6,219 research outputs found

    Constitutions of Value

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    Gathering an interdisciplinary range of cutting-edge scholars, this book addresses legal constitutions of value. Global value production and transnational value practices that rely on exploitation and extraction have left us with toxic commons and a damaged planet. Against this situation, the book examines law’s fundamental role in institutions of value production and valuation. Utilising pathbreaking theoretical approaches, it problematizes mainstream efforts to redeem institutions of value production by recoupling them with progressive values. Aiming beyond radical critique, the book opens up the possibility of imagining and enacting new and different value practices. This wide-ranging and accessible book will appeal to international lawyers, socio-legal scholars, those working at the intersections of law and economy and others, in politics, economics, environmental studies and elsewhere, who are concerned with rethinking our current ideas of what has value, what does not, and whether and how value may be revalued

    Science and Innovations for Food Systems Transformation

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    This Open Access book compiles the findings of the Scientific Group of the United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021 and its research partners. The Scientific Group was an independent group of 28 food systems scientists from all over the world with a mandate from the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. The chapters provide science- and research-based, state-of-the-art, solution-oriented knowledge and evidence to inform the transformation of contemporary food systems in order to achieve more sustainable, equitable and resilient systems

    China-US Competition

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    This open access edited book brings together a closer examination of European and Asian responses to the escalating rivalry between the US and China. As the new Cold War has surfaced as a perceivable reality in the post-COVID era, the topic itself is of great importance to policymakers, academic researchers, and the interested public. Furthermore, this manuscript makes a valuable contribution to an under-studied and increasingly important phenomenon in international relations: the impact of the growing strategic competition between the United States and China on third parties, such as small and middle powers in the two arguably most affected regions of the world: Europe and East Asia. The European side has been under-studied and explicitly comparative work on Europe and East Asia is extremely rare. Given that the manuscript focuses heavily on recent developments—and because many of these developments have been quite dramatic—there are very few publications that cover the same topics

    Ciguatoxins

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    Ciguatoxins (CTXs), which are responsible for Ciguatera fish poisoning (CFP), are liposoluble toxins produced by microalgae of the genera Gambierdiscus and Fukuyoa. This book presents 18 scientific papers that offer new information and scientific evidence on: (i) CTX occurrence in aquatic environments, with an emphasis on edible aquatic organisms; (ii) analysis methods for the determination of CTXs; (iii) advances in research on CTX-producing organisms; (iv) environmental factors involved in the presence of CTXs; and (v) the assessment of public health risks related to the presence of CTXs, as well as risk management and mitigation strategies

    Public sector accounting and financial management in the context of a developing country: an empirical study of the Volta River Authority in Ghana

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    Using the Volta River Authority, a major Ghanaian corporation responsible for the generation and distribution of electricity in Ghana and neighbouring countries, as a case study, this thesis seeks to gain an empirical understanding of the nature and effectiveness of accounting and financial management systems in the context of a public sector organisation in a developing country. The principal rationale of the thesis is an attempt to substantiate and illuminate major issues and concerns about the nature of accounting and financial management systems in public sector organisations of developing countries today. The thesis problematises an overly simple view that developing countries have deficient accounting and financial management systems in their public sector organisations. The methodological, epistemological, and ontological orientations of the thesis are consistent with what Chua (1986) labels the “interpretive” paradigm. A recognition of multiple realities in the functioning of accounting enables an exploration of the claim that developing countries have deficient public sector accounting and financial management systems in a three-dimensional fashion. Firstly, the perceptions of organisational actors are drawn upon to aid evaluation of the basic deficiency claim. The research at this level emphasizes the technical-rational view of accounting as a tool for control over organisational financial resources. Thick descriptions of the systems for managing financial resources (including planning, budgeting, pricing, extent of computerisation, financial reporting and audit practices) of the VRA are gathered from organisational actors together with perceptions of the accounting and financial management systems by external constituencies such as the World Bank and the Authority’s multinational audit firms as a basis for evaluating the deficiency claim in the context of the VRA. Secondly, the thesis draws upon social theory (the view of organisations as negotiated orders) to further interpret the deficiency claim by bringing into the analysis the socio-historical circumstances of the organisation and how they help to provide insights into how the systems for financial resource management arise at the VRA. At this level of analysis, the thesis provides an interpretive construction of the technical procedures for financial resource management against the backdrop of the institutional setting within which the Authority conducts its operations. To this end, the influence of external constituencies such as the World Bank and the Volta Aluminium Company (VRA’s major customer) on the Authority’s accounting and financial management systems are explored. Thirdly, the thesis evaluates the effectiveness of the Authority’s accounting and financial management systems with reference to the extent to which they assist in the accomplishment of the principal rationale for establishing the organisation (i.e. socio-economic development of Ghana). At the third level of analysis, the Brundtland Commission’s notion of sustainable development is drawn upon as an alternative to the dominant economistic notion of development to provide a benchmark for the analysis. Employing the Commission’s perspective, the thesis attempts to understand the extent to which VRA’s systems of financial resource management reflect the notion of people-centredness and environmental awareness (i.e. the two major strands of the Commission’s notion of sustainable development). Multiple methods, including interviews, observation, document analysis and survey are employed to collect empirical evidence for this study. The major conclusions of the study are that from a technical-rational perspective, the claim that developing countries generally have deficient public sector accounting and financial management systems could not be established in the context of the VRA. This conclusion derived from the overwhelming positive perception of the Authority’s financial resource management systems by organisational actors, international funding agencies such as the World Bank, and the Authority’s multinational accounting/audit firms. Indeed, the claims about the lack of published annual accounts, inadequate information for managerial decision making, poor budgetary practices, and lack of independent auditors in developing country public sector contexts could not be supported in the case of the VRA. However, by going behind the technical procedures (façade) to uncover the forces which explain how the systems arise, the thesis argued that the deficiency claim might be supported in another sense; a sense which appreciates and problematises the socio-historical and institutional setting which are strongly responsible not only for the nature of the Authority’s current systems but how they have changed over time. In particular, the thesis argues that the systems of financial resource management are constructed partly to legitimise outcomes of prior negotiations between the Authority and its external constituencies. The constraints presented by these prior agreements and contracts render some of the Authority’s systems of financial resource management inconsistent with explanations grounded in conventional accounting and financial management logic. The thesis also finds, however, that some of the inadequacies observed with VRA’s systems of financial resource management reflected general limitations of conventional accounting with its over-emphasis on the entity concept rather than a peculiar organisational or even developing country problem. By employing an interpretive methodological approach to gain an understanding of the nature and effectiveness of accounting in a third world public sector organisational context, this thesis illuminates hitherto relatively unappreciated issues, including furthering an appreciation of accounting as a socio-political artefact in this context, and thus contributes to the critical and interpretive accounting literature

    Operatic Pasticcios in 18th-Century Europe

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    In Early Modern times, techniques of assembling, compiling and arranging pre-existing material were part of the established working methods in many arts. In the world of 18th-century opera, such practices ensured that operas could become a commercial success because the substitution or compilation of arias fitting the singer's abilities proved the best recipe for fulfilling the expectations of audiences. Known as »pasticcios« since the 18th-century, these operas have long been considered inferior patchwork. The volume collects essays that reconsider the pasticcio, contextualize it, define its preconditions, look at its material aspects and uncover its aesthetical principles

    Land Use and Land Cover Mapping in a Changing World

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    It is increasingly being recognized that land use and land cover changes driven by anthropogenic pressures are impacting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and their services, human society, and human livelihoods and well-being. This Special Issue contains 12 original papers covering various issues related to land use and land use changes in various parts of the world (see references), with the purpose of providing a forum to exchange ideas and progress in related areas. Research topics include land use targets, dynamic modelling and mapping using satellite images, pressures from energy production, deforestation, impacts on ecosystem services, aboveground biomass evaluation, and investigations on libraries of legends and classification systems

    The Failure of Market Efficiency

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    Recent years have witnessed the near total triumph of market efficiency as a regulatory goal. Policymakers regularly proclaim their devotion to ensuring efficient capital markets. Courts use market efficiency as a guiding light for crafting legal doctrine. And scholars have explored in great depth the mechanisms of market efficiency and the role of law in promoting it. There is strong evidence that, at least on some metrics, our capital markets are indeed more efficient than they have ever been. But the pursuit of efficiency has come at a cost. By focusing our attention narrowly on economic efficiency concerns—such as competition, friction, and transaction costs—we have lost sight of other, deeper values within our economic system, including wider conceptions of duty, fairness, and morality. And while regulators sometimes pay lip service to these values, they often treat them as merely a subset of efficiency: the best way to treat investors fairly, to promote equality, and to prevent immoral, exploitative behavior, in this view, is simply to create an efficient market. We have seen the consequences of this emphasis play out in spectacular fashion in the last decade. New market structures and technologies—from special purpose acquisition companies to social-media oriented trading apps to cryptocurrencies—have emerged to eliminate barriers to trade and compete with institutional incumbents. These strategies may well lead to more efficient markets insomuch as they facilitate access to capital, but they also have the side effect of placing unsophisticated individuals into complex contractual arrangements with sophisticated market actors. The result is an “efficient” market, but one with steep moral and social costs. This Article examines the limits of market efficiency as a regulatory goal and suggests a set of structural and substantive reforms aimed at better balancing efficiency with the other goals of markets. It concludes that regulators, courts, and scholars alike need to adopt a more comprehensive understanding of the proper ends of market regulation, one that emphasizes the purpose and spirit of finance over the false promise of efficiency

    Investor sentiment and statistical moments of the return distribution in the German stock market. A three stage empirical analysis.

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    This dissertation contributes to an increasing body of literature through a holistic perspective in research and model development to investigate the relationships between investor sentiment and the lower- and higher-order statistics of the return distribution in the German stock market utilizing the market-wide CDAX stock index as an exemplary sample. Since empirical studies on investor sentiment are conducted mainly with USmarket-based data, comparatively few academic contributions are made to the German investor sentiment literature. Moreover, previous findings for other countries cannot necessarily be generalized to Germany, especially as Germany appears to be mainly influenced by global trends and investor sentiments owing to its high dependence on foreign trade. Consequently, the empirical evidence for Germany in this research domain, which includes both cross-sectional and longitudinal perspectives, is sparse. As various approaches exist to measure and assess the links between investor sentiment and capital market movements, a proprietarily defined investor sentiment categorization system is established, in which each investor sentiment indicator is assigned. This dissertation's underlying investor sentiment sample consists of all three categories of the dedicated categorization system for investor sentiment indicators and covers up to 20 years to 2021. With regard to the thesis structure, a comprehensive overview of the literature and current research on market efficiency and investor sentiment is initially elaborated before the applied methodology and the evaluation results are analyzed. Of particular note is the three-stage empirical analysis conducted in this thesis: First, a principal component analysis-based investor sentiment risk factor is established to improve model performance in traditional cross-sectional multifactor models as measured by the corrected coefficient of determination and additional metrics. Second, the application of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) artificial recurrent neural network architecture models to account for time-varying investor sentiment risk premia explaining and predicting the return distribution's lower- and higherorder statistics leads to notable findings. A performant model for the German stock market results from fitting a deep neural network fed with 73 sentiment indicators without dimension reduction and performing out-of-sample tests. Third, an insightful exploratory Twitter study of social investor sentiment in the German stock market in times of COVID-19-induced market turmoil is elaborated. The study investigates the impact of incorporating unstructured data into investor sentiment analysis to improve discriminatory power and predictive accuracy and employs elaborate processing techniques. The exploratory study is based on a unique hand-curated dataset of almost two million tweets on the German stock market, exclusively collected for this study. In this context, the importance of investor sentiment in social media for volatility in the German stock market is investigated and highlighted. As a result, all three empirical studies address many vital matters, although new challenges worthy of investigation are as well raised and discussed in the final part of the thesis.Administración y Dirección de Empresa
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