A shareholder’s contractual right to a dividend and a company’s oppressive conduct in withholding dividend payments: Sumiseki Materials Co Ltd v Wambo Coal Pty Ltd

Traditionally, a shareholder’s expectation of receiving a dividend has been limited by the discretion the board of directors has to recommend the appropriate amount of payment as a dividend. As a general rule, shareholders will only be entitled to a dividend after the dividend is declared (normally, at the general meeting), or when the actual date arrives for the dividend to be paid. Because courts were traditionally reluctant to interfere with the internal management of companies, the remedies available to shareholders to compel a company to declare a dividend were very limited. As a result, if the directors have decided to withhold dividend payment, courts will only make an order requiring dividends to be paid under very exceptional circumstances. In this article, the authors discuss the case of Sumiseki Materials Co Ltd v Wambo Coal Pty Ltd [2013] NSWSC 235, which is exceptional for the court’s recognition of a shareholder’s contractual right to a dividend. The article analyses the court’s approach, which found that withholding dividend payments was oppressive and unfairly prejudicial conduct of the company. It also discusses the significance of shareh9olders entrenching their rights in a company’s constitution, irrespective of the fact that a company has a statutory right to alter its constitution by way of a special resolution.

Use of the Screening Tool of Older Persons' Prescriptions (STOPP) and the Screening Tool to Alert doctors to the Right Treatment (START) in hospitalised older people

To determine the prevalence and nature of potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs) and potential prescribing omissions (PPOs) in patients aged 65 years and over.

Selection of the right risk measures for portfolio allocation

 An optimisation framework is proposed to enable investors to select the right risk measures in portfolio selection. Verification is deployed by performing experiments in developed markets (e.g., the US stock market), emerging markets (e.g., the South Korean stock market) and global investments. A preselection procedure dealing with large datasets is also introduced to eliminate stocks that have low diversification potential before running the portfolio optimisation model. Portfolios are evaluated by four performance indices, i.e., the Sortino ratio, the Sharpe ratio, the Stutzer performance index, and the Omega measure. Experimental results demonstrate that high performance and also well-diversified portfolios are obtained if modified value-at-risk, variance, or semi-variance is concerned whereas emphasising only skewness, kurtosis or higher moments in general produces low performance and poorly diversified portfolios. In addition, the preselection applied to large datasets results in portfolios that have not only high performance but also high diversification degree.

Doing the right thing at the right time: Assessing responses to patient deterioration in electronic simulation scenarios using course-of-action analysis

International studies indicate that the recognition and management of deteriorating patients in hospitals are poor and that patient assessment is often inadequate. Face-to-face simulation programs have been shown to have an impact on educational and clinical outcomes; however, little is known about performance in contemporary healthcare e-simulation approaches. Using data from an open-access Web-based patient deterioration program (FIRSTACTWeb), the performance of 367 Australian nursing students in identification of treatment priorities and clinical actions was analyzed using a military model of Course of Action Simulation Analysis. Participants' performance in the whole program demonstrated a significant improvement in knowledge and skills (P ≤ .001) with high levels of participant satisfaction. Course of Action Simulation Analysis modeling identified three key participant groupings within which only 18% took the "best course of action" (the right actions and timing), with most (70%) completing the right actions but in the wrong order. The remaining 12% produced incomplete assessments and actions in an incorrect sequence. Contemporary approaches such as e-simulation do enhance educational outcomes. Measurement of performance when combined with Course of Action Simulation Analysis becomes a useful tool in the description of outcomes, an understanding of decision making, and the prediction of future events.

Migration and the right to social security: perceptions of off-farm migrants' rights to social insurance in China's Jiangsu Province

In 2001 China ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. By so doing the national government became legally bound, "to the maximum of its available resources", to achieve "progressively" full realization of the rights specified in the Covenant. Included amongst these entitlements is the "right of everyone to social security, including social insurance". This paper uses data from Jiangsu to examine the extent to which urbanites agree that previously disenfranchised migrants have the same right to social insurance as the urban population. Many urbanites fear that their existing entitlements to social protection will be diluted if social insurance coverage is extended to include new populations. Accordingly, state agencies and the media have sought to promote acceptance of a more positive view of migrant workers than has traditionally prevailed within towns and cities. We find that younger urban residents, urban residents who already have social insurance and urban residents working in the state-owned sector are more likely to agree that migrants have the same right to social insurance as the urban population. © 2007 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Bias and precision of measures of survival gain from right-censored data

In cost-effectiveness analyses of drugs or health technologies, estimates of life years saved or quality-adjusted life years saved are required. Randomised controlled trials can provide an estimate of the average treatment effect; for survival data, the treatment effect is the difference in mean survival. However, typically not all patients will have reached the endpoint of interest at the close-out of a trial, making it difficult to estimate the difference in mean survival. In this situation, it is common to report the more readily estimable difference in median survival. Alternative approaches to estimating the mean have also been proposed. We conducted a simulation study to investigate the bias and precision of the three most commonly used sample measures of absolute survival gain - difference in median, restricted mean and extended mean survival - when used as estimates of the true mean difference, under different censoring proportions, while assuming a range of survival patterns, represented by Weibull survival distributions with constant, increasing and decreasing hazards. Our study showed that the three commonly used methods tended to underestimate the true treatment effect; consequently, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) would be overestimated. Of the three methods, the least biased is the extended mean survival, which perhaps should be used as the point estimate of the treatment effect to be inputted into the ICER, while the other two approaches could be used in sensitivity analyses. More work on the trade-offs between simple extrapolation using the exponential distribution and more complicated extrapolation using other methods would be valuable.

Finding and Keeping the Right People How to Recruit Motivated Employees

This book provides managers, team leaders, personnel and human resources managers, and human resources students with a guide to knowing how to hire the right people, keep them motivated, and keep them with the company

Lifting the cloak of conceptual confusion: Exploring the meaning of the human right to higher education

The right to education, and specifically higher education, is clearly set out in international law. Higher education is, however, in a state of change as a result of pressures from the increased demand for higher education, globalisation and the impact of new technology (Barber, Donnelly and Rizvi 2013, 1–2). This article asserts that before significant changes to higher education are made, we should reflect on the content of the human rights obligations contained in the international documentation. It seeks to outline the content and scope of the right to higher education in an effort to assist this consideration.