Trade related business climate and manufacturing export performance in Africa: A firm-level analysis

Africa continues to be marginalised in world trade of manufactured goods, despite reductions in tariffs and non-tariff barriers. This paper investigates whether high business and trade costs associated with Africa’s trade-related infrastructure, trade institutions and the regulatory environment have contributed towards its mediocre trade performance. The paper focuses on eight African countries - Egypt, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Morocco, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia - using the World Bank’s investment climate surveys. The results of the study suggest that the business climate, as measured using principal components for micro-level supply constraints, macroeconomic conditions and the legal environment, is closely associated with firm-level export propensity. Improvements in domestic policy may therefore have a considerable positive impact on manufacturing export performance in Africa

A Tale of Evaluation and Reporting in UK Smart Cities

Global trends towards urbanisation are associated with wide-ranging challenges and opportunities for cities. Smart technologies create new opportunities for a range of smart city development and regeneration programmes designed to address the environmental, economic and social challenges concentrated in cities. Whilst smart city programmes have received much publicity, there has been much less discussion about evaluation of smart city programmes and the measurement of their outcomes for cities. Existing evaluation approaches have been criticised as non-standard and inadequate, focusing more on implementation processes and investment metrics than on the impacts of smart city programmes on strategic city outcomes and progress. To examine this, the SmartDframe project conducted research on city approaches to the evaluation of smart city projects and programmes, and reporting of impacts on city outcomes. This included the ‘smarter’ UK cities of Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough. City reports and interviews with representative local government authorities informed the case study analysis. The report provides a series of smart city case studies that exemplify contemporary city practices, offering a timely, insightful contribution to city discourse about best practice approaches to evaluation and reporting of complex smart city projects and programmes

Ride quality and international standard ISO 2631 (Guide for the evaluation of human exposure to whole-body vibration)

The evolution of the standard, which is aimed at promoting research and production of more data, and providing some design guidance, is outlined and its contents summarized. Some of the assumptions and information on which it is based are analyzed. Its application to vehicle ride quality is considered in the context of the safety, efficiency and comfort of crew and passengers. The importance of establishing the precise criteria against which vibration limits are required is underlined, particularly the difficulties of first defining comfort and then postulating appropriate levels. Some current and future work related to improving the standard is outlined and additional suggestions offered

Corporate Codes of Conduct: Is Common Environmental Content Feasible?

In a developing country context, a policy to promote adoption of common environmental content for corporate codes of conduct (COCs) aspires to meaningful results on two fronts. First, adherence to COC provisions should offer economic benefits that exceed the costs of compliance; i.e., companies must receive a price premium, market expansion, efficiency gains, subsidized technical assistance, or some combination of these benefits in return for meeting the requirements. Second, compliance should produce significant improvements in environmental outcomes; i.e., the code must impose real requirements, and monitoring and enforcement must offer sufficient incentives to prevent evasion. With those goals in mind, we explore options for establishing common environmental content in voluntary COCs. Because the benefits of a COC rest on its ability to signal information, we ground our analysis in a review of experiences with a broad range of voluntary (and involuntary) information-based programs: not only existing corporate COCs, but also the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) family of standards, ecolabels, and information disclosure programs. We find some important tradeoffs between harmonization, applicability, feasibility, and efficacy.corporate social responsibility, codes of conduct, environmental management

Condensation risk: comparison of steady-state and transient methods

Accurate assessment of both surface and interstitial condensation risk is important not only to reduce the damaging effect of moisture within the structure of buildings, but also to provide a healthy environment free from mould growth. The current British Standard (BS EN ISO 13788: 2002) contains an assessment procedure based on the assumption of a steady-state heat flow through the building envelope, neglecting the transient nature of the problem. This paper compares and evaluates numerical results of the condensation risk calculation under both steady-state and transient conditions using the existing numerical codes. Significant differences are apparent between the predictions of the simple (steady-state) and complex (transient) methods for all construction details modelled

How may quality asurance systems in food chains include environmental aspects based on life cycle methodology?

The number of Quality Assurance Systems (QAS) for food products is increasing and so is the topics they cover, from traditional intrinsic product characteristics such as percent meat in slaughtered pigs and protein content in milk to food safety issues such as zoonoses and pesticide residues and in some cases aspects of animal welfare. This development is linked to de-mands for risk controlling systems such as HACCP and traceability systems that would allow food safety problems to be traced to a small number of producers or farms. The large retail companies (supermarkets) are an important driving force for this development because of their efforts to build consumer trust in food products and loyalty to the companies own brands. Envi-ronmental characteristics of food products and information on their production methods are be-coming part of some QAS but not mostly in the form of qualitative information e.g. certification that the farmers have used Good Agricultural Practice (GAP). The paper gives examples of this and then discuss this development in relation to LCA based environmental appraisal of food products. The development of quantitative (tools for) environmental appraisal of agriculture and food production is becoming more productoriented improving the possibilities of assessing the regional and global impacts of food production chains and consumption. But these systems building on LCA does not so far seem to be linked with the development of QAS for food. The paper finally discuss the possibilities for linking the food safety related traceability systems and gives an example of on-going work to establish LCA based QAS in a meat processing system

El punto que le falta al CAFTA

Aunque la motivación del Tratado de Libre Comercio entre Estados Unidos y Centroamérica (CAFTA) con Estados Unidos es generar beneficios para los exportadores e importadores, es probable que los elevados costos portuarios en la región incidan negativamente en esos beneficios. Los costos elevados, junto con las inquietudes sobre la infraestructura, seguridad, eficiencia y productividad, pueden hacer disminuir los beneficios potenciales del CAFTA. Por lo tanto, Centroamérica debe efectuar reformas jurídicas que permitan la privatización de puertos, dado que el sector privado posee los recursos necesarios para invertir en esos puertos y hacerlos competitivos.