Search

In this article, we investigate the effect of removing the bank lending rate floor in 2013 on the market for loans in China. Given the backdrop of gradual liberalization of financial markets, we analyze data from 2008 to 2018 to gauge whether the interest rate on securities of different maturities have been materially affected by this act of partial liberalization. We find that this action has affected short-term repo (repurchase agreements) interest rates but not long-term interest rates. There is also evidence that the efficiency of lending markets has improved, but the health of the banking sector overall seems to have deteriorated, with lower capital but higher nonperforming loans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English law is central to the history of colonial Hong Kong. Traditional colonial historians conceptualise it as a gift to the colonised, and it is still widely acknowledged by Hong Kong citizens today as a core contributing factor to the city's continued growth and prosperity. The traditional narrative is that the rule of lew, which embraces the principles of judicial independence and offers such safeguards of individual liberty as freedom of expression, is the most important legacy of British colonial rule, a legacy that is very often cited to distinguish the legal and societal development of Hong Kong from that of its neighbour across the border, mainland China. This article, drawing on unexplored archival materials, challenges this widely accepted narrative, thereby severing the link between common law's legal past and present in Hong Kong. Through a close reading of a widely reported court case concerning students' anti-Japan movement in 1919, the article further argues that the common law system practised in pre-World War II Hong Kong played a more important role in reinforcing an authoritarian form of colonial law and order to achieve the British Empire's strategic aim of maintaining its overseas territorial and economic possessions than in safeguarding individual liberty and the impartiality of the judicial process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, drawing on a wide range of archived materials, and using one of the earliest sets of English business law imported to Hong Kong – the Bankruptcy Ordinance of 1864 – as a case study, argues that the transplantation of the English bankruptcy regime into early colonial Hong Kong was contrary to the business interests of both the European and Chinese communities and wrongfully displaced the traditional Chinese business norms and practices that had contributed to the health of the colonial economy prior to the regime's introduction. This article constitutes one of the first empirical studies to place English business law and its widely acknowledged contribution to the economy of early colonial Hong Kong under scrutiny. From the perspective of the relationship between English law and former British colonies’ development of business modernity, the findings presented herein contradict the readily accepted notion that English business law provided a solid legal infrastructure upon which colonial Hong Kong's prosperity and economic growth were built and call for more nuanced studies of the positive role of Chinese legal traditions in Hong Kong's development of business modernity in its early colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective: To describe the characteristics and outcomes of patients with severe COVID-19 and in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) in Wuhan, China.Methods: The outcomes of patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia after IHCA over a 40-day period were retrospectively evaluated. Between January 15 and February 25, 2020, data for all cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) attempts for IHCA that occurred in a tertiary teaching hospital in Wuhan, China were collected according to the Utstein style. The primary outcome was restoration of spontaneous circulation (ROSC), and the secondary outcomes were 30-day survival, and neurological outcome.Results: Data from 136 patients showed 119 (87.5%) patients had a respiratory cause for their cardiac arrest, and 113 (83.1%) were resuscitated in a general ward. The initial rhythm was asystole in 89.7%, pulseless electrical activity (PEA) in 4.4%, and shockable in 5.9%. Most patients with IHCA were monitored (93.4%) and in most resuscitation (89%) was initiated <1 min. The average length of hospital stay was 7 days and the time from illness onset to hospital admission was 10 days. The most frequent comorbidity was hypertension (30.2%), and the most frequent symptom was shortness of breath (75%). Of the patients receiving CPR, ROSC was achieved in 18 (13.2%) patients, 4 (2.9%) patients survived for at least 30 days, and one patient achieved a favourable neurological outcome at 30 days. Cardiac arrest location and initial rhythm were associated with better outcomes.Conclusion: Survival of patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia who had an in-hospital cardiac arrest was poor in Wuhan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to identify clinical features for prognosing mortality risk using machine-learning methods in patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). A retrospective study of the inpatients with COVID-19 admitted from 15 January to 15 March 2020 in Wuhan is reported. The data of symptoms, comorbidity, demographic, vital sign, CT scans results and laboratory test results on admission were collected. Machine-learning methods (Random Forest and XGboost) were used to rank clinical features for mortality risk. Multivariate logistic regression models were applied to identify clinical features with statistical significance. The predictors of mortality were lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), C-reactive protein (CRP) and age based on 500 bootstrapped samples. A multivariate logistic regression model was formed to predict mortality 292 in-sample patients with area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUROC) of 0.9521, which was better than CURB-65 (AUROC of 0.8501) and the machine-learning-based model (AUROC of 0.4530). An out-sample data set of 13 patients was further tested to show our model (AUROC of 0.6061) was also better than CURB-65 (AUROC of 0.4608) and the machine-learning-based model (AUROC of 0.2292). LDH, CRP and age can be used to identify severe patients with COVID-19 on hospital admission.