Governance of Environment-Enhancing Technical change - past experiences and suggestions for improvement

There is much talk about environmental policies being faulty. Past policies are being criticisedfor failing to achieve environmental goals (the environmentalist complaint), for being overlyexpensive (the industrialist complaint) and for failing to encourage innovation and dynamicefficiency (the complaint of economists dealing with innovation). This paper looks at theinnovation and technology adoption effects of past environmental policies. It finds indeed fewexamples of environmental policies that stimulated innovation. The common technologyresponse is the use of expensive end-of-pipe solutions and incremental process changesoffering limited environmental gains. This begs the question: why did the policies fail topromote more radical innovation and dynamic efficiency? One explanation—well-recognisedin the economic literature—is the capture of government policies by special interests. Thispaper offers a second explanation—based on innovation and technology adoption studies—which says that in order to have a decisive and socially beneficial influence policy instrumentsmust be fine-tuned to the circumstances in which sociotechnical change processes occur and tipthe balance. Within this alternative view, the starting point of government interventions is thecapabilities, interests, interdependencies and games of social actors around an environmentalproblem instead of the set of environmental policy instruments for achieving an environmentalgoal. The paper sees a need for government authorities to be explicitly concerned with technicalchange (rather than implicitly through a change in the economic frame conditions) and to beconcerned with institutional arrangements beyond the choice of policy instruments, and act as achange agent. This requires different roles for policy makers: that of a sponsor, planner,regulator, matchmaker, alignment actor and ‘creative game regulator’. The paper offers twoperspectives on environmental policy: an instrument one and a modulation one. The latter isespecially important for promoting innovation and bringing about radical change, somethingwhich is very difficult with traditional regulatory instruments. Instruments for promotingenvironment-enhancing technical change are appraised and suggestions are offered for thepurposes for which different policy instruments may be used in differing economic contexts.environmental economics ;

Reverse Logistics in Micro Businesses : An Exploratory Study

There has been growth in managing supply chain processes for enhancing both economic and environmental benefits. Consequently, new dimensions in the supply chain have been added, with one of them being reverse logistics. Reverse logistics deals with the backward flow of goods which help firms to recover and reinstate discarded products, helping firms to realise their economic and environmental initiatives. Reverse logistics has now become a matter of strategic importance, helping to bring sustainable competitive advantage to the firm. This study recognises the inclination of the current research in reverse logistics to focus on larger firms. Hence, this research explores how smaller businesses, specifically micro enterprises, pursue reverse logistics to understand the related capabilities they have, and also to understand the way they address/perceive the related costs; this has the potential to contribute towards the development of the reverse logistics concept in micro firms. The two theoretical lenses of Resource Based View and Transaction Cost Economics are employed, both of which have the potential to explain the capabilities and the cost situation, respectively. An exploratory case study methodology is employed, and research is made on six micro retail firms. A semi-structured interview is used as the primary data collection method, supported by participant observation. The findings indicate that micro businesses may not possess all the relevant capabilities but pursue reverse logistics in their own unique way which, however, needs further development and refinement. The findings also suggest that micro businesses have developed the capabilities for reverse logistics, they however are not aware of all the benefits they can achieve through this capability. The findings also show that various cost facets prevail in the reverse logistics cost situation of the studied businesses. Not having a clear understanding of the various cost situation has again prohibited these businesses from making an optimal cost decision. This thesis realises the need to study the related capabilities and costs in the micro business context. As being small and resource constrained in nature, a phenomenon like reverse logistics – which is resource intense – can be a challenging aspect to pursue for these businesses. The study contributes to knowledge in both the reverse logistics and micro business research fields, by recognising key gaps within the related combined literature, critiquing current theory, and developing new and unique theoretical perspectives

Guidelines and Methods for Conducting Porperty Transfer Site Histories

HWRIC Project 90-077NTIS PB91-10508

GOOD GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC POLICY IN INDIA

Good Governance is required to ensure that the public policies have their desired effect. In the recent past, issues of governance have received serious attention from the researchers, policy makers and international development community. Today, ‘governance’ not only occupies centre stage in the development discourse but is also considered as a crucial element to be incorporated in the development strategy. The major focus of the study is on Good Governance and public policy process in India. In this context the present research paper discusses the basic concepts and elements of Good Governance in the first part of the article. The need of the Good Governance in the effective implementation of public policies has been elaborately discussed and the nature of public policy has been mentioned in the next part Various stages and constraints that are involved in public policy process and need for an effective policy has been discussed in detail in subsequent parts.&nbsp

Wellness, Health, and Salvation : About the Religious Dimension of Contemporary Body-Mindedness

Alluding to the enormous investments in wellness, health, and anti-aging by affluent US society today the article focuses on the anthropological and religious implications of this phenomenon by stating that the pursuit of such caring for the body has superseded the quest for salvation. The first section provides a historical background analysis of how the contemporary semi-religious bodymindedness came about, while the second part analyses wellness, health, and salvation from a phenomenological point of view. It shows that any body image which does not address human frailty turns into something utterly inhumane while a religiously informed anthropology, in contrast, not only accepts frailty, dying, and death as realities of life but situates these experiences within a broader frame of reference and meaning thereby setting people free to leave behind at the proper time anxieties and worries about body-upkeep and to embrace life in the face of death

Efficient Aggregated Deliveries with Strong Guarantees in an Event-based Distributed System

A popular approach to designing large scale distributed systems is to follow an event-based approach. In an event-based approach, a set of software components interact by producing and consuming events. The event-based model allows for the decoupling of software components, allowing distributed systems to scale to a large number of components. Event correlation allows for higher order reasoning of events by constructing complex events from single, consumable events. In many cases, event correlation applications rely on centralized setups or broker overlay networks. In the case of centralized setups, the guarantees for complex event delivery are stronger, however, centralized setups create performance bottlenecks and single points of failure. With broker overlays, the performance and fault tolerance are improved but at the cost of weaker guarantees

Datapedia: a Yellow Brick Roadmap

This note lays out a roadmap to Datapedia: the goal is to share numbers with the same power and ease that the Wiki has delivered for documents. This would transform the quality and usability of economic data. The goal is a system which, by analogy with Wikipedia can establish a world resource for reliable data. The paper discusses a process by which data providers and users can evolve a new set os systems for exchanging, describing and interacting with data to bring this about. The proposal centres on the metadata – additional descriptive data – that is associated with numeric data, and suggests how, in two cases – World GDP and Creative Industry Employment – data could be mapped in such a way that viable Datawiki platforms can be built. The proposal also allows existing communities of users to start reshaping the way they exchange and handle data, to permit, and also to improve existing standards for collaborative use of data. The first step would be Datawiki: an opensource system for recording revisions, changes and sources of data, allowing users to compare different revisions and versions of data with each other. It would be a set of protocols, and simple web tools, to help data researchers pool, compare, scrutinise, and revise datasets from multiple sources. The first step towards Datawiki is Wikidata: rethinking the way that data itself is transmitted between people that collaborate on it a platform-independent standard for exchanging specifically numeric data. I show that the ubiquitous standard for exchanging data – the spreadsheet – is not up to the task of serving as a platform for Datawiki, and assess how alternatives can be developed.Creative Industries; Economic statistics; Datapedia; Wikipedia; Wikidata, wikipedia, creative industries, macroeconomics