Online monitoring and assessment of emerging risk in conventional industrial plants: possible way to implement integrated risk management approach and KPI’s

Existing methodologies and practices do not provide enough possibility for online monitoring and assessment of emerging risks occurring as a result of a change in technology, product, operating conditions, as well as in organization of activities in conventional industrial plants. Typical today’s off and online methods and corresponding software packages are used as risk assessment methods, while various risk aspects (such as: process risks, process equipment integrity risks, organizational risks, and health and environmental risks) are being assessed and treated independently. However, it is clear that risk assessment and making decisions in line with that has to be based on information collected from different (independent) sources in online mode. Also, the fact that additional risks in operations may occur due to unexpected changes in technology, accidents or unexpected process equipment degradation should be taken into account. When monitoring and process management systems are being designed and developed, only the process aspect and process risk are usually analyzed, while other risk aspects are not taken into account (like health and environmental risks). A new approach, to be presented in this paper, provides a possibility of online monitoring and assessment of risks (e.g. in petrochemical industry, power industry, etc.).     

Purchasing power parity in Brazil: a test for fractional cointegration

The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of the purchasing power parity (PPP) doctrine in Brazil. Historical data for the period 1855–1996 are considered. The period 1855–1990 is also analysed in order to compare the results with those obtained by Zini and Cati (1993) using the conventional cointegration analysis. This article uses fractional cointegration analysis, a flexible methodology which allows for more subtle forms of mean reversion. The tests performed are those of Geweke and Porter-Hudak (1983), and of Hurvich and Ray (1995). The critical values for both tests are generated by simulation because they are non-standard. The empirical results do not support the absolute PPP hypothesis but the relative PPP holds in the long run.     

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ABSTRACT

The authors studied how knowledge derived from firms’ relationships—the so-called second-hand knowledge—is likely to influence their internationalization process. In this article, they examine how a European producer of textiles is able to sell worldwide, including to China, a highly competitive player in this industry. This article discusses models of firms’ networks and the extent to which such networks generate important knowledge that can explain internationalization behavior—how it is able to influence the selection of foreign markets and the entry mode used. The authors use the revised version of the Uppsala model of internationalization, which emphasizes the roles of trust-building, knowledge, and creation of opportunities within relationships.     

Different Manifestations of the Concept of Empowerment: The Politics of Urban Renewal in the United States and the United Kingdom

Over the course of the 1990s the concept of empowerment became firmly established within the vocabulary of urban politics in several different national contexts. This article analyzes the spread of this concept by looking at the politics of urban renewal in the United States and the United Kingdom. It shows that even if (and possibly because) the definition of empowerment remained vague, the turn to empowerment came out of and contributed to a shift in the nature of urban politics and to a reconfiguration of governmental methods, the role of the state and, consequently, to changes in civil society, all of which were associated with a rise to prominence of a neoliberal perspective.     

French Retirement Reforms and Intragenerational Equity in Retirement Duration

As most developed countries, France has gone over the last 20 years through a process of pension system reforms, mainly aiming at increasing the average retirement age, through increasing the required number of contribution years or through postponing legal (minimal and/or normal) ages. Public debates over which lever should be preferred have been paramount in France, with concerns focusing on redistribution issues between high wage high life-expectancy and low-wage low life-expectancy workers. In this paper, we empirically address this issue by simulating the differentiated impacts of the past French reforms on average retirement ages across wage quartiles. Our simulations show that increasing the required duration criterion—as was done by the 1993 and 2003 reforms–have redistributive impact as regards retirement age, while increasing the normal age—as was done by the 2010 reform—has a counter-distributive impact. The redistributive impact on average of the required duration criterion however only holds thanks to the fact that disabled workers—most of them in the lowest wage quartile—are exempted from it. Last, increasing minimal age has ambiguous impacts according to gender: redistributive among women but counter-distributive among men.     

A competing risks analysis of firms’ exit

Firms may exit the market in several ways and each form of exit is likely to be caused by different factors (Schary in RAND J Econ 22:339–353, 1991). This paper explores the determinants of different exit routes. Using a sample of Spanish manufacturing firms for 1990–2000, we estimate a competing risks proportional hazards model to identify the factors leading firms to exit the market through (the mutually precluding events of) liquidation/bankruptcy and acquisition/merger. Our results show the existence of a sharp difference between the determinants of these two exit routes in terms of firm and industry characteristics.     

Internal auditors’ roles: From watchdogs to helpers and protectors of the top manager

The purpose of this paper is to understand the governance roles of internal auditors in public sector organizations. An analysis of 42 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with experienced internal auditors working in public administration in Quebec indicates that internal auditors perform two key roles: a protector role, further subdivided into two roles, protective shield and keeper of secrets, and a helper role, also subdivided into two roles, support of organizational performance and guide. The analysis also shows that internal auditors have developed a nuanced conception of independence defined as ‘grey independence’ in order to perform their roles. Internal auditors consider that their primary role is to serve the top manager and the organization and that they must prioritize the top manager at the expense of audit committee members. Therefore, this paper contributes to the literature on internal auditor independence. Overall, the findings suggest that internal auditing is not the governance watchdog expected by the regulatory bodies since this is not the role performed by internal auditors.     

Evaluación de la conversión a café orgánico usando la metodología de opciones reales

Since the deregulation of the coffee market in 1989, price crises are proof of the uncertainty and risk around coffee growers’ income, particularly for small producers who, in the case of Mexico, have taken action such as the conversion of their traditional crops into the organic production system which, besides the ecological priority, allows them to get a higher income than from conventional coffee. In this document we model as real investment options (RIO) the possibility of conversion from one system into the other one also including the feasibility of abandoning this strategic decision.     

Regional growth and unemployment in the medium run: asymmetric cointegrated Okun’s Law for UK regions

This article tests for the presence of a medium-run asymmetric Okun’s Law relationship between regional output and regional unemployment rate in UK regions. The test is performed with a panel data version of the hidden cointegration technique suggested by Granger and Yoon. A novelty of the article is to combine the method of hidden cointegration with a panel data method of removing cross-sectional dependence. The medium-run Okun relationship for regions in the UK appears to confirm results found elsewhere in the literature on countries as a whole, although the coefficients tend to be smaller.