Correcting the World's Greatest Market Failure: Climate Change and the Multilateral Development Banks

Outlines efforts by multilaterals to link economic development and environmental policies. Discusses the need for more progress in realizing low carbon development in the developing world, the political and financial challenges, and recommendations

Recurrent expenditure requirements of capital projects - estimation for budget purposes

This paper examines the issue of estimating recurrent costs associated with capital projects in the investment budget. It is intended to help overcome budget planning problems which give rise to the chronic under-funding of maintenance and operating costs typical in some developing economies. The objective is to provide guidance in the preparation of budget submissions so that information on the future recurrent cost implications of today's capital spending is quantified in a way that supports the authorities in making project selection and budget decisions. The paper is in three parts. The first part outlines some concepts and definitions involved in measuring recurrent costs. The second part provides stylized examples of individual projects. And the third part presents some rough empirical guidance drawn from a sample of actual investment projects.ICT Policy and Strategies,Business Environment,Banks&Banking Reform,Decentralization,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Business Environment,Business in Development,Economic Theory&Research

Business Process Redesign in the Perioperative Process: A Case Perspective for Digital Transformation

This case study investigates business process redesign within the perioperative process as a method to achieve digital transformation. Specific perioperative sub-processes are targeted for re-design and digitalization, which yield improvement. Based on a 184-month longitudinal study of a large 1,157 registered-bed academic medical center, the observed effects are viewed through a lens of information technology (IT) impact on core capabilities and core strategy to yield a digital transformation framework that supports patient-centric improvement across perioperative sub-processes. This research identifies existing limitations, potential capabilities, and subsequent contextual understanding to minimize perioperative process complexity, target opportunity for improvement, and ultimately yield improved capabilities. Dynamic technological activities of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis applied to specific perioperative patient-centric data collected within integrated hospital information systems yield the organizational resource for process management and control. Conclusions include theoretical and practical implications as well as study limitations

Requirements for the conceptual design of advanced underground coal extraction systems

Conceptual design requirements are presented for underground coal mining systems having substantially improved performance in the areas of production cost and miner safety. Mandatory performance levels are also set for miner health, environmental impact, and coal recovery. In addition to mandatory design goals and constraints, a number of desirable system characteristics are identified which must be assessed in terms of their impact on production cost and their compatibility with other system elements. Although developed for the flat lying, moderately thick seams of Central Appalachia, these requirements are designed to be easily adaptable to other coals

A Revised Publication Model for ECML PKDD

ECML PKDD is the main European conference on machine learning and data mining. Since its foundation it implemented the publication model common in computer science: there was one conference deadline; conference submissions were reviewed by a program committee; papers were accepted with a low acceptance rate. Proceedings were published in several Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial (LNAI) volumes, while selected papers were invited to special issues of the Machine Learning and Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journals. In recent years, this model has however come under stress. Problems include: reviews are of highly variable quality; the purpose of bringing the community together is lost; reviewing workloads are high; the information content of conferences and journals decreases; there is confusion among scientists in interdisciplinary contexts. In this paper, we present a new publication model, which will be adopted for the ECML PKDD 2013 conference, and aims to solve some of the problems of the traditional model. The key feature of this model is the creation of a journal track, which is open to submissions all year long and allows for revision cycles.Comment: 13 page

Topical Issues in Environmental Finance

The purposes of this paper are to illustrate some practical examples of environmental finance situations; demonstrate that all of these situations could benefit from environmental economics and its insights; and, suggest some specific topics in environmental finance that might be of interest to researchers.Environmental finance