G-20 Reforms of the International Monetary System: An Evaluation

At the recent Cannes G-20 summit, the international monetary system (IMS) reform agenda, along with a number of other important issues, was hijacked by the European crisis. Nevertheless, the G-20 countries and various international institutions conducted an intensive process of review and discussion of the IMS via conferences, working groups, and reports. A year ago French President Sarkozy and other French government officials set the agenda for IMS reform to include five elements: surveillance of the global economy and financial system, the international lender-of-last-resort mechanisms (global financial safety nets), the management of global capital flows, reserve assets and reserve currencies, and IMS governance. Little progress was made on most of these topics. On surveillance there was only one surprise in the form of commitments by a few countries to allow their automatic stabilizers to operate in the current slowdown; on the lender-of-last-resort issues, there will only be marginal steps forward; and on the management of capital flows, the progress that has been achieved over the past several years has been loosely codified, which is a substantive achievement. Overall, the G-20 summit at Cannes resulted in some useful mutual education but not much in terms of concrete accomplishments.

The Millennium Development Goals And Reproductive Health: Moving Beyond the UN

One of a series of reports for the foundation on women's rights and poverty reductio

DC Teens: Progress & Promise

This report summarizes the challenging journey taken by so many to significantly reduce teen pregnancy in Washington, DC over the past 20+ years. The Summit Fund of Washington is just one of many organizations that has contributed to our community's unprecedented progress to date. We hope to convey the power of setting a time-bound measurable goal to drive progress, as well as the importance of delivering the highest quality programmatic interventions possible to our city's teens. Further progress is absolutely possible, but not inevitable. We hope to influence a redoubling of the efforts to continue progress to reduce teen pregnancy in Washington, DC

Trade and the Americas

CRS ReportCRSTradeAmericas12Sept03.pdf: 220 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Air-snow exchange investigations at Summit, Greenland: An overview

The Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) and Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) deep drilling programs at Summit, Greenland included support (both logistical and scientific) of extensive investigation of atmospheric transport and air-snow exchange processes of gases and particles relevant to the interpretation of the ice-core records. Much of the sampling for the air-snow exchange investigations was conducted at a unique solar-powered camp 30 km southwest of the GISP2 drill camp (even further from the GRIP camp) and was characterized by a high degree of international collaboration and cooperation. The wide range of expertise and analytical capabilities of the 20-plus investigators participating in these studies has provided important insight into the meteorological, physical, and chemical processes which interact to determine the composition of snow and firn at Summit. Evolving understanding of this system will allow improved reconstruction of the composition of the atmosphere over Greenland in the past from the detailed Summit ice-core records. This paper provides an overview of air-snow exchange investigations at Summit, including their development through the course of the drilling programs (1989–1993), significant findings related to both air-snow exchange issues and the present state of the Arctic free troposphere, as well as the major outstanding questions which are being addressed in ongoing experiments at Summit

Integrated environmental modeling : the new DREAM for Geological Surveys

This paper summarises the British Geological Survey (BGS) plans for the development of integrated environmental models to address the grand challenges that face society. It describes a vision for an Environmental Modelling Platform (BGS 2009), that will allow integrated models to be built and describes case studies of emerging models in the United Kingdom. After an initial scoping phase (Giles et al. 2010), this activity is now being carried out under the DREAM (Data and Research for Environmental Applications and Modelling) cross-cutting project

Banking on Cooperation: The Role of the G-20 in Improving the International Financial Architecture

Piling is expensive but often necessary when building large structures, for example bridges. Some pile types, such as steel core piles, are very costly and it is therefore of great interest to keep the number piles in a pile group to a minimum. This thesis deals with optimization of pile groups with respect to placement, batter and angle of rotation in order to minimize the number of piles. A program has been developed, where two optimization algorithms named Genetic Algorithm and Direct Search, and four objective functions have been used. These have been tested and compared to find the most suitable for pile group optimization. Three real cases, two bridge supports and one culvert, have been studied, using the program.  It has been difficult to draw any clear conclusions since the results have been ambiguous. This is probably because only three cases have been tested and the results are very problemdependent.The outcome depends, for example, on the starting guess and settings for the optimization. However, the results show that the Genetic Algorithm is somewhat more robust in its ability to remove piles than Direct Search and is therefore to prefer in pile group optimization