Ecosystem service trade-offs and stakeholder claims - a meso-scale study from a Madagascar biodiversity hotspot

The north-eastern escarpment of Madagascar has been labelled a global biodiversity hotspot due to its extremely high rates of endemic species which are heavily threatened by accelerated deforestation rates and landscape change. The traditional practice of shifting cultivation or "tavy" used by the majority of land users in this area to produce subsistence rice is commonly blamed for these threats. A wide range of stakeholders ranging from conservation to development agencies, and from the private to the public sector has therefore been involved in trying to find solutions to protect the remaining forest fragments and to increase agricultural production. Consequently, provisioning, regulating and socio-cultural services of this forest-mosaic landscape are fundamentally altered leading to trade-offs between them and consequently new winners and losers amongst the stakeholders at different scales. However, despite a growing amount of evidence from case studies analysing local changes, the regional dynamics of the landscape and their contribution to such trade-offs remain poorely understood. This study therefore aims at using generalised landscape units as a base for the assessment of multi-level stakeholder claims on ecosystem services to inform negotiation, planning and decision making at a meso-scale. The presented study applies a mixed-method approach combining remote sensing, GIS and socio-economic methods to reveal current landscape dynamics, their change over time and the corresponding ecosystem service trade-offs induced by diverse stakeholder claims on the regional level. In a first step a new regional land cover classification for three points in time (1995, 2005 and 2011) was conducted including agricultural classes characteristic for shifting cultivation systems. Secondly, a novel GIS approach, termed “landscape mosaics approach” originally developed to assess dynamics of shifting cultivation landscapes in Laos was applied. Through this approach generalised landscape mosaics were generated allowing for a better understanding of changes in land use intensities instead of land cover. As a next step we will try to use these landscape units as proxies to map provisioning and regulating ecosystem services throughout the region. Through the overlay with other regional background data such as accessibility and population density and information from a region-wide stakeholder analysis, multiscale trade-offs between different services will be highlighted. The trade-offs observed on the regional scale will then be validated through a socio-economic ground-truthing within selected sites at the local scale. We propose that such meso-scale knowledge is required by all stakeholders involved in decision making towards sustainable development of north-eastern Madagascar.

The Dialectical Relationship of Preferential and Multilateral Trade Agreements

Preferentialism and multilateralism are not two independent and succinct avenues in the pur-suit of market access and regulatory policies. They historically build upon each other in a dialectical process, closely related and linked through regulatory bridges and references. They influence and direct each other in various ways. The paper mainly focuses on the evolution of international protection of intellectual property rights and of services. The multilateral regulation of the TRIPS and others derive from years of regulatory experience and high numbers of preferential agreements across the globe. The GATS and others, on the other hand, have entered the pluri- or multilateral stage early. Once regulation has reached the mul-tilateral stage, preferentialism focuses on WTO-plus and -extra commitments. Both areas, however, show close interaction. The principle of MFN ensures that multilateralism and preferentialism do not evolve independently from each other. It produces significant spill-over effects of preferential agreements. Such effects and the need to develop uniform and coherent regulatory standards have led in parallel to a number of preferential, plurilateral and multilateral regulatory initiatives. We submit that the process will eventually encourage the return to multilateralism and negotiations in international fora, in particular the WTO while traditional market access may stay with preferential relations among Nations. Such burden-sharing between different regulatory fora should be reflected in future WTO rules providing the overall backbone of the system.

A Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement: Implications for Swiss Agriculture

To say that regionalism is gaining momentum has become an understatement. To mourn the lack of progress in multilateral trade rule-making is a commonplace in the discourse of politicians regretting the WTO negotiation standstill, and of “know-what-to-do” academics. The real problem is the uneven level-playing field resulting from increasing differences of rules and obligations. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP) is a very ambitious project. WTI studies in 2014 have shown that the implications for Switzerland could be enormous. But even the combined market power of the two TTIP participants – the EU and the USA – will not level the playing field impairing the regulatory framework, and the market access barriers for trade in agriculture. Such differences will remain in three areas which, incidentally, are also vital for a global response to the food security challenge to feed 9 billion people before the year 2050: market access, non-tariff barriers, and trade-distorting domestic support programmes. This means that without multilateral progress the TTIP and other so-called mega-regionals, if successfully concluded, will exacerbate rather than lessen trade distortions. While this makes farmers in rich countries safer from competition, competitive production in all countries will be hampered. Consequently, and notwithstanding the many affirmations to the contrary, farm policies worldwide will continue to only address farmer security without increasing global food security. What are the implications of the TTIP for Swiss agriculture? This article, commissioned by Waseda University in Tokyo, finds that the failure to achieve further reforms – including a number of areas where earlier reforms have been reversed – is presenting Switzerland and Swiss agriculture with a terrible dilemma in the eventuality of a successful conclusion of the TTIP. If Swiss farm production is to survive for more than another generation, continuous reform efforts are required, and over-reliance on the traditional instruments of border protection and product support is to be avoided. Without a substantial TTIP obliging Switzerland to follow suit, autonomous reforms will remain extremely fragile.

Carbon dioxide emissions and international trade at the turn of the millennium

We present a new dataset of geographical production-, final (embodied) production-, and consumption-based carbon dioxide emission inventories, covering 78 regions and 55 sectors from 1997 to 2011. We extend previous work both in terms of time span and in bridging from geographical to embodied production and, ultimately, to consumption. We analyse the recent evolution of emissions, the development of carbon efficiency of the global economy, and the role of international trade. As the distribution of responsibility for emissions across countries is key to the adoption and implementation of international environmental agreements and regulations, the final production- and consumption-based inventories developed here provide a valuable extension to more traditional geographical production-based criteria.

Trade and Business Cycle Correlations in Asia-Pacific

Recent empirical studies challenge the traditional theory of optimum currency areas by arguing that a monetary union enhances trade and business cycle co-movements among its member countries sufficiently as to obviate the need for national monetary policy. This paper examines the empirical relationship between trade and business cycle correlations among thirteen Asia-Pacific countries, paying particular attention to the structural characteristics of their economies and other issues not explored fully in the literature. According to our result, although trade is relevant to the business cycles of individual countries, the main determinant of their international correlations is not the geographical structure of their trade but what they produce and export --more specifically the extent to which their output and exports are concentrated on electronic products.

Chapter 1 Market Access and Intermediate Goods Trade

This paper examines a distinctive feature of intermediate goods trade which the traditional gravity equation fails to capture, i.e., intermediate goods trade is positively related not only to the importing country's demand for finished goods but also to its neighbors' demand for finished goods. We regress a gravity equation for finished goods trade in the first step. Then, introducing the importing country's access to the total demand for finished goods which is calculated by using the estimates in the first step, we regress our gravity equation for trade in intermediate goods. Our regression results confirm such a feature of intermediate goods trade. Using the results of the regression, we simulate how the rise of US consumers' demand for finished goods affects the total imports and exports of intermediate goods in each country.

Growth, convergence and trade: The services sector in India’s states

India’s success story in services is well documented at the national level, but similar literature does not exist for India’s states. In this paper, we bridge this gap in research by looking at India’s services growth at the sub-national level and in doing so, also challenge existing literature by arguing that this growth has positive implications for income distribution. We find that even as per capita income is not converging across India’s states, per capita services are; evidence is provided both in terms of traditional measures of sigma- and beta-convergence and more recent panel unit root tests. A more disaggregated analysis of services sectors reveals convergence in railways, public administration and financial services. Finally, a Jensen & Kletzer (2005) approach to determining tradability provides evidence of most services being “traded” across India’s states, suggesting the role of such trade in the services growth and convergence story.

Optimising profitability and environmental trade-offs in managing cropping systems using differential evolution

Whilst traditional optimisation techniques based on mathematical programming techniques are in common use, they suffer from their inability to explore the complexity of decision problems addressed using agricultural system models. In these models, the full decision space is usually very large while the solution space is characterized by many local optima. Methods to search such large decision spaces rely on effective sampling of the problem domain. Nevertheless, problem reduction based on insight into agronomic relations and farming practice is necessary to safeguard computational feasibility. Here, we present a global search approach based on an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA). We introduce a multi-objective evaluation technique within this EA framework, linking the optimisation procedure to the APSIM cropping systems model. The approach addresses the issue of system management when faced with a trade-off between economic and ecological consequences.

Modelling trade offs between public and private conservation policies

To reduce global biodiversity loss, there is an urgent need to determine the most efficient allocation of conservation resources. Recently, there has been a growing trend for many governments to supplement public ownership and management of reserves with incentive programs for conservation on private land. This raises important questions, such as the extent to which private land conservation can improve conservation outcomes, and how it should be mixed with more traditional public land conservation. We address these questions, using a general framework for modelling environmental policies and a case study examining the conservation of endangered native grasslands to the west of Melbourne, Australia. Specifically, we examine three policies that involve i) spending all resources on creating public conservation areas; ii) spending all resources on an ongoing incentive program where private landholders are paid to manage vegetation on their property with 5-year contracts; and iii) splitting resources between these two approaches. The performance of each strategy is quantified with a vegetation condition change model that predicts future changes in grassland quality. Of the policies tested, no one policy was always best and policy performance depended on the objectives of those enacting the policy. Although policies to promote conservation on private land are proposed and implemented in many areas, they are rarely evaluated in terms of their ecological consequences. This work demonstrates a general method for evaluating environmental policies and highlights the utility of a model which combines ecological and socioeconomic processes.

New technology, industrial relations and white collar trade unions : the case of the National and Local Government Officers Association

The decade since 1979 has seen the most rapid introduction of microelectronic technology in the workplace. In particular, the scope offered for the application of this new technology to the area of white collar work has meant that it is a sector where trade unions have been confronted with major challenges. However the application of this technology has also provided trade unions with opportunities for exerting influence to reshape traditional attitudes to both industrial relations and the nature of work. Recent academic research on the trade union response to the introduction of new technology at the workplace suggests that, despite the resources and apparent sophistication of modern trade unions, they have not in general been able to take advantage of the opportunities offered during this period of radical technological change,the argument being that this is due both to structural weaknesses and the inappropriateness of the system of collective bargaining where new technology issues are concerned. Despite the significance of the Public Sector in employment terms, research into the response of public sector white collar trade unions to technological change has been fairly limited. This thesis sets out the approach of the National and Local Government Officers Association (NALGO), the largest solely white collar union in the world with over three quarters of a million members employed in a wide range of public service industries. The thesis examines NALGO's response at national level and, through detailed case studies, at local level in respect of Local Government and Water Industry NALGO members. The response is then evaluated and conclusions drawn in terms of a framework based upon an assessment of the key factors relevant in judging the ability of NALGO to respond effectively to the challenges brought about by the technological revolution of the last ten years.

Trade union policy and new technology: the Civil and Public Services Association

The introduction of a micro-electronic based technology to the workplace has had a far reaching and widespread effect on the numbers and content of jobs. The importance of the implications of new technology were recognised by the trade unions, leading to a plethora of advice and literature in the late 70s and early 80s, notably the TUC 'Technology and Employment ' report. However, studies into the union response have consistently found an overall lack of influence by unions in the introduction of technology. Whilst the advent of new technology has coincided with an industrial relations climate of unprecedented hostility to union activity in the post-war period, there are structural weaknesses in unions in coming to terms with the process of technological change. In particular was the identification of a lack of suitable technological expertise. Addressing itself to this perceived weakness of the union response, this thesis is the outcome of a collaborative project between a national union and an academic institution. The thesis is based on detailed case studies concerning technology bargaining in the Civil Service and the response of the Civil and Public Services Associations (CPSA), the union that represents lower grade white collar civil servants. It is demonstrated that the application of expertise to union negotiators is insufficient on its own to extend union influence and that for unions to effectively come to terms with technology and influence its development requires a re-assessment across all spheres of union activity. It is suggested that this has repercussions for not only the internal organisation and quality of union policy formation and the extent, form and nature of collective bargaining with employer representatives, but also in the relationship with consumer and interest groups outside the traditional collective bargaining forum. Three policy options are developed in the thesis with the 'adversarial' and 'co~operative' options representing the more traditional reactive and passive forms of involvement. These are contrasted with an 'independent participative' form of involvement which was a 'pro-active' policy option and utilised the expertise of the Author in the CPSA's response to technological change.

Political parties and trade unions in the post-communist Poland:class politics that have never a chance to happen

Trade unions in Poland have not built the stable and long-term relations with political parties as are observed in Western democracies. By analysing the historical and symbolic background of the transformation to a democratic civil society and free market economy, political preferences of working class, trade union membership rates, and public opinion polls, we argue that, in case of Poland, the initial links between political parties and trade unions weakened over time. Polish trade unions never had a chance to become a long-term intermediary between society and political parties, making the Polish case study a double exception from the traditional models.

Exchange-Trade Funds Evaluation using Performance Measures Distribution

In this study we propose the use of the performance measure distribution rather than its punctual value to rank hedge funds. Generalized Sharpe Ratio and other similar measures that take into account the higher-order moments of portfolio return distributions are commonly used to evaluate hedge funds performance. The literature in this field has reported non-significant difference in ranking between performance measures that take, and those that do not take, into account higher moments of distribution. Our approach provides a much more powerful manner to differentiate between hedge funds performance. We use a non-semiparametric density based on Gram-Charlier expansions to forecast the conditional distribution of hedge fund returns and its corresponding performance measure distribution. Through a forecasting exercise we show the advantages of our technique in relation to using the more traditional punctual performance measures.

From traditional resource to global commodities: a comparison of Rhodiola species using NMR spectroscopy - metabolomics and HPTLC

The fast developing international trade of products based on traditional knowledge and their value chains has become an important aspect of the ethnopharmacological debate. The structure and diversity of value chains and their impact on the phytochemical composition of herbal medicinal products has been overlooked in the debate about quality problems in transnational trade. Different government policies and regulations governing trade in herbal medicinal products impact on such value chains. Medicinal Rhodiola species, including Rhodiola rosea L. and Rhodiola crenulata (Hook.f. & Thomson) H.Ohba, have been used widely in Europe and Asia as traditional herbal medicines with numerous claims for their therapeutic effects. Faced with resource depletion and environment destruction, R. rosea and R. crenulata are becoming endangered, making them more economically valuable to collectors and middlemen, and also increasing the risk of adulteration and low quality. We compare the phytochemical differences among Rhodiola raw materials available on the market to provide a practical method for Rhodiola authentication and the detection of potential adulterant compounds. Samples were collected from Europe and Asia and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy coupled with multivariate analysis software and high performance thin layer chromatography techniques were used to analyse the samples. A method was developed to quantify the amount of adulterant species contained within mixtures. We compared the phytochemical composition of collected Rhodiola samples to authenticated samples. Rosavin and rosarin were mainly present in R. rosea whereas crenulatin was only present in R. crenulata. 30% of the Rhodiola samples purchased from the Chinese market were adulterated by other Rhodiola spp. Moreover, 7 % of the raw-material samples were not labelled satifactorily. The utilisation of both 1H-NMR and HPTLC methods provided an integrated analysis of the phytochemical differences and novel identification method for R. rosea and R. crenulata. Using 1H-NMR spectroscopy it was possible to quantify the presence of R. crenulata in admixtures with R. rosea. This quantitative technique could be used in the future to assess a variety of herbal drugs and products. This project also highlights the need to further study the links between producers and consumers in national and trans-national trade.

Traditional Korean islanders encounters with the British navy in the 1880s: The Port Hamilton Affair of 1885-1887

This article deals with the encounters between a traditional Korean rural and island population and western military forces when the British navy occupied Geomundo, an archipelago known to them as Port Hamilton, for 22 months between 1885 and 1887. The paper first outlines the sometimes painful process of East Asian countries being opened up to trade and outside influences in the 19th century, a process sometimes urged upon them by naval weapons in this era of gunboat diplomacy. This provides the setting for the Port Hamilton Affair itself when in preparation for possible war with Russia, a British naval squadron steamed into Port Hamilton and took it without reference to the local people or their national government. After brief reference to the political consequences of this action, the focus is then on what the records from the occupation and earlier investigations by the British, who had long coveted the islands’ strategic harbour, reveal about the life of the islanders. The article considers both their traditional life, from a time rather before western travel accounts were written about the Korean mainland, and how the islanders fared under the British.