Taiwan became the 144th member of the WTO on Jan. 1, 2002 and as a result, the customs on agricultural products were reduced year by year, the agricultural market was open to the world and subsidies to local farmers were cancelled. A wild development in Taiwanese agriculture was anticipated. The study aims to understand the relation between rural villages and agriculture in the development process as well as the current transformation problems by analyzing data and a case study. It tries to determine the orientation and direction of the agricultural policy in the related development process. The target and strategy of the agricultural policy in various developing stages were compared and it is hoped that the available proposals for the trend in free trade will be used as a references for companies and governmental authorities. The present agricultural problems are classified into three factors: agriculture, rural villages, and farmers. Its influence on land, labor, capital, and management are implicative of each other. The population in rural villages has dropped largely due to migration and farmers¡¦ incomes are low and many are aging. Rural and urban development in regions cannot be balanced. A breakthrough in development has to be made. However, agricultural specialties have to be planned based on the regional features; products that possess high economic value have to be promoted; farm management techniques must move from functional to strategic. Products can be made based on the needs of consumers. Agricultural management has to be professionalized. Supply and demand can be adjusted by market access mechanisms. Sustainability management can help achieve long term profits. Managing efficiency and product image are both key to successful marketing. By analyzing the success of kiwis imported from New Zealand, we know that the agriculture problem in Taiwan is not due to production technique but marketing. A national managing organization was established by the government of New Zealand for promoting their agricultural products to the world. It integrates the industry and culture and lifts product quality to a refined level. The marketing not only emphasizes brand, but also research and development of new products as well as its accessory products so that more business opportunities can be made. Increased innovative value-added products are linked with the international competitiveness of Taiwanese agricultural products. The crises can only be a transition and it is the time that we should bring agriculture management into a new age.

A merger of steel mills has arisen up in the global steel industry. What is the reason to activate those steel mills involved in such a kind of business action, even those steel mills are with a mass scale. According to the expert's prediction, only ten to twelve steel mills will be survived after ten or twenty years and each steel mill will with a capacity over fifty million tons. Actually, there is one steel mill reached this scale after merging with other mills. In chapter 1, to describe the background motivation, purpose and limitation related to the study. In chapter 2, the study of the related theory and information about the competitive strategy, merger and acquisition, diversification, core competence and strategic alliance. To understand the theory and can be used for the analysis in the next chapter. In chapter3, the introductions to the tendency of development for the global steel industry and the case of merger between the steel mill. To realize the reason, background, strategic thinking and expected benefit from it. Meanwhile, the introduction to the career of the development for the steel industry of the Japan, USA and Taiwan in the past and now. In chapter 4, the introduction to the China Steel Corporation and to understand what cause it to have the most competitive strength in the global steel industry. Also, two cases will be reported which concerned about the cost and experience brought to China Steel Corporation to realize how to learn from it next time for the merge and acquisition activity. In chapter 5, the conclusion has been made by the study. The diversification is the necessary step taken by the steel mills in order to grow up, but the key point is on the evaluation and estimation. The profitability and future expansion will be the top priority. Who can close to the end-user will be the winner for the competition. The major consideration to the merger and acquisition held by the steel mills lie on the complementary of the product, the market sharing and distribution and cost down. The Mainland China, due to its mass population will be a big consumer for the steel. So, China Steel should pay attention to evaluate and deep into the market of the South of the China where 500 million people will become a huge market in future. Is bigger the better? Somebody doubt it, the synergy and profit will be the focus on consideration to a merger activity.

From the view of industry's technological development trend, the basic theory researches and technologies were sprouted by advanced developed country in Europe and USA. The technical and practical application of these researches and technologies were developed by Japan. By the way of cost down, mass production was made in developing countries such as Taiwan and Korea. In order to reduce the manufacturing worker and workspace cost, most companies moved to under-developed countries such as China and Vietnam, etc. These industry companies are including textile, shoes, petrochemical, PCB, IC and LCD manufacturing companies. In recent years, the modern techniques countries such as USA and Japan paid a lot of attention on the influence power of China and neglected Taiwan and Korea. In order to reduce operating cost and aim at the consumer markets closed to 1,300 million people, they entered China and set up the factory directly. How should domestic small and medium-sized enterprises in Taiwan respond to this situation? When the small enterprise using specialization to overcome the problems such as small-scale and lacking-resource, the companies had cooperated with the flexible attitude to deal with the change in situation in order to stand firm gradually and make a profit steadily. At this moment, the companies have already built and constructed the key ability. They tried to improve rate of production, increase enterprise's income and gross value, desalinize the prosperous circulation fluctuation and disperse the risk. Except expanding the service stations and developing key technology, the companies turn a means with much angles of relevant technology and enter the potential profit pool to set up the second and three pillars in order to adopt many angle actions to extend the goals and get involve into the new business field. Meanwhile, the main methods used is to expand from the key ability of most manufacturers in the course of growing up. In the key process of expansion, it is the important topic to have key ability and levelage accurately reach new technology, new product and new field. The motive of this research combines the practical experience of the industry and relevant references. It also discusses the enterprise with key technology to make the environmental analysis, tactics of industry plan and execution in different business. The key succeed factor and failed reason is also compared to provide as the reference which company or the new undertaking of relevant industry's future assess of the cases to reduce the investment risk in the future and increase the probability of success. The main purpose of this analysis can be summarized as following: 1. The case study of the company is based on key ability to make different management tactics analysis that technology is correlated with. 2. In the case study of multi-business, it is analyzed and summarized on the key factors of the successful and unsuccessful cases. 3. Give some suggestions as the reference for the company or the relevant industry's factory to develop new business. In this investigation, the resource basic theory, multi-business motive and key successful factor are used to analyze the small and medium-sized enterprises that can create relevant technology for multi-business management. One precision coating professional manufacturing company is studied and analyzed by its tactics and key successful factor. In the results of this study, one can find that the company keep far from core ability during the process of multi-business operation will cause automatic control parameter lower and external variable larger. It leads the probability parameter of success to be smaller and difficult to master with greater risk. While getting into the new business, it will increase the success probability if one can integrate the upstream and downstream industry chain at the same time. Especially, the company obtains the support of original supplies or main customers with key raw materials and technology will develop the specialization and characteristic to make better profit.

Diss.--Jacobs Univ. Bremen, 2008. / In SpringerLink. Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 11 novembre 2009). Bibliogr. Publié aussi en version papier.

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Divergent natural selection for use of locally abundant resources can lead to diversification within and across species. However, the consequences of divergent selection for phenotypic evolution also depend on the development of variation. Because relationships among traits such as shared developmental timing or common involvement in an organismal function can channel variation generated during development, these relationships strongly influence the direction of evolution.During development of the mammalian mandible multiple tissues of distinct developmental origins interact with inputs from the functioning of attached muscles to produce a cohesive and well integrated trait. In soricid shrews, part of the mandible matures late in ontogeny, coinciding with the onset of foraging. In this case, foraging-linked muscle activity should influence the development of the late maturing mandibular region. Here, I show that variation in this late ossifying region reveals the local functional requirements of the jaw and results in an opportunity to decouple internal and external sources of variation (developmental and environmental respectively) in the mandible. Capitalizing on this feature of the Sorex system, I empirically examined the historical persistence of internal and external patterns of variation, the consequences of variation patterning for ecological and morphological diversification across taxa, and differences between early and late ossifying regions in their contribution to local adaptation in mandible morphology.I found that the functional requirements of diet directed mandible development and determined species similarity in both mandible morphology and function. Timing of bone maturation determined the morphological effects of foraging-linked muscle activity, resulting in differential expression of adaptive variation in the late maturing region. Further, I found higher levels of interspecific variation in the late maturing region of the mandible, and showed that interspecific divergence in foraging morphology occurs along the lines delineated by epigenetic inputs of muscle on bone formation during late ontogeny within species. These findings indicate that differences in functional requirements are critical for divergence among taxa in this system. Further, these results suggest that, when external inputs into trait development are indicative of local functional requirements, the same epigenetic mechanism of development can generate diversity both within and among taxa.

A growing number of studies suggest that accounting information risk, primarily idiosyncratic in nature, can be diversified away in the capital market. In this dissertation, I show that accounting information risk, proxied by accruals quality, is priced even if it is entirely idiosyncratic. In particular, building on a model from the ambiguity literature, I demonstrate that (1) in an under-diversified market, idiosyncratic information risk is priced even if it is diversifiable, and (2) in a well-diversified market, idiosyncratic information risk is priced when information is subject to managers' discretion and thus ambiguous. The empirical results corroborate the predictions from the model. Specifically, although an association is observed between (unambiguous if risky) innate accruals quality and cost of capital, the association can be largely mitigated through diversification. However, diversification has little impact on the association between (ambiguous) discretionary accruals quality and cost of capital. Taken together, these findings strengthen our understanding of the fundamental role of accounting information as a basis for capital allocation.

A growing number of studies suggest that accounting information risk, primarily idiosyncratic in nature, can be diversified away in the capital market. In this dissertation, I show that accounting information risk, proxied by accruals quality, is priced even if it is entirely idiosyncratic. In particular, building on a model from the ambiguity literature, I demonstrate that (1) in an under-diversified market, idiosyncratic information risk is priced even if it is diversifiable, and (2) in a well-diversified market, idiosyncratic information risk is priced when information is subject to managers' discretion and thus ambiguous. The empirical results corroborate the predictions from the model. Specifically, although an association is observed between (unambiguous if risky) innate accruals quality and cost of capital, the association can be largely mitigated through diversification. However, diversification has little impact on the association between (ambiguous) discretionary accruals quality and cost of capital. Taken together, these findings strengthen our understanding of the fundamental role of accounting information as a basis for capital allocation.

In this study we contribute to the ongoing research on the rationales for corporate diversification. Using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we examine whether combining several lines of business in one entity leads to increased productive efficiency. Studying the direct effect of diversification on efficiency allows us to discern between two major theories of corporate diversification: the synergy hypothesis and the agency-cost hypothesis. To measure productive efficiency, we employ a non-parametric approach—a test based on Varian’s Weak Axiom of Profit Maximization (WAPM). This method has several advantages over other conventional measures of productive efficiency. Most importantly, it allows one to perform the efficiency test without relying on assumptions about the functional form of the underlying production function. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first application of the WAPM test to a large sample of non-financial firms. The study provides evidence that business segments of diversified firms are more efficient compared to single-segment firms in the same industry. This finding suggests that the existence of the so-called ‘diversification discount’ cannot be explained by efficiency differences between multi-segment and focused firms. Furthermore, more efficient segments tend to be vertically integrated with others segments in the same firm and to have been added through acquisitions rather than grown internally. Overall, the results of this study indicate that corporate diversification is value-enhancing, and that it is not necessarily driven by managers’ pursuit of their private benefits.

This paper will show the effect of cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin and Litecoin, on a diversified portfolio of traditional and alternative assets. By using weekly closing price of these data, I use a single-index model to find betas, Sharpe ratios, and asset correlations. Then using the Markowitz Portfolio Optimization model to find optimal weights both with and without percentage restrictions. To date there is little academic research into cryptocurrency portfolio management. This paper expands upon a similar study done in the summer of 20131 through the Université Libre de Bruxelles. However, their data was from before a major spike in Bitcoin demand in November that same year, and did not include Litecoin. This paper fills the gap.