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The present article explores the structure of and recent developments in research activities in the polar regions. Based on a bibliographic study of published papers indexed in the ISI Web of Science during the period 1981-2007, we have analyzed trends in publication, scientific disciplines and subdisciplines, coauthorship, and international collaboration within the field of polar research. We have uncovered several rather striking trends. Scientific output in terms of refereed publications has increased far more rapidly in polar research compared to science in general, quadrupling rather than doubling over the surveyed period. There is a nearly 1:1 ratio between papers covering the Arctic relative to the Antarctic, with the vast majority within either the geosciences (40%) or biology (33%). There has been particularly a steep rise in the number of climate-related papers. The U.S.A. is by far the largest contributor to polar research on both the Arctic and the Antarctic, followed by Canada, the U.K., Germany, Norway, and Russia. The number of coauthored papers has grown markedly, reflecting geopolitical shifts and changing national and international funding priorities during the period. We believe our publication-based survey reveals interesting developments in scientific activities and international cooperation in general, and in polar science strategies and priorities in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on contemporary press articles and applying a comparative methodology, this study examines the responses of important British and American quality papers to the unfolding of Nazi anti-Semitism from September 1930 until April 1933. Besides reconstructing and comparing the press coverage, the study seeks to explain the patterns beneath the journalistic perceptions and interpretations of Nazi anti-Semitism in the liberal democracies. During the final years of the Weimar Republic the papers reported fully and critically on Nazi anti-Semitism, yet they underestimated its radical nature. The extent of the assault on the Jews following Hitler's seizure of power therefore surprised British and American observers. Between 30 January 1933 and the anti-Jewish boycott of 1 April 1933 the journalists struggled to grasp the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism and the role of Hitler therein. Ultimately, their reading of events in Germany was preconditioned by their own liberal democratic outlook. Even if they reached differing conclusions, they were united in their conviction that Hitler and the Nazis would not dare to continue their anti-Semitic campaign in the face of adverse ‘world opinion’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Provides an overview of the topics discussed in the October 2004 issue of "Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs." Evaluation of the Turkish diaspora community in the U.S.; Examination of the Turkish-Muslim diaspora in Great Britain; Presentation of the essay exploring the situation of the Turks in Germany who are claiming a particular Islamic identity.

In light of continuing mixed results in the literature, this paper re-examines the German Dominance Hypothesis (GDH) and considers whether the UK should join the Eurozone. For this purpose, short-term interest rate relationships between the UK, Germany, the Eurozone and the USA, for the period January 1982 to June 2007, are studied. The policy implication of a loss of monetary autonomy for the UK in favour of Germany or the European Central Bank (ECB) would give support to the UK joining the EMU as an economic response. From the early 1980s the Bundesbank's responsibility was to use money growth targets to keep average inflation rate down in the long run. This long run objective suggests that an appropriate methodology for testing the GDH is to test whether the German stochastic trend is a driving stochastic trend. In other words we determine whether a permanent shock to the German interest rate has a permanent effect on the UK interest rate. To this end the structural shocks in a VECM are identified by imposing long-run restrictions of the type developed in King et al. (1991). We apply the same techniques to testing whether the UK has suffered a loss of monetary autonomy in favour of the ECB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper finds empirical support for a Taylor (1993) type interest rate determination rule. The model is solved analytically, estimated and used for simulation, impulse response analyses and forecasting with quarterly time series data for the UK and annual time series data for Germany, France, Japan, the UK and the US. The results confirm that such rules implicitly exists during the period of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I identify whether budgets in Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States are punctuated and investigate the variation in budget punctuations over time. Building on stochastic process methods, I find that budgets in all four cases exhibit mostly incremental changes punctuated by extreme shifts. In order to explain variation in budget punctuations over time, I rely on two models: partisan control of government and partisan distance of the assembly. The two models are tested using national budgetary data across all government functions for the four countries from the mid-1960s to 1989. I find that greater distance in strength and ideology among parties leads to increases in the degree of punctuations in the German and the British cases, whereas there is some evidence for the partisan control model in the American cases. In the Danish cases, partisan distance reduces the degree of budget punctuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By comparing the US environmental justice movement with recent European developments, this paper suggests an environmental justice framework which is based on the idea of environmental justice as a heterogeneous process rather than an analytical or normative category. Using major debates on environmental justice particularly in the UK and Germany as a touchstone, eight dimensions of environmental justice are carved out and integrated into a processual model. It is discussed how environmental justice as a process may become robust enough to integrate and react to changing natural and social conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the regulation of biotechnology in Britain, Germany and the United States and shows that systematic differences have developed around four issues: abortion, assisted reproduction, stem cells, and genetically modified crops and foods. Policy choices with respect to these issues reflect the capacity of each nation's regulatory institutions to deal with the scientific, social and ethical uncertainties around biotechnology. National regulatory frameworks constitute an apparatus of collective sense-making through which governments and publics interpret biotechnology's risks and promises. Specifically, regulatory choices position the novel ontologies created by biotechnology either on the side of the familiar and manageable or on the side of the unknown and insupportably risky. The comparison shows that public responses to biotechnology are embedded within robust and coherent political cultures and are not ad hoc expressions of concern that vary unpredictably from issue to issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares recent developments in income inequality in Canada, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition to describing cross-national variation in changes in income inequality, the paper examines different explanatory factors for these recent developments. The findings reported indicate that there is substantial cross-national variation, not only with regard to the level of inequality, but furthermore with regard to changes in inequality. The results indicate that the equalizing effect of welfare state redistribution did not decrease in all countries. By contrast, in all countries there was a universal tendency towards increased inequality in the pre-tax and transfer distribution, although the magnitude of the change differs from country to country. Even though a polarization of the earnings distribution is reported, the results still give no support to cross-national convergence with regard to income inequality during the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports results of an empirical study on the effectiveness of labour market policy. Data from Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States are used to apply a simultaneous equation model with wages and employment being the endogenous variables. In order to explain employment, the amount of unemployment benefits per unemployed (passive labour market policy) and payment for wage subsidies and training per employed and unemployed person (active labour market policy) are used in addition to real wages and output. Wages and output have their expected impact on total employment. It turns out that passive labour market policy has a negative, and active labour market measures a positive, effect on the number of persons employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The guidelines of brain death determination vary across countries. Our aim was to compare diagnostic procedures of brain death determination in adults among five countries. Consecutive comatose patients who received brain death determination from June 2018 to June 2020 were included. The technical specifications, completion rates and positive rates of brain death determination according to criteria of different countries were compared. The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) of each ancillary test for the identification of brain death diagnosed according to different criteria were investigated. One hundred and ninety nine patients were included in this study. One hundred and thirty one (65.8%) patients were diagnosed with brain death according to French criteria, 132 (66.3%) according to Chinese criteria, and 135 (67.7%) according to criteria of USA, UK and Germany. The sensitivity and PPV of electroencephalogram (92.2% – 92.3%) and somatosensory evoked potential (95.5% – 98.5%) were higher than transcranial Doppler (84.3% – 86.0%). The criteria of brain death in China and France are comparatively stricter than in USA, UK and Germany. The discrepancy in brain death determination between clinical assessments and additional confirmation of ancillary tests is small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An online survey of 691 clinicians who use hypnosis was conducted in 31 countries to gain a broad real-world picture of current practices, views, and experiences in clinical hypnosis. Among 36 common clinical uses, stress reduction, wellbeing and self-esteem-enhancement, surgery preparations, anxiety interventions, mindfulness facilitation, and labor and childbirth applications were the most frequently rated as highly effective (each by ≥70% of raters) in the clinicians' own experience. Adverse hypnosis-associated effects had been encountered by 55% of clinicians but were generally short-lived and very rarely judged as serious. The most common hypnosis approaches used were Ericksonian (71%), hypnotic relaxation therapy (55%), and traditional hypnosis (50%). Almost all respondents reported regularly using other therapeutic modalities alongside hypnosis. Among a range of client variables potentially affecting therapy, most clinicians rated hypnotist-client rapport (88%) and client motivation (75%) as very or extremely important factors for successful hypnotherapy. The majority of respondents had conducted hypnosis treatment via teletherapy, and 54% of those estimated it to be as effective as in-person treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the climatic influence on COVID-19 transmission risks in 228 cities globally across three climatic zones. The results, based on the application of a Boosted Regression Tree algorithm method, show that average temperature and average relative humidity explain significant variations in COVID-19 transmission across temperate and subtropical regions, whereas in the tropical region, the average diurnal temperature range and temperature seasonality significantly predict the infection outbreak. The number of positive cases showed a decrease sharply above an average temperature of 10°C in the cities of France, Turkey, the US, the UK, and Germany. Among the tropical countries, COVID-19 in Indian cities is most affected by mean diurnal temperature, and those in Brazil by temperature seasonality. The findings have implications on public health interventions, and contribute to the ongoing scientific and policy discourse on the complex interplay of climatic factors determining the risks of COVID-19 transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People have a fair idea of how they are supposed to behave to slow down the spread of COVID-19. But what about people's perception of their own compared to others' adherence to the guidelines? Building on prior research on self-enhancement biases, we predicted that people perceive themselves to adhere more strictly to the COVID-19 guidelines than others. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a large-scale online experiment (N = 1,102), using a sample from four countries (UK, US, Germany, Sweden). As predicted, people perceived themselves to adhere to the COVID-19 guidelines more strictly than both the average citizen of their country and their close friends. These findings were robust across countries. Furthermore, findings were not moderated by whether people first thought about themselves or about others. In conclusion, our study provides a robust demonstration of how a long-standing psychological effect perseveres, even during a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we investigated the representation of countries and continents in the publication of six English language journals of sport and exercise psychology from 1997 until 2011. We selected all articles (N = 2093) published in theJournal of Sport and Exercise Psychology,The Sport Psychologist,Journal of Applied Sport Psychology,Journal of Sport Behavior,Psychology of Sport and Exercise, andInternational Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychologyduring 1997–2011 and all proceedings (N = 2034) in the last four World Congress of Sport Psychology (1997, 2001, 2005, and 2009). Then, we classified them by country and continent where the first author's institution was located. Five English-speaking countries (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) represented 82% of the total publications in the six journals and 38.5% of congress proceedings. These were followed by five European countries (France, Germany, Greece, Norway, and Belgium) accumulating 10% of the total publications. The continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America represented less than 4% of the publications but 28.2% of congress proceedings. There was a very high correlation between continents' representation in journal editorial boards and journal publications. Reviewers and readers should be aware of systematic errors that might happen in the review process of submitted manuscripts describing studies which have been conducted in non-English-speaking countries but which are eventually rejected in English language journals of sport and exercise psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the strategic level, international differences have proved important, especially during international collaborations. Since Dore's classic "British Factory: Japanese Factory," comparative values, behavior, and institutional settings have been extensively investigated, though attention has only recently switched to emerging markets such as that of Russia, which was not covered by Hofstede's comparative values study. Harvard's matched comparison of Soviet and U.S. decision making by Lawrence and Vlachoutsicos (around 1988) provided a classic study portraying behavioral differences just prior to transition. Coincidentally, my matched comparisons between the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan involved the same U.S. company investigated by Harvard, aiding comparisons in all five countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social discount rates are estimated for six major economies: Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA. A common methodology based on social time preference is employed and the information required is taken from the same OECD database. The main policy implications of applying consistently measured discount rates in the context of social project appraisal are then discussed. This is an important matter because, up to now, these countries have set their official discount rates using strikingly different methods and such disparities may have resulted in inconsistent decision-making in relation to the allocation of funds to long-term social projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to the United States and the United Kingdom, little empirical work exists about the distributional characteristics of appraisalbased real estate returns outside these countries. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by focusing on Germany. In line with other studies, this paper offers an extensive investigation into the distribution of German real estate returns and compares them with and U.S. and U.K. data in the same period. Furthermore, the comovements with bonds and stocks are also examined. In the core, the distributional characteristics for German real estate are comparable to that for the U.S. and U.K. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research to date suggests older adults prefer a passive involvement in the clinical decision-making process; however, the empirical evidence underlying this claim in the mental health context is yet to be reviewed systematically. To understand whether older adults desire involvement in mental health-related clinical decisions. A systematic review was conducted to identify primary research that explored mental-health decision-making preferences of people with a mean age of over 55 from January 1990 through to December 2018. Three independent studies of varying design and quality were included. Study settings were in the USA, Germany, and the UK. A preference for shared decision-making was seen in two studies, while a preference for active decision-making was identified in one. In contrast to other reviews on clinical decision-making, this review focused on mental health-related decisions of older adults. The evidence suggests older adults desire involvement in mental health-related clinical decisions. Given the political drive to empower patients and the need to ensure evidence-based clinical practice, more high-quality research regarding the shared decision-making preferences and outcomes of older adults with mental ill-health is needed. Systematic Review Registration PROSPERO: CRD42018102009 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is outstanding about the development of pharmaceutical laboratories in German, British and American drug companies is their differences. The outstanding differences stem from the organisation of medical science and practice, and differences in the structure and evolution of the industry. The use to which a company put its laboratory depended upon the advantage the firm saw in investing in scientists, and the extent to which the company was linked to the medical profession. The industry's relation to government was also crucial. These factors were quite different in Germany from Britain, and different again from the United States. At the Bayer Corp. in Leverkusen there was no commitment to organised research until the late 1880s. The crisis in the dyestuffs trade of the early 1880s made them receptive to change. Research offered Bayer a strategy that might reduce vulnerability to the fluctuations of the business cycle. The need to invest in research staff and facilities was only slowly accepted in the 1880s. Bayer established a pattern of hiring Ph.D. chemists for one year, and then sending them to a university or Technisehe Hochschule laboratory, where they worked on research problems related to the company production programme.

Background: Overuse of and dependence on analgesics (including opioids and other pain medications) are major international public health problems. Objective: To identify influences on analgesic dependence among analgesic users in the general populations of different countries. Methods: Online surveys of 1,283 people with pain in the UK, USA, Australia, Germany, Egypt and China/Macau/Hong Kong. Results: Levels of analgesic overuse and dependence were highest in Egypt and lowest in China/Macau/Hong Kong. In every country except Egypt, frequency of pain and frequency of analgesic use were correlated with analgesic dependence, and scores on the Need subscale of the Pain Medication Attitudes Questionnaire (PMAQ) independently predicted analgesic dependence. In the UK, USA, Australia, and Germany, frequency of analgesic use mediated the effects of pain frequency or intensity, and Need scores mediated the effects of frequency of analgesic use. In Egypt, more recent pain, analgesic overuse, and the Emotion and Solicitude subscales of the Survey of Pain Attitudes independently predicted analgesic dependence. Conclusions: Across multiple countries, the impact of pain on analgesic dependence was mediated by frequency of analgesic use rather than overuse or abuse, and self-reported need for analgesics was the strongest independent predictor of dependence. Asking people directly about their feelings of needing analgesics could therefore identify those who could be helped to use analgesics less frequently, which should reduce their risk of dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses the potential of topic models coupled with machine translation for comparative communication research across language barriers. From a methodological point of view, the robustness of a combined approach is examined. For this purpose the results of different machine translation services (Google Translate vs. DeepL) as well as methods (full-text vs. term-by-term) are compared. From a substantive point of view, the integratability of the approach into comparative study designs is tested. For this, the online discourses about climate change in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States are compared. First, the results show that the approach is relatively robust and second, that integration in comparative study designs is not a problem. It is concluded that this as well as the relatively moderate costs in terms of time and money makes the strategy to couple topic models with machine translation a valuable addition to the toolbox of comparative communication researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of the regulatory furore over 'fake news', this article examines the protection that is afforded to untruthful expression by the European Court of Human Rights and by national courts in Germany, the UK and the US. It argues that the suppression of 'fake news' in the face of uncertainty over the contours of this highly politicised term and of the evidentiary vacuum as to the harm posed, may run counter to constitutional guarantees of free speech. Regulatory interventions seeking to curb the flow of 'fake news', which is not per se illegal, require careful consideration lest they should empower governments or unaccountable technology corporations without editorial culture to become the arbiters of truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article ponders the future of NATO after the collapse of European communism. NATO leaders have thought of seven reasons to stay in business, even though the communist threat has crumbled. NATO members indeed have a good reason for being pleased--the epic change in Europe's political and military landscape. More tacitly, NATO also served to fetter West German military might. For political and military reasons, the United States should remain closely allied and militarily present in Europe, and NATO guarantees that coupling. In the meantime, NATO should actively participate in building the European security community, although, in the process, it will lose importance as the Soviet Union turns into a political partner and as CSCE institutions progressively assume more of NATO's current functions.

This article uses a time–space approach to check the UK business cycle synchronization with Germany and the US. As a novelty, we consider the co-movements in terms of economic growth rate structure. In line with the existing studies, we discover that the UK business cycle is more synchronized with the US then with Germany, and that the co-movements have intensified lately. We also show that co-movements are reduced in terms of business cycle structure and are time–frequency-dependent. Finally, we point out that the UK business cycle became more synchronized with the US cycle given the contribution of investments and external balance to the real growth rate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the use of satellite-based navigation system electronic monitoring (EM) Global Positioning System (GPS) in tracking offenders in the U.S., radio frequency (RF) EM, and EM home detention.

Using the statistical technique of fuzzy clustering, regimes of inflation and unemployment are explored for the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany between 1871 and 2009. We identify for each country three distinct regimes in inflation/unemployment space. Similarities exist across countries in both the regimes and the timings of the transitions between regimes. However, the typical rates of inflation and unemployment experienced in the regimes are substantially different. Further, even within a given regime, the results from the cluster analysis reveal persistent fluctuations in the degree of attachment to that regime of inflation/unemployment observations over time. The economic implications of this are that, first, the inflation/unemployment relationship or Phillips curve experiences from time to time major shifts. Second, that it is also inherently unstable even in the short run. It is likely that the factors which govern the inflation/unemployment trade-off are so multi-dimensional that it is hard to identify periods of short-run Phillips curves which can be assigned to particular historical periods with any degree of accuracy or predictability. The analysis shows that reliance on a trade-off between inflation and unemployment for policy purposes is misplaced even in the short run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the differences in the financial debt level of firms both in market-oriented systems (the US, the UK) and bank-oriented systems (Germany, France and Italy) on a sample of 3360 listed companies between the period 2006 and 2010. Results indicate that the debt level is significantly higher in market-oriented systems when compared to the book value of equity. We find confirmation that Book-to-Market (BTM) cannot explain the debt level in bank-oriented systems but, contrary to reference literature, we observe that the BTM ratio has a negative influence on the debt level in market-oriented systems, especially in the United States. We claim different reasons to explain the evidence: (i) the financing standards of market-oriented countries, with an inflationary effect of market values on debt; (ii) an underlying activity for ownership protection and (iii) the unfavourable conditions of stock market over the years of the financial crisis that reduced the convenience of equity issuance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes strategies of an evidence-based parenting programme, Families and Schools Together (FAST), which has a track record for retaining low-income families. FAST multi-family groups held after school are led by culturally representative teams of parents and professionals. Parents are coached to practise positive parenting, lead fun family activities, including one to one responsive play, and meet in parent groups. Families (n = 403) were recruited into 31 FAST groups: 253 families in the UK; 114 in Germany and 36 in Holland. Attendance was recorded. To graduate a family attended 6 or more of 8 weekly sessions. Results revealed high retention rates; 83% for the UK, 83% for Holland and 89% for Germany. The assumption is that the following strategies contributed to these high retention rates: respect for parents to co-produce the programme; flexibility while being “manualized”; providing positive emotion; “foot in the door” recruitment technique; crossing the social ecology to increase social capital; and systematically reinforcing attendance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three European Union (EU) member states – the UK, France and Germany – have played a central role in the Iranian nuclear issue since 2003. However, their contribution cannot be understood without consideration of America's hard-line approach regarding its recent non-proliferation policies in the Middle East and its past policies toward the Islamic Republic. I argue that these policies have highlighted Iran's military and energy insecurity, and that they cast doubt on the limited nature of the demands made to Iran by the Security Council. The fact that European positions have in recent years moved closer to the US also with respect to the key issues that contribute to Iran's lack of trust can actually be seen to undermine the goals of non-proliferation diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article provides information from various aspects of the field of international serials and electronic resource management. Abstracts for several research articles are included on topics such as scholarly electronic books (e-books) and open source data in academic publishing. Additionally, awards and grants presented by the American Library Association (ALA) in 2011 are highlighted along with notes on the reorganization of the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG). Brief information regarding the 2012 conference for the UKSG and a list of online resources related to serials librarians are also included.

Objective: To report the clinical use of the QOLIBRI, a disease-specific measure of health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Methods: The QOLIBRI, with 37 items in six scales (cognition, self, daily life and autonomy, social relationships, emotions and physical problems) was completed by 795 patients in six languages (Finnish, German, Italian, French, English and Dutch). QOLIBRI scores were examined by variables likely to be influenced by rehabilitation interventions and included socio-demographic, functional outcome, health status and mental health variables. Results: The QOLIBRI was self-completed by 73% of participants and 27% completed it in interview. It was sensitive to areas of life amenable to intervention, such as accommodation, work participation, health status (including mental health) and functional outcome. Conclusion: The QOLIBRI provides information about patient's subjective perception of his/her HRQoL which supplements clinical measures and measures of functional outcome. It can be applied across different populations and cultures. It allows the identification of personal needs, the prioritization of therapeutic goals and the evaluation of individual progress. It may also be useful in clinical trials and in longitudinal studies of TBI recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the results of transition studies in the UK, Germany, USA and Canada, the virtues of analysing the structural contexts, institutional arrangements and the young peoples' action orientations are presented. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, school and the labour market have become more and more decoupled and transition routes more uncertain. From a structural perspective, the sorting of school leavers into different transition pathways according to their educational achievements contributes to the reproduction of social inequality. From the actor' perspective, transition uncertainty requires that young adults develop agency (planful and adaptive competence) in order to manage meaningful decisions between alternative pathways to employment. By relating the concept of agency to intuitive rationality and biographical choice, various action strategies are presented that document how young people from different social origins actively pursue individual goals when choosing to follow or to change transition pathways. In contrast to an emphatic reading of the individualisation thesis, comparative transition studies show that only socially privileged and educationally successful youths succeed in transforming their agency into self-reflexive projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncovered Interest Rate Parity (UIP) states that bonds in different denomination should produce the same returns if the maturities of the bonds are the same. Given this, if a foreign bond produces a lower holding period return than a home bond of the same maturity, for their remaining lives the same foreign bond ought to produce a return higher than the home bond. A test is designed according to this relationship. With 1 to 6 year interest rate data of U.S., Britain and Germany from 1979 to 2005, our test shows that this relationship is more reliable for 6-year interest rates than the shorter rates in general. This result lends support to the long-run UIP. A trading strategy is developed by utilizing this idea. We show that positive returns can be achieved by the strategy for bonds of longer horizons. This result also serves as indirect evidence of the long-run UIP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a leximetry study of corporate laws related to shareholder protection in Great Britain, United States, Germany, France and India.. The corporate law of the United States is weaker than the law of the four other countries due to their stronger protection of minority shareholders. The similarities of laws in terms of proxy voting, power for de-facto changes and appraisal rights of the five countries are also presented.

This work examines the behaviour of the input and output measures of the R&D process in the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, in the second half of the 20th century. The researcher and idea stock series can be construed as stationary fluctuations around a trend function, with a main breakpoint at the end of the 1960s. All the countries exhibit slower growth after their last breaks that during the decades preceding its first breaks. In this connection, the United States and Germany appear to represent the end points in the range of incidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the extreme tails of the distributions of equity returns tend to exhibit more negative than positive returns, very few studies have analysed how pervasive is skewness across entire distributions. We use daily returns on 6 international stock market indices from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States over 24 years from January 1978 to February 2002 to search for skewness in the tails, in different intervals, and in the entire distributions using binomial distribution tests and two distribution free tests, the Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test and the Siegel-Tukey test. We find limited evidence of asymmetry in the tails, with more asymmetry close to the means. However, we find that the asymmetries closer to the means are statistically significant and consistent in a way that the asymmetry in the tails is not. We show via a Monte Carlo study that the Wilcoxon Rank Sum and Binomial Distribution test have good power inferring that the data are independent and identically distributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British commercial and political hopes to expand trade in the new Soviet state after 1920 were to an extent disappointed. Despite successful ventures by individual companies, in aggregate business fell short of expectations, especially compared with German and American competitors. The reasons were both (micro and macro) economic variables and political factors, in Britain and the USSR. From 1926 the Soviet regime was committed to rapid industrialization and a pattern of imports in which Germany enjoyed some comparative advantage. But, in contrast to major rivals, British governments occasionally tried to use trade as a political instrument to the disadvantage of commercial operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National social statistics have become one of the pervasive institutions of modern economics and politics. However, less is known about the origins of national accounting and the disagreements over its fundamental purpose and design. Modern national accounts emerged in attempts by German statistical entrepreneurs to understand the industrial economy and harness production in the service of national goals. In the American context national accounts emerged as a means for measuring social welfare, but evolved in the direction of the German and then British efforts at maximizing war production during the Second World War. The origins and evolution of social accounting in the German, British and American contexts illustrate the competing public goals served by our institutional choices. Different normative purposes, driven by new national goals, may require institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-evaluates the origins of the armistice of November 1918, drawing on German, French and British primary sources and on insights from work by political scientists on war termination. It examines why the German government decided to request a ceasefire and why the US, Britain and France decided to grant one. At first sight these decisions appear paradoxical in the light of the military-political situation at the time. In accounting for them the article stresses (on the German side) the campaigning on the Western Front over the previous months and (among Germany's opponents) the diplomatic tensions between Washington, London and Paris. Between them these considerations caused an unexpected and temporary convergence of perceived interests in favour of ending the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the dividend discount model (DDM), a long run relationship should exist between stock prices and dividends. In this study, in order to test the validity of the DDM on the French, German, Japanese, UK and US stock markets from 1973 to 2002, cointegration tests corrected for skewness and excess kurtosis are implemented. As dividends distribution may be affected by stock repurchases strategies, the test is adjusted by taking earnings into account. It is found that the speculative bubble hypothesis cannot be rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Editorial introduces the Special Issue on 'Biotechnology Clusters and Beyond'. Drawing on the interventions of five commissioned articles from Canada, Germany, Israel, the UK and the US it suggests that biotechnology clusters are interesting and important intellectually and for policy deliberation. They pose questions about basic cluster theory because localized networks, though intense, may not be as extensive as global ones infirm practices, especially as these evolve over time. Moreover, innovation is more deeply embedded in the publicly landed science base than for 'Porterian' clusters. Regarding innovation, biotechnology is also less obviously Schumpeterian, there being little market-driven 'creative destruction', and is arguably, with its strong emphasis on both large- and small-firm 'capabilities'—Penrosian—an emphasis in clustering research and applications that warrants further investigation. Finally, at the specific technology-exploitation phase, market interactions assert themselves over milieu characteristics because scientists know the value of their discoveries and there is accordingly high appropriability associated with such knowledge capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the contributions of the U.S. and Great Britain to Japanese and German corporate governance (CG) after World War II. Although different forms of CG have developed around the world in response to market forces and national culture, serious doubts have been cast on the ability of national governments to influence CG through legal changes. If governments can influence CG significantly, therefore, the most propitious circumstances were likely to occur under military occupation,, when an occupying government is free from any local electoral pressure, and citizens are demoralized and helpless in defeat. It seems appropriate therefore to reflect on the immediate post-World War Two period as potentially a miniature controlled laboratory of social experiment when occupying American and British military governments were in very strong position to reform CG in Japan and Germany in their own images. However, it turns out that, although many of their regulatory changes were subsequently modified and even reversed by domestic governments later restored to power, in some subtle ways, these changes did lay a basis for rapid post-war economic recoveries in Germany and Japan,

The article analyzes the Chinese-western scholarly interaction. China has signified its willingness to strengthen ties with western universities and maintain or increase the flow of scholarly exchange. Chinese leaders are confident that their scholars will absorb from the West techniques that will be useful for a modern, independent China. An examination of China's academic exchange with Great Britain, France and West Germany was undertaken, and the exchange policies and programs of the U.S. Canada and Japan in relation to China was reviewed.

The section of "Woolen-yarn Manufacture," presents information on the woolen and worsted yarn industry, especially wool industries of seven countries including the U.S., the Great Britain, Japan, Italy, Germany, Belgium and France. It reports that these countries constitute 70-80% of woolen and worsted-yarn production. It is noted that 70% of total wool and 77% of total worsted yarn were produced by the U.S., Japan and Italy in 1982. In the last decade several woolen manufacturers have shut down in Europe. Whereas, woolen industry in Scotland, which produced 7% of woolen yarn of total production by the Great Britain ten years ago, now produces 20%. The most recent fall in production levels in the woolen industry is believed to have reached a minimum, and an improvement in trade is expected over the next few years.