The Impacts of Market Segmentation on Thermal Power Generation Efficiency

China’s power industry is in a critical transformation period. The new round of power system reform in 2015 will have a profound impact on China’s power industry. Therefore, it’s necessary to analyze the influencing factors of thermal power generation efficiency. Based on the thermal power generation industry related data in China’s 30 provinces from 2005 to 2017, this paper studies the impacts of market segmentation on thermal power generation efficiency in China. And the empirical result shows that the market segmentation exhibit significant negative effects on the thermal power generation efficiency, that is, the thermal power generation efficiency significantly decrease 1.6799 for each unit increase of market segmentation index of thermal power industry. Besides, by decomposing the dynamic thermal power efficiency index, we find that the “innovation effect” is the primary channel for the market segmentation to make effects on the thermal power generation efficiency. Furthermore, our findings are still robust after considering endogenous problems and eliminating the relevant data. Finally, research conclusions of our study paper provide empirical supports for the efficient development of China’s power market.

Coordinating nominations: how to deal with an incumbent surplus after electoral reform

How do parties and candidates react to electoral system reform? While the literature on causes and consequences of electoral reforms is receiving increasing attention, we lack a systematic micro-level account on how parties and candidates adopt to changes in electoral rules and district boundaries. This paper examines the case of the Japanese Liberal Democrats to explore how the party has managed to accommodate a surplus of incumbents to a reduced number of nominal tier seats following the 1994 electoral reform. By using micro-level data, I examine how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has matched candidates based on their expected electoral strength and ideological positioning to new districts. Moreover, I investigate how the newly instituted party-list allowed the LDP to avoid its disintegration at the local level by systematically defusing local stand-offs through the handing out of promising list positions. My findings help to understand how the LDP could avoid its disintegration and could continue to dominate Japanese politics until today.

Time Evolution of Market Efficiency and Multifractality of the Japanese Stock Market

This study investigates the time evolution of market efficiency in the Japanese stock markets, considering three indices: Tokyo Stock Price Index (TOPIX), Tokyo Stock Exchange Second Section Index, and TOPIX-Small. The Hurst exponent reveals that the Japanese markets are inefficient in their early stages and improve gradually. TOPIX and TOPIX-Small showed an anti-persistence around the year 2000, which still persists. The degree of multifractality varies over time and does not show that the Japanese markets are permanently efficient. The multifractal properties of the Japanese markets changed considerably around the year 2000; this may have been caused by the complete migration from the stock trading floor to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s computer trading system and the financial system reform, also known as the “Japanese Big Bang”.

Malaysian Electoral System Reform and the Challenges of its Implementation After the 14th General Election

Prior to the 14th general election (GE-14), electoral practices in Malaysia have been often criticised as being obscure and biased since it was plagued with issues such as dubious voter registers and ballot paper fraud. Therefore, in its manifesto during GE-14, Pakatan Harapan (PH) promised to reform this electoral practice to make it more independent, transparent, and fair. PH then won the GE-14 on the strength of this vow, forcing it to keep its manifesto pledge. However, implementing the said promise is not easy as most of the proposals involve amendments to the Federal Constitution that require the support of at least a two-thirds majority. The fact that PH lacks such a majority has raised the issue of whether or not the objective to reform the electoral system can be materialised. Thus, this article examines the aspects of electoral reform implemented by PH during its 22 months in power and assesses the challenges faced in implementing such electoral system reform. The concept of electoral reform was used as an analytical tool in this article. This article mainly obtained its data from secondary sources including books, journals, theses, official government documents and websites, while primary data were collected from unstructured interviews with authoritative informants. Findings revealed that among the important reforms of the country's electoral system that have been accomplished by PH are improving the standard operating procedures of elections, enhancing election rules that do not require amendments, amending laws that require simple majority support in the parliament, and implementing ‘high-impact’ electoral reforms that require amendments to the Federal Constitution. Moreover, it was also discovered that the main challenge to reforming the electoral system was the constraint of electoral rule amendments that require the approval of a two-thirds majority of parliamentarians. Other obstacles included politicians' unwillingness to accept a new electoral system culture, barriers to accessing data and information owned by other agencies, discrepancies between federal and state legislation, and financial constraints on improving existing hardware and systems necessary for electoral reform success.

Janusz Józef Węc, Germany’s Position on the System Reform of the European Union in the 2002–2016, Wydawnictwo Peter Lang, Berlin 2018, ss. 288.

Recenzja

Adultery Criminalization Spirit in Islamic Criminal Law: Alternatives in Indonesia’s Positive Legal System Reform

This study aims to provide new ideas in the criminal law reform discourse in Indonesia, especially concerning the adultery issue, by employing a socio-legal approach and Islamic criminal law. The socio-legal approach was performed by combining normative analysis and non-legal scientific tactics in observing the applicable law. Meanwhile, the Islamic criminal law was used to assess and contribute new ideas to the Indonesian legal system in the future, presuming criminal law reforms are implemented. The results indicated fundamental weaknesses in Article 284 of the Criminal Code (KUHP) in terms of defining adultery and the prescribed sanctions. Hence, the community’s need for efforts to reform the adultery penalty following the national culture is inevitable. The best solution is that the spirit of adultery sanctions in Islamic criminal is expected to be an alternative to renew Indonesia’s criminal law system in the future. Although some elements of the nation may not expect the form of adultery sanction in Islamic penalties, the spirit in it aims to have strong legal certainty and maintain human life

Research on the Practical Teaching System Reform of Computer Hardware Courses

This study analyzes the current situation of the practical teaching system of computer hardware courses in local undergraduate colleges, scrutinizes the experimental environment construction, contents, and methods of computer hardware courses, and proposes a new practical teaching system for computer hardware courses, so as to meet the needs of transformation and development as well as application-oriented talent training.

Financial Management Early-Warning Mechanism Construction and Decision Analysis Research Based on Wireless Sensor Network and Data Mining

With the gradual and complete establishment of the current socialist legal market economy management system with Chinese characteristics and the continuous investment in deepening system reform and continuous improvement in the later period, the social financial industry and corporate financial management have gradually increased their risk awareness of corporate financial management. This paper deeply analyzes and studies the statistical methods of financial data-related legal rule interactive mining and proposes a new improved statistical algorithm of financial-related legal rules, which greatly improves the work efficiency of financial data interactive mining. At the same time, a multilevel analysis model based on the concept of corporate financial crisis risk assessment and a corporate financial crisis risk early-warning analysis model for decision-making risk evaluation are proposed. Finally, it can be determined how to choose more internationally representative corporate financial management risk analysis indicators, which have more objectivity and practical application significance than traditional analysis methods. Finally, it is concluded that the accuracy of this model is better than that of other models. The accuracy rate of financial crisis prediction reached 62.35%.