National Evaluation of the Capacity Building Programme in English Local Government: Annex 3. Direct Support in Poor and Weak Local Authorities: Emerging findings

This report summarises emerging findings from initial scoping analysis and case study fieldwork with authorities that have received Direct Support from the Capacity Building Programme (CBP) for local government. The report is one of a series of outputs from the national evaluation of the CBP, being undertaken by a team of researchers at the Policy Research Institute (PRI) at Leeds Metropolitan University and the Cities Research Unit at the University of West of England

Kuwait: Unlimited Deposit Guarantee

On October 26, 2008, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis, the Central Bank of Kuwait (CBK) announced that it would support Gulf Bank, the country’s third-largest bank, which had sustained losses on clients’ derivatives trades. In the same announcement, it said it would ask the government to guarantee all banking deposits to shore up confidence in banks and to keep Kuwait’s banking system competitive with those of other countries, including neighboring Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which had already announced unlimited deposit guarantees. The legislature passed an unlimited deposit guarantee bill eight days later. Kuwait did not have an existing deposit insurance system at the time, and legislators tasked the CBK with its implementation. The guarantee covered a variety of deposit accounts in Kuwait-based banks, including commercial banks, branches of foreign banks, banks whose operations were compliant with Islamic Sharia law, and specialized banks. The CBK did not charge fees for coverage, relying instead on public funds to cover any payouts. The policy guaranteed a total of 24 billion Kuwaiti dinars (KWD) in deposits in 2009 (USD 84 billion). As of March 2022, Kuwait’s National Assembly had not terminated the unlimited guarantee. There is no evidence to suggest that a payout event has occurred. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has argued since 2010 that Kuwait should replace the unlimited guarantee with a permanent deposit insurance system with an appropriate insurance cap. The IMF has said that the unlimited policy may raise moral hazard concerns and reduce market discipline on banks. Even so, the IMF says that the guarantee has contributed to financial stability in the absence of a legal and constitutional environment that would allow for swift remedial action or resolution of ailing financial institutions

Opposed discs for furrowing in pastoral areas

THROUGHOUT our pastoral regions in all land divisions from Murchison to Kimberley, there are extensive areas of bare country which must be broken in some way to enable water penetration and to provide a place for seed to lodge before regeneration of pasture species can be expected. Earlier articles in this Journal have explained the occurrence of these bare areas, and described methods of furrowing. Checkerboard designs have been successful on perfectly level locations but contouring becomes essential where there is a slope of any dimension

Water usage trials with bananas on the Gascoyne

THE banana industry at Carnarvon is an unusual one by most agricultural standards. Normally a tropical plant liking relatively humid conditions in a high rainfall, the banana is cultivated at Carnarvon in an area of extremely low rainfall and with relatively low humidity throughout the year. Water is pumped to irrigate the crop from the sands of the Gascoyne River bed or from bores adjacent to the river course

Austria: Unlimited Deposit Guarantee

After Germany and Ireland implemented unlimited deposit guarantees, Austrian officials passed a law on October 26, 2008, that removed deposit-insurance limits for individual depositors, fearing that Austrians would move their money to countries with higher deposit coverage. The government established the program using the country’s existing, mandatory deposit-insurance system (DIS), which was private, ex post funded, and segmented into sectoral schemes that covered different kinds of financial institutions. During payouts, the schemes covered the first EUR 50,000 (USD 67,000) of guaranteed funds to a given depositor, and the government the government covered the rest. The government required all financial institutions that were members of a sectoral scheme to participate in the unlimited guarantee. It covered checking, savings, and time-deposit accounts held by Austrian citizens. During 2009, the unlimited deposit guarantee covered EUR 275.7 billion in deposits. It expired on December 21, 2009, when a new, EUR 100,000 deposit-guarantee level went into effect. No payouts occurred while the unlimited guarantee was in operation. During the unlimited-guarantee period, deposits grew in all but the smallest guaranteed accounts. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) later criticized Austria’s deposit-guarantee system because it was private, fragmented, and ex-post-funded. After consolidation, there are now three deposit-guarantee schemes, all of which have begun to accumulate ex-ante deposit-insurance funds with member contributions

Mineral supplements for Kimberley cattle

For some years we have felt that in sections at least of the Kimberley cattle region, stock would benefit from a supplement of phosphorus. In his article More Beef from the Kimberleys, which appeared in 1952 issues of this Journal, Cattle Adviser Grant A. Smith stressed this conviction and referred to trials which would be put in hand using American Fosfeeder equipment to meter the right amounts of soluble phosphate automatically into the trough along with the drinking water

Pastoral research - \u27Munda Field Day demonstrates real progress in the Port Hedland area

When a programme of research was first put in hand at Abydos Research Station in 1951, it was generally thought that an almost impossible task was being undertaken— that of demonstrating that sheep might still be carried profitably on country which had been abandoned after years of occupation as commercial sheep stations

Deferred grazing : what it may mean in the mulga region

THE practice of deferred grazing has been written up in American textbooks and has been applied effectively to sections of the cattle range lands of the United States. Early attempts to apply the principle in eastern Australia were not very successful, and it remained for our Departmental workers in the North-West and Kimberley Divisions to demonstrate the phenomenal results that could be obtained on grasslands in summer rainfall areas