Business and Public Administration Studies (E-Journal, Washington Institute of China Studies - WICS)
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Healthy, Balanced Perspective On Money Investments
Full text linkSometimes it is easy to get caught up in old paradigms, old ways of doing things with thinking that is not current with the times. Sometimes it is easy to miss the critical and important things that are right in front of us because of those old voices or traditional voices. Too often, it is simply just hard to change doing what we normally have been doing or what we are familiar with. Additionally, sometimes we do not take the time to carefully look at the necessary facts and realities to get the complete picture and truth about how things work.Not being current or not being well informed can cause us to miss the opportunities available to us; therefore, causing problems and issues we do not desire. We simply do not seize the day. We may not take the time to focus adequately, to have the healthy and balanced perspective that is in the best interest of our needs for safety, security, growth, tax savings and income
The Voluntary Adoption of an Audit Committee and Earnings Quality: Evidence from China
Full text linkThis study investigates the causes and consequences of firms’ voluntarily adoption of the audit committees, using a sample of China’s listed firms from 2001 to 2008 when no regulations or listing rules existed for audit committees. We develop and test two hypotheses. The ‘‘demand’’ hypothesis holds that firms with greater agency costs are more likely to have an audit committee. In contract , the ‘‘opportunistic behavior’’ hypothesis predicts that the bargaining power of the CEO relative to the rest of the board of directors will determine the level of composition of the board and the extent of board monitoring. In this study, we empirically investigate the validity of these two hypotheses and further compare the quality of accounting numbers produced by China’s listed firms with and without an audit committee, in order to shed light on the determinants and effectiveness of audit committee in emerging markets
Renewable Energy in China: Market Barriers and Policy Options
Full text linkWith an obvious characteristic of innovation, the development of renewable energy (RE) industry is a process of industry innovation itself. There are serious market failures and barriers in the RE technology innovation process. The reasons for RE innovation’s market failure include “dual information externalities”, “coordination failure” and “lock-in effect”. As an emerging strategic industry, the RE industry has gained sound support from policies in recent years. Nevertheless, industrial development is being impeded by difficulties such as a lack of core technology, disorderly competition and a rupture in market demands, which also brought to the light the deviation of the current industry policies. Combined with industrial innovation theories of Neoclassical Economics, New Institutional Economics, and Evolutionary Economics, and based on the perspective of new industry policies, this paper reexamines the RE industrial policies in China and tries to explore new industry policies that accord with the innovative essence in the RE industry
Chinese Companies Investing in Europe: Modern Conquerors or Strategic Partners?
Full text linkAs the Year of the Dragon unfolds, Chinese companies continue to nurture their ambitious plans to expand into Europe supported by the Chinese government (Anderlini, 2011). These modern conquerors can contribute to reshape global trade and investment flows in the coming years (Miller, 2011), which has caused controversial reactions in the European Union (EU) (Voss & Clegg, 2011).On the one hand, as Chinese banks and investment funds are state-controlled, concerns have been raised about the real motives underlying their investment. In fact, what today seems to be a commercially motivated investment strategy might be leveraged in the future to pursue political goals. Moreover, the EU does not have a central investment review system similar to those of other developed countries such as USA, Australia, or Japan, which can prevent it from losing its industrial capabilities and preserve its technological leadership. In other words, the EU, as a whole, has a lower sensitivity and control over national-security issues than USA and other Western developed economies (Miller, 2011). However, potential and actual local conflicts with the national interest of host countries represent concrete barriers to Chinese expansion (Shi, Milelli, & Hay, 2010)
Corporate Corruption And The New Challenges For The Role Of Government
Full text linkThe US financial and economic distress that began in 2007 poses profound challenges for public policy and public administration in the US and abroad. Corporate mismanagement, insider trading in the stock market, reckless behaviour of accountants and auditors and conflicts of interest are at the heart of the problem.The past experience of corporate scandals, such as the US company Enron, and the Italian company, Parmalat, and many other comparable scandals around the world has showed that information by private markets cannot always be trusted. Deficiencies in transparency, fairness, trust and freedom from corruption are very well seated in the corporate world, just as in government worldwide
Alternative Measures of U.S. Fiscal Deficits
Full text linkThe most widely quoted financial statistic about the U.S. government is its annual budget deficit. This measure, usually interpreted as an indicator of the extent to which the government is shifting costs incurred in the current period to the future, can be incomplete and misleading. At the very least, informed citizens with an interest in future tax burdens or intergenerational equity need to supplement the current deficit measure with broader, more comprehensive statistics that are currently available, but which also have their own limitations. In this article, we describe some of the major omissions of the U.S. federal budget deficit and consider the additional information provided by three broader measures of fiscal shortfall: the increase in outstanding gross federal debt; the change in the government’s net financial position; and the change in the fiscal gap. Effectively, we offer an evaluation of one element of the budget—the deficit—by the single criteria of its comprehensiveness as a measure of the burden of today’s policies on future taxpayers and other stakeholders. Additional budget elements that could be evaluated using other criteria include budget outlays as a measure of the size of government or the effectiveness of the budget process in achieving the goals of efficiency, stability, and equity. These topics, however, are beyond the scope of this paper.
Value Premium In The Chinese Stock Market：Free Lunch Or Paid Lunch?
Full text linkIn this paper we examine the time-series predictability of the book-to-market (B/M) ratio for annual and monthly portfolio returns in the Chinese stock market. We find that value premiums exist throughout our sample period of 1998 to 2008. However, the predictability of B/M appears to be unrelated with financial distress risk. In fact, value stocks are less risky than growth stocks in terms of return volatility and estimated financial distress risk. Further, our results suggest that the factor VMG, which is directly related to value premium, is not a pervasive risk measure compared to market factor and SMB. While the size effect seems to be closely related to distress risk, both size and B/M factors do not appear to be driven by financial distress risk
Efficiency in the steel sector
Full text linkThe iron and steel sector consumes about 19% of global final energy use and accounts for a quarter of direct CO2 emissions from industry and roughly 4.5% of global CO2 emissions (WSA 2008a). Steel production is very energy intensive with 20% to 40% of the cost of steel production derived from energy expenses (WSA 2008a). On average every ton of primary steel produced in a blast furnace results in one-and-a-half to two tons of direct CO2 emissions in OECD countries (ArcelorMittal 2008). The energy efficiency of steelmaking facilities differ greatly depending on production route, type of iron ore and coal used, the steel product mix, operation control technology, and material efficiency (WSA 2008b)