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The COVID-19 pandemic, an unexpected event with strong and long-lasting consequences, led to increased uncertainty among investors and collapses in commodities and financial markets. However, while some investors pulled their capital out and sold assets, others bought them back at low prices. Although less volatile, the foreign direct investment (FDI) market was also hit hard. Against this background, this paper explores the effect of the pandemic on Chinese FDI in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that are strategically important to China. The paper uses the Coordinated Direct Investment Survey by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Statistical Bulletins of China’s Outward Foreign Direct Investment, the OECD.Stat FDI data, and the China Global Investment Tracker. The paper finds that the pandemic did not have a negative impact on Chinese outward FDI to the CEE countries. The structure of Chinese outward FDI to the CEE countries changed in favor of more indirect FDI. Moreover, the paper shows that there are still huge discrepancies between the IMF data and the Chinese national statistics, which suggests that further work in the direction of statistical harmonization is necessary. As for the future of Chinese investment in the region, the paper anticipates China’s continued strategic interest in the region with increasing competition from other geopolitical centers.

In the context of SARS-CoV-2 crises, the phenomenological studies analyze the market phenomenon of People’s Republic of China (PRC) in public health. With PRC’s diplomatic behaviors around the national, international, and global public health crises, the phenomenological occurrence was further questioned into on accounts of genetic engineering, PRC’s top-down behaviors, and financial and non-financial incentives in public health inequality with its declared universal healthcare coverage. The phenomenological studies further the evidence chains on the PRC governmental bodies’ purposeful and intentional crimes against humanity, with the public health system they designed to hide criminal evidences in the clinical evidence chains. Albeit it is paramount for the medical professionals to prepare for a certain but unforeseeable surge of biomedical intrusion, the phenomenological studies call for military interventions on the humanitarian catastrophe that have twice in three years caused unnecessary sufferings regionally and globally. Without it, the world can only wait to detect Chinese passengers’ carriers instead of obtaining firsthand data, potentially leading to more deaths and mutation risks. Only peace-building and government reformation on democratic basis in the region can solve the humanitarian crisis once and for all.

Three files: tales (mostly in English), images and writing exercises. The stories compiled in the attachment are called stories of nothing, as they are built from coincidences and are based on real events: as they happened, they were slippery and difficult to remember. With the work of time—and practice—they became stories: picked up, linked to events and occasionally come with some advice. Like in Walter Benjamin’s essay on Nikolai Leskov—the Storyteller—the stories eschew the premises of journalism and of authoring. In his words, the crafts constitute the home of a higher level of storytelling. Since they deal with coincidence the stories of Nothing are connected to Surrealism, as explained by André Breton and Paul Eluard (Minotaure). In some sense they oppose the Hidden Hand of Liberalism, with the Hidden Hand of History: as necessity finds its way through desire and dream to display in coincidence. A number of the attached stories the events utfolder as though there was a hidden film director at work, and the story teller became unwittingly involved and tangled in a movie take. Of course, there was no such thing, which is why they are called stories of nothing. At the bottom of the coloumn of files to the left, the reader will also find some writing exercises, that will help to prepare her for stories like these. It takes som effort and toil to get there, but in the end they will yield to writing. The stories were compiled in the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic, on a FB group support page called Mora til Herman. It closed, as the pandemic progressed, the 23rd april 2020. The definition of DESIGN used here, determines a two-tiered process of 1) pathfinding and 2) goalseeking, through sustain trail and search of mark-making (writing or drawing) that hatches when the two tiers start to converge/coincide. Design searches and queries between what never works and what always works: it explores the slim possibilities in between, in quest of moving from a current situation to a preferred one (Herbert Simon).

Did the Covid-19 pandemic have an impact on innovation? Past economic disruptions, anecdotal evidence, and the previous literature suggest a decline with substantial differences between industries. We leverage USPTO patent application data to investigate and quantify the disturbance. We assess differences by field of technology (at the CPC subclass level) as well as the impact of direct and indirect relevance for the management of the pandemic. Direct Covid-19 relevance is identified from a keyword search of the patent application fulltexts; indirect Covid-19 relevance is derived from past CPC subclass to subclass citation patterns. We find that direct Covid-19 relevance is associated with a strong boost to the growth of the number of patent applications in the first year of the pandemic at the same order of magnitude (in percentage points) as the percentage of patents referencing Covid-19. We find no effect for indirect Covid-19 relevance, indicating a focus on applied research at the expense of more basic research. Fields of technology (CPC mainsections) have an additional significant impact, with, e.g., mainsections A (human necessities) and C (chemistry, metallurgy) having a strong performance.

The maritime industry is indispensable to many countries as trade represents the lifeblood of many economies across the globe, including Singapore. Due to economies of scale, sea transport is highly employed for trades, transporting over 80% of the world’s trade by volume. The maritime industry is of high economic importance in Singapore, accounting for 7% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Production (GDP). In a world increasingly characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), the Sea Transport Industry Transformation Map (ITM) was launched in 2018, with a refreshed version released in 2022 in an endeavour to safeguard the competitiveness of Singapore’s maritime industry. A few unprecedented global events have taken place since 2018. In particular, Covid-19 upturned the world and brought forth the “new normal”, which includes an increased focus on sustainability, digitalisation, and work-life balance. From the Sea Transport ITM, developing a future-ready maritime workforce is one of Singapore’s key strategies and it involves attracting, retaining, and retraining talent. Based on current literature, it is only possible to gather the various talent initiatives developed by the different government bodies in response to the ITM and the industry's general need to attract, retain and upskill talent. As such, the research gaps with regards to Singapore’s maritime talent strategy include the current state of the maritime industry and whether maritime companies are putting in similar efforts to attract, retain and upskill talent. To gain insights into the industry’s current state of attracting, retaining, and retraining talent including other realistic issues overlooked, surveys and interviews were carried out to gather quantitative and qualitative data. Primary research efforts revealed that the overall push factor of the maritime industry is more than its pull factor. In addition, the government generally puts in more effort to attract talent into the industry than the companies but there are often limitations. Other issues uncovered include the word of mouth as a double-edged sword in attracting talent, low employee engagement by companies in retaining talent, the limited support provided by companies in retraining talent and people’s lack of awareness of the Maritime Port Authority (MPA) co-funding schemes for them to utilise in their training. The most challenging aspect of developing a future-ready maritime workforce is aligning the maritime companies with Maritime Singapore's vision as some companies may have tunnel vision. Companies also have the autonomy to decide on the extent they will contribute to a future-ready maritime workforce in Singapore. Hence, the study suggests establishing a maritime association to provide more direct support for all maritime stakeholders and a multilateral synergy model to remind the industry of the interdependence of the three key maritime strategies – sustainability, digitalisation and talent. Overall, maritime companies must and will need to generate more value. Bachelor of Science (Maritime Studies)

Singapore is a country known for importing most of their food with over 90% imported. However, the past few years has taught us that food security is something that can be changed drastically quickly. From lockdown restrictions thru COVID 19 to war breaking out between Russia and Ukraine, it has hindered the global food exports and affected us. This highlights the importance to strengthen our local food production. In addition, land space in Singapore is limited and not much area can be used for companies to grow local produces. Area used in housing is the highest which can be a solution to increase food production. In this project, we will be looking at the current innovation and technologies available in indoor planting and ways we could improve in them to fit into our everyday lives. With the usage of sensors and processors plus data to analyze plant growth. Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering)

Digitalization is an essential element for the development of today’s society, in the context of actual geo-political challenges. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the process of digitalization, offering new perspectives on sustainable and inclusive development. From the point of view of the regional approach, digitalization can have an important impact on the level of territorial development and on the reduction of economic and social inequalities. This paper proposes to identify the relationship between a series of indicators specific to digitization and regional GDP, with the help of panel models. The objective of the research is to estimate the relationship between GDP and two indicators specific to digitalization: online commerce and broadband internet infrastructure, the level of the eight development regions in Romania. Dependency modelling, based on econometric equations, offers the possibility of highlighting the way in which the two indicators of the digital economy contribute to the growth of GDP per capita. This analysis aims to illustrate the fact that broadband technologies and the increase in the number of people using the Internet for commercial purposes can have a positive impact on the growth of the regional economy. The results of the analysis highlighted the direct relationship of the indicators between the three variables related to the digitalization process at the level of Romania’s regions and the strong influence of broadband internet and online trade on GDP per capita, proving that any growth among independent variables will lead to an increase amongst the dependent variables.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased consumers’ reliance on online food delivery (OFD) platforms, a trend that is expected to continue even after the pandemic. The surge in OFD orders has resulted in OFD platforms facing some difficulty in keeping up with the demand. Furthermore, if more labour regulations are imposed on the OFD industry, OFD platforms possibly face a more challenging business environment due to their reliance on freelance riders to provide delivery services. Thus, OFD platforms must remain adaptable and consider further promoting the use of self pick-up as a viable alternative to delivery. This will allow OFD platforms to diversify their service offerings and meet the growing demand for OFD services in the future. This report aims to address the use of self pick-up on OFD platforms, a topic that has not been widely studied in existing literature. By exploring the key factors which influence customers to use self pick-up over door-to-door delivery on OFD platforms in Singapore, suggestions can be made to improve the self pick-up customer experience and encourage its adoption. A qualitative method of data collection was employed where semi-structured interviews were conducted with OFD platform users to gain first-hand insights into the preferences of OFD platform users. An analysis of the interview responses using inductive thematic analysis revealed three key factors that influence customers to use self pick-up on OFD platforms in Singapore: convenience, price, and greater control. These insights contribute to research in the OFD sector since an enhanced understanding of customer preferences will allow OFD platforms to gain insights on how to better encourage their users to opt for self pick-up. Further research can be done to explore alternative last-mile delivery options such as self pick-up from smart lockers. Bachelor of Science (Maritime Studies)

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the public health measures implemented in Manitoba and Ontario during waves 1 and 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted allied health professionals working in primary care settings. This study used a case study methodology to develop four cases, two allied health professionals from Manitoba and two allied health professionals of the same professions from Ontario. Two methods of data collection were used, diary entry and interview. Diary entry data was collected between March 2020 and August 2020. Interviews were conducted in December 2020. This study’s approach to data analysis was to use the framework analysis to apply a conceptual framework, specifically the Roy Adaptation Model. The Roy Adaptation Model encompasses four adaptive modes: role function, interdependence, group identity, and physiological. The results section presents how each of these modes were operationalized for each case. The public health measures affected the role function mode more significantly than the other modes. All participants experienced role disruptions with redeployment and role change with the transition to remote and virtual care. The allied health providers in both provinces experienced role reductions with limitations in their ability to practice their primary role. The implemented COVID-19 public health measures led providers to work within their roles in an adapted capacity during the length of the pandemic. The greatest differences between the experiences of providers in Ontario versus Manitoba was the timeline of events and the response of the provincial governments. This study highlights how macro policies influence the day-to-day of healthcare workers.

Clinical Data Table containing all relevant information for the COVID-19 study performed, in particular COVID-19 disease duration (which was used to stratify the lung samples analyzed by multiplexed histology and spatial transcriptomics) and presence of SARS-CoV-2 viral particles.