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Based on a first video conference: small and middle sized companies in Russia and Germany: A comparative view organized by University "Interregional Institute of Economics and Law", Saint Petersburg/Russia and the University of Applied Sciences – Faculty of Business, Fulda/Germany held on 20th May 2010. Both institutes decided to organize a follow-up conference on January 27th 2011. Again the focus was to compare both markets for international operating companies in reasons for going abroad. The following papers are the outcome of this conference and were presented on the one hand by Fulda master students and on the other hand by Master Students from Saint Petersburg. The overall focus was again a comparative work from a company point of view. Hereby the main research question was to present different case studies based on a heterogeneous group of German-based companies in terms of size and branches. Success and failure in international management activities are discussed on an empirical and statistical basis. Furthermore the students from both institutes learnt also some practical matters like for example how can a foreign company establish its legal presence in Russia?
The purpose of this report is to determine whether health maintenance organisations (HMOs) can provide a suitable and viable form of financial health protection and service provision in selected West African countries, supplementary to existing healthcare provision and coverage. Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Sierra Leone were chosen as country examples. Chapter 1 provides the context for the health and healthcare situation in West Africa as well as specific country profiles, whilst Chapter 2 describes factors to be considered when establishing an HMO. The range of technical di-mensions of an HMO introduced in this report includes: administration, human resources, financing, accreditation, service availability and readiness, the benefits catalogue, paying providers, drugs and quality management. Each of these dimensions is further discussed in Chapters 3 – 10.
The administration of an HMO consists of nine interconnected fields: management dash-board, quality management, IT department, purchasing and coordination, finance and ac-counting, health plan and benefit package, member management, human resources, and marketing. In Chapter 3, the authors give a more in-depth analysis of the fields of marketing and member management. Recommendations provided in this chapter include the use of different marketing approaches to bridge the gap between communities and the HMO by establishing informative advertising (e.g., via a mobile responsive website, social media, posters, flyers, radio, and recorded information).
Chapter 4 focuses on an HMO’s human resources, particularly in regard to staff recruiting, development and retention. Staff development expands staff competence by increasing employees’ motivation and job satisfaction, which leads to an increase in their performance and productivity, thereby improving staff retention. Furthermore, staff retention is important for ensuring a long-term commitment to the HMO. In conclusion, the success of an HMO is crucially dependent on motivating staff and enabling them to exercise, develop and share their skills.
Chapter 5 covers the financial aspects of an HMO, including dimensions related to its target population, financial barriers, funding resources, management of funds, and specific coun-try challenges. In order to calculate the necessary resources, this chapter make clear that an HMO must consider cost projections for the benefit package, infrastructure development, administration, expansion and a reserve.
To establish an accreditation system, HMOs can interact with stakeholders from different fields and levels of service delivery and administration, as examined in Chapter 6. The polit-ical and social conditions of a country must be considered by the HMO in order to effective-ly implement an accreditation system. Besides this, an HMO can seek to improve the per-formance quality of healthcare by supporting the establishment of an accreditation scheme.
Reliable information on service availability and readiness is necessary for successful health systems management as it allows health services to be tracked in terms of how they have responded to changed inputs and processes. In Chapter 7, the authors analyse the Service Availability and Readiness Assessment (SARA) tool, and recommend its application within the HMO, as it offers a standardised approach to monitoring the supply of services by providing a standard set of tracer indicators.
To implement a health benefit package (HBP), the authors assess existing models, such as the one introduced by Glassman et al. (2017) which specifies ten core elements of an HBP design and helps to enable discussions on the most relevant aspects in designing an HBP for an HMO. Chapter 8 presents a coinsurance scheme within the HBP design which will affect the service utilisation of members as well as utilisation management as one method for cost control. In addition, actuarial calculations are proposed using Sierra Leone as a case example.
Chapter 9 describes the pharmaceutical supply chain required by an HMO. Important steps of the HMO’s medicine supply chain include: selection, quantification and forecasting, pro-curement, storage, and distribution of medical products. Medicines provided by the HMO must be safe, available, accessible, and affordable at all times and for all members. Stock-outs must be avoided, and therefore this chapter recommends employing community-based health workers in order to ensure distribution to patients in rural areas.
Quality management is an important field in an HMO analysed in Chapter 10 of this report. It includes patient safety, efficiency, and patient satisfaction; all factors that must be con-sidered during the implementation of an HMO. The chapter concludes by noting that quality is highly subjective and must therefore be applied to the specific context of an HMO within a specific country.
Finally, Chapters 11 and 12 of the report include implementation challenges of an HMO in West Africa, as well next steps that should be followed. Although similar challenges con-cerning the social, political, or structural environment can be found in most West African countries, direct transfer of elaborated information to other countries and healthcare situa-tions is not always possible. As well as these situational challenges, HMOs encounter dif-ferent questions such as how to balance the scope of available services against the cover-age of diverse geographical areas, engagement of various stakeholders and reflection of respective values, interests and perspectives of local populations.
Limitations of the report include a lack of specificity in general, and the use of many specific country settings, as observations and examples for one HMO dimension may not always be transferable to other regions and healthcare situations. Therefore, this report is not meant to provide concrete conclusions or solutions in regard to the implementation of an HMO in a specific country setting.
In conclusion, this report states that HMOs have the potential to play a substantial role in healthcare system strengthening, provision of quality healthcare services and the preven-tion of financial burden due to ill-health. As a result, an HMO can support West African countries in their role to fulfil their obligation of protecting the health of their citizens. Addi-tionally, the authors strongly believe that an HMO must reflect the cultural, societal and political environment in which it is implemented. Therefore, it is essential that research be conducted prior to its implementation in addition to including the relevant local stakeholders as early as possible in the process.
The research papers published in this reader were presented to an audience of academicians and practitioners at the 2011 Global Business Management Research Conference at Fulda University. The conference was conducted under the topic “Recent Developments in Business Management Research in an International and Regional Context”.
Abstract
Over the course of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis members of the euro area have put up significant resources to stabilize the financial situation of a few fellow member states. In Germany, this support is subject to a controversial discussion. One aspect in that is the extent of support provided. Using the financial assistance provided to Greece as an example, this paper sheds some light on the financial burden for Germany in comparison to other member states of the euro area, especially Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This implies not only an interesting comparison of strains between large and small economies but also between original and later euro area members.
Keywords: euro area, debt crisis, exposure, Greece, Baltic states, Germany
Climate change is a global challenge, with estimated mitigation costs ranging from $1.6 to $3.8 trillion per year. As a pioneer in climate action, the European Union has the most exten-sive emissions trading system worldwide (90% of the global value of $759 billion in 2021). In this paper, we review the European Union's climate strategy, emphasizing the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) development, and the role of tropical forest carbon credits for off-setting. We argue that the European Union continues to leave a significant potential of trop-ical forests as natural carbon sinks unattended. In contrast, we reveal that the regulators can learn from the experiences made in the past and the finalization of the rulebook for Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. We present a proposal on changes to the EU ETS regulation by con-verting the European Commission's proposal to increase the linear reduction factor from 2.2% to 4.2% to the eligibility of forest carbon credits, resulting in additional funding poten-tial for forestry projects to increase necessary carbon sinks. Simultaneously, allowing flexibil-ity of investing to a limited extent in neutralization projects mitigates the risk of overstress-ing regulated companies to reach the emission reduction targets.
We explore whether the integration of carbon offsets into investment portfolios improves perfor-mance. Our results show that investment strategies that include such offsets achieve higher Sharpe Ratios than the diversified benchmark portfolios. The efficient frontier of optimal portfolio choices is shifted upwards as a result of including compliance and voluntary carbon offsets in the portfolio. Our results also show that while diversified portfolios may benefit from carbon offsets integration, voluntary carbon offsets are significantly more sensitive to exogenous shocks than compliance carbon allowances. All these results are novel and may encourage investors to invest in such sustainable asset classes.
Abstract
Forest-based carbon credits are crucial in most Emissions Trading Schemes as they offer a cost-efficient means of offsetting hard-to-abate emissions. To date, this has not been the case in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). However with the Paris Agreement rulebook now finalized, there could be an opportunity to revive this flexibility mechanism in European climate policy. Based on 24 expert interviews, we examined the forest potential within the EU ETS across short, medium, and long-term time frames. We found that the compliance system will remain blocked until 2030, but there is a greater likelihood of transitioning towards the inclusion of forest-based removals and reductions in the long term. Although forestry projects have faced significant reluctance in the EU, there is unanimous agreement on the importance of both technological solutions and such initiatives for climate protection. To fully leverage the potential of forest activity in the future, it will be necessary to adopt different methods and tools (e.g., liability regimes), stricter legislation on socio-economic factors (e.g., land use rights), overcoming implementation hurdles (e.g., do not compromise deterrence through mitigation), and maintaining an open political stance. This study provides a comprehensive perspective on the barriers and potentials of forestry projects within the compliance system of the EU which is essential to be addressed when re-opening the discussion on future eligibility. The implication of the findings suggest an immediate start to adopt to the barriers for carbon credit readiness in the next phase of the EU ETS beginning of 2030.
Abstract knowledge is deeply grounded in many computer-based applications. An important research area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) deals with the automatic derivation of knowledge from data. Machine learning offers the according algorithms. One area of research focuses on the development of biologically inspired learning algorithms. The respective machine learning methods are based on neurological concepts so that they can systematically derive knowledge from data and store it. One type of machine learning algorithms that can be categorized as "deep learning" model is referred to as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). DNNs consist of multiple artificial neurons arranged in layers that are trained by using the backpropagation algorithm. These deep learning methods exhibit amazing capabilities for inferring and storing complex knowledge from high-dimensional data.
However, DNNs are affected by a problem that prevents new knowledge from being added to an existing base. The ability to continuously accumulate knowledge is an important factor that contributed to evolution and is therefore a prerequisite for the development of strong AIs. The so-called "catastrophic forgetting" (CF) effect causes DNNs to immediately loose already derived knowledge after a few training iterations on a new data distribution. Only an energetically expensive retraining with the joint data distribution of past and new data enables the abstraction of the entire new set of knowledge. In order to counteract the effect, various techniques have been and are still being developed with the goal to mitigate or even solve the CF problem. These published CF avoidance studies usually imply the effectiveness of their approaches for various continual learning tasks.
This dissertation is set in the context of continual machine learning with deep learning methods. The first part deals with the development of an application-oriented real-world evaluation protocol which can be used to investigate different machine learning models with regard to the suppression of the CF effect. In the second part, a comprehensive study indicates that under the application-oriented requirements none of the investigated models can exhibit satisfactory continual learning results. In the third part, a novel deep learning model is presented which is referred to as Deep Convolutional Gaussian Mixture Models (DCGMMs). DCGMMs build upon the unsupervised approach of Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). GMMs cannot be considered as deep learning method and they have to be initialized in a data-driven manner before training. These aspects limit the use of GMMs in continual learning scenarios.
The training procedure proposed in this work enables the training of GMMs by using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) (as applied to DNNs). The integrated annealing scheme solves the problem of a data-driven initialization, which has been a prerequisite for GMM training. It is experimentally proven that the novel training method enables equivalent results compared to conventional methods without iterating their disadvantages. Another innovation is the arrangement of GMMs in form of layers, which is similar to DNNs. The transformation of GMMs into layers enables the combination with existing layer types and thus the construction of deep architectures, which can derive more complex knowledge with less resources.
In the final part of this work, the DCGMM model is examined with regard to its continual learning capabilities. In this context, a replay approach referred to as Gaussian Mixture Replay (GMR) is introduced. GMR describes the generation and replay of data samples by utilizing the DCGMM functionalities. Comparisons with existing CF avoidance models show that similar continual learning results can be achieved by using GMR under application-oriented conditions. All in all, the presented work implies that the identified application-oriented requirements are still an open issue with respect to "applied" continual learning research approaches. In addition, the novel deep learning model provides an interesting starting point for many other research areas.
To date, studies on individual and organizational health literacy (OHL) in facilities for people with disabilities are scarce. Thus, the aims of this study are (1) to adapt an existing instrument for measuring organizational health literacy (OHL), namely, the “Health literate health care organization scale” (HLHO-10), to the context of facilities for people with disabilities, (2) to quantitatively examine characteristics of OHL, and (3) to qualitatively assess the definition and role of OHL by interviewing managers and skilled staff. An online study in Germany with N = 130 managers and skilled staff in facilities for people with disabilities was conducted, using the adapted HLHO-10 questionnaire. Univariate analyses were applied. Qualitative content analysis was used to investigate interview data from N = 8 managers and skilled staff from N = 8 facilities for people with disabilities in Hesse, Germany. Quantitative results revealed that respondents reported a below-average level in HLHO-10, with the lowest level found in the attribute of participative development of health information. The qualitative findings showed a clear need for improved navigation to and in facilities. The quantitative and qualitative findings are mainly consistent. Future research and measures should focus on facilities for people with disabilities in order to strengthen the development of and access to target-group-specific health information, as well as to establish a health-literate working and living environment.
The aim of this paper is to examine the causes of food waste and potential prevention strategies from a grocery retail store owner’s perspective. We therefore conducted a case study in a German region through semi-structured expert interviews with grocery retail store owners. From the collected responses, we applied a qualitative content analysis. The results indicated that store owners try to avoid food waste as this incurs a financial loss for them that directly affects them personally, as opposed to store managers of supermarket chains who receive a fixed salary. The main causes of food waste in the grocery retail stores in the region surveyed are expiration dates, spoilage, consumer purchasing behavior, and over-ordering of food products. The most appropriate food waste prevention strategies developed by store owners are those based on store owners’ experience and their own management style, such as the optimization of sales and management strategies, including precise planning, accurate ordering, and timely price reductions on soon-to-be-expiring food products. The redistribution of food surpluses as donations to food banks, employees, and as animal feed further helps to reduce the amount of food waste, but not the financial loss. This study enhances the literature by revealing that grocery retail store owners have the ability and are willing to successfully implement and enforce food prevention strategies in their stores.