In coalitions, parties tend to receive their proportional share of ministries

Coalitions are the norm across Europe, where proportional electoral systems tend to be the norm and majority governments are thus scarce. Here, Cristina Bucur looks at ‘who gets what’ and finds that, when the importance of cabinet posts is taken into account, small and big parties alike tend to receive their fair share of the ministerial prize

COMPETITION BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM) AND MARKETING

Knowledge management has become, in recent years, a starting point for those that deal with business strategies, providing the opportunity to achieve competitive advantage and a great long-term increase of the organizational efficiency. The formation of a knowledge strategy appropriate to the economic realities enables organizations, whatever their nature, not only to survive but also in their future development. On a practical level it can be said that knowledge management works like an organization inside the other organizations. The competitiveness of implementation of the knowledge management and marketing strategy is currently, and in the future, one of the viable ways by which the maximum efficiency can mobilize resources in order to meet the full needs of individuals, communities and of the whole society. This approach may be a modern solution of knowledge and prevention of economic risk under its various forms, but also a performance guarantee in an activity. The purpose of this approach is to present a number of characteristics in a synthetic manner of knowledge management, bringing attention to the concept of adaptive management and the influences and intersections that are found in relation to the marketing process in the organizational environment.knowledge management, adaptive management, information, marketing implementation, dissemination, collaborative education, organizational environment

The development of the French executive: endogenous Americanization

In the context of current debates about the presidentialization and personalization of politics, this review discusses the Americanization of presidential politics in France. Two specific areas are reviewed: the personalization of French presidential elections, and the presidentialization of the executive decision-making process. The discussion focuses on a set of features that are usually associated with the US system, such as the relatively recent adoption of primary elections, the programmatic differences between presidential candidates and their parties, and their increasingly centrist policies. By contextualizing this analysis within the development of the Fifth Republic, we emphasize the endogenous roots of the apparently Americanized practices of the French executive and their full adaptation to the French institutional context

A new proposal for efficiency quantification of capital markets in the context of complex non-linear dynamics and chaos

The main purpose of this paper is efficiency analysis as well as its quantification in the case of emerging capital markets, by building a new measure of market efficiency. The basic assumption of such markets is the lack of correlation between returns, and therefore the existence of low entropy, the lack of randomness, manifestation of fractality and long-term memory, integrated into a single measure, will indicate the distancing from the state of efficient market. This paper proposes five different estimates (for informational entropy, run test, Hurst exponent, long-term correlation coefficient and fractal dimension) to construct a new measure of market efficiency based on a deviation from the ideal state (expressed by the efficient market). The Capital Market Efficiency Exponent is estimated for nine emerging capital markets and, for comparison, for three developed capital markets, at different stages of development over a 16-year time span

ASPECTS OF FINANCIAL EQUILIBRIUM ANALYSIS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS IN MANAGEMENT DECISIONS

Considering the impact of risk factors in the economic environment, this study provides to all users of financial information a possible pattern for analyzing the financial equilibrium, designed to clarify the importance of dynamic analysis of indicators characterizing the financial equilibrium of an enterprise, expressed on absolute values, especially for managers in decision-making on future work, aimed at achieving pre-established strategic and tactical objectives. Practice has shown that the management cannot be based on intuition and routine but on a scientific analysis, on a thorough knowledge of the existing situation, as well as on the identification of vulnerabilities and opportunities for development. In order to promote a rational policy concerning business growth and achieving economic and financial satisfactory results, the company’s management grants a special importance to the financial diagnosis. The support of financial analysis is the balance sheet that allows developing financial diagnosis on the financial equilibrium conditions and creditworthiness, objectives that allow the evaluation of the independence of the firm and its market value

Who fires ministers? A principal-agent approach to ministerial deselection

Despite extensive research on government and ministerial duration, there are still relatively few comparative studies of ministerial survival and accountability. This thesis uses the analytical tools provided by the agency theory to study the variation in the length of ministerial tenure and makes an original contribution to the study of this topic from two points of view. First, whereas earlier literature studied cabinet members solely as prime ministerial agents, this thesis explicitly adopts a three-principal-agent model to analyse the accountability of cabinet ministers to their own parties, directly-elected presidents, and prime ministers. For this reason, the variation in the length of ministerial tenure is analysed in countries with semi-presidential constitutions, which maximise the intra- and inter-case variation in principal-agent relationships. Adopting an interactionist view on the factors that explain the variation in the ability of presidents, prime ministers, and parties to control cabinet members in semi-presidential systems, we expect that the ministers’ survival in office depends on the interaction between institutional scenarios and party relationships between the minister, the president and the prime minister. The second contribution of this thesis is empirical. A unique data set on the tenures of French, Portuguese and Romanian ministers during two legislative terms has been collected in order to test these theoretical expectations. In addition to fixed characteristics at the moment of appointment, the data set records resignation calls and conflicts between ministers and their principals. This data allow one to measure the variation in the political influence of presidents, prime ministers and political parties that is not easily observable. The results indicate that principals who act as de facto party leaders are more likely to control the process of ministerial deselection under certain institutional scenarios. Such a study is important because it addresses the link between institutional design and political accountability and emphasises the extra- constitutional factors accounting for the variation in political practices across and within similar institutional frameworks over time

Non-ambient FTIR study of thermally treated seashells

A large quantity of waste seashells (millions of tons) is discarded annually after mollusc consumption, which becomes a problem for the environment worldwide as these shells are a habitat for microbes which could turn into a public health issue [1]. On the other hand, waste shell biomaterials need a small amount of energy for recycling and processing into useful products for various applications. Calcium carbonate is essential in biomineralization, where it is the primary constituent of mollusc shells, crustacean cuticles, corals etc. In its pure form, it occurs naturally, under normal temperature and pressure conditions, in three anhydrous crystalline forms, namely calcite, aragonite and vaterite [2]. At high pressures, two further forms, namely calcite II and calcite III, are formed. The most stable form of calcium carbonate at atmospheric pressure and room temperature is calcite. The presence of both calcite and aragonite is very frequent in biologically produced calcium carbonate minerals. Though aragonite is metastable in aqueous solution, it can nucleate [3]. Aragonite is found in the nacre of the shells of bivalve molluscs, which provide a protection for these animals [4]. From the study of the marine bivalve species Mercenaria mercenaria and Crassostrea gigas, Weiner et al. [5] have shown that amorphous calcium carbonate is a precursor phase of aragonite. The present study, which is part of our efforts to convert seashells into useful products like hydroxyapatite, investigates the temperature influence on the calcite and aragonite in a processed shell sample by using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR)

Incubation-based hydroxyapatite synthesis method using shells as Ca2+ source

Hydroxyapatite, the well-known calcium phosphate, was obtained on the surface of shells fragments by partial conversion of the latter, which served both as template and also provided the calcium ions required for synthesis. Confirmation of hydroxyapatite formation was acquired by recording and analyzing X-ray diffraction patterns. The degree to which the phosphate ions were consumed during the incubation-based synthesis was determined using a phosphate minicolorimeter, and the results indicate that a nucleation process takes place in the first 4 hours