Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Bachelor thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Air transport is a key instrument of the increasingly global flows of goods, services, and people. Despite the fact that commercial aviation can be seen as a vanguard of globalisation, it remains one of the most tightly regulated and nationally controlled industries in the world. While progressive deregulation has taken place in certain regions, most importantly in North America and Europe, much of the world continues to be dominated by restrictive, state-centric bilateral air service agreements. Since the particular institutional and geographical settings of East Asia impede making direct inferences from air transport deregulation in the West, there is a need to develop a better understanding of the air transport environment in the region. his study aims at analysing the endogenous factors that influence the development of aeropolitics on the global scale, in general, and in East Asia, in specific. A mixed methods approach, combining both qualitative and quantitative tools, is used to uncover the relationships between factors related to institutional organisation and polity size, on the one hand, and aeropolitics, on the other. The first part of the study consists of a predominantly quantitative analysis of the relationships on the global scale. Since the quantitative section can at most point to potential causal linkages, it is followed by an in-depth qualitative case study section, focusing on aeropolitical development in three East Asian polities of China, Hong Kong, and South Korea. This study argues that aeropolitics cannot be analysed without due attention to the context in which aeropolitical development takes place. While the direct effects of geographical, demographic, and economic factors remain limited, the importance of the polity-level institutional framework to aeropolitics cannot be overstated. More precisely, economic institutions have a direct impact on the development of aeropolitics, while political institutions set the boundaries within which economic institutions operate. / published_or_final_version / Geography / Master / Master of Philosophy

Age assessment which is an integral part of forensic and clinical practice when assessed using the extent of dental development has proven to be more accurate than other methods. Variations in dental development have necessitated the construction of ethnic specific reference datasets (RDS) to ensure accurate age assessments. Age estimated from ethnically different RDS in southern Chinese subjects has been shown to be inaccurate. A systematic review and meta-analysis from the most commonly used French-Canadian dataset revealed consistent over-estimations of age of global population groups, inferring the need for population specific RDS. A study which compared a group of 400 five years old children born in the 1980s and the 2000s demonstrated that children born in recent decades have more advanced dental development. Hence, only the most recent samples were included in the construction of a RDS for southern Chinese using dental panoramic radiographs of 2306 subjects. The reference dataset was subsequently validated on 484 subjects of southern Chinese origin by conducting dental age assessments (DAA) using un-weighted and weighted methods of dental age calculations. Paired t-test demonstrated that all methods of assessments were able to accurately estimate the age (p>0.05). The overall age differences ranged from -0.01 to 0.11 years for males and -0.03 to 0.10 years for females respectively. In addition, to test the accuracy of different ethnic datasets, 266 southern Chinese subjects for whom age had been estimated using the UK Caucasian and French-Canadian datasets were re-scored using the southern Chinese RDS. The latter was able to estimate the age of 80% of the subjects within a range of 12 months and the importance of population specific reference standards was elucidated. The validated southern Chinese RDS on dental development can thus be used to estimate the age of children and young adults of southern Chinese origin. This RDS was also tested for applicability on the records of 953 subject obtained from Japan, Thailand and Philippines. A similar method of validation was conducted and the southern Chinese RDS estimated the age of Thai males, Filipino and Japanese subjects with a reasonable degree of accuracy. The genetic similarity between the southern Han Chinese and the other East Asian population groups may account for the obtained accuracy. The secular trend study was the first of its kind study in Asia that demonstrated advanced dental maturation in children born in recent decades. Natural calamities that strike East Asia leave thousands of people missing. In those circumstances, dental age assessment using the southern Chinese RDS would help in the process of identifying deceased victims. Furthermore, only half of the children in the world below the age of five years are registered; thus the need for determining age is of foremost importance to safeguard them against age specific crimes. Methods of establishing reference datasets and conducting accurate age assessments that have been investigated and tested in this study indicate that the methodology can be applied to any ethnic population group in the world. / published_or_final_version / Paediatric Dentistry / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Physics / Master / Master of Philosophy

Land reform is closely related to agricultural development and the whole development process. This thesis examines the impacts of land reform on asset distribution, agricultural productivity, and the process of structural transformation. By investigating land reforms in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea after World War II, I find that land reform has positive and long-run influences on the structural transformation. Through redistributing farmland from large landholders to small farmers, land reform is viewed as an effective instrument for the achievement of low levels of asset inequality. Land reform also provides small owner-cultivators incentives to work harder and invest more in their own farmlands, leading to an increase in agricultural productivity. The rapid growth in agricultural productivity stimulates the reallocation of labor from agricultural to non-agricultural occupations, which is the key part of structural transformation.

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It is over thirty years since the U. S. became embroiled in the Vietnam war. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to assess how that involvement in South East Asia affected America's relations with other countries. This thesis examines the impact of the Vietnam war on the relationship between the United States and one of its key allies, Great Britain, during the height of the conflict. It assesses how far Vietnam was a factor in the cooling of transatlantic relations during the mid to late 1960s. Scholars have long noted the decline in importance of Anglo-American relations during the 1960s. It is the contention of this thesis that the Johnson administration's preoccupation with events in South East Asia made the inevitable loosening of ties between the two countries strained and uncomfortable. Although it was not the only problematic issue troubling Anglo-American relations during this period, Vietnam was the one area where there was clear and open conflict. Whereas tensions over sterling and the decision by the British Government to remove its troops from East of Suez prompted feelings of disappointment, sadness and frustration, Vietnam provoked disagreement, misunderstandings, annoyance and accusations of betrayal. At the beginning of their period in office, the British Labour Government desired a `closer' relationship with the United States but by 1968 it was apparent that the Johnson Administration was not amenable to this. This was partly because Britain was now, just one of a number of close allies in Europe; partly because the American President did not develop a personal friendship with the British Prime Minister; but also because the Vietnam conflict had proved an issue - important enough and emotive enough - to cause open and deep disagreement between the two countries.