East Asian Capital Markets Integration - Steps Beyond ABMI

finance, development, institutions

Primary schools as community hubs: a review of the literature

Considerable work has been undertaken over several years to establish primary schools as community hubs in the City of Hume through the Hubs Strategy Group for the Hume Communities for Children Initiative and, more recently, the Supporting Parents Developing Children project. This work has highlighted the need for a primary school community hub toolkit. The purpose of this review is to inform the development of a resource (e.g. a toolkit) that can be used by other schools so that they can also establish themselves as community hubs. An agreed definition of schools as community hubs within the literature has not been reached. Rather, the notion of schools as community hubs seems to be understood in a variety of ways. For the purposes of this review we will draw on the definitions provided by Black (2008) and the Hubs Strategy Group for the Broadmeadows Communities for Children Initiative (2009). Black (2008) describes hubs as involving \u27collaboration between school education systems and the other sectors (community, business, local government and philanthropy) to support the learning and wellbeing of young people, especially those facing disadvantage\u27 (p. 6). These collaborations can range from sharing, co-locating or joint use of physical facilities, through to schools as the centre of a hub or precinct that offers multiple services for the whole community. In the City of Hume, the Hubs Strategy Group have conceptualised a hub as, a welcoming place for families that engages key service providers to work collaboratively. A hub can be a single location or a network of places working together to provide services, such as schools, kindergartens, maternal and child health, and other relevant agencies. Hubs facilitate connections between key services and professionals and represent a paradigm shift in the planning and practice of service provision. Services and their staff are required to rethink existing practice to move to an inclusive practices framework at a professional and community level. &nbsp

Developing Walvis Bay Port into a logistics gateway for southern Africa: Issues, challenges and the potential implications for Namibia’s future

Many developing countries wish to become the ‘gateway’ to a region or part of a continent.One strategy involves encouraging logistics cluster development. These hubs support global supply chains and may enable the economic growth of the host country through the resulting trade, as well as providing direct and indirect employment opportunities during the build and subsequent operation of the hub. Namibia intends to develop the Port of Walvis Bay to be come the preferred gateway to southern Africa and the Southern African Development Community region. This article builds on research on Caribbean cluster potential and Namibian logistics to identify the potential benefits and impact on development, as well as the drawbacks and risks of such a strategy

ECOWAS's infrastructure : a regional perspective

Infrastructure improvements boosted growth in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) by one percentage point per capita per year during 1995-2005, primarily thanks to growth in information and communication technology. Deficient power infrastructure held growth back by 0.1 percent. Raising the region's infrastructure to the level of Mauritius could boost growth by 5 percentage points. Overall, infrastructure in the 15 ECOWAS countries ranks consistently behind southern Africa across many indicators. However, there is parity in access to household services -- water, sanitation, and power. ECOWAS has a well-developed regional road network, though sea corridors and ports need attention. Surface transport is expensive and slow, owing to cartelization, restrictive regulations, and delays. There is no regional rail network. Air transport has improved despite the lack of a strong hub-and-spoke structure. Safety remains a concern. Electrical power, the most expensive and least reliable in Africa, reaches 50 percent of the population but meets just 30 percent of demand. Regional power trading would bring substantial benefits if Guinea could become a hydropower exporter. Prices for critical ICT services are relatively high. Recent panregional initiatives have improved roaming. New projects are underway to provide access and improved services to unconnected countries. Completing and maintaining ECOWAS's infrastructure will require sustained spending of $1.5 billion annually for a decade, with one-third going to power. Although the necessary spending is only 1 percent of regional GDP, some countries'share is between 5 and 25 percent of national GDP. Clearly, external assistance will be needed.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Airports and Air Services,Infrastructure Economics,Transport and Trade Logistics,Roads&Highways

Enhancing Knowledge Management Strategies

{Excerpt} Despite worldwide attention to strategic planning, the notion of strategic practice is surprisingly new. To draw a strategy is relatively easy but to execute it is difficult—strategy is both a macro and a micro phenomenon that depends on synchronization. One should systematically review, evaluate, prioritize, sequence, manage, redirect, and if necessary even cancel strategic initiatives

A ROS2 based communication architecture for control in collaborative and intelligent automation systems

Collaborative robots are becoming part of intelligent automation systems in modern industry. Development and control of such systems differs from traditional automation methods and consequently leads to new challenges. Thankfully, Robot Operating System (ROS) provides a communication platform and a vast variety of tools and utilities that can aid that development. However, it is hard to use ROS in large-scale automation systems due to communication issues in a distributed setup, hence the development of ROS2. In this paper, a ROS2 based communication architecture is presented together with an industrial use-case of a collaborative and intelligent automation system.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, to be published in the proceedings of 29th International Conference on Flexible Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing (FAIM2019), June 201

R&D Subsidization effect and network centralization. Evidence from an agent-based micro-policy simulation

This paper presents an agent-based micro-policy simulation model assessing public R&D policy effect when R&D and non-R&D performing companies are located within a network. We set out by illustrating the behavioural structure and the computational logic of the proposed model; then, we provide a simulation experiment where the pattern of the total level of R&D activated by a fixed amount of public support is analysed as function of companies’ network topology. More specifically, the suggested simulation experiment shows that a larger “hubness” of the network is more likely accompanied with a decreasing median of the aggregated total R&D performance of the system. Since the aggregated firm idiosyncratic R&D (i.e., the part of total R&D independent of spillovers) is slightly increasing, we conclude that positive cross-firm spillover effects - in the presence of a given amount of support - have a sizeable impact within less centralized networks, where fewer hubs emerge. This may question the common wisdom suggesting that larger R&D externality effects should be more likely to arise when few central champions receive a support