New Sourcebook | RIS Bibliography on South-South Cooperation, 2016

RIS Bibliography on South-South Cooperation

edited by Beena Pandey with Kashika Arora, Akanksha Batra, Pratyush, Divya Prakash, Jyoti, and Sushila. Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), New Delhi, India, 2016.

Summary: The RIS Bibliography on South-South Cooperation includes selected books, documents and research articles on five broad sectors, viz. Broad Themes, Trade and Investment, Sectoral Studies, Technology and Technology Transfer and Miscellaneous. It is a result of collective efforts made by a research team and the RIS Library team.  This is an on-going work, not an exhaustive bibliography.

Table of Contents

1. Broad Themes

2. Trade and Investment

3. Sectoral Studies

4. Technology and Technology Transfer

5. Miscellaneous 

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CfPs | CCI National Conference on the Economics of Competition Law | 2-3 March 2017 in New Delhi

CCI's National Conference on the Economics of Competition Law 

2-3 March 2017 in New Delhi

Call for Papers

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) is organizing the second annual two-day National Conference on the 'Economics of Competition Law' on 2-3 March 2017 in New Delhi. Papers are invited from Economists on the following

broad themes:

• Market definition and measuring market power
• Economics of cartels and collusion
• Economics of abuse of dominant position
• Economic analysis in merger review
• Any other theme related to enforcement of the Competition Act, 2002.

Interested scholars are invited to send an abstract of 100 words and an extended abstract of 1,000 words of original research papers along with their bio-data and professional contact details to ecoseminar@cci.gov.in. The last date for submission of abstract is 5th September 2016. Authors of the accepted papers will be invited to present their papers in the conference. Depending on the quality of submissions, some papers may be considered for publication by the CCI. The authors of the selected papers will be considered for honorarium. Those from outside Delhi/NCR would also be eligible for reimbursement of TA/DA on the submission of original bills and invoices. For details please visit http://www.cci.gov.in.

CSIR-NISTADS Vitarka/Policy Debate on India's Current Agricultural Trade Policy is not Water Sustainable | 24th August | IIC New Delhi

Vitarka: A CSIR-NISTADS Outreach Programme for Inclusive Policy Debate

Topic: "India's Current Agricultural Trade Policy is not Water Sustainable"

Date: 24th August 2016 at 6:00 PM (Tea: 5:45 pm)

Venue: India International Center, Seminar Hall 1, New Delhi

Online Register Vitarka session at CSIR-NISTADS

NISTADS is planning a small group discussion comprising maximum 30 participants from various section of the society. Participation in Vitarka is by invitation based on direct invitation or selection from requests received through web registration. Kindly register on NISTADS website for participation by 20th August 2016. Email from NISTADS will be sent by 22nd August 2016 to the participants whose participation is confirmed.

About Vitarka

An active and inclusive public debate can make significant contribution to policy formulation and policy advocacy. CSIR National Institute for Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS) is launching a public discussion forum Vitarka. The primary goal of Vitarka is to engage the public in policy debate for techno-socio-economic transformation, especially through S&T intervention.

Vitarka is planned as an open environment platform for informed and participative discussion. Vitarka sessions will be organized at India International Centre (IIC).

CSIR-NISTADS invites public and all stakeholders for their views, contribution and participation in this techno-socio-economic developments initiative. Vitarka will greatly benefit from your contribution and participation. The topics planned under Vitarka can range from Clean Water, Carbon Taxes, Energy, GM Crops, and Stem Cell Research to Space Mission and Nuclear Policy.

Background Note
Eliminating hunger and malnutrition has been a pertinent challenge for India since Independence. Despite the tremendous growth and phenomenal industrial and economic performance, India is still home to 190.7 million under nourished people (FAO and UN, 2014, The State of Food Insecurity in the World), a quarter of all undernourished population in the world. Moreover, projections of India’s population reaching 1.6 billion by 2050 (UN, Department of Economics and Social Affairs, June 2013, World Population Prospect) shall entail much higher food requirements than today. It is of highest priority for India to ensure secure access to food by every one of its citizens, now and for the future. Climate change, resource constraints, distribution and storage are some concerns that threaten India’s food security. 
Agriculture, the soul of food security, is a highly intensive resource sector. Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of total global freshwater withdrawals, making it the largest user of water. At the same time, the food production and supply chain consumes about 30 percent of total energy consumed globally (FAO 2011, Issue Paper: Energy-smart Food for People and Climate). Food security is related to the nexus between water and energy, and while water and energy are required for irrigation, energy is vital for water access, and water is critical for energy production. While water scarcity in the region increases, food price hikes and food access become grave concerns for many. A balance is crucial for the nexus approach. Agriculture is undeniably a resource intensive sector and this fact comes along with a need for efficient and effective management of finite resources, in order to ensure long term sustainability of agriculture and thus food security for all.
India is poised to lose its entire available water supply within 500 years if its current food export policy continues, a new method of calculating “virtual water” flow through trade has shown. India, in contrast, is a net exporter of water through agricultural products and the new analysis claims: “This can lead to a slow but irreversible loss of water sustainability”. India’s main exports are cereals, tea, coffee, cashew nuts and sugar, which all require vast amounts of water. The analysis concludes that the net virtual water export alone can severely impact on a nation’s long-term water sustainability. 
Water shortage in India is not merely because of bad monsoon. Water is now a policy challenge. Several countries have started analysing water demand and supply in the context of agricultural, trade and industrial policies. India and China are the world's biggest countries (in terms of population) and their water policies are the subject of global studies. Studies of Stockholm Water Institute and International Water Institute (available on the internet) show that China is managing its water resources better. Rainfall in India is 50 per cent higher than that in China, but India's water resources are 67 per cent of those of China's and per capita water availability is declining faster than that in China.
Looking at the exploitation of groundwater, river water and other water resources, India needs a comprehensive policy change on its water usage. This is essential because India hosts a massive virtual water trade at the domestic level, which involves the cultivation of crops like cotton, sugarcane and paddy in low rainfall areas of north-west and their supply to eastern states.
Through this debate, we would like to address the following questions:

• What policy interventions (trade, investment, natural capital, climate) are needed to build co-ordination among water, energy and food sectors to address the issue of resource conflicts?
• What are the technology solutions in agriculture that can support in attaining optimum efficiency and utilisation of resources along with the balance in the nexus? Are there market mechanisms required to mainstream such technologies?
• What are the strategies needed to prevent incoherence of macro policies with local problems of resource availability and usage?
• How can farmer ensure efficient use of resource keeping the Water-Energy-Food nexus in perspective?

Further Details

Dr. Mohammad Rais

Coordinator: Vitarka-NISTADS Outreach Programme (NOP)

CSIR-NISTADS, Pusa Gate, K.S. Krishnan Marg, New Delhi 110012, India

T: +91-11-25843052 (office)

E: mohammad_rais[at]hotmail.com; rais[at]nistads.res.in

http://nistads.res.in/index.php/outreach-programme/vitarka

NITI Aayog, India | Report of the Expert Committee on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Report of the Expert Committee on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
by NITI Aayog, New Delhi, India, August 2015.

Foreword
Late in the spring of 2015, I was privileged to be asked to chair a committee on Entrepreneurship and Innovation, constituted under the auspices of NITI Aayog. The committee was pulled together in rather short order - a testimony to the good spiritedness of my colleagues who were willing to carve out time from their incredibly busy schedules - and we met formally to initiate the work on May 1, 2015, in the NITI Aayog offices in New Delhi.
Subsequently, there has been a whirlwind of activity, a near-continuous virtual meeting to brainstorm and write the report these past months, punctuated by occasional physical meetings in New Delhi, Bangalore, and Boston (my adopted home).
We took care to ensure the committee was drawn from very diverse walks of life, to include entrepreneurs (with track records of building for-profit and social enterprises), financiers, scientists and academics, heads of academic institutions and, finally, several who have experience liaising with government. Each member has, in turn, helped us access an incredibly broad network of individuals not on the committee, both in India and in parts of the Indian diaspora, who have all unfailingly and generously given of their time.
Through all this, my colleagues in NITI Aayog, led by Arvind Panagariya and his able team, and, informally, colleagues in the Prime Minister's Office, have been nothing short of spectacular.
Our approach has been to take a big-tent view of entrepreneurship, to think of the innovation and creativity that underlie successful entrepreneurship in a variety of walks of life, far transcending the exciting but ultimately rather limited remit of current entrepreneurial hotspots in information technology and e-commerce. These hotspots have given us much to be proud of, the "re-Bangalorization of the world" as the media sometimes puts it, but we cannot rest on these (limited) laurels. This has meant that our report is intentionally broader than past reports that have tended to emphasize venture capital and private-equity as handmaidens of entrepreneurship. There is an important role for such financing, and we suggest how to nurture it. However, at the end of the day, such financing is but one of multiple factors that need attention.
That said, we surely stand on the proverbial shoulders of giants. The committee laboured hard to acquaint itself with the myriad reports related to entrepreneurship produced by prior government committees and bodies, as well as numerous superbly qualified groups from the private sector and civil society. We are mindful of learning from these, as well from some other groups of people working in parallel in India on, for example, skill-development and securities markets issues.
Finally, consistent with India's desire to reimagine its future as a world leader, we seek to learn from the experiences of others and to contribute to these. So the reader will find an openness to experiments from far and wide. Chile, China, Israel and the United States, are sites of some of these that receive mention in these pages.
All this has led us to a conceptual model of an Entrepreneurial Pyramid that offers a prioritization of the many efforts that will propel entrepreneurship forward. First, we recognize that success breeds success, so, in the interests of building a constituency for change, we must identify actions that yield short-term payoffs. The so-called 'top layer' of our pyramid model does this. In particular, it identifies a dramatic upgrading and broadening of the incubators that pepper the Indian landscape already, a commitment to using competition and prizes to encourage grass-roots innovation, and the initiation of a symbolic but also substantive national entrepreneurship movement. The use of novel methods to stimulate innovation—including a special focus on science and technology—will affect the social inclusion that is sorely needed to empower the disenfranchised.
From there, we sequentially identify longer-range actions that will yield longer-term and more systemic payoffs, and will amplify the efforts of subsequent short-term initiatives. There is no use pretending that these investments– often in the form of public goods that have received short shrift from Indian society in recent decades—will yield results immediately, but there' s also no option but to embrace the need for these changes.
Through all this, we repeatedly emphasize the importance of some behavioural traits that we' d all do well to embrace—a bias to action, a willingness to be accountable with output rather than input metrics, an openness to ideas from wherever they emerge, and a partnership ethos, the last especially important to overcome the huge trust deficit that exists between the public and private sectors. These 'can-do' attitudes will, we are confident, ensure that our report does not gather dust in some cabinet.
As the Honourable Prime Minister said in his Independence Day address on August 15, 2015, to the people of India, "Startup and Stand-up". I couldn' t agree more. Let's do it sans partisanship and with team spirit. | Tarun Khanna, New Delhi and Cambridge

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World Social Science Report 2013:Changing Global Environments | A global report mapping social sciences research

World Social Science Report 2013: Changing Global Environments

by UNESCO. UNESCO, OECD and the International Social Science Council (ISSC), Paris, 2013, ISBN: 9789264203419.

Summary:The environmental challenges that confront society are unprecedented and staggering in their magnitude, scope, pace and complexity. They have potentially serious consequences for the wellbeing of people all over the world. The consequences of global environmental change are unfolding now; individuals and communities are already struggling to manage often precarious livelihoods; other social, economic and political crises – including persistent poverty, increasing inequalities and social discontent – are intricately linked to and exacerbated by environmental change. Global environmental change changes everything for everyone on this planet – our life support systems, our livelihoods, our ways of life, our actions and interactions with each other. It also changes demands for and on the social, including behavioural and economic sciences.

This is the third edition of the World Social Science Report. Based on a call for proposals, over 150 authors from all over the world have contributed articles. The Report issues an urgent call to action to the international social science community. Social scientists need to collaborate more effectively with colleagues from the natural, human and engineering sciences to deliver relevant, credible knowledge that can help to address the most pressing of today's environmental problems and sustainability challenges. And they need to do so in close collaboration with decision-makers, practitioners and the other users of their research.

A new kind of social science is needed, one that is bolder, better, bigger, different:

• Bold enough to reframe and reinterpret global environmental change as a fundamentally social process
• Better in terms of infusing social science insights into real-world problem-solving
• Bigger in terms of the need for more social scientists to address the challenges of global environmental change directly
  
• Different in the sense of changing the way the social sciences think about and do science – its theories, assumptions, methodologies, institutions, norms and incentives, to help meet the vexing interdisciplinary and cross-sector challenges society faces.
  

This report aims to engage social scientists working in all disciplines in academia, research institutes, think tanks, NGOs, and government agencies all over the world. The ISSC will use the report as a basis for critical discussion with its members and partners to sharpen the social science knowledge base on global environmental change and to support social science leadership in research for sustainability.Report includes two chapters on open knowledge: 11. A new vision of open knowledge systems for sustainability: Opportunities for social scientists, by David Tàbara; 12. Viewpoint: Open knowledge and learning for sustainability, by Tim O'Riordan.

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Innovation and Global Intellectual Property Regulatory Regimes: The Tension between Protection and Access| by N Syam and VM Tellez| The South Centre Research Paper No. 67, June 2016

"Innovation and Global Intellectual Property Regulatory Regimes: The Tension between Protection and Access"
by Nirmalya Syam and Viviana Munoz Tellez | The South Centre Research Paper No. 67, June 2016.
Abstract: The objective of the paper is to assess the global intellectual property (IP) regimes centred on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as the expansion of the scope of IP regimes through bilateral trade and investment agreements, from a development perspective. It will also focus on African efforts to engage with these regimes, including African proposals for rule-making in policy areas of interest to the region such as protection of biological resources and traditional knowledge and an enlarged scope for geographical indications. The implications of rules in these areas for innovation in the region will be explored. Finally, the paper discusses the arrangements that would provide an appropriate intellectual property regime to complement Africa's regional integration programmes such as the proposed Continental Free Trade Area and Treaty commitments.

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EU JRC Technical Reports on Smart Specialisation Strategies in Europe | Research and Innovation | SDG9

EU JRC Technical Reports on Smart Specialisation Strategies in Europe | Innovation | SDG9
S3 Policy Brief Series (published between 2013 and 2016)

• The Goals of Smart Specialisation (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 01/2013)
• Smart Specialisation Programmes and Implementation (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 02/2013)
• Universities and Smart Specialisation (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 03/2013)
• A Policymakers Guide to Transnational Learning in Smart Specialisation (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 05/2014)
• Regional Branching and Smart Specialisation Policy (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 06/2014)
• The Role of Science Parks in Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 08/2014)
• Smart Specialisation and Innovation in Rural Areas (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 09/2014)
• Inter-regional Collaboration in Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation (RIS3) (S3 Working Paper Series, No. 06/2014)
• Developing Danube R&I Projects across Borders: How to Make the Joint Use of EU-Funds a Reality? (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 10/2014)
• Synergies between EU R&I Funding Programmes. Policy Suggestions from the Launching Event of the Stairway to Excellence Project (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 12/2014)
• Monitoring Mechanisms for Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 13/2015)
• Research and Technology Organisations and Smart Specialisation (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 15/2015)
• How Outward-Looking is Smart Specialisation? Results from a Survey on Inter-Regional Collaboration in Smart Specialisation Strategies (RIS3) (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 16/2016)
• Universities and RIS3: the case of Catalonia and the RIS3CAT Communities (S3 Policy Brief Series, No. 18/2016)

       

European Commission's Guidebook Series: How to Support SME Policy from Structural Funds

European Commission, Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry launches "Guidebook Series: How to Support SME Policy from Structural Funds". Presently the series includes eleven guidebooks related to innovation in SMEs and availability of structural funds for SMEs. Each guidebook deals with a specific area of SME policy and includes examples of recent projects. A general guide provides an overview of the whole process.

The titles published so far in the "Guidebook Series: How to Support SME Policy from Structural Funds" (Download each Guidebook by clicking on individual title):

1. Building Entrepreneurial Mind-sets and Skills in the EU: A Smart Guide on promoting and facilitating entrepreneurship education for young people with the help of EU structural funds
2. Using Standards to Support Growth, Competitiveness and Innovation
3. Facilitating Transfer of Business
4. The Smart Guide to Service Innovation: How to better capitalise on service innovation for regional structural change and industrial modernisation
5. Regional implementation of the SBA – Small Business Act for Europe
6. How to Use Structural Funds for SME & Entrepreneurship Policy
7. Supporting the Internationalisation of SMEs
8. Public Procurement as a Driver of Innovation in SMEs and Public Services
9. Fostering Business Angel Activities in Support of SME Growth
10. Improving Resource Efficiency in SMEs
11. Smart Guide to Cluster Policy

These guidebooks will surely be useful to SMEs operating in the emerging countries and BRICS nations.