Responsible Consumption and Production

El año pasado, durante la crisis sanitaria provocada por la pandemia de COVID-19, fuimos muchos los que buscamos refugio en la televisión. En el plano más elemental, nuestro consumo de medios de comunicación no refleja sino nuestro deseo de divertirnos o de escapar del estrés, el tedio o la soledad aunque sólo sea por unos breves instantes.

Los habitantes de las zonas que limitan con el Parque Nacional del Bosque Impenetrable de Bwindi y del Parque Nacional de Gorilas de Mgahinga en Uganda eran, hasta hace unos 25 años, los peores enemigos de los gorilas de montaña. Para ellos, estos animales representaban una amenaza y daban la voz de alarma cuando salían de los bosques lluviosos tropicales donde moran y penetraban en los cultivos y huertos. Las consecuencias de estas alarmas generales eran a menudo letales para esta especie viva en peligro de extinción.

En 2015, los países que se comprometieron a alcanzar los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) acordaron dedicar una mayor proporción de su producto interior bruto (PIB) a la investigación científica y tecnológica. Según el Informe de la UNESCO sobre la Ciencia 2021 publicado el 11 de junio, el gasto mundial en investigación creció en un 19,2 % entre 2014 y 2018, y casi la mitad de ese aumento se debió exclusivamente a China. A pesar de este avance, cuatro de cada cinco países siguen asignando menos del 1% de su PIB a la investigación.

Cotorras en los parques de Bruselas, Amsterdam o Londres; plantas silvestres que crecen en el asfalto; edificios industriales invadidos por murciélagos o rapaces: estudios recientes ponen de relieve la asombrosa capacidad de determinadas especies para adaptarse al medio ambiente ruidoso y densamente poblado que conforman las ciudades.

В прошлом году телепередачи стали для многих своего рода убежищем, позволив пережить изоляцию в разгар пандемии COVID-19. И это закономерно: наше медиапотребление отражает инстинктивное желание получить удовольствие и хотя бы на краткое время убежать от тревоги, скуки или одиночества.

En 1997 estuve investigando en Borneo los incendios incontrolados que devoraban desde hacía meses grandes extensiones de bosques tropicales vírgenes. Un intenso episodio del fenómeno climático El Niño había provocado una espantosa sequía y una espesa niebla amarillenta cubría gran parte de Indonesia, Malasia y algunas regiones vecinas.

Todas las islas tienen una edad geológica, una situación geográfica y un grado de aislamiento específicos. Esas características hace que sean únicas en su género y que alberguen ecosistemas con concentraciones de fauna y de flora inexistentes en otras partes del mundo. Por eso, algunas de sus especies vivas desarrollan características muy singulares, como gigantismo, enanismo o apterismo (incapacidad de volar).

Economic agglomeration and industrial clusters have always been part of industrialization and economic development. Since the 1960s, industrial hubs have proliferated in Asia, driven by policies to foster economic catch-up and structural transformation. Industrial hubs are relatively new to Africa but continue to attract attention from policymakers and researchers. However, empirical studies on African industrial hubs have been inadequate and, to date, have had only a limited influence on policymaking. Contrary to accepted wisdom, underperforming African industrial hubs offer an opportunity for policy learning from successes and failures. This paper aims to fill the existing knowledge gap from a policymaking perspective. It has three objectives: first, to demonstrate the diversity, the uneven and mixed outcomes, and the evolving nature of African industrial hubs; second, to provide insights and policymaking lessons through a comparative analysis of four diverse cases, namely those of Mauritius, the China-Africa economic and trade cooperation development zones, the Tanger Med Complex in Morocco and the recent experiment with industrial hubs in Ethiopia; third, to show that developing synergies to advance industrialization requires a strategic approach, integrating the state’s productive role and executive excellence within the broader industrial policy framework.

This paper investigates the role of global economic uncertainty in Dunning’s investment development path (IDP) framework. By applying the dynamic panel threshold model to data from 76 developed and developing countries, we find that countries’ net outward investment (NOI) follows a non-linear pattern even after incorporating global economic uncertainty into the analysis. At the same time, global economic uncertainty has non-linear effects on NOI subject to the level of economic development. More importantly, our results show that NOI is path dependent, with correlation coefficients changing across the different stages of IDP, which implies that uncertainty affects countries’ progression to the next stage of IDP differently. From a policy perspective, our findings call for special attention to policymakers in less developed nations. Even though global economic uncertainty may not always have a negative effect or may even improve a country’s NOI for a while, it may deter the international expansion of local firms. In the presence of high global economic uncertainty, local firms are less likely to become outward foreign direct investors, which implies stagnation in internationalization.

UNCTAD first published a list of the top 100 digital multinationals in the World Investment Report 2017. This research note builds on the analysis and conceptual framework on digitalization and foreign direct investment set out in that report. It provides an updated list, allowing for an analysis of trends over the five-year period including the COVID-19 pandemic and adds new features to the data set that will be exploited in forthcoming UNCTAD work. The note describes the methodology to create the new and extended data set and points at possible avenues for further work. The purpose of the research note is to provide academic scholars with the basic elements needed to pursue further research in this field.

This paper analyses the major features of the 2020 Ethiopian investment law and their policy implications. The law has liberalized many areas of the Ethiopian economy to pave the way for increasing the private sector’s share and diminishing the Government’s role. It adopted the negative list approach to liberalization to simplify the process of determining investment fields that are open for foreign investors. It laid out procedures for handling investors’ grievances and for resolving investor–State disputes, principally through domestic institutions. It also obliges investors to discharge their corporate social responsibilities. The paper argues that these features of the law demand transparent, efficient and competent government institutions to properly regulate and protect investments and to attain sustainable development as the ultimate goal of the law. For this purpose, it also argues that two factors are essential: ensuring effective institutional coordination and supplementing the mandatory corporate social responsibility requirements with voluntary engagement. In addition, it contends that the Government needs to strengthen linkages between foreign and domestic investment, promote decent jobs and sustainability, enhance human resources and infrastructure, and build a stable political system to reap the significant development benefits of investment, as envisaged in the investment law. The paper also suggests that other countries, in Africa and beyond, can benefit from applying these lessons in designing or reforming their investment policies to maximize the sustainable development gains from foreign investment.

This paper analyses the potential impact of the minimum tax envisaged under the OECD Pillar Two on several common corporate tax incentives. It reaches the conclusion that while the impact is expected to be low to moderate for some common incentives, such as participation exemption regimes and accelerated depreciations, it might be significant for direct cuts from the tax bill, which include tax holidays, intellectual property (IP) box regimes and special economic zones (SEZs). Hence, the response by policymakers must be informed by the specific interaction between the corporate tax incentives under their respective systems and the upcoming international standards on the minimum level of taxation.

The OECD agreement in principle on a global minimum corporate income tax – Pillar Two of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting project – is a major step in international tax regulation and coordination. Yet, its consequences for foreign direct investment (FDI) have received limited attention thus far. In the present paper, the authors detail the analytical framework developed to underpin the findings of the World Investment Report 2022: International Tax Reforms and Sustainable Investment. The paper introduces the notion of FDI-level effective tax rate (ETR). Unlike standard ETRs, FDI-level ETRs embed the profit shifting schemes of multinational enterprises (MNEs). They capture not only the taxes paid on income reported in the host country of the foreign investment but also those levied on income shifted to offshore financial centres (OFCs). The effect of Pillar Two on these two components of the tax base determines the increase in the overall tax rate faced by MNEs, which ultimately affects the investment decisions of MNEs. After empirically calibrating ETRs, profit shifting and FDI-level ETRs of more than 200 countries, the authors quantify the effect of Pillar Two on FDI-level ETRs. The results show that after the reform FDI-level ETRs are likely to increase by 2 to 3 percentage points in non-OFCs, which corresponds to an increase in the corporate income tax liability for MNEs between 14 and 20 per cent.

This paper investigates the role of human capital and institutional quality in the nexus of foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth in 46 African countries between 2002 and 2018. Based on panel data modelling, the empirical findings suggest that FDI in itself does not promote economic growth in Africa; however, we observe that human capital and institutional quality play a supportive role in enhancing the positive spillover effect of FDI on economic growth in uppermiddle- income countries in the region. The findings for low-income and lowermiddle- income countries are mostly not significant. Given the initial conditions and absorptive capacity constraints in these countries, the positive spillover effects of FDI might be limited. From a policy perspective, the findings call for special attention by policymakers to improving the quality of their human capital and strengthening their institutions to maximize the benefits of FDI.

The present paper investigates the effect of linguistic distance on location decisions of Moroccan outward foreign direct investment (FDI) using panel data on 54 host countries from 2007 to 2021 and the robust weighted least squares estimation method. The results show that the higher the share of French- and Arabic-speaking populations, the more the host country attracts FDI from Morocco. Also, the results show that the higher the share of the English-speaking population, the less the host country attracts FDI because English-speaking countries tend to adopt institutional structures (the Anglo-Saxon way of governance) that differ from the French model inherited by Morocco during its colonization. For Spanish, there is no effect on the location decisions of Moroccan multinational enterprises because of the language’s marginalization at the formal level. The study highlights important policy considerations for home and host countries in terms of investment policy and investment promotion, language-in-education policies, and the role of international cultural and linguistic institutes in home and host countries.

Do comprehensive trade agreements increase the participation of States in global value chains (GVCs) and contribute to their development? Although there is extensive evidence in the trade literature that deep preferential trade agreements (PTAs) can increase States’ bilateral export of final goods and, by implication, contribute to local development, much less is known about the characteristics of this effect on GVC relations. This paper answers the question in the framework of a gravity model and uses a comprehensive dyadic data set on trade in GVCs, PTAs, export and other characteristics for 188 countries and economies between 1990 and 2018. Results provide robust evidence that deep PTAs increase members’ bilateral trade in GVCs over the long term, especially when these agreements involve at least one developing country or economy and include provisions that support investment. These results underscore that GVC-facilitating deep PTAs are a powerful policy tool that can mobilize the potential of production and trade in GVCs for development.

En Krudthus, unos 30 kilómetros al norte de Copenhague, los niños de la escuela infantil del bosque pasan la mayor parte del día al aire libre. Los pequeños se ocupan de identificar los insectos que se esconden entre las piedras y las ramas caídas, siguen el ritmo de las estaciones a través de la evolución de los árboles y aprenden los ciclos de la vida observando la descomposición de las plantas y de los animales muertos. Entre dos actividades, saltan y retozan antes de ir a pescar o de andar en bicicleta entre macizos de anémonas silvestres.

Elles nous sont à la fois étrangères et familières. Ce sont des photos d’avant l’ère du numérique et des selfies, d’avant Instagram. De leurs couleurs vintage et du grain argentique sourd un curieux parfum d’innocence, de mélancolie aussi. Les protagonistes n’ont pas de nom. On ne sait rien d’eux ni de celui – ou celle – qui a fixé un jour sur pellicule ces scènes de vie ordinaire. Tout juste connaît-on le pays d’origine et l’année (dans la série présentée ici, des images prises aux États-Unis et au Royaume-Uni entre les années 1950 et 1970).

El valor de un árbol talado es fácil de cuantificar: el precio de la madera alcanza actualmente unos 350 dólares. ¿Pero cuál es el precio de un árbol en pie? ¿Cómo calcular su aporte a la biodiversidad, al clima, a la vida humana y la agricultura? Un bosque proporciona refugio a las aves, retiene el carbono, mantiene el frescor y regula las precipitaciones. Pero los servicios ecológicos que el bosque proporciona son difíciles de evaluar. De ahí que surgiera una nueva idea.

La pérdida de biodiversidad amenaza la supervivencia de innumerables especies y la estabilidad de los ecosistemas de nuestro planeta. El problema es particularmente grave para los sitios del Patrimonio Mundial de la UNESCO, que representan más de una quinta parte de la biodiversidad mundial.

Durante mucho tiempo, la palabra “vikingo” hacía pensar en un hombre alto y corpulento, ataviado con un casco, que blandía un hacha y navegaba en la proa de un barco listo para saquear e incendiar aldeas enemigas. Sin embargo, hoy en día, como resultado de investigaciones interdisciplinarias y la omnipresencia de la historia medieval no solo en museos y universidades, sino también en el cine y en las redes sociales, la idea de los vikingos ha cambiado.

Tari, Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée, 1965. Un garçon naît sur un tapis de feuilles de ficus très anciens dans la forêt des hautes terres. Son nom, Mundiya, se prononce « Moundidjê ».

They are both foreign and yet familiar. Photos from before the digital age and selfies, before Instagram. Their vintage colours and gelatin-silver grain give off a curious air of innocence – and melancholy. The protagonists have no names. We know nothing about them, or the person who, one day, captured these scenes of ordinary life on film. All we know is the country and the year (the pictures presented here were taken between 1950 and 1980 in the United States and the United Kingdom).

En 2015, una película filmada en cámara rápida por la agencia espacial estadounidense (NASA) mostraba cómo “respira” la Tierra. De abril a septiembre, los bosques boreales de Siberia, Escandinavia y América del Norte reviven y cubren de verde gran parte del hemisferio Norte, antes de retroceder con la llegada del invierno. En el hemisferio Sur, la animación muestra el proceso inverso: la zona verde se extiende y retrocede sobre el mapa en función de los movimientos del sol. Los tres grandes bosques tropicales del mundo, en la Amazonia, la cuenca del Congo e Indonesia, dibujan zonas de un verde profundo a ambos lados del ecuador.

Nos resultan a la vez extrañas y familiares. Son fotos anteriores a la era digital y a los selfis, antes de Instagram. Sus colores envejecidos y su granulado de gelatina de plata desprenden un curioso perfume de inocencia, también de melancolía. Los protagonistas carecen de nombre. De ellos no sabemos nada. Ni de ellos, ni de quien un día capturó en película estas escenas de la vida ordinaria. Apenas sabemos el país de origen y el año en el que se hicieron. En la serie presentada aquí, se trata de imágenes tomadas en Estados Unidos y Reino Unido entre los años 1950 y 1970.

The worth of a felled tree is easy to quantify; currently, lumber is worth about US$350. But what is the value of a standing tree? It is obviously valuable for biodiversity, for the climate, for humans and agriculture: a forest provides habitat for birds, stores carbon, casts shadow and regulates rainfall. But these are not financial values, therefore leaving forests vulnerable for clearance. So a new idea emerged.

En 2016, dans le district de Leye, ville de Baise, région autonome zhuang du Guangxi en Chine, mon équipe et moi-même sommes descendus au fond du tiankeng de Dashiwei, à 600 mètres de profondeur. Le terme tiankeng, ou puits céleste, désigne les vastes dépressions d’effondrement aux parois abruptes, ou dolines, qui se sont formées pendant des millions d’années dans des strates de roches carbonatées.

Vincent Beaubien a besoin de se rendre régulièrement en forêt. Il va y pique-niquer au coin du feu, dormir ou simplement se promener. Contremaître dans le bâtiment, cet homme de 33 ans qui vit à Delson, dans la banlieue de Montréal, ressent les bienfaits de ce contact avec les arbres après quelques pas dans les bois. « Cela me procure l’apaisement et la sérénité dont j’ai besoin. Ce sont des émotions que j’emporte avec moi. »

En 2015, un film en accéléré réalisé par l’agence spatiale américaine (NASA) montrait la Terre en train de « respirer ». D’avril à septembre, les forêts boréales de Sibérie, de Scandinavie et d’Amérique du Nord prennent vie et verdissent une grande partie de l’hémisphère Nord, avant de régresser avec l’arrivée de l’hiver. Dans l’hémisphère Sud, l’animation montre le processus inverse, la partie verte s’allongeant et reculant sur la carte avec la course du soleil. Les trois plus grandes forêts tropicales du monde, en Amazonie, dans le bassin du Congo et en Indonésie, dessinent des zones d’un vert profond de part et d’autre de l’équateur.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.