El FONVIS: su trayectoria institucional en el contexto sociopolitíco venezolana de 1980 a 2004

In Venezuela wurden ab 1989 als Reaktion auf die Zahlungsunfähigkeit des Landes erste neoliberale Strukturanpassungsmaßnahmen eingeleitet. Eine daraus resultierende zusätzliche Belastung der armen Bevölkerung mündete in einen völlig unerwarteten, massiven sozialen Aufruhr, dem sogenannten caracazo von 1989. Als eine Antwort darauf gründete die Regierung in Kooperation mit der Interamerikanischen Entwicklungsbank (BID) den venezolanischen Sozialfond FONVIS, der die sozialen Auswirkungen der neoliberalen Anpassung abfedern sollte. In diesem working paper werden unter Berücksichtigung der nationalen Kontextbedingungen die historische Entwicklung und die verschiedenen Konfigurationen des FONVIS beschrieben und analysiert. Als international gefördertes Implementierungsinstrument startete der Fonds mit einer Armutsbekämpfungspolitik, die den Ausbau von sozialer Infrastruktur sowie die Unterstützung des venezolanischen Dezentralisierungsprozesses fokussierte. Mit dem Regierungsantritt von Hugo Chávez 1999 hatte der Fonds dann in einem zunehmend schwierigeren Kontext zu operieren: Durch den Aufbau von neuen zentralstaatlichen sozialpolitischen Instrumenten und regierungsnahen ad hoc-Instanzen wurde der FONVIS zunehmend von einer anfänglich wichtigen Stellung innerhalb der nationalen Sozialpolitik ins institutionelle Abseits verdrängt und schließlich Ende 2005 offiziell aufgelöst. Die hier analysierte Performance des FONVIS macht deutlich, dass in der venezolanischen Fondslandschaft sich nur schwer eine breit entfaltete Multi-Level-Governance entwickeln konnte, weil der nationalstaatliche Kontext die Fondspolitik in allen Momenten dominierte. Schließlich leitete der Staat sogar ohne weitere Absprachen weder mit der internationalen noch regionalen und lokalen Ebene die Abschaffung des Fonds ein.

The Impact of Electricity Sector Privatisation on Employees in Argentina and Brazil

This book investigates country-specific responses to privatisation by examining two of the most important Latin American examples of the 1990s, the Argentine and the Brazilian programmes, and one essential public service sector, electricity. In doing so, it aims to: identify the impact of privatisation on electricity sector employees in Argentina and Brazil during the 1990s; explore how the impact came about; and analyse the reasons for this impact. A multi-dimensional perspective provides a comparative analysis of privatisation processes, regulatory contexts, and results, striving to capture the phenomenon by combining insights from political and economic analysis.

A User-Centric Perspective on Parallel Programming with Focus on OpenMP

The process of developing software that takes advantage of multiple processors is commonly referred to as parallel programming. For various reasons, this process is much harder than the sequential case. For decades, parallel programming has been a problem for a small niche only: engineers working on parallelizing mostly numerical applications in High Performance Computing. This has changed with the advent of multi-core processors in mainstream computer architectures. Parallel programming in our days becomes a problem for a much larger group of developers. The main objective of this thesis was to find ways to make parallel programming easier for them. Different aims were identified in order to reach the objective: research the state of the art of parallel programming today, improve the education of software developers about the topic, and provide programmers with powerful abstractions to make their work easier. To reach these aims, several key steps were taken. To start with, a survey was conducted among parallel programmers to find out about the state of the art. More than 250 people participated, yielding results about the parallel programming systems and languages in use, as well as about common problems with these systems. Furthermore, a study was conducted in university classes on parallel programming. It resulted in a list of frequently made mistakes that were analyzed and used to create a programmers' checklist to avoid them in the future. For programmers' education, an online resource was setup to collect experiences and knowledge in the field of parallel programming - called the Parawiki. Another key step in this direction was the creation of the Thinking Parallel weblog, where more than 50.000 readers to date have read essays on the topic. For the third aim (powerful abstractions), it was decided to concentrate on one parallel programming system: OpenMP. Its ease of use and high level of abstraction were the most important reasons for this decision. Two different research directions were pursued. The first one resulted in a parallel library called AthenaMP. It contains so-called generic components, derived from design patterns for parallel programming. These include functionality to enhance the locks provided by OpenMP, to perform operations on large amounts of data (data-parallel programming), and to enable the implementation of irregular algorithms using task pools. AthenaMP itself serves a triple role: the components are well-documented and can be used directly in programs, it enables developers to study the source code and learn from it, and it is possible for compiler writers to use it as a testing ground for their OpenMP compilers. The second research direction was targeted at changing the OpenMP specification to make the system more powerful. The main contributions here were a proposal to enable thread-cancellation and a proposal to avoid busy waiting. Both were implemented in a research compiler, shown to be useful in example applications, and proposed to the OpenMP Language Committee.

Multi-Scale Governance of Sustainable Natural Resource Use—Challenges and Opportunities for Monitoring and Institutional Development at the National and Global Level

In a globalized economy, the use of natural resources is determined by the demand of modern production and consumption systems, and by infrastructure development. Sustainable natural resource use will require good governance and management based on sound scientific information, data and indicators. There is a rich literature on natural resource management, yet the national and global scale and macro-economic policy making has been underrepresented. We provide an overview of the scholarly literature on multi-scale governance of natural resources, focusing on the information required by relevant actors from local to global scale. Global natural resource use is largely determined by national, regional, and local policies. We observe that in recent decades, the development of public policies of natural resource use has been fostered by an “inspiration cycle” between the research, policy and statistics community, fostering social learning. Effective natural resource policies require adequate monitoring tools, in particular indicators for the use of materials, energy, land, and water as well as waste and GHG emissions of national economies. We summarize the state-of-the-art of the application of accounting methods and data sources for national material flow accounts and indicators, including territorial and product-life-cycle based approaches. We show how accounts on natural resource use can inform the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and argue that information on natural resource use, and in particular footprint indicators, will be indispensable for a consistent implementation of the SDGs. We recognize that improving the knowledge base for global natural resource use will require further institutional development including at national and international levels, for which we outline options.