PPPs and the SDGs: Don’t believe the hype

The advent of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has prompted Public-Private Partnership (PPP) advocates to launch a renewed push for their use in providing network and social infrastructure and services. This briefing suggests that claims that PPPs should be a central part of any attempt to address SDG commitments should be viewed with caution. Prioritisation of PPPs may bias governments towards bankable projects rather than initiatives which best respond to social development objectives. Claims that PPPs are more efficient, better transfer risk and therefore represent better value-for-money are not backed up by the evidence. Finally, particularly where institutional strength is weak, PPPs threaten to undermine democratic accountability and make problems with corruption worse, not better

Impact of liberalisation on public safety in the transport, water and health care sectors

The loss of 304 lives in the sinking of the MV Sewol 14 April 2014, was South Korea’s second worst maritime disaster in its history, and the worst in nearly half a century. This was made all the more tragic by the fact that most of those killed were secondary school students. The immediate cause of the sinking was a sudden and extreme turn to starboard, causing cargo to shift and making the ship unmanageable. However, investigations into why such drastic manoeuvres were undertaken have revealed a litany of safety failures on behalf of the company, Chonghaejin Marine, inspectors and regulators. Mark Dickinson, general secretary of Nautilus, the international union for maritime professionals, summarised the failings: “Issues including training, experience, safety management, ship design and construction, and the effectiveness of the regulatory regime are all critical factors in this disaster…” The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (2014) has drawn attention to the role played by the deregulation of the transport sector: “Safety experts are now pointing to excessive deregulations, privatisation of public transport and emergency services, the use of precarious work arrangements and the corrupt appointment of officials in oversight agencies as causes of the Sewol tragedy.” This report will examine the complex linkages between liberalisation and public safety in transport. From this preliminary investigation, there does not appear to be a universally applicable causal linkage running directly from liberalisation to a deterioration in public safety. However, from a range of case studies, which examine the transport, water and health sectors as well as deaths of workers and members of the public in contracts operated by Serco, what emerges is that the way in which liberalisation is carried out is critical for safety outcomes. The careful construction of a safety culture built up through learning from decades of experience can be swept aside by ill-conceived policy reforms. Increased competitive pressures can lead to a prioritisation of performance and the bottom line over more abstract concerns over public safety. Corruption can play a key role. Institutional realities may mean that a newly liberalised transport sector is subject to new or increasingly corrupt practices

Method or madness: does OTU delineation bias our perceptions of fungal ecology?

This is the author's manuscript. The definitive version is available at www.newphytologist.co

Feminist perspectives on monetary policy

Executive Summary This research takes as its point of departure that the continued dominance of monetary policy for macroeconomic management provides an imperative for feminist interventions on this critical area of public policy. Such a perspective can reveal not only important gendered distributional implications of monetary policy for consumption, income, employment and wealth, but also how these outcomes in turn impact upon gendered roles and power in the household, workplace and public spaces, and our collective ability to build a more caring society. The New Keynesian Economics (NKE) monetary policy (MP) framework has for over three decades stood behind the conventional approach to central banking and monetary policy, that of an independent central bank using short-term interest rates to target an inflation rate of 2%, the so-called 'inflation targeting regime'. In terms of distribution, the balance of empirical evidence suggests that contractionary (/expansionary) conventional monetary policy (CMP) leads to increased (/decreased) income and wealth inequality. The crisis of 2008 posed an important challenge to NKE monetary policy orthodoxy. It became clear that the requisite turn to unconventional monetary policy (UMP), most notably quantitative easing (QE), was reliant on a wealth effect for impact, bringing increased attention to distribution. Expansionary UMP appears to have increased income and wealth inequality in the UK. To date very little research exists which examines the gendered distributional impact of either CMP or UMP. The distributional impacts of both CMP and UMP are not unambiguous; a range of institutional characteristics, the nature of central bank intervention, and the fiscal framework into which MP is conducted, all play a role in determining the ultimate distributional outcome of a particular set of MP measures. Also important, and under-researched, is the impact of the timing of intervention and the asymmetry of the impacts over the business cycle. The NKE framework is beset by a number of fundamental problems. These include its grounding in the controversial theoretical precept of a 'natural' interest rate; the arbitrary choice of inflation target; tenuous support for the hypothesised impacts of incremental changes in the short-term interest rate on output and inflation; and an over-emphasis on the role of domestic wage pressure in generating, and therefore managing, inflationary pressures. A feminist approach to monetary policy, by abandoning the shibboleths of the NKE framework, could adopt a very different approach: moving from a rigid focus on price stability to the recognition of complex social realities in its goals; considering the use of a broader range of central bank tools to target real variables in addition to price stability; and taking a less dogmatic approach to inflation management involving both a more nuanced understanding of causality and greater willingness to cooperate with fiscal authorities in addressing its impact. What would reform of monetary policy from a feminist perspective look like in concrete terms? More easily accomplished will be those reforms which do not threaten the hegemonic NKE monetary policy framework. This would include: criteria for increased diversity on both formal governance bodies of central banks and citizens' forums which provide feedback on central bank policy; greater attention to gender, race and class in data-gathering exercises; research into the impact of gender discrimination on monetary policy transmission; ex-ante impact assessments of the gender, race and class-based impacts of proposed monetary policy; and greater public accountability for the central bank over investment in the care economy. While such reforms may be important in their own right, they run the risk of becoming gender ‘window dressing' and even perhaps reinforcing the ongoing commodification and financialisation of care. In the longer-term, more fundamental reforms that challenge the hegemonic model of NKE MP must be considered: revisiting central bank goals and independence; a greater role for the central bank in channelling low-cost credit to social and environmental priorities; the integration of social and environmental standards into capital requirements and financial regulation; and greater coordination with Treasury to ensure the financial sustainability of increased public investment in and support of a caring economy. However, any such calls for a more interventionist role of the Bank of England in pursuit of gender equity must be carefully calibrated so as not to endorse monetary dominance, given the greater effectiveness of fiscal policy to directly impact a range of macroeconomic outcomes, distribution and gender equity. Moreover, it is clear that any such challenges to monetary policy orthodoxy will face significant opposition from powerful voices within policy circles, the private sector and academia

The orthogonal LMBA: a novel RFPA architecture with broadband reconfigurability

A novel RF power amplifier (RFPA) architecture, the orthogonal load-modulated balanced amplifier, or OLMBA, is described and demonstrated. Compared to the load-modulated balanced amplifier (LMBA), the OLMBA displays many of the same benefits, such as active adaptive tuning using the phase and amplitude of an external control signal, but with much lower power requirements on the control signal power (CSP). As such, a useful range of active tuning can be implemented with essentially no impact on overall efficiency due to the low level of a control signal. A demonstrator is described and measured, which delivers 30 W at a minimum of 50% efficiency over a 0.65-3.25-GHz bandwidth

Deciphering the relative contributions of multiple functions within plant-microbe symbioses

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/09-1858.1For microbial symbioses with plants, such as mycorrhizas, we typically quantify either the net effects of one partner on another or a single function a symbiont provides. However, many microbial symbioses provide multiple functions to plants that vary based on the microbial species or functional group, plant species, and environment. Here we quantified the relative contributions of multiple functions provided by arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi to symbiont-mediated changes in plant biomass. We used two published data sets, one that measured multiple functions (pathogen protection and nutrient uptake) on a single plant and one that measured a single function (pathogen protection) on multiple plants. Using structural equation modeling, we observed strong variation in the functional pathways by which AM fungi altered plant growth; changes in plant biomass were associated with different functions (and different AM fungal functional groups) for the different plant species. Utilizing this methodology across multiple partners and environments will allow researchers to gauge the relative importance of functions they isolate and, perhaps more importantly, those they did not consider. This baseline information is essential for establishing the specific mechanisms by which microbial symbioses influence plant diversity and to more effectively utilize these organisms in agriculture, restoration and conservation