Responsible Consumption and Production
La canopée : découvertes au sommet
Mundiya kepanga, un jefe papú fiel a sus raíces
Tari, Papúa Nueva Guinea, 1965. Un bebé acaba de venir al mundo sobre un manto de hojas de un ficus muy antiguo en un bosque de las tierras altas. Su nombre, Mundiya, se pronuncia “Mundiyé”.
In Canada, nature by prescription
Vincent Beaubien needs to go to the forest regularly. He goes there to picnic by a fire, sleep or simply walk. The 33-year-old construction foreman, who lives in Delson, a suburb of Montreal, feels the benefits of this contact with the trees after taking just a few steps in the woods. “It gives me the peace and serenity I need. These are the feelings I take away with me.”
Nuestro invitado: La música de las palabras de Akira Mizubayashi
Wide angle: The call of the forest: Winds of change
In 2015, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) published a time-lapse of the Earth “breathing”. From April to September, boreal forests in Siberia, Scandinavia and North America burst into life, turning much of the northern hemisphere green, only to fall back with the arrival of winter. In the southern hemisphere, the process happens in reverse, the graphic showed, the green waxing and waning on the map with the movements of the sun. The world’s three largest rainforests in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and Indonesia are deep-green and ever-present around the equator.
Les crédits carbone : une fausse bonne idée?
La valeur d’un arbre abattu est facile à quantifier : le cours du bois d’oeuvre s’élève actuellement à près de 350 dollars. Mais quelle est celle d’un arbre sur pied ? Comment évaluer ce qu’il apporte à la biodiversité, au climat, à la vie humaine et à l’agriculture ? Une forêt fournit en effet un refuge pour les oiseaux, retient le carbone, garde la fraîcheur et régule les précipitations. Mais la valeur marchande des services écologiques qu’elle rend est difficile à évaluer. Une nouvelle idée a donc germé.
Décryptage: Les sites du patrimoine mondial au coeur de la conservation de la biodiversité
Le recul de la biodiversité menace la survie d’innombrables espèces et la stabilité des écosystèmes de notre planète. Le problème se pose avec une acuité particulière pour les sites du patrimoine mondial de l’UNESCO, qui représentent plus d’un cinquième de la biodiversité mondiale.
Discovering life in the canopy
Mexique: les femmes en première ligne pour sauver la mangrove
Depuis son plus jeune âge, Erika Barnett, issue de la communauté seri, au nord-est du Mexique, voyait les plantules de mangroves se faire emporter par les vagues. Elle en ramassait alors de jeunes pousses pour les rapporter chez elle, sur la côte.
Ideas: Viking women in a new light
The word “Viking” has long been associated with tall and muscular man wielding a razor-sharp weapon, wearing a helmet and standing boldly on the prow of a ship, ready to pillage and burn. Today, however, in the age of interdisciplinary research, and when medieval history is omnipresent in museums and universities but also on social media and the silver screen, our visions of the Vikings are changing.
China’s “heavenly pits”, a dive into the unknown
In 2016, in Baise Leye County of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China, my team and I rappelled down with a rope to the bottom of the Dashiwei Tiankeng, 600 metres under the ground. The term tiankeng, “heavenly pit”, refers to large sink-like negative terrains with steep walls, formed over millions of years and developed in carbonate rock strata.
Au Danemark, l’école au milieu des abres
À Krudthus, à une trentaine de kilomètres au nord de Copenhague, les enfants de la maternelle de la forêt passent la plupart de leurs journées en plein air. Ils s’affairent à identifier les insectes dissimulés sous les pierres et les branches tombées au sol, à suivre le rythme des saisons à travers l’évolution des arbres ou encore apprendre le cycle de la vie en observant la décomposition des plantes et des animaux morts. Entre deux activités, ils gambadent avant d’aller pêcher ou de faire du vélo au milieu des massifs d’anémones.
Jens Liljestrand: “Quise captar el sentimiento de cólera ante los incendios”
La selva de la cuenca del Congo, un tesoro frágil
Los viejos edificios coloniales de la Universidad de Kisangani, en la República Democrática del Congo (RDC) no siempre estuvieron dedicados al estudio de las ciencias del medio ambiente. Hasta la década de 1970, los decrépitos locales de ladrillo rojo acogían almacenes de tabaco. Fue por aquel entonces cuando un biólogo polaco plantó los primeros arbustos en el patio de esta antigua fábrica.
Globalized production processes and foreign governmental lobbies: Analysing the United States Foreign Agents Registration Act reports
This study examines two potentially opposing effects that the current state of trade globalization can have on foreign governmental lobbies in the United States. On one hand, economic globalization and increased flows of goods may lead to more and more contentious issues between trading partners. On the other hand, the growing networks of global value chains (GVCs) may mobilize interest groups in foreign lobbies’ target countries (the United States in this study), whose activities might substitute for those of foreign governmental lobbies. With such linkages, an increase in lobbying activities by domestic producers may reduce the need for direct foreign lobbying on contentious issues. The study reveals different effects of forward and backward GVC linkages, and the results have two main policy implications: first, policymakers should be aware of the growing intricate nature of foreign influence; second, more attention must be paid to political consequences of GVCs’ distributive effects, particularly those from backward linkages.
Reshoring, nearshoring and development. Readiness and implications for Latin America and the Caribbean
This paper discusses the concepts of reshoring and nearshoring, which are gaining increasing popularity. We contribute to the literature in three main ways. First, building on previous theories we define a conceptual framework and consider how recent developments – the COVID-19 pandemic and Industry 4.0 technologies – may affect these patterns. Second, we process some preliminary evidence to test whether Latin American and Caribbean economies are indeed participating in this reshoring trend. Third, we propose a measure of “reshoring readiness”, to assess whether these countries appear to be ready to host relocations and benefit from them. Overall, we find limited evidence of nearshoring to the region so far, except in Mexico, and we highlight strengths and weaknesses of the region for attracting and benefitting from future relocations.
Articles: Are emerging market MNEs more attracted towards better patent enforcement regimes when undertaking greenfield R&D-focused FDI?
Multinational enterprises in emerging markets (EMNEs), owing to weak enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR), face challenges when undertaking domestic innovation. As a result, they may search for superior IPR environments in which to create greenfield projects focused on research and development (R&D) and innovation. We hypothesize that the likelihood that an EMNE chooses to invest in an R&D-focused greenfield project over other FDI projects is positively associated with increased levels of host-country patent enforcement protection relative to its home market. In addition, we hypothesize that EMNEs, many in the process of catching up through “springboard” FDI with developed-market MNEs (DMNEs), are more sensitive to IPR protection than DMNEs. Results of logistic regression modelling of 112,908 greenfield projects largely support our hypotheses. We discuss implications for understanding EMNE theorizing and policy, which has to date focused more on regulating technology-seeking mergers and acquisitions (M&As), overlooking the growing importance of R&D-related greenfield FDI as an effective firm-level catch-up strategy for EMNEs.
UNCTAD Insights: Internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): A new assessment
The contributions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to domestic economies are sizeable. The most productive and dynamic ones venture abroad and internationalize by exporting or by investing overseas. For smaller firms, foreign direct investment (FDI) implies the commitment of a high level of resources, potentially increasing the risk of failure. This study empirically assesses the question of whether outward investment is a valuable growth strategy or whether engaging in FDI might hurt performance. The results show that while displaying higher revenue growth rates than their larger counterparts, SMEs experience a bigger shock after their foreign investment: the sales growth of SMEs decreases by about 6 per cent during the first three years after a cross-border greenfield project; it starts recovering only after the fourth year. Larger MNEs show no significant change in growth rate after an investment. The decrease in revenues in SMEs occurs mostly in manufacturing enterprises, and less so in services companies. This is primarily because for services companies a foreign affiliate, which almost by definition is market-seeking, tends to make an immediate contribution to sales and sales growth, whereas many manufacturing affiliates require a start-up period and may engage in activities that contribute less to sales growth, such as supply chain activities.
Intrafirm transactions and tax haven linkages: Evidence from Indian manufacturing
This study aims to assess the pattern and prevalence of intrafirm activities in foreign exchange transactions of foreign affiliates in the manufacturing sector in India. The related-party foreign transactions of selected foreign affiliates are analysed for two years, and the shares of financial payments directed to tax haven locations are identified to appraise the vulnerability of these outflow transactions to potential risk of corporate tax avoidance. A majority of foreign exchange earnings and expense transactions were found to be conducted within firms. The major part of intrafirm payments for the key expenditure types was made to various tax haven locations having different levels of tax avoidance risk. Close to half of all expense payments were traced to tax havens, with several firms reporting predominant shares of intrafirm import, financial or services payments linked to certain significant tax havens. The data indicate active involvement of foreign affiliates in India in the use of tax havens for foreign expense transfers, which could be motivated by tax avoidance aims. This tendency is noted to be high for specific channels such as services, interest payments and other miscellaneous transactions, suggesting that these channels may be used for transfer mispricing and tax avoidance strategies by foreign-affiliated firms.
The United Kingdom Modern Slavery Act: Are we making progress? A look at organizational commitment to eradicating modern slavery
This study examines the effect of regulatory outreach actions on modern slavery statements by the United Kingdom. More than 30,000 policy entries in the United Kingdom Modern Slavery Compliance Registry from 2020 to 2022 were reviewed using analysis of variance and multiple regression to determine predictors of policy statement robustness. The results reveal that policies have become more robust following regulatory efforts. Private conglomerate groups, which can include multinational corporations, are the largest publishers to the registry. However, the role of the chief executive officer as the authority approving the statements has diminished in impact, while company turnover has emerged as a more reliable predictor of impact. Furthermore, the presence of International Labour Organization indicators in the policy statement shows that concern for child-related issues can vary depending on the geographical focus of risk, but that it does not predict a focus on women. The steady improvement in the robustness of modern slavery policies signals some progress following regulator outreach.