Dr. Vesselin Popovski,  Senior Academic Programme Officer in the UNU Institute for Peace and Sustainability (UNU-ISP), will present the latest UNU research and publications, including those from UNU Press, on various conceptual and operational developments. Among the topics that he will cover are the concept of “Responsibility to Protect”, in light of the recent interventions in Libya and the current impasse in Syria, and how the UN system has approached — or failed to approach — other major global challenges.

The lecture will be followed by a questions and answer session.

This event, organized by UNU Press and the Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University, will be held at Waseda University. The event is free and open to the public. No pre-registration is required.

For more information, see the Public Lecture announcement page of the Wasdea University website.

The Doha Declaration paved the way for developing countries to limit patent protection for medicines, giving them easier access to medicine without negating the treaty obligation of the TRIPS Agreement. Giving an overview of developing countries’ experiences, this workshop explores the appropriate balance between the promotion of innovation, on one hand, and sustainable development, on the other, by analysing prior access to medicine and discussions relating to biodiversity. Referring to past events, this workshop may also touch upon the implications of climate change issues.

Hiroshi Kato (Patent Attorney, Aoyama & Partners, and Professor, Faculty of Law, Nihon University) will give an overview of the tension between access to medicine and patent protection, and that between CBD and patent protection. He will explain and analyse examples where compulsory licenses were ordered by the government. In addition, he will review and analyse the relevant theoretical and practical framework of the CBD.

Mitsuo Fujii ( Director, Intellectual Property, Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association) will explain the driving factors for innovation and emerging innovation models in pharmaceutical companies, referring to both general and special features of the industry. In addition, he will give an overview of cases of both philanthropic and business-based cooperation with developing countries. He also will propose an intellectual property system for the pharmaceutical industry.

Takeshi Hishinuma (Visiting Research Fellow, UNU-IAS), after briefly explaining the outcomes of the past two events relating to the WIPO Green and Public-Private Partnership, will add analyses on the implications of the relationship between climate change and intellectual property. He may touch upon perspectives on the international community and international norms under the current diplomatic atmosphere as well.

For more information and to register, please see the event page on the UNU-IAS website.

Please note: The language of this event is Japanese;
English interpretation will not be provided.

To commemorate the United Nations International Day for Biological Diversity (May 22), many ceremonies are held all over the world on this day to increase awareness and understanding of biodiversity issues.

The United Nations University Institute for Sustainability and Peace (UNU-ISP) and the Ministry of the Environment Japan (MOEJ) are pleased to announce the organization of the Symposium on the International Day for Biological Diversity as a part of their initiatives to support the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. The theme of this year’s symposium is “Marine Biodiversity”.

Japan has enjoyed and developed with the significant blessings of the surrounding sea. This symposium will serve as an opportunity to raise awareness of biodiversity among the public and consider about people, ocean and sustainable use of oceanic resources through the presentations and discussions.

For more information and to register, please visit the UNU-ISP event page.

Trade facilitation concerns itself with eliminating “red-tape“ in international trade. It looks at how procedures and controls governing the movement of goods across national borders can be improved to reduce associated cost burdens and maximize efficiency while safeguarding legitimate regulatory objectives. Economist may describe trade facilitation in terms of reducing the transaction costs between business operators and regulatory authorities in cross-border operations.

Trade facilitation has become a topic with considerable policy momentum, especially in the context of trade negotiations and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), cstoms reform (e.g., the European Union’s Modernised Customs Code), supply chain security (e.g., the World Customs Organization’s SAFE Framework of Standards) and economic development, where trade facilitation is seen as a means towards ensuring access to the world’s markets.

In this seminar, Andrew Grainger, an experienced academic and practitioner in this exciting field, will outline recent developments in trade facilitation with a focus on the conflict between operational and institutional variables. In his discussion, he will (i) raise the question of whether the current institutions concerned with trade policy have the necessary capabilities to apply themselves to operational issues adequately, and (ii) outline the potential for an interdisciplinary research agenda.

For more information, see the Calendar of upcoming events on the UNU-MERIT website.

About the speaker

Dr. Andrew Grainger is an experienced trade facilitation practitioner and academic. He is currently based at Nottingham University Business School where he is a Lecturer in Logistics and Supply Chain Management. In previous roles, he worked as Deputy Director at SITPRO, the former UK trade facilitation agency, and Secretary for EUROPRO, the umbrella body for European trade facilitation organizations. On a number of occasions he has worked as staff consultant with the World Bank Group. In a free-lance capacity he has also supplied consulting services to the European Commission, the European Parliament, UK’s HM Revenue and Customs, UK’s Businesslink.gov.uk programme, the government of Lao PDR, the government of Ethiopia, as well as a number of private sector companies and research organizations. Andrew is also an editor for the World Customs Journal and an active member in the International Network of Customs Universities.

The 2012 Africa Day Symposium, at UNU Headquarters in Tokyo, will be centered on the nexus of hard infrastructure, regional integration, development and the important role of Japan. More specifically, it will focus on the emergence of the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), a fully-integrated infrastructure development blueprint for the continent, led by the African Union Commission, the African Development Bank and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Planning and Coordination Agency. The PIDA initiative places the greatest priority on key infrastructure projects supporting regional integration and the physical interconnection between and among African countries.

With the impending convening of TICAD V in 2013, this symposium is very timely as it will further highlight how the growing Japanese private sector interest in trade and investment opportunities on the continent (including in the infrastructure sector) can be further expanded in this critical field of development in and for Africa.

Japanese–English interpretation will be provided.

A complete programme for the event will soon be available online.

Please click on the Register for Event button to register to attend the 2012 Africa Day Symposium.

Future eGovernment will have to keep pace with rapid technology development while responding to social and economic changes. This seminar will outline two research areas in computer and software engineering that will have a major influence on the future eGovernment: multimedia and virtual reality (i.e., defining new ways for man-computer interaction) and network-based cooperation (which covers (i) cooperation between organizations (service-oriented architecture), (ii) cooperation between organizations and engineers (cloud computing), (iii) cooperation between people (social networks) and (iv) cooperation between devices (the “Internet of things”)).

Both areas are pursued by the Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Informatics and Electronic Economy, Poznań University of Economics. In this seminar, Prof. Wojciech Cellary will explain some research problems investigated by the department in these areas, and describe the results obtained to date.

About the speaker

Wojciech Cellary holds MSc, PhD and DrHab degrees from the Technical University of Poznań. He received the title of Professor in 1989, and in 1996 joined the Poznań University of Economics where he currently heads the Department of Information Technology. He has been a visiting professor at a number of European universities and has been the leader of numerous research and industrial projects on the development of hardware and software of computer systems and their applications in telecommunications, the computer industry, the electric power industry, education and administration. Prof. Cellary teaches courses on Electronic Business both in Polish and English at the Poznań University of Economics.

For more information please see the UNU-IIST seminar page.

What did the global food, fuel and financial crises of 2008-11 mean to those living in the developing world? How did people cope? What help was available?

To address these questions, a new book brings together community studies conducted during 2008-2011 in 17 countries, with eight case studies that illustrate how people in specific localities were impacted by global shocks and what coping mechanisms they used. The book’s analysis of crisis impacts, coping responses and sources of support indicates that while export-oriented formal sector workers were more vulnerable to the financial crisis, the impacts of the food price crisis were more widespread and severe; informal sector workers in particular struggled to cope and to recover. Much “resilience” to these shocks owed to increased unpaid care work, typically by women. Common sources of assistance were family, friends, and community- and faith-based organizations; formal social protection and finance played minor roles.

For more information, see the UNU-WIDER event page.

About the speaker

Rasmus Heltberg is Program Manager (TFESSD) and Sr. Technical Specialist of The World Bank Group, based in Washington DC.

Publication details

Rasmus Heltberg, Naomi Hossain and Anna Reva (editors), Living through Crises: How the Food, Fuel, and Financial Shocks Affect the Poor, World Bank New Frontiers of Social Policy book (forthcoming 29 March 2012).

The counting approach to the measurement of multidimensional poverty has gained popularity recently with the publication of a “Multidimensional Poverty Index” (MPI) in the 2010 and 2011 Human Development Reports (UNDP). The MPI is based on a member of the Alkire-Foster (AF) family of counting measures that stands out for its resilience in identifying the multidimensionally poor with cut-off criteria covering the spectrum from the union identification approach to the intersection approach. However, a natural concern with these measures, as well as with other composite indices, is whether their ordinal comparisons are robust to changes in the indices’ parameter values.

This seminar focuses on a paper that applies multivariate stochastic dominance techniques to derive the distributional conditions under which a multidimensional poverty comparison based on counting measures is fully robust to any values of the indices’ parameters. It will be shown that the conditions are relevant to most of the multidimensional poverty indices in the literature, including the Alkire-Foster family.

About the speaker

Gaston Yalonetzky is a Lecturer at the Leeds University Business School, and a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. His research interests are in the fields of economic development, socio-economic mobility, group inequality and measurement of wellbeing.

For more information and to register, please see the UNU-MERIT seminars page.

For more information, please see the Calendar of upcoming events page on the UNU-MERIT website.

The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has stimulated much reflection on the political, economic and social transitions that have taken place in the past two decades. Many Central European and Baltic countries initially appeared to epitomize a successful transition to markets and democracy, becoming full members of the European Union. Yet the impact of the recent global financial crisis has called into question the stability of their success, and the viability of existing political arrangements.

This book focuses on the long-term development of the former Soviet bloc, providing a stimulating discussion on a range of important issues, including institutional development, demographic trends and the role of civil society. Twenty-three eminent scholars discuss the effects and implications of reform policies, providing a unique perspective on the past as well as the economic prospects for the future.

Please see the event page on the UNU-WIDER website for more details.