Suchergebnisse

Controls — the Rule of Inefficiency ?
In Italy, controls on administration are greatly inefficient. Internal controls hardly exist and external controls suffer a lack of coordination and a more or less important dependence towards political and administrative power. This inefficiency is partly due to the age of the controlling system which goes back for its greatest part to the middle of the nineteenth century and has not been adapted to transformations during the last fifty years (there have been no more than three important Acts of Parliament in that period). Nevertheless, some recent initiatives try to find remedies, in the field of local authorities amongst others. The influence of the European Union on the future evolution of these controls, and especially on a possible redefinition of the functions of the Court of Auditors, is still difficult to measure.

Sustainable development has clearly taken on a global dimension, even if in recent years it has increasingly been acknowledged that there is a close mutual interaction between local and global processes. Politicians, economists and practitioners have realised that regional differences and particularities have become very important for building a people‐based development which is not only goods‐based. Thus, some new keywords for endogenous self‐sustainable development are: networks, knowledge and local milieux. The integration of sustainable development aspects in spatial planning, territory governance and development has become stronger and stronger, combined with a spread of local knowledge and the preservation of both the cultural and environmental heritage. This paper considers all these factors and tries to explain these types of relationships, starting from the idea of city network as a basis for global competition, and moving on towards discussing the role of universities and scientific parks as institutions for knowledge production and dissemination. Finally, the important role of cultural heritage in a territory is investigated, as tool for building a culture‐based growth that should increase social cohesion, local identity and equity. Although largely descriptive, this analysis is of special use to those teaching courses in the fields of architecture, planning and civil engineering, where a broader knowledge of city networks offers a more solid basis upon which awareness of sustainability may be built.

"One might be surprised, astonished or indignant seeing men and women prostrating themselves in front of other men and other women. Or one might feel it is right to bow down before God, Allah, the saints, the Holy Virgin or the gods. Kings into Gods: How Prostration Shaped Eurasian Civilizations investigates the reasons why men prostrate themselves before deities or before powerful men. Through an in-depth historical and cultural analysis, this book highlights the connection between rituality and royalty within the Eurasian civilizations. The narrative and iconic documentation gathered and analyzed concerns the Greek and Roman world, the Mongolian civilization during the Middle Ages, the Hindu and Chinese civilizations, the Islamic civilization in India in the fourteenth century, the Mughal civilization and European civilization in the late Middle Ages. The different forms of the rituals in the courts of kings and emperors are tightly connected with the concept of royalty. The prostration is an act of humiliation of defeated enemies, a means to establish an abysmal distance between powerful elite and the people, a way of creating hierarchies within the elite itself"--

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Knowledge Transmission and Universality of Man in Global Society -- The Other and the Paradoxes of Universalism -- Religion, Human Rights and Political Conflicts -- Europe: Common Values and a Common Identity -- The Public Sphere and Political Space -- America and Europe: Carl Schmitt and Alexis de Tocqueville -- Identity and Human Rights: A Glance at Europe from Afar -- Human Rights, Universalism and Cosmopolitanism -- Bibliography -- Index of Names.

AbstractBy employing the technique of enlargement of filtrations, we demonstrate how to incorporate information about the future trend of the stochastic interest rate process into a financial model. By modeling the interest rate as an affine diffusion process, we obtain explicit formulas for the additional expected logarithmic utility in solving the optimal portfolio problem. We begin by solving the problem when the additional information directly refers to the interest rate process, and then extend the analysis to the case where the information relates to the values of an underlying Markov chain. The dynamics of this chain may depend on anticipated market information, jump at predefined epochs, and modulate the parameters of the stochastic interest rate process. The theoretical study is then complemented by an illustrative numerical analysis.

Die Pandemie hat gewohnte Vorstellungen von Büroorganisation und Zusammenarbeit auf den Prüfstand geschoben. Unternehmen müssen diese Erfahrungen analysieren und einfließen lassen in moderne Konzepte für die Gesundheitsförderung und den Arbeitsplatz der Zukunft.

The U.S. Supreme Court on June 14, 2018, reversed the Second Circuit's 2016 decision to vacate a $147 million judgment against two Chinese companies, who allegedly fixed vitamin C prices. The high court held that courts should give foreign governments' statements "respectful consideration" but are not bound by another country's description of its own laws. Going forward, courts will need to evaluate a foreign government's statements when defendants claim a contradiction between U.S. law and foreign regulations as a defense. When government regulation and private cartelization overlap, complications arise because the foreign companies may be liable for their anticompetitive conduct that was beyond the requirement of and might even have influenced foreign government policies. Using two illustrative cases ( In Re Vitamin C Antitrust Litigation and Resco Products v. Bosai Minerals), we analyze the impact of the price floor and export quotas and propose a new, workable methodology for measuring antitrust damages attributable to the private cartel in the presence of foreign regulation.