The Governance deficit in Central Asia and the threat to China’s Central Asian energy strategy

Over the past decade, China has invested heavily in Central Asian energy sources and pipelines, on the grounds that an overland energy supply from friendly, stable authoritarian countries would be more secure than continued reliance on a maritime energy supply. This paper argues that this strategy rests on false assumptions, and that China’s investment in and growing dependence on Central Asian energy imports is not safer than the alternative. This is largely due to the various governance failures in the five Central Asian states, which create regime instability, succession risk, corruption, labour tensions and intraregional energy conflict. Furthermore, the fact that the Chinese oil and gas pipeline network traverses all five Central Asian countries means that unrest and conflict in any one country can disrupt China’s energy supply from the entire region. These threaten China’s energy supply in Central Asia by undermining the supposed foundation of China’s energy strategy in the region, namely the friendliness and stability of the local regimes and the supply security provided by overland transport routes. Furthermore, China’s economic, diplomatic and legal initiatives to mitigate these governance risks are unlikely to succeed in doing so. Not only do such initiatives presume the continued survival and pro-China attitudes of the Central Asian regimes, they also focus on alleviating the consequences of underlying governance failures in Central Asia rather than addressing the corruption, authoritarianism and other problems which constitute the principal threat to China’s energy strategy in the region

Social Upheaval, Poverty and the Latvian Demographic Crisis

Latvia has been suffering a substantial decrease in population since the early 1990s. There appears to have been little or no detailed analysis of the genesis of this decline in population. The major political event occurring at the beginning of the population decline was the rapid transitioning from socialism to capitalism. This study has revealed the causes of severe population decline to be a combination of steadily-declining birth rate, sharply rising high death rate, and mass emigration of people to wealthier European states. The cross-over of birth rate and death rate could be attributed to the tumultuous societal upheavals in the changeover from the socialistic protective-welfare system to a free-market capitalistic economic system. In particular, this traumatic event had probably affected the physical and mental health of many people to result in premature deaths from, among other things, consequential morbidity, accidents, homicides and suicides. Practicable remedies to arrest the continuing trend of precipitous decline in the population might include a) repairing the failures of the current modality of national health care, b) creating higher paying jobs in Latvia to entice prospective young emigrants to stay in Latvia, and c) repatriating of recent Latvian émigrés

Urban Gardening Realities: The Example Case Study of Portsmouth, England

This paper offers an empirical case study of the potential for urban gardening to contribute to individual food security. Food security generally encompasses both availability and accessibility. In Western Europe, availability per se has declined in importance with the development of national and international transportation networks. During the past decade, urban gardening has gained political currency as a strategy to provide greater food security at the local level. However, prevailing economic and social structures hamper the likelihood that urban gardening might offer much greater food security. Realistically, contemporary urban gardening most closely resembles a middle-class pursuit for personal enjoyment

ATM network impairment to video quality

Includes bibliographical reference

Farm-to-Fork: A Proposed Revision of the Classical Food Miles Concept

The “Food Miles” concept was introduced in the UK nearly two decades ago in order to highlight the emissions of CO2 that arise during the transportation of food grown in distant locations. The concept has subsequently energized urban citizens to re-consider the on-purpose purchase of locally grown foods. The important contribution of CO2 emitted in heated greenhouse operations has heretofore been routinely omitted from the “Food Miles” accounting protocol. In the analysis of tomato supply to Vancouver, the CO2 emission was estimated to be about 7 times higher for tomatoes grown in local greenhouses than in local open fields

The molecular evolution of surgical oncology

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88126/1/22050_ftp.pd

Managing outsourcing to develop business : goal interdependence for sharing effective business practices in China

This study proposes that when partners develop cooperative relationships with each other, rather than competitive or independent ones, they are open with their ideas and resources as they believe that they both will use this exchange for mutual benefit. The structural equation analysis of findings from 95 outsourcing partnerships in China supported the reasoning that cooperative goals foster open discussion of effective practices that in turn results in business development. Results were interpreted as providing support that cooperative interdependence is a foundation for effective interaction and learning between outsourcing partners in China and perhaps in other countries as well