Surge In Investment Research Articles

The Touristic Potential of Aral Sea and an Innovative Approach in its Effective

The article mainly illustrates Aral Sea as one of the largest man-made environmental devastation and provides eligible programs that aims at remedying humanity mistake partially through converting the disastrous territory into an eco-touristic destination. Together with exploring adverse impacts of Aral Sea on the locals, the study also examines attractiveness and touristic potential of the territory which will then leads creating an attractive image of the land to ensure a surge of foreign investment. This is the strategic thinking that can reform the prospective revenue generated by the use of Aral Sea as a tourist destination. Based on the identified problems and examined potentiality, the prospects for the further development of integration processes focused on the effective use of the area will be determined.

The Gulf in Bosnia and Herzegovina: an (un)intentional consequence of peace

The rapidly changing (sub)urban and architectural landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina instigated this research in the surge in foreign real estate investment after the war in the 1990s. This article focuses on the influx of capital from the Gulf States that was directed into residential developments, tourist resorts and commercial buildings. It scrutinises the Dayton Peace Agreement and its role as a state-building mechanism that sets this case study apart from its global counterparts. To unpack its complexity, a mix of different methodologies has been employed. The Agreement operated within the specific ethno-religious context of the region. It was underlined by a structural violence deeply embedded at its core. As such, the Agreement produced a new milieu that proved conducive to the flow of global capital. But the influx of capital from the Gulf States challenged the pre-existing binary relationship between the Agreement and the ethno-religious identities of the region. This intense encounter produced a milieu of corruption and underhanded practices, including the deregulation of planning policies and land grabbing. It also endorsed the instrumentalisation of religion as a bait for foreign investment.

Luang Prabang: Climate change and rapid development

Few other Asian cities have been as orientalised as Luang Prabang, the former capital of the Royal Kingdom of Laos and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Situated on the banks of the Mekong River, Luang Prabang has historically been a hub for trade and culture in upland Southeast Asia. The internationalisation engendered by the country's economic reforms and rapid opening up to and integration in regional and transnational economic processes has led to a surge in investment, trade, development assistance and tourist flows. All this has brought opportunities for the residents of Luang Prabang, but such sudden development has also led to socioeconomic dislocation and challenges to both the physical and social fabric of the city. This profile of Luang Prabang looks at the town's geographical location and physical context. This is followed by an account of how spatial use has evolved and the pressures it is under, particularly following the spike in tourist arrivals that followed the city's inscription as a World Heritage site. The article highlights the city's environmental vulnerabilities, zooming in on the impact of climate change which compounds the challenges of rapid development. Far from being fixed in timelessness, the town truly lies at the nexus of local and global processes, experiencing and shaping change, and negotiating the tensions between conservation and development.

Lessons from three decades of IT productivity research: towards a better understanding of IT-induced productivity effects

New developments in the fields of artificial intelligence or robotics are receiving considerable attention from businesses, as they promise astonishing gains in process efficiency—sparking a surge of corporate investments in new, digital technologies. Yet, firms did not become per se more productive, as labor productivity growth in various industrial nations has decelerated in recent years. The fact that the adoption of innovative technologies is not accompanied by productivity increases has already been observed during the dawn of the computer age and became known as Solow’s Paradox. Thus, this paper takes stock of what is known about the Solow Paradox, before incorporating the findings into the debate of the current productivity slowdown. Based on an in-depth review of 86 empirical studies at the firm level, this paper uncovers various reasons for the emergence of the Solow Paradox, debates its following reversal marked by the occurrence of excess returns and deduces a model of factors influencing the returns on IT investments. Based on these insights, four overarching explanations of the modern productivity paradox namely adjustment delays, measurement issues, exaggerated expectations and mismanagement are discussed, whereby mismanagement emerges as a currently neglected, but focal issue.

India and the Civil Nuclear Liability Regime

The successful winding up of the Indo–US civil nuclear cooperation agreement in 2008 had generated a lot of sanguinity of thriving nuclear trade and increased investment surge in India’s civil nuclear power sector. However, the differences over the Indian nuclear liability regime because of its non-conformity with the international liability regime have marred those expectations. In the stated background, the article in its first part traces the chronological development of the international nuclear liability regimes, and, in second part, the Indian liability law and its inconsistencies are dealt with emphasis on shifting tenor of India–US relations vis-à-vis the law.

Brave new world: debt, industrialization and security in China–Africa relations

China's ties with Africa are evolving into a multi-faceted relationship of increasing complexity. After nearly two decades of debt-financed infrastructure development, Beijing's exposure to African debt is reaching disquieting proportions with an estimated US$132 billion owed to China in 2016. Managing this new role as Africa's creditor poses uncomfortable questions for creditor and debtor alike. Concurrently, the quiet surge of Chinese investment in manufacturing in Africa is transforming local economies in ways that are beginning to alter the continent's position within the global economy. Finally, the proliferation of Chinese businesses and migrants across Africa is inspiring greater Chinese involvement in UN peacekeeping and private security initiatives. This article examines how these structural changes are challenging core practices and principles which guided China–Africa relations in its formative decades. For instance, under the banner of an alternative to western policies China promoted the absence of conditionalities attached to its concessional loans and grants. Equally, promotion of industrialization of African economies marks a key shift away from China's resource-centric engagement with the continent. And, in the case of security, Beijing's commitment to avoid intervention in domestic affairs is being set aside with implications for its principles, and ultimately status, in Africa.

Emerging trends in urbanizing Palestine: neglected city-builders beyond the occupation

ABSTRACTIn this article, we draw attention to trends in land transformation in the West Bank since the Second Intifada, after which a surge of investment from Gulf countries entered Palestine, almost exclusively in the West Bank. The occupied Palestinian territories have attracted a great deal of attention from media and academics, yet the vast majority of scholarship focuses on the conflict and the variety of social, economic, and political repercussions of the on-going Israeli occupation. While the occupation has undeniably serious impacts on every aspect of life for Palestinians, the near-exclusive focus on the conflict means that significant new trends, such as urban mega-developments and emerging market-based urbanisation processes, have been largely overlooked. We outline three directions for future research: the assemblage of “neglected city-builders” shaping current urbanization processes in Palestine; the ideas, policies, and norms circulating in the West Bank; and the social, spatial, economic, and other impacts of these new urban developments.

Price Bubble Metrics for Single-Family Housing

Home-price indexes for several metropolitan areas show real prices well above their pre-Great Recession level. Further, CoreLogic’s Market Conditions Indicator has identified more than one-third of metropolitan areas as possibly overvalued, the highest share in a rising price environment since 2003 and raising concerns of an upcoming national valuation bubble. This article presents four indicators to monitor overvaluation tendencies for metropolitan areas: price-to-income ratio, price-to-rent ratio, mortgage payment-to-rent ratio, and home flipping activity. The first three metrics measure overvaluation, while the fourth measures speculative fervor. Taken together, if multiple metrics indicate overvaluation, coupled with a surge in speculative investment, then there is a greater risk of a future price decline. These metrics indicate that there is little risk of a national price bubble in 2018, but parts of southern California, southern Florida, and the Puget Sound area do have heightened overvaluation risk.

Developing Transgenic Agronomic Traits for Crops: Targets, Methods, and Challenges.

The last two decades have witnessed a surge of investment by the agricultural biotechnology industry in the development of transgenic agronomic traits. These are traits that improve yield performance by modifying endogenous physiological processes such as energy capture, nutrient utilization, and stress tolerance. In this chapter we provide a foundation for understanding these fundamental processes and then outline approaches that have been taken to use this knowledge for yield improvement. We characterize the current status of product development pipelines in the industry and illustrate the trait discovery process with three important examples-bacterial cold-shock proteins, alanine aminotransferase, and auxin-regulated genes. The challenges with developing and commercializing an agronomic trait product are discussed.

Extractive Capital, Imperialism, and the Colombian State

Since the turn of the century, Colombia has become increasingly dependent on mining exports to drive economic growth. While the surge in mining investments in Colombia and the problems associated with this form of economic development have received much attention from scholars and policy analysts, the common explanation is that the state has been undermined or eroded by emergent global forces. However, nation-states should be seen not as victims but as authors and enforcers of new processes of capital accumulation. The Colombian state has acted as the principal guarantor of the political and territorial conditions necessary for this form of extractive capitalism by reconstituting property and contract laws, signing free-trade agreements, reconfiguring the internal state apparatus. and expanding military forces. Desde el principio del siglo, Colombia se ha vuelto cada vez más dependiente de las exportaciones mineras para impulsar el crecimiento económico. Si bien el aumento de las inversiones mineras en Colombia y los problemas asociados con esta forma de desarrollo económico han recibido mucha atención por parte de académicos y analistas de políticas, la explicación común es que el estado ha sido socavado o erosionado por las fuerzas globales emergentes. Sin embargo, los Estados-nación deberían ser vistos no como víctimas sino como autores y ejecutores de nuevos procesos de acumulación de capital. El estado colombiano ha actuado como el principal garante de las condiciones políticas y territoriales necesarias para esta forma de capitalismo extractivo mediante la reconstitución de las leyes de propiedad y contratos, la firma de acuerdos de libre comercio, la reconfiguración del aparato estatal interno, y la expansión de fuerzas militares.

China–Africa financial markets linkages: Volatility and interdependence

The China–Africa relationship has blossomed in recent years and the scale and scope of Chinese engagement and investment in the latter have expanded enormously in the last decade. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the dynamic linkages and volatility transmission mechanisms between Chinese and African stock markets in recent years while highlighting the relative importance of Chinese capital flows and investments. We utilise dynamic forecasting models including Bayesian VAR and BEKK GARCH to estimate both price and volatility behaviours of Chinese and 15 selected African stock markets. Our empirical results indicate strong evidence of spillover effects in terms of both price movement and volatility behaviour, implying that Chinese and African stock markets are showing signs of integration. For price movement, bidirectional feedback relationships between Chinese and most of the African stock markets are observed, suggesting that both Chinese and African stock markets could influence each other. China has been building a strong African partnership and, therefore, increasing its trade and investment influences in the region. Examining volatility transmissions, at least one spillover effect (shock and/or volatility) from China to most of the African stock markets is reported. This suggests that the Chinese stock market now plays an influential role across African stock markets given that it has major investments in 46 out of 54 countries. Our findings show important portfolio management implications as a surge in Chinese investments provide new portfolio diversification opportunities for international investors. Policy-wise, we believe further market-oriented reforms and carefully designed and long-term development policies are required to boost capacity for development and achieve sustainable trade and growth.

Civic Technology for Social Innovation

The recent surge of investment in Civic Technologies represents a unique opportunity to realize the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for improving democratic participation. In this review, we study what technologies are proposed and evaluated in the academic literature for such goal. We focus our exploration on how civic technology is used in the collaborative creation of solutions for social issues and innovations for public services (i.e., social innovation). Our goal is to provide researchers, designers, and practitioners a starting point to understand both the academic state of the art and the existing opportunities for ICT in a democracy.

The Microeconomic Origins of the Spanish Boom

The Spanish growth experience over the 1995-2007 period was characterized by the remarkable surge in employment and investment as well as the dismal evolution of productivity. These macroeconomic fluctuations were coupled with an unprecedented credit boom fueled by a housing bubble. This article reviews a line of research that investigates the connection between these developments using micro-level data on Spanish firms and banks. The evidence suggests that the abundant availability of credit, partially induced by the real estate bubble, and its propagation through the Spanish production network explain a sizable part of the massive accumulation of labor and capital. Also, the deterioration in the allocation of resources across firms is the main responsible of the fall in aggregate productivity. The allocation of credit across firms and municipalities, the softening of banks lending standards, and the low productivity of Spanish firms can partly explain this deterioration.

Asia Region Funds Passport and Proposed Corporate Collective Investment Vehicles

The introduction of laws enabling the use of corporate collective investment vehicles in Australia has been long due and the surge in investments from the Asia-Pacific region has hastened the day of its adoption. Australian fund management can look forward to a more flexible system of investment more at home with the region.

Large-scale land investments and forests in Africa

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in land-based investments for food, feed, fuel, and fibre, driven by the volatility in commodity prices, economic growth of emerging economies, policy drivers of biofuel demand, and investor strategies in the wake of the global economic crisis. This interest has led to a surge of foreign and local investments in developing countries, where land can be obtained at a lower cost, and it has led to fears of land grabbing. In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying the determinants of large-scale land acquisitions in Africa and employ a unilateral beta regression to explore the link between investments and a number of indicators related to both land supply and institutional features. The results on the resource-seeking nature of investments and the impact of the land governance indicators are mostly in line with the findings of other studies. On the contrary, the results on forest land being a driver for large-scale land acquisitions, especially from international investors in Africa, differ from previous findings and indicate commercial pressure on African forests that may lead to accelerating degradation and deforestation.

Biotech booms in China.

A surge of investment and innovation mean that careers in the country’s biopharmaceutical industries have never looked more promising. A surge of investment and innovation mean that careers in the country’s biopharmaceutical industries have never looked more promising.

Asymmetric impacts of public and private investments on the non-oil GDP of Saudi Arabia

This paper investigates the impact of four major macroeconomic variables (private investment, public investment, oil production and inflation) on non-oil GDP in the oil-based Saudi Arabia. To this end, we use the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) and the causality-in-quantiles methods to measure the impact of these variables on non-oil GDP. The results show that past non-oil GDP shocks affect current non-oil GDP strongly in the short term. Moreover, a surge in public investment increases non-oil GDP in both the short- and long-run, while a negative private investment shock reduces non-oil GDP in both the short- and long-run. Furthermore, positive (negative) oil production shocks increase the non-oil GDP also in the short- and long-run. In addition, we find a positive relationship between negative and positive inflation shocks and non-oil GDP in the long run, while negative inflation shocks decrease non-oil GDP. Using the nonparametric causality-in- quantile approach, we find that causality-in-the mean and causality-in-the variance emanating from the four explanatory variables vary across the quantiles. Finally, non-oil GDP does not Granger cause these macroeconomic variables. Those non-standard macroeconomic results for this major oil exporter are different from those for well-diversified developed countries. Regardless, they have important implications for Saudi policy makers involved in the Vision 2030 initiative, international organizations and institutional investors.

LEGALITY OF UNILATERAL EXPLOITATION OF SPACE RESOURCES UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

AbstractIn recent years, there has been a surge of private investment in space resources and the enactment of domestic legislation aimed at protecting property rights over the resources to be extracted. This article argues that the unilateral exploitation of space resources is not prohibited by the principle of non-appropriation and is consistent with the freedom of use for common benefit and interests, with the caveat that it does not exclude others from exploitation or exacerbate inequality among States. It also argues that a laissez-faire approach would be detrimental to the orderly, sustainable and safe exploitation and use of space resources and calls for the establishment of an international regulatory regime consisting of rules concerning international coordination, benefits sharing and environmental protection.

Explaining rural land use change and reforestation: A causal-historical approach

Research on human-environment interactions is bedeviled by two key analytical challenges: integrating natural and social science information and demonstrating causal connections between proximate and distant influences. These challenges can be met by adopting an event-focused, causal-historical approach to research methodology, referred to here as Abductive Causal Eventism (ACE). With ACE, researchers construct causal histories of interrelated social and/or biophysical events backward in time and outward or inward in space through a process of eliminative inference and reasoning from effects to causes, called abduction. ACE is contrasted with three leading approaches to human-environment research: Land Change Science (LCS), Socio-ecological Systems (SES), and Political Ecology (PE). For illustration, ACE is applied to a study of post-War environmental change in two rural watersheds in Saint Lucia, West Indies. Findings reveal that the most consequential change has been the widespread reforestation of lands abandoned from farming. This change occurred irrespective of the type of land tenure, but was especially commonplace on lands with steeper slopes and further from roads. Reforestation during the 1960s and 1970s was caused by a combination of commodity market challenges, abandonment of subsistence cultivation in response to smaller family sizes, and sizable out-migrations of younger adults overseas. The expansion of banana cultivation in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s slowed and in places reversed this trend. But an especially large wave of farmland abandonment swept the island from the mid-1990s to early-2000s because the banana export market collapsed as a result of preferential market access being eroded by a series of WTO trade rulings. These effects have been reinforced by a surge in investment from return migrants and the tourism industry which has drawn labour out of farming while also creating economic incentive and political support for protecting more forests on both private estates and public lands. Yet, the post-War trend in reforestation may have ended as agriculture displays signs of rebounding and residential and tourism development expands unabated into the countryside. This study demonstrates the advantages of using ACE where explanations entail diverse types of causes operating across space and over time.

India–Japan Relations

Prime Minister Mori’s visit to India in 2000 began a new era in the India–Japan partnership, resulting in a surge in Japanese aid and investment into India. Japanese aid facilitated infrastructure development, health, water and sanitation programmes of India. Japanese investment also predominantly flowed into the automobile and the electronic sectors. The relationship followed the standard practice that was witnessed in Japan’s relations with other countries in Asia. However, Koizumi’s visit in 2005 brought a ‘strategic’ component into the purview of the India–Japan partnership. From 2010 onwards, especially with Shinzo Abe’s ascendency as the premier of Japan in 2012, this relationship further strengthened the strategic trajectory. China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean and in the Asian region and the changing priorities of the US have drawn the two nations closer, strengthening economic cooperation between the two countries by diverting the Japanese investment to long-term infrastructure projects and many public–private partnerships which address the strategic concerns. The main focus of this article is to highlight how the relationship between India and Japan no longer rests only on ‘complementary economic needs’, but rather that this economic cooperation is being used as a tool to gain strategic strength in the larger canvas of the ‘Indo-Pacific region’.