Narrow Results

The role of vegetation cover within the processes that link land and atmosphere is of stringent interest for the correct modeling of Climate dynamics. Temporal and spatial correlation of the terrestrial coverage varies according to Climate and acts as a major forcing on it through changes in surface energy and water balance as well as in the carbon cycle. Recent studies have enhanced the actual and potential impact of this forcing on the radiative balance thus evidencing effects that are at least comparable to that due to all the anthropogenic greenhouse gases together. At now, observational studies on land cover dynamics are strongly in progress thanks to satellite data. The availability of continuous observations of the land surface can allow us to understand the correlation structure, both in time and in space, that characterizes the land cover activity. Satellites provide time series of photosynthetic activity measures that can be regarded as a succession of observations of a two-dimensional scalar field. We exploited the paradigm of fluctuating surfaces as a mechanic analogue for our problem. To capture vegetation cover characteristic time-scales, persistence properties were evaluated by analysing annual maps of NDVI-AVHRR time series and persistence probability was estimated by using the sing-time distribution methodology. The analysis performed for ecoregions of Italian and Greek territories evidenced signatures of short range persistence with characteristic time scales that depend on land cover, climate, and anthropic activities. Our results confirm that such an approach can provide a useful parameterisation for including vegetation into climate models as a dynamical component.

In this paper we propose that a crisis can be avoided by taking countermeasures, which are informed by an Early Warning System. An Early Warning System can help lessen the impact of crisis episodes and provide a systematic approach to the response of small business owners to challenges in their business environment. Following a review of the literature, we undertook data collection in two stages. In stage one, focus groups were conducted with small business owners in four European countries. In stage two we worked with an expert panel to refine and develop a set of indicators for an Early Warning System. It is envisaged that the set of indicators will serve as the basis for further thought and empiricism. We argue that a delay in crisis recognition curtails the scope and time for corrective action.

Alcon’s New Eye Drops Offers More Long-lasting Relief for Dry Eyes.

Carl Zeiss Opens New Shanghai Showroom.

Allergan’s Lumigan Receives Positive Opinion for Approval in Europe.

Australian Optical Retailer OPSM Sells Ten Stores to Sunglass Hut.

Bausch & Lomb Clearwater Plant Named Center of Excellence for Lathing Technology.

Santen — The Leading Prescription Ophthalmic Pharmaceutical Firm in Japan.

Always Top — An ISO9002 Quality Assured Eyewear Firm in Hong Kong.

Nanyang Optical — One of the Largest Optical Retail Chains in Singapore.

Alliance between AGT Biosciences and Starpharma.

First Australian Biotech Company to List on HKSE.

Breakthrough in Transdermal Drug Discovery Technology.

Acrux Licenses MDTS Technology to Eli Lilly got Animal Health Products.

Biota Secures SARS Testing Agreement with US Government Research Agencies.

SysArris in Bio Partnering Europe 2003.

Shantha Bio to Launch Streptokinase by Year-end.

Lupin Receives US FDA Approval to Launch Ceftriaxone.

MerLion Pharma Collaborates with Schering-Plough in Drug Discovery Research.

Quest Pharmaceutical Sets up Taiwanese Subsidiary.

BenQ to Invest in Nanjing's Medical Facilities.

CyGenics Expands Into Europe.

Increasing US Investment Support for Starpharma.

Proteomics — An Australian-based Biotech Company.

Resonance Health to Expand US Business Operations.

Rockeby biomed Announces Four New Developments for Avian Influenza Test Kits.

Ranbaxy Buys Companies in Belgium, Italy and Romania.

Japan's Bioventures Today — HuBit Genomix Inc.

Abbott to Invest US$280 Million in the Largest Nutritional Plant in Singapore.

Covance Celebrates 10th Anniversary Milestone in Singapore.

NanoMaterials Technology Opens New S$2.5 Million Facility.

Waters Corporation Collaborates with Solectron.

Zentek Engineering Becomes First Irish Company to Set Up Asia Pacific HQ in Singapore.

Informal entrepreneurs have been viewed variously as reluctant participants in such endeavors doing so out of economic necessity because of their exclusion from formal work and welfare (structuralist theory), or as willing entrepreneurs who voluntarily exit the formal economy either as a rational economic decision (neo-liberal theory) or as social actors who do not agree with the formal rules and regulations of the state (neo-institutional theory). The aim of this paper is to evaluate these competing theorizations of entrepreneurs’ motives for participating in the informal sector. Reporting evidence from a 2019 Eurobarometer survey involving 27,565 face-to-face interviews in 28 European countries, the finding is that five percent are reluctant participants, twenty percent are willing participants doing so as a rational economic decision, 21 percent are willing participants doing so because of their disagreement with the rules and 54 percent do so for a mixture of these motives. A logistic regression analysis reveals who is more likely to engage in informal entrepreneurship and who is significantly more likely to do so for each motive. The theoretical and policy implications are then discussed.

Photodynamic therapy has become of interest in many European countries. Since, most of national authorities and all medical journals require the registration of the clinical study on the database ClinicalTrials. gov in order to be published, information regarding clinical studies are now available. This article aims to synthetize data gathered thanks to this database. The keywords used for this analysis was: (i) status: “All studies “(recruiting, completed, terminated, we did not take into account unknown status), (ii) condition or disease: “Photodynamic Therapy”, (iii) country: name of each European country. Since 2003, 76 clinical trials were registered in Europe. Most clinical studies are performed in Germany (22), France (20) and UK (19). These 3 countries represent 80% of all studies performed in Europe. However 21 European countries have one or more studies on PDT. Clinical studies were mainly performed on skin. Actinic Keratosis treatment (20 studies) represents more than 45% of all studies. 21% were focused on eye, mainly on Age Macular Degeneration (AMD) (8 studies). In 2018, ten (10) clinical trials are in the recruitment phase. On November, 10, 2017, Padeliporfin (STEBA Biotech S.A, Luxembourg) obtained the marketing authorization throughout the European Union. Despite the critical importance of trial registration, compliance with requirements from governmental regulators which mandate the prospective registration of clinical trials has been imperfect. Besides, a large proportion of registry entries are never updated to reflect study completion. However, this review clearly demonstrated that PDT is progressively used in most European countries.

Although regulation on corporate social and environmental reporting in Europe has grown in recent years, there has been limited empirical research on the level, quality, and economic consequences of this regulated disclosure. Barbu, Feleaga and Ferrat (2022) advance our understanding of the impact of European Union legislation on the quantity of corporate environmental disclosures in Europe, showing that regulations improve the level of environmental disclosure. Future research on environmental reporting should provide more in-depth economic intuition and address issues related to differences in cross-country analyses, as well as investigate in more depth both the level and quality of increased disclosure on social and environmental issues, the factors influencing this type of disclosure, and any economic consequences.

This paper is concerned with the calibration of the surface-wave magnitude scale for the European region using the Prague formula. Two issues in particular have been addressed:

• Does the Prague formula require a correction of the distance dependency term?

• Is a source depth correction required?

The issue of distance dependency has been investigated by examining the distance dependency of residuals from individual station M_s magnitudes and "representative" M_s magnitude values. We find that M_s magnitudes determined for the European region, using the Prague formula show slight dependence on recording station distance. The subsequent distance dependency of the mean M_s magnitude determination is therefore a function of the distance distribution of the recording stations.

The question of depth correction has been investigated by examining the regression of M_s magnitudes versus seismic moment as a function of depth. We find that the M_s magnitudes determined by the Prague formula are only valid for crustal events, and require a depth correction for source depths greater than 30 km.

As a by-product of these investigations, we find that for the European region there are stable nonlinear relations between surface-wave magnitude (M_s) and the log of seismic moment (logMo) and vice versa. These relationships will provide suitable functions for the correlation between one source size indicator and the other.

The innovation process in the biopharmaceutical sector is influenced by long business cycles, multiple stakeholders and complex interactions. Early models of the innovation process are inadequate to capture the complexity of innovation in the life sciences sector. In particular, narrow classifications which describe innovations as "radical" or "incremental" are not particularly useful when considered in the context of the complex patterns of interrelated innovations observed in practice.

Many partial models of the innovation process which equate innovation to inventive research, patenting and product development fail to recognise that innovation is a cyclical and business-driven process and underscore the final phase of the innovation process, namely, achieving timely market diffusion and adoption of innovations to benefit patients and innovators. Innovation is sustained if it is appropriately rewarded. Investment in the science base alone without appropriate reward system for innovations is unlikely to promote renewed competitiveness in the European biopharmaceutical industry.

Internal and external hired CEOs could differently affect company investment behaviour and capability to encourage strategic changes and entrepreneurship, such as innovation activity. Based on a sample of 13,749 European manufacturing SMEs, the paper shows that CEO has a significant effect on the innovative activities in SMEs. However, this effect is negative in case the CEO is appointed from the external of the company, while the effect becomes positive in case of internal CEO. These findings remark that external CEO may lack firm-specific knowledge to manage the innovation process and experience with firms’ available resources and innovation capabilities.

While innovation studies generated a great number of insights regarding the conditions under which innovation performance occurs, there are two main points of criticisms. First, many studies focus on a narrow conception of innovation (namely product innovation). Second, many studies are based on data from the manufacturing sector. The present analysis aims to overcome these criticisms by analyzing a broad indicator of innovation across multiple sectors. Hypotheses are formulated guided by organizational learning theories of innovation. These hypotheses are tested using data from the third European Company Survey.

Environmental assessment and management (EAM) is an inherently interdisciplinary subject, drawing on science (e.g. ecology, biology, physical geography), social science (e.g. decision making theory, political sciences, planning) and economics. Due to the absence of a clear disciplinary home, understanding of EAM related higher education degree programmes has remained poor. Furthermore, teaching of EAM is influenced by how it is practiced and therefore differs from country to country. The aim of this paper is to shed light on this still under researched area by establishing a comprehensive overview of EAM related master level degree programmes across the EU. In this context, current baseline and emerging trends as well as challenges and opportunities are presented and discussed. The paper is aimed specifically at those interested in EAM higher education, e.g. researchers, university teachers and (prospective) students.

Environmental cost–benefit analysis is increasingly used to support the formulation of European air quality policies. In these analyses, typically around three-quarters of the societal benefits of cleaner air are related to monetised increases in statistical life expectancy. However, the literature presents widely diverging estimates for the value of a statistical life year (a ‘VOLY’). This paper presents a review of studies aimed at establishing a VOLY as used in European air quality policies and it examines the factors that cause the variations in VOLY estimates. We discuss the implications of our findings for European air quality policies and also present a novel approach to analyse the VOLY. We have labelled our approach the ‘maximum societal revenue VOLY’ (MSR-VOLY), and postulate that this approach may be particularly useful in the context of natural capital accounting.

The paper examined real wage convergence across 27 European economies, at aggregate and sectoral levels, using the panel unit root tests of stochastic convergence and the club clustering procedure. Convergence was absent for a panel as a whole, but present within the clubs. In most sectors, the common component of the relative wages was stationary, while idiosyncratic component contained unit roots, suggesting the country- and sector-specific drivers of convergence and only transitory effects of exogenous forces. The most pronounced club convergence was observed in the sectors characterized by significant labor mobility, knowledge intensity and speed of technological change.

Accounting for socioeconomic and demographic variables, as well as country-specific effects, households' marginal willingness to pay for climate is revealed using European data on life-satisfaction. Individuals located in areas with lower average levels of sunshine and higher average levels of relative humidity are less satisfied as are individuals in locations subject to significant seasonal variation in monthly mean temperatures and rain days. Ranking regions by climate households appear strongly to favor the Mediterranean climate over the climate of Northern Europe.

Energy security improvement is often presented as a co-benefit of climate policies. This paper evaluates this claim. It investigates whether climate policy would improve energy security, while accounting for the difficulties entailed by the many-faceted nature of the concept and the large uncertainties on the determinants of future energy systems. A multi-dimension analysis grid is used to capture the energy security concept, and a database of scenarios allows us to explore the uncertainty space. The results, focusing on Europe, reveal there is no unequivocal effect of climate policy on all the perspectives of energy security. Moreover, time significantly matters: the impact of climate policies is mixed in the short term and globally good in the medium term. In the long term, there is a risk of degradation of the energy security. Lastly, we examine the robustness of our results to uncertainties on drivers of economic growth, availability of fossil fuels and the potentials and low-carbon technologies, and find that they are sensitive mainly to fossil fuels availability, low carbon technologies in the energy sector and improvements in energy efficiency.

In this paper, we investigate the nature of sovereign credit risk for selected Asian and European countries based on a set of sovereign CDS data over an eight-year period that includes the episode of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. Our results indicate that there exists strong commonality in sovereign credit risk among the countries studied in this paper following the crisis. In addition, our results also show that commonality is importantly associated with both local and global financial and economic variables. However, there are markedly different impacts of the sovereign of credit risk in Asian and European countries. Specifically, we find that foreign reserve, global stock market, and volatility risk premium, affect Asian and European sovereign credit risks in the opposite direction. Lastly, we model the arrival rates of credit events as a square-root diffusion process from which a pricing model is constructed and estimated over pre- and post-crisis periods. Then the resulting model is used to decompose credit spreads into risk premium and credit-event components. For most countries in our study, credit-event components appear to weight more than risk-premiums.

What does it mean to live in a world without global leadership? Where is the European Union heading? What impact will Trump’s “America first” policy and China’s Belt and Road Initiative have on tomorrow’s world order? Geopolitical reflections on the G-Zero world.