This study examines the relationship between income and the environment in Beijing from 2008 to 2017 using quarterly data. The indicator for environmental quality is concentrations of Particular Matter (PM) 2.5, from the Mission China Air Quality Monitoring Programme (MCAQMP), whose observation site is in the US embassy in Chaoyang District, Beijing. By adding cubic GDP and other variables consistent with the Urban Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis, such as green space and the length of the road network, the result suggests an N-shaped pattern rather than the conventional inverted U shape. The per capita GDP for Beijing is currently slightly lower than the second turning point, suggesting that the degradation would become more severe as income grows, if no new development strategies are implemented in the city.

Environmental protection during the armed conflicts is rarely considered as a prioritized concern. Due to the concept of state sovereignty, this is especially problematic when examining interference of warfare and environmental protection in non-international conflicts. Not only it is challenging to find any exhaustive and explicit legal provisions regulating the matter, but this issue has also been forgotten by international legal scholars. Therefore, in this article, the author reviews are written and customary norms laid down in documents of different branches of international law, such as human rights law, international humanitarian law, environmental law and international criminal law, which directly or by way of interpretation may favour environmental protection during the internally armed conflict. This is to be done in order to gather information about the sufficiency of the legal framework on the preservation of the environment during the non-international armed conflicts. After doing this research, a few possible means to improve current legal framework are suggested. The author suggests to impose civil liability, enact new comprehensive document, initiates changes in international criminal law and other.

This paper is devoted to the analysis of value concepts and theories that provided the basis for the integrated reporting development, their implementation, and disclosure in integrated reporting practice. It is widely accepted that traditional financial reporting no longer meets the needs of its users - the analysis of historical financial information is backwards-looking, the emphasis on financial capital is not any more relevant for every company due to the involvement of other capitals that more significantly contribute to the company’s success. Integrated reporting is meant to bridge this reporting gap. The paper also provides a high-level overview of current progress in integrated reporting adoption on the international level.

The objective of this paper is to study the concept of mergers and acquisitions in the context of modern financial relations. It is an essential process nowadays for the growth and survival of almost all business. If any company is not adopting this way either they will not grow or will be acquired by the other major corporations. In this paper, to conduct a uniform research and arrive at an accurate conclusion why organizations take this innovative mode of expansion, we restrict our research to only Asian companies-Masan and Singha-which work in food and beverage industry. Over and above that, the main focus is on investigating the major issues associated with pre and post merging situations with special emphasis on the improvement of the business well-being and competitive edge.

Country risk has become a topic of major concern for the international financial community over the last two decades. The importance of country ratings is underscored by the existence of several major country risk rating agencies, namely the Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, Fitch. Previous research has analyzed the ratings provided by S&P and Moody’s and found quite close interrelationships and dependencies between them. This paper extends earlier our research by comparing the ratings of Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch. Initially, the paper was aiming to examine extensive database with daily observations of sovereign credit rating across 143 countries over a 70-year time period (from 1949 up to 2017) basing on the sovereign credit rating data obtained from such sources like Bloomberg, IMF, and the World Bank. However, due to a large volume of missing data, the data sample was shrunk up to 25 years (from 1992 up to 2017). The analysis focuses on comparing rating levels, rating changes, and the impact of sovereign credit debt on credit rating.