A club theory approach to voluntary social programs: Multinational companies and the extractive industries transparency initiative

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Schuler

This study uses club theory to describe the incentives of extractive industry MNCs to support the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a multi-stakeholder promoted voluntary social program (VSP) aimed at creating national legislation to make the royalty payments received by governments from mining and oil and gas companies more transparent to the public. We characterize the EITI as a VSP that lacks stringent standards and that has a moderate to high level of enforcement through the national governments that have adopted its principles. According to club theory, VSPs with these characteristics produce only a low to medium level of club benefits, in this case “social branding,” for member firms. Noting that over 60 MNCs have signed on to the EITI as of April 2012, we argue that VSPs offering low to medium club benefits should be most attractive to MNCs from countries with long arm disclosure laws, to MNCs lacking relationships with NGOs seeking inexpensive CSR, to MNCs relying upon financing from institutional and social investors, to MNCs attempting to differentiate themselves from competitors on social criteria, and to MNCs with broad stakeholder-focused top managers. We also describe the implications for MNCs if the EITI were to include a more stringent set of social requirements.

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arina Alexandra Muresan

The Second High-Level United Nations (UN) Conference on South-South Cooperation (also known as BAPA+40), held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from 20 to 22 March 2019, promised to reinvigorate efforts to further achieve and implement South-South cooperation (SSC). Forty years on, the Global South is shaping its image as a solutions provider. Immense strides have been made in improving access to allow a multitude of state and non-state actors to cooperate, while broadening and deepening modes of cooperation and facilitating the exchange of knowledge and transfer of technology, thus moving beyond the simplistic view that developing countries require aid to function and move forward. However, noting these symbolic strides, the Global South should move forward by building understanding of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks; integrating multi-stakeholder models; improving the visibility of peace and security in South-South programming; and building effective communications systems.


Author(s):  
Alan Roe ◽  
Samantha Dodd

This chapter synthesizes statistical information evidencing the proposition that extractive industries are of great significance in many low- and middle-income developing economies, and so to their development prospects. It examines the scale of the current dependence of low- and middle-income economies on both types of extractive resources: metals, and oil and gas. The chapter also assesses how country levels of dependence have changed in the past twenty years, showing that there has been a clear upward trend based on exports. The chapter outlines how the upward trend has continued in many countries despite the recent commodity price collapse, and assesses some of the consequences of that collapse.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2199781
Author(s):  
Xinyue Luo ◽  
Mingxing Chen

The nodes and links in urban networks are usually presented in a two-dimensional(2D) view. The co-occurrence of nodes and links can also be realized from a three-dimensional(3D) perspective to make the characteristics of urban network more intuitively revealed. Our result shows that the external connections of high-level cities are mainly affected by the level of cities(nodes) and less affected by geographical distance, while medium-level cities are affected by the interaction of the level of cities(nodes) and geographical distance. The external connections of low-level cities are greatly restricted by geographical distance.


2003 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Pauletti ◽  
Raul Machado Neto ◽  
Irineu Umberto Packer ◽  
Raul Dantas D'Arce ◽  
Rosana Bessi

Immunity acquired by newborn animals is known as passive immunity, and for ruminants, antibody acquisition depends on the ingestion and absorption of adequate amounts of immunoglobulins from colostrum. This study relates different initial levels of acquired passive protection and serum total protein (TP) and immunoglobulin G (IgG). Serum immunoglobulin concentration and total protein were evaluated for female Holstein calves in the first sixty days of life. Animals were separated into three groups according to their initial level of passive immunity: group 1- animals with a low level of passive immunity (below 20 mg mL-1); group 2- animals with a medium level (between 20 and 30 mg mL-1), and group 3- animals with a high level (above 30 mg mL-1). Serum total protein was determined through the biuret method and IgG was determined by radial immunodiffusion. Data were analyzed as a completely randomized, split-plot statistical design. Fluctuation of the variables along the experimental period was determined through non-linear regression by the DUD method (PROC NLIN - Non Linear SAS). Animals with low antibody acquisition started to produce antibodies earlier, reflecting a compensatory synthesis. On the other hand, animals having adequate levels exhibited an extended period of immunoglobulin catabolism and the beginning of the endogenous phase was delayed. Regardless initial levels, the fluctuations in IgG contents occurred around adequate physiological concentrations, ranging from 20 to 25 mg mL-1.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 1022
Author(s):  
Gianluca D’Addese ◽  
Martina Casari ◽  
Roberto Serra ◽  
Marco Villani

In many complex systems one observes the formation of medium-level structures, whose detection could allow a high-level description of the dynamical organization of the system itself, and thus to its better understanding. We have developed in the past a powerful method to achieve this goal, which however requires a heavy computational cost in several real-world cases. In this work we introduce a modified version of our approach, which reduces the computational burden. The design of the new algorithm allowed the realization of an original suite of methods able to work simultaneously at the micro level (that of the binary relationships of the single variables) and at meso level (the identification of dynamically relevant groups). We apply this suite to a particularly relevant case, in which we look for the dynamic organization of a gene regulatory network when it is subject to knock-outs. The approach combines information theory, graph analysis, and an iterated sieving algorithm in order to describe rather complex situations. Its application allowed to derive some general observations on the dynamical organization of gene regulatory networks, and to observe interesting characteristics in an experimental case.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Made Ngurah Partha ◽  
Noor Ellyawati ◽  
Komang Ayu Safitri

This research purposes to determine the income of Grabbike drivers in Samarinda during March 2019 and to compare the income toward the City Minimum Wage (UMK) in 2019. This research also intends to know the average and the percentage of Grabbike driver’s income in Samarinda toward the City Minimum Wage (UMK) in 2019. This is a descriptive quantitative research. The populations in this research are 1200 Samarinda Grabbike drivers in 2019 with 120 respondents. Data collection techniques in this research use questionnaires, interviews and documentation. The data analysis technique uses the net income formula; the average and percentage income. The research data and analysis of the Samarinda Grabbike driver’s income in 2019 includes several indicators; the number of working hours and working days. The research results show that the Samarinda Grabbike driver’s net income in March 2019 is Rp. 200,758,204. The percentage comparison between Samarinda Grabbike Driver’s incomes toward the City Minimum Wage (UMK) shows 24 drivers achieving high-level income or 20%, 65 drivers achieving medium-level income or 54.2% and 31 drivers achieving low-level income or 25.8%. The average income of Samarinda Grabbike drivers in March 2019 is Rp. 1,672,985.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (07) ◽  
pp. 12862-12869
Author(s):  
Shiwen Zhang ◽  
Sheng Guo ◽  
Limin Wang ◽  
Weilin Huang ◽  
Matthew Scott

In this work, we propose Knowledge Integration Networks (referred as KINet) for video action recognition. KINet is capable of aggregating meaningful context features which are of great importance to identifying an action, such as human information and scene context. We design a three-branch architecture consisting of a main branch for action recognition, and two auxiliary branches for human parsing and scene recognition which allow the model to encode the knowledge of human and scene for action recognition. We explore two pre-trained models as teacher networks to distill the knowledge of human and scene for training the auxiliary tasks of KINet. Furthermore, we propose a two-level knowledge encoding mechanism which contains a Cross Branch Integration (CBI) module for encoding the auxiliary knowledge into medium-level convolutional features, and an Action Knowledge Graph (AKG) for effectively fusing high-level context information. This results in an end-to-end trainable framework where the three tasks can be trained collaboratively, allowing the model to compute strong context knowledge efficiently. The proposed KINet achieves the state-of-the-art performance on a large-scale action recognition benchmark Kinetics-400, with a top-1 accuracy of 77.8%. We further demonstrate that our KINet has strong capability by transferring the Kinetics-trained model to UCF-101, where it obtains 97.8% top-1 accuracy.


Author(s):  
Kordiana K Rangga ◽  
Indah Listiana

<p align="center"><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p><pre><em>                </em><em>Farmer groups are a forum for farmers to make it easier for farmers to carry out their farming, if the farmer group runs effectively in accordance with the goals of the group. Effective farmer groups cannot be separated from the role of group leaders. The head of the farmer group has an important role in supporting the group to achieve its group goals. Based on the background described, then </em><em>the purpose of this research are to know: the effectiveness of paddy farmer group; the leadership level of farmer group; and the relationship between leadership of farmer group leader with the effectiveness of farmer group in Sukoharjo Sub District of Pringsewu Regency. This research was conducted in Sukoharjo Sub District Pringsewu Regency, with 73 respondents of paddy farmer.  Data was collected by using survey method with descriptive analysis and using statistical non parametric test rank spearman correlation to test hypothesis.  The results showed that</em><em> paddy farmer group in </em><em>Sukoharjo Sub District had a high level of effectiveness, had a medium level of leadership of farmer group leader; and leadership of farmer group had significant relationship with farmer group effectiveness.  </em></pre><p> </p><p>Keyword:<em>  effectiveness, </em><em>farmer group</em><em>, leadership.</em></p><p align="center"><strong> </strong></p><p align="center"><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p><p>Kelompok tani merupakan wadah bagi petani agar memudahkan petani dalam menajalankan usahataninya, jika kelompok tani berjalan secara efektif sesuai dengan tujuan kelompoknya. Kelompok tani yang efektif tidak terlepas dari peran ketua kelompok. Ketua kelompok tani memiliki peran yang penting dalam mendukung kelompok mencapai tujuan kelompoknya. Berdasarkan latar belakang yang telah diuraikan, maka tujuan dari penelitian ini yaitu untuk mengetahui: keefektifan kelompok tani padi sawah; tingkat kepemimpinan ketua kelompok tani; dan hubungan antara tingkat kepemimpinan ketua kelompok tani dengan keefektifan kelompok tani padi sawah di Kecamatan Sukoharjo Kabupaten Pringsewu.  Penelitian ini dilakukan di Kecamatan Sukoharjo Kabupaten Pringsewu, dengan 73 petani responden. Metode pengumpulan data menggunakan metode survey, dengan anilisis deskriptif dan menggunakan uji statistik korelasi <em>rank spearman </em>non parametrik untuk menguji hipotesis. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan kelompok tani padi sawah memiliki tingkat keefektifan yang tinggi, memiliki tingkat kepemimpinan ketua kelompok yang sedang, dan kepemimpinan ketua kelompok tani memiliki hubungan yang nyata dengan keefektifan kelompok tani.</p><p> </p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 210 ◽  
pp. 17002
Author(s):  
Elena Katamanova ◽  
Larisa Vasilieva ◽  
Natalia Kuptsova ◽  
Irina Kodinets ◽  
Irina Kudaeva ◽  
...  

Thirty three athletes’ health (average age – 16.4±1.0 years) were studied. Anthropometry and analysis of body composition, and load test were performed by the Hardware-software complex "Zdorovye-Express" (Russia). Spirometry, electrocardiography, assessment of physical performance as per Harvard step test, and ultrasound scan of abdominal organs, blood biochemical indicators were also performed. It is established, examined athletes have medium level of harmony of development and high level of physical fitness. Harvard step test data showed that the vast majority of athletes have an adequate level of physical performance (66.6%) with good recovery ability, and 33.4% - a very poor level of physical performance with a normal or slow recovery period after exercise. Assessing the cardiac singular index, the condition of the cardiovascular system in 82.6% surveyed was considered as optimal and in 17.3% examined as moderately increased. Spirometer indicators confirmed to the age norms. Ultrasound data of the abdominal organs showed the presence of disturbances in 24% of cases, while these disorders were manifested by diffuse liver echogenicity changes in 7% of cases and pathology of the gallbladder in 17% cases. The revealed changes in the health status of athletes require further research.


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