Education Of Canadian Aborigines Seen As Productivity Boost

Aboriginals key to economic future

Kerry Benjoe
Leader-Post
Published: Tuesday, November 27, 2007

A new study released Monday states that education is the key to unlocking billions for Canada's economy in the next 10 years.

"We feel aboriginal Canadians can make a much more greater contribution to the economy in terms of more people working and higher productivity if they had better education," said Andrew Sharpe, the study's author. "There's a lot lost to society by having people not using their full potential in terms of education."

Sharpe completed the new study called, The Potential Contribution of Aboriginal Canadians to Labour Force, Employment, Productivity and Output Growth in Canada, 2001-2017 for the Centre for the Study of Living Standards (CSLS).

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How India Clusters Growth

Manjeet Kripalani
BusinessWeek.com
November 26, 2007

In a neat industrial area on the outskirts of Chennai is the factory of export house Farida Group. Inside the spacious workplace are rows of women in uniform blue jackets and men in blue-gray polo shirts who quietly operate moulding and pressing machines.

At the beginning of the rows are marked-up productivity and quality charts. The floors have markings in paint for the exact position of the tables and machines. It has the look and feel of an efficient, modern auto parts operation, but Farida is in fact a leather factory that makes shoes for export to top brands like Timberland.

About 80% of the workforce is composed of women who sit behind the tables, hand-cleaning and finishing the shoes, lacing them up expertly and then putting them into boxes, ready for the shipping container.

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Technology Investment Sought To Enhance Productivity

Via
Jamaica Information Service

JPC Head Proposes Greater Investment in S&T
to Increase Productivity Levels

BY: SASHA-GAY LEWIS

Executive Director of the Jamaica Productivity Centre (JPC), Dr. Charles Douglas, is pointing to the need for greater investment in science and technology (S&T) as one way to boost Jamaica's declining productivity levels.

Speaking against the background of National Science and Technology month in November and the observance of National Productivity Awareness Week from November 18 to 23 under the theme: 'Enhancing Standards through Productivity Growth,' Dr. Douglas says that inadequate investment in S&T is among the factors that account for Jamaica's low labour productivity rate, which declines on average by approximately 0.12 per cent per year.

Other factors include insufficient investment in human and physical capital, the high levels of crime, the absence of a productivity culture and bad labour management relationships.

Stating that Jamaica spends too little on scientific and technological pursuits, the productivity advocate points out that "large segments of Jamaican enterprises lack adequate product design capabilities, process reconfiguration and production organization, which will give them a competitive edge even in niche markets."

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Improve Productivity For Global Competition: Jamaica PM

Via
Jamaica Gleaner Online

Prime Minister Bruce Golding says if Jamaica is to keep pace with the competition globally, the productivity level of the Jamaican labour force will have to be improved.

Addressing the 27th conference of the Human Resources Management Association of Jamaica on Saturday, Golding said he has already approached the Planning Institute of Jamaica to provide an annual index on the productivity level of the labour force to determine whether it is getting better, holding its own or is slipping away.

The conference was held at the Sunset Jamaica Grande hotel in Ocho Rios.

The Prime Minister said Jamaica was part of a world where "the rules of the game have shifted, the goals are bigger and, therefore, everybody was falling into line in pursuit of economic growth and activity".

He said human capital cannot be excluded from the productivity process.

"In this borderless world in which we live, we are facing a level of competition that we have never faced before. Investors looking for a destination to place their investment no longer have a narrow list from which to choose. The competition is not just how we face foreign investment but how we hold on to our own market to maintain a share for ourselves," he said.

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More Plant Productivity Without More Fertilizer

Via
Topnews.in

Researchers at the University of Illinois have devised a new method to successfully simulate photosynthesis in plants, and improve their productivity of leaves and fruit without needing extra fertilizer.

The researchers used a computer model, which mimics the process of evolution, for the purpose.

They have described their model, the first to simulate every step of the process of photosynthesis, in the journal Plant Physiology. They will also present their work at the BIO-Asia 2007 Conference in Bangkok, Thailand.

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Chinese Profit Sustainability

Via
REG Monitor

By Rachel Ziemba

In a recent paper, Song-Yi Kim and Louis Kuijs look at the enduring strength of Chinese corporate profits amid rising imput and wage costs. Overall they argue that growing productivity gains. These gains and efficiencies were greatest, they argue, in sectors with strongest wage pressures. These results do rely on piecing together the available data - for example the broad input/output price indices might obscure changes in the relative sophistication of products and wage rates do not capture unofficial workers.

Their conclusion:

China ’s industrial sector has experienced hefty cost pressures in recent years coming from rapid increases in raw material prices and wages. At the same time, profit margins have largely continued their trend rise. China’s industrial enterprises have been able to cope with the cost pressures because of rapid growth of productivity and efficiency and output price increases…Our results suggest that those sectors with the largest cost pressures appear to have made the largest effort in offsetting the cost pressures. …

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Productivity Incentives Lacking In Malta

‘R&I in Malta still leaves much to be desired’
by Francesca Vella
Malta Independent

The sector of research and innovation in Malta still leaves much to be desired and in general, companies do not offer incentives for employees to come up with innovative ideas, said Adrian Said, economist and chief coordinator of Competitive Malta and Partner Institute of the World Economic Forum.

Mr Said was giving a presentation as he launched The Global Competitiveness Report 2007-2008 during a business breakfast organised by The Malta Business Weekly at the Hotel Phoenicia yesterday.

Published by the World Economic Forum, the Global Competitiveness Report’s overall competitiveness ranking is the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), developed by Colombia University Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin and originally introduced in 2004.

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Climate Change And Tourism

Saving Our Global Destinations

CHRISTOPHER JONES AND DANIEL SCOTT
Special to Globe and Mail Update

Bad weather can ruin a holiday. Global climate change can ruin a holiday destination. This is one of the urgent messages that delegates heard at an international conference on climate change, co-sponsored by the United Nations World Tourism Organization and other international bodies, in Davos, Switzerland, last month.

Tourism has been both a victim and a vector of global climate change. Iconic tourist destinations such as the Great Barrier Reef, the countries bordering on the Mediterranean Sea, the European Alps, the island states of the Seychelles, the Maldives and Mauritius, and the majestic glaciated mountain landscapes from the Rockies to the Andes have all become victims of the rise in global mean temperature of the past 150 years.

But the tourism sector has also become a non-negligible contributor to climate change through greenhouse-gas emissions largely from the transport and accommodation of tourists — as much as 5 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions from human activities, according to the conference's foundational paper, Climate Change and Tourism: Responding to Global Challenges. Under a "business as usual" scenario, emissions from the rapidly growing global tourism sector were projected to more than double in the next 30 years.

Tourism is highly dependant on climate, with weather affecting a wide range of the environmental resources that are critical attractions for tourism, such as snow conditions, wildlife productivity and biodiversity, water levels and quality. Tourists themselves have a high adaptive capacity to avoid destinations affected by climate change or to shift the timing of travel to avoid unfavourable climate conditions.

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Global Competitiveness Report

World Economic Forum’s
2007 Global Competitiveness Report

By Arpitha Bykere

This year’s World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report ranks the competitiveness of 133 countries based on macroeconomic and institutional factors, health, education, market (labor/product/financial) size and efficiency, infrastructure, business and technological development.

The U.S. tops the rankings due to high productive and innovative capacity, large domestic economy, and strong research affiliation between universities and businesses but the report notes that present macroeconomic and institutional trends like fiscal and trade deficits, public debt, dollar weakness and the role of private sector in policy-making are matters of concern. U.S. is followed by Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany in the rankings. Singapore and Japan topped the list among Asian countries while Chile and Mexico were in the top among Latam countries. Israel and Kuwait were the most competitive among the Middle-Eastern nations but Sub-Saharan countries performed very low in the ranking. China and India ranked 34th and 48th respectively. According to the report, while China had advantages like large domestic and foreign markets, it needs to improve the education system and the quality of institutions and financial markets. While India has improved market efficiency, business environment and innovation, it needs to address problems related to macroeconomic stability, infrastructure and access to health and education.

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Using IT to Boost Agricultural Productivity

By Victoria Onoja
www.allafrica.com

The World is in the midst of what could be called a 'knowledge revolution' that is being spearheaded by the rapid advancement in Information Technology. This has significantly changed the way people communicate, live, and conduct their business. The revolution in communication has provided efficient ways for developing countries to grow economically, socially as well as increase productivity.

Information empowers people and improves their wealth; it has great impact on the economic performance of a nation. The Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) has become an increasingly important feature for information. Significantly, it reduces the cost of many transactions, increases efficiency, convenience and satisfaction. Overall, increases in employment, technological diffusion, and increased foreign capital flows are seen as economy-wide benefits.

The past decade has witnessed a rapid expansion of the Internet, which has proven to be invaluable resources for obtaining information and providing new dimensions to existing areas of business and non-business activities.

There is an interactive nature to the Internet. It allows for dialogue based on question and answer mode. Online interaction between producers and users of knowledge enable diverse forms of complementary and localised information to be put together and integrated. Instead of knowledge produced by one particular group of professionals or experts, knowledge is generated from a variety of sources including the users themselves so that it can adapt to the needs of the users.

In sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural information and extension have been largely confined to public domain, only obtainable through the Ministries of Agriculture. These structures are greatly centralised. Moreover, technical messages communicated to farmers were often of an extremely general type, applicable to only a few.

The problem associated with these type of arrangements is that farmers are treated as ignorant recipients of information, rather than knowledgeable partners in technology transfer. Management systems are poor, so that there is little pressure on the staff or their managers to seek new knowledge or to serve farmers; the extension staff are poorly trained and know little more than the farmers know. In some cases, operating facilities, vehicles and bicycles are so rare that the few motivated and knowledgeable extension staff cannot systematically visit farmers even if they wanted to. The result is typically a large information and agricultural bureaucracy that has no impact in agriculture.

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