Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Thomas T. H. Wan. Includes bibliographical references (p. 196-209).

China is simply bigger and growing faster than any other country. The rapid growth of China during the past few decades has led to suggestions that China is exporting deflation, but many of studies of this idea have found no significant effect of China on trading countries' price levels, mainly due to the small share of China in world GDP. This study will look at China's impact not through trade shares, but by analysing the price effect directly. For actual competition, we use a model loosely related to the Bertrand model to find the Chinese price effect on Mexico's export prices in the US market. China's productivity has increased faster than any other country's and we assume that the increased productivity as the main exogenous driver of China's market expansion in the world market. The Chinese price effect is indeed statistically significant; after experimenting with various robustness tests, our regression results show that a 10% drop in Chinese price will cause Mexico to drop its price by around 4% to 8%. We also found that China can influence Mexico's price even if it has no direct exports to the USA; the mere threat of entry into the market is enough to constrain Mexico's exporters' pricing ambitions. We term this effect potential competition. The Chinese price effect for the set of potential products is present and is positive and statistically significant at around at 0.20 to 0.50. To compare the Chinese price effect in a relatively small market, we repeat the analysis on Singapore. We found that China influences Malaysia's prices in the Singapore market and the results are comparable to those in the USA. One of the necessary conditions for China exporting deflation is its competitive price effect on other manufacturing producers' prices; we tested for this and have found support for this condition.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-95). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A. in Security studies (Homeland Security and Defense))--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2005. / Thesis Advisor(s): Maria Rasmussen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-88). Also available online.

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) have performed an important and even essential role to the whole society and refer to complex softwareintensive systems, resulted from interoperability of independent constituent systems that work together to achieve more complex missions. SoS have emerged specially in critical application domains and, therefore, high level of quality must be assured during their development and evolution. However, dealing with quality of SoS still presents great challenges, as SoS present a set of unique characteristics that can directly affect the quality of such systems. Moreover, there are not comprehensive models that can support the quality evaluation of SoS. Motivated by this scenario, the main contribution of this Masters project is to present a SoS Evaluation Model, more specifically, addressing the crisis/emergency management domain, built in the context of a large international research project. The proposed model covers important evaluation activities and considers all SoS characteristics and challenges not usually addressed by other models. This model was applied to evaluate a crisis/emergency management SoS and our results have shown it viability to the effective management of the SoS quality. / Sistemas-de-Sistemas (SoS, do inglês Systems-of-Systems) realizam um importante e até essencial papel na sociedade. Referem-se a complexos sistemas intensivos em software, resultado da interoperabilidade de sistemas constituintes independentes que trabalham juntos para realizar missões mais complexas. SoS têm emergido especialmente em domínios de aplicação crítica, portanto, um alto nível de qualidade deve ser garantido durante seu desenvolvimento e evolução. Entretanto, lidar com qualidade em SoS ainda apresenta grandes desafios, uma vez que possuem um conjunto de características únicas que podem diretamente afetar a qualidade desses sistemas. Além disso, não existem modelos abrangentes para o suporte à avaliação de qualidade de SoS. Motivado por este cenário, a principal contribuição deste projeto de mestrado é apresentar um modelo de avaliação para SoS, especialmente destinado ao domínio de gerenciamento de crises e emergências. Este modelo foi construído no contexto de um grande projeto de pesquisa internacional, e cobre as mais importantes atividades de avaliação, considerando as principais características e desafios de SoS geralmente não abordados por outros modelos. Este modelo foi aplicado na avaliação de um SoS de gerenciamento de crises e emergência, e nossos resultados têm mostrado sua viabilidade para o efetivo gerenciamento da qualidade de SoS.

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) have performed an important and even essential role to the whole society and refer to complex softwareintensive systems, resulted from interoperability of independent constituent systems that work together to achieve more complex missions. SoS have emerged specially in critical application domains and, therefore, high level of quality must be assured during their development and evolution. However, dealing with quality of SoS still presents great challenges, as SoS present a set of unique characteristics that can directly affect the quality of such systems. Moreover, there are not comprehensive models that can support the quality evaluation of SoS. Motivated by this scenario, the main contribution of this Masters project is to present a SoS Evaluation Model, more specifically, addressing the crisis/emergency management domain, built in the context of a large international research project. The proposed model covers important evaluation activities and considers all SoS characteristics and challenges not usually addressed by other models. This model was applied to evaluate a crisis/emergency management SoS and our results have shown it viability to the effective management of the SoS quality. / Sistemas-de-Sistemas (SoS, do inglês Systems-of-Systems) realizam um importante e até essencial papel na sociedade. Referem-se a complexos sistemas intensivos em software, resultado da interoperabilidade de sistemas constituintes independentes que trabalham juntos para realizar missões mais complexas. SoS têm emergido especialmente em domínios de aplicação crítica, portanto, um alto nível de qualidade deve ser garantido durante seu desenvolvimento e evolução. Entretanto, lidar com qualidade em SoS ainda apresenta grandes desafios, uma vez que possuem um conjunto de características únicas que podem diretamente afetar a qualidade desses sistemas. Além disso, não existem modelos abrangentes para o suporte à avaliação de qualidade de SoS. Motivado por este cenário, a principal contribuição deste projeto de mestrado é apresentar um modelo de avaliação para SoS, especialmente destinado ao domínio de gerenciamento de crises e emergências. Este modelo foi construído no contexto de um grande projeto de pesquisa internacional, e cobre as mais importantes atividades de avaliação, considerando as principais características e desafios de SoS geralmente não abordados por outros modelos. Este modelo foi aplicado na avaliação de um SoS de gerenciamento de crises e emergência, e nossos resultados têm mostrado sua viabilidade para o efetivo gerenciamento da qualidade de SoS.