Search results

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of a variety of levels of education, namely, high school, vocational and university education, on the probability of being employed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The data are from two waves of the Life-in-Transition Survey that covers 29 post-communist transitional countries. The number of binary logistic models is estimated to quantify the effects of different types of education on the likelihood of being employed, while controlling for different sets of covariates.

The findings reveal that the effect of employment associated with university education is higher than that of vocational education, which in turn is higher than that of high school education. However, the differences between the effects of the various levels of education are not considerable. Any specific level of education is always associated with a higher effect in Eastern Europe as compared to the former Soviet Union. The effect of education is also found to be higher for females than for males. In the former Soviet Union, the positive effect of university and vocational education on employment is found to go down with age.

This is the first study which compares effect of different types of education on probability of being employed on a diverse sample of 29 post-communist countries over the period of five years.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test two opposing theoretical hypotheses from research literature: low quality of public education boosts support for public education; and low quality of public education weakens support for public education.

The authors use microdata from 27 post-communist countries over a period of five years. This study uses two outcome variables in order to capture the level of support for public education: the willingness to elevate investments in public education to an important policy priority; and the willingness to pay more taxes to improve public healthcare. A series of logistic regressions is used to find how the outcome variable is influenced by six dimensions of the quality of the public education system.

The main finding is that a lower quality of public education strengthens the willingness of citizens to make investments into public education by: making it a political priority for the government; and through a professed increased willingness to pay more taxes towards improving public education. These findings remain valid for both years of investigation and for both EU and non-EU samples. In contrast, the authors could not find support for the hypothesis that postulates that a lower quality of public education will reduce support for public education.

The main implication of these findings is that despite the increases in availability of private schooling opportunities, the citizens of post-communist countries have not abandoned their support for public education. Even if citizens of post-communist countries believe that public education is no longer of an appropriately high quality, they continue to support the provision of resources to it in order to improve on the current situation.

The current low quality of public education can be seen as providing an impetus for encouraging support for public education.

In terms of policy-making, the findings demonstrate the opportunity to shore up public support for further reforms in public- education in post-communist countries.

The current education policy research literature is silent about the direction of the effect of low quality public education on the willingness to provide support for public education. Against this background, this is the first study which empirically tested whether quality of public education affect willingness to support it. Covering a period of five years, the authors test the above-postulated hypotheses using a diverse sample of 27 post-communist countries.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the effects of interpersonal and institutional trust on welfare state support in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU).

The authors use micro-data from two rounds of a multinational survey conducted in these countries in 2010 and 2016. The outcome variable of interest is the willingness to pay more taxes to support the welfare state. The authors define the welfare state broadly, and focus on support for three main domains of the welfare state, namely, support for the needy, public healthcare and public education. Binomial regression is used to establish influence of interpersonal and institutional trust on welfare state support.

The authors find that both interpersonal and institutional trust have positive influences on strengthening support for the welfare state against a number of alternative explanations for public support for the welfare state. These positive effects remain the same for all three domains under investigation, namely, helping the needy, public healthcare and public education. Furthermore, these positive effects were observed both in the relatively less developed countries of the FSU and in the more developed Eastern European countries. Moreover, the positive effects of interpersonal and institutional trust on support for the needy, public healthcare and public education were found to grow over time.

The findings indicate that the benefits of nurturing social capital will likely be substantial. Decision-makers, politicians, welfare state administrators and multinational founders (e.g. the UN and World Bank) should acknowledge the role played by trust in influencing the citizenry’s support for the allocation of financial resources toward the development and maintenance of the welfare state. The findings imply that welfare state reforms could prove be more effective within a social context where levels of trust are high. Thus, special attention should be paid to initiatives aimed at developing strategies to build trust.

Social welfare reforms in post-communist transitional countries may fail without active strategies aimed at nurturing institutional trust. One way to nurture institutional trust is through making additional efforts at enhancing the levels of accountability and transparency within a society as well as through increasing citizen engagement. Another way to build increased levels of trust is to take part in a variety of initiatives in good governance put forth by multinational initiatives.

As far as the authors know, this is the first paper which studies effect of interpersonal and institutional trust on support of the welfare state using a large and diverse sample of 27 countries over the period of five years. This is the first study which focuses on post-communist countries where trust is inherently low.

The purpose of this paper is to devise novel methods for effectively reducing China’s coal mining accidents via analysis of the relation between coal mine safety production and social factors.

The variations and characteristics of the safety production for coal mines in China from 1949 to 2013 are studied via induction and statistical analysis of data from the perspective of mortality rate per million tons, raw coal output and death tolls. It is analyzed that the relationship between coal mine safety production level and social economic, safety investment via SPSS.

Analysis of the coal mine safety management evolution across the 64 years after the founding of China demonstrates that China’s coal mine safety management evolution is partitioned into four stages, and there is the coupling relation between coal mine safety production and structure the of coal industry, government supervision and safety investment. By discussing the similarity between China and America in coal mine safety management evolution, it is found that the rapid increase in the number of accidents during the transformation from agricultural to industrial society is not accidental.

The suggestions in this paper are helpful to improve the current safety situation in China’s coal mines and provide management experience to other coal mining countries.

Based on present and future socioeconomic development, it is proposed that the coal mine safety situation can be further enhanced by properly adjusting the structure of the coal industry, strengthening supervision and ensuring safety investment.

The purpose of the present study is to identify and measure economically the losses related to inventory management in an oil refinery.

An exploratory case study was conducted to search for a better understanding of a phenomenon and its implications.

The results obtained based on the case study suggest the need to observe this phenomenon in other contexts and take managerial actions that will eliminate waste as one of the forms of generating value for the company. The results were related to each other and to the traditional metrics of inventory management and can be used as a base to improve mathematical and computational models for production planning and scheduling and also performance indicators.

No studies have been found that attempt to measure the economic losses derived from inventory management and their capacity in this environment.

This paper aims to describe a recently proposed algorithm in terrain‐based cooperative UAV mapping of the unknown complex obstacle in a stationary environment where the complex obstacles are represented as curved in nature. It also aims to use an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to estimate the fused position of the UAVs and to apply the 2‐D splinegon technique to build the map of the complex shaped obstacles. The path of the UAVs are dictated by the Dubins path planning algorithm. The focus is to achieve a guaranteed performance of sensor based mapping of the uncertain environments using multiple UAVs.

An extended Kalman filter is used to estimate the position of the UAVs, and the 2‐D splinegon technique is used to build the map of the complex obstacle where the path of the UAVs are dictated by the Dubins path planning algorithm.

The guaranteed performance is quantified by explicit bounds of the position estimate of the multiple UAVs for mapping of the complex obstacles using 2‐D splinegon technique. This is a newly proposed algorithm, the most efficient and a robust way in terrain based mapping of the complex obstacles. The proposed method can provide mathematically provable and performance guarantees that are achievable in practice.

The paper describes the main contribution in mapping the complex shaped curvilinear objects using the 2‐D splinegon technique. This is a new approach where the fused EKF estimated positions are used with the limited number of sensors' measurements in building the map of the complex obstacles.

Reports on the first of two joint symposia to be held in South China during 1998. The Zhongshan University Symposium focused on library automation and networking, with six sessions on specific subthemes and 47 papers on such topics as information resources development and digital libraries, Internet information applications and services, resource sharing and regional cooperation. Participants at the symposium concluded that the standardisation of a Chinese encoding system to cater for all Chinese characters from China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea is a prerequisite for future cooperation and resource sharing. In addition, the panellists agreed that it is important to concentrate on developing library and information networks, especially using Internet technology and related resources.

Advances in information technology and the increasing digitalization of the general public have favored the growth of the sharing economy. The sharing economy is based on transactions of idle resources between individuals to satisfy cogent needs. Notwithstanding the great interest in this emerging phenomenon, it is still not clear which factors are driving the shift in consumer consumption behavior from the traditional economy toward this new economic model. Grounded in self-determination theory, we contend that what is needed is a holistic approach that considers the three elements involved in sharing economy transactions, namely (1) consumer motivations, (2) web-based platforms and (3) types of assets exchanged.

To conduct our study, we used the Flash Eurobarometer 467 database titled “The Use of the Collaborative Economy,” collected by the European Union with Flash Eurobarometer datasets and openly available to the public. Consequently, our study aims to provide results based on a large-scale quantitative analysis involving a large number of individuals and multiple sectors.

Our findings provide empirical evidence of the positive effects of the shift in consumption behavior toward the sharing economy brought about by (1) consumers’ intrinsic motivations, (2) the quality of the platform and (3) the human asset-based categories of products offered.

This research seeks to advance understanding of the factors that facilitate the adoption of the sharing economy, and we provide managers and policymakers with suggestions regarding the factors they may leverage to further favor the spread of this economic model.

This paper aims to tackle the challenge topic of continuum structural layout in the presence of random loads and to develop an efficient robust method.

An innovative robust topology optimization approach for continuum structures with random applied loads is reported. Simultaneous minimization of the expectation and the variance of the structural compliance is performed. Uncertain load vectors are dealt with by using additional uncertain pseudo random load vectors. The sensitivity information of the robust objective function is obtained approximately by using the Taylor expansion technique. The design problem is solved using bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization method with the derived sensitivity numbers.

The numerical examples show the significant topological changes of the robust solutions compared with the equivalent deterministic solutions.

A simple yet efficient robust topology optimization approach for continuum structures with random applied loads is developed. The computational time scales linearly with the number of applied loads with uncertainty, which is very efficient when compared with Monte Carlo-based optimization method.