Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Faculty of Economics and Commerce, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 307-319)

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the Master's Diploma in Technology: Electrical Engineering (Heavy Current), M.L. Sultan Technikon, 1998. / With the ever increasing electrical demand on an electrical system, the quality of the supply will be tested more and more. And it is with this deteriorating quality that the topic of voltage dips and depressions has become a contentious issue amounts the industrial sector and supply authorities, hence the means to combat this issue in recent years. / M

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

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It is now more than thirty years since the reform of corporate insolvency law in the United Kingdom (UK) focused on the promotion of a 'rescue culture,' a trend which started with the work of the Cork Committee chaired by Sir Kenneth Cork. The Cork Committee in its Report recommended encouraging the continuation and disposal of a corporate debtors' business as a going concern wherever possible, and the Government responded to Cork's recommendation by introducing Administration and Company Voluntary Arrangement ('CVA') in the Insolvency Act 1986 ('IA 1986'). The corporate insolvency laws in the UK have been subject to considerable scrutiny and reform, culminating in the implementation of two distinct but related nieces of legislation bearing upon corporate rescue; the Insolvency Act 2000 (IA 2000) and the Enterprise Act 2002 (EA).

The purpose of this study is to investigate the subject of student academic failures in high school.

M.Ing. / Sunter (1999:13) states "Unemployment is now the scourge of virtually every single nation." Sunter believes that unemployment or the creation of new jobs will be the responsibility of small businesses. If one however analyses the survival of new business ventures, failure is not the exception but the rule. According to literature 52% of all new business ventures are dissolved within the first four years of their existence and 63% within 6 years. Various publications on business incubators state that new business ventures that were incubated by business incubators demonstrated a success rate that is as high or higher than the failure rate of non-incubated new business ventures. A typical success rate of approximately 86% is quoted as the norm for these incubated ventures. The success rate can be attributed to the support provided by the incubators. The support and services provided by incubators consist typically of a range of products but the distinguishing attribute or feature is the support programme developed and tailored to meet the specific requirements of each individual organisation that joined the incubator. To ensure that jobs are created in South Africa it seems that incubators should be in a position to contribute much. The results of an evaluation of the achievements of seven of the highly visible incubators in South Africa, indicate that the flirtation with incubators resulted in very limited success. None of the seven examples were found to be very successful, but not all for the same reason. The aim of this dissertation is to identify some of the attributes that a high-technology incubator should possess to ensure success. The approach adopted was to: Define what a high-technology business incubator is. Identify the typical life-cycle of new ventures. Determine why new ventures fail. Determine the critical success factors of new ventures Determine the reasons for failure of South African high technology business ventures and incubators. Then based on the results of the above define some of the attributes a South African incubator should possess. The conclusion is that the attributes, excluding flexible lease space, shared business services and networking to the know-how network (technical) of the South African incubators are well developed. The following attributes were found lacking and should be fully developed: Education, training and information programmes; Networking to debt and equity capital and networking in general and Counselling and mentoring support. These attributes are those that will enable an incubator to develop and tailor support programmes to meet the specific requirements of individual firms. The South African environment is identified as being detrimental to the development of small new ventures and it was recommended that it should form the subject of further research.

In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master of Management Degree in Finance & Investment Management / The fragility of the banking sector and the systemic effects of bank failures coupled with the position banks occupy as the centre of financial and economic activity has called for effective regulatory reforms to ensure greater supervision and monitoring, prudent banking practices, financial stability and restoration of public confidence in the financial system. Therefore, this study is aimed at examining the spate of bank failures in Africa and the extent to which the introduction of regulatory reforms and prudential measures by regulatory authorities have impacted or helped in reducing the incidence of bank failures in Africa. To this end, the study looks at the various determinants of bank failures and fragility, indicators of financial soundness, the measures adopted so far in curbing bank failures and the resultant effect, the deficiencies in the existing reforms and regulations as well as policy recommendations for future studies. The study revealed that successful implementation of reforms is not limited to effective prudential approach & guidelines but largely influenced by Macro-economic conditions in the economy. For the purpose of performance evaluation and assessing the impact of regulatory reforms on the banking sector in Africa (Pre reform and Post reform), this study looks at a case study of some selected African countries namely Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Uganda, Ghana to enable us have a clear insight on the performance of banks pre-reforms and post reforms. Keywords: Banking sector reforms, Financial intermediation, Banking crisis, Bank performance, Capital adequacy. / GR2018

This thesis is divided into two distinct and independent parts. Part I focuses on the extension of the concept of Variability Response Function (VRF). The focus of research community has recently shifted from the improvement of structural models and enhancement of the performance of computational tools in a deterministic framework towards the development of tools capable of quantifying the uncertainty of parameters of the structural system and their effect on the system response in a probabilistic framework. One limitation to this direction is the inadequacy of information to fully describe the probabilistic characteristics of a structural system. In effort to bypass this barrier, VRF was introduced by Shinozuka as a tool to calculate the variability of the response of a system. VRF is a deterministic function and for the case of deterministic structural beams where the uncertain system parameters are modeled as homogeneous stochastic fields, it offers an efficient way to circumvent timely computational analyses. In this dissertation, a flexibility-based VRF for the case of statically determinate beams following an arbitrary non-linear constitutive law is proposed. A closed-form analytical expression of VRF is derived and the constrains of the mechanics approximation embedded are discussed. No series expansion is used, thus the probabilistic part is exact and not limited by any constraint on the relative magnitude of the variations of the parameters. Part II of this dissertation explores the topic of progressive collapse. The appearance of damage in structural systems (explosions, design or construction errors, aging infrastructure) is following an upward trend during the last decades, urging for measures to be taken in order to control the damage advancement within the system. There has been an organized effort to update the design codes and regulations, in order to include provisions towards the reinforcement of buildings to eliminate their susceptibility to local damage. These efforts tend to focus on improving redundancy and alternate load paths, to ensure that loss of any single component will not lead to a general structural collapse. The analysis of a damaged system is a very complicated phenomenon due to its non-linear nature. So far the engineering community has addressed the problem of progressive collapse by employing sophisticated computational finite element methods to accurately simulate an unexpected damaging event. In this framework, damage has been introduced in the model by removing key load-bearing elements of the building and conducting elaborate analyses which almost always require inelastic and loss of stability theories to be considered. The computational complexity renders this kind of analyses almost prohibitive for practicing engineers. In the direction of eliminating sophisticated and computationally expensive analyses, simple, trustworthy tools should be generated for practitioners to easily predict the mechanism of damage propagation and determine the governing collapse mode of a structure. In this environment, this thesis introduces a simple and less labor demanding analytical tool/method which can be used to determine the governing progressive collapse mechanism of steel moment frames under the scenario of a column removal. After performing plain elastic analyses, the method develops critical Euler-type ductility curves for each removal scenario by performing straightforward analytical calculations. The response of structural systems under column removals is examined in a 2D and 3D context. The main objective of Part II is to investigate the response of dierent structural systems to the event of damage introduction (in this thesis, in the form of column removals in several locations of the system) and to develop a simple analytical framework for the identification of the governing progressive collapse failure modes. Although failure may occur due to a number of reasons (shear beam-to-column connection failure, beam yielding-type mechanism, loss of stability of adjacent columns, global loss of stability of the structural system, etc), in this study focus is being placed in only two of them; The proposed method establishes critical limit state functions which are used to identify whether a specic structure will experience progressive collapse through a yielding-type beam-induced collapse mechanism or through a loss-of-stability-induced column failure collapse mechanism.