Evolutionary governance in mining: Boom and bust in peripheral communities in Sweden

This study investigates the consequences of dramatic price fluctuations on the global iron ore market between boom and bust for the Swedish communities Kiruna and Pajala, located above the polar circle, in the years 2006-2018. It focuses on the impact of the Swedish state’s reorientation towards neoliberal policies that have entailed reduced state involvement in peripheral communities still dependant on heavy industry. This reorientation was manifested in the Mineral Strategy presented by the liberal-conservative government in 2013, in which the state was prescribed a role as facilitator of investment of foreign and private capital in the Swedish mining sector, but not as an active owner or developer of mining enterprises. The neoliberalisation of Swedish mining has established a fundamental conflict of interests between communities whose economic, social and cultural wellbeing depends on long-term state commitment, and the state whose main interests are aimed at global capital flows rather than the maintenance of industrial production in peripheral regions. This conflict remained latent as long as global mineral prices were high, but as boom turned to bust around 2012, it was activated in a way that highlighted asymmetric relations of power and economic development between the sparsely populated and resource-rich northern parts of the country and the densely populated south.     

An exploration of student failure on an undergraduate accounting programme of study

Academic failure creates financial and emotional issues for students, with associated resource and performance implications for higher education institutions. The literature reveals that much of the work on student performance is quantitative, restricting understanding of the deeper feelings and perceptions of students towards their studies. This paper explores undergraduate student performance from an experiential perspective, recognising the complexity and subjectivity of academic performance. Findings appear to highlight: the negative focus of reasoning underlying the choice of study; the impact of affect; the importance of the role of the tutor; the tutor expectations gap; levels of control and personal responsibility for learning; and patterns of participation as possible significant and important factors in understanding academic performance. Finally, the implications of the findings are discussed and further research outlined in terms of developing a predictive model that could offer early identification of students who are susceptible to academic failure and establishing appropriate, proactive support strategies for such students.     

Evaluating accessibility impacts of the proposed America 2050 high-speed rail corridor for the Appalachian Region

Transportation improvements are often considered to be precursors of economic growth. This paper examines industry-specific ‘attractiveness’ due to changes in the transportation network for 23 counties in the Appalachian Region. The network improvements result from new highway construction and the proposed America 2050 High-Speed Rail (HSR) plan for the Piedmont Atlantic Megaregion. The impacted counties that are proximate to five HSR stations (Birmingham, Atlanta, Greenville, Charlotte, and Greensboro) are studied for potential accessibility changes between the years 2002 to 2035. The impacts are examined with respect to six key industry sectors found around the proposed HSR stations: manufacturing; retail; construction; mining, quarrying, oil and gas extraction; health-care services; and all other remaining industries combined. The analysis shows that, for transportation improvements with highways only (and no HSR), a decrease in accessibility for all the impacted counties occurs for the six industry sectors examined in the future year of 2035. The HSR speed of 150 miles per hour is found to be adequate enough to cause positive changes in potential accessibility of the directly impacted counties containing the Birmingham and Greenville HSR stations. With combined transportation network improvements from both highway construction and the new 150 mph HSR line, counties around the Atlanta and Greensboro HSR stations would see accessibility increases in 2035 compared to 2002 with respect to five industry sectors: manufacturing; retail; construction; health-care services; and all other remaining industries combined. However, accessibility changes with respect to mining, quarrying, oil and gas extraction would be positive specifically only for the indirectly impacted counties around the Atlanta HSR station and the county containing the Greenville HSR station. This clearly shows differences in the spatial distribution of attractiveness for different industry sectors across the impacted counties along the HSR corridor. Thus, this exploratory analysis could serve as an aid to proactive public policy decision-making for large-scale transportation network improvements, such as the HSR, in understanding and improving economic activities for different industry mixes across other regions of the United States.     

中、美矿产资源产业的经济贡献率研究

本文运用采矿业的产值占GDP的比重来考察矿产资源产业的经济贡献率,通过核算表明,当前美国的矿业经济贡献率维持在3.53%的较低水平。中国矿产资源的贡献率在12%左右,预估2015-2020,中美矿产资源产业的经济贡献率分别为10%和3%左右。通过对中美矿产资源产业的贡献率比较发现,中国矿产资源的贡献率中煤炭行业对GDP贡献率占较大的部分。而美国油气产业对GDP的贡献率所占绝大部分的比例,未来中国的矿产资源产业的结构必须优化升级。     

Predicting Korean lodging firm failures: An artificial neural network model along with a logistic regression model

Using financial variables as predictors, this study developed logistic regression and artificial neural network (ANN) models to predict business failures for Korean lodging firms. While both models demonstrated comparable Type I errors, the ANN model showed considerably lower Type II errors for both in-sample and hold-out sample predictions. This study also found that interest coverage is the most important signal of business failure for the Korean hotel industry. This ratio is directly related to the hotel's solvency, ability to service debts and productivity of profits and can thus be regarded as a survival indicator of Korean hotel firms.     

金属材料磨损失效及防护的探讨

我国对金属材料磨损失效的研究非常重视,而材料磨损失效的模式很多,磨损失效的起因更是多样,如何做好金属材料磨损失效的分析与防护对我国工业建设起着重要的作用。     

技术源头降成本的具体实践

文章介绍了淮南矿业集团张集矿从思想观念、方案设计、方法确立、作业过程、技术创新、提高工效等方面降低成本的经验,并强调了考核在降低成本方面的重要性。     

American boomers and the flotation of shares in the city of London in the late nineteenth century

During the late nineteenth century there was a wave of promotions of American companies on the London Stock Exchange, which have been described as ‘free-standing’. The British company promoter, H. Osborne O'Hagan, is often regarded as the first mover in these promotions, a view based on his autobiography. This article suggests that, in fact, the American lawyer promoters, Samuel and Isaac Untermyer, were the first movers in these company promotions. This article looks at a number of free-standing companies where everyday managerial control was retained by the original managers, and in particular, the case of the Untermyer brothers who competed with O'Hagan.     

Right censoring in a discrete life model

Although there are many sophisticated models for estimation of failure rate based on censored data in continuous distributions, not much work has been done in the discrete case. We introduce a discrete model for life lengths and consider its properties. For this model, we derive the corresponding maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters under Type I and Type II right-censoring. Received May 2000     

LUCC of large opencast mines in loess area during ecological restoration： a case study of Pingshuo Mine

1. Introduction Studies on land eco-recovery and ecology re- construction emerged in1960s in the world, but it didn't begin until 1980s in China. Actually, the stud- ies on land recovery and ecological reconstruction began in China in 1990s. Many large progresses have been made in the study on the theory of eco- logical recovery of disused land in recent 10 years [1-3]. According to the characters of terrene and min- eral resources, the research areas of ecological re- covery consist of: (1) …