Brunei economy

Brunei Darussalam is a small, oil- and gas-dependent economy, which is continuing to strive for economic diversification and attempting to reduce its dependence on non-renewable resources. The sultanate has good physical infrastructure; free high-quality health care and education for its citizens; no personal income tax or sales taxes; heavily subsidized retail prices for petrol, diesel, electricity, rice and sugar that have remained unchanged for many years; and a relatively high material standard of living

KBE frameworks and their applicability to a resource-based country: The case of Brunei Darussalam

Knowledge is generally considered to be one of the most important drivers of economic growth. The difference between a knowledge-based economy (KBE) and a resource-based one is that in the former, the main competition between individuals, firms, and countries is the ability to innovate. Other forms of competition, for example through pricing strategies and access to resources, become secondary. Generally, knowledge is information combined with technology that dramatically increases its impact when shared. Organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC), Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the World Bank Institute (WBI) have developed different KBE frameworks to indicate the extent of countries' knowledge base and implicitly to guide policy. But these frameworks have little in theoretical underpinnings and applying them universally across all countries in different regions, at different stages of development and with different institutional, social and economic characteristics may be misleading and result in inappropriate policy responses. In this paper we propose a framework that clearly distinguishes input-output indicators of a knowledge-based economy under four important dimensions: knowledge acquisition, knowledge production, knowledge distribution and knowledge utilization, and attempt to adapt them in a practical policy oriented approach for an economy like Brunei Darussalam, which is attempting to transform from a resource-based to a knowledge-based economy

Contemporary Efforts to Guarantee Indigenous Rights Under International Law

This Article examines recent attempts to improve international standards governing the rights of indigenous peoples. In this context, Ms. Lawrey analyzes the Australian Government\u27s 1988 commitment to negotiate a treaty with Australia\u27s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Ms. Lawrey discusses the strained relationship between international law and indigenous peoples. At present, indigenous groups are not guaranteed special rights under international law. Furthermore, traditional individual rights are inadequate to effectively protect indigenous land rights and the right to self-determination. Ms. Lawrey identifies developments in indigenous rights since World War II, including International Labor Organization Convention Number 107 (Convention 107) and the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Despite these advances, Ms. Lawrey indicates Convention 107 is of little practical value and that for the United Nations Working Group to succeed, it must effectively address the issues of land rights and self-determination and must recognize the importance of treaties to indigenous peoples. Ms. Lawrey also discusses the contemporary relevance of treaties, high-lighting the recurring conflicts between indigenous peoples and their national governments. In addition, Ms. Lawrey questions the practical value of treaties as guarantees of indigenous rights, as states are free to modify or terminate such treaties on a unilateral basis. Under this framework, Ms. Lawrey examines the Australian Aboriginal Treaty proposal against the background of the settled colony doctrine in Australia and its implications for Aboriginal rights. Aborigines have called for a solemn and binding negotiated treaty. Although the Australian Government publicly has committed itself to negotiate such an agreement, there are political difficulties to overcome before this commitment can be fulfilled. Ms. Lawrey concludes that a worthwhile Universal Declaration on indigenous rights must deal with the sensitive issue of indigenous self-determination in a way that is acceptable both to indigenous groups and national governments. She further concludes that for any domestic agreement on indigenous rights to be effective, it must include a credible guarantee that it will not be subject to unilateral modification or termination by future governments. Ms. Lawrey indicates that possible alternatives to this requirement include mandatory international oversight, international dispute settlement for a independent conciliation, and other methods of guaranteeing the binding character of treaties or agreements with indigenous peoples

Three Essays On Firm Liquidity Management

In Part 1, we study the costs associated with firm illiquidity. We specifically examine the impact of illiquidity on the costs of financing, financial distress, underinvestment, and competitiveness in product markets. We focus on a comprehensive definition of liquidity that expands upon the typical measure of liquidity, cash and marketable securities, commonly used in the management literature. Our liquidity index, derived from existing cash and marketable securities, available credit lines and cash volatility, measures the likelihood that a firm will become illiquid. Lastly, we address the endogeneity issue that plagues corporate literature linking firm performance to other firm attributes using a well-developed dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator. Our results indicate that illiquidity is associated with higher costs of financing, increased financial distress, and decreased competitive advantage. In Part 2, we examine the extent that firms utilize lines of credit to fund cash dividends. We find that higher dividend payouts are related to higher liquidity and dividend paying firms that experience cash shortages with utilize credit lines to continue dividend payments. Our sample statistics indicate that dividend paying firms are considerably different than non-payers. Dividend payers tend to be more liquid, despite having less cash, have smaller credit line balances, higher market capitalizations, less long-term debt, are more profitable, and spend less on capital investments. One of our keying findings indicates that liquidity is an important determinant of dividend payouts. In Part 3, we study the determinants of liquidity for 4,928 micro-firms surveyed by the Kauffman Foundation over the period 2004 – 2012. Female owned firms are more liquid, smaller, carry more inventories, and use less trade credit than male firms. White-owned firms are less liquid than Asian or African-American owned firms, while the Asian-owned are significantly larger than white- and African-American-owned, and the African-American-owned have the least inventory and land holdings. The most highly educated owners operated the largest firms, with the most equipment, and the least inventory and land. Firms with most experienced owners are the most liquid and largest. Additionally, we find that liquidity is negatively related to firm inventory levels and equipment holdings

A grazing incidence vacuum grating spectrograph for far ultra violet spectroscopy

Spectroscopy, in the region of the far ultraviolet from 100 Angstroms to 1000 Angstroms, requires special equipment and techniques, inasmuch as these wavelengths are highly absorbed by air. Many gases have resonant frequencies corresponding to the wavelengths mentioned and hence absorption bands appear in the spectrograms obtained by using spectrographs for the visible region. One solution of the problem of obtaining data in this region is to construct a spectrograph from which all intervening gas molecules have been removed, thus eliminating the absorbing material. A vacuum of 10⁻⁴ mm. of mercury is necessary to reduce the absorption to a value low enough to be neglible [sic] in effect. In addition to reducing absorption by gases, special methods of recording the spectral lines are required for these short wavelengths, as ordinary photographic film presents absorption by the gelatin of the film. A vacuum spectrograph capable of obtaining data in the far ultraviolet is a powerful tool in furthering our knowledge of atomic and molecular structure. Boyce shows the need for additional data in this region. It was felt that a vacuum spectrograph would provide a means of obtaining specific data which is nonexistent or incomplete, and construction of the instrument was undertaken --Introduction, page 1-2

Lichen Accumulation of Some Heavy Metals from Acidic Surface Substrates of Coal Mine Ecosystems in Southeastern Ohio

Author Institution: Department of Botany, The Ohio State Universit

Measuring The Importance And Efficiency Of Research And Development Expenditures In The Transformation Of Knowledge-based Economies: A Case Study Of The Asean Region

This paper presents an evaluation of the efficient use of public research and development (R&D) expenditure in the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The efficiency of public R&D expenditure is measured as a percentage of GDP, by considering it as an input to knowledge generation. Two knowledge outputs are considered, namely real GDP growth and high-tech goods export as a percentage of total manufacturing exports. All data are collected from World Development Indicators (2010), World Competitiveness Yearbook (2011) and ASEAN publications. The efficiency results are prepared following both constant returns to scale (CRS) and variable returns to scale (VRS) assumptions. The efficiency scores under CRS suggest that the Philippines and Indonesia were the best performers in 2010 while under VRS, Singapore and Thailand were the most efficient countries in 2010. Special emphasis is placed on how to present the DEA results to government and policy makers in order to provide more policy guidance on how to achieve optimum knowledge output relative to R&D expenditure

The Cross of Lorraine in the South Pacific

This study attempts to set the development of the Free French movement in the Pacific , and Australia's cooperation with it, in the context of the contemporary p olitical and strategic situation

Supplementary report to the final report of the coral reef expert group: S8. Monitoring site planner - choosing where to monitor coral reefs on the Great Barrier Reef

[Extract] In this project we develop a multi-criteria analysis and optimisation tool, called the Monitoring Site Planner, to assist in the evaluation of the existing and new proposed coral reef monitoring programs for the Great Barrier Reef (the Reef). This tool allows the performance of a given monitoring survey design (a set of reefs that will be monitored) to be evaluated against a set of performance criteria. This tool can be run as an interactive web application that is available for use from https://tools.eatlas.org.au/msp.An accessible copy of this report is not yet available from this repository, please contact [email protected] for more information

Practice of Triple Helix (TH) Model in Malaysian research universities (RU)

Innovation is one of the key elements of countries’ competitiveness. In the face of continuous world economic changes, the Triple Helix Model (University-Industry-Government) relationship allows many countries to improve and accelerate their innovation processes. In developing countries, which are in transition towards innovation-based economies, such as Malaysia, Triple Helix (TH) can serve as a tool to speed up this transition. This paper explores the implementation of Triple Helix to discover the extent of collaboration between companies and universities both on a global scale and particularly in Malaysia. The study uses a quantitative methodology based on an integrative analysis of literature, secondary data and results of a survey, conducted among four Malaysian research based universities. The research finds that the average performance of Malaysian research based public universities in the Triple Helix system is generally good. For individual universities this study finds that the National University of Malaysia (UKM) has performed above average, while University of Malaya (UM) shows below average performance among major research universities in Malaysia. The findings of this research highlight the need to solve the identified problems in parallel with implementation of the open innovation concept in university industry collaborations