Art festival attendance: Who attends and why with implications on developing future festival attractiveness

Art festivals are an increasing part of a destination's event portfolio, asserted by destination marketing and management agencies to hopefully promote community engagement including attracting tourism, trade, and talent to the destination. With art festivals a common annual event feature at destinations, the competition for festival participation has increased, creating a greater need to isolate those festival attributes that are specifically appealing to targeted visitor segments. Examining participant profile and motives to attend the publically funded annually recurring Macau Arts Festival (MAF), the findings of this case study showed mostly community involvement with participants being mainly well educated, middle-aged, and female. While an aim of the festival, international participation in the festival was limited. A factor analysis on motives to attend the festival revealed that while there was common agreement with previous literature on reasons to attend, Macau's cultural background provided increased opportunity for the MAF to differentiate the event. Marketing implications also suggested investigating a communication strategy that could differ between attracting local and international audiences. With a significant cost to public finances, greater scrutiny on the appeal of the festival to specific local and international audiences was recommended to better present the cost to benefit argument for hosting.     

Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

ABSTRACT

Founded on a call to place climate change adaptation and climate risk management at the heart of contemporary development practice, the World Bank’s Africa Climate Business Plan presents an ambitious agenda for coordinating $19bn of loans, grants and investment over the coming decade. The centrepiece of this recasting of development thinking is the notion of resilience, which ties together the various activities proposed under the Plan. Resilience must respectively be strengthened, empowered and enabled in order for African countries to withstand climate change impacts. In this paper we subject this new climate-resilient development discourse to critical scrutiny. Using the theoretical lens of post-politics, we caution how the ill-defined category of resilience is deployed to reinforce a profoundly depoliticising agenda in which climate change is posited as an external threat to an otherwise seamless narrative of African advancement. In so doing, we illustrate how the Bank obscures the contested histories of African development and uses the discourse of climate-resilient development to perpetuate its neoliberal agenda within the continent.     

The dynamics of textile firm responses to the restriction of endocrine disrupting surfactants: a Vietnam case study

Abstract

Since textile industry has been claimed to endanger the environment and human health, the insight of textile firm behavior regarding chemical use and discharge is vital for designing environmental risk management strategies. This study aimed to explore the dynamics of responses to the restriction of nonylphenol (NP) and its ethoxylates (NPEOs) among the Vietnamese textile manufacturers from the perspectives of attitude and the perceptions of adaptabilities, risks, benefits, and barriers. The chemicals are used as surfactants and are known to be responsible for endocrine disrupting effects. In-depth interviews were conducted with technical specialists from four textile firms and one chemical supplier. Regulatory and market situations with regards to the chemicals were also assessed. The findings revealed varied responses to chemical elimination where perceived technical risk, financial risk, benefits, and barriers played different roles in driving a certain action. The attitude towards chemical restriction was shaped by the trade-off between perceptions of financial risk and benefits and was moderated by market strategy. Efforts, such as enhanced washing or reductions in the dose of NP/NPEOs, imply the potency of continuous discharge of these chemicals into the environment, suggesting critical investigations on NP/NPEOs removal to prioritize actions for balancing between economic growth and environmental protection. Poor access to new policies and technological and chemical innovations was the most important barrier among private firms, highlighting the roles of non-governmental textile and garment industrial/trade associations in enhancing their members’ informative capacity. The study reflects the significance of incorporation of firm behavior research into environmental risk management practice.     

Industrial Effects of European Community Integration

This paper examines the potential effects of European Community (EC) integration. It develops a number of assumptions representing the EC directives, and introduces them in the INFORUM system of models, which links inter-industry dynamic macro-economic models of 10 countries. These assumptions include the deregulation of financial services, abolition of border controls, increased competition, economies of scale and opening up of government procurement. According to the system results, the European economies will experience higher economic growth and higher per capita income, with lower prices and higher labor productivity. It is expected that the rest of the world economies will not be affected significantly by the European integration. Finally, the integration process will generate diverse results across sectors in different countries.     

聚焦库区:低收入群体医疗保障的缺失问题

三峡库区因其特殊的地缘位置和举世瞩目的三峡工程而备受关注。本文通过对重庆三峡库区低收入群体医疗保障问题进行调查,结果显示重庆库区低收入群体的医疗保障严重缺失,由此陷入了“因病致贫、因贫生病”的恶性循环。对此,笔者有针对性地提出了对策建议。     

Europe '92. Decentralizing environmental policy in the single market

The creation of the EC's internal market by the end of 1992 appears to necessitate a harmonization of environmental policies in the European Community. Against this background, the paper analyzes the options for decentralizing environmental policy in Europe and indicates some limitations of this approach.It is shown that, in the case of stationary sources, a harmonization is not required whereas, in the case of international spillovers and global environmental systems, a decentralization of policies is possible if countries can agree on international diffusion norms or national emission quantities, respectively. A harmonization seems to be unavoidable if product norms have to be applied, e.g. in the case of pollutants in consumption goods. Generally, however, price instruments should be used wherever possible, since they allow for a regional differentiation of environmental qualities without segmenting European markets.     

Modelling short- and long-term effects in the aggregate demand for soft drinks

A dynamic regression model for non-durable commodity demand is specified based on the additive unobserved components seasonal model with causal variables. The seasonal component which includes retailer stock effects is modelled as a seasonal ARMA process with fixed temperature effects. The non-seasonal component incorporates both short-run consumer responses and long-run adaptation to steady-state growth paths. Aggregation effects on per capita demand caused by the increase of new consumers as real income grows are investigated and the resulting growth trends accounted for. It is shown that neglecting these trends in the long-run adaptation process is likely to produce biased predictions and misleading estimates of crucial response parameters.     

基于“新都市主义”的混合社区:城市郊区化的一个新思路

在中国诸多大中城市郊区化进程中,一个非常显著的现象是:高档和低档住宅的二元分立,从而破坏了人们居住空间的复合性及和谐性.造成这一现象的根本原因并非人们的"阶层"意识,而是城市郊区化的潜在思路:仅仅关照人们的居住,却没有关照人们的生活,人们的完整生活在郊区化过程中被割裂了.解决这一问题的出路是构建混合式社区,而其理论基础是新都市主义.