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This article outlines a set of methodological, theoretical, and other issues relating to the conduct of good outcome studies. The article begins by considering the contribution of evidence-based medicine to the methodology of outcome research. The lessons which can be applied in outcome studies in nonmedical settings are described. The article then examines the role of causal pathways between interventions and outcomes and especially the importance of delineating them in advance of undertaking investigations. The development of designs based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with fully articulated causal pathways is described. Ways of supplementing RCTs with methods to highlight elements in the causal pathway in outcome studies are indicated. The importance of adhering to best practice in reporting and analysis is also noted.

Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe's specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI – including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions – has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

Infrastructural development is characteristically multifaceted, but studies tend to be focused on limited context which has shed more light on structural issues at the cost of increased ambiguity as regards institutional factors that influence infrastructural development. Combining institutional theory and institutional analysis and development framework (IADF), this research studies how institutional factors influence infrastructural development. In particular, it explores three questions: what are the main differences that exist in policymaking processes? How do stakeholders interact in infrastructural development in Nigeria? How can institutions enhance infrastructural development? The findings show that institutional arrangements and legitimacy pressures are the main reasons for organizational passivity which produce under-performing infrastructures. Initially, mimetic pressures influenced infrastructural development practices as companies imitated other company's structures that were perceived to be beneficial to attain certain goals. However, coercive pressures by government and normative pressures wielded through professional network of actors appear to be more potent institutional instruments for reducing unresponsiveness. We concluded that favourable institutional pressures support infrastructural development practices, which indicates the need for more structured decision-making process based on collective participation of relevant stakeholders.

Rural access infrastructural development projects in post 2001 Afghanistan represent a vital component of the economic recovery of the state. This thesis examines four of the most prevalent of these projects implemented by the World Bank, and in doing so substantiates the significant challenges faced by both the international development aid community and domestic implementing agencies. These challenges not only impact the efficiency and outcomes of these rural access projects, but are also significantly observable across a broader set of infrastructural development and rehabilitation programs throughout Afghanistan. While these issues are certainly exacerbated by the austere operational climate of the region itself, referring to ongoing conflict, government capacity and legitimacy limitations, and economic instability, they should more accurately be understood as symptomatic of greater structural contradictions within contemporary "development" paradigms. The future success or failure of Afghanistan's economic recovery will depend on the international aid community's ability to aggressively reform its aid goals and success indicators, facilitate domestic institutional agency in establishing and realizing development goals, and definitively separating aid goals and operations from military ones.

This article analyses two important issues pertaining to Indian economy. One is the numerical target under rule-based fiscal correction mechanism being followed by Indian government and second is on infrastructural investment requirements. India lags behind many countries in the world including some of the developing ones both in terms of stock and quality of infrastructure. There exist huge investment requirements in order to foster the economic growth and efficiently utilise the available resources. In the recent years, there is a significant contribution from the private sector towards infrastructural investment. However, private participation is concentrated in few sectors which are commercially viable and hence in the remaining key areas, like rural infrastructure, government is the sole investor. In India, excess spending by the central government is restricted under Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, 2003 and for the state governments under state-specific Fiscal Responsibility Legislations. The Act limits the fiscal deficit (FD) to 3 per cent of GDP for central government and 3 per cent of GSDP for state governments. FD is capped due to its adverse impact on macroeconomy. However, the available literature shows mixed evidence. Most importantly, revenue deficit (RD) component covers major portion of FD and only a meagre amount is left for capital investments. This article debates whether 3 per cent cap on FD is advisable in all the circumstances and also analyses whether infrastructural investment gap can be filled with available fiscal-deficit amount. This article finds that there is an infrastructural investment gap of '5,165.20 billion in the 12th Plan period and concludes that it makes no harm even though FD crosses 3 per cent cap given that amount in entirety is spent on capital formation.

The present paper proposes a way of reading telecommunications systems, software protocols and specifications in terms of collective imaginings of mobility. It reports on an ethnographic study of a large software system designed to control telecommunications infrastructure in rural Australia. Drawing on a notion of infrastructural work as involving an imagining of mobility, the paper develops two lines of inquiry. First, it asks how practices of imagining help us to understand the embodied practices and bewildering variety of artefacts circling around the development of a large distributed software system. These practices include the heavy use of citation, the interweaving of different tropes, metaphors and figures through the system, and the role of figures such as `system' and `process' in organizing work. Second, the present paper suggests that intensely invested issues in software production such as configurability, scalability, flexibility and distributing process imply that infrastructural design and implementation have a complicated relation to place. Via recent theoretical critiques of ethnography, it asks how notions such as locality and place can encompass mutually contextualizing movements and imaginings of movement.

International audience ; Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe's specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI-including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions-has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

International audience ; Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe's specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI-including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions-has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

In view of these issues, this paper proposes an optimal approach to design and regulation of commodity contingent instruments for private enterprises. The design of these instruments is likely to significantly alleviate the capital constraints in emerging markets, particularly in Eurasia. A commodity contingent security usually consists of a combination of a traditional debt security (a bond) and several units of a financial instrument, the payoff of which is in some well-defined way linked to the price of a traded commodity. Although commodity contingent securitization can, in theory, be applied at both the national and the private level, the proposals in this paper are directed mainly toward private sector funding. Government plays an important and complementary role in determining the success of these instruments. Government should provide tax subsidies to external sources of private sector capital, design a regulatory framework that preserves the integrity and professional reputation of these infant markets, and, more generally, foster a social consensus for entrepreneurship and growth.