Who to blame: An inquiry into universal factors accounting for output variations in public–private partnership initiatives across geographical locations. Who to be blamed for not meeting performance,innovativeness, and quality outputs?

With the current controversy and blame game on output of public–private partnership (PPP) initiatives concerns, we investigate why there may be variations in achieving innovativeness, perceived quality, and performance of PPP initiatives across different geographical locations. For instance, we investigate a scenario where “a private company involved in waste management will perform in country ‘A’ but fails to perform in country ‘B’ given the same assignment and target.” We empirically sampled and make conclusions with 475 respondents from the public sector, private sector, and academia based on a survey inquiry. We adopted the structural equation modeling method using the partial least square for the data analysis. The results show that environmental dynamism causes major variations in desired output of PPP initiatives followed by collaboration capacity, environmental fit, and absorptive capacity, respectively. The findings further show that one partner cannot be blamed entirely for causing the failure of PPP initiative. However, we conclude that because on the basis of our data, environmental dynamism, which is as a result of some governmental activities, depicts the highest effect on output, public partners might be more liable. The findings from this study are an explicit view of PPP technocrats, which makes the conclusions more reliable.     

欧洲水下滑翔机发展应用现状及其法律规制——对中国借鉴意义之思考

海洋观测与调查的科学活动为中国海洋事业的金方位发展提供了重要的基础资料和科学依据。科学技术的发展使得海洋科学调查方法不断面临新的变革。水下滑翔机，作为目前国际上的研究热点，欧洲对其发展及应用给予了高度关注，并在法律规制方面开始进行深入探讨。中国对于水下滑翔机研究起步较晚，尚未广泛应用，对其法律规制更是鲜有涉及。通过对欧洲水下滑翔机发展应用现状的介绍，详细分析了水下滑翔机的应用在目前国际法律体系中存在的法律规制问题，介绍了欧洲正在开展的相关工作，希望为中国相关规定的制定提供参考和借鉴，保障中国海洋调查新方法的顺利应用。     

A note on the functioning of international commodity price stabilisation agreements in periods of fluctuating monetary exchange rates

A belief held by many government officials and development economists is that sizeable and irregular commodity price fluctuations have important detrimental effects on both exporting and importing countries. Given the nature of these adverse effects attempts have been made to negotiate international price stabilisation agreements under which some central authority would make market interventions to offset the random price fluctuations. However, this study argues that the utility of such agreements should be re‐examined due to the effects of floating exchange rates. Empirical evidence is also presented which shows that recent exchange rate variability has had at least as much of a destabilising influence on commodity export earnings as fluctuating prices, and that the effects are borne unevenly by exporters of the same commodity due to their association with different currency blocks. When examined from the viewpoint of commodity importers the price and exchange rate effects are also found to be very different for individual countries.