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This study examines how fiscal decentralization affects the quality of governance and public administration. Using a balanced panel dataset of 63 provinces in Vietnam over the 2011–18 period and employing the spatial Durbin model, we find that governance and public administration quality develop gradually, leading to spatial spillovers across provinces. Importantly, revenue decentralization exerts a negative spatial effect on participation, transparency, accountability and control of corruption, but exhibits a positive spatial effect on public administrative procedures across regions. By contrast, fiscal transfers improve transparency, accountability and control of corruption. That is, fiscal decentralization drives local governments in ‘a race to the bottom’ when they address budget shortfall pressures.

Landslide is one of the most common natural disasters in mountainous area of Vietnam. Therefore, studying and developing a landslide susceptibility map would make a significant contribution to local authorities in taking initiative in landslide prevention and mitigation. The quality of input data and the choice of model building methods are two very important impacted factors to accuracy of produced maps. This study will focus on investigating the influences of terrain data, which is a significant causative factor on landslides, to select the most appropriate DEM model. The DEM will be combined with other impact factors to develop landslide susceptibility assessment by applying two landslide spatial analysis methods: Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Frequency Ratio (FR). Conducting the investigation with three free sources of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) in mountainous areas of Quang Ngai province has shown that NasaDEM performs better than the other DEMs (TanDEM-X90 and STRM). For this purpose, a total of 339 landslide locations was collected in this area, and then randomly split into two parts to generate training (70%) and testing (30%) datasets for construction and validation of the map, respectively. In addition, seven affecting factors were selected, including slope, aspect, soil types, land use, distance to roads, distance to rivers, and rainfall for developing the models. Validation of the maps was done using two performances indexes namely Untainted Area Under the Curve (AUC) and Landslide Density (LD). The results show that that two methods are appropriate for producing landslide susceptibility maps. Meanwhile, analyzing using the FR would get better AUC (0.793 > 0.747) and LD index compared to the AHP.

The study examines the diversification capability of seven cryptocurrencies with the largest market size against risks from economic factors as oil price, gold price, interest rate, USD strength, and S&P500. Using the weekly data of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple, Stellar, Monero, Dash, and Bytecoin in the period Aug/2014-Jun/2018, the study finds that there are structural breaks and ARCH disturbance in each cryptocurrency, suggesting a systematic risk within the cryptocurrency market. However, the causality between cryptocurrencies and economic factors is undirected. Interestingly, our findings show that cryptocurrencies are insignificant correlations with economic factors. The result implies that cryptocurrencies can not be assumed as financial assets to hedge systematic risks from economic factors.

Acute pancreatitis (AP) continues to be a cause of significant morbidity and mortality and requires more research to identify the best clinical management practices. Many guidelines have been proposed for the initial management of AP. Although these guidelines have a significant overlap in the recommendations provided for diagnosing and managing AP, there is still some disagreement in aspects of the types and timing of interventions that should be used for the diagnosis and management of both mild and severe AP. A working group consisting of physicians, especially gastroenterologists from various hospitals and universities from the Asia-Pacific region, has led to the development of these evidence-based guidelines and recommendations. Early enteral feedings, performing a cholecystectomy in the case of gallstones if indicated during the initial hospitalisation, treatment of hypertriglyceridaemia-induced acute pancreatitis using intravenous regular insulin or plasmapheresis if severe, and providing counselling for alcohol avoidance are recommended.

In light of an increasingly complex and uncertain environment, energy security and institutional quality are recognized as important factors that influence sustainable development. Emerging economies that seek to address the problems of high energy need/consumption for development and with relatively poor institutional quality have become a topic of interest in current research. This chapter is the first work to contribute to institutional quality literature by examining the impact of energy security, measured along eight different dimensions, on institutional quality in 43 emerging economies for the period 2002–2017. We conducted panel data analysis using the panel corrected standard error (PCSE) and feasible generalized least square (FGLS) techniques to deal with autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity, and to check for robustness. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and pooled mean group estimator were also employed to check the long-run effects. The results show that (i) six of the eight energy security indicators (i.e., energy gap, energy supply capability, energy structure, energy inefficiency, and energy developability in terms of consumption and CO2 emissions) negatively affect institutional quality, whereas energy developability in terms of the CO2 emissions per unit of energy consumption and energy acceptability (renewable energy consumption) has significant positive impacts; (ii) most of these energy security indicators have insignificantly positive effects on institutional quality in the short run, while seven of the eight energy security indicators have significantly negative effects on institutional quality in the long run. The effects of the energy security indicators on institutional quality were found to be consistent with the six institutional dimensions. Interestingly, these findings imply that emerging countries should increasingly use renewable energy to enhance institutional quality for long-run benefits.

Under non-homogeneous solar irradiation, photovoltaic (PV) panels receive different solar irradiance, resulting in a decrease in efficiency of the PV generation system. There are a few technical options to fix this issue that goes under the name of mismatch. One of these is the reconfiguration of the PV generation system, namely changing the connections of the PV panels from the initial configuration to the optimal one. Such technique has been widely considered for small systems, due to the excessive number of required switches. In this paper, the authors propose a new method for increasing the efficiency of large PV systems under non-homogeneous solar irradiation using Series-Parallel (SP) topology. In the first part of the paper, the authors propose a method containing two key points: a switching matrix to change the connection of PV panels based on SP topology and the proof that the SP-based reconfiguration method can increase the efficiency of the photovoltaic system up to 50%. In the second part, the authors propose the extension of the method proposed in the first part to improve the efficiency of large solar generation systems by means of a two-levels architecture to minimize the cost of fabrication of the switching matrix.