At present, most developed economies have open capital accounts coupled with liberalised domestic financial sectors. Following the trend, developing and transition economies have opened up mostly between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s. The Economist recently carried an article proclaiming that emerging economies are driving global growth and making a big impact on developed countries as these...

W ith nearly two-thirds of the population afflicted, the Nuu-chah-nulth Indians of Vancouver Island in British Columbia have one of the highest rates of arthritis in the world. Often passed down family lines, the genetics of arthritis in this unique population was studied extensively during the 1980s by Richard Ward, now head of the Institute of Biological Anthropology at the University of Oxfo...

A new triflavanoid, kandelin B-5 (1), was isolated from the rhizomes of Smilax china L., together with six known phenylpropanoid substituted flavan-3-ols (2-7), nine flavonoids (8-16), two stilbenoids (17, 18), and two other compounds (19, 20). The structure of compound 1 was determined on the basis of 1D, 2D NMR and HR-ESI-MS data, as well as chemical method. Compounds 2-5, 8-12, 15, 17, and 1...

Guanxi is an important part of Chinese business culture, and there are a large number of business people from all over the world coming to China since its opening up and reform policies. The purpose of this paper is to examine the importance of Guanxi to multinational companies in China, and discuss if its importance has declined since China’s opening up and reform policies have reached an adva...

Robert M. Hartwell, in his path-breaking article on the transformation from the eighth to the sixteenth century, defined this transition as the demise and re-absorption of “a semihereditary professional bureaucratic elite” into “a multitude of local elite gentry families,” which it had hitherto coexisted with. Since Hartwell maintained that those local gentry elites had dominated the local scen...

Background We present results of expanding the contents of the China Biographical Database by text mining historical local gazetteers, difangzhi地方志 . The goal of the database is to see how people are connected together, through kinship, social connections, and the places and offices in which they served. The gazetteers are the single most important collection of names and offices covering the S...

We introduce an approach to revealing the likelihood of different population histories that utilizes an explicit model of sequence evolution for the DNA segment under study. Based on a phylogenetic tree reconstruction method we show that a Tamura-Nei model with heterogeneous mutation rates is a fair description of the evolutionary process of the hypervariable region I of the mitochondrial DNA f...

Plant dcfcncr rcsponscs to pathogcn clicitation, plant ccll growth and dcvclopmcnt arc complex and highly integrated pmcesses. Intcraction betwecn host plant and pathogcn result in significant differences in defence gcnc cxprcssion. A mynad 01 defence-related gcncs arc induccd in many caws of inumpati blc interaction betwccn host plant and pathogcn. Tcchniqucs that monitor individual rcsponscs ...

Empirical data and previous research have shown that capitalization rates vary across different MSA markets as well as between different product types. The cause of these variations is not fully understood however. Theory would suggest that the cause of variation should be income growth expectations, or risk variation. Surprisingly, ex-post data comparing income growth and cap rates shows almos...

We present here the first complete Squash leaf curl China virus (SLCCV) genomic segment DNA-A sequence from East Timor. It was isolated from a pumpkin plant. When compared with 15 complete SLCCV DNA-A genome sequences from other world regions, it most resembled the Malaysian isolate MC1 sequence.