Pioneering multilateralism: the sugar agreements 1864 – 1914

This paper examines the negotiations which led to the Brussels Convention of 1902 for the abolition of subsidies on sugar exports, showing how the practice of multilateral commodity trade negotiations was an outcome of this experience. Encompassing diverse fiscal systems, these negotiations began a process of pluri-national harmonization of taxation criteria and regulations, which forced changes to national statutes. They also initiated new forms of economic negotiations and coexistence. When war broke out in 1914, undoing agreements and inaugurating a new era of strict government control of economic activities, multilateralism had been established as a conceptual alternative and a practical possibility.SUGAR TRADE; MULTILATERAL AGREEMENTS; TARIFFS; EXPORT BOUNTIES

Using a bibliometric approach to support research policy decisions: The case of the Flemish BOF-key.

In this paper, we describe the development of a methodology and an instrument to support a major research funding allocation decision by the Flemish government. Over the last decade, and in parallel with the decentralization and the devolution of the Belgian federal policy authority towards the various regions and communities in the country, science and technology policy have become a major component of regional policy making. In the Flemish region, there has been an increasing focus on basing the funding allocation decisions that originate from this policy decentralization on 'objective, quantifiable and repeatable' decision parameters. One of the data sources and indicator bases that have received ample attention in this evolution is the use of bibliometric data and indicators. This has now led to the creation of a dedicated research and policy support staff, called 'Steunpunt O&O Statistieken,' and the first time application of bibliometric data and methods to support a major inter-university funding allocation decision. In this paper, we analyze this evolution. We show how bibliometric data have for the first time been used to allocate 93 million Euro of public research money between 6 Flemish universities for the fiscal year 2003, based on Web-of-Science SCI data provided to 'Steunpunt O&O Statistieken' via a license agreement with Thomson-ISI. We also discuss the limitations of the current approach that was based on inter-university publication and citation counts. We provide insights into future adaptations that might make it more representative of the total research activity at the universities involved (e.g. by including data for the humanities) and of its visibility (e.g. by including impact measures). Finally, based on our current experience and interactions with the universities involved, we speculate on the future of the specific bibliometric approach that has now been adopted. More specifically, we hypothesize that the allocation method now developed and under further improvement will become more criticized if it turns out that it (1) also starts influencing intra-university research allocation decisions and, as a consequence (2) introduces adverse publication and citation behaviors at the universities involved.Policy; Decisions; Decision;

Optimisation of traffic accident statistics

The OPTIMA project or the “Optimisation of traffic accident statistics”, initiated by the DWTC1, is part of a strategy to obtain the necessary means to establish a traffic safety policy. A policy on traffic safety should be a reliable and representative reflection of safety issues. This makes traffic accident data an essential element in making policy decisions on traffic safety. In this sense, the availability of reliable and representative statistical material is the basis upon which traffic safety policy must be founded. The project objective is to obtain more complete and more representative traffic accident statistics by linking hospital records with existing police records and comparing the hospital data with available police information. Part 1 of the project, the description of the existing situation, goes through a series of steps. The introductory text explores the problem of the current incom-pleteness of recorded data in Belgium. This is followed by an international investigation of recording methods in the Nether-lands, Sweden, Great Britain and the USA. This section provides a more detailed description of hospital records and the concurrence between hospital and police records. In the following report the current Belgian process for hospital records, as well as the pro-cedure through which the hospital notifies the police will be set out. This part will end with a series of policy suggestions, based on the description of the weaknesses of the existing formalities for records. Part 2 of the project outlines a demonstration record system for traffic casualties in hospitals. The aim is to introduce this demo into an emergency admission service and to extend it to a day clinic at a later stage. At the same time, the possibility of coupling hospital data with police data will be explored. Foreign experience with traffic casualty records will be put to use in this experiment. Alongside the de-monstration, the possibility of recording traffic casualties through primary care services will also be examined. Part 3 features policy proposals and validates the research results. This inception report looks at the state of affairs in part 1 of the research project, and more specifically at the problem of the current under-recording of traffic casualties in Belgium and at recording methods in the Netherlands, Sweden, Great Britain and the USA