Pushing the boundaries of the social: private agri-food standards and the governance of Fair Trade in European public procurement

The article explores how fair trade and associated private agri-food standards are incorporated into public procurement in Europe. Procurement law is underpinned by principles of equity, non-discrimination and transparency; one consequence is that legal obstacles exist to fair trade being privileged within procurement practice. These obstacles have pragmatic dimensions, concerning whether and how procurement can be used to fulfil wider social policy objectives or to incorporate private standards; they also bring to the fore underlying issues of value. Taking an agency-based approach and incorporating the concept of governability, empirical evidence demonstrates the role played by different actors in negotiating fair trade’s passage into procurement through pre-empting and managing legal risk. This process exposes contestations that arise when contrasting values come together within sustainable procurement. This examination of fair trade in public procurement helps reveal how practices and knowledge on ethical consumption enter into a new governance arena within the global agri-food system.

Exempt treatment of financial intermediation services under a value-added tax: an assessment of alternatives

Most countries with a value-added tax (VAT) exempt financial intermediation services from the tax. While exemption is generally perceived to be undesirable, it is also widely regarded as unavoidable because of technical difficulties in applying VAT to these services. This article reviews the standard rationale for exempt treatment and then considers the relative merits of two recent challenges raised in the tax literature. The first challenge involves the application of cash flow taxation to financial intermediation services in a manner that is consistent with an invoice/credit VAT (which is the dominant form). The second challenge proposes a comprehensive system of zero-rating of financial intermediation services, which is supported by a characterization of the household consumption of such services as non-taxable. The author argues that each of these alternatives to an exemption system suffers from both theoretical and practical implementation difficulties that make maintenance of exempt treatment the preferred approach, at least in the short term. There is, however, a simpler alternative to these fundamental reform options, involving modification of just one aspect of an exemption system to relieve some of its more problematic aspects. Many of the interpretative problems and associated inefficiencies that plague an exemption system arise from the need to distinguish between taxable and exempt financial services. The author argues that these difficulties can be eliminated, to a large extent, by basing the distinction on the form of prices. In support of this approach, he points out that it is consistent with the underlying reasons for the application of exempt treatment. The author considers a number of other possible modifications, but these are either rejected outright or viewed with a healthy skepticism. For example, the author is critical of the apparent rationale for the application of cash flow taxation to property and casualty insurers. He also rejects proposals that accept some looseness in the formulaic allocation by financial intermediaries of the costs of business inputs between exempt and taxable services for input credit purposes. In his view, an explicit reliance on pricing structures to draw the boundary between exempt and taxable services is preferable to the provision of relief for blocked input tax credits of financial intermediaries. Finally, the author is skeptical of the case for a policy response intended to address the tax bias under an exemption system for financial intermediaries to insource supplies.

An online environment for value added learning : more than you bargained for

Online web-based technologies are increasingly being used in educational and professional contexts to create an effective environment for teaching or professional learning. A number of studies have explored the intersections between on and off line teaching and learning, participants’ perceptions, and claims of connectedness and community fostered by online sites (Jones, 1998; Rheingold, 1995; Soderstrom, 2006). This paper will outline the development, functionality and usefulness of the online environment (Drupal) installed and used to support the Australian Government Summer School for Teachers of English. It includes an analysis of the virtual environment (social software) established for the Summer School. The research project aimed to determine what aspects of an online environment supported the success of this national professional development activity that incorporated physically present, and online communication, connection, and collaboration between 200 teachers over a period of seven months. In this paper the site manager explains their role and perspective of the potential of social software for learning.

Value-added role of internal audit : an Ethiopian case study

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to draw inferences – from the results of an Ethiopian public sector corporation (for-profit) case study – on how the attributes of a value-adding internal audit department would vary among organisations.

Design/methodology/approach – The case study strategy is employed. The internal audit function of a public sector corporation was examined using an analytical framework derived from the literature. Research evidence was gathered distributing questionnaires to managers and internal auditors, conducting a semi-structured interview with the internal audit department manager, and reviewing documents.

Findings – The results highlight that traditional/compliance audit is dominant in the organisation studied as contrasted with value-added auditing. The paper concludes that goals and strategies pursued and the level of risk faced by organisations to which internal audit provides service, appear to shape the attributes of a value-adding internal audit department. The study also demonstrates that the quality of strategic planning for, and marketing of, internal audit would influence the extent to which an appropriate value-added profile is attained in a particular context.

Research limitations/implications – Since a single unit of analysis is examined, universal generalisability of the findings cannot be claimed. Also, the research design assumed that the unit of analysis investigated falls within the scope of internal audit departments considered in the literature that served as a basis to develop the analytical framework and data collection instruments.

Originality/value – The paper is expected to inspire conclusive follow-on research on the role of internal audit in Ethiopia, or other countries with similar settings.

International trade in Latina America and the Caribbean 2009: crisis and recovery

Includes bibliography

SOA-Based Model for Value-Added ITS Services Delivery

Integration is currently a key factor in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), especially because of the ever increasing service demands originating from the ITS industry and ITS users. The current ITS landscape is made up of multiple technologies that are tightly coupled, and its interoperability is extremely low, which limits ITS services generation. Given this fact, novel information technologies (IT) based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm have begun to introduce new ways to address this problem. The SOA paradigm allows the construction of loosely coupled distributed systems that can help to integrate the heterogeneous systems that are part of ITS. In this paper, we focus on developing an SOA-based model for integrating information technologies (IT) into ITS to achieve ITS service delivery. To develop our model, the ITS technologies and services involved were identified, catalogued, and decoupled. In doing so, we applied our SOA-based model to integrate all of the ITS technologies and services, ranging from the lowest-level technical components, such as roadside unit as a service (RS S), to the most abstract ITS services that will be offered to ITS users (value-added services). To validate our model, a functionality case study that included all of the components of our model was designed.

Value-added tax : European experience and lessons for the United States /

Item 925

Starting a value-added agribusiness : the legal perspective /

"First Printing: January 2000."--p. [ii].

Value-added agricultural resource guide for rural development /

"First printing April 2004."--t.p. verso.

Moving toward a higher value-added economy : what is the national need for economic growth and work improvements? /

Bibliography: leaves [19-20].

Evaluating corporate performance:a critique of economic value added

There has been a revival of interest in economic techniques to measure the value of a firm through the use of economic value added as a technique for measuring such value to shareholders. This technique, based upon the concept of economic value equating to total value, is founded upon the assumptions of classical liberal economic theory. Such techniques have been subject to criticism both from the point of view of the level of adjustment to published accounts needed to make the technique work and from the point of view of the validity of such techniques in actually measuring value in a meaningful context. This paper critiques economic value added techniques as a means of calculating changes in shareholder value, contrasting such techniques with more traditional techniques of measuring value added. It uses the company Severn Trent plc as an actual example in order to evaluate and contrast the techniques in action. The paper demonstrates discrepancies between the calculated results from using economic value added analysis and those reported using conventional accounting measures. It considers the merits of the respective techniques in explaining shareholder and managerial behaviour and the problems with using such techniques in considering the wider stakeholder concept of value. It concludes that this economic value added technique has merits when compared with traditional accounting measures of performance but that it does not provide the universal panacea claimed by its proponents.

Discriminating behaviors through value added premium online grocery offering

Despite many interest in e-grocery, little has changed, over the years, in the offering that is often geared only towards low value staple products. Yet, from an e-supermarket perspective, the number of sourcing stores is increasing regularly providing an illusion of service improvement. This situation, we argue is leading e-grocery providers to forego profits as consumers need to look both at the competition online and offline to satisfy their overall regular grocery needs. Expansion of e-grocery operations could be better achieved, we argue, by serving diverse and premium priced products (e.g. organic, limited production, regional items; special occasions items and products related to health e.g. allergies, diabetes) and utilizing more efficiently modern logistic techniques. A framework is offered presenting a model including the delivery of premium products from various suppliers and providing an integrated service solution to e-grocery customers that complete traditional supermarket ranges, creating potential high value added products niches. In this context, the objective was to understand the consumer discrimination factors (ie: range of product, delivery timing, location, service quality) leading to intentions towards purchasing more items from e-grocery retailers. Data are derived from a survey of 356 respondents in Turkey’s three biggest metropolitan areas. The relationship between consumer attitudes and demographic characteristics are also analyzed. Factor and SEM analyses are used to discriminate within the sample (n=356, no of items=150). Results, future research and policy implications are discussed.

Exploring value-added benefits to enhance wider adoption of chipless RFID system

Radio-frequency identification technology (RFID) is a popular modern technology proven to deliver a range of value-added benefits to achieve system and operational efficiency, as well as cost-effectiveness. The operational characteristics of RFID outperform barcodes in many aspects. Despite its well-perceived benefits, a definite rationale for larger scale adoption is still not so promising. One of the key reasons is high implementation cost, especially the cost of tags for applications involving item-level tagging. This has resulted in the development of chipless RFID tags which cost much less than conventional chip-based tags. Despite the much lower tag cost, the uptake of chipless RFID system in the market is still not as widespread as predicted by RFID experts. This chapter explores the value-added applications of chipless RFID system to promote wider adoption. The chipless technology's technical and operational characteristics, benefits, limitations and current uses will also be examined. The merit of this chapter is to contribute fresh propositions to the promising applications of chipless RFID to increase its adoption in the industries that are currently not (or less popular in) utilising it, such as retail, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, and service sectors. © 2013, IGI Global.