To meet the increasing demand for energy, the past decade has seen the revitalization of nuclear power technologies and many countries adopting nuclear power as a priority strategy in their energy policy. However, Japan's Fukushima nuclear crisis, following the tsunami on 11 March 2011,...

The increasing frequency and impact of environmental accidents have pushed the issue of environmental risk management (ERM) to the top of the Chinese governments' agendas and popularized the term 'emergency response.' Although the boundary between environmental accidents and other types of...

China, as a 'double risk' society, is in urgent need for effective environmental risk management systems. Compared with other risks, man-made environmental risks have not been given due weight. Public awareness and perceptions of environmental risks are crucial in all phases of effective risk...

How are we to understand the East Asian crisis? There are two popular explanations: first that it was just like a nineteenth century British bank panic, calling for prompt action by a 'lender of last resort', namely the IMF; second that it was much worse —nothing less than the bursting of a...

Using a variant of the Cagan model with rational expectations, this paper shows that expected stabilization can result in a budget deficit in excess of the maximum inflation tax. A cap on the deficit dampens inflation expectations and raises real balances, thus increasing the yield of the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a distributed multiple mobile robot system that provides a collaborative control and simulation environment. Design/methodology/approach – A CORBA‐based cooperative system is designed to implement a robotic layered cooperative mechanism....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel autonomous in‐pipe robot to perform the preventive point reparation for long‐distance offshore oil pipelines. Design/methodology/approach – The autonomous in‐pipe robot performs online ultrasonic inspection for pipe wall...

Recent empirical research by Mark Taylor and coauthors has found evidence of hybrid dynamics for real exchange rates. While there is a random walk near equilibrium, for real exchange rates some distance from equilibrium there is mean-reversion which increases with the degree of misalignment. An...

A vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) tax is frequently mentioned as viable alternative to a fuel tax for collecting highway users fees from light vehicles. Both a static model and a regression based model are used here to assess the distributional impacts of a switch from a fuel tax to a VMT tax for...

Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test...