Monitoring and Assessment of Desertification and Land Degradation: Knowledge Management, Institutions and Economics: White Paper of the DSD Working Group 3

The White Paper is a review of leading scientific knowledge on the role of knowledge management, institutions and economics in monitoring and assessment of land degradation and desertification. It provides key recommendations for more effective policies and actions for combating desertification both withn the UNCCD and beyond. This White Paper is the result of an international collaboration and consultation led jointly by the Association of DesertNet International and the United Nations University - Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), of the Dryland Science for Development Consortium (DSD). The findings were presented at the First UNCCD Scientific Conference held during the COP-9 in Buenos Aires, 2009.

Valuation of ecosystem goods and services. Part 2: Implications of unpredictable novel change

This is the second part of a two-part paper which offers a new approach to the valuation of ecosystem goods and services. In the first part a simple pre-industrial model was introduced to show how the interdependencies between the three subsystems, society, economy and nature, influence values, and how values change over time. In this second part the assumption of perfect foresight is dropped. I argue that due to novelty and complexity ex ante unpredictable change occurs within the three subsystems society, economy and nature. Again the simple pre-industrial model, which was introduced in part 1, serves as a simple paradigm to show how unpredictable novel change limits the possibility to derive accurate estimates of values.

Exploring intra-commonwealth goods and services trade

A background paper for the Commonwealth Secretariat by Anirudh Shingal and Mohammad Razzaque: Existing work examining the trade effect of commonwealth membership does not account for sample selection, unobserved heterogeneity and multilateral resistance in estimation, leading to biased estimates. Our analyses improve on all these fronts. Unlike earlier work, we also consider services trade and assemble a much larger sample of trading partners (242 x 242, over 1995-2010). Commonwealth membership is found to increase goods exports by 18.5-33.2% and services exports by 42.8% in our results, ceteris paribus and on average. Our analyses on the determinants of intra-commonwealth trade suggest the positive role of common language (only for goods trade) and colonial relationships as well as the negative impact of geography, thereby confirming that commonwealth member states are not natural trading partners for each other. Finally, being one of Australia, Canada or the UK is associated with 98.2% greater merchandise trade than the commonwealth average; however, a similar effect is not observed for services trade.

Exploring complementarities between goods and services trade in trade agreements

More than three decades of research on trade costs and goods trade have unveiled fundamental insights into the determinants, the nature and the consequences of goods trade agreements. A cottage literature has also evolved studying similar issues from a services trade perspective, but the two-way interaction between goods and services trade has not been explored formally. We bridge this gap by providing a formal treatment of the inter-linkages between goods and services trade. The model provides insights into how trade agreements impact goods and services trade. We also explore the impact of the complementarities of goods and services agreements on goods and services trade empirically using bilateral goods and services trade data for OECD and BRICS trading partners over 1995-2010.

A feasibility study for the provision of electronic healthcare tools and services in areas of Greece, Cyprus and Italy

Background Through this paper, we present the initial steps for the creation of an integrated platform for the provision of a series of eHealth tools and services to both citizens and travelers in isolated areas of thesoutheast Mediterranean, and on board ships travelling across it. The platform was created through an INTERREG IIIB ARCHIMED project called INTERMED. Methods The support of primary healthcare, home care and the continuous education of physicians are the three major issues that the proposed platform is trying to facilitate. The proposed system is based on state-of-the-art telemedicine systems and is able to provide the following healthcare services: i) Telecollaboration and teleconsultation services between remotely located healthcare providers, ii) telemedicine services in emergencies, iii) home telecare services for "at risk" citizens such as the elderly and patients with chronic diseases, and iv) eLearning services for the continuous training through seminars of both healthcare personnel (physicians, nurses etc) and persons supporting "at risk" citizens. These systems support data transmission over simple phone lines, internet connections, integrated services digital network/digital subscriber lines, satellite links, mobile networks (GPRS/3G), and wireless local area networks. The data corresponds, among others, to voice, vital biosignals, still medical images, video, and data used by eLearning applications. The proposed platform comprises several systems, each supporting different services. These were integrated using a common data storage and exchange scheme in order to achieve system interoperability in terms of software, language and national characteristics. Results The platform has been installed and evaluated in different rural and urban sites in Greece, Cyprus and Italy. The evaluation was mainly related to technical issues and user satisfaction. The selected sites are, among others, rural health centers, ambulances, homes of "at-risk" citizens, and a ferry. Conclusions The results proved the functionality and utilization of the platform in various rural places in Greece, Cyprus and Italy. However, further actions are needed to enable the local healthcare systems and the different population groups to be familiarized with, and use in their everyday lives, mature technological solutions for the provision of healthcare services.