Control Enforcement Research Articles

The Blurred Scope of Non-Horizontal Merger Control in Europe

The 2008 Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines of the European Commission did not entirely succeed in supplying a plausible theory of harm regarding those mergers that cause competitive concerns, because of what could be optimistically considered only a misleading wording. This is mainly due to the use of the term “foreclosure” and to the reference to long-term profits which, it is said, could also provide incentives for foreclosing strategies. Because of this, it is not clear whether non-horizontal merger control has to prevent price increases due to short-term profit maximizing firms (as horizontal merger control does) or whether it must contrast exclusionary conduct, of the type examined in the assessment of abuses of dominance (under Art. 102 of the Treaties). We motivate our preference for the first alternative and, consequently, advocate the removal of the term “foreclosure” from the Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines. Although the first implementation of the Guidelines by the Commission does not show relevant flaws, there is still the risk that the literal reading of the Guidelines could lead to a wrong merger control enforcement by European Competition Authorities.We also believe that, for the purpose of clarifying the appropriate scope of the assessment of a vertical merger, a more extensive employment of simulation techniques could be effective, as they clearly focus on short-term incentives to increase prices. We exemplify how to run such an exercise under different hypotheses.

119구급서비스 품질관리가 병원 전 심정지 환자의 생존율에 미치는 영향

Hospitals in Korea are enforcing a quality control over 119Emergency Medical Services to increase the survival rate of Out of Hospital Cardiac arrest patients. This study is to analyze the factors that effect the survival rate of Out of hospital Cardiac arrest patients by comparing the results of before and after the quality control enforcement. Cardiac arrest patients can be assorted into pre-decision group and decision group. The study analyzed the survival factors which was based on the adequate use of 119 BLS and ACLS usage rates, response time of 119EMS, qualification of ambulance worker, number of EMS team members, and adequate use of AED according to ECG diagnosis. The analyzation was done over total 1,233 of Cardiac arrest patients from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2011 After the enforcement of the quality control, the usage of Vital sign check and BLS showed a big difference. Especially, as the usage of ECG showed a significant difference, Shockable rhythm, which is the most important to Cardiac arrest patients, also showed a significant difference. After the enforcement of quality control, the performance of ACLS showed a significant difference in IV. The study showed 119 ambulance workers provided better service in Vital sign and BLS and ACLS after the enforcement of quality control. It is considered a 119 ambulance service effects the survival rate of Cardiac arrest patients. Therefore, it can increase the survival rate and it is necessary to continue a quality control.

Access control for cloud‐based eHealth social networking: design and evaluation

ABSTRACTeHealth is being rapidly deployed. Lower cost and greater productivity attract government and healthcare enterprise to transit from traditional healthcare service to eHealth service. Security and privacy are growing concerns with the widespread deployment of eHealth and the development of next generation of eHealth services. In this paper, we discuss these security problems and propose a high‐level security framework that captures required features in the next‐generation eHealth infrastructure. Our framework consists of the following: (i) an adaptive trust‐aware tag‐based privacy control to specify which data to share and whom to share with. The fine‐grained control of data access is guaranteed; (ii) a decentralized authorization that relies on trust propagation protocol to provide robust and resilient access control enforcement; and (iii) a hybrid trust management mechanism that addresses access control information depository on a cloud server. It enforces user‐defined access control not only in a distributed environment but also in a privacy‐preserving manner so as to minimize the disclosure of privileges and of access policies. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An enquiry into the existence of environmental Kuznets curve and issue of convergence related to CO<SUB align="right">2 emission - a panel data analysis

A world-wide concern has recently emerged about the rapid depletion of natural resources and degradation of environmental conditions caused by the actions of both developed and developing groups of countries. Analysis of panel data covering the period 1990–2008, shows that developed countries are facing an N-shaped curve regarding the relation between income and CO2 emission while EKC relation holds for developing countries. The observance of EKC should not however make the developing countries complacent. The observed convergence in CO2 emission growth indicates that the developing region is catching up at a faster rate with the developed countries. Hence, with an extended future time, there is likelihood that N-shaped pattern might ensue for developing countries also. Introduction of economic instruments for pollution control and strict enforcement laws, greater use of captive mechanism for carbon capture, strengthening institutional rules of forest management though greater peoples’ participation in fo...

AN INVESTIGATION OF RURAL - URBAN LINKAGES OF THE LAGOS MEGACITY, NIGERIA

This paper has investigated the environmental challenges faced by Peri urban settlements in the Lagos Megacity. An intense study of the Isheri, Ibafo and Sagamu Interchange areas along the Lagos Ibadan Expressway axis was done. Socio economic characteristics, housing and environmental conditions as well as rural urban linkages were done to determine the flow of interaction between the settlements and the Lagos Metropolis. Data collection was by the administration of structured questionnaires on household heads of which 46 were sampled in Isheri, 113 in Ibafo and 191 in Sagamu Interchange areas respectively. Survey was by systematic random sampling. The study revealed a high level of interaction between the settlements and the Lagos Megacity as over 60% of respondents in the study area commute daily to work in Lagos. The study also revealed that land value, rental value in these peri-urban settlements had increase since 2005 when the highest rate of population influx was observed. Furthermore, environmental challenges especially poor infrastructure and security concerns had exacerbated. The paper concluded by suggesting strategies for mitigating these challenges and they include the introduction of participatory planning mechanisms as well as the enforcement of development control

Graduated Control and Beyond: The Evolving Government-NGO Relations

Despite recent policy changes, governmental monitoring and control of grassroots NGOs remain pervasive and effective to a large extent in China. The enforcement of control over NGOs is complicated by at least three layers of factors: First, multiple agencies are involved in NGO control without a centralised norm. Second, government-NGO interactions vary across cases and are deeply rooted in local political contexts. Last, but not least, since the NGO community at its origin is highly diverse, NGOs’ responses to various types of governmental control differ, which in turn triggers further complications. The main findings of this research are based on interviews with 60 NGO staff, as well as with civil affairs officials in Shanghai and Shenzhen from January 2011 to May 2012.

‘Hosting the world’

Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a case study, this paper will explore how security measures for sports mega-events have been steadily militarized with policing operations comparable to war planning. It will be argued that this is representative of the ‘new military urbanism’ in which everyday urban life is rendered as a site of ubiquitous risk leading to the increased diffusion of military tactics and doctrines in policing and policy. While the interpenetration between urbanism and militarism has often been studied against the context of the War on Terror, the paper will argue that in the case of South Africa this has primarily been accelerated by a pervasive social fear of violent crime, which has resulted in the securitization of cities, the remilitarization of policing and the intensification of a historical legacy of socio-spatial inequalities. The South African government used the World Cup to ‘rebrand’ the country's violent international image, while promising that security measures would leave a legacy of safer cities for ordinary South Africans. However, using military urbanism as a conceptual backdrop, the case studies presented in the second part of the paper argue that policing measures were primarily cosmetic and designed to allay the fears of foreign tourists and the national middle class. In practice, security measures pivoted around the enforcement of social control and urban marginalization while serving as a training ground for an increasingly repressive state security apparatus. The paper will conclude with a discussion of how the global crossover between militarism and urbanism threatens to stimulate and rehabilitate deeply entrenched authoritarian tendencies in South Africa.

Flexible access control framework for MARC records

PurposeThe goal of this paper is to propose a data access control framework that is used for editing MARC‐based bibliographic databases. In cases where the bibliographic record editing activities carried out in libraries are complex and involve many people with different skills and expertise, a way of managing the workflow and data quality is needed. Enforcing access control can contribute to these goals.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed solution for data access control enforcement is based on the well‐studied standard role‐based access control (RBAC) model. The bibliographic data, for the purpose of this system, is represented using the XML language. The software architecture of the access control system is modelled using the Unified Modelling Language (UML).FindingsThe access control framework presented in this paper represents a successful application of concepts of role‐based access control to bibliographic databases. The use of XML language for bibliographic data representation provides the means to integrate this solution into many different library information systems, facilitates data exchange and simplifies the software implementation because of the abundance of available XML tools. The solution presented is not dependent on any particular XML schema for bibliographic records and may be used in different library environments. Its flexibility stems from the fact that access control rules can be defined at different levels of granularity and for different XML schemas.Research limitations/implicationsThis access control framework is designed to handle XML documents. Library systems that utilise bibliographic databases in other formats not easily convertible to XML would hardly integrate the framework into their environment.Practical implicationsThe use of an access control enforcement framework in a bibliographic database can significantly improve the quality of data in organisations where record editing is performed by a large number of people with different skills. The examples of access control enforcement presented in this paper are extracted from the actual workflow for editing bibliographic records in the Belgrade City Library, the largest public city library in Serbia. The software implementation of the proposed framework and its integration in the BISIS library information system prove the practical usability of the framework. BISIS is currently deployed in over 40 university, public, and specialized libraries in Serbia.Originality/valueA proposal for enforcing access control in bibliographic databases is given, and a software implementation and its integration in a library information system are presented. The proposed framework can be used in library information systems that use MARC‐based cataloguing.

Access control enforcement delegation for information-centric networking architectures

Information is the building block of Information Centric Networks (ICNs). Access control policies limit information dissemination to authorized entities only. Defining access control policies in an ICN is a non-trivial task as an information item may exist in multiple copies dispersed in various network locations, including caches and content replication servers. In this paper we propose an access control enforcement delegation scheme which enables the purveyor of an information item to evaluate a request against an access control policy, without having access to the requestor credentials nor to the actual definition of the policy. Such an approach has multiple merits: it enables the interoperability of various stakeholders, it protects user identity and it can set the basis for a privacy preserving mechanism. An implementation of our scheme supports its feasibility.

A meat control system achieving significant reduction of visible faecal and ingesta contamination of cattle, lamb and swine carcasses at Swedish slaughterhouses

The aim of this study is to describe how unsatisfying slaughter hygiene was identified by monitoring of visible carcass contamination, and to review the effectiveness of subsequent official control measures. In 2007, a survey of visible faecal and ingesta carcass contamination was performed by National Food Agency staff at, respectively, 14, 9 and 11 of the largest Swedish slaughterhouses for cattle, lamb and swine. The results revealed that large percentages of beef and lamb carcasses were visibly contaminated and a new control system was introduced in 2008. Data from regular official control collected in 2011, at, respectively, 14, 8 and 12 of the largest slaughterhouses for cattle, lamb and swine show that the general level of cattle and lamb carcasses contamination was significantly lower than in 2007. The median percentage of visibly contaminated carcasses had decreased from 10% (beef) and 13% (lamb) in 2007, to 0% for both species in 2011. For swine, the level of visibly contaminated carcasses was relatively low already in 2007 (median 2%), but tended to be even lower in 2011. According to local official control coordinators, the operators primarily achieved the reduction in contamination of carcasses through improving their own verifying control, trimming, slaughter hygiene and education of personnel. Among the measures taken by the National Food Agency, the enforcement of regular official control and communication with operators was listed as important measures at all slaughterhouses, and sanctions (civil penalty, or consideration of civil penalty) at some slaughterhouses. This study shows how measures taken by the competent authority can lead to substantial reductions in visible carcass contamination.

Immigration Control in an Era of Globalization: Deflecting Foreigners, Weakening Citizens, and Strengthening the State

In stark contrast to the field of legislation on the rights of third-country nationals or to the requirements and conditions for access to the territory of states, the field of the enforcement of immigration control has been increasingly subject to legal harmonization: either by the adoption of global law on immigration control or by the convergence of domestic law and policy in the field. This convergence is particularly marked when one compares legal responses to immigration control in the United States and the European Union, where globalization has been used to justify the extension of state power—by proclaiming state action necessary in order to address perceived global security threats—and the use of key features of globalization that may facilitate free movement— such as the use of technology—in order to enhance immigration control. Globalization has led to the strengthening, rather than the weakening, of the state. This strengthening of the state has significant consequences not only for immigration but also for citizenship as expressed by both relations between individuals and between citizens and the state. By examining the global and transatlantic policy and legislative consensus on immigration control, this Article will cast light on the challenges the extension of state power that globalized immigration control entails for fundamental rights and the rule of law.

Supporting Secure Information Flow

The authors describe a model to provide access control for information flow that crosses organisational boundaries. The model specifies a distributed access control enforcement approach for workflow objects (e.g., a document assigned to a pre-defined workflow) using software agents and data encryption techniques. Access to restricted content within the workflow object is based on the possession of encryption keys and role enactment. The model relies on trusted software agents to verify and ensure the validity of the workflow object. The authors construct a prototype and report on a case study that demonstrates the feasibility of the proposal.

Enforcing access control in workflow systems with a task engineering approach

The need for 'role engineering' becomes evident once a decision has been made to adopt role-based access control (RBAC) to ensure access control in a computer system. Role engineering is a process to define roles, permissions, and role hierarchies. Therefore, it is a critical step in deploying any RBAC-oriented system. The question is even more crucial for workflow management systems: additionally to role engineering, a 'task engineering' process could be needed to allow the satisfaction of access control constraints even in critical situations. In this paper, we propose an approach of task engineering to improve access control enforcement in workflow management systems. By task engineering, we mean the process to examine the granularity of each workflow's task in a way to meet – at run time – the main access control requirements, precisely the least privilege and separation of duties principles. This approach uses the constraints satisfaction problem (CSP) formulation and resolution method.

Removing infection from the state

When confronted with microscopic pathogens, one of humanity's few predators, the most robust health systems are only as strong as their weakest neighbours, and pathogens care very little for migration formalities. To compound the challenges faced by unprecedented human movement, national health systems are mired by the old-school practice of politicking, rather than being propelled by evidence and action centred on a long-term strategic vision for the public's health. Given these realities, why is communicable disease control confined within geo-political boundaries that are no longer representative of population movements? Tuberculosis is one example with complications arising from human mobility, where migrants acquire infection in one country, and then travel elsewhere. Individuals may become lost to follow-up in national health systems as they move into and out of respective countries, and the receiving country may or may not be aware of the infectious status of the migrant. The World Health Organization (WHO) is one option for combating state-centred public health, and to a certain extent some tremendous gains have been achieved since its inception. Some of the significant challenges facing the WHO reside in the lack of statutory power to collect quality-assured data and to enforce measures for the control of infections. Some might argue that this failing is essentially positive by design. Is it truly possible (or desirable) to have a global body with statutory powers for the enforcement of disease control? In a world of 195 countries representing thousands of living languages, a global public health agency would likely not have the cultural sensitivity requisite to prove effective on a local-level. Conversely, in an attempt to please all constituents a global agency might be rendered ineffectual in its quest for inclusivity. A compromise might be found in supra-national public health regions. Such agencies could be grouped along meaningful geo-cultural-political boundaries (e.g. Arabic Middle-Eastern countries), and these regional bodies would effectively assume the statutory communicable disease control functions of national or sub-national agencies. There is no doubt that this process of alignment would require substantial consideration and debate, far beyond the confines of this article. Even if this herculean feat of cooperation were to be realised, how then do we overcome the political agendas of member states? Certainly regional disease control agencies should be funded by participating member states, but there is much to be said for keeping them at arm's-length from any one national government. The benefits would include enhanced patient confidentiality from non-health actors; long-term strategic planning; a continuity of surveillance and treatment across a much broader terrain; and coherent international standards of prevention, disease control and treatment. …

Public health challenges of electronic cigarettes in South Korea.

Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarrettes) were recently introduced and advertised as a smoking cession device in South Korea. As the social norm to quit smoking has gained hold in the country, the number of e-cigarette users is growing rapidly. This phenomenon should be urgently considered, because of the lack of research that has been conducted to examine the safety of e-cigarettes and its efficacy as a smoking cessation aid.This paper raises several public health concerns on e-cigarettes in South Korea. Uncertain regulations of the government on e-cigarettes are contributing to an increase of e-cigarette users and allowing the e-cigarette industry to circumvent existing regulations. The aggressive marketing activity of this industry is also a core factor that is responsible for the rapid increase of e-cigarette use, in particular among the youth. Following the enforcement of tobacco control, some cigarette smokers may be encouraged to purchase e-cigarettes in order to circumvent the regulations, even though the dual use of e-cigarette and cigarette may be more harmful.Until there is clear evidence of the e-cigarette's safety, it is recommended that the industry's marketing and promotional activities be banned and closely monitored, and public campaigns be initiated to educate the public regarding e-cigarettes.

GEODAC: A Data Assurance Policy Specification and Enforcement Framework for Outsourced Services

Many cloud service providers offer outsourcing capabilities to businesses using the software-as-a-service delivery model. In this delivery model, sensitive business data need to be stored and processed outside the control of the business. The ability to manage data in compliance with regulatory and corporate policies, which we refer to as data assurance, is an essential success factor for this delivery model. There exist challenges to express service data assurance capabilities, capture customers' requirements, and enforce these policies inside service providers' environments. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing Global Enforcement Of Data Assurance Controls (GEODAC), a policy framework that enables the expression of both service providers' capabilities and customers' requirements, and enforcement of the agreed-upon data assurance policies in service providers' environments. High-level policy statements are backed in the service environment with a state machine-based representation of policies in which each state represents a data lifecycle stage. Data assurance policies that define requirements on data retention, data migration, data appropriateness for use, etc. can be described and enforced. The approach has been implemented in a prototype tool and evaluated in a services environment.

Challenges to the enforcement of development controls in the Wa municipality

The imposition and enforcement of a land-use regulation is extremely important if society is to reap the full benefits of its stock of land. Ghana has therefore enacted various statutes to regulate land development throughout the country. This paper examines development controls in the Wa Municipality. It finds out the challenges confronting the development control process in the municipality. The paper does these through a review of the development control literature. It also reviews the legal framework for development controls in Ghana. It used questionnaires to gather data from the officials of the Municipal Building Inspectorate Division (MBID), Wa. It used questionnaires to solicit the opinion, knowledge, experience and perception of land developers on the development control regime in the municipality. It revealed that development controls are not adequately enforced in the Wa Municipality. It notes that uncontrolled developments are a common sight in the municipality. It also established that socio-cultural reasons, political interferences, limited public knowledge on the essence of development controls, and an under-resourced building inspectorate division are responsible for this state of affairs. It recommends that the Wa Municipal Assembly strictly enforce its land-use regulations to ensure that the residents of the municipality fully benefit from the imposition of land-use regulations.

A New Conceptual Framework of Sales Force Control Systems

An important stream of research has recently studied sales force control systems (SFCS). Most studies have relied on a simple conceptualization of control, especially outcome-/behavior-based and formal/informal controls. Because most empirical studies based on such conceptual frameworks have led to contradictory or inconsistent findings, this paper attempts to identify a few important causes, especially management style (centralized or decentralized) and the different managerial objective’s time horizons (short and long run). Relying on an extended definition of an SFCS, the proposed new conceptual framework recognizes the dynamic nature of controls, introduces the concepts of usage intensity, depth of usage, and rigor of enforcement of control and feedback tools. The effects of the SFCS on salespeople’s transactional and customer relationship-building performances are considered. A series of research propositions is proposed.

Access control framework for XML document collections

It is often the case that XML documents contain information of different sensitivity degrees that must be selectively shared by user communities. This paper presents the XXACF (eXtensible Role-Based XML Access Control Framework) framework for controlling access to XML documents in different environments. The proposed access control model of XXACF is described. The framework represents an improvement over the existing systems and enables defining context-sensitive access control policies on different priority and granularity levels, the enforcement of access control for different operations on XML documents, as well as different ways of access control enforcement for the same operation.

An Institutional Approach to Bordering in Islands: The Canary Islands on the AfricanEuropean Migration Routes

Islands play a significant role in international irregular maritime migration. Frequently they are part of maritime interstitial spaces between states, and their location, combined with institutional membership, makes them part of international migration routes and subject to border management strategies. In this paper borders are analysed as social institutions used for regulating relative permeability through rules of entry and exit for persons, goods and capital. Borders institutionalize territoriality and are politically implemented by states. They are selective, also in migration, and irregular border transit is not always indicative of an inability to control. The Canary Islands are used as an illustrative example of how border management at the southern edge of the European Union has evolved towards more coercive deterrence and tighter surveillance. The Canary Islands experienced irregular maritime immigration from the west African coasts during the first decade of the 21st century and most of these migrants intended to use the islands as transit space towards the European continent. Increasing surveillance in countries of origin, enforcement of border controls and stricter return policies were used to stop flows. The so-called “cayuco crisis” in 2006 induced institutional change in border management and forced the active involvement of the EU through FRONTEX.