The Korean Armistice of 1953 and its Consequences - Part I

Hoare: Both North and South Korea claim victory in the Korean War. Yet neither makes much of the ending of the war in July 1953, and both have had problems coming to terms with the reality of the war. The reality is that both suffered so much in a conflict that achieved little that formal celebrations seem inappropriate.Daniels: The outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 and the ferocious fighting which took place affected Britain, whose army took part in the war. This essay records the different shades of opinion expressed in its various newspapers/journals.Korea, Korean war, 1950, Korean armistice, commemoration, Britain, Japan, China, newspapers, museums, monuments.

Bridging the Divide: Principles for Healthy Corporate Social Responsibility Partnerships

In its infancy, corporate social responsibility (CSR) focused on environmental issues rather than the provision of a wider array of support to local communities. Today, CSR includes strong partnerships between multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Previous research has demonstrated that corporations that partner with NGOs are more visible to their key stakeholders. Through a longitudinal, in-depth study of Merck Thailand and the Raks Thai Foundation in Bangkok, Thailand, this case study identified best practices for a multinational company interested in partnering with a local NGO. From those practices, the research identified the key principles that sustain the partnership: leadership, communication, collaboration and innovation, competencies and culture, and sustainability. Leadership includes taking risks and being a visionary in order to build and sustain CSR partnerships. Communication includes external communication that occurs between the CSR partners and internal communications within each organization involved in the partnership. Competencies and culture involve identifying the skill levels necessary to sustain a successful CSR partnership and to identify cultural barriers between the partner organizations. Sustainability includes developing a long-term CSR partnership built on trust and mutual respect. These principles are useful to corporate and NGO executives who are interested in building sustainable relationships that can help their organizations meet the needs of their stakeholders

Optimal contracting and incentives for public transport in Sydney: what has been learned from the Sydney Metro experience?

The New South Wales (NSW) government created the Sydney Metro Authority to design, build and operate a completely separate underground Metro rail system to supplement the existing public transport network in Sydney. By the time the NSW government abruptly cancelled the entire Metro project in early 2010, the Authority had conceived and designed a contract that was proceeding to procurement. This paper examines the nature of the proposed Sydney Metro contract in relation to its performance framework and compares this to the frameworks in current contracts for bus, rail and ferry public transport in NSW. Against this background, the paper examines the extent to which the Sydney Metro approach has had an impact on subsequent public transport contracts in the context of the literature on optimal contracting and optimal incentives. The paper concludes that little has been implemented, although the other mode contracts now enable more performance measurement and incentivisation. In particular, the decision to award contracts to existing (and mostly public sector) operators appears to have acted as a brake on developing these performance elements

Underlying influences on health and mortality trends in post-industrial regions of Europe

This Thesis is part of a wider programme of work being pursued by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH) which is examining health outcomes in West Central Scotland and other post-industrial regions throughout Europe. Scotland‘s health has been improving since the industrial revolution but its position relative to improving trends within Europe has been deteriorating. This is recent, dating from the period since the Second World War and becoming more problematical over the past three decades. While deprivation is a fundamental determinant of health, in the case of Scotland (and particularly West Central Scotland (WCS)) it does not explain the entire extent of the higher levels of mortality. There is, of course, a well established link between deindustrialisation, deprivation and poor health. However, the unexplained additional mortality in Scotland and WCS (the Scottish Effect) compared to other similar post-industrial regions and the time scale of Scotland‘s worsening relative health status, require further investigation. Other research has examined this question using a range of well established public health principles and methods. This thesis adds to this understanding by providing a comparative analysis of the political and socioeconomic contexts for the observed mortality trends. Post-industrial change is discussed at three levels. These are (i) International regions – Eastern Europe and Western Europe (ii) Countries – Scotland within the UK is compared with two Eastern European (Poland and the Czech Republic) and two Western European (France and Germany) countries. (iii) Regions within countries that have been subject to deindustrialisation. Five post-industrial regions are investigated (West Central Scotland, The Ruhr, Germany, Nord Pas-de-Calais, France, Katowice, Poland and Northern Moravia, Czech Republic). These regions were selected because they are analogous in their experience of deindustrialisation but diverse in their political and socioeconomic histories. The main aim of the thesis is to determine what aspects of the political and socioeconomic context in WCS have diverged from comparable post-industrial regions of Europe and whether these might form the basis of potential explanations for the region‘s poor health record. Two methods were employed. First, a detailed narrative literature review was undertaken to examine political and socioeconomic change in the post-war period at the national level with a particular focus on policy responses to deindustrialisation. Second, case studies were conducted on the five regions listed above. These examined political and socioeconomic changes in each of the five regions in some detail using published data and a variety of literatures as source materials. In this way a rich but diverse picture of economic restructuring as a response to deindustrialisation emerged. Insights from the literature review and case studies were then brought together to formulate some conclusions about why health in WCS has suffered more adverse effects than in the other four regions. This thesis has shown that there was a broad correspondence between life expectancy and the socioeconomic/political success of states in Central East Europe and Western Europe during the 20th Century. When states prosper and their governments enjoy the confidence of the population, health improves. In all the countries covered in this analysis, deindustrialisation damaged health and slowed improvements in life expectancy (in some cases putting it into reverse). The institutional path dependencies and country-specific factors outlined in this thesis help to explain the divergence in policy responses and subsequent economic development that can be observed in each of the five regions and their parent countries. The five countries and regions have each taken a different approach to deindustrialisation, have varied in the levels of social protection provided and each manifests a very different context. In response to economic restructuring (and associated social costs), policy in WCS (and the UK) has focused primarily on narrow economic growth policies, emphasising employment and physical regeneration, but not social outcomes such as community cohesion and sustainability