Zambia Country Profile: Promoting the Employability and Employment of People with Disabilities Through Effective Legislation (Southern Africa)

In recent years, many countries have adopted policies aiming to promote the rights of people with disabilities to full and equal participation in society. In Africa, some countries have made progress in introducing disability-related legislation, but many of these laws have not yet been implemented, and in others, existing national laws need to be reviewed in order to achieve equalization of opportunities for persons with disabilities. The country study for Zambia is part of an ILO project, “Promoting the employability and employment of people with disabilities through effective legislation”. The first phase of the programme (2001-2004) aimed at enhancing the capacity of national governments in selected countries of East Africa and Asia1 to implement effective legislation concerning the employment of people with disabilities. Phase 2 of the project (2004-2007) is extending coverage to several additional countries (Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa and Zambia in Africa and Viet Nam in Asia), with a broadened focus on provisions for vocational training and skills development. This country study outlines the main provisions of the laws and policies in place in Zambia concerning the employment and training of people with disabilities. An initial review of the implementation of the legislation is also provided. A concluding comment underlines the progress made in the country and points to areas that have been identified, by key stakeholders or in the literature, as in need of further improvement. It may be read in conjunction with the regional overview prepared for the Technical Consultation in 2002, “Employment of people with disabilities - The impact of legislation (East Africa),Technical Consultation Report, Addis Ababa, 20-22 May 2002”, ILO, 2002

Individual country profile: South Africa - Promoting the employability and employment of people with disabilities through effective legislation (Southern Africa)

In recent years, many countries have adopted policies aiming to promote the rights of people with disabilities to full and equal participation in society. In Africa, some countries have made progress in introducing disability-related legislation, but many of these laws have not yet been implemented, and in others, existing national laws need to be reviewed in order to achieve equalization of opportunities for persons with disabilities. The country study for Zambia is part of an ILO project, “Promoting the employability and employment of people with disabilities through effective legislation”. The first phase of the programme (2001-2004) aimed at enhancing the capacity of national governments in selected countries of East Africa and Asia1 to implement effective legislation concerning the employment of people with disabilities. Phase 2 of the project (2004-2007) is extending coverage to several additional countries (Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa and Zambia in Africa and Viet Nam in Asia), with a broadened focus on provisions for vocational training and skills development. This country study outlines the main provisions of the laws and policies in place in South Africa concerning the employment and training of people with disabilities. An initial review of the implementation of the legislation is also provided. A concluding comment underlines the progress made in the country and points to areas that have been identified, by key stakeholders or in the literature, as in need of further improvement. It may be read in conjunction with the regional overview prepared for this Consultation: Employment of people with disabilities: The impact of legislation (East Africa), Technical Consultation Report, Addis Ababa, 20-22 May 2002, ILO, 2002

Particle and Nuclear Physics with High Energy Leptons

In high centre-of-mass energy lepton-nucleon collisions the space-time time resolution of partonic processes can be {\it fine-tuned} within a dynamical range which is unattainable in hadronic collisions. Replacing nucleons by nuclei of variable atomic number enables one to tune the strength of colour forces. The experimental program of high energy electron-nucleon and its extension to electron-nucleus collisions should thus give an unique opportunity to experimentally explore the transition between the soft and hard interactions of small and extended partonic systems. Such an experimental program, which can be realized at DESY and/or BNL with relatively modest cost, is discussed in this talk.Comment: Plenary talk at the PANIC conference, Uppsala, June 1999. 8 pages. 3 figure

Bounds on QCD Instantons from HERA

Signals for processes induced by QCD instantons are searched for in HERA data on the hadronic final state in deep-inelastic scattering. The maximally allowed fraction of instanton induced events is found at 95% confidence level to be on the percent level in the kinematic domain 0.0001<x<0.01 and 5 < Q-squared < 100 GeV-squared. The most stringent limits are obtained from the multiplicity distributions.Comment: 14 pages, latex, 9 figures as ps/ep

Aid for Trade: Cool Aid or Kool-Aid?

Aid for Trade may alleviate some fears by developing countries about the social cost of trade reforms and hence help de-block the WTO negotiations. It may also help address critical supply-side issues and contribute to the achievement of the MDGs. However, there is wide divergence in views what is covered, what should be supported and how. There are concerns among developing countries that, despite promises, aid for trade may simply be a redistribution of existing funds, that it may not address development priorities, and that arduous, new conditions will be attached. For these reasons, developing countries that might be expected to have welcomed the possibility of aid for trade, have looked with some suspicion at the proposals, regarding aid for trade more as Kool-Aid, rather than cool aid!

Diffractive Physics at HERA

Brief review of the diffractive physics at HERA, stressing QCD aspects.Comment: Contribution to the INPC98 proceeding, 5 pages, 6 figure

Crushed Aid: Fragmentation in Sectoral Aid

This paper measures and compares fragmentation in aid sectors. Past studies focused on aggregate country data but a sector analysis provides a better picture of fragmentation. We start by counting the number of aid projects in the developing world and find that, in 2007, more than 90 000 projects were running simultaneously. Project proliferation is on a steep upward trend and will certainly be reinforced by the emergence of new donors. Developing countries with the largest numbers of aid projects have more than 2 000 in a single year. In parallel to this boom of aid projects, there has been a major shift towards social sectors and, as a consequence, these are the most fragmented. We quantify fragmentation in each aid sector for donors and recipients and identify which exhibit the highest fragmentation. While fragmentation is usually seen as an issue when it is excessive, we also show that some countries suffer from too little fragmentation. An original contribution of this paper is to develop a monopoly index that identifies countries where a donor enjoys monopoly power. Finally, we characterise countries with high fragmentation levels. Countries that are poor, democratic and have a large population get more fragmented aid. However, this is only because poor and democratic countries attract more donors. Once we control for the number of donors in a country-sector, democratic countries do not appear different from non-democratic ones in any sector and poor countries actually have a slightly less fragmented aid allocation.Aid; Fragmentation

Visual alignment aid

Device consists of beam-splitter cube and two 90 deg prisms cemented together. Various components can be made as two pieces, eliminating seams, except beam-splitter diagonal

A structural risk-neutral model of electricity prices

The objective of this paper is to present a model for electricity spot prices and the corresponding forward contracts, which relies on the underlying fuels markets, thus avoiding the electricity non-storability restriction. The structural aspect of our model comes from the fact that the electricity spot prices depend on the dynamic of the electricity demand at the maturity $T$, and on the random available capacity of each production means. Our model allows to explain, in a stylized fact, how the different fuels prices together with the demand combine to produce electricity prices. This modeling methodology allows to transfer to electricity prices the risk-neutral probabilities of the fuels market and under the hypothesis of independence between demand, outages filtrations on one hand, and fuels prices filtration on the other hand, it provides a regression-type relation between electricity forward prices and fuels forward prices. Moreover, the model produces, by nature, the well-known peaks observed on electricity market data. In our model, spikes occur when the producer has to switch from one technology to the lowest cost available one. Numerical tests performed on a very crude approximation of the French electricity market using only two fuels (gas and oil) provide an illustration of the potential interest of this model.energy markets; electricity prices; fuels prices; risk-neutral probability; no-arbitrage pricing; forward contracts