International patent applications and innovation in South Africa

Background: Experts recommend support to patents for stimulating innovation. Also, the South African government supports patents, in particular, international patents. In this paper it is examined how this strategy can be designed to successfully trigger economic progress.Aim: The present South African activities in patents are investigated in this paper and areas identified where an intensification of patenting looks promising for economic progress.Setting: The patent activities since 1985 are analysed and compared to the annual export–import balance from 2009 to 2018, in order to identify starting points for improving economic structures. The data are linked to current suggestions to the National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) for future technologies.Methods: The analysis of patents is performed, using the international patent database PATSTAT, as well as the analysis of the export–import balance at the WITS database of the World Bank.Results: The patent analysis reveals a low level of South African domestic patents, with a focus on less complex goods and a stagnation period of 35 years. The data on the export – import balance show negative figures for consumer goods and even more so for capital goods.Conclusion: Economic progress can be accelerated by stimulating patent and economic activities to produce more complex consumer and capital goods. However, it may be necessary to focus on certain areas at the beginning in order to achieve a sufficient critical mass of competence and international competitiveness. In any case, the support of patents is only successful when it is closely linked to a strategy regarding technology.

The Political Economic Structure of Early Media Reform Before and After the Communications Act of 1934

This paper examines how early media reform work evolved from political activism into a system-building advocacy campaign in support of Schools of the Air between 1930 and 1940. Calling upon archival work that focuses on 1935–1940 records, it examines how prominent activist groups the National Committee for Education by Radio (NCER) and the National Advisory Council for Radio in Education (NACRE) shifted their strategic approaches to adjust to the “public interest” mandate of the Communications Act of 1934. Though scholarship has chronicled disagreements between the NCER and NACRE over how to best support educational broadcasting, a dialectical interplay emerged after the act during the New Deal due to the influence of the Federal Radio Education Committee (FREC). FREC inspired A.G. Crane of the NCER to build the Rocky Mountain Radio Council (RMRC). The RMRC was the first sustainable educational media network, and the group coined the term public broadcasting. While the Communications Act signaled the end of the first wave of media activism, the policy also inspired reformers to develop a new system-building strategy that set the groundwork for NPR and PBS.

SUFFICIENCY OF THE POLICIES RELATED TO CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY IN SRI LANKA

Public policy on construction will reflect the economic, political, social, and cultural status of Sri Lanka. The construction industry in Sri Lanka has faced many issues in the recent past because of unsuccessful government policies. Therefore, an effective national policy for the construction industry has become necessary. Thus, the aim of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the existing construction policies. The empirical data required were collected by interviewing ten experts, who were selected using snowball sampling. The collected data were manually analysed using content analysis. The findings revealed that the National Policy on Construction (NPC), formulated by the National Advisory Council on Construction, which was set up under the Construction Industry Development Act No. 33 of 2014, is the only construction policy that has been formulated in Sri Lanka so far. NPC contains eighteen (18) policies applied for both the public and private sectors. Although according to the literature, policies in Sri Lanka change along with the change of governments, the study revealed that NPC, which has remained unchanged since its formulation in 2014, is still applicable in the country.

Blueprint for Advancing High-Value Maternity Care Through Physiologic Childbearing

The Blueprint for Advancing High-Value Maternity Care Through Physiologic Childbearing charts an efficient pathway to a maternity care system that reliably enables all women and newborns to experience healthy physiologic processes around the time of birth, to the extent possible given their health needs and informed preferences. The authors are members of a multistakeholder, multidisciplinary National Advisory Council that collaborated to develop this document. This approach preventively addresses troubling trends in maternal and newborn outcomes and persistent racial and other disparities by mobilizing innate capacities for healthy childbearing processes and limiting use of consequential interventions. It provides more appropriate care to healthier, lower-risk women and newborns who often receive more specialized care, though such care may not be needed and may cause unintended harm. It also offers opportunities to improve the care, experience and outcomes of women with health challenges by fostering healthy perinatal physiologic processes whenever safely possible.