Background: Over the years the EU, the US and the rest of the world have experienced several devastating financial crises. As a result of the Great Recession and several accounting scandals the EU-commission added new proposals of regulations. The Commission carried out a proposal to restrict the non-audit services to audit clients with the purpose to achieve improved audit quality and a more competitive market, which was later approved by the European Parliament.   Purpose & Problem:  The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate how non-audit services to audit clients affect the audit quality and with that information evaluate the opinion divergence between the regulators and the practitioners, on providing non-audit services to audit clients and its effect on audit quality. Method: Our intentions were to compare collected evidence and earlier reports with fresh intake of raw data along with statements from several interview subjects from different positions such as the EU-commission and audit firms. By gathering information from both company personnel and state-working staff in the area of auditing, we obtained sufficient information on the thesis empirical findings we did also take part of professional bodies like IFAC and FAR.   Conclusion: Our conclusion is that both regulators and practitioners chose to define audit quality based on their own interests. We believe that this creates an opinion divergence. In order to resolve this conflict of interest, there is a need to agree on a universal definition of audit quality. To be more particular a definition that leave no room for ambiguities and misinterpretation regarding both practitioners and regulators.

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The financial crisis of 2007 until today affected the banking industry to a large extent. Many banks failed or got bailed out by governments. To protect against banking failures and new financial crises the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) has reviewed, renewed and extended the banking regulations. The result is a framework for banking regulations called Basel III. This study examines the Basel III framework and its potential effect on protecting the banks. The study answers the question: if Basel III may protect against new banking failures. The study has used a qualitative approach. The theoretical framework has been built up by the use of the literature review. Literature has mainly been found by use of the university library’s online databases. For the empirical results interviews were made with banks and supervisors from Sweden and from Finland to see their view on the emerging framework. The views of supervisors and banks are that Basel III should have tougher requirements than it now has. The capital requirements are seen as too low and the risk-weights are criticized not to reflect the reality. Supervisors are still positive and believe that Basel III will give a better protection, but it will not fully protect against failures. Banks have a similar view, some are positive and believe that it will give a better protection while others do not think it will protect against failures any better.

The Department of Building and Housing is currently developing a performance framework that will, if adopted, provide a compulsory methodology for performance based fire engineering designs to prove compliance with the fire safety requirements of the New Zealand Building Code. The conceptual performance framework currently includes eight design fire scenarios, fire loads for particular building uses, and tenability criteria for the life safety of occupants. As the level of fire safety within the Code is not explicit, the Department of Building and Housing determined that the performance framework for fire should ensure buildings are designed and built to provide the same level of safety as if they complied with the current Compliance Document for New Zealand Building Code Fire Safety Clauses, C/AS1. This work analysed 12 buildings with a range of uses, which comply with the current C/AS1, using the conceptual performance framework to provide a risk comparison for life safety. Accepted, previously established calculation and modelling methods were used to test the case buildings to the performance framework. None of the buildings met the pass criteria proposed for life safety. Consequently, to comply with the performance framework, a building would be required to be designed to a higher level of safety than is currently accepted to meet code. This shows the current proposal provides a more onerous design regime for fire safety for buildings than the current C/AS1. The results of this research show the conceptual performance framework for fire safety is not ready to be included into New Zealand building regulations in its present form. Furthermore, protection from fire for primary structural members and systems, to protect against building collapse, and tenability criteria and fire fighting access for fire fighters needs to be developed and included in the framework.

For a meaningful discussion of the effectiveness of ecological objectives and ecological quality standards, their terms and purposes must be examined and clarified. This study explores the terms and content of ecological quality objectives and ecological quality standards, based on the Water Framework Directive’s legal conceptualization of ‘ecological status’. This exploration is accomplished by analysing and describing the Water Framework Directive’s ‘ecological status’ aspect from a legal-ecological perspective. The analysis of ‘ecological status’ and its main constructs forms the basis for a possible alternative form of regulation, which addresses the shortcomings identified in the analysis.

Regulation in its generic sense has existed for a very long time in different forms, with different aims and different problems of accountability, but the study of competition regulation by a Government agency has perhaps become fashionable only in recent years. This thesis consists of two leading themes. First, it will contend that, whilst the market system has been seriously underestimated as a social institution to the extent that it should be left to operate and organise itself where that is possible, it is at the same time not always self-regulating. Residual intervention by the State or its agencies will remain necessary in strategic cases, either to protect individual autonomy and choice, or to correct failures of the market system. The question is simply more or less regulation. Secondly, and on that premise, competition regulation must be distinguished into economic regulation and antitrust regulation because the relationship between them is inversely proportional: the more intense economic regulation is, the less important antitrust regulation becomes. By implication then, economic liberalisation or deregulation must be accompanied by a robust framework of antitrust regulation to ensure that the conditions of sustainable competition are not threatened by anti-competitive practices. Conditions of sustainable competition are thus critical for market contestability. For many years, domestic and international airline competition has been the subject of comprehensive regulation. With the passage of time, however, the thinking has changed and, no doubt, liberal policies and practices will continue to find expression in future political and economic sentiments. The responsibility for regulating airlines in the United Kingdom falls on the Civil Aviation Authority, which has played a formidable role in transforming the policy of heavy regulation into minimal regulation, although much of that regulatory landscape has now been altered with the advent of the Single European Aviation Market. The experiences of, both, the CAA and the new SEATNI provide an illuminating account of the evolutionary process of regulating airline competition, that from economic to antitrust regulation.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX186045.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1968. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-138).