12 research outputs found
Originalité et limites de l’écologie profonde (Deep Ecology): Faut-il instaurer un Nouvel Ordre écologique?
No full textNotre réflexion porte sur le radicalisme de certains écologistes qui, sous prétexte d’œuvrer pour la cause environnementale, poussent leurs ambitions et prétentions à l’extrême, en accordant des droits aux êtres non humains, précisément les animaux. Il fallait donc comprendre le sens de cette écologie profonde (deep ecology) articulée autour du principe d’égalitarisme biosphérique. Il nous fallait surtout comprendre la signification des critiques adressées aux mouvements affiliés à la Deep Ecology. Considérant que ces deep ecologists, extrémistes et fondamentalistes étaient simplement porteurs de projets subversifs, voire d’introduire dans l’ordre démocratique un «désordre» écologique, Luc Ferry contre-attaque. Selon lui, il ne faut pas donner droit de cité à ce «nouvel intégrisme» qui menace notre civilisation actuelle héritée de l’humanisme des Lumières. Les dangers qu’il dénonce dans le Nouvel Ordre écologique sont entres autres, le rapprochement entre l’écologie profonde et l’écologie nazie, les tendances révolutionnaires et même totalitaires de la deep ecology, etc. Toutefois, au regard de l’influence grandissante de ces mouvements écologistes radicaux, Luc Ferry a-t-il vraiment une chance d’instaurer dans les pays industrialisés un Nouvel Ordre écologique et démocratique
Macroeconomics effects of private sector participation in Latin America's infrastructure
No full textThe authors provide empirical evidence on the impact that private participation in infrastructure has had on key macroeconomic variables in a sample of 21 Latin American countries from 1985-98. Specifically, they look at the effects on GDP per capita, current public expenditures, public investment, and private investment, controlling for country effects and institutional factors. The authors also investigate the relevance of the specific contractual form of private participation contracts on these variables and show differentiated effects according to contract types. The results suggest that: 1) Private sector involvement in utilities and transport have some, but not impressive, positive effects on GDP per capita. 2) There is some degree of crowding-out of private investment resulting from greenfield projects in utilities, and delayed crowding-in from concessions in transport. 3) There is crowding-in of public investment by private participation in utilities, while there is crowding-out by increased private investment in transport. 4) Private participation in utilities decreases recurrent expenditures, while in transport it results in an increase. The net effect on the public sector account is uncertain, but this uncertainty is a major risk. The revelation of this risk may be the main contribution of this paper since it is inconsistent with the fiscal gains expected by many policymakers as they engage in infrastructure privatization programs.Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Health Economics&Finance,ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Scientific Research&Science Parks,Science Education
The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act and its rules of origin : generosity undermined?
No full textThe African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), signed into American law on May 18, 2000, is a major plank of U.S. initiatives toward the African continent. The Act aims broadly at improving economic policymaking in Africa, enabling countries to embrace globalization, and securing durable political and economic stability. As an incentive for Africa to adopt the necessary policy reform, AGOA offers increased preferential access for African exports to the United States. This paper describes the provisions of AGOA and assesses its quantitative impact on African exports, particularly in the apparel sector. Its main conclusions are: 1) AGOA will provide real opportunities to Africa. Even on conservative estimates about Africa's supply response, Africa's non-oil exports could be increased by about 8-11 percent. 2) However, the medium-term gains could have been much greater if AGOA had not imposed certain conditions and not excluded certain items from its coverage. The most important condition is the stringent rule-of-origin, that is, the requirement that exporters source certain inputs from within Africa or the United States. Estimates suggest that the absence of these conditions would have magnified the impact nearly five-fold, resulting in an overall increase in non-oil exports of US100-US$140 million increase that is expected in the presence of these restrictions. These restrictions, particularly on apparel, will come at a particularly inopportune time, as Africa will be exposed to competition from other developing countries when the quotas maintained on the latters'exports under the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA) are eliminated. Africa's apparel exports will be lower by over 30 percent with the dismantling of the MFA. If, on the other hand, AGOA had provided unrestricted access, the negative impact of the dismantling could be nearly fully offset.Export Competitiveness,Economic Theory&Research,Trade Policy,Environmental Economics&Policies,Agribusiness&Markets,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Export Competitiveness,Trade Policy
Crise environnementale et développement soutenable en Afrique : Vers une agriculture écologique
No full textNotre réflexion porte sur la problématique du développement soutenable en lien avec la crise environnementale dont les effets sont de plus en plus perceptibles en Afrique. Si le changement climatique est une réalité globale, certains facteurs spécifiques semblent aggraver la situation des pays africains. Nous faisons allusion aux conséquences désastreuses de l’agriculture industrielle (extensive et productiviste) qui détruit le couvert forestier, déséquilibre les écosystèmes naturels et contribue à l’appauvrissement des sols. On peut évoquer aussi les affres de l’orpaillage clandestin, ainsi que la forte croissance démographique. Cette situation nous impose l’urgence d’une réflexion sur l’environnement. Les résultats de cette réflexion montreront qu’il est possible de trouver solution à la crise environnementale en changeant de paradigmes, notamment dans notre approche de l’éducation et dans notre manière de pratiquer l’agriculture. L’éducation à l’écocitoyenneté doit être un objectif prioritaire aussi bien dans les programmes scolaires que dans les programmes de sensibilisation des populations. Nous souscrivons à l’idée qu’une implication des citoyens dans l’implémentation des politiques environnementales est le gage d’un développement soutenable en Afrique. Il faut donc conjuguer les efforts de nos décideurs avec la participation effective et solidaire des populations, qui sont les plus impactées par la crise écologique et économique. En capitalisant les acquis d’une éducation à l’écocitoyenneté, on pourrait encourager les populations à pratiquer une agriculture écologique soucieuse de la préservation des ressources naturelles
Financial globalization : unequal blessings
No full textThe authors present a framework to analyze financial globalization. They argue that financial globalization needs to take into account the relation between money (particularly in its role as store of value), asset and factor price flexibility, and contractual and regulatory institutions. Countries that have the"blessed trinity"(international currency, flexible exchange rate regime, and sound contractual and regulatory environment) can integrate successfully into the world financial markets. But developing countries normally display the"unblessed trinity"(weak currency, fear of floating, and weak institutional framework). The authors define and discuss two alternative avenues (a"dollar trinity"and a"peso trinity") for developing countries to safely embrace international financial integration while the blessed trinity remains beyond reach.Economic Theory&Research,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Banks&Banking Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Financial Intermediation,Financial Economics,Macroeconomic Management,Economic Stabilization,Economic Theory&Research,Fiscal&Monetary Policy
The Devil is in the Details: On the Robust Determinants of Development Aid in G5 Sahel Countries
No full textThe authors are very grateful to the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) for the financial support. Thanks to the Chair of thematic research Group C (Finance and Resource Mobilization) Victor Murinde (SOAS, University of London, UK) and our resource persons, including Issouf Soumare (Université Laval, Canada), Alessandra Guariglia (University of Birmingham, UK), Bo Sjö (Linköping University, Sweden) and Prosper Dovonon (Concordia University, Canada) for their insightful comments during the research phase, especially in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data. The lead author would also like to thank the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) for the use of their facilities during the completion of this paper as a Research Fellow with the Macroeconomic Policy Division (MPD) of the UNECA, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. However, the views expressed are those of the author and do not represent that of the United Nations (UN) or the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) and the AERC. Finally, the authors are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the Editor-in-Chief of Comparative Economic Studies, whose comments have greatly improved this paper
Boondoogles and expropriation : rent-sseking and policy distortion when property rights are insecure
No full textMost analyses of property rights and economic development point to the negative influence of insecure property rights on private investment. The authors focus instead on the largely unexamined effects of insecure property rights on government policy choices. They identify one significant anomaly-dramatically higher public investment in countries with insecure property rights-and use it to make the following broad claims about insecure property rights; 1) They increase rent-seeking. 2) They may reduce the incentives of governments to use tax revenues for productive purposes, such as public investment. 3) They do so whether one regards the principal problem of insecure property rights as the maintenance of law and order, which government spending can potentially remedy, or as the threat of expropriation by government itself, and therefore not remediable by government spending. The authors present substantial empirical evidence to support these claims.Environmental Economics&Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Labor Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,National Governance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Land and Real Estate Development
Estimation of the height profile of the path for autonomous driving in terrain
No full textPublisher Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s)A priori knowledge about the height profile of the path is vital for rollover avoidance in the context of autonomous driving through uneven forest ground. The forest ground is usually covered with either soft vegetation in summertime, or by snow in winter. Thus, the exact solid form of the forest ground cannot be detected by camera or LiDAR. This article, we propose height-odometry and aided height-odometry methods for ground height estimation. The height-odometry method depends solely on interoceptive and proprioceptive sensor data, while the aided height-odometry combines height-odometry output with the existing 3D map information. Thus, the central idea is to build a reference 3D path for autonomous forest machines where the spatial positioning – based on the RTK-GNSS or Forest SLAM method – is fused with the output of (aided) height-odometry method(s). We evaluate the proposed height-odometry methods in two separate environments that are accurately (3D) mapped by a UAV using the advanced machine-vision-based SfM method and the LiDAR-based SLAM algorithms. Through comprehensive data analysis, we demonstrate that the proposed 3D path estimation methods are practical and simple to implement, yet sufficient to estimate the height profile of the path with desired accuracy.Peer reviewe
Towards a Semiautonomous Young Spruce Forest Late Cleaning
No full textPublisher Copyright: © 2025 The Author(s). Journal of Field Robotics published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.Cleaning a seedling spruce stand is an important silvicultural task required to help the young spruce trees thrive. It is usually manual work with a clearing saw. Mechanized solutions have been proposed, but they have not worked out well, since the driver has challenges in seeing the seedling trees that should be left growing. Instead, we demonstrate that a semiautonomous forest machine could do the cleaning operation using a suitable map of the environment. We propose using a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to map the area beforehand, and a real-time perception system onboard the forest machine performing the semiautonomous late cleaning of a seedling spruce stand with the help of a driver using a dedicated human–machine interface (HMI). In the proposed solution, overlapping color images are collected by a UAV to build a map that integrates both color and depth information. This map is used to detect the young spruce trees, among other species. We also propose a graph-based point-cloud matching method, which can precisely locate the forest machine on the map using forest machine-mounted sensors. An HMI is developed to improve the situational awareness of the operator in the forest machine cabin during the cleaning process. The proposed integrated solution has been demonstrated in a real seedling spruce forest.Peer reviewe
Relative returns to policy reform - evidence from controlled cross-country regressions
No full textThe authors aim at contributing to understand the dispersion of returns from policy reforms using cross-country regressions. The authors compare the"before reform"with"after reform"GDP growth outcome of countries that undertook import-liberalization and fiscal policy reforms. They survey a large sample (about 54) of developing countries over the period 1980-99. The benefits of openness to trade and fiscal prudence have been extensively identified in the growth literature, but the evidence from simple cross-section analysis can sometimes be inconclusive and remains vulnerable to criticism on estimation techniques, such as identification, endogeneity, multi-colinearity, and the quality of the data. The authors use a different analytical framework that establishes additional controls. First, they construct a counterfactual control group. These are countries that-under specific thresholds-did not introduce policy reforms under scrutiny. Second, the authors also try to use the most appropriate variable of policy reform, for example, exogenous changes in import-tariffs instead of the endogenous sum of all trade flows. Third, the authors try to base the before-after reform comparison on the most accurate date for the beginning of a policy reform period (instead of comparing averages over fixed intervals of time). Once these controls are set, they explain the difference between average GDP growth rates during the country-specific post and the pre-reform periods, relative to the average GDP growth of the relevant control group. The explanatory variables in the regressions include the standard growth-regression controls. The results are the following: 1) With a better measurement and timing of the policy reforms, the growth effect (the"returns on reform") is generally smaller than in previous papers. 2) There is evidence of contingent relationships between policy and growth, corresponding to the country's size, its export profile, and its governance. 2) Within the group of policy reformers, some countries have exhibited a relatively weaker growth response. Overall, the findings suggest that more accurate measurement and definition of the timing of reforms does not strengthen the significance of the effects of reforms on GDP growth. In fact, the effects are weaker than indicated in most cross-section studies. This suggests that the policy implications to be derived from these relationships should be treated with even more caution than previously thought.Environmental Economics&Policies,Trade Policy,Public Health Promotion,Economic Theory&Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,TF054105-DONOR FUNDED OPERATION ADMINISTRATION FEE INCOME AND EXPENSE ACCOUNT,Economic Theory&Research,Achieving Shared Growth,Environmental Economics&Policies,Trade and Regional Integration
