Commercial property loan valuations in the UK : the changing landscape of practice and liability

This paper is the first of two which aim to examine the major legal liability implications of changes to the commercial property loan valuation process caused by the recession in the UK property market and to make recommendations to valuers and their professional institutions to improve the quality of the process and the result. This paper identifies the market background to commercial property lending and discusses the implications of the falls in value for lenders and valuers. These include two major strands; first, the outcome of discussions between the representative bodies of these two groups and, second, the increasing litigation caused by lenders suing valuers for professional negligence. The discussions between representative groups have driven a debate on the valuation process leading to a number of reports and guidance notes. This paper discusses the outcomes paying particular attention to the basis of valuation for loan purposes and the provision of additional information in valuation reports. This paper also reviews the legal framework which influences the relationship between the lenders and valuers and discusses the duty of care. The role of instructions in the valuation process, the significance of the identity of the person to be advised and the possibility of a conflict of interest arising are all considered. The paper also addresses the issue of the standards required of a commercial loan valuer, including how this is interpreted by the courts and the legal status of professional guidance notes. The paper concludes by identifying potential areas for dispute within the loan valuation process and raising a number of research questions concerning the operation of this process which are addressed in a following paper

Commercial property loan valuations in the UK : implications of current trends in practice and liability

This paper is the second of two papers which aim to examine the major legal liability implications of changes to the commercial property loan valuation process caused by the recession in the UK property market and to make recommendations to valuers and their professional institutions to improve the quality of the process and the result. The objectives of this paper are to address a number of the practical implications of changes to the loan valuation process within the context of legal liability. The results of an interview survey of lenders and valuers are reported and analysed. The survey examined the loan valuation process including the selection and instruction of valuers, bases of valuation and valuation reporting. In the selection and instruction process, the findings of the survey reveal two potential problems within the valuer/lender relationship. First, valuers still occasionally accept instructions from borrowers and this could lead to a conflict of interest as lenders may rely on the survey. Second, the occasional lack of formal instructions prior to the delivery of reports casts doubt on the valuer’s ability to correctly identify the needs of clients. Regarding the basis of valuation, it was found that valuers are providing valuations on bases which they do not think are appropriate. Valuers may be legally liable if they do not inform clients of their reservations and this situation must be urgently addressed. The survey also confirms previous research that valuation reports are considered to be light on contextual information concerning markets. The paper concludes by making a number of specific recommendations concerning possible improvements to the commercial property loan valuation process

Cities in the Developing World

Rapid urbanisation is a major feature of developing countries. Some 2 billion more people are likely to become city residents in the next 30 years, yet urbanisation has received little attention in the modern development economics literature. This paper reviews theoretical and empirical work on the determinants and effects of urbanisation. This suggests that there are substantial productivity benefits from cities, although unregulated outcomes may well lead to excessive primacy as externalities and coordination failures inhibit decentralisation of economic activity. Policy should operate both by identifying and addressing these market failures, and by seeking to remove institutional obstacles to decentralisation.Urbanisation, economic development

Diversifying Children’s Literature by the Retelling of Folk Tradition and Orality in Afro-Caribbean Stories

Examining the historical context of Children\u27s Literature in America and the Caribbean, there are common threads that occur. Linked by a complex history of racial tensions, the representation of Afro-Caribbean children are minimal compared to white children. Disconnected from the orality of previous generations, Afro-Caribbean writers utilizes folk tradition and dialect to retell those stories of their ancestors in an amalgamation of oral-literature text

Economic Linkages Across Space

We develop a diagrammatic framework that can be used to study the economic linkages between regions or cities. Hitherto, such linkages have not been the primary focus of either the theoretical or empirical literatures. We show that our general framework can be used to interpret both the New Economic Geography and Urban Systems literatures to help us understand spatial economic linkages. We then extend the theoretical framework to allow us to consider a number of additional issues which may be particularly important for analyzing the impact of policy. Such policy analysis will also require empirical work to identify the nature of key relationships. In a final section, we consider what the existing empirical literature can tell us about these relationships.Spatial linkages, Urban systems, New Economic Geography, Urban and regional policy

The Economic Geography of Trade, Production, and Income: A Survey of Empirics

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the economic geography of trade flows, factor prices, and the location of production. The discussion is structured around the empirical predictions of a canonical theoretical model. We review empirical evidence on the determinants of trade costs and the effects of these costs on trade flows. Geography is a major determinant of factor prices, and access to foreign markets alone is shown to explain some 35% of the cross-country variation in per capita income. The paper documents empirical findings of home market (or magnification) effects, suggesting that imperfectly competitive industries are drawn more than proportionately to locations with good market access. Sub-national evidence establishes the presence of industrial clustering, and we examine the roles played by product market linkages to customer and supplier firms, knowledge spillovers, and labour market externalities.

The economic geography of trade, production and income : a survey of empirics.

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the economic geography of trade flows, factor prices, and the location of production. The discussion is structured around the empirical predictions of a canonical theoretical model. We review empirical evidence on the determinants of trade costs and the effects of these costs on trade flows. Geography is a major determinant of factor prices, and access to foreign markets alone is shown to explain some 35% of the cross-country variation in per capita income. The paper documents empirical findings of home market (or magnification) effects, suggesting that imperfectly competitive industries are drawn more than proportionately to locations with good market access. Sub-national evidence establishes the presence of industrial clustering, and we examine the roles played by product market linkages to customer and supplier firms, knowledge spillovers, and labour market externalities.

Reggae, Rasta and the role of the deejay in the Black British experience

This article explores the role of Reggae music and Rastafari in the creation of alternative public arenas that served as spaces of resistance and sites of transcendental edification in post-war Britain. The approach suggests that wherever there were significant African Caribbean communities in the UK, Sound System deejays used the Reggae dancehall arena as an alternate site of learning. Significantly it was the practiced use of 'oral skills' in Creolised languages, couched in Rastafarian and Garveyite sensibilities, that underpinned and ensured the perpetuation of these politically driven, vernacular cultures. It is argued that expressive musical cultures opened access to an alternative world view which, in turn, provided a space where the African diaspora thought themselves into being in a more conscious manner than has been previously recognised. The suggestion is that black music often spoke to the lived experiences of the disenfranchised in a racist society, and thus furnished a site for various types of inter/intra-cultural exchanges to take place, enabling them to debate and discuss their own 'problem' status in a language owned and controlled by them. At no point was this more apparent than during the perceived collapse of the post-war 'consensus' in the 1970s and early 1980s

The Stratigraphy And Depositional History Of The Deadwood Formation, With A Focus On Early Paleozoic Subsidence In The Williston Basin

The Deadwood Formation is an assemblage of siliciclastic, carbonate, and evaporite sedimentary rocks in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. The majority of the lateral extent of the Deadwood Formation is in the subsurface of the Williston Basin, where it is the basal lithostratigraphic unit. Deposition began roughly 501 million years ago, as the Sauk sequence reached the exposed Precambrian igneous and metamorphic rock of the North American Craton. Six identifiable and widespread gamma ray markers occur in the well logs, dividing the formation into six informal units, label members A through F in ascending order. The initial deposits on the craton were conglomerates and sandstones of the Cambrian Member A. These sediments were overlain by glauconite rich, siltstones and fine-grained sandstones of the Cambrian and Ordovician Member B. After the deposition of Member B, three regressive-transgressive sequences took place, depositing a succession of sandstones, limestones, dolomudstones, siliciclastic mudstones, and calcareous siltstones. These deposits represent the Ordovician members, C, D, E and F. Using the thickness, depositional environments, age of each member, and other well information, tectonic subsidence values were determined using backstripping analysis. This analysis was completed by inputting all of the information into Novva®, a 1D geological modeling software released by Sirius Exploration Geochemistry Inc. Data collected from well logs and core, other data researched by the author, and information from previous works was combined with information and calculations supplied by Novva®. The results produce an accurate computation of the depositional history for the seven wells that penetrated all six members of the Deadwood Formation and the Precambrian basement. Prior to and at the start of Deadwood deposition the Williston Basin did not exist. Evidence from isopach maps created for each member of the Deadwood Formation and the results from Novva® concluded that subsidence in the area, now known as the Williston Basin, did not begin until Member C was being deposited. This places the initiation of the Williston Basin to be roughly 485 to 482 million years ago

'While nuff ah right and rahbit; we write and arrange’: deejay lyricism and the transcendental use of the voice in alternative public spaces in the UK

“While nuff ah right and rahbit; we write and arrange”, is taken from a statement made by the British deejay, Trevor Natch, on the London based Diamonds the Girl’s Best Friend, Sound System in 1984. The suggestion was that during that historical moment, many deejays were content to either rely on gimmicks when chatting on the mic, or they were content to pirate (copy) other performers. For this reason, there was a dichotomy that placed those types of performers, ‘pirates’, at one end of the deejay spectrum, and the ‘originators’, who prided themselves on research and composition, at the other. To make this aspect of the culture known, the paper will present an understanding of the centrality of these types of lyricism that were, in essence, far more than forms of resistance, but were in fact forms of linguistic, cultural antagonism. Significantly it was the practised usage of ‘oral skills’ in the British deejays’ take on patwa (Jamaican language), couched in Rastafarian and Garveyite sensibilities, that underpinned and ensured the perpetuation of these politically driven, vernacular cultures. By focusing on samples of this lyricism, the paper will argue that these types of expressive musical culture, combat the imposition of a Eurocentric ‘alien’ worldview on African peoples on an Outernational level, across Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’