The geography of international investment

Much foreign direct investment is between high-income countries, but investment in some developing and transition regions, while still modest, grew rapidly in the 1990s. Adjusting for market size, much investment stays close to home; adjusting for distance, much heads toward the countries with the biggest markets. Foreign direct investment is more geographically concentrated than either exports, or production. Thus, U.S. affiliate production in Europe, is 7 times US exports to Europe; that ratio drops to 4 for all industrial countries, and to 1.6 for developing countries. Multinational activity in high-income countries is overwhelmingly horizontal, involving production for sale to the host country market. In developing countries, a greater proportion of multinational activity is"vertical", involving manufacturing at intermediate stages of production. Thus, only four percent of US affiliate production in the European Union (EU) is sold back to the United States, whereas for developing countries, the figure is eighteen percent, rising to forty percent for Mexico. Similarly, less than ten percent of Japan's affiliate production in the EU is sold back to Japan, compared with more than twenty percent in developing countries. In models of horizontal activity, the decision to go multinational, is a tradeoff between the additional fixed costs involved in setting up a new plant, and the savings in variable costs (transport costs, and tariffs) on exports. In models of vertical activity, direct investment is motivated by differences in factor prices) and discourage it (by making trade between headquarters , and an affiliate more expensive). The major outward investors carry out much horizontal investment in large markets. For US investors, this means Europe, especially the United Kingdom; for Japan and Europe, it means the United States. Most EU investments, however, stay within the EU. The major outward investors carry out much of their vertical investment closer to home: the United States, in Mexico; the EU, in Central and Eastern Europe; Japan, in Asia.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Foreign Direct Investment,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Trade and Regional Integration

Theorising Leadership Authenticity: An Existentialist-Personalist Perspective

The purpose of this study is to describe authentic leadership theory (ALT), identify its philosophical limitations regarding the meaning of authenticity and what it is to be authentically human. The study also evaluates the contribution of three thinkers—the existentialists Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, and the personalist Karol Wojtyła—towards overcoming those limitations. This study straddles the fields of management and philosophy, combining management concepts regarding authentic leadership with the philosophical traditions of existentialism and personalism, to interrogate authenticity and authentic leadership. It finds that the existentialists Kierkegaard and Heidegger offer a more extensive understanding of authenticity than what the authentic leadership literature recognises. However, neither answers the ultimate questions regarding being authentic persons. Therefore, this study introduces an explicitly personalist thinker—Karol Wojtyła—who focuses on the meaning of the person and the person in relationship with other persons. Ultimately, the study finds the philosophical limitations within ALT cannot be overcome; rather, these limitations are exposed when the meaning of authenticity and what it means to be an authentic person are considered from an existentialist and personalist perspective. What is advanced as ‘authentic leadership theory’ has largely failed to understand the concept of authenticity and authenticity in regard to persons, leaders and leadership. This study contributes to the disciplines of management and philosophy in several ways. It reveals that in ALT, authenticity is a form of sincere autonomy and, thus, fundamentally in tension with leadership. The concept of fulfillment, which refers to becoming who and what one is, more adequately explains what is sought in authenticity—that persons are fulfilled by taking total responsibility for their choices and their actions. Further, leadership, which involves persons, is an intersubjective action of mutual service, between leader(s) and follower(s), in solidarity with one another for the common good. Thereby, people take full responsibility for themselves, others and their world, which then provides a framework for ethical behaviour. This understanding of leadership can be termed personalist leadership

Leviathan as Hobbes\u27s Narrative of Salvation

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Business and Public Affairs at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Public Administration by Michael Anthony Howard on April 25, 2011

Epidemiology and prevention of rugby injuries amongst schoolboy, senior club and provincial rugby players in the Western Cape

This thesis comprises a series of independent investigations examining rugby injuries occurring to players from under 14 to senior provincial level in the Cape Province (now the Western Cape). The first two studies report data aimed at gaining a more detailed understanding of rugby injuries in specific populations or under specific conditions, whilst the remainder of the thesis reports injury data from both a retrospective and a prospective epidemiological survey involving the same 3990 boys from 25 high schools. Following publication of data showing a progressive rise in the number of spinal cord injuries in the Western Cape, coupled with a sustained media attack on the attitudes of the (then) South African Rugby Board, certain experimental law changes were introduced to South African schoolboy rugby in 1990 and 1991. The purpose of the law changes was either to make the game safer or to make it more open and flowing, or both. Accordingly, the studies described in chapters 4 -8 set out to analyse the effects of these law changes on the incidence and nature of rugby injuries. This was accomplished by comparing data with a similar study conducted in 1983 and 1984 in the same 25 schools (Roux, 1992). The study reported in chapter 2 determined whether the use of neoprene (thermal) pants might reduce the risk of hamstring injury amongst 60 senior club rugby players, all of whom had previously sustained a hamstring muscle tear. The rationale was that the few seasons prior to this 1992 study had been characterised by an increasing use by rugby players of thermal or neoprene pants; a practice which seemed to have evolved spontaneously and without any scientific assessment of its value. We concluded that the wearing of thermal pants can reduce the risk of hamstring injury during rugby. However, other risk factors for injury are probably more important. These include levels of preseason physical fitness, correct warm up and stretching procedures before activity and adequate rehabilitation before returning to activity following injury. The objective of the study reported in chapter 3 was to determine the influence of preseason strength and endurance training on risk of injury in rugby players from two South African provincial teams during the 1992 rugby season. Players from one province followed a supervised scientifically-designed physical training programme, while those from the other did not follow a structured programme. The findings of the study, the first study to prove the relationship between pre-season preparation and early season injury, showed that inadequate pre-season endurance training is a major contributor to the high injury rate at the beginning of the season amongst provincial rugby players. Further, strength and endurance training are interrelated as risk factors. Thus, compared to players with adequate strength and endurance training, those with adequate strength training and insufficient endurance training are at greatest risk of injury, followed by players with insufficient strength and endurance training. It was also shown that contact practices 2 days after inter-provincial match contributed more to an increased number of injuries than to success; that "niggling" injuries may develop into more serious injury if players attempt to "play through" them; and that the lack of structured treatment and rehabilitation of an injury places players at risk of being re-injured

Learning Models for Following Natural Language Directions in Unknown Environments

Natural language offers an intuitive and flexible means for humans to communicate with the robots that we will increasingly work alongside in our homes and workplaces. Recent advancements have given rise to robots that are able to interpret natural language manipulation and navigation commands, but these methods require a prior map of the robot's environment. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework that enables robots to successfully follow natural language route directions without any previous knowledge of the environment. The algorithm utilizes spatial and semantic information that the human conveys through the command to learn a distribution over the metric and semantic properties of spatially extended environments. Our method uses this distribution in place of the latent world model and interprets the natural language instruction as a distribution over the intended behavior. A novel belief space planner reasons directly over the map and behavior distributions to solve for a policy using imitation learning. We evaluate our framework on a voice-commandable wheelchair. The results demonstrate that by learning and performing inference over a latent environment model, the algorithm is able to successfully follow natural language route directions within novel, extended environments.Comment: ICRA 201

Lunar Surface Scenarios: Habitation and Life Support Systems for a Pressurized Rover

Pressurized rovers will be a critical component of successful lunar exploration to enable safe investigation of sites distant from the outpost location. A pressurized rover is a complex system with the same functions as any other crewed vehicle. Designs for a pressurized rover need to take into account significant constraints, a multitude of tasks to be performed inside and out, and the complexity of life support systems to support the crew. In future studies, pressurized rovers should be given the same level of consideration as any other vehicle occupied by the crew

Description and process evaluation of pharmacists' interventions in a pharmacist-led information technology-enabled multicentre cluster randomised controlled trial for reducing medication errors in general practice (PINCER trial)

Objective To undertake a process evaluation of pharmacists' recommendations arising in the context of a complex IT-enabled pharmacist-delivered randomised controlled trial (PINCER trial) to reduce the risk of hazardous medicines management in general practices. Methods PINCER pharmacists manually recorded patients' demographics, details of interventions recommended, actions undertaken by practice staff and time taken to manage individual cases of hazardous medicines management. Data were coded, double-entered into SPSS version 15 and then summarised using percentages for categorical data (with 95% confidence interval (CI)) and, as appropriate, means (± standard deviation) or medians (interquartile range) for continuous data. Key findings Pharmacists spent a median of 20 min (interquartile range 10, 30) reviewing medical records, recommending interventions and completing actions in each case of hazardous medicines management. Pharmacists judged 72% (95% CI 70, 74; 1463/2026) of cases of hazardous medicines management to be clinically relevant. Pharmacists recommended 2105 interventions in 74% (95% CI 73, 76; 1516/2038) of cases and 1685 actions were taken in 61% (95% CI 59, 63; 1246/2038) of cases; 66% (95% CI 64, 68; 1383/2105) of interventions recommended by pharmacists were completed and 5% (95% CI 4, 6; 104/2105) of recommendations were accepted by general practitioners (GPs), but not completed at the end of the pharmacists' placement; the remaining recommendations were rejected or considered not relevant by GPs. Conclusions The outcome measures were used to target pharmacist activity in general practice towards patients at risk from hazardous medicines management. Recommendations from trained PINCER pharmacists were found to be broadly acceptable to GPs and led to ameliorative action in the majority of cases. It seems likely that the approach used by the PINCER pharmacists could be employed by other practice pharmacists following appropriate training