The performance of private companies in China before and during the global financial crisis: firms’ characteristics and entrepreneurs’ attributes

This work sheds light on how firm- and entrepreneur-specific attributes covariate with Chinese private firms’ growth rates before and during the global financial crisis. In order to do so, we exploit the exceptional presence of data regarding the firms’ sales over the previous three years in the 2010 China Private Enterprises Survey. Firms run by entrepreneurs with a high level of education and a positive subjective perception of their economic and social status tend to grow more in both periods. The age and the gender of the entrepreneurs, on the contrary, are not associated with different growth performances. As shown in the literature, companies that are smaller, more productive and have higher capital at start-up perform better in both periods. Notably, the relationship between firm growth rates and other relevant factors changes between 2007/2008 and 2008/2009: privatized companies outperform the others before the crisis, whereas joint-stock enterprises and companies with articulated systems of corporate governance do better in the crisis period. These and other novel results contribute to the understanding of the heterogeneous performances of the private firms in China and of the evolution of entrepreneurship during its transition toward a market-oriented economy.

Acompanhamento e avaliação aos municípios: a perspectiva do sistema articulado de educação

In this text, with a critical approach, it is discussed about the thematic management of education, with the aim of understanding the accompaniment and the evaluation of municipalities from the perspective of the planning process as an articulator of the Education System. In general, it is understood that the challenges of accompaniment and evaluation in educational management are implicated in the entire planning process that must take place taking into account its role and importance. The theoretical studies announce/denounce that, despite a normative legal context that establishes democratic evaluation, antagonistic conceptions built in conjunctures political, economic and social situations are identified, which causes tensions and creates the need for deepening within the scope of articulated systems of education, bearing in mind the indispensability of grounding conceptions and practices.

Design of Spatial Non-Anthropomorphic Articulated Systems Based on Arm Joint Constraint Kinematic Data for Human Interactive Robotics Applications

The design of human interactive robotic systems requires additional considerations compared to conventional robotic designs to take into account human factors. In this paper, a recently developed linkage kinematic synthesis incorporating higher order motion constraints is utilized to the synthesis of a five degree of freedom serial TS linkage for human interactive applications. The T represents a universal two degrees-of-freedom shoulder, while the S defines a spherical three degrees-of-freedom wrist joint. The desired hand kinematics and its time derivatives can be obtained by a motion capture system as well as from the hand-object/environment contact geometries at two task locations. In order to determine the design parameters (i.e., locations of the base/shoulder and moving/wrist pivots, as well as the link length connecting these joints), position, velocity and acceleration constraint equations of the TS linkage are solved in the vicinity of the initial and the final reaching locations. The entire robotic joint trajectories are formulated via minimum jerk theory to closely approximate human natural hand profile with an elbow joint constraint. In this manner, the TS linkage system can be designed to guarantee to reproduce the natural human hand kinematics with the minimum amount of information about the desired hand kinematic specifications. The applicability of the proposed technique was verified by designing a TS linkage system from a captured human data, and then comparing the generated end-effector trajectory with the human hand motion trajectory, which show promising results.