Financial Risk Analysis of Portuguese Textile and Tourism Companies

Textile and tourism sectors are two important industries in the Portuguese economy. However, its high exposure to both internal and international economic volatility make the companies operating in these economic sectors particularly vulnerable to economic crises, such as the ones which have been impacting Portugal and the European Union. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and understand the impact of size and age on the financial health of textile and tourism companies, measured by economic indices. An empirical based model is proposed. Its implications are derived and tested on a sample of 4061 Portuguese companies from textile and tourism sectors, during the period 2005-2009. The findings suggest that age has a major impact on the risk of failure, rather than size. Whereas the effect of age is generally positive regarding the financial health of the company, the effect of size is less clear and ultimately depends on the age of the company.

Financial Risk Analysis of Portuguese Textile and Tourism Companies

Textile and tourism sectors are two important industries in the Portuguese economy. However, its high exposure to both internal and international economic volatility make the companies operating in these economic sectors particularly vulnerable to economic crises, such as the ones which have been impacting Portugal and the European Union. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and understand the impact of size and age on the financial health of textile and tourism companies, measured by economic indices. An empirical based model is proposed. Its implications are derived and tested on a sample of 4061 Portuguese companies from textile and tourism sectors, during the period 2005-2009. The findings suggest that age has a major impact on the risk of failure, rather than size. Whereas the effect of age is generally positive regarding the financial health of the company, the effect of size is less clear and ultimately depends on the age of the company.

The impact of size and age of the company on assessing financial risk.

Textiles and tourism sectors are two important sectors in Portuguese economy. Its high exposure to both internal and international economy volatility transform the companies operating in these economic sectors especially vulnerable to recent economic crises in Portugal and European Union. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and understand the impact of size and age on the financial health of textile and tourism companies, measured by economic indices. An empirical based model is proposed. Its implications are derived and tested on a sample of 4061 Portuguese companies from textile and tourism sector, during the period 2005-2009. The results conclude that age has a stronger impact on the risk of failure than size. Whereas the effect of age is generally positive regarding the financial health of the company, the effect of size is less clear and depends on the age of the company.

Effects of health decentralization, financing and governance in Mexico

OBJECTIVE: To identify the effects of decentralization on health financing and governance policies in Mexico from the perspective of users and providers. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was carried out in four states that were selected according to geopolitical and administrative criteria. Four indicators were assessed: changes and effects on governance, financing sources and funds, the final destination of resources, and fund allocation mechanisms. Data collection was performed using in-depth interviews with health system key personnel and community leaders, consensus techniques and document analyses. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed by thematic segmentation. RESULTS: The results show different effectiveness levels for the four states regarding changes in financing policies and community participation. Effects on health financing after decentralization were identified in each state, including: greater participation of municipal and state governments in health expenditure, increased financial participation of households, greater community participation in low-income states, duality and confusion in the new mechanisms for coordination among the three government levels, absence of an accountability system, lack of human resources and technical skills to implement, monitor and evaluate changes in financing. CONCLUSIONS: In general, positive and negative effects of decentralization on health financing and governance were identified. The effects mentioned by health service providers and users were related to a diversification of financing sources, a greater margin for decisions around the use and final destination of financial resources and normative development for the use of resources. At the community level, direct financial contributions were mentioned, as well as in-kind contributions, particularly in the form of community work.

Weaving encounters: towards an art of participation

In the early 21st Century, with the phenomenon of digital convergence, the consecration of Web 2.0, the decrease of the cost of cameras and video recorders, the proliferation of mobile phones, laptops and wireless technologies, we witness the arising of a new wave of media, of an informal, personal and at times “minority” nature, facilitating social networks, a culture of fans, of sharing and remix. As digital networks become fully and deeply intricate in our experience, the idea of “participation” arises as one of the most complex and controversial themes of the contemporary critical discourse, namely in what concerns contemporary art and new media art. However, the idea of “participation” as a practice or postulate traverses the 20th century art playing an essential role in its auto-critic, in questioning the concept of author, and in the dilution of the frontiers between art, “life” and society, emphasizing the process, the everyday and a community sense. As such, questioning the new media art in light of a “participatory art” (Frieling, 2008) invokes a double gaze simultaneously attentive to the emerging figures of a “participatory aesthetics” in digital arts and of the genealogy in which it is included. In fact, relating the new media art with the complex and paradoxical phenomenon of “participation” allows us to, on the one hand, avoid “digital formalism” (Lovink, 2008) and analyse the relations between digital art and contemporary social movements; on the other hand, this angle of analysis contributes to reinforce the dialogue and the links between digital art and contemporary art, questioning the alleged frontiers that separate them.

Terminology and knowledge engineering conference. New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

To meet the increasing demands of the complex inter-organizational processes and the demand for continuous innovation and internationalization, it is evident that new forms of organisation are being adopted, fostering more intensive collaboration processes and sharing of resources, in what can be called collaborative networks (Camarinha-Matos, 2006:03). Information and knowledge are crucial resources in collaborative networks, being their management fundamental processes to optimize. Knowledge organisation and collaboration systems are thus important instruments for the success of collaborative networks of organisations having been researched in the last decade in the areas of computer science, information science, management sciences, terminology and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this area didn’t give much attention to multilingual contexts of collaboration, which pose specific and challenging problems. It is then clear that access to and representation of knowledge will happen more and more on a multilingual setting which implies the overcoming of difficulties inherent to the presence of multiple languages, through the use of processes like localization of ontologies. Although localization, like other processes that involve multilingualism, is a rather well-developed practice and its methodologies and tools fruitfully employed by the language industry in the development and adaptation of multilingual content, it has not yet been sufficiently explored as an element of support to the development of knowledge representations - in particular ontologies - expressed in more than one language. Multilingual knowledge representation is then an open research area calling for cross-contributions from knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences. This workshop joined researchers interested in multilingual knowledge representation, in a multidisciplinary environment to debate the possibilities of cross-fertilization between knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences applied to contexts where multilingualism continuously creates new and demanding challenges to current knowledge representation methods and techniques. In this workshop six papers dealing with different approaches to multilingual knowledge representation are presented, most of them describing tools, approaches and results obtained in the development of ongoing projects. In the first case, Andrés Domínguez Burgos, Koen Kerremansa and Rita Temmerman present a software module that is part of a workbench for terminological and ontological mining, Termontospider, a wiki crawler that aims at optimally traverse Wikipedia in search of domainspecific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologicallyunderpinned multilingual terminological databases. In this paper the authors describe the basic principles behind the crawler and summarized the research setting in which the tool is currently tested. In the second paper, Fumiko Kano presents a work comparing four feature-based similarity measures derived from cognitive sciences. The purpose of the comparative analysis presented by the author is to verify the potentially most effective model that can be applied for mapping independent ontologies in a culturally influenced domain. For that, datasets based on standardized pre-defined feature dimensions and values, which are obtainable from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have been used for the comparative analysis of the similarity measures. The purpose of the comparison is to verify the similarity measures based on the objectively developed datasets. According to the author the results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model of Generalization provides for the most effective cognitive model for identifying the most similar corresponding concepts existing for a targeted socio-cultural community. In another presentation, Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger and Dagmar Gromann present an ongoing work and propose an approach to automatic extraction of information from multilingual financial Web resources, to provide candidate terms for building ontology elements or instances of ontology concepts. The authors present a complementary approach to the direct localization/translation of ontology labels, by acquiring terminologies through the access and harvesting of multilingual Web presences of structured information providers in the field of finance, leading to both the detection of candidate terms in various multilingual sources in the financial domain that can be used not only as labels of ontology classes and properties but also for the possible generation of (multilingual) domain ontologies themselves. In the next paper, Manuel Silva, António Lucas Soares and Rute Costa claim that despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. These questions become, according to the authors, more complex when the conceptualization occurs in a multilingual setting. To tackle these issues the authors present a collaborative platform – conceptME - where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework, allowing the inclusion of multilingual data as a way to promote knowledge sharing and enhance conceptualization and support a multilingual ontology specification. In another presentation Frieda Steurs and Hendrik J. Kockaert present us TermWise, a large project dealing with legal terminology and phraseology for the Belgian public services, i.e. the translation office of the ministry of justice, a project which aims at developing an advanced tool including expert knowledge in the algorithms that extract specialized language from textual data (legal documents) and whose outcome is a knowledge database including Dutch/French equivalents for legal concepts, enriched with the phraseology related to the terms under discussion. Finally, Deborah Grbac, Luca Losito, Andrea Sada and Paolo Sirito report on the preliminary results of a pilot project currently ongoing at UCSC Central Library, where they propose to adapt to subject librarians, employed in large and multilingual Academic Institutions, the model used by translators working within European Union Institutions. The authors are using User Experience (UX) Analysis in order to provide subject librarians with a visual support, by means of “ontology tables” depicting conceptual linking and connections of words with concepts presented according to their semantic and linguistic meaning. The organizers hope that the selection of papers presented here will be of interest to a broad audience, and will be a starting point for further discussion and cooperation.

Regulation and disclosure about financial instruments: Evidence on financial reporting in the Portuguese banking sector

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Finance from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Market selection and market entry recommendations for a non-profit organization's first international venture

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Productivity, Preferences and UIP deviations in an Open Economy Business Cycle Model

We show that a flex-price two-sector open economy DSGE model can explain the poor degree of international risk sharing and exchange rate disconnect. We use a suite of model evaluation measures and examine the role of (i) traded and non-traded sectors; (ii) financial market incompleteness; (iii) preference shocks; (iv) deviations from UIP condition for the exchange rates; and (v) creditor status in net foreign assets. We find that there is a good case for both traded and non-traded productivity shocks as well as UIP deviations in explaining the puzzles.

Sorting out measures and definitions of screening participation to improve comparability: The example of colorectal cancer.

Participation is a key indicator of the potential effectiveness of any population-based intervention. Defining, measuring and reporting participation in cancer screening programmes has become more heterogeneous as the number and diversity of interventions have increased, and the purposes of this benchmarking parameter have broadened. This study, centred on colorectal cancer, addresses current issues that affect the increasingly complex task of comparing screening participation across settings. Reports from programmes with a defined target population and active invitation scheme, published between 2005 and 2012, were reviewed. Differences in defining and measuring participation were identified and quantified, and participation indicators were grouped by aims of measure and temporal dimensions. We found that consistent terminology, clear and complete reporting of participation definition and systematic documentation of coverage by invitation were lacking. Further, adherence to definitions proposed in the 2010 European Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Colorectal Cancer Screening was suboptimal. Ineligible individuals represented 1% to 15% of invitations, and variable criteria for ineligibility yielded differences in participation estimates that could obscure the interpretation of colorectal cancer screening participation internationally. Excluding ineligible individuals from the reference population enhances comparability of participation measures. Standardised measures of cumulative participation to compare screening protocols with different intervals and inclusion of time since invitation in definitions are urgently needed to improve international comparability of colorectal cancer screening participation. Recommendations to improve comparability of participation indicators in cancer screening interventions are made.

The Barcelona Forum: on decentralized governance and conflict prevention 6-8 july 2009

The Barcelona Forum aimed to generate both a theoretical and practical discussion on decentralized governance and its capacity to promote peace, prevent conflict, advance human security and ensure greater governmental accountability. The Forum intended to review the theoretical strength of decentralization as a political tool and discuss how it can be properly implemented. Eight case studies were selected to be covered during the two days in order to draw conclusions and offer proposals for the future implementation of decentralization. The case of Catalonia and the decentralized experience of Spain was given special attention, as an example of successful decentralization. The other cases presented achievements and challenges and prompted discussions on both the validity and universality of decentralization as a way to promote and preserve peace. Topics such as ethnic and territorial divisions, democratic accountability, financial decentralization and distribution, resource sharing, and external implementation of decentralization through peace processes were discussed.

Framework for Corporate and Financial Governance for Regulatory Bodies under the aegis of the Department of Health and Children

The document should be read as supplementary to existing requirements as set out both in statute â?" particularly legislation specific to your organisation, the Health Acts 1947-2004, Ombudsman Act, 1980, Data Protection Acts 1988 & 2003, Freedom of Information Acts 1997-2003, Ethics in Public Office Acts 1995 & 2001, Ombudsman for Children Act, 2002 and the Comptroller and Auditor General (Amendment) Act, 1993 – and in Government approved guidelines, including the Code of Practice for the Governance of State Bodies (2001), Public Financial Procedures, The Role and Responsibilities of Accounting Officers (2003) and Risk Management Guidance for Government Departments and Offices (2004). Read the report (PDF, 1.4mb)  

Sorting out measures and definitions of screening participation to improve comparability : the example of colorectal cancer.

Participation is a key indicator of the potential effectiveness of any population-based intervention. Defining, measuring and reporting participation in cancer screening programmes has become more heterogeneous as the number and diversity of interventions have increased, and the purposes of this benchmarking parameter have broadened. This study, centred on colorectal cancer, addresses current issues that affect the increasingly complex task of comparing screening participation across settings. Reports from programmes with a defined target population and active invitation scheme, published between 2005 and 2012, were reviewed. Differences in defining and measuring participation were identified and quantified, and participation indicators were grouped by aims of measure and temporal dimensions. We found that consistent terminology, clear and complete reporting of participation definition and systematic documentation of coverage by invitation were lacking. Further, adherence to definitions proposed in the 2010 European Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Colorectal Cancer Screening was suboptimal. Ineligible individuals represented 1% to 15% of invitations, and variable criteria for ineligibility yielded differences in participation estimates that could obscure the interpretation of colorectal cancer screening participation internationally. Excluding ineligible individuals from the reference population enhances comparability of participation measures. Standardised measures of cumulative participation to compare screening protocols with different intervals and inclusion of time since invitation in definitions are urgently needed to improve international comparability of colorectal cancer screening participation. Recommendations to improve comparability of participation indicators in cancer screening interventions are made.

The generation and re-generation of social capital and enterprises in multi-stakeholders social cooperative enterprises: a system dynamic approach

Theories on social capital and on social entrepreneurship have mainly highlighted the attitude of social capital to generate enterprises and to foster good relations between third sector organizations and the public sector. This paper considers the social capital in a specific third sector enterprise; here, multi-stakeholder social cooperatives are seen, at the same time, as social capital results, creators and incubators. In the particular enterprises that identify themselves as community social enterprises, social capital, both as organizational and relational capital, is fundamental: SCEs arise from but also produce and disseminate social capital. This paper aims to improve the building of relational social capital and the refining of helpful relations drawn from other arenas, where they were created and from where they are sometimes transferred to other realities, where their role is carried on further (often working in non-profit, horizontally and vertically arranged groups, where they share resources and relations). To represent this perspective, we use a qualitative system dynamic approach in which social capital is measured using proxies. Cooperation of volunteers, customers, community leaders and third sector local organizations is fundamental to establish trust relations between public local authorities and cooperatives. These relations help the latter to maintain long-term contracts with local authorities as providers of social services and enable them to add innovation to their services, by developing experiences and management models and maintaining an interchange with civil servants regarding these matters. The long-term relations and the organizational relations linking SCEs and public organizations help to create and to renovate social capital. Thus, multi-stakeholder cooperatives originated via social capital developed in third sector organizations produce new social capital within the cooperatives themselves and between different cooperatives (entrepreneurial components of the third sector) and the public sector. In their entrepreneurial life, cooperatives have to contrast the "working drift," as a result of which only workers remain as members of the cooperative, while other stakeholders leave the organization. Those who are not workers in the cooperative are (stake)holders with "weak ties," who are nevertheless fundamental in making a worker's cooperative an authentic social multi-stakeholders cooperative. To maintain multi-stakeholder governance and the relations with third sector and civil society, social cooperatives have to reinforce participation and dialogue with civil society through ongoing efforts to include people that provide social proposals. We try to represent these processes in a system dynamic model applied to local cooperatives, measuring the social capital created by the social cooperative through proxies, such as number of volunteers and strong cooperation with public institutions. Using a reverse-engineering approach, we can individuate the determinants of the creation of social capital and thereby give support to governance that creates social capital.

Business Organization and Coordination in Marketing Specialty Hogs: A Comparative Analysis of Two Firms from Iowa, November 2005

We study business organization and coordination of specialty-market hog production using a comparative analysis of two Iowa pork niche-marketing firms. We describe and analyze each firms management of five key organizational challenges: planning and logistics, quality assurance, process verication and management of �credence attributes,� business structure, and profit sharing. Although each firm is engaged in essentially the same activity, there are substantial differences across the two firms in the way production and marketing are coordinated. These differences are partly explained by the relative size and age of each firm, thus highlighting the importance of organizational evolution in agricultural markets, but are also partly the result of a formal organizational separation between marketing and production activities in one of the firm.