China's new bankruptcy rules will lift economic growth

Significance Chinese law at the national level does not include provisions for personal bankruptcy. This prevents resolution of many insolvent companies that involve liabilities from heavily indebted individuals. There is no formal resolution of bankruptcies for sole traders and those unable to fulfil personal guarantees, nor a way for failed entrepreneurs and their families to make fresh starts. Impacts Government efforts to promote entrepreneurship and innovation will have more success as trialling new ideas becomes less risky. Realising the full potential of the law will require changes in attitudes to personal bankruptcy and removal of associated stigma. Implementation will be slower and more difficult in less-developed regions of China that lack Shenzhen's experience.

Vanishing Worlds: Epic Disappearance in Manhattan Beach

In Jennifer Egan's manhattan beach, certain aspects of american culture—farmland in brooklyn, the ziegfeld follies, Jean Harlow's curls, the “old salts” who sailed in wooden ships (259)—are recalled at the moment of their vanishing. These and other disappearances provide evidence that, in the novel, historical change is treated as an epic trope. At the same time, disappearances mark swerves in an individual character's destiny as novelistic events. In its blending of history with individuals' stories, Manhattan Beach can be called an epic novel, along the lines of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Don DeLillo's Libra. Whereas novels particularize individual experience in an evolving present, epics position individual destinies in a fixed, complete history. Novels differ from epics in the distance that they take from their respective subjects, though the two genres demonstrate “all-inclusiveness” and “expansiveness” (Merchant 71, 93). The epic novel mobilizes at the point where national ambitions overlay personal stories. hrough the trope of disappearance, Manhattan Beach correlates the epic ambition to show historical transformation with the novelistic ambition to represent personal renewal. Disappearances may be escapes, but they also forecast characters' fresh starts and future convergences.

Fine-Tuning Your Fresh Start

What's the best time of year to set goals for self-improvement? My answer: Right now. January is a fresh start: an opportunity to leave our imperfect 2018 selves behind and begin anew with the hope that our 2019 selves will be better. Hence the time-honored tradition of New Year's resolutions, which most American adults report making. For students, January is also often the beginning of a new marking period. It is at this equinox—midway between the first day of school and the last—when students have enough feedback to know what they need to improve and enough time to feel like effort might change their final grades. The science of fresh starts is intuitive: temporal landmarks like the New Year or a new semester spur us to set goals for improving our performance, no matter what it is we want to improve. What may not be obvious is how fickle hope can be.

Evolution of the share capital function, as a tool for overcoming economic turmoil

The paper aims at showing that a lower share capital in limited liability companies can be a successful tool for overcoming the consequences of an economic crisis. In a period of economic turmoil insolvency is more than a simple risk. For such a reason the limited liability company shareholders, thanks to the complete financial autonomy given by the share capital, have a shield from the legitimate expectations of the creditors. The share capital protects the entrepreneur and at the same time allows faster fresh starts; nevertheless, in order for that to happen, the share capital cannot be an additional burden, instead has to be a simple formal element. The article demonstrates that in the last 50 years is visible a shift in the concept and function of the share capital. During the 50’s of the past century, the share capital was considered as a guarantee for the company’s creditors. Nowadays the European legislators across Europe are heading to consider the share capital as a mere formal element disconnected by any due quantity.

Why policy needs history (and historians)

Policy makers like the idea of new initiatives and fresh starts, unencumbered by, even actively overthrowing, what has been done in the past. At the same time, history can be pigeonholed as fusty and antiquarian, dealing with long past events of no relevance to the present. Academic historians are sometimes bound up in their own worlds. The debates central to academe may have little direct relevance to the immediate concerns of policy making. The paper argues that history, as the evidence-based discipline par excellence, is as relevant as other approaches to evidence-based policy making. Case studies can show us the nature of that relevance. How to achieve influence for history also needs discussion. The relationship is not straightforward and will vary according to time and place. History is an interpretative discipline, not just a collection of ‘facts’. The paper discusses how historians work and why it is important for policy makers to engage, not just with history, but with historians as well. Historians too need to think about the value of bringing their analysis into policy.