While the cat’s away, will the mice play? Government-NGO relations and the politics of aid in Hungary

This chapter examines the nature of the relationship between governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the field of international development policy, and how this relationship impacts the influence that NGOs have on policy-making. It selects an emerging donor of foreign aid, Hungary, as a case study, and it argues that government-NGO relations have gone through many changes between 2003 and 2018. The government has clearly favoured certain development NGOs, while has it co-opted or confronted with others. The advocacy activities of NGOs have proved stronger when the government has had fewer resources for co-opting them. However, due to the low political salience of international development, NGOs have not been able to put significant reform pressure on the government, which was thus been able to ignore their demands. Significant reform only happened after 2014, when the government took stronger political ownership of the policy area with a view of using foreign aid to support Hungarian business interests

Ethane steam reforming over a platinum/alumina catalyst: effect of sulphur poisoning

In this study we have examined the adsorption of hydrogen sulfide and methanethiol over platinum catalysts and examined the effect of these poisons on the steam reforming of ethane. Adsorption of hydrogen sulfide was measured at 293 and 873 K. At 873 K the adsorbed state of hydrogen sulfide in the presence of hydrogen was SH rather than S, even though the Pt:S ratio was unity. The effect of 11.2 ppm hydrogen sulfide or methanethiol on the steam reforming of ethane was studied at 873 K and 20 barg. Both poisons deactivated the catalyst over a number of hours, but methanethiol was found to be more deleterious, reducing the conversion by almost an order of magnitude, possibly due to the co-deposition of sulfur and carbon. Changes in the selectivity revealed that the effect of sulfur was not uniform on the reactions occurring, with the production of methane reduced proportionally more than the other products, due to the surface sensitivity of the hydrogenolysis and methanation reactions. The water-gas shift reaction was affected to a lesser extent. No regeneration was observed when hydrogen sulfide was removed from the feedstream in agreement with adsorption studies. A slight regeneration was observed when methanethiol was removed from the feed, but this was believed to be due to the removal of carbon rather than sulfur. The overall effect of sulfur poisoning was to reduce activity and enhance hydrogen selectivity

A Chemotaxonomic Classification of the Solanaceae

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Learning rare disasters

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the performance of a macrofinance model equipped with Epstein-Zin utility, learning and disasters. The observed high price of risk in the United States economy is successfully explained, but the variances of the financial variables generated by the model are unrealistically low.4