Law market forces underlying international jurisdictional competition: the case of Taiwan's regulatory evolution on outward investment in mainland China, 1997-2008

This dissertation seeks to explore how basic law market demand and supply forces (or underlying exit and voice rights), interplaying under international jurisdictional competition among global legal centers, shape regulations laid down by such a democratically-constrained onshore jurisdiction as Taiwan. The thesis in this dissertation is that jurisdictional competition brought about by physical mobility would provoke a change in local laws. In general, the case study of Taiwan???s regulatory evolution on outward investment in Mainland China (???China-Investment???) from 1997 to 2008 further examines the extent to which jurisdictional competition fuelled by physical mobility may drive local legal changes. In particular, this case study is to test the process by which constraints on excessive regulation would be imposed by international jurisdictional competition stimulated by business demands and fuelled by physical mobility. To begin with, after incorporating basic theories involving the law market and so forth, I draw lessons from corporate charter competitions in the 19-century U.S. and contemporary Europe as well as the negative effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 on foreign issuers, that jurisdictional competition constrains regulating jurisdictions from disregarding business demands and from imposing excessive regulation, and that jurisdictional competition brought about by mobility or exit would push for legal flexibility. Subsequently, this case study first displays a stage-by-stage liberalization of the regulation on China-Investment, generally from strictly mandatory to much more flexible legal regimes. This phenomenon could demonstrate the output of market interactions between demand and supply sides of the international law market among global legal centers. Specifically, this dissertation gives a causal interpretation that business demands of Taiwanese firms, via their exit and voice rights, galvanize the relaxation transitions of Taiwan???s Capital Controls, while arriving at a positive conclusion that the usual demand and supply forces operating in this international jurisdictional competition, which was stimulated by Taiwan-invested firms??? business demands and fuelled by concomitant physical mobility, may have the effect of nudging the Taiwanese government in the direction of relaxing the regulation on China-Investment. Although Taiwan???s government struggled to regulate China-Investment as effectively as possible, it failed after all due to the impacts of globalization in general and the denationalization of financial capital in particular. This, on the other hand, suggests that the fact that the international jurisdictional competition provoked by the heightened physical mobility under economic globalization turned the regulation all but ineffective has much to do with the stage-by-stage liberalization. Finally, even though proving a causal relationship is a challenge, this dissertation could, at the very least after ruling out major alternative theories, find a strong correlation between international jurisdictional competition and the stage-by-stage liberalization

The Teaching Case For Product Management In The Electronic Component Industry -Using Company Was A Case Study

Company W is one of the biggest Electronic Component Distributors in Taiwan. In the electronic component industry, W company plays a buffer role between upstream and downstream companies. It coordinates order quantity and production time. In addition, it can also reduce loss caused by uncertain situations like urgent or rescheduling orders. While an electronic component distributor may face many uncertain situations, product managers in the company face tremendous challenges in making ordering decisions. Currently, product managers in the W company only depend on their experience and intuition to make choices. In other words, W company does not have a clear rule or method to educate their product managers. According to Harvard Business Publishing (2015), “using case method teaching can let students enjoy the lively, participatory nature of an approach that enables them to play an active role in the learning process.” Thus, W company collaborates with us to design a teaching case for their product managers. Roberts, M. J. (2001) pointed out some tips for writing a good case. In addition to prepare an outline, it is important to use a time line for understand the logical relationships between events. Simulation can easily be built in case by means of spreadsheet or data, which is available over the web as “courseware”. Analysis of financial data is often helpful to make available in spreadsheet. There are many teaching cases on Harvard Business Pub.. Gourville, J. T. (2011) made a pricing simulation software to simulate rental car agency. Students can check the dashboard to overview several cities’ market share and set each price to maximize inventory and profit. For every pricing decision, students must consider competitive reactions. Instructors can help students using varied scenarios to experience different pricing challenges. Other teaching cases like Hammond, J. H. (1994) extended beer game to a board version that made it easier to understand how supply chains work. Frei, F. X., & Shapiro, R. D. (2009) used some simulation models teaching in executive education programs. Students can increase their intuition and understand core operation concepts via group discussing. Mollick, E. (2014) has developed simulation for students to learn starting a new company. While incorporating simulation and games into teaching case is helpful for students to understand difficult concepts, rules and theories,.We aim to use this approach to design our teaching case for students to understand how to determine order amount and time in an uncertain environment. We started this research in July, 2015. Our research plan will go through one year and be divided into three stages. First, we will conduct interviews with product managers in W companies. In this stage, our goal is to identify questions for students and prepare potential answers. Second, we will incorporate the questions and answers into a simulation or game. We will invite employees to test the simulation model and refine it. At the last stage, we will prepare teaching tutorial to illustrate the theories and concepts behind the simulation model and the teaching goals of this case. We expect this research will deliver three outputs: 1. The implicit knowledge about ordering amount and time extracted from from product managers. 2. A case with simulation and gaming design. 3. A teaching tutorial that illustrates how to use the case to educate product managers

Shedding New Light on Multinational Corporations and Human Rights: Promises and Limits of “Blockchainizing” the Global Supply Chain

Over the last few decades, advances in transportation and production technology, in conjunction with economic globalization and the emergence of multinational corporations, have consolidated fragmented production processes into long and complex supply chains across jurisdictions. While there are benefits to such global supply chains (“GSCs”), the prevalence of human rights violations attributable to information asymmetry, as well as rule of law gaps between different jurisdictions, has been a constant challenge. Modern slavery, child abuse, harsh working conditions, low wages, and other problems have reoccurred in the factories of upstream suppliers in the global South and have been systemically ignored by buyers in the global North. As such, how to alleviate human rights abuses along GSCs is indeed a daunting problem. Today, various public, private, and hybrid approaches have been designed and implemented at different levels by different actors to address GSC human rights challenges, such as the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“UNGPs”), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (“OECD”) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act, the United States’ Dodd-Frank Act, the Responsible Business Alliance Codes of Conduct, and the Social Accountability 8000 International Standard. However, these public, private, and hybrid governance mechanisms have grown more ineffective and inefficient due to—again—information asymmetry, and rule of law gaps. A stronger approach that is premised upon transparency and traceability in the GSC is urgently needed. To fill these gaps, the recent emergence of distributed ledger technologies (commonly referred to as blockchain) may offer a promising disintermediation step toward a “technological fix” to GSCs’ human rights challenges. To assess such a possibility from both a theoretical and a practical perspective, we first examine in Section II the characteristics, benefits, and cross-border spillover effects of GSCs, as well as human rights violations by multinational corporations and their power and responsibilities. Section III illuminates the ineffectiveness of existing governance models and regulatory measures, at both the international and national levels, and identifies information asymmetry and rule of law gaps as fundamental flaws. This finding leads us to examine the extent to which blockchain can serve as a governance tool along GSCs. Section IV discusses how the key features of blockchain—transparency, traceability, data consistency and security, authenticity, and completeness—can alleviate problems of information asymmetry, rule of law gaps, and corporate compliance along GSCs, further helping to ameliorate transnational human rights issues. Nevertheless, while “blockchainizing” GSCs seems to have the potential to overcome challenges of public and private governance, some normative and technical limits and risks remain to be addressed, such as adequate infrastructural support, scalability, cybersecurity, and the “garbage in, garbage out” conundrum

What Conflict Minerals Rules Tell Us about the Legal Transplantation of Corporate Social Responsibility Standards without the State: From the United Nations to the United States to Taiwan

To resolve global political and scholarly concerns over conflict minerals (“CM”) produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring regions, two kinds of CM-related disclosure rules (or “CM rules”) come into play in regulating their use: government-mandated laws such as Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act in the United States (hereinafter “Sec. 1502”) and transnational voluntary codes such as the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (“EICC”) Code of Conduct. The creation of both of these CM rules could be attributed to the promotion of such concerns by the United Nations. This article is the first attempt to unpack and closely consider the process of two distinct types of CM rules that are probably transplanted into Taiwan through global supply chains. This article joins a growing body of literature that deepens our understanding of the channels and objects of legal transplants. The findings of the Taiwanese case study are important for two reasons. First, in terms of the transplant process or channels, some Taiwanese companies have started to follow CM rules due to their supply contracts, demonstrating that applicable CM rules might have been transplanted into Taiwan through private channels such as supply contracts, rather than through the formal public channels of legal transplantation initiated by the government. Second, but just as importantly, with regard to transplanted objects, what further distinguishes this article from prior studies is that the Taiwanese case study could indicate that Taiwanese suppliers comply with CM rules established by the EICC more prevalently than those promulgated under the Dodd-Frank Act. If so, this would imply that when it comes to adopting or implementing transnational corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) standards in suppliers’ countries or jurisdictions, private CSR standards written by non-governmental organizations (“NGOs”) or industries themselves in a bottom-up approach are more effective or more easily accepted than public standards such as state laws enacted by a foreign/national government in a top-down approach

Communications and Interfaces in Implementation of e-Bid System: A Case Study for Governmental Procurement in EC

While the computer network is very popular in many applications, anything is always electronically rebuilt to pursue higher value. This is an era of information technology, computers and networks are linked together to reform the society, all fields of business administration are generally reengineering through the adoption of information and technology. One of the new requirements is the bid system operated in Internets. Because the huge cost and inconvenience in managing paper-based bid system, e-bid system is then required. A research team of professors is formed and get the grant from National Science Council (NSC) to design and implement the e-bid system for three years. The objective is to develop an e-bid system with features of fairness, justice and opening. This paper explains overall design of the e-bid system; all tasks in development of e-bid system are partitioned to five subprojects. The functions of interfaces and communications are in charge by us, we have the primary concern to design and implement an easy and friendly operational interfaces and secure communications for external users. With three basic characteristics of the proposed e-bid system, we hope that the proposed e-bid system may be applicable for all governmental procurements

Design and Development of the Reactive BGP peering in Software-Defined Routing Exchanges

The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is considered to be an improved solution for applying flexible control and operation recently in the network. Its characteristics include centralized management, global view, as well as fast adjustment and adaptation. Many experimental and research networks have already migrated to the SDN-enabled architecture. As the global network continues to grow in a fast pace, how to use SDN to improve the networking fields becomes a popular topic in research. One of the interesting topics is to enable routing exchanges among the SDN-enabled network and production networks. However, considering that many production networks are still operated on legacy architecture, the enabled SDN routing functionalities have to support hybrid mode in operation. In this paper, we propose a routing exchange mechanism by enabling reactive BGP peering actions among the SDN and legacy network components. The results of experiments show that our SDN controller is able to mask as an Autonomous System (AS) to exchange routing information with other BGP routers

Influence of electrode thermal conductivity on resistive switching behavior during reset process

Resistive random access memory (RRAM) is the most promising candidate for non-volatile memory (NVM) due to its extremely low operation voltage, extremely fast write/erase speed, and excellent scaling capability. However, an obstacle hindering mass production of RRAM is the non-uniform physical mechanism in its resistance switching process. This study examines the influence of different electrode thermal conductivity on switching behavior during the reset process. Electrical analysis methods and an analysis of current conduction mechanism indicate that better thermal conductivity in the electrode will require larger input power in order to induce more active oxygen ions to take part in the reset process. More active oxygen ions cause a more complete reaction during the reset process, and cause the effective switching gap (dsw) to become thicker. The effect of the electrode thermal conductivity and input power are explained by our model and clarified by electrical analysis methods. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Genome-wide analysis of the cis-regulatory modules of divergent gene pairs in yeast

AbstractIn budding yeast, approximately a quarter of adjacent genes are divergently transcribed (divergent gene pairs). Whether genes in a divergent pair share the same regulatory system is still unknown. By examining transcription factor (TF) knockout experiments, we found that most TF knockout only altered the expression of one gene in a divergent pair. This prompted us to conduct a comprehensive analysis in silico to estimate how many divergent pairs are regulated by common sets of TFs (cis-regulatory modules, CRMs) using TF binding sites and expression data. Analyses of ten expression datasets show that only a limited number of divergent gene pairs share CRMs in any single dataset. However, around half of divergent pairs do share a regulatory system in at least one dataset. Our analysis suggests that genes in a divergent pair tend to be co-regulated in at least one condition; however, in most conditions, they may not be co-regulated

The Internal Audit Performance: The Effectiveness of ERM and IT Environments

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors determining the performance of the internal audit (IA) in the context of internal auditors’ work environments. This includes Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) implementation, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, the use of auditing software and the internal auditors’ IT (information technology) competence. Although a number of recent studies have reported tremendous changes in the roles of the IA, there is still little research on the influential factors of IA implementation and its effectiveness from a contextual perspective. This paper develops and tests a theoretical framework with samples from Taiwan. Data were analyzed using the structural equation model (SEM). This research confirms that the complete ERM implementation and effectiveness of ERP implementation have significant impacts on the performance of IA. It also highlights the importance of internal auditors’ IT competence in improving the performance of IA

Jaundice, occult blood and acute cholecystitis: hemobilia as the initial presentation of acute cholecystitis complicated by a pseudoaneurysm

Identifying the presence of hemobilia can be clinically important since it might change the therapeutic approach to patient management. Here, we report a 56-year-old man with clinical symptoms of acute cholecystitis. Multidetector-row computed tomography of the abdomen showed a ruptured pseudoaneurysm arising from the right hepatic artery. Angiography, with transarterial coil embolization of the pseudoaneurysm, was performed before surgery to reduce the risk of hemostatic complications