Inherently safer plants: An update

Instead of adding on protective equipment to control hazards, in an inherently safer plant we avoid them by using less of the hazardous material. Another option is to implement safer alternatives. Though the chemical industry has been slow to adopt such designs there has been some progress.     

An assessment of the economic and environmental potential of biomass production in an agricultural region

The establishment of deep-rooted perennial species and their processing for biomass-based products such as renewable energy can have benefits for both local and global scale environmental objectives. In this study, we assess the potential economic viability of biomass production in the South Australian River Murray Corridor and quantify the resultant benefits for local and global scale environmental objectives. We model the spatial distribution of economically viable biomass production in a Geographic Information System and quantify the model sensitivity and uncertainty using Monte Carlo analysis. The total potentially viable area for biomass production under the Most Likely Scenario is 360,728 ha (57.7% of the dryland agricultural area), producing over 3 million tonnes of green biomass per annum, with a total Net Present Value over 100 years of A$ 88 million. The salinity in the River Murray could be reduced by 2.65 EC (μS/cm) over a 100-year timeframe, and over 96,000 ha of land with high wind erosion potential could be stabilised over a much shorter period. With sufficient generating capacity, our Most Likely Scenario suggests that economically viable biomass production could reduce carbon emissions by over 1.7 million tonnes per annum through the production of renewable energy and a reduced reliance on coal-based electricity generation. Our analyses suggest that biomass production is a potentially viable alternative agricultural system that can have substantial local scale environmental benefits with complimentary global scale benefits for climate change mitigation.     

Ethnic minority business and the employment of illegal immigrants

Based on detailed case histories of South Asian workers and their co-ethnic employers in the West Midlands clothing and catering industries, this paper examines the use of illegal immigrant labour in small ethnic minority firms and attempts to tease out its implications for the migrants themselves, their employers and the broader national interest. To establish a proper context, we begin with a review of the recent literature on the structural changes – principally the confluence of globalization and post-industrialism – which have generated a seemingly unstoppable flow of labour migration; and the official state policies that have forced much of it underground. Our own case histories are seen as one of countless local expressions of this clash between economic and political imperatives, a clash which effectively criminalizes employers and workers for providing a positive economic and social contribution to the wider good. In the present case, it is only by employing immigrant labour that struggling entrepreneurs can survive in hyper-competitive sectors of the economy and the stark choice is between official tolerance of law-breaking or driving many of these enterprises to the wall.     

Pricing Options under Generalized GARCH and Stochastic Volatility Processes

In this paper, we develop an efficient lattice algorithm to price European and American options under discrete time GARCH processes. We show that this algorithm is easily extended to price options under generalized GARCH processes, with many of the existing stochastic volatility bivariate diffusion models appearing as limiting cases. We establish one unifying algorithm that can price options under almost all existing GARCH specifications as well as under a large family of bivariate diffusions in which volatility follows its own, perhaps correlated, process.