The EU’s Medium-term Financial Perspective and Turkey’s Potential Slice of the Cake

The issue of Turkey’s membership in the EU remains controversial, and the arguments for and against are not only economic. Nevertheless, the potential economic impact of Turkish membership does play an important role. How much financial support is Turkey presently receiving under existing pre-accession programmes and what changes could be expected in the case of full membership?     

Measures for Sustainable Investment Decisions and Business Strategy – A Triple Bottom Line Approach

Traditionally, most investors have only taken economic variables (profitability and risk) into account when making investment decisions. In this paper we propose two measures, the Relative Sustainable Performance Measure (RSPM) and the Measure of Commitment‐failure (MC), that permit sustainable decision making, which takes environmental and social variables into consideration in addition to the economic variables, for both investors and companies themselves. This makes a triple bottom line (TBL) approach to investment decision making possible. We apply our measures to the worldwide chemical sector and validate them. Moreover, we propose a 2D graphical sustainability analysis, which is simple and easy for investors to understand when making investment decisions and can be used if they are concerned about environmental and social matters. It also enables companies to analyse their sustainability performance and adapt their business plans accordingly. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

The social construction of “shared growth”: Zambia Sugar and the uneven terrain of social benefit

Recent years have witnessed a growing trend in agricultural investment and large‐scale farmland acquisition in the Global South and a rapid expansion of scholarship and public debate over the nature, consequences, and desirability of these trends. The polarization of this debate into “win/lose” narratives raises the question of whether, and under what conditions, the logic of capital accumulation driving farmland acquisition and investment can engender broad‐based social benefits akin to “shared growth.” This paper sheds light on this question through a detailed look at the recent expansion of Zambia Sugar's Nakambala Estate in Mazabuka, Zambia. We explore outcomes linked to two of the most prominent pathways through which social benefits are said to accrue: smallholder incorporation and employment. Findings demonstrate the unevenness of outcomes linked to both pathways, with the concrete benefits both claimed and observed through some measures quickly eroding under the weight of alternative performance metrics. The unevenness produced by the intensification of capitalist relations is manifested not just between those differentially positioned with respect to the incoming investment (“outgrower,” “employee,” and “land loser”) but within each of those conditions. This ambiguity opens spaces for competing representations of the promises and pitfalls of these processes, while highlighting the shaky ground on which shared growth and inclusive business agendas stand.     

Differences Between Classical and Bayesian Estimates for Mixed Logit Models: A Replication Study

The mixed logit model is widely used in applied econometrics. Researchers typically rely on the free choice between the classical and Bayesian estimation approach. However, empirical evidence of the similarity of their parameter estimates is sparse. The presumed similarity is mainly based on one empirical study that analyzes a single dataset (Huber J, Train KE. 2001. On the similarity of classical and Bayesian estimates of individual mean partworths. Marketing Letters 12 (3): 259–269). Our replication study offers a generalization of their results by comparing classical and Bayesian parameter estimates from six additional datasets and specifically for panel versus cross‐sectional data. In general, our results suggest that the two methods provide similar results, with less similarity for cross‐sectional data than for panel data. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The economic situation in the Republic of Belarus

Summary For some years now the Republic of Belarus has pursued an economic policy strategy that appears to exert a certain attraction on Russian policy. The Belarusan concept is based, at heart, on the attempt to raise output quickly with the help of direct grants to enterprises, financed by the central bank. This is associated with extremely rapid growth of the money supply. Central to the negative economic trend in Belarus is the substantial overvaluation of the official exchange rate. In an attempt to counter the numerous negative repercussions of this policy, the regime is being forced to adopt ever more wide-ranging administrative interventions in economic processes. The economic outcome is such, however, that recently even President Lukashenko posed the rhetorical question ‘why is our people getting poorer from month to month..., when our industry and agriculture are developing so dynamically?’³⁰ The political leadership sees the answer in the financial crisis in Russia and a poor harvest in Belarus due to unfavourable weather conditions. Its own economic policy concept is still considered to be correct, indeed is even held up as a model for Russia. However, in the course of 1998 there was an unmistakable decline in the official rates of the GDP growth and of its aggregates. Inflation soared to more than 180%. The negative economic trend is expected to deteriorate further in 1999; GDP is forecast to contract by the order of 5%, and inflation will remain in triple figures.     

Problem-oriented modeling in industrial technology: The steel industry

The development of up-to-date industrial technology and improving efficiency can be achieved by operational control and management and by research and design. These three problems and the corresponding subproblems can be formulated, investigated, and solved on the basis of problem-oriented mathematical models.The general approach to the development of the problem-oriented models has several particular features that depend on the problems to be solved—knowledge and data about the systems to be modeled, demand for model accuracy, type of model solution (off-line or on-line), computer type, and so on.The results of implementing problem-oriented models to improve the efficiency of industrial technology is considered for the case of steelmaking in basic oxygen furnaces (BOF), which is the most widely used technology in the world.The problems that were formulated, the approaches to the development of the mathematical models, and the processes that occur in BOF technology are typical for other different kinds of industrial technology, such as chemicals, the cement industry, atomic reactors, and the glass industry.     

Local financial benefits of rain forests: comparative evidence from Amerindian societies in Bolivia and Honduras

Researchers generally express the local value of tropical rain forests in dollars/ha/year. The approach is problematic because it produces low values to local users, underestimating the importance of the forest expressed as a share of household consumption or earnings. Here we contribute to valuation studies of rain forests by estimating the financial importance of the forest measured in three ways: (1) the contribution of forests to annual household consumption and (2) earnings; and (3) the value of a hectare of rain forest to villagers measured through the biological goods consumed and sold. We collected panel data on consumption and earnings from 81 households in four villages of two Amerindian societies in two nations (Tsimane’, Bolivia; Tawahka, Honduras). Analyses suggest: (1) forests account for a large share of household consumption (median 38.5%; range 14.65–53.11%); (2) forests contribute more to household consumption than to household earnings (median 22.69%; range 16.56–44.81%); (3) the relative contribution of forests to household consumption and earnings falls among villages closer to towns; and (4) the range of values/year of rain forest/ha is US$7.10–9.70 using 1999 dollars or US$18.46–46.56 using purchasing power parity indexes, below previous estimates. Results show much variation in forest values; valuation methods and stakeholder perspectives affect the variation. Given the variation, a useful strategy to promote forest conservation would transfer income to villagers to compensate them for non-local forest values.