An eagle eye: Africa in the 20th Century as viewed through the archives of Barclays Bank

Barclays’ international business was founded in 1925 as Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas). The roots of the business lay in three 19th century banks: the Anglo-Egyptian, the Colonial, and the National Bank of South Africa. It had long been the dream of Barclays Chairman, Frederick Goodenough, to create an ‘Empire Bank’, and by buying these three and merging them, that is precisely what he achieved. This article sets out to provide an overview of the collection and suggest avenues of future research

Impact of the EU Common Agricultural Policy on Organic in Comparison to Conventional Farms

Farms in the EU receive considerable support from the Common Agricultural Policy. Support for organic and conventional farms is analysed, covering a wide range of different Common Agricultural Policy support measures. The current design of the Common Market Organisations tends to disadvantage organic farming systems, although developments in the last two CAP reforms (year 1992 and 2000) and the latest reform (2003) have reduced the discrimination of extensive farming systems and now provide opportunities to introduce measures to meet some of the needs of organic farms.agricultural policy, farm accounts, Agricultural and Food Policy, Q18, Q12,

Modelling of simultaneous mass and heat transfer with chemical reaction using the Maxwell-Stefan theory II. Non-isothermal study

In Part I a general applicable model has been developed which calculates mass and heat transfer fluxes through a vapour/gas-liquid interface in case a reversible chemical reaction with associated heat effect takes place in the liquid phase. In this model the Maxwell-Stefan theory has been used to describe the mass transport. Also in Part I the isothermal absorption of a pure gas A in a solvent containing a reactive component B has been studied. In this paper the influence of thermal effects on the mass transfer rates is investigated, with special attention to the concentrated systems. The thermal effects arise as a consequence of enthalpy changes due to phase transitions and chemical reaction. Account is taken of the influence of temperature gradients on (i) the solubility of the gaseous component in the liquid phase, (ii) the chemical reaction rate and (iii) the mass transfer coefficients in the liquid phase. Numerical simulations show that, when compared to the corresponding isothermal case, the thermal effects can affect the mass transfer rates by as much as a factor of 30. In case of high Lewis numbers the numerically calculated mass transfer rates can very well be predicted from an approximate analytical expression, which has been presented in this paper. In most cases this is also a reasonable estimate of the mass transfer rate in case the Lewis number equals unity. In case of a second-order chemical reaction it was shown that thermal effects may change the maximum enhancement factor and consequently shift the absorption from the instantaneous regime to the pseudo-first-order regime. Further, it is concluded that there may exist non-isothermal gas-li1uid absorption systems where minor changes in parameters appearing in the heat balance, e.g. binary mass transfer coefficients, chemical reaction rate constant, Lé number or heat transfer coefficients, may result in drastically altered system behaviour. For situations in which thermal effects are significant, also the vaporization of the liquid mixture should be taken into account, especially when the calculated interface temperature is near or exceeds the boiling temperature of the liquid

Generalized Kuhn-Tucker Conditions for N-Firm Stochastic Irreversible Investment under Limited Resources

In this paper we study a continuous time, optimal stochastic investment problem under limited resources in a market with N firms. The investment processes are subject to a time-dependent stochastic constraint. Rather than using a dynamic programming approach, we exploit the concavity of the profit functional to derive some necessary and sufficient first order conditions for the corresponding Social Planner optimal policy. Our conditions are a stochastic infinite-dimensional generalization of the Kuhn-Tucker Theorem. The Lagrange multiplier takes the form of a nonnegative optional random measure on [0,T] which is flat off the set of times for which the constraint is binding, i.e. when all the fuel is spent. As a subproduct we obtain an enlightening interpretation of the first order conditions for a single firm in Bank (2005). In the infinite-horizon case, with operating profit functions of Cobb-Douglas type, our method allows the explicit calculation of the optimal policy in terms of the `base capacity' process, i.e. the unique solution of the Bank and El Karoui representation problem (2004).Comment: 25 page

Modelling of simultaneous mass and heat transfer with chemical reaction using the Maxwell-Stefan theory I. Model development and isothermal study

A general applicable model has been developed which can predict mass and heat transfer fluxes through a vapour/gas-liquid interface in case a reversible chemical reaction with associated heat effect takes place in the liquid phase. In this model the Maxwell-Stefan theory has been used to describe the transport of mass and heat. The description of the transfer rates has been based on the film model in which a well-mixed bulk and a stagnant zone are thought to exist. In this paper results obtained from the Maxwell-Stefan theory have been compared with the results obtained from the classical theory due to Fick. This has been done for isothermal absorption of a pure gas A in a solvent containing a reactive component B. Component A is allowed to react by a unimolecular chemical reaction or by a bimolecular chemical reaction with B to produce component C. Since the Maxwell-Stefan theory leads to implicit expressions for the absorption rates, approximate explicit expressions have been derived. In case of absorption with chemical reaction it turned out that the mass transfer rate could be formulated as the product of the mass flux for physical absorption and an enhancement factor. This enhancement factor possesses the same functional dependency in case Fick's law is used to describe the mass transfer process. The model which has been developed in this work is quite general and can be used for a rather general class of gas-liquid and vapour-liquid transfer processes. In this paper (Part I) only isothermal simulations will be reported to show the important features of the model for describing mass transfer with chemical reaction. In many processes such as distillation, reactive distillation and some absorption processes, heat effects may play an important additional role. In Part II non-isothermal processes will be studied to investigate the influence of heat effects on mass transfer rates

Partnership in Practice

This paper examines human resource management practices adopted in a group of eight case study firms and their tendencies towards versus away from partnership. The analysis is based on data collected during interviews with 124 employees (75 in organisations tending towards partnership and 49 in organisations tending away from partnership) and senior managers, conducted in 1997-1998 for the Job Insecurity and Work Intensification Survey (JIWIS). Drawing on the perspectives of senior managers and employees, we examine the tendency of firms towards and away from partnership in employment relations; and in keeping with the JIWIS methodology (Burchell et.al., 2001) we combine quantitative and qualitative evidence in our analysis. Specifically, we are interested in what partnership looks like in these different contexts, the reasons it is pursued (or not), the degree to which companies have been successful in achieving their partnership objectives (from the perspective of both management and employees), and the conditions that have either facilitated or impeded partnership in relationships with employees.industrial partnership, corporate governance, cooperation

Environmental Policy à la Carte: Letting Firms Choose their Regulation

Environmental policy often has to be devised under informational constraints, like uncertainty and asymmetric information. We consider an environmental policy that aims at reducing the welfare losses caused by asymmetric information while being sufficiently simple for implementation. In this policy, firms can choose between being regulated with an emission tax or a permit market. This serves as a screening device; the firms reveal private information by choosing an instrument. We show that such a menu of policy options improves upon conventional environmental policy. Furthermore, the optimal policy is simple and thus easily implementable. The approach is also theoretically interesting, because the simultaneous use of price- and quantity-based instruments induces an asymmetry into the pricesversus- quantities decision compared to Weitzman’s criterion. Especially, there can be an optimal pooling equilibrium where all firms choose the tax, but it is never optimal that all firms participate in permit trading.Environmental Policy, Asymmetric Information, Screening, Uncertainty, Prices-versus-Quantities