Catalysing Impact Deal Flow in East Africa: Recommendations for Development of the Services Market

East Africa has become a focal point for impact investors across the globe, with investments steadily increasing since 2010. Yet despite this growth in recent years, the number of investment opportunities available remains limited. Catalysing Impact Deal Flow in East Africa explores the causes of this constraint and provides recommendations for donors seeking to increase impact investing volumes (deal flow).Top TakeawaysTwo key challenges are constraining the growth of impact investing in East Africa: 1) The pairing of investors and enterprises ("matching challenge"); and 2) enterprises' lack of readiness to take on investment ("preparation challenge").Local service providers (consulting and advisory firms) that help enterprises raise capital and build capacity are already addressing both the matching and the preparation challenges. However, these service providers themselves face constraints in scaling their services due to delayed and conditional payment of fees from enterprises resulting from a deferred success fee model.An appropriate market-shaping intervention could help service providers to scale up sustainably, and help to develop a more vibrant impact investing market overall

An Interim Assessment of the U.S. Trade Policy of “Competitive Liberalization”

Since taking office the Administration of George W. Bush has pursued a trade policy known as Competitive Liberalization. This policy envisages a series of mutually-reinforcing steps to open markets abroad to U.S. companies, to strengthen market-oriented laws and regulations overseas, and to place the U.S. at the centre of the world trading system. Foreign and security policy considerations have influenced U.S. trade policymaking, perhaps more so than in the 1990s. To date the principal outcome of this policy has been the negotiation by the U.S. of numerous free trade agreements, mainly with developing countries individually or in subregional groupings. In addition to characterising this policy in detail, the principal purpose of this paper is to assess the logic underlying this approach to trade policymaking and whether Competitive Liberalization has begun to fulfil the promise spelt out for it at the beginning of this decade.United States, trade policy, commercial policy, Competitive Liberalization, WTO, regional trade agreements

Why Does Unemployment Hurt the Employed? Evidence from the Life Satisfaction Gap between the Public and the Private Sector

High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular job security, in workers’ well-being by exploiting sector-specific institutional differences in the exposure to economic shocks. Public servants have stricter dismissal protection and face a lower risk of their organization’s bankruptcy than private sector employees. The empirical results for individual panel data for Germany and repeated cross-sectional data for the United States and the European Union show that the sensitivity of subjective well-being to fluctuations in unemployment rates is much lower in the public sector than in the private. This suggests that increased economic insecurity constitutes an important welfare loss associated with high general unemployment.unemployment, life satisfaction, job security, public sector

Why Does Unemployment Hurt the Employed? Evidence from the Life Satisfaction Gap between the Public and the Private Sector

High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular job security, in workers’ well-being by exploiting sectorspecific institutional differences in the exposure to economic shocks. Public servants have stricter dismissal protection and face a lower risk of their organization’s bankruptcy than private sector employees. The empirical results for individual panel data for Germany and repeated cross-sectional data for the United States and the European Union show that the sensitivity of subjective well-being to fluctuations in unemployment rates is much lower in the public sector than in the private. This suggests that increased economic insecurity constitutes an important welfare loss associated with high general unemployment.Unemployment, life satisfaction, job security, public sector

Angemessenheit. Pragmatische Perspektiven auf ein linguistisches Bewertungskriterium : Bericht zur Tagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Linguistische Pragmatik (ALP e. V.) an der Universität Leipzig am 3. März 2015

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively

Why Does Unemployment Hurt the Employed?: Evidence from the Life Satisfaction Gap between the Public and Private Sectors

High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular, job security, in workers' well-being by exploiting sector-specific institutional differences in the exposure to economic shocks. Public servants have stricter dismissal protection and face a lower risk of their organization's bankruptcy than do private sector employees. The empirical results for individual panel data for Germany and repeated cross-sectional data for the United States and the European Union show that the sensitivity of subjective well-being to fluctuations in unemployment rates is much lower in the public sector than in the private. This suggests that increased economic insecurity constitutes an important welfare loss associated with high general unemployment.Unemployment, life satisfaction, job security, public sector

Smallholder Farmer Development: International Donor Funding Trends

In order to enable more coordination between these various initiatives, FSG and the Smallholder Coalition have catalogued and analyzed $12 billion in funding from 29 donors representing more than 1,700 smallholder-focused projects active from 2009 onwards. Our intention with this analysis is to provide the community of donors, corporations, networks, NGOs, and governments involved with smallholder development with a first-of-its-kind snapshot of the state of smallholder funding flow trends

Creating Shared Value in India: How Indian Corporations Are Contributing to Inclusive Growth While Strengthening Their Competitive Advantage

Leading companies are finding new ways to accelerate growth and increase competitive advantage through innovative business models that meet societal needs at scale. These companies are "creating shared value" by using their core business processes and practices to enhance the competitiveness of companies while improving social and environmental conditions. The concept of Creating Shared Value (CSV) was introduced by the co-founders of FSG, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Mark Kramer, in several Harvard Business Review articles (most recently in January/February 2011). FSG's research in India has identified a number of highly innovative examples of shared value. In this paper, we highlight these examples and call on corporations, especially our largest ones, to lead the charge toward a strategy for growth that benefits all our citizens

Wutreden – Konstruktion einer Gattung in den digitalen Medien

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.This paper proposes a reception-oriented and discursive concept of genre by using the example of „Wutreden“, i. e. public and medially distributed rants and their coverage in (online) media and Web 2.0. On the basis of a corpus of video recordings and transcriptions of Wutreden as well as comments made by journalists and users, it is shown that neither their linguistic features nor their situational functions qualify Wutreden as a distinct genre. Rather, the medial and internet-based recontextualisations of Wutreden build an orienting framework for the reception of discourse. It is these recontextualisations that put disparate speech events in order, so that they can be received as instances of one single genre. The analysis of accompanying discourse like media reports, user comments, and tweets as well as the multimodal surroundings of the respective videos shows, that such documents of reception reflect a genre awareness of Wutreden which will shape their reception as well as the follow-up discourse. The increase of Wutreden in the recent past as appears to be as a result of altered conditions of reception in online environments – conditions, which the linguistic study of genre and genre change within digital media should not neglect

Angaben zur Klimarelevanz als Bewertungsgrundlage für unterschiedliche landwirtschaftliche Produktionsverfahren und Nachfrageorientierungen

Zusammenfassung: Das Konzept der Klimarelevanz wird vorgestellt und auf die Analyse der Sektoren Landwirtschaft und Ernährung angewendet. Einige Ergebnisse werden gezeigt, die u.a. die systematische Unterschätzung von Anteilen der Landwirtschaft an der Klimabeeinflussung belegen. Es wird auch gezeigt, wie mit der Inblicknahme des Gesamtsystems der Aspekt der Landnutzung einbezogen werden kann und wie Veränderungen in den Versorgungssystemen sich dort bemerkbar machen