Suchergebnisse

University of Orleans (France) - Faculty of Law, Economics and Management - Orleans Economic Laboratory (LEO), UMR CNRS 7322, Rue de Blois, B.P. 26739 - 45067 Orléans Cedex 2 - France. There is considerable debate whether the domestic political institutions (specifically, the country's level of democracy) of the host developing country toward foreign investors are effective in establishing the credibility of commitments are still underway, researchers have also analyzed the effect of international institutions such as (GATT-WTO) membership and Bilateral Investment treaties (BIT) in their role of establishing the credibility of commitment to attract foreign investments. In addition, most recent studies have examined the effect of International Trade Agreements (TAs) on FDI flows as they contain separate investment chapters and dispute settlement mechanism, thus providing confidence to investor regarding the security of their investments. We argue that there are qualitative differences among various types of trade agreements and full-fledged trade agreements (FTA-CU) provide credibility to foreign investors and democracy level in the host country conditions this effect whereas the partial scope agreements (PSA) are not sufficient in providing credibility of commitments and not moderated by democracy. This paper analyses the impact of heterogeneous TAs, and their interaction with domestic institutions, on FDI inflows. Statistical analyses for 122 developing countries from 1970 to 2005 support this argument. The method adopted relies on fixed effects estimator which is robust to control endogeneity on a large panel dataset. The strict erogeneity of results by using a method suggested by Baier and Bergstrand (2007) and no feedback effect found in sample. The results state that (1) More the FTA-CU concluded, larger the amount of FDI inflows are attracted into the developing countries and PSA are insignificant in determining the FDI inflow; (2) FTA CU are complementary to democratic regime whereas the conditional ...

169486 169495 8 ; S ; [EN] Means and modes of transport in urban environments are changing. The emergence of new means of personal transport, such as e-scooters or e-bikes, combined with new concepts such as `vehicle sharing' are changing urban transport. A greater social awareness of the harmful effects of polluting gases is leading to the adoption of new e-mobility solutions. A sustainable e-scooter recharging dock has been designed, built, and put into operation in a small town north of the city of Valencia (Spain). In the proposed novel solution, a stand-alone PV system is built for the free recharge of e-scooters using an original system that supports new sustainable means of transport. The design of the PV system considers the size limitations of the equipment, where a single PV module must generate the energy needed to recharge the e-scooters. A battery is used to store the energy and adjust power generation and consumption profiles. A commercial electronic converter adjusts the various electrical characteristics of generation, storage, and consumption. As a result of the system analysis, the surplus autonomy provided for the e-scooter recharging dock is calculated. Potential stakeholders in the use of the proposed system and their reasons for adopting this sustainable solution are identified. Experimental results of the first months of operation are included and these demonstrate the correct operation of the proposed system. Martinez-Navarro, A.; Cloquell Ballester, VA.; Segui-Chilet, S. (2020). Photovoltaic Electric Scooter Charger Dock for the Development of Sustainable Mobility in Urban Environments. IEEE Access. 8:169486-169495. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3023881

This report explores the drivers (both direct and indirect) of deforestation and forest degradation and discusses the political, economic and social opportunities and constraints that will influence the design and implementation of REDD+ in Laos. The government of Laos has long sought to curb deforestation and forest degradation, and the country is receiving considerable international attention and support to implement REDD+. However, agricultural expansion, the development of industrial tree plantations, and large hydropower, mining and infrastructure projects continue to result in deforestation, with shifting cultivation and selective logging (legal and illegal) largely blamed for forest degradation. At the same time, indirect drivers of deforestation and forest degradation are rooted in a national agenda of economic growth, characterized by incentives for foreign and domestic investment in forest management and timber harvesting. As a result, Laos is becoming an important resource frontier for transnational capital and large-scale land and natural resource investments. The consequent intensification of competition for resources poses a challenge not only for forest governance, but also for the development of REDD+ policies and initiatives. In an examination of the institutions and policies defining Laos� forestry sector and REDD+, the report reflects on lessons to be learned from past forestry and economic development policies. The government of Laos has demonstrated strong political interest in REDD+, but REDD+ implementation faces major obstacles, particularly unclear carbon rights and weak governance, with the latter attributable to poor local capacity, weak coordination among stakeholders, and minimal involvement by local communities and civil society. The report makes several recommendations for achieving effective, efficient and equitable outcomes of REDD+ in Laos: capacity building of administrative and technical staff, especially at the subnational level; clarification and harmonization of land-use planning and land allocation processes; and stronger monitoring and law enforcement in areas under high threat of deforestation and forest degradation. Furthermore, an accountable and transparent mechanism for sharing the benefits of REDD+ across levels and fully accountable consultation processes must be implemented, with the participation of not only elite and powerful actors such as domestic and foreign businesses but also local groups and civil society.

In Morocco, large-scale irrigation schemes have evolved over the past twenty years from the centralised management of irrigation and agricultural production into more complex multi-actor systems. This study analysed whether, and how, in the context of state withdrawal, increased farmer autonomy and political liberalisation, family farmers currently participate in the coordination and negotiation of issues that affect them and involve scheme-level organisations. Issues related to water management, the sugar industry and the dairy sector were analysed in five large-scale irrigation schemes. Farmer organisations that were set up to intervene in water management and sugar production were seen to be either inactive or to have weak links with their constituency; hence, the irrigation administration and the sugar industry continue to interact directly with farmers in a centralised way. Given their inability to voice their interests, when farmers have the opportunity, many choose exit strategies, for instance by resorting to the use of groundwater. In contrast, many community-based milk collection cooperatives were seen to function as accountable intermediaries between smallholders and dairy firms. While, as in the past, family farmers are still generally not involved in decision making at scheme level, in the milk collection cooperatives studied, farmers learn to coordinate and negotiate for the development of their communities.

A critical look at state-dominated health care.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the World Bank introduced conditionalities to reform the forest concession regime in Central Africa and continuously intervened, inter alia, in Cameroon, Congo, Gabon and the DRC up to 2010. The reforms were designed to achieve two immediate objectives: (i) increase the price of the resource through competitive market procedures or, if inapplicable, through taxation, (ii) break down the patronage system that governed the forest permits allocation. These efforts have been supported by national reformers, and fought against by various vested interests such as the timber companies, but also officials in the forest departments. Because of the difficult political economy, reform ambitions have been lowered, and only a certain proportion of the policy measures initially contemplated has been implemented. This called for a completion of the reform agenda and fine tuning. But by the middle of the 2000s, the evolution of paradigms in tropical forestry gave the critics of the WB policy of concession reforms opportunities to challenge the orientations followed hitherto in Central Africa. The 2013 Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) report of the WB forestry policy, criticizing the WB's management efforts to reform concession regimes in Africa, testified to this change of paradigm. The critics are of mixed mind, with community advocates favoring more pressure on the African governments to dismantle the concession regime and proponents of "performance-based aid" seeing REDD+ as an opportunity to withdraw from direct sectoral intervention. Paradoxically, in spite of REDD+ initiatives and rhetoric, forestry has tumbled in the national policy agendas and forest concessions or protected areas are encroached by agribusiness plantations and mines with the implicit support of large fractions within governments.

Developing the portal of Russian for ELBEP project («Eliminating Language Barriers in European Prisons through Open and Distance Learning Technologies») the work group of Moscow State University of Economics, Statistics and Informatics (MESI) considered its primary goal to create a set of visualization means facilitating students to acquire knowledge through e-learning technologies. We carried out. We visualize a number of learning tools: print materials; Flash-animations; exercises; videos; tests - using icons, at the bottom of the portal page. The main character of Flash-animations is a «teaching/learning object» possessing essential features similar to and acting as a human being, so it helps to visualize meanings of words and phrases introduced in the course. For certain didactic purposes tables, photos, pictures, drawings, etc. were used. Pointing at a certain object of reality is the gesture which helps a teacher in face-to-face communication to attract student's attention. We use color, size, motion or their combinations to point at a certain image for a student to understand what exactly is meant when he or she hears the sound pattern of a word, word-from or phrase. Videos are samples of everyday communication and the scenery helps to visualize the meaning of dialogues.

Demand theory can be applied to analyse how a human or animal consumer changes her selection of commodities within a certain budget in response to changes in price of those commodities. This change in consumption assessed over a range of prices is defined as demand elasticity. Previously, income-compensated and income-uncompensated price changes have been investigated using human and animal consumers, as demand theory predicts different elasticities for both conditions. However, in these studies, demand elasticity was only evaluated over the entirety of choices made from a budget. As compensating budgets changes the number of attainable commodities relative to uncompensated conditions, and thus the number of choices, it remained unclear whether budget compensation has a trivial effect on demand elasticity by simply sampling from a different total number of choices or has a direct effect on consumers' sequential choice structure. If the budget context independently changes choices between commodities over and above price effects, this should become apparent when demand elasticity is assessed over choice sets of any reasonable size that are matched in choice opportunities between budget conditions. To gain more detailed insight in the sequential choice dynamics underlying differences in demand elasticity between budget conditions, we trained N=8 rat consumers to spend a daily budget by making a number of nosepokes to obtain two liquid commodities under different price regimes, in sessions with and without budget compensation. We confirmed that demand elasticity for both commodities differed between compensated and uncompensated budget conditions, also when the number of choices considered was matched, and showed that these elasticity differences emerge early in the sessions. These differences in demand elasticity were driven by a higher choice rate and an increased reselection bias for the preferred commodity in compensated compared to uncompensated budget conditions, suggesting a budget context effect on relative ...

The vampire metaphor has been used in numerous papers describing biological interactions between two populations. Such a metaphor translates well to a standard endogenous growth model with public debt. Public debt can be assimilated to a Vamp, whose blood-sucking behavior corresponds to the harmful effect of the debt burden on productive public expenditures. However, the complete destruction of public debt in the long-run is shown to be socially undesirable, because this would imply too much distortionary taxation, with damaging effects on the balanced growth path. By identifying ecological or biological processes with usual national account relationships, this analysis is one step further in the integration of macroeconomics and environmental economics.

In France, in the peri-urban context, urban sprawl dynamics are particularly strong with huge population growth as well as a land crisis. The increase and spreading of built-up areas from the city centre towards the periphery takes place to the detriment of natural and agricultural spaces. The conversion of land with agricultural potential is all the more worrying as it is usually irreversible. The French Ministry of Agriculture therefore needs reliable and repeatable spatial-temporal methods to locate and quantify loss of land at both local and national scales. The main objective of this study was to design a repeatable method to monitor land conversion characterized by artificial sprawl: (i) We used an object-based image analysis to extract artificial areas from satellite images; (ii) We built an artificial patch that consists of aggregating all the peripheral areas that characterize artificial areas. The "artificialized" patch concept is an innovative extension of the urban patch concept, but differs in the nature of its components and in the continuity distance applied; (iii) The diachronic analysis of artificial patch maps enables characterization of artificial sprawl. The method was applied at the scale of four departments (similar to provinces) along the coast of Languedoc-Roussillon, in the South of France, based on two satellite datasets, one acquired in 1996-1997 (Indian Remote Sensing) and the other in 2009 (RapidEye). In the four departments, we measured an increase in artificial areas of from 113,000 ha in 1997 to 133,000 ha in 2009, i.e., an 18% increase in 12 years. The package comes in the form of a 1/15,000 valid cartography, usable at the scale of a commune (the smallest territorial division used for administrative purposes in France) that can be adapted to departmental and regional scales. The method is reproducible in homogenous spatial-temporal terms, so that it could be used periodically to assess changes in land conversion rates in France as a whole.

508 515 6691 1 ; S ; [EN] This paper presents a new algorithm for nonlinear prediction based on independent component analysis mixture modelling (ICAMM). The data are considered from several mutually-exclusive classes which are generated by different ICA models. This strategy allows linear local projections that can be adapted to partial segments of a data set while maintaining generalization (capability for nonlinear modelling) given the mixture of several ICAs. The resulting algorithm is a general purpose technique that could be applied to time series prediction, to recover missing data in images, etc. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulations in comparison with several classical linear and nonlinear methods. © 2011 Springer-Verlag. This work has been supported by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEO/2010/040, and the Spanish Administration and the FEDER Programme of the European Union under grant TEC 2008-02975/TEC. Safont Armero, G.; Salazar Afanador, A.; Vergara Domínguez, L. (2011). Nonlinear prediction based on independent component analysis mixture modelling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 6691(1):508-515. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-21498-1_64 Hyvärinen, A., Karhunen, J., Oja, E.: Independent Component Analysis. John Wiley & Sons, New York (2001) Lee, T.W., Lewicki, M.S., Sejnowski, T.J.: ICA mixture models for unsupervised classification of non-gaussian classes and automatic context switching in blind signal separation. IEEE Trans. on Patt. Analysis and Mach. Intellig. 22(10), 1078–1089 (2000) Malaroiu, S., Kiviluoto, K., Oja, E.: ICA Preprocessing for Time Series Prediction. In: 2nd International Workshop on ICA and BSS (ICA 2000), pp. 453–457 (2000) Pajunen, P.: Extensions of Linear Independent Component Analysis: Neural and Information-Theoretic Methods. Ph.D. Thesis, Helsinki University of Technology (1998) Gorriz, J.M., Puntonet, C.G., Salmeron, G., Lang, E.W.: Time Series Prediction using ICA Algorithms. In: Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International ...

Online article on the paying website http://www.armand-colin.com/revues_article_info.php?idr=30&idnum=307268&idart=3946 The generalisation of municipalities with elected assemblies throughout Syria, including in rural areas, is a way for the Baathist regime to strengthen its clientelism networks. After the Muslim Brotherhood revolt (1979-1982), it was also a question of creating intermediary actors between the population and the state, which could defuse social crises. Municipal councils are made up of the small baathist bourgeoisie, usually through internal promotion within the administration. The choice of municipality presidents by the regime is delicate, as it needs to avoid this function allowing them to acquire a certain degree of independence. ; International audience Municipalities in Baathist Syria : administrative devolution and political domination Widespread municipalities with elected council at all Syrian territory, including rural areas, are a way for the Baathist regime to reinforce political clienteles. After the revolt of the Muslim Brotherhood (1979-1982), it is also to create intermediaries between the people and the State, which could defuse social crises. The municipal councils are constituted by the Baathist small bourgeoisie, mostly through internal promotion within the administration. The choice of the mayor of municipality by the regime is tricky, because it needs to ensure that this function does not allow them to be independent. ; Online article on the paying website http://www.armand-colin.com/revues_article_info.php?idr=30&idnum=307268&idart=3946 The generalisation of municipalities with elected assemblies throughout Syria, including in rural areas, is a way for the Baathist regime to strengthen its clientelism networks. After the Muslim Brotherhood revolt (1979-1982), it was also a question of creating intermediary actors between the population and the state, which could defuse social crises. Municipal councils are made up of the small baathist bourgeoisie, usually ...

The Red River Delta is the hub of all economic activity in Northern Vietnam. The delta alone contributes 18% of total paddy production in the country. This densely populated delta is rapidly changing its agriculture activities to urban. Changing environment is degrading natural resources and greeneries, making water pollution and pushing human health into hazard are major concerns in the delta. In this study, Thai Binh as a representative province in the delta is selected for environmental changes analysis. The main objective of the study is to monitor the environmental changes and help to develop a RS&GIS based diagnostic methodology for pig production at the province. Four LANDSAT satellite images taken in different time period of past two and half decades were used for environmental changes monitoring. ERDAS Imagine and Microsoft Excel software were used for processing the images, analyzing and presenting the results. Four types of spectral signature normalization techniques namely SAVI, BSI, NDWI and UI were applied in each image. The normalized images were further quantified at commune level by computing mean and standard deviation. The mean and standard deviation were evaluated carefully for environmental changes analysis. Natural vegetation and conventional agriculture areas were in decreasing trends but water related activities such as aquatic fanning were observed as increasing. Strong negative correlation was found between vegetation and urban index, which interprets less vegetation mainly due to occupancy of land by growing urban activities. These results will be very useful in developing diagnostic methodology further. The methodology used in this paper is easy to use and good enough for environmental and urban change analysis at provincial level, which may help the environmental planners and decision-makers for preparing sustainable environmental planning in the province.

In this paper, we try to evaluate the change in welfare gains due to trade liberalization when imperfect information is considered. The results of two versions of a CGE model, using GTAP database and representing goods as well as capital flows, are compared. In the first one, a standard world CGE approach is followed. In the second version we included risk aversion, imperfect information and production lag in the agricultural sector. After a brief description of the two versions, changes in welfare, represented by the income of two types of household (middle-low and middle-high) in three regions (Europe, United States, Rest of the World) after agricultural trade liberalisation are presented. Theoretical and political consequences of the results are discussed.

Workplace injuries are common, avoidable, and unacceptable. The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada reveals how employers and governments engage in ineffective injury prevention efforts, intervening only when necessary to maintain the standard legitimacy. Dr. Bob Barnetson sheds light on this faulty system, highlighting the way in which employers create dangerous work environments yet pour billions of dollars into compensation and treatment. Examining this dynamic clarifies the way in which production costs are passed on to workers in the form of workplace injuries.