"Of the 2633 people scheduled to attend the World Economic Forum 2014 in Davos, only 395 are women."
Finding a woman at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos is not getting any easier. Last year, 17% of participants at the invitation-only event were women. This year, only 15% are.
Organizers say it’s simply the reality of today’s world. Many participants are invited to Davos based solely on their job function—like the president of Harvard University, who is currently a woman. When the people in those roles change, so can the demographics of Davos.
“We’re on the front line of reflecting the world as it is, not how we want it to be,” says Adrian Monck, a managing director and head of communications for WEF. Monck says the organization would prefer that its meeting in Davos were more evenly distributed by gender, but its hands are tied by a different imperative: bringing together the world’s most powerful and influential people. Presently only 16.9% of Fortune 500 boards of directors are comprised of women. Fewer than 5% of the Fortune 500 are led by women.
Business members of WEF get a certain number of invitations and can distribute them to their top employees as they see fit. The highest levels of the membership get four tickets, but if one of their tickets goes to a woman who is an executive or board member, the company is rewarded with a fifth ticket.
Here’s a look at the percentage of attendees from each country who are women (among countries with more than 10 participants). As a raw number, the United States is sending the most women.
By David Yanofsky
Извор: WUNRN – 21.01.2014
There are several important policy implications. First, behavioral economics has important applications in the design of public policies for taxation and other fields. Second, the cost of applying such methods in the fight against tax evasion―by inserting appropriate messages in tax invoices and other documents issued by the authorities―is extremely low. Choosing policies according to their benefits and costs is a feature (as indicated by Sandmo [2005]) sometimes ignored both by the academic literature and policymakers. Third, the messages should be appropriately designed to have a positive effect on taxpayers. Fourth, “universal” policies may backfire, as positive and negative behavioral responses cancel each other out. Therefore, policies (particularly “nudges”) should be tailored to taxpayers’ types. Finally, it is important to consider how to make any of the compliance (and revenue) gains permanent. On the one hand, any efforts to change beliefs through the use of messages should be accompanied by equivalent actions by government authorities such as stepping up enforcement. On the other hand, complementary mechanisms should be introduced to facilitate compliance among debtors who are willing to pay, and to reinforce the positive effect of complying for those taxpayers who changed their behavior.
Advocacy and civil society groups around the world are increasing their calls for governments to publish budgets and expenditure reports, not least in Africa, where budget transparency remains low by global standards. However, while governments are often praised internationally for the number and type of budget documents they release, less attention is given to the content of these documents and whether they allow for meaningful budget analysis. This note therefore considers whether the budget documents released by African governments are sufficiently comprehensive to answer basic questions about budget policy and performance. It spotlights those African governments surveyed in the Open Budget Survey with the strongest transparency records, and looks at i) whether their budget reports are accessible online; ii) the number of years for which reports are available; iii) the coverage and detail of these reports and iv) the comparability of the budget data across countries. While the national budget is but one of the many reports and documents citizens needs to scrutinize government performance, it is an important foundation for other performance information, as it allows stakeholders to understand how their local concerns fit into the broader canvas of revenue collection and resource allocation. Improving the usability of national budget information should therefore be of interest to both international and domestic stakeholders.
A lack of concerted action on the part of local authorities and their citizens to respond to climate change is argued to arise partly from a poor relationship between the two. Meanwhile, local authorities could have a significant impact on community-wide levels of greenhouse gas emissions because of their influence over many other actors, but have had limited success with orthodox voluntary behavior change methods and hold back from stricter behavior change interventions. Citizen participation may offer an effective means of improving understanding between citizens and government concerning climate change and, because it is inherently a dialogue, avoids many of the pitfalls of more orthodox attempts to effect behavior change. Participatory budgeting is a form of citizen participation which seems well suited to the task in being quantitative, drawing a diverse audience and, when successfully run, engendering confidence amongst authority stakeholders. A variant of it, participatory emissions budgeting, would introduce the issue of climate change in a way that required citizens to trade off greenhouse gas emissions with wider policy goals. It may help citizens to appreciate the nature of the challenge and the role of local government in responding; this may in turn provide authority stakeholders with increased confidence in the scope to implement pro-environmental agendas without meeting significant resistance.
Народната банка на Република Македонија објави преглед на најнови макроекономски показатели за РМ за 2013 година.
“Прегледот на тековната состојба има за цел да даде осврт на најновите макроекономски податоци (октомври-декември 2013 година) и споредба со последните макроекономски проекции (октомври 2013 година). Со тоа ќе се утврди колку тековната состојба во економијата соодветствува со очекуваните движења на варијаблите во претходниот циклус на проекции. Прегледот е фокусиран на промените на екстерните претпоставки и остварувањата кај домашните варијабли и на тоа како овие промени се одразуваат врз амбиентот за водење на монетарната политика.”
