SAFE-ICE: research, innovation and business support for a low-carbon economy

The SAFE-ICE Cluster unites 20 partners from the coastal regions adjoining the Channel and the North Sea, of France, England, Belgium and the Netherlands. The mix of partners highlights the group’s triple helix approach to exploring key issues from multiple perspectives with universities, public bodies and private organisations all being represented. The SAFE-ICE Cluster work is set within a backdrop of various European policies and strategies and an evolving market

Agri-Food Supply Chain Development by Various Chain Leaders: Case Studies in Japan and New Concept of High Nature Value

In this paper, firstly several different agri-food chain leaders are to be considered, such as aged and/or women farmers, supermarkets, consumers' cooperatives, and big general trade company. Secondly the high nature value of food is to be dealt with the matters Japanese consumers are concerned. The diligent working attitude of aged persons and women has led to the production in small amount, in fresh, with low pesticide use and in many varieties. Producers sell products in different modalities such as renting a space from cooperatives, consignment to cooperatives at direct sales shop, and buying-out of all products by agricultural cooperatives. Moreover some farmers shipment groups in city carry out the direct selling to supermarkets in contract. Japan's consumer cooperatives conduct two pillar businesses of "Sanchoku-Teikei" (direct transaction of food and coop-PB products under contract with producers) and operating supermarket-level stores. The co-ops have developed joint buying system in which members form small group units of 5-10 households called "Han" through which they place advance orders for various kinds of goods. The big general trading company ("Sogo Shosha") has the power for developing new businesses through closer ties with local government to assists local areas in taking new approaches to agriculture to achieve regional redevelopment. Japanese consumers seek agricultural products and their processed food with high quality, and are incessantly renewing the concept and contents regarding the high value. A movement linking consumers to agriculturalists has started, in which the concept is defined as the nature management agriculture and the products produced under it are recognized as "high nature value".Agribusiness, Consumer/Household Economics,

Export and Import Price Indices

Export and import price indices are essential for assessing the impact of international trade on the domestic economy. Among their most important uses are analyzing developments in the trade balance, measuring foreign prices' contribution to domestic inflation, and deflating nominal values of exports and imports for estimating the volume of gross domestic product. This paper discusses economic concepts for trade price indices at some length. We note the need for reasonably frequent chaining in view of the fluctuation in the conditioning variables of trade price indices. We characterize the effect of the residency orientation of the index on the substitution biases of the commonly used Laspeyres and Paasche formulas, and superlative formulas, which greatly attenuate these biases. Finally, we consider the data sources and methods used to compile them. Copyright 2004, International Monetary Fund

Procurement and supplier diversity in the 2012 Olympics

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Regulation and UK Retailing Productivity: Evidence from Micro Data

We use UK micro data to explore whether planning regulation reduced UK retailing productivity growth between 1997 and 2003. We document a shift to smaller shops, particularly within supermarket chains, following a regulatory change in 1996 which increased the costs of opening large stores. This might have caused a slowdown in productivity growth if firms (a) lose scale advantages, by moving to smaller stores and (b) lose scope advantages if existing organisational knowledge appropriate to larger stores is not perfectly substitutable with the organisational capital required to run smaller stores. Our micro data shows a relation, controlling for fixed effects, between chain-level TFP for multi-store chains and various measures of the size of the stores within the chain. Our results suggest the fall in within-chain shop sizes was associated with a lowering of chain TFP by about 0.4% pa, about 40% of the post-1995 slowdown in UK retail TFP growth. The foregone productivity works out at about £80,000 per small chain supermarket store.productivity, retail, regulation

E-business impacts for urban freight: results from an Australian study

E-Business is expected to dramatically change the way business is conducted internationally, nationally, within states and at the local area level. Moreover, these changes are very likely to happen well within the planning time frames required for provision of transport infrastructure and services. E-business is defined as including e-commerce, either between Businesses to Business (B2B) or Business to Customers (B2C), and the adoption of electronic technology within businesses. This paper presents some results from a study commissioned by the Australian National Transport Secretariat (NTS) to assist Australian business and government pro-actively address the transport issues arising from e-business. The resulting working papers will be used to establish a research framework for identifying policy and planning levers to maximize benefits to Australia from national and global e-business activity. The study sought to investigate three principal questions on e-business impacts: how will the transport task change; what will be affected; and how can the transport system respond? Current literature suggests that growth in e-business stems from the combined existence of market demand, suitable enabling technology, and skills and familiarity in management/users/ industry/government. The results of the study suggest that e-business will have implications for urban freight including higher levels of demand for goods and services, increased requirements for logistics distribution, changes in location preferences and improved transport network performance

Making the most of the G8+5 Climate Change Process: Accelerating Structural Change and Technology Diffusion on a Global Scale. CEPS Task Force Reports, 5 June 2008

Under the chairmanship of Gunnar Still, Senior Vice President and Head of Environment Division at ThyssenKrupp, CEPS organized a Task Force to explore possible initiatives within the context of the G8+5 dialogue on tackling climate change. This report identifies a number of concrete measures that could reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, while at the same time stimulating structural change and technology development and diffusion. It calls for supporting action-based approaches, which are essential to achieve the necessary reductions in GHG emissions, inform the post-2012 negotiations and address the most urgent issues such as surging energy demand and the need for clean energy technologies in emerging economies. An action-based approach can be regarded as a way of integrating targets and timetables, as they are agreed, with consistent and comparable policies and measures. With a view to a long-term climate strategy, this report attempts to present a portfolio of actions that can be implemented and accelerated on a global scale – especially in the G8+5 countries and the EU, and could become a basis on which developed and developing countries can cooperate

Aquaculture, fisheries, poverty and food security

Fisheries and aquaculture play important roles in providing food and income in many developing countries, either as a stand-alone activity or in association with crop agriculture and livestock rearing. The aim of this paper is to identify how these contributions of fisheries and aquaculture to poverty reduction and food security can be enhanced while also addressing the need for a sustainability transition in over-exploited and over-capitalized capture fisheries, and for improved environmental performance and distributive justice in a rapidly growing aquaculture sector. The focus of the paper is on the poverty and food security concerns of developing countries, with an emphasis on the least developed. The emphasis is on food security rather than poverty reduction policies and strategies, although the two are of course related. The food security agenda is very much to the fore at present; fish prices rose along with other food prices in 2007-8 and as fish provide important nutritional benefits to the poor, food security has become a primary concern for sector policy

Invisible Market: Energy and Agricultural Technologies for Women's Economic Advancement

This research explores what it takes for technology initiatives, specifically in the energy and agricultural sectors, to reach and economically benefit women in developing countries through market-based strategies that have the potential for achieving scale and financial sustainability. It builds on ICRW's landmark paper, Bridging the Gender Divide: How Technology Can Advance Women Economically, which made the case for how technologies can create pathways for strengthening women's economic opportunities. Through a field-level investigation and interviews with experts, the authors examine how women's use of technology and their involvement in the development and distribution of a technology can not only advance women economically, but also can benefit enterprise-based technology initiatives by expanding their markets and helping them generate greater financial returns