Regional implementation meeting on access rights and sustainable development in the Caribbean. Workshop on enhancing access to information on climate change, natural disasters and coastal vulnerability: leaving no one behind

This document summarizes the regional implementation meeting on access rights and sustainable development in the Caribbean and the workshop on enhancing access to information on climate change, natural disasters and coastal vulnerability: leaving no one behind held in Rodney’s Bay, Saint Lucia, from 24 to 26 August 2015.

Puerto Rico: Fiscal and economic growth challenges

The objective of this paper is to assess the challenges that Puerto Rico’s economy is currently facing. Puerto Rico’s development experience in the postwar period is briefly discussed in order to understand the nature of the island’s current situation. Puerto Rico’s recent economic performance, credit position, debt situation and fiscal conditions, including its complex capital structure and recently released fiscal and economic growth plan are also analyzed.

The cost of hunger: Social and economic impact of child undernutrition in Central America and the Dominican Republic

This document presents the results derived from the analyses of the cost of undernutrition in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and the Dominican Republic. The study shows that not only are the effects reported valid for the countries of Central America and the Dominican Republic, but the resultant economic impact is also significant, representing between 1.7% and 11.4% of GDP. In this regard, productivity losses as a consequence of the higher death rate and the lower level of education account for 90% of the costs. Thus, in addition to the ethical imperative, eradicating undernutrition would yield benefits as well. Therefore, any programme that is effective in reducing the prevalence of this problem will have an impact on people's quality of life, and will also represent major savings for society. The greater the problem, the greater the challenge, but the greater the benefits as well, especially in terms of countries' production capacity.

Media Education and Brazilian Educational Policies for the Enhancement of Learning

As media education concepts and practices have been disseminated and strengthened in European countries and Americas, the policies responsible for that expansion remain little known, particularly in countries where the achievements have been recently noted. That is the case for Brazil, where there have been new opportunities for media education, considered as a valuable resource to help accomplish goals of the educational system. This paper looks into the contribution of media education to the enhancement of teaching and learning in the context of innovations brought by recent policies of the Brazilian Ministry of Education. After educational reform programmes which brought the opportunity for emerging fields such as media education, we produced teaching material and conducted a series of workshops with students and teachers from state secondary schools. By reading and producing multimedia information about local public services available to young people, pupils learned about democracy, citizenship, civic engagement, media language, and identity. Lessons from our experiment are discussed against the backdrop of education policies being implemented to ameliorate harsh conditions resulting from the recent economic crisis. We suggest that media education can help by creating a learning environment in which the students become aware of the value of educational attainments.

Moments of induced spawning and embryonic development of Brycon amazonicus (Teleostei, Characidae)

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

MORPHO-PHYSIOLOGICAL INDICES AND ECONOMIC PRODUCTIVITY OF JAMBU CULTIVARS INFLUENCED BY THE ORGANIC AND MINERAL FERTILIZERS

The jambu belongs to the family Asteraceae, tropical crop, nowadays, this plant has been considered as a promising vegetable crop, because to its pharmacological properties. Despite this novelty, the vegetable remains invisible in the statistics of production and market in the state of Para, Brazil. This research was carried out with the aim of comparing the economic productivity and phenological development by the morpho-physiological growth indexes of two cultivars of jambu organic manure and mineral fertilizers. The experiment was carried out at the Sao Manuel Experimental Farm (Sao Manuel-SP), which belongs to the Faculdade de Ciencias Agronomicas - UNESP, campus Botucatu. The experimental design was a factorial randomized blocks (2 x 2) with two fertilization (organic and mineral) and two cultivars (Jambuarana and Nazareth), with six replications, two fertilization (organic and mineral) and two cultivars (Jambuarana and Nazareth). The following characteristics were evaluated: Plant height (cm), Leaf area (cm(2)), Fresh mass (g), Dry mass (g), Leaf area index (LAI), Leaf area ratio (LAR), Specific leaf Area (SLA), Leaf Weight Ratio (LWR), Amount of water in the plant (QAPA) (g per plant set), Leaf specific weight (LSW) (g cm(-2) per plant set) and Economic productivity. All data were statistically analyzed by analysis of variance and the Tukey test (1%) for mean comparison, with the software SISVAR. In the conditions of this experiment was carried out, it was possible to verify that the cultivar Jamburana had not only a good agronomic development and economic productivity under organic fertilization but also the best morpho-physiological indexes, showing that this kind of fertilization increases the agronomic effectiveness of this cultivar.

Efficiency in Brazil's industrial sectors in terms of energy and sustainable development

This article evaluates the efficiency of Brazil's industrial sectors from 1996 to 2009, taking into account energy consumption and respective contributions to the country's economic and social aspects. This analysis used a mathematical programming method called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which enabled, from the SBM model and the window analysis, to evaluate the ability of industries to reduce energy consumption and fossil-fuel CO2 emissions (inputs), as well as to increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by sectors, the persons employed and personnel expenses (outputs). The results of this study indicated that the Textile sector is the most efficient industrial sector in Brazil, according to the variables used, followed by these sectors: Foods and Beverages, Chemical, Mining, Paper and Pulp, Nonmetallic and Metallurgical.

A critical analysis on "Active Learning" in the light of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT): Implications to Physics Education and to experimental activities as a particular case.

This is a research paper in which we discuss “active learning” in the light of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), a powerful framework to analyze human activity, including teaching and learning process and the relations between education and wider human dimensions as politics, development, emancipation etc. This framework has its origin in Vygotsky's works in the psychology, supported by a Marxist perspective, but nowadays is a interdisciplinary field encompassing History, Anthropology, Psychology, Education for example.

The abuse of intellectual property rights and regulations in China: a law and economic analysis

From the institutional point of view, the legal system of IPR (intellectual property right, hereafter, IPR) is one of incentive institutions of innovation and it plays very important role in the development of economy. According to the law, the owner of the IPR enjoy a kind of exclusive right to use his IP(intellectual property, hereafter, IP), in other words, he enjoys a kind of legal monopoly position in the market. How to well protect the IPR and at the same time to regulate the abuse of IPR is very interested topic in this knowledge-orientated market and it is the basic research question in this dissertation. In this paper, by way of comparing study and by way of law and economic analyses, and based on the Austrian Economics School’s theories, the writer claims that there is no any contradiction between the IPR and competition law. However, in this new economy (high-technology industries), there is really probability of the owner of IPR to abuse his dominant position. And with the characteristics of the new economy, such as, the high rates of innovation, “instant scalability”, network externality and lock-in effects, the IPR “will vest the dominant undertakings with the power not just to monopolize the market but to shift such power from one market to another, to create strong barriers to enter and, in so doing, granting the perpetuation of such dominance for quite a long time.”1 Therefore, in order to keep the order of market, to vitalize the competition and innovation, and to benefit the customer, in EU and US, it is common ways to apply the competition law to regulate the IPR abuse. In Austrian Economic School perspective, especially the Schumpeterian theories, the innovation/competition/monopoly and entrepreneurship are inter-correlated, therefore, we should apply the dynamic antitrust model based on the AES theories to analysis the relationship between the IPR and competition law. China is still a developing country with relative not so high ability of innovation. Therefore, at present, to protect the IPR and to make good use of the incentive mechanism of IPR legal system is the first important task for Chinese government to do. However, according to the investigation reports,2 based on their IPR advantage and capital advantage, some multinational companies really obtained the dominant or monopoly market position in some aspects of some industries, and there are some IPR abuses conducted by such multinational companies. And then, the Chinese government should be paying close attention to regulate any IPR abuse. However, how to effectively regulate the IPR abuse by way of competition law in Chinese situation, from the law and economic theories’ perspective, from the legislation perspective, and from the judicial practice perspective, there is a long way for China to go!

Topics in Local Economic Development

This thesis contributes to the current debate in literature about local economic development by considering two different topics: quality of institutions, and the role of clusters in innovation and productivity growth. The research is built upon three papers. The first paper deals with the analysis of the effect of administrative continuity on administrative efficiency. The analysis underlines the importance of different typologies of social capital. Findings reveal a positive impact on administrative efficiency (AE) by administrative continuity (AC) when it is coupled by bridging and linking social capital. On the contrary, bonding social capital influences negatively the effect by AC on AE. The second paper investigates the spatial interaction in levels of quality of government (QoG) among European regions. Notwithstanding the largely recognised role by institutions in the design of regional policies, no study has been conducted about the mechanisms of interaction and diffusion of QoG at regional level. This research wants to overcome this knowledge gap in literature. Findings reveal a heterogeneity in spatial interaction among groups of regions, i.e. ‘leader regions’ (Northern regions) and ‘lagging regions’ (Southern regions), when considering different mechanisms of interaction (learning / imitating competition and pure competition). Moreover, the effect of wealth on the levels of QoG is nonlinear. Finally, the third paper analyses the relation among specialization and productivity within the agricultural sector. In literature, the study of clusters dynamics has long neglected agriculture. The analysis describes the changes in sectorial specialization for eight main crop groups in Italian regions (NUTS 3), assessing the existence of spatial autocorrelations by using an exploratory data analysis. Furthermore, the effect of specialization on productivity is analysed within the main crop groups using a spatial panel data model. Findings reveal a marked tendency to specialization in the Italian agriculture, and a heterogeneous effect by specialization on productivity.

Volunteer-based coral reef monitoring: reliability of data, environmental education and implications for conservation

Coral reefs are the most biodiverse ecosystems of the ocean and they provide notable ecosystem services. Nowadays, they are facing a number of local anthropogenic threats and environmental change is threatening their survivorship on a global scale. Large-scale monitoring is necessary to understand environmental changes and to perform useful conservation measurements. Governmental agencies are often underfunded and are not able of sustain the necessary spatial and temporal large-scale monitoring. To overcome the economic constrains, in some cases scientists can engage volunteers in environmental monitoring. Citizen Science enables the collection and analysis of scientific data at larger spatial and temporal scales than otherwise possible, addressing issues that are otherwise logistically or financially unfeasible. “STE: Scuba Tourism for the Environment” was a volunteer-based Red Sea coral reef biodiversity monitoring program. SCUBA divers and snorkelers were involved in the collection of data for 72 taxa, by completing survey questionnaires after their dives. In my thesis, I evaluated the reliability of the data collected by volunteers, comparing their questionnaires with those completed by professional scientists. Validation trials showed a sufficient level of reliability, indicating that non-specialists performed similarly to conservation volunteer divers on accurate transects. Using the data collected by volunteers, I developed a biodiversity index that revealed spatial trends across surveyed areas. The project results provided important feedbacks to the local authorities on the current health status of Red Sea coral reefs and on the effectiveness of the environmental management. I also analysed the spatial and temporal distribution of each surveyed taxa, identifying abundance trends related with anthropogenic impacts. Finally, I evaluated the effectiveness of the project to increase the environmental education of volunteers and showed that the participation in STEproject significantly increased both the knowledge on coral reef biology and ecology and the awareness of human behavioural impacts on the environment.

Global Change and Sustainable Development: A Synthesis of Regional Experiences from Research Partnerships

Humankind today is challenged by numerous threats brought about by the speed and scope of global change dynamics. A concerted and informed approach to solutions is needed to face the severity and magnitude of current development problems. Generating shared knowledge is a key to addressing global challenges. This requires developing the ability to cross multiple borders wherever radically different understandings of issues such as health and environmental sanitation, governance and conflict, livelihood options and globalisation, and natural resources and development exist. Global Change and Sustainable Development presents 36 peer-reviewed articles written by interdisciplinary teams of authors who reflected on results of development-oriented research conducted from 2001 to 2008. Scientific activities were – and continue to be – carried out in partnerships involving people and institutions in the global North, South and East, guided by principles of sustainability. The articles seek to inform solutions for mitigating, or adapting to, the negative impacts of global dynamics in the social, political, ecological, institutional and economic spheres.

International Service-Learning and the Development of Civic Identity: Understanding the Role of Short-Term International Service-Learning and its Influence on the Development of Civic Identity in College Students Using a Mixed Methodological Approach

Higher education has a responsibility to educate a democratic citizenry and recent research indicates civic engagement is on the decline in the United States. Through a mixed methodological approach, I demonstrate that the potential exists for well structured short-term international service-learning programming to develop college students’ civic identities. Quantitative analysis of questionnaire data, collected from American college students immediately prior to their participation in a short-term service-learning experience in Northern Ireland and again upon their return to the United States, revealed increases in civic accountability, political efficacy, justice oriented citizenship, and service-learning. Subsequent qualitative analysis of interview transcripts, student journals, and field notes suggested that facilitated critical reflection before, during, and after the experience promoted transformational learning. Emergent themes included: (a) responsibilities to others, (b) the value of international service-learning, (c) crosspollination of ideas, (d) stepping outside the daily routine to facilitate divergent thinking, and (e) the necessity of precursory thinking for sustaining transformations in thinking. The first theme, responsibilities to others, was further divided into subthemes of thinking beyond oneself, raising awareness of responsibility to others, and voting responsibly.

Cultural and Educational Society of Muslims "Narodna Uzdanica" /"National Hope"/ 1923-1941

Ibrahim Kemura. The Muslim Cultural-Educational Society Narodna uzdanica from 1923/4 to 1941 One of the features of the cultural history of the Bosniacs between the two world wars (1918-1941) was a cultural and educational society named Narodna uzdanica, which was a significant institutional and cultural-intellectual centre of the Bosniac people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Narodna uzdanica expressed the aspirations and needs of the Bosniac citizens who were its main support and axis and was aimed at fulfilling their interests. This was reflected in an ideological-cultural orientation towards the West and the adoption of positive western achievements while at the same time stressing its Slavic origins and individuality, the education of young people and the formation of a European-type civic intelligentsia, adaptation to life in capitalist society, the development of modern trade and crafts, the emancipation of women, and cultural education based on European values. Thus conceived, the programme enjoyed the support of a wider circle of members, the reading public and the cultural consumers of those particular elements such as education and economic prosperity which it sought to achieve. The political involvement of Narodna uzdanica and its use as a platform for the leading Bosniac political party Jugoslovenska muslimanska organizacija (JMO - Yugoslav Muslim Organisation) which had founded the society, played a significant role in the socio-political life and development of Bosniacs. The opposition to the ruling regime, often expressed through close cooperation with similar Croat organisations and through the pro-Croat attitude of some of the society's leading figures, offered both the regime and Narodna uzdanica's political adversaries grounds for describing it as separatist and Croat and served as a pretext for repressive measures to hinder its normal operations. This research proved these accusations to be groundless, showing that the pro-Croat orientation was primarily political and cultural and that throughout its existence Narodna uzdanica was active in the cultural and educational renaissance of Bosniacs, helping to strengthen their national identity.