Sustainable Enterprise Value Creation

This Open Access book provides a practical guide to the creation of sustainable enterprise value and implementation of the principles of stakeholder capitalism for corporate boards and management teams. The authors argue that business leadership is on the threshold of a new era driven by major shifts in technology, society, political economy and climate change. They set this transition in international and historical context and outline a comprehensive leadership agenda for fully integrating environmental, social, governance (ESG) and data stewardship risks and opportunities into corporate governance, strategy, reporting and partnerships. This systematic approach is illustrated with good practices by leading companies and includes an explanation of how sustainability reporting is making the leap into formal accounting standards set by the same body that oversees international financial accounting standards and what companies should do to prepare. The book’s combination of scholarly analysis and practical guidance make it a valuable resource for anyone seeking to navigate the new business context, whether from the perspective of a board director, C-suite executive, manager, policymaker, scholar or student. This is an open access book

The Inclusive Growth and Development Report 2017

Around the globe, leaders of governments and other stakeholder institutions enter 2017 facing a set of difficult and increasingly urgent questions:With fiscal space limited, interest rates near zero, and demographic trends unfavorable in many countries, does the world economy face a protracted period of relatively low growth? Will macroeconomics and demography determine the world economy's destiny for the foreseeable future?Can rising in-country inequality be satisfactorily redressed within the prevailing liberal international economic order? Can those who argue that modern capitalist economies face inherent limitations in this regard – that their internal "income distribution system" is broken and likely beyond repair – be proven wrong?As technological disruption accelerates in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, how can societies organize themselves better to respond to the potential employment and other distributional effects? Are expanded transfer payments the only or primary solution, or can market mechanisms be developed to widen social participation in new forms of economic value-creation?These questions beg the more fundamental one of whether a secular correction is required in the existing economic growth model in order to counteract secular stagnation and dispersion (chronic low growth and rising inequality). Does the mental map of how policymakers conceptualize and enable national economic performance need to be redrawn? Is there a structural way, beyond the temporary monetary and fiscal measures of recent years, to cut the Gordian knot of slow growth and rising inequality, to turn the current vicious cycle of stagnation and dispersion into a virtuous one in which greater social inclusion and stronger and more sustainable growth reinforce each other?This is precisely what government, business, and other leaders from every region have been calling for. Over the past several years, a worldwide consensus has emerged on the need for a more inclusive growth and development model; however, this consensus is mainly directional. Inclusive growth remains more a discussion topic than an action agenda. This Report seeks to help countries and the wider international community practice inclusive growth and development by offering a new policy framework and corresponding set of policy and performance indicators for this purpose

Mainstreaming Responsible Investment

The outcome of a Global Corporate Citizenship Initiative's inquiry, namely: why the investment community places only modest emphasis on social, environmental, and ethical issues in investment valuation and asset allocation decisions. The report identifies obstacles and explores possible changes in policies and practices that could serve to integrate non-financial considerations into their investment strategies

Capturing sequence variation among flowering-time regulatory gene homologs in the allopolyploid crop species Brassica napus

Flowering, the transition from the vegetative to the generative phase, is a decisive time point in the lifecycle of a plant. Flowering is controlled by a complex network of transcription factors, photoreceptors, enzymes and miRNAs. In recent years, several studies gave rise to the hypothesis that this network is also strongly involved in the regulation of other important lifecycle processes ranging from germination and seed development through to fundamental developmental and yield-related traits. In the allopolyploid crop species Brassica napus, (genome AACC), homoeologous copies of flowering time regulatory genes are implicated in major phenological variation within the species, however the extent and control of intraspecific and intergenomic variation among flowering-time regulators is still unclear. To investigate differences among B. napus morphotypes in relation to flowering-time gene variation, we performed targeted deep sequencing of 29 regulatory flowering-time genes in four genetically and phenologically diverse B. napus accessions. The genotype panel included a winter-type oilseed rape, a winter fodder rape, a spring-type oilseed rape (all B. napus ssp. napus) and a swede (B. napus ssp. napobrassica), which show extreme differences in winter-hardiness, vernalization requirement and flowering behaviour. A broad range of genetic variation was detected in the targeted genes for the different morphotypes, including non-synonymous SNPs, copy number variation and presence-absence variation. The results suggest that this broad variation in vernalisation, clock and signaling genes could be a key driver of morphological differentiation for flowering-related traits in this recent allopolyploid crop species

Financing human-centred COVID-19 recovery and decisive climate action worldwide: International cooperation's twenty-first century moment of truth

This Working Paper provides a concrete illustration of how the existing international financial architecture could be activated more fully to mobilize the large sums required to respond decisively to the 'great divergence' in COVID-19 crisis recovery between advanced and developing countries as well as to the climate crisis. @International cooperation and financing for development in particular face a moment of truth. A lack of national capacity to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change anywhere is a threat to the security and well-being of people everywhere. The most feasible way to mobilize the large additional sums required to advance a fully inclusive, human-centred recovery from the pandemic and a rapid acceleration of climate action on a worldwide basis - including in resource-constrained low-and lower-middle-income countries - is for the international community to apply the public capital it has already invested in the International Monetary Fund and multilateral development banksmore efficiently and expansively. This could be achieved by applying the balance sheets and tools of these institutions just as imaginatively for such common purposes as those of central banks and treasuries in advanced countries have been applied for domestic purposes during the pandemic. The paper proposes a set of initiatives to this end in order to fully fund the WHO ACT-A/COVAX Initiative, adequately resource debt relief and restructuring, social protection floors and job-rich sustainable infrastructure and industry in these countries, and finance a global effort to avoid a lock-in of greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power generation, which represents the single largest and most time sensitive aspect of the climate action required to achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement. This fuller utilization of the existing international financial architecture to implement multilaterally agreed objectives would generate an average increase in annual external flows of about 4% of GDP to 82 poorer developing countries during the next seven years, exceeding the Marshall Plan's support of Europe's efforts to "build back better" from World War II, while using such additional international assistance in a similar manner to generate complementary increases in domestic resource mobilization

Financer une reprise centrée sur l'humain pour sortir de la crise du COVID-19 et une action décisive pour le climat à l'échelle mondiale: L'heure de vérité pour la coopération internationale au XXIe siècle

International cooperation and financing for development in particular face a moment of truth. A lack of national capacity to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change anywhere is a threat to the security and well-being of people everywhere. The most feasible way to mobilize the large additional sums required to advance a fully inclusive, human-centred recovery from the pandemic and a rapid acceleration of climate action on a worldwide basis - including in resource-constrained low-and lower-middle-income countries - is for the international community to apply the public capital it has already invested in the International Monetary Fund and multilateral development banksmore efficiently and expansively. This could be achieved by applying the balance sheets and tools of these institutions just as imaginatively for such common purposes as those of central banks and treasuries in advanced countries have been applied for domestic purposes during the pandemic. The paper proposes a set of initiatives to this end in order to fully fund the WHO ACT-A/COVAX Initiative, adequately resource debt relief and restructuring, social protection floors and job-rich sustainable infrastructure and industry in these countries, and finance a global effort to avoid a lock-in of greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power generation, which represents the single largest and most time sensitive aspect of the climate action required to achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement. This fuller utilization of the existing international financial architecture to implement multilaterally agreed objectives would generate an average increase in annual external flows of about 4% of GDP to 82 poorer developing countries during the next seven years, exceeding the Marshall Plan's support of Europe's efforts to "build back better" from World War II, while using such additional international assistance in a similar manner to generate complementary increases in domestic resource mobilization

Sustainable Enterprise Value Creation

This Open Access book provides a practical guide to the creation of sustainable enterprise value and implementation of the principles of stakeholder capitalism for corporate boards and management teams. The authors argue that business leadership is on the threshold of a new era driven by major shifts in technology, society, political economy and climate change. They set this transition in international and historical context and outline a comprehensive leadership agenda for fully integrating environmental, social, governance (ESG) and data stewardship risks and opportunities into corporate governance, strategy, reporting and partnerships. This systematic approach is illustrated with good practices by leading companies and includes an explanation of how sustainability reporting is making the leap into formal accounting standards set by the same body that oversees international financial accounting standards and what companies should do to prepare. The book’s combination of scholarly analysis and practical guidance make it a valuable resource for anyone seeking to navigate the new business context, whether from the perspective of a board director, C-suite executive, manager, policymaker, scholar or student. This is an open access book