Narrow Results

The 2015 international Paris Agreement called for pursuing efforts to limit the changes in climate to 1.5^∘C above pre-industrial levels. This study uses two approaches to re-examine this feasibility more fully. The observed trends in the temperature record provide one means to estimate when 1.5^∘C will be reached. Examination of the remaining allowed carbon emissions provides another approach. The temperature record and the observed trends in temperature over recent decades suggest that 1.5^∘C will be reached by 2032–2042. Consideration of the equivalent amount of CO₂ reveals the ranges of 266, 366 and 531 GtCO₂-eq still allowed for 67%, 50% and 33% probabilities, respectively, of staying within the temperature limit. At the current rate of emissions, the 50% limit would be reached in eight years. If an emissions reduction of 4% per year beginning in January 2023 is considered, the 67% likelihood for staying within the 1.5^∘C limit is passed in 2030 and the 50% likelihood is passed in 2035. As a result, humanity is very unlikely to meet the identified targets needed to keep the global temperature change to 1.5^∘C and the SSP1-1.9 scenario assumptions for future emissions toward enabling a limit of 1.5^∘C are also extremely unlikely.

FinTech is inducing changes in how financial services (FS) are perceived, developed, promoted, delivered and consumed. Future of FinTech, however, is rooted in deliberate integrated actions to improve framework conditions related to consumer trust, regulation and scalability. Building on limited scholarship, this paper identifies the building blocks for the future of FinTech and provides prescriptive areas of focus to guide research, policy and practice. In sum, the purpose of the paper is to serve as a catalyst and a call for an integrative approach in developing a common understanding and interpretation of FinTech as a socially-constructed phenomenon at the intersection of research and technology management.

The vital factors which can facilitate the development of Startups and Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in markets are the appropriate regulatory and policy frameworks. However, there is a difference in the frameworks which may contribute to different levels of development of startups and SMEs in different countries. This chapter thus focuses on the comparative study of the frameworks of selected countries to display their possible challenges in those countries. The chapter shows that governments in Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand adopt different regulatory frameworks which help stimulate the creation of startups and SMEs. It provides comparisons of the frameworks in those four countries, and also presents that there are challenges from these regulatory frameworks for startups and SMEs developing there.

In this paper, we analyze how India’s climate change policy is framed, formulated and implemented and argue that it requires carefully balancing of domestic and international interests. Given the country’s population size, composition and projected economic growth, India will, in the next few years, see its most significant energy demand upsurge along with a massive need for infrastructure. As projected by the International Energy Agency, “nearly 60% of its CO₂ emissions in the late 2030s will be coming from infrastructure and machines that do not exist today”. As a result, policy choices made today by India’s decision-makers and international negotiators will have severe implications for the world.

This paper analyzes global emission trends, climate change impacts and India’s international and domestic climate policies—from Paris to Glasgow and New Delhi to rural India. Furthermore, we examine the core constraints that Indian policymakers face and draw attention to shortcomings in India’s climate change policies, particularly concerning continued investment in coal despite the country’s widely lauded efforts to embrace renewables. We argue that fossil fuel subsidies are a delicate political issue with significant implications for many election-determining poor citizens—hence accompanying “just transition” measures are essential.

With China’s rapidly aging population, this paper constructs a policy model using overlapping generation (OLG) model and the computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling to analyze the second-child policy and delaying retirement policy. Our research findings suggest that considering the short-term effects, delaying the retirement age imposes a greater impact on the economy than the second-child policy. Its economic impact increases initially, but then decreases to a stable level showing a diminishing influence. In the long term, the second-child policy has greater ability to boost the economy than the delaying retirement age policy and its economic impact gets stronger. From an industrial output perspective, the two policies exert greater influence on agriculture, light industry, finance and service sector than on construction and heavy industries. From an industrial import and export perspective, the two policies have great influence on finance, electric power, and fossil energy more than they do on the agricultural sector. From a monetary perspective, the impacts are greater on household income followed by the government income and corporate income, respectively. The policies also make a bigger difference to fixed capital than to changes in deposits and loans.

The theme of Topic Study Group 40 (TSG-40) at the 14^th International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME-14) (Shanghai, China) is Research and Development on Mathematics Curriculum. TSG-40 was held worldwide on-line style in three sessions of July 13, July 16, and July 17, 2021. This article reports a concise summary of TSG-40 including its organization, theme and description, the list of presentations and program overview, the summary of presentations in the theme of four topics at TSG-40, and future directions and suggestions in the area of research and development on mathematics curriculum.

The first chapter provides an overview of our research on connecting the various aspects of technology that now shapes the Sharing as well as the Digital Economies. It underscores the integration of IoT, blockchain, and AI into a decentralized intelligence system that has profound possibilities to employ data in innovative ways. The explosion of data has the potential to transform how we view our current processes and possibilities. How we use and analyze data has become significantly important to our economics, and we discuss its transformative adoption in our industries and policy to enable its development. As we grapple with technology’s inherent risks, we describe how it can be used as a moral agent. It also describes the structure of the book, where each chapter elaborates on a specific application in a particular economic sector.

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.

This paper sets out to understand the use of public procurement as a policy instrument for catching up. Brazil and China, who have explicitly linked procurement to innovation, are used as empirical cases. We review their respective institutional settings, policy approaches, and micro-level processes related to the public procurement of innovation (PPI). We have discovered that they share similarities concerning issues encountered during PPI implementation. Although both countries have made some achievements in promoting innovation through procurement, this paper highlights some of the obstacles they have experienced when implementing this policy, such as institutional problems, changes in the political landscape, and macroeconomic constraints. Such obstacles, more prominent in the case of Brazil, may have acted as an obstruction to achieving the pursued objectives, thereby restricting the full potential of PPI in driving technological catching up. The article then offers managerial and policy implications for the implementation of PPI, such as the importance of choosing relevant procurement procedures, critical roles played by policy champions, and demonstrating effects of leading firms and regions. While in China PPI was once an instrumental part of its technology development agenda, in Brazil it has been sporadic and unconnected to a given national strategy.

Hydrologic, climatic, regulatory and economic factors interact in complex ways to influence groundwater conditions. These relationships can be difficult to measure and model but are important for water management and for considering viable futures for regional economies. This paper proposes a strategy for an improved understanding of how groundwater levels reflect signals of regulatory, economic and climate factors. Most existing econometric studies of groundwater use focus on large-scale irrigated agriculture and urbanized areas in first world nations, where groundwater extraction data is available. In much of the world, groundwater extraction data are not available for individual farms and other water users. The goal of this study is to explore the responsiveness of groundwater levels (a more widely available measure of groundwater conditions) to regulatory, economic and climate signals in rural areas, using a growing body of remotely sensed land cover data. Pooled Ordinary Least Squares econometric models examine the effects of regulatory, climatic and economic factors on groundwater levels in rural Arizona. Groundwater regulations, recharge projects, housing units and irrigated acreage have statistically significant relationships to groundwater levels in the study areas. This approach can be valuable for understanding factors that influence groundwater conditions and which may be useful in managing groundwater use in widespread areas where groundwater extraction data is unavailable.

Climate change is the outstanding survival and ethical issue of our time, and requires urgent action if our descendants are to inherit a livable world. Substantial opportunities exist in the transition to a renewable economy provided through climate action. Reliable, relevant, and accessible information is key…

Scientists and policymakers alike have increasingly been interested in exploring ways to advance algorithmic fairness, recognizing not only the potential utility of algorithms in biomedical and digital health contexts but also that the unique challenges that algorithms—in a datafied culture such as the United States—pose for civil rights (including, but not limited to, privacy and nondiscrimination). In addition to the technical complexities, separation of powers issues are making the task even more daunting for policymakers—issues that might seem obscure to many scientists and technologists. While administrative agencies (such as the Federal Trade Commission) and legislators have been working to advance algorithmic fairness (in large part through comprehensive data privacy reform), recent judicial activism by the Roberts Court threaten to undermine those efforts. Scientists need to understand these legal developments so they can take appropriate action when contributing to a biomedical data ecosystem and designing, deploying, and maintaining algorithms for digital health. Here I highlight some of the recent actions taken by policymakers. I then review three recent Supreme Court cases (and foreshadow a fourth case) that illustrate the radical power grab by the Roberts Court, explaining for scientists how these drastic shifts in law will frustrate governmental approaches to algorithmic fairness and necessitate increased reliance by scientists on self-governance strategies to promote responsible and ethical practices.

The trajectory of Singapore's population size and composition can be mapped out with its progression through the various phases of demographic transition from high birth and death rates in the post-war years to very low birth and death rates today, all within the context of rapid economic and social development that has taken place in the past 50 years. Population planning has been integral in Singapore's national development strategy, balancing the economy's needs for more and better qualified workers with social considerations such as the dependency burden and the integration of large numbers of foreigners in a global city-state. This paper considers Singapore's population and manpower planning policies, with an account of the country's passage through the various stages of its demographic transition, and how its working age population composition has evolved. Population and labor force policies are examined with specific consideration of the social, economic and political implications resulting from those policy choices. A final section considers the challenges for the future stemming from these demographic trends.

A key focus for entrepreneurial development strategies for many economies is to facilitate sustainable and inclusive growth that will create jobs and reduce poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is confronted with institutional challenges in bringing these objectives into fruition. We draw from institutionalism and entrepreneurial governance theory to explore institutional context and challenges to entrepreneurial development and inclusive growth in Africa. We theorize that entrepreneurial governance and public policy must focus on policy direction, enterprise enabling institutions for nascent entrepreneurs, seed funding and local embeddedness to eliminate institutional voids. We provide a dynamic view of institutional context and offer a policy framework to uncover challenges to entrepreneurial emergence and sustainable development in Africa. The study submits that enabling entrepreneurial activities for inclusive growth and sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa requires the right institutional and supporting ecosystem.

This paper highlights perhaps one of the most fundamental issues constraining strategic environmental assessment (SEA) practice — its definition. Current reviews fail to explain why certain assessments are referred to as strategic while others are not. Furthermore, there appears to be very little attention given to the basic characteristics of strategy in the environmental assessment of proposed or existing policies, plans and programmes. This paper attempts to identify the characteristics of SEA that make it strategic and therefore different from other forms of impact assessment. A review of selected case studies is undertaken with the purpose of identifying those assessments that actually conform to the characteristics of a "strategic assessment". It is argued here that if SEA methodology and practice is to advance, then a common understanding of its definition and characteristics must first be achieved.

Policy monitoring and evaluation are important elements of the policy cycle, this help to initiate policy-makers to assess the proper implementation and adjust it as appropriate. This paper aims to evaluate the existing policy, strategies, and institutional arrangement on the development of urban green infrastructure in the three study areas; namely Hawassa, Wolayita Sodo, and Bodity town. Analyzing policy documents, key informant interview, and questionnaire survey were used to collect the required data. Descriptive statistics and policy analysis were also used to analyze the collected data from different sources. The study revealed that different strategies and standards were developed by the federal government, but it is not practically exercised at the regional and local level. The majority of government officials and experts agreed that existing policies and strategies related to UGI is not properly implemented. On the other hand, lack of policy and strategies are the major limitation in the development and management of UGI. Almost majority of the respondents confirmed that weak institutional arrangement has contributed to the poor implementation of UGI development. Lack of attention and awareness, the weak institutional arrangement is the main responsible factors for the absence of proper policy and poor implementation of strategies concerning UGI. Thus, actions needed for all the development of proper policies and strategies to improve UGI development.

In this chapter, we propose the structural model in terms of the Stair Tree model and barrier option to evaluate the fair deposit insurance premium in accordance with the constraints of the deposit insurance contracts and the consideration of bankruptcy costs. First, we show that the deposit insurance model in Brockman and Turle (2003) is a special case of our model. Second, the simulation results suggest that insurers should adopt a forbearance policy instead of a strict policy for closure regulation to avoid losses from bankruptcy costs. An appropriate deposit insurance premium can alleviate potential moral hazard problems caused by a forbearance policy. Our simulation results can be used as reference in risk management for individual banks and for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

The traditional macroeconomic approach to poverty alleviation in neighborhoods and communities is to use housing development and job-creation programs to address the income and the opportunity gaps. Entrepreneurship is a much less used poverty alleviation strategy that, in our estimation, can have a significant effect in favorable policy environments. After a brief literature review, we highlight policy approaches that use entrepreneurship as a poverty alleviation strategy. We present several case studies from the United States as evidence of how public policy can empower an entrepreneurial ecosystem to support the self-employed and other low-income entrepreneurs. We conclude with a framework for how public policy can alleviate poverty through entrepreneurship that is generalizable in other contexts.

Addressing the urban heat island effect is critical in mitigating the threat of heat from the perspective of land use planning and design. This paper, therefore, presents a structured review of urban heat island mitigation policy that is contained in the local-level planning policy documents and regulation of 20 large municipalities throughout the United States and Canada. It explores how the issue of the urban heat island effect is framed and approached and, therewith, facilitates an understanding of how aware municipalities are of the issue and its impacts. The review identifies a total of 307 instances of mitigation policy measures among 19 of the 20 municipalities, with the most commonly applied: approaches to mitigation being the promotion of latent heat flux, albedo modification, and provision of shade cover; and, framing contexts being public health, air quality, energy, comfort, and climate change. Although the review indicates that there is widespread awareness of the issue, it notes that only 79, or 25.7 percent, of the 307 mitigation policy measures were framed in any context. Thus, the majority of policy measures do not communicate an understanding of the significance and potential impacts of the urban heat island effect or provide a lens through which it should be perceived and, therewith, addressed. Indeed, they call for blind action. This suggests a need to promote awareness of the potential impacts of the urban heat island effect and communicate same in local planning policy documents and regulations.

Climate change is a pervasive global challenge with far-reaching implications for both the environment and human society. A thorough comprehension of these repercussions is essential in crafting effective strategies to mitigate their effects. Climate change, a major threat to sustainable development, impacts the environment, economy, natural resources, food security, human health, and physical infrastructure globally. Bangladesh stands out among affected nations due to geographical and socio-economic vulnerabilities. Despite its vulnerability, Bangladesh has successfully mitigated the impact of extreme events over the years. This study focuses on examining climate change, its outcomes, and mitigation initiatives in Bangladesh. It endeavors to offer a comprehensive analysis of the current climate scenario in Bangladesh, delving into pivotal trends, impacts, adaptation strategies, and evaluating the effectiveness of national policies, legal frameworks, involvement of local governments, non-governmental organizations, and international collaborative efforts in developing an efficient disaster risk reduction and anticipatory action system. Despite achievements, safeguarding the livelihoods and properties of vulnerable communities from disaster-induced loss and damage remains a challenge. Additionally, addressing past adaptation failures is crucial. The paper highlights the necessity to enhance disaster risk reduction, green economy, promote economic development, implement government policies, and bolster anticipatory action systems, emphasizing the pivotal role of establishing a locally led climate-resilient system in addressing these challenges.