Growth, Structural Dynamics and EU Integration in the Context of the Lisbon Agenda

The long term dynamics of growth and structural change in open economies are discussed where integration aspects are included. Taking a closer look at basic economic dynamics, namely developments in terms of sustainable growth and international interdependencies, the theoretical section emphasizes international links on the demand side as well as (within a theoretical innovation) on the supply side. The latter basically means the production function where a broader range of inputs, including technology effects and aspects of foreign direct investment are considered. For the first time, the distinction between efficient international specialization and golden efficient international specialization is discussed here. With respect to the EU, the Lisbon Agenda is discussed and various policy conclusions are drawn. The Euro area has considerable strong points in terms of a high potential for sustained growth; at the same time, one cannot overlook that aging, and partly weak prudential supervision represent serious challenges. The EU has achieved some increase in the growth of productivity and output due to its modernization efforts in the field of telecommunications and information as well as communication technology. Major challenges for policymakers are identified, including the field of green ICT, which could become a common field of cooperation between the EU and China.Economic Growth, Structural Change, Economic Integration, Lisbon Agenda

Review of the environmental and organisational implications of cloud computing: final report.

Cloud computing – where elastic computing resources are delivered over the Internet by external service providers – is generating significant interest within HE and FE. In the cloud computing business model, organisations or individuals contract with a cloud computing service provider on a pay-per-use basis to access data centres, application software or web services from any location. This provides an elasticity of provision which the customer can scale up or down to meet demand. This form of utility computing potentially opens up a new paradigm in the provision of IT to support administrative and educational functions within HE and FE. Further, the economies of scale and increasingly energy efficient data centre technologies which underpin cloud services means that cloud solutions may also have a positive impact on carbon footprints. In response to the growing interest in cloud computing within UK HE and FE, JISC commissioned the University of Strathclyde to undertake a Review of the Environmental and Organisational Implications of Cloud Computing in Higher and Further Education [19]

Gendering the European Digital Agenda: The Challenge of Gender Mainstreaming TwentyYears after the Beijing World Conference on Women

open1The goals set out in the 1995 Platform for Action of the Beijing World Conference on Women—to achieve gender equality in and through the media—interrogate today’s digital policies: To what extent have internationally agreed-upon norms of gender equality and gender mainstreaming been recognized and implemented? To what extent has the knowledge produced by feminist scholarship informed media policy developments? What kind of new knowledge, and analytical frameworks, may contribute to unmask gender-unequal power relations in contemporary media environments? The article addresses these questions with a focus on European discourses and institutional practices for the Digital Agenda.Special issue edited by Padovani and Shade on 'Gendering Global Media Policy: Critical Perspectives On Digital Agendas’openClaudia PadovaniPadovani, Claudi

Meeting their potential: the role of education and technology in overcoming disadvantage and disaffection in young people

This report is a review of literature, policy and reported practice, exploring the potential of technology to mitigate disaffection and disadvantage in education and raise attainment of those young people who are under-achieving in school or other educational settings

New issues in NGA regulation: is there a scope for geographic regulation?

The adoption of geographically differentiated remedies may be a new regulatory instrument to foster NGAN investment. We present economic insights and review recent cases on the implementation of such regulatory interventio

INTEGRATING DIGITAL ECONOMY AND GREEN ECONOMY: OPPORTUNITIES FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Digital economy and green economy are the most important subjects on the environmental policy agenda in the last years. The first section of the paper examine the current state of thinking on the environmental impact of digital economy, especially of ICT, while the second section looks at what is known as the green economy and the most recent initiatives in this area. Both are paradigms that have become proeminent in the separate worlds of ITC policy and sustainable development. The integration between them leads to new paradigms and creates opportunities for sustainable development, also for economic recovery in the context of recent crises.green economy, digital economy, sustainable development, green knowledge society.

Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview

The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network—the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio

Challenges and complexities in application of LCA approaches in the case of ICT for a sustainable future

In this work, three of many ICT-specific challenges of LCA are discussed. First, the inconsistency versus uncertainty is reviewed with regard to the meta-technological nature of ICT. As an example, the semiconductor technologies are used to highlight the complexities especially with respect to energy and water consumption. The need for specific representations and metric to separately assess products and technologies is discussed. It is highlighted that applying product-oriented approaches would result in abandoning or disfavoring of new technologies that could otherwise help toward a better world. Second, several believed-untouchable hot spots are highlighted to emphasize on their importance and footprint. The list includes, but not limited to, i) User Computer-Interfaces (UCIs), especially screens and displays, ii) Network-Computer Interlaces (NCIs), such as electronic and optical ports, and iii) electricity power interfaces. In addition, considering cross-regional social and economic impacts, and also taking into account the marketing nature of the need for many ICT's product and services in both forms of hardware and software, the complexity of End of Life (EoL) stage of ICT products, technologies, and services is explored. Finally, the impact of smart management and intelligence, and in general software, in ICT solutions and products is highlighted. In particular, it is observed that, even using the same technology, the significance of software could be highly variable depending on the level of intelligence and awareness deployed. With examples from an interconnected network of data centers managed using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technology and smart cooling systems, it is shown that the unadjusted assessments could be highly uncertain, and even inconsistent, in calculating the management component's significance on the ICT impacts.Comment: 10 pages. Preprint/Accepted of a paper submitted to the ICT4S Conferenc