The objective of this research was to assess the feasibility of establishing Egyptian RDCs in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) in order to enhance Egyptian export flows to that economic bloc. The research hypothesis was that the volume of Egyptian exports within the COMESA market would be enhanced through the establishment of a network of RDCs. Intensive analysis of COMESA imports was conducted in order to understand the nature of the demand in the COMESA market and explore the export potential for Egyptian products. To increase the competitiveness of Egyptian exports to the COMESA market the research proposes the establishment of an RDC network in COMESA. Two models were used to select the locations for the Egyptian RDCs network within COMESA countries. The first model was used to set the criteria for the location decision within COMESA countries from a logistics perspective. The second model was used to assess the selected locations through criteria pertaining to several external factors such as economic and political stability, local infrastructure and geographical locations. Kenya, Djibouti and Tanzania are the three countries which proved to be the optimal locations to establish a generic network of Egyptian RDCs for the COMESA market. The factors which are adversely affecting the competitiveness of Egyptian exports to the COMESA countries were assessed based on three stages of export flows from the manufacturers' facilities in Egypt until reaching each country in COMESA via the RDCs. The first stage is from the Egyptian manufacturers' locations to the Egyptian seaports, the second from the Egyptian seaports to the seaport of the receiving country in which the RDC is located, and finally the third stage from the location of the RDC to the COMESA market for redistribution to the end users. In order to test the results from these models, two questionnaires were conducted to target Egyptian exporters and COMESA importers to investigate their views regarding the establishment of the Egyptian RDC network to serve the COMESA market. The findings of the questionnaires revealed that the COMESA market is a good gateway for Egyptian exports, however, a number of problems render the benefits from such a market to be a challenge to achieve. Therefore, the research has focused on recommended actions to be considered in potential implementation strategies through a schematic model to enhance the flows of Egyptian exports to the COMESA market and to overcome the hindrances in achieving a competitive position within this market.

This thesis attempts to identify factors that are important for shipping companies in tapping the capital markets for finance, either to raise equity or to issue debt in the high yield bond market. The analysis is carried out through the presentation of three research papers. The first paper presents evidence for the first time on the aftermarket perfomance of 27 initial public offerings (IPOs) of common stock in the shipping industry worldwide, for the period 1987-1995. The portfolio of shipping IPOs in the sample underperforms the local stock market indices by as much as 36.79% by the end of their second anniversary of trading, but there is no evidence of underperformance in relation to the Morgan Stanley Capital International Shipping Index. Moreover, univariate regression analysis shows that two year holding period returns are positively related to the initial level of gearing and negatively related to the fleet age of the companies at the time of the offering. The second paper examines for the first time the relationships between a prespecified set of global macroeconomic risk variables and shipping stock returns internationally. The sample consists of 36 companies that are listed in 10 stock exchanges around the world and the analysis concentrates in the period December 1989 - March 1998. The macroeconomic factors included in the analysis are the returns on the world equity market portfolio, and innovations in a prespecified set of global macro variables, namely, industrial production, inflation, oil prices, US dollar exchange rates, and laid up tonnage. Oil prices and laid up tonnage are found to have a negative effect on shipping stocks, whereas the exchange rate variable has a positive effect. In addition, it is found that, in general, the effects of macroeconomic factors exhibit a consistent pattern in the way in which they affect the shipping industry, across countries. The third paper examines for the first time the primary pricing of shipping high yield bonds. This is performed by testing for the relationships between the following factors and the new issue spread of 30 high yield bond offerings issued by shipping companies in the US market, during the period 1993-1998: rating, callability, term, float, default rate, security status, 144A status, gearing, laid up tonnage and fleet age. Findings of the paper are that shipping high yield bonds carry wider spreads, the lower the rating of their issue, the higher their gearing levels, and the higher the laid up tonnage for the two months preceding the issue. Moreover, here is a statistically significant increase in explanatory power arising from the inclusion of gearing and laid up tonnage in the estimation, suggesting that rating agencies have not fully incorporated the potential effects of these variables, as credit risk factors.

In today's business environment, manufacturers need to manage their enterprises as an inseparable part of a supply chain. Key to achieving this is the creation of an extended and integrated information system. In an attempt to find out what needs to be done to improve current supply chain methods and tools, the current research project 1) reviewed the literature to establish current approaches to Supply Chain Management (SCM); 2) identified what tools and methods are available; 3) categorised the current approaches to supply chain management and established a current practice SCM model; 4) identified the requirements for improved SCM; 5) produced an outline requirements specification for improved SCM. The research has made a number of contributions to knowledge. A literature survey on the subject of what SCM involves and what a SCM system is was carried out and was followed by the conclusions that existing software systems have not been classified and tested against the criteria of a true SCM system. A survey of existing SCM software solutions provided data for an analysis of what typical SCM applications include and concluded that a comprehensive SCM solution currently does not exist. That conclusion was verified by a survey based on SCM expert interviews. Three case studies were carried out that looked into different parts of the supply chain and demonstrated the significance of advanced SCM functionality for each one of them. The case studies also involved the design and implementation of a supply chain mapping tool and a supplier relationship management tool. Finally, a conceptual specification of an improved SCM system was developed. The research will be of interest to practitioners in the area of SCM that are looking for ideas to improve SCM procedures and namely, are looking into implementing or developing an already existing software system for SCM. It also suggests ideas for further research, which may be of interest to research students who are interested in the area of SCM.

This thesis consists of a comparative analysis of policy making in Australian and British telecommunications and printing trade unions. It tests empirically the validity of different models of union policy making and behaviour, whilst also assessing the strength of the research hypothesis, that informal micro-political influences inside unions - such as personal friendships, enmities and loyalties - affect union policy making to a greater extent than is acknowledged in the literature. In order to address the subject the following research questions were posed: How, and why, do unions adopt specific policies? What factors explain the different behaviour of similar unions, when faced with comparable policy choices? To ensure that policies of strategic significance were focused upon, three key areas were selected for study: recruitment, amalgamations and union efforts to influence the labour process. As a former senior union officer I realised that trade unions were often loathe to publically disclose those factors which informed their policy making processes. For this reason a qualitative, interview rich, methodology was adopted, which involved a longitudinal study, in which over 220 officers and staff, of the relevant unions were rviewed. The research revealed that policy making in all the featured unions was a rich and complex process, in which occupational, geographical, ideological and personality based factional groups all had a significant influence on policy makers, along with the institutional and political context within which the unions operated. The empirical evidence also showed that micro-political factors, in particular enmities and personal loyalties, along with the individual beliefs, values and ideologies of policy makers, profoundly influenced their policy choices. Finally the research corroborated the assertion that strategic policy choices, made by trade unions, have a significant affect on their success or failure as organisations.

Risk became popular among management theorists, with many proposing ways to manage all sorts of risks. Some countries require corporations to implement risk management as stand-alone or even integrated element within improved internal control frameworks. As result, several national standards were developed over the last 20 years, but just one arose as truly international solution: ISO 31000. Little has been published on integrated risk management at airlines and the use of industry-wide standards has never been consistently explored before. Two industry-specific standards exist, but their limited scope led to little adherence by airlines. To cover this gap,this thesis analysed the wider picture of integrated airline risk management practices, aiming at identifying improvement areas to propose an adaptation of the ISO 31000 risk management framework. Several empirical methods (including a survey to publications by the ToplOO airlines, and interviews to airline risk managers, experts and practitioners) showed that only six airlines reported using ISO 31000, with two others citing its predecessor, AS/NZS 4360. Many vaguely referred to COSO, customised models or didn't mention any framework. It is unclear why only few airlines use ISO 31000, when other industries applied it successfully before. Therefore, to help disseminating ISO 31000 among airlines, a customised framework has been designed that proposes a truly holistic industry-specific approach, not focussing on individual risk sources. It integrates risk management along the airlines' entire value chain and involves relevant stakeholders in the airlines' internal risk management efforts. The proposal's validation process showed that, while being ambitious in its goals, the customised framework is complete and concise, providing valuable input for airlines using other risk management models. It has been considered particularly suitable for those airlines thinking of launching risk management initiatives. Given that a fundamental culture change is needed, the timeframe for implementation should be generous, allowing for several process iterations and revisions.

This thesis studies the interrelationship between government and the shipbuilding industry in the United Kingdom during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of economic growth between 1945 and 1973. It argues that actions of government in the 1960s and 70s aimed at arresting the decline of shipbuilding as an industry instead acted first as a brake on the industry’s development and second as one of the principal agents of its decline. It does this by demonstrating that the constant government led introspection into the shipbuilding industry between 1960 and 1966 delayed investment decisions by companies that were uncertain about which direction the government would take or whether it would provide funding. This thesis also demonstrates that the Wilson Labour governments’ instruments of modernisation and change, the Shipbuilding Inquiry Committee and the Shipbuilding Industry Board, chose and imposed technical and organisational solutions on the industry that did not reflect the prevailing orthodoxy of shipbuilding in competitor nations such as Japan and Sweden. This fatally damaged the industry during a time of demand for newly constructed vessels; the cheap price of crude oil in the 1960s led to a very high demand for very large crude carriers, supertankers, capable of transporting between one quarter and one half a million tons of crude oil from the Middle East to the industrial nations of North American and Europe. However, as the case studies of the Harland and Wolff and Scott Lithgow companies in this thesis demonstrates, British shipyards were ill equipped and poorly prepared to take advantage of this situation and when finally the shipyards were positioned to take advantage of the situation, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and subsequent OPEC oil embargo took away the demand for supertankers. This was when the British government dealt the now nationalised shipbuilding industry a fatal blow, subsidising supertankers no longer in demand for purchase at a heavily subsidised price by shipping lines that would place the vessels into immediate and long-term storage. In short, this thesis illuminates the complex relationship between government and industry that led to the demise of the British shipbuilding industry.

The study of e-governance in developing nations is informed by the idea that new technologies, reshaping the very nature of public services, can generate better outcomes in their provision. Beyond objective changes in governance infrastructures, the subjective perception of the state, as it is constructed by service recipients, is exposed to a parallel process of change, whose study has generated a novel research domain in the field of egovernance for development. With a view of contributing to this domain, this thesis studies the role of ICTs in processes of image formation on the state, as experienced by citizens in a developing country context. The theory on which the thesis is developed views technology as embedded in its sociopolitical context, and conceives e-governance as implicated in the reconstruction of images of the state. This vision is applied to the computerization of the main food security programme in India, the Public Distribution System (PDS), as it has been devised and implemented in the state of Kerala. Through an interpretive case study of the object at the core of computerization, known as the Electronic Public Distribution System or e-PDS, the thesis investigates the ICT-led processes of image construction by the state, and the ways in which citizens, confronted with new images, structure their perception of these. Through inclusion of front-end PDS services in existing infrastructure, and through the inscription of a clear problem-solution nexus in e-PDS, the state is found, as expected, to be using e-governance as a means to reconstruct its own image. At the same time, though, the loci of image formation that are found in citizens (direct experience, social networks, and political circuits) systematically escape control by governmental action, and seem to be, in fact, only marginally touched by the ICT-induced reinvention of governance. The thesis results, therefore, in an extension of existing theory in this respect: the capability of the state to reconstruct its image, through the usage of new technologies, is limited by the spaces of image formation which citizens experience in their daily lives.

At the highest level the aim of this thesis is to review and develop reliable and efficient algorithms for classifying road scenery primarily using vision based technology mounted on vehicles. The purpose of this technology is to enhance vehicle safety systems in order to prevent accidents which cause injuries to drivers and pedestrians. This thesis uses LIDAR–stereo sensor fusion to analyse the scene in the path of the vehicle and apply semantic labels to the different content types within the images. It details every step of the process from raw sensor data to automatically labelled images. At each stage of the process currently used methods are investigated and evaluated. In cases where existingmethods do not produce satisfactory results improvedmethods have been suggested. In particular, this thesis presents a novel, automated,method for aligning LIDAR data to the stereo camera frame without the need for specialised alignment grids. For image segmentation a hybrid approach is presented, combining the strengths of both edge detection and mean-shift segmentation. For texture analysis the presented method uses GLCM metrics which allows texture information to be captured and summarised using only four feature descriptors compared to the 100’s produced by SURF descriptors. In addition to texture descriptors, the ìD information provided by the stereo system is also exploited. The segmented point cloud is used to determine orientation and curvature using polynomial surface fitting, a technique not yet applied to this application. Regarding classification methods a comprehensive study was carried out comparing the performance of the SVM and neural network algorithms for this particular application. The outcome shows that for this particular set of learning features the SVM classifiers offer slightly better performance in the context of image and depth based classification which was not made clear in existing literature. Finally a novel method of making unsupervised classifications is presented. Segments are automatically grouped into sub-classes which can then be mapped to more expressive super-classes as needed. Although the method in its current state does not yet match the performance of supervised methods it does produce usable classification results without the need for any training data. In addition, the method can be used to automatically sub-class classes with significant inter-class variation into more specialised groups prior to being used as training targets in a supervised method.

This research sought to examine the relationship between material and virtual space for Transnational Advocacy Network members in Manila, Bangkok and Jakarta. In the decade since the seminal work of Keck and Sikkink’s ‘Activists Beyond Borders’ there have been significant technological advancement and the ensuing literature has positively portrayed the possibilities for network members and other activists. Through extensive semi-structured interviews with members of Transnational Women’s Networks in Jakarta, Bangkok and Manila and thorough review of the literature it sought to establish the relationship between traditional, material spaces and emergent virtual spaces across four main themes; access to technology, relationships, freedom in virtual space and collective identity. These themes emerged from the fieldwork and presented themselves as trends within the literature which then led to their consideration within this research. This work argues that there is a continued relationship between material geography and virtual space and that an individual or groups physical location continues to have overriding implications on their online presence both in terms of their direct access, legislative obstacles and their perceptions of relationships and identity.

The current debate on transport policy in the UK is focused on the need for a sustainable transport system. Buses play a vital role in achieving this, as they are the most frequently used and most accessible mode of public transport. However, the literature shows that the delivery of sustainable transport policies is not producing the desired outcomes (Hull, 2009) and the application of such policies in real situations remains inconsistent. This is evident across the UK where there has been a decrease in bus patronage and bus mileage. To address this gap, the aim of this research is to identify why bus policies are not imple-mented successfully at a local level and to provide recommendations for implementation and decision making that will aid policy makers, local authority staff, regional transport partnerships, bus operating companies and other practitioners working within the field of transport. A mixed methodology was chosen for this research and is divided into three key stages to address the research problem. The first methodology included an online ques-tionnaire and 143 questionnaires were sent to all public transport officers in Great Britain. 80 surveys were returned giving a response rate of 56%. The second methodology in-cluded telephone interviews conducted with 10 of those public transport officers who responded to the questionnaire in order to elicit a deeper understanding of the results, which could not be achieved from the questionnaire results alone. Finally, the third meth-odology included four case studies on specific bus schemes within Great Britain. These case studies were the Quality Contract Scheme in Tyne and Wear, Fastlink Scheme in Glasgow, Bus Priority Scheme in Solihull and Smart Ticketing Scheme in Dundee. While the questionnaires and telephone interviews provide an overview of bus policy imple-mentation across Great Britain, the multiple case studies were required to investigate the topic in depth, thus identifying the greatest barriers to bus policy implementation. Analysis of the three sets of data is based on the application of a new decision support frame-work developed in this research. The findings in this thesis reveal that local authorities in Great Britain are under-performing in the implementation of bus policy due to the barriers they face. The greatest barriers to implementation include the lack of a policy document; the characteristics of the organisation; availability of resources; intra-organisation support and communication; economic, social and political environments; and opposition, conflict, and ambiguities. Overall, this research has identified several concerns with bus policy implementation. The most obvious concern is the unclear link between policy objectives and measures and the setting and monitoring of performance targets. Meanwhile, the deregulation of the bus sector in the UK means that, in some cases, a lack of control over the implementation of certain measures places limits on policy implementation and results in the frequent im-plementation of policy measures that are achievable rather than those that are necessary to the achievement of policy objectives. The findings from this research also help policy-makers and transport planners to predict what makes implementation successful and to address problems and issues through improved policies and regulations, as well as to an-ticipate and plan for likely barriers. Moreover, addressing these barriers can help tackle the decline in bus mileage and bus usage across Great Britain.