Assessment of the Reasons for the Termination of Entrepreneurial Activity: Data for Various Countries in 2020

The research featured the issue of business termination. The COVID-19 pandemic hit small and medium-sized businesses all over the world. The research objective was to assess various economic indicators in order to explain why entrepreneurs had to abandon their business in 2020. The study was based on the economic and mathematical models that represent the functions of normal distribution. The author analyzed the opinions of entrepreneurs from 39 countries, who were asked to explain why they had to give up their business. The survey was part of the Global Monitoring of Entrepreneurship. The analysis revealed four indicators that determined the positive and negative reasons for the entrepreneurs to stop their business activities. The article introduces some new information about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on this process. Most entrepreneurs (56.3 %) gave up their business for some pandemic-unrelated negative reasons. A quarter of them (28 %) were forced to close their businesses due to the negative consequences of the pandemic. Only one-sixth of the participants terminated their business activities for a positive reason. Further research will assess the consequences of the pandemic in 2021.

Financial Capital Deepening, Technological Progress and Industrial Structure Upgrading

A necessary condition for realizing macroeconomics is to rationally upgrade the industrial structure. In this process of upgrading, financial capital deepening and technological progress are important ways to promote the upgrading of industrial structure. From an endogenous perspective, this essay explores the internal links between financial capital deepening, technological progress, and industrial structure upgrading. The analysis shows that factors of technological progress have not make a tremendous impact on the upgrading of Chinese industrial structure, nor are they a positive reason for promoting the development of the industry to a higher level. The deepening of financial capital obviously promotes the optimization and upgrading of industrial institutions, which is its main factor.

Could custody visiting be made to work?

Custody visiting is not independent, and it is not effective as a regulator. The relation between custody visiting and deaths in custody has been suppressed by the police and the Home Office. The chapter then discusses whether, and if so how, the current system could be rebuilt to provide effective regulation, identifying the radical changes that would be necessary. It would depend on a fundamental reconsideration of all the policy issues; how to deal with the power of the police; independence of the scheme from the state; and would need greatly enhanced statutory powers. The chapter asks why the scheme has been allowed to survive. The explanation is that it causes the police no trouble, and, beyond that, there is a positive reason, that its existence justifies the absence of further regulation. This book provides an authoritative evidence base for a challenge to that line. The revelation to parliament and the public that custody visiting has no legitimacy could lead to a real chance of reform.

Explaining Instrumental Irrationality

Chapter 10 provides an account of instrumental irrationality in terms of requirements to respond to reasons. This anti-structuralist approach faces the challenge to explain what is irrational about means/end-incoherence in case the agent’s end is neither required nor forbidden by the agent’s reasons (10.1). It is argued that this ‘underdetermination problem’ cannot be solved by assuming that adopting an end in an underdetermined case tips the balance in favour of taking the means (10.2–10.3). Neither can instrumental irrationality be explained as an instance of akrasia or theoretical inconsistency (10.4). The remainder of the chapter develops and defends the following general idea: means/end-incoherence is irrational because it increases the risk of engaging in pointless activity and thereby wasting valuable resources, which gives one a positive reason to make a decision for taking the means or giving up the end (10.5–10.9).

We’re Number One

When a person must choose among actions that will affect both him and other people, he generally takes the others’ interests to have some rational weight, but not as much as his own. This familiar view is intermediate between two others: first, that only the individual’s own interests give him reason to act, and, second, that everyone else’s interests count just as much as his own. Of these two polar views, each has had forceful proponents and each can be traced to a compelling starting point. By contrast, the intermediate view that actually informs most practice seems much harder to defend. The question in this paper is whether that view is simply an unprincipled compromise between two powerful but irreconcilable intellectual pressures or whether, instead, there is some positive reason to accept it

Dissimulation and Memory in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania: the Art of Forgetting

The most well-known practitioner of dissimulation among early modern Christians of the Eastern Rite is Meletii Smotryts'kyi (ca. 1577–1633), the Orthodox archbishop of Polatsk (in modern-day Belarus), who was suspected of being a Uniate for several years before he was openly charged with apostasy during a council of the Orthodox hierarchy of Poland-Lithuania in August of 1628. For the previous year Smotryts'kyi had lived a double life, outwardly an Orthodox archbishop but secretly a Uniate, having formally accepted the Union with Rome on July 6, 1627. In this period of clandestine Uniatism and the years leading up to it, during which he flirted with conversion, Smotryts'kyi fulfilled his official duties, playing a leading role in Orthodox synods and risking exposure that would bring public disgrace and even physical harm. Smotryts'kyi had a positive reason for keeping his conversion secret: he argued that the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition should allow him to remain in office as an Orthodox bishop so that he might convene a council of the Orthodox hierarchy and elite and, “received as a schismatic [an Orthodox], would be able to set forth and to explain the twofold causes of the present discord of the Church & and to cause doubt for them in the schismatic faith (through the reasons that had taught him himself that there was no contradiction in thing [essence], only in words, between the holy Greek and Latin fathers).” Smotryts'kyi concluded his request for secrecy by comparing his situation with that of Jesuits engaged in mission work with non-Christians: “Wherefore, indeed, if the fathers of the Society of Jesus and the other priests in India can live with the heathens in secular habit, this should cause no one scandal, especially since, with God’s help, we will hope for the much greater fruit of holy Union from his hidden Catholicism & than if he were now known by all.”

Paradigm economy

The inflexional paradigm, as a linguistic entity or concept, has not been a major preoccupation of theoretical linguists (at least in the English-speaking world) for several decades. For example, it is scarcely mentioned by Zellig Harris in his classic Methods in structural linguistics (1951). Nor have generative grammarians devoted much attention to it. Being interested originally in syntax, semantics and phonology to the almost total exclusion of morphology, they had no immediate incentive to reconsider such a squarely morphological concept. Quite apart from this, a positive reason for continuing to neglect, or reject, the paradigm seemed to flow from their approach to phonology. If phonological organization and phonological change were properly understood (they thought), then it could be seen that there was no need to invoke explicitly non-phonological factors such as ‘paradigm pressure’ or ‘analogical levelling’ in order to account for ‘exceptions’ to ‘sound laws’.

Angels in Plastic: The Liberal Surge in 1974

Before the Liberal surge in 1974, survey research stressed that the Liberal vote was electorally volatile, socially representative, and negative in character. Data from 1974 indicates that the volatility of the Liberal vote owes more to the absence of a large core of stable Liberal voters than to any difference among parties in their ability to retain the votes of recent converts. Moreover, the small core of regular Liberal voters is unusually middle-aged and middle-class, socially very different from the larger and socially representative body of occasional Liberal voters. In the eyes of the electorate, the Liberal Party continues to have a diffuse image, largely devoid of any specific policy content. The Party benefited from dissatisfaction with the state of the country, but there is no evidence that an image of classlessness contributed to its electoral success. Moreover, while most Liberal voters did so for some positive reason, many of their reasons had more to do with style than policy, and the personalities of party leaders appear to have had much to do with moving people to consider—if not actually vote for—the Liberal Party.

The Name Avgvstvs

On 13th January, 27 B.C. Octavian completed his first attempt to find a constitutional basis for his extraordinary position, and on 16th January he received from the senate the cognomen Augustus, which henceforward remained the personal appellation of the reigning Roman emperors, and, substantially, of them alone. It has been generally recognised that the name was well chosen, but no writer, so far as I know, has offered any positive reason why it in particular should have been chosen. Yet some reason is surely needed. Before 27 B.C. the name, though not altogether unknown, does not seem to have served as a Roman proper name. It had not been borne as a cognomen by any republican statesman, or indeed by any historical character or legendary hero. It was an adjective adapted by Octavian. We can, indeed, see how much it had to recommend it to the genius in adaptation. It possessed no political associations of any sort; it had belonged to nobody before Octavian and recalled no one's peculiar policy or aims. It had been merely an adjective used occasionally, yet not very often, in earlier literature (since Ennius), and, so far as it implied anything at all, implied simply a semi-religious sanctity—‘sancta vocant augusta patres,’ as Ovid says. Thus it fitted singularly well with the half-divinity of the DIVI FILIVS. Just as Augustus, early in his career (40 B.C.), had dropped the name Julius and had adapted an appellation (Imp. Caesar, etc.) which marked him off from the ordinary citizens, thereby indicating by the subtle change his great aims and his ambitions, so by the name Augustus he again set himself apart. Still, the name did not lie ready-made to his hand; we need some reason, beyond its fitness, to explain why his peculiar choice tell on it; such a reason can, I think, be learnt from coins.