Tourism partnerships and small firms: Power, participation and partition

Partnerships have been a central feature of the tourism public policy landscape in advanced capitalist countries for some time. The intuitively appealing argument is that, by sharing expertise and decision making, commitment to the local tourism project is ensured. By participating in partnership working, small firms - which are almost universally characteristic of the sector - are said to contribute to the form and competitiveness of the tourism offer. Drawing on a variety of sources, this paper argues that in most cases such assertions are misplaced because 'partnerships' organized by the public sector are often predicated on an inadequate conceptualization of small firms in tourism, fail to appreciate the importance and complexity of informal economic relations, and usually ignore the particular power relations at play in local tourism policy formation and change

Romania's EU accession negotiations: the significance of the EU budget

Romania completed its negotiations for accession to the European Union, as scheduled, by the end of 2004. The experience of the negotiations over the 2004 enlargement confirmed that the EU budget is an absolutely key issue in such talks. The purpose of this paper is to consider the context of Romania's negotiations over the EU Budget. First, we look at the relationship the EU15 member states have with the EU budget.We show how rules governing the operation of the EU Budget have affected budgetary flows to the EU15 and highlight the stability over time of the shares of total budget flows to and from each member state. Second, we look at the experience of the new Member States in their accession negotiations and review the outcomes. This will allow us to see how the political economy of the EU Budget affected the talks and the deal the new member states were able to secure. We then apply the lessons learned to the case of Romania. Our analysis reveals inflexibilities in the negotiations that left Romania more or less facing a 'take-it-or leave- it' offer

The European Union budget, the balanced budget rule and the development of common European policies

The European Union budget is subject to a strict annual balanced budget rule. Given different types of expenditure within the budget, this rule has most effect on - and is most threatened by - spending on the Common Agricultural Policy. This article examines the merits of applying a balanced budget rule to the EU budget and explores the links between the budget and the CAP. The presence of the rule also forced the EU to improve its financial management. The 1999 CAP reform is examined. The presence of a pre-agreed spending limit on the CAP forced changes to be made to the initial CAP reform agreement in order to comply with this limit, although political bargaining was critical in shaping the changes. The general perception is that the CAP drives the European budget. The budget, if not driving the CAP, imposes an increasingly tight constraint on its reform

The maker not the tool: The cognitive significance of great ape manual skills

Tool-use by chimpanzees has attracted disproportionate attention among primatologists, because of an understandable wish to understand the evolutionary origins of hominin tool use. In archaeology and paleoanthropology, a focus on made-objects is inevitable: there is nothing else to study. However, it is evidently object-directed manual skills, enabling the objects to be made, that are critical in understanding the evolutionary origins of stone-tool manufacture. In this chapter I review object-directed manual skills in living great apes, making comparison where possible with hominin abilities that can be inferred from the archaeological record. To this end, ‘translations’ of terminology between the research traditions are offered. Much of the evidence comes from observation of apes gathering plants that present physical problems for handling and consumption, in addition to the more patchy data from tool use in captivity and the field. The living great apes, like ourselves, build up novel hierarchical structures involving regular sequences of elementary actions, showing co-ordinated manual role differentiation, in modular organizations with the option of iterating subroutines. Further, great apes appear able to use imitation of skilled practitioners as one source of information for this process, implying some ability to ‘see’ below the surface level of action and understand the motor planning of other individual; however, that process does not necessarily involve understanding cause-and-effect or the intentions of other individuals. Finally I consider whether a living non-human ape could effectively knap stone, and if not, what competence is lacking.Postprin

EU enlargement, the CAP and the cost of direct payments: a note

Negotiations over EU enlargement have highlighted difficulties in extending the CAP – and in particular direct payments - to the applicant countries, given the spending limits agreed in Berlin in 1999. This note presents estimates of direct payment costs in the Eastern European applicants. It argues that the only way all member states in an enlarged EU can receive the same level of payments is if the payments currently prevailing in the EU15 are reduced

An IT approach to cardiovascular care based on primary care

We describe a unique telemedicine approach to cardiovascular care, based in primary care, which combines store and forward with real time video. Patients presenting to the family practitioner (GP) with chest pain or symptoms indicative of cardiac disease are assessed within the health centre by exercise test ECG. The report, together with other clinical information is forwarded as an electronic referral to the cardiologist. Suitable candidates for angiography have an initial teleconsultation by video-conferencing, in which not only may the patient, GP and cardiologist discuss the diagnosis and forthcoming procedures in hospital, but also can undertake management of the patient, such as review of medication and life style. Follow-up consultations may be conducted by further tele-clinics. We also show how re-engineering the process has the potential to eliminate 75 of outpatient appointment

Approximation algorithms for hard variants of the stable marriage and hospitals/residents problems

When ties and incomplete preference lists are permitted in the Stable Marriage and Hospitals/Residents problems, stable matchings can have different sizes. The problem of finding a maximum cardinality stable matching in this context is known to be NP-hard, even under very severe restrictions on the number, size and position of ties. In this paper, we describe polynomial-time 5/3-approximation algorithms for variants of these problems in which ties are on one side only and at the end of the preference lists. The particular variant is motivated by important applications in large scale centralised matching schemes

A novel record of aardwolf Proteles cristata feeding behaviour

Terrestrial members of the order Carnivora show great variation in their diet; some specialising on vertebrates, invertebrates, or plant matter, whereas others are omnivores or scavengers (Bekoff et al, 1984). The aardwolf Proteles cristata is a highly specialised myrmecovore (Skinner and Chimimba 2005). We present a first report of a wild aardwolf preying on a vertebrate - captive geese Anser anser domesticus