Addressing Food Loss and Waste : A Global Problem with Local Solutions

The report focuses on the role that food loss and waste (FLW) could play in reducing the environmental footprint of food systems while attempting to meet the caloric and nutrient needs of a population expected to increase by 3 billion people in the next 30 years. The performance of the global food system over the last century has been extraordinary. From a global population of 1.6 billion people in 1900 to nearly 8 billion in 2020, the agri-food sector has risen to the challenge of providing global caloric sufficiency, mainly by increasing yields of a few principal staple crops. However, this path is no longer sustainable

Democracy in a Pandemic: Participation in Response to Crisis

Covid-19 has highlighted limitations in our democratic politics – but also lessons for how to deepen our democracy and more effectively respond to future crises. In the face of an emergency, the working assumption all too often is that only a centralised, top-down response is possible. This book exposes the weakness of this assumption, making the case for deeper participation and deliberation in times of crises. During the pandemic, mutual aid and self-help groups have realised unmet needs. And forward-thinking organisations have shown that listening to and working with diverse social groups leads to more inclusive outcomes. Participation and deliberation are not just possible in an emergency. They are valuable, perhaps even indispensable. This book draws together a diverse range of voices of activists, practitioners, policy makers, researchers and writers. Together they make visible the critical role played by participation and deliberation during the pandemic and make the case for enhanced engagement during and beyond emergency contexts. Another, more democratic world can be realised in the face of a crisis. The contributors to this book offer us meaningful insights into what this could look like

Learning from our place in the global economy

A study undertaken for Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership into Greater Lincolnshire's economy and its relationship with similar regions in the UK and worldwide

Global Risks 2014, Ninth Edition.

The Global Risks 2014 report highlights how global risks are not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments. If global risks are not effectively addressed, their social, economic and political fallouts could be far-reaching, as exemplified by the continuing impacts of the financial crisis of 2007-2008

Adolescent Girls Initiative-Kenya: Health and Life Skills Curriculum, Kibera

The Adolescent Girls Initiative–Kenya builds the social, health, and economic assets of adolescent girls in urban slums and Northeastern Kenya. This collection of learning sessions was designed to increase adolescent girls’ knowledge of reproductive health and sexuality; reinforce and promote attitudes and behaviors that will lead to a better quality of life; and instill skills among adolescents to enable them to overcome the challenges of growing up and becoming responsible adults including communication skills, decision-making, assertiveness, setting goals and resisting peer pressure. The sessions were developed to be delivered without a lot of resources or materials, with limited time available for training. The guide contains step-by-step descriptions of the learning activities as well as background information

Contradictions in development: growth and crisis in Indian economy

Since the pro-market reforms were launched, the Indian economy has grown from 5% in the 1980s to around 10% in 2011 before slowing down dramatically to less than half that rate in recent years. From launching of reforms until 2011, it did manifest some vivid and impressive signs of India moving towards high growth and increase in living conditions of its population. The purpose of this article is to access the likely effects of the reform measures on economic growth and poverty. Because the mainstream approach suggests that the reforms can be expected to increase economic growth and incomes. It seems that India’s growth has been led by the services sector, which includes real estates, IT, telecommunications, and banking, which contributes nearly 50% to the GDP in 2012. Manufacturing, which experienced remarkable growth and transformation in the East Asian economies, had rather grown much slower. The agriculture sector, which still employs nearly two-third of the India’s workforce, remains stagnant. The study suggests that education and health have been neglected in India and this will compromise productivity and growth

The importance of strategic financial leadership in the UK public sector in a time of financial austerity

Given the severity of financial pressures on public authorities, this report is concerned with how finance managers in public services are coping with the demands placed on them and how they can demonstrate improved value by providing more effective strategic financial leadership. It considers how they are applying managerial approaches and solutions to the challenges of austerity and the role that the public sector finance function can play in this process

Gender education and equality in a global context: conceptual frameworks and policy perspectives

What does gender equality mean for young men and women in poor communities across different countries? The Millennium Development Goals aim to achieve basic education for all by 2015. But can such global agendas address national and local gender inequalities and will they empower women through education? New research on gender education makes an important contribution to this global debate. Shailaja Fennell and Madeleine Arnot have brought together leading international scholars and a new generation of researchers working within development studies, gender studies and education. The result is a thought-provoking book that offers an opportunity to engage critically with existing and emergent conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches

Does Investment in Advertising Boost Economic Performance? Firm-Level Evidence of Ecuadorian Manufacturing

This paper examines how the firm´s advertising investments are related to different measures of economic and productivity performance during 2007 – 2017 in Ecuadorian manufacturing. Particularly, this study analyzes if firms that have advertising investments have better economic and productivity performance compare to non-advertising investment firms. In addition, this looks for evidence on how the different advertising strategies may affect productivity and gross revenue in both advertising and non-advertising firms. For this, this paper estimates the total factor productivity (TFP) at firm-level using a semi-parametric approach to reduce the simultaneous and endogeneity problems in the selection of inputs. The estimation results show that manufacturing firms which invest in advertising have an Advertising Premia on economic and productivity indicators, this premia is higher on economic outcomes. Also, the findings are that continuing advertising investment strategy firms have higher TFP, labor productivity, and gross revenue than exiting advertising investment firms, suggesting self-selection in the exit side of the market but not in the entry side of the market. Finally, the study finds that after firms entering to invest in advertising, firms experience an improvement on TFP, labor productivity, and gross revenue growth, which are in favor of learning by advertising hypothesis

China?s Development Strategy and Energy Security: Growth, Distribution and Regional Cooperation

This paper analyses both global and regional approaches to solving problems of energy security and ecological imbalance by addressing specifically the problems of China?s energy security. China?s growing energy dependence has become a major concern for both economic and national security policymakers in that country. The ambitious goal of modernization of the economy along the lines of the other newly industrialized economies (NIEs) of Asia has succeeded only too well, and it is difficult to reorient economic priorities. If examined rigorously, such an economic strategic assumption can be seen to entail the goal of creating further technological capabilities. In particular, China seems to be firmly committed to the creation of a largely self-sustaining innovation system as part of a knowledge-based economy of the future. Such innovation systems, called positive feedback loop innovation systems or POLIS have been created by advanced countries, and NIEs such as South Korea and Taiwan are proceeding to create these as well. But this will add to its energy burden and further dependence on the US as the power which controls the key sea lanes. Only a strategic reorientation to building a self-sustaining POLIS and appropriate regional cooperation institutions can lead to the way out of the current dilemma for China. Fortunately, such a model of POLIS which is distributionally and ecologically sensitive can be built for China and applied strategically to lead towards a sustainable development trajectory. ...China, development strategy, energy, environment, POLIS, innovation system, regional cooperation