Energy issues in the developing world

In 1986 and 1987 the lower oil prices called into question many of the fundamental assumptions that were the stock in trade of energy experts during the previous ten years. This document is a collection of papers representing responses to concerns prepared by current and former World Bank staff. Although these papers raise a variety of different concerns, a common theme that runs throughout the paper is the need to continue the pursuit of efficiency goals in the energy sector. The developing world still needs large amounts of capital to meet its ever-expanding energy requirements. These capital requirements will be a significant part of most countries'total investment plan. Given the problems of debt and public revenues, the report concludes that the pursuit of efficiency is just as important under lower fuel prices as it is under rising fuel prices.Power&Energy Conversion,Urban Environment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Energy Demand,Energy and Environment

Doing Business in Argentina

[Excerpt] Foreign investors enjoy the same rights and undertake the same duties as domestic investors when investing in financial or productive activities. Generally, Argentine Law does not set any restrictions or prohibitions on foreign investments. They are no longer subject to prior government approval beyond those applicable to any domestic or foreign investor in each particular activity. The Ley de Inversiones Extranjeras (Foreign Investment Law) (hereinafter referred to as the “FIL”) (Law No. 21,382/76) was amended several times for the purpose of achieving a liberalization and deregulation of said investments. It was recently amended by Law No. 23,697 and Executive Order No. 1,853/93. The FIL sets forth that foreign investors shall be treated as local investors, provided they invest in productive activities. (i.e., industrial, mining, agricultural, commercial, service or financial activities, or any other activities related to the production or exchange of goods or services). Investments may be made in: (i) foreign currency; (ii) capital assets, (iii) profits from other investments; (iii) repatriable capital resulting from other investments made in the country; (iv) capitalization of foreign credits; (vi) certain intangible assets; (vi) other forms acceptable to the foreign investment authorities or contemplated by special legislation

Between a rock and a hard place? No consideration from the Supreme Court in Rock Advertising Ltd v MWB Business Exchange Centres Ltd

Discusses Rock Advertising Ltd v MWB Business Exchange Centres Ltd (SC) on whether a no oral modification clause invalidated oral variation of a licence agreement, and whether an agreement to pay less or pay later was underpinned by consideration. Reviews possible approaches to contractual modifications, including extending the practical benefit concept to part payments or invoking economic duress. Considers the case's commercial implications

Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations

The globalization of Chinese energy companies

This repository item contains a report from the Boston University Global Economic Governance Initiative. The Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) is a research program of the Center for Finance, Law & Policy, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. It was founded in 2008 to advance policy-relevant knowledge about governance for financial stability, human development, and the environment

Influence of developer factors on code quality: a data study

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Automatic source-code inspection tools help to assess, monitor and improve code quality. Since these tools only examine the software project’s codebase, they overlook other possible factors that may impact code quality and the assessment of the technical debt (TD). Our initial hypothesis is that human factors associated with the software developers, like coding expertise, communication skills, and experience in the project have some measurable impact on the code quality. In this exploratory study, we test this hypothesis on two large open source repositories, using TD as a code quality metric and the data that may be inferred from the version control systems. The preliminary results of our statistical analysis suggest that the level of participation of the developers and their experience in the project have a positive correlation with the amount of TD that they introduce. On the contrary, communication skills have barely any impact on TD.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Effects of Budget 2011 on Activity in the UK Continental Shelf

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