Assessing Opportunities for Livelihood Enhancement and Diversification in Coastal Fishing Communities of Southern India

"The United Nations Team for Tsunami Recovery Support (UNTRS) based in Chennai,India, is facilitating the process of tsunami recovery in the region through specific interventions in strategic areas. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of United Nations (FAO) as a part of the UNTRS team aims to set clear directions to ensure sustainable livelihoods for fishers. It has a pro-poor focus. With the fisheries sector suffering from both over-capitalization and resource depletion, the livelihoods of poor fishers and fisherfolk communities have been badly hit, and the tsunami has aggravated their misery. While relief measures have helped, what's essential for the long term is to improve livelihood opportunities. They need to be enhanced and diversified. Many development interventions have been attempted. But what's needed is a viable people-centric approach that taps the strengths of coastal fisheries and draws on them. Hence this study on ""Assessing opportunities for livelihood enhancement and diversification in coastal fishing communities of southern India."" carried out by Integrated Coastal Management, Kakinada. The study covers tsunami-affected areas in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The study has analysed a number of inherent strategies of the fishers to enhance and diversify livelihoods, both past and present. It has come out with a planning framework for livelihoods enhancement and diversification. Stakeholders in fisheries can make use of the framework, validate its usefulness, and decide and further develop appropriate tool box. They may then spell out the support and co-operation necessary from other stakeholders.

Reliable Provisioning of Spot Instances for Compute-intensive Applications

Cloud computing providers are now offering their unused resources for leasing in the spot market, which has been considered the first step towards a full-fledged market economy for computational resources. Spot instances are virtual machines (VMs) available at lower prices than their standard on-demand counterparts. These VMs will run for as long as the current price is lower than the maximum bid price users are willing to pay per hour. Spot instances have been increasingly used for executing compute-intensive applications. In spite of an apparent economical advantage, due to an intermittent nature of biddable resources, application execution times may be prolonged or they may not finish at all. This paper proposes a resource allocation strategy that addresses the problem of running compute-intensive jobs on a pool of intermittent virtual machines, while also aiming to run applications in a fast and economical way. To mitigate potential unavailability periods, a multifaceted fault-aware resource provisioning policy is proposed. Our solution employs price and runtime estimation mechanisms, as well as three fault tolerance techniques, namely checkpointing, task duplication and migration. We evaluate our strategies using trace-driven simulations, which take as input real price variation traces, as well as an application trace from the Parallel Workload Archive. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of executing applications on spot instances, respecting QoS constraints, despite occasional failures.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

From television to multi-platform: less from more or more for less?

This article examines economic aspects of convergence and of multi-platform expansion in the media sector. Focusing on television broadcasters in the UK, it analyses the recent migration of conventional media towards multi-platform strategies and asks whether digitization is making content delivery more resource–intensive than before or whether it is facilitating greater efficiency. Findings suggest that adaptation to a multi-platform outlook on the part of conventional media requires investment in staffing and re-versioning of content. Funding this, especially in a period of economic downturn, has encouraged a more selective approach towards content, with concomitant implications for diversity. Notwithstanding generally low commercial returns from online activities so far, the potential economic advantages to be had from multi-platform are significant. The experience of UK broadcasters suggests a well-executed ‘360-degree’ approach to commissioning and distribution will increase the value that can be realized from any given universe of content, partly because of extended opportunities for consumption of that content, but also because modes of engagement in a digital multi-platform context allow for an improved audience experience and for better signalling of audience preferences back to suppliers

Analytical Appendix 2: The Challenges of Managing Small Scale Fisheries in West Africa

This is the Final Technical Report to the DFID regarding The Management of Conflict in Tropical Fisheries project R7334. Ghana's small-scale marine fisheries face considerably less problems and challenges than its neighbours. There is no foreign industrial fleet competing with canoes for resources and the economy, although weakened, is comparatively stronger than other West African fishing nations. However, like many other coastal fishing nations, Ghana is still trying to find a successful means of marrying two different systems. The traditional management system, which, for generations has sustained small-scale fishing communities along the coast, is under threat from the modern management system that sees fish as a commodity for trading by entrepreneurs, rather than the basis for an entire way of life. Economic difficulties that stem from Ghana's commitment to neo-liberal economic reforms have further complicated the situation. State priorities and policies with regard to poverty alleviation in coastal communities are dictated largely by outside interests rather than internal needs. As the economy and economic policy has focused on the individual and the market, so the role of community, and indeed traditional systems has come under threat. This battle between the two systems is being played out in the arena of small-scale fisheries management. Increased competition, decreased enforcement and a failure to support traditional systems is putting increasing pressure of small-scale fishing communities. Although recent initiatives by the World Bank to reverse this trend are having some impact, the future for traditional fisheries management of small-scale fisheries in Ghana looks bleak

The End of National Models in Employment Relations?

The erosion of a number of national systems of employment relations, and the evidence from large scale workplace surveys has brought attention to the considerable diversity of employment systems within major economies. This essay applies the theory of evolutionary games to explain the diffusion of different employment systems within national economies, and how they interact with established sectoral and national level institutions. This also helps to explain potential tipping points in their expansion and retreat. Evidence to support the argument is taken from the British and French workplace employment relations surveys and the European Working Conditions Survey.Labor-Management Relations, Labor Contracting

Migration costs and observational returns to migration in the developing world

Recent studies find that observational returns to rural-urban migration are near zero in three developing countries. We revisit this result using panel tracking surveys from six countries, finding higher returns on average. We then interpret these returns in a multi-region Roy model with heterogeneity in migration costs. In the model, the observational return to migration confounds the urban premium and the individual benefits of migrants, and is not directly informative about the welfare gain from lowering migration costs. Patterns of regional heterogeneity in returns, and a comparison of experimental to observational returns, are consistent with the model’s predictions

No. 08: International Migration and Urban Food Security in South African Cities

The drivers of food insecurity in rapidly growing urban areas of the Global South are receiving more research and policy attention, but the precise connections between urbanization, urban food security and migration are still largely unexplored. In particular, the levels and causes of food insecurity amongst new migrants to the city have received little consideration. This is in marked contrast to the literature on the food security experience of new immigrants from the South in European and North American cities. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on urban food security in the South by focusing on the case of Zimbabwean migrants in South African cities and discussing the results of a household survey of migrants in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The survey showed extremely high levels of food insecurity and low dietary diversity amongst migrants, which are attributable to the difficulties of accessing regular incomes and the other demands on household income. Most migrants are also members of multi-spatial households and have obligations to support household members in Zimbabwe. Although migration may improve the food security of the multi-spatial household as a whole, it is also a factor in explaining the high levels of insecurity by migrants in the city

Impact of globalization on the human resource management function in developing countries: a case study of Kenya public corporations

KCA Journal of Business Management > Vol 1, No 1 (2008)This study seeks to establish if the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Kenya has been associated with higher accounting quality for listed companies. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), in its objectives and preamble, supposes that the beneficial effects from IFRS adoption include transparency, accounting quality and reduced cost of capital. Based on these assumptions, this study applied accounting quality measures; earnings management, timely loss recognition and value relevance to find out whether the adoption of IFRS has led to improvements in accounting quality in companies listed in Kenya. The methodology is based on prior literature definition of metrics of accounting quality mainly earnings management, timely loss recognition and value relevance. The study differs from the previous ones by overcoming difficulties in controlling for confounding factors faced in previous studies which could have led to less reliable results. Three out of the eight metrics indicated that quality had marginally improved while five indicated that it had marginally declined. These mixed outcomes are very much in line with findings in other studies and the study contributes to the debate by explaining why accounting quality outcomes are still not consistent with IFRS promises in spite of improved test conditions.This study seeks to establish if the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Kenya has been associated with higher accounting quality for listed companies. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), in its objectives and preamble, supposes that the beneficial effects from IFRS adoption include transparency, accounting quality and reduced cost of capital. Based on these assumptions, this study applied accounting quality measures; earnings management, timely loss recognition and value relevance to find out whether the adoption of IFRS has led to improvements in accounting quality in companies listed in Kenya. The methodology is based on prior literature definition of metrics of accounting quality mainly earnings management, timely loss recognition and value relevance. The study differs from the previous ones by overcoming difficulties in controlling for confounding factors faced in previous studies which could have led to less reliable results. Three out of the eight metrics indicated that quality had marginally improved while five indicated that it had marginally declined. These mixed outcomes are very much in line with findings in other studies and the study contributes to the debate by explaining why accounting quality outcomes are still not consistent with IFRS promises in spite of improved test conditions

Impact of Globalization on the Human Resource Management Function in Developing Countries: A Case Study of Kenya Public Corporations

Globalization has a major impact on the management of human resources in developing countries including Kenya. It has led to homogenization and convergence in organization strategies, structures and processes as well as in consumer choice. With accelerating globalization, organizations have had to change and new trends have set in even in the management of human resources. Globalization has led to changes in organization design and organization structures are leaner thus improving efficiency but having a negative impact on staff numbers which have had to be reduced. This means employees have been retrenched in many sectors like telecommunications, the Kenya Railways and the Kenya public service sectors in order for those organizations to gain competitive advantage. Reward management systems have changed and even the human resource planning strategy is to have a leaner staff in the core areas and to hire part time workers in a bid to reduce costs and to enable the business to run profitably and efficiently. The non-core jobs have been outsourced which has led to an increase in independent contractors to service industries. However, the homogeneity that results from globalization has had a major effect in developing countries because of brain drain. Globalization can therefore be said to have had a phenomenal impact on a developing economy like Kenya that is both positive and negative as explored in the paper