Global outlook on sustainable consumption and production policies: taking action together

Provides a non-exhaustive review of policies and initiatives that are promoting the shift towards sustainable consumption and production (SCP) patterns. This report identifies examples of effective policies and initiatives being implemented worldwide. It reviews 56 case studies ranging from global multilateral agreements and regional strategies to specific policies and initiatives and shows progress achieved in promoting SCP, highlighting best practices and offering recommendations to scale up and replicate these important efforts worldwide.   The Global Outlook on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) Policies was developed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) with the financial support of the European Commissio

Manager’s and citizen’s perspective of positive and negative risks for small probabilities

So far „risk‟ has been mostly defined as the expected value of a loss, mathematically PL, being P the probability of an adverse event and L the loss incurred as a consequence of the event. The so called risk matrix is based on this definition. Also for favorable events one usually refers to the expected gain PG, being G the gain incurred as a consequence of the positive event. These “measures” are generally violated in practice. The case of insurances (on the side of losses, negative risk) and the case of lotteries (on the side of gains, positive risk) are the most obvious. In these cases a single person is available to pay a higher price than that stated by the mathematical expected value, according to (more or less theoretically justified) measures. The higher the risk, the higher the unfair accepted price. The definition of risk as expected value is justified in a long term “manager‟s” perspective, in which it is conceivable to distribute the effects of an adverse event on a large number of subjects or a large number of recurrences. In other words, this definition is mostly justified on frequentist terms. Moreover, according to this definition, in two extreme situations (high-probability/low-consequence and low-probability/high-consequence), the estimated risk is low. This logic is against the principles of sustainability and continuous improvement, which should impose instead both a continuous search for lower probabilities of adverse events (higher and higher reliability) and a continuous search for lower impact of adverse events (in accordance with the fail-safe principle). In this work a different definition of risk is proposed, which stems from the idea of safeguard: (1Risk)=(1P)(1L). According to this definition, the risk levels can be considered low only when both the probability of the adverse event and the loss are small. Such perspective, in which the calculation of safeguard is privileged to the calculation of risk, would possibly avoid exposing the Society to catastrophic consequences, sometimes due to wrong or oversimplified use of probabilistic models. Therefore, it can be seen as the citizen‟s perspective to the definition of risk

‘Technology as a trusted companion for accountants and business professionals in the business unusual environment’

Abstract: A conceptual model of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and service quality for Islamic bank service users is developed in this paper. The model is expected to bring about a better understanding of customer perceptions relating to issues of social responsibility and its impact on service quality as it pertains to Islamic banking in South Africa. The conceptual model is developed by synthesising relevant literature and theories pertaining to this study. This conceptual model is proposed to be tested in due course of time by using customer perceptions derived from a survey instrument to assess the relationship between aspects of social responsibility and service quality at the Islamic bank. The proposed model has implications towards enhancing the CSR and service quality offered by the Islamic bank according to their customer expectations

E-Government adoption and implementation in Oman: a government perspective

This thesis reports a description and analysis of the factors that influenced the process of adoption and implementation of the e-Government initiative in Oman over the period 2000 - 2013. The research provides an explanation of why government organisations in Oman developed and then adopted e-Government projects, and how that affected their success as an example of what might also be the case in many developing countries. Data was collected using a theoretical framework developed from the extant literature, and analysed using Institutional Theory. The findings suggest that the Omani Government was motivated to adopt e-Government as a service to the people of Oman because of a perceived need to conform to world standards and improving the performance of the public sector. The intention in Oman was also to adopt e-Government services to improve efficiency in relations with various government departments as a means to attract foreign direct investment and create a knowledge-based industry. The study shows that while it was considered important for Oman to adopt e-Government, the progress of implementation was slow with an observable mismatch between the rhetoric of the implementation strategy and the actual outcomes. This mismatch, the study argues, is associated with interrelated challenges within the institutional infrastructure which lacked integration, with an ineffective management style lacking effective project control and the requisite IS/IT knowledge, and with the technology infrastructure which lacked reliable high-speed network coverage. The study concludes that although a strong will for the adoption and implementation of e-Government existed, coupled with sufficient financial resources, the necessary human and technological resources to overcome implementation obstacles did not exist. The study shows that the implementation was episodic: the implementation of e-Government in Oman was launched in 2003, discovered to be stalled in 2011, and was restarted in 2012. As the focus of the study was on the supply-side of e-Government, an important theoretical contribution of this study is the development of a framework of e-Government adoption motivators. Using the concept of institutional decoupling, this framework offers a new understanding of the observed high failure rate of e-Government implementation in many developing countries. In terms of practical contributions, important lessons can be learnt particularly with regard to synchronising motivating factors with institutional, technological and organisational prerequisites, and expected outcomes. In other words, governments should establish a clear and close link between means and ends prior to implementing e-Government initiatives by engaging relevant stakeholders in the design process to avoid mismatch between project design and reality

A Statistical Approach to the Alignment of fMRI Data

Multi-subject functional Magnetic Resonance Image studies are critical. The anatomical and functional structure varies across subjects, so the image alignment is necessary. We define a probabilistic model to describe functional alignment. Imposing a prior distribution, as the matrix Fisher Von Mises distribution, of the orthogonal transformation parameter, the anatomical information is embedded in the estimation of the parameters, i.e., penalizing the combination of spatially distant voxels. Real applications show an improvement in the classification and interpretability of the results compared to various functional alignment methods

A comparison of the CAR and DAGAR spatial random effects models with an application to diabetics rate estimation in Belgium

When hierarchically modelling an epidemiological phenomenon on a finite collection of sites in space, one must always take a latent spatial effect into account in order to capture the correlation structure that links the phenomenon to the territory. In this work, we compare two autoregressive spatial models that can be used for this purpose: the classical CAR model and the more recent DAGAR model. Differently from the former, the latter has a desirable property: its ρ parameter can be naturally interpreted as the average neighbor pair correlation and, in addition, this parameter can be directly estimated when the effect is modelled using a DAGAR rather than a CAR structure. As an application, we model the diabetics rate in Belgium in 2014 and show the adequacy of these models in predicting the response variable when no covariates are available