying machine learning techniques to ASP solving, it is possible to obtain very robust performance: our approach can solve more instances compared with any solver that entered the 3rd ASP Competition. (To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).)Comment: 26 pages, 8 figure