top of page
EU Commission meets Doughnut Economics

An updated story of how the European Commission is exploring ways to apply Doughnut Economics in policy processes
17536
0
0
EXTERNAL LINKS
Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um
OUTPUTS
Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.
Is Hydrogen that good for the Climate?

Blog
Albert Norström
Title
Type

Firstname Lastname
Mar 30, 2022
Ich bin ein Textabschnitt. Klicke hier, um deinen eigenen Text hinzuzufügen und mich zu bearbeiten.
Is Hydrogen that good for the Climate?

Blog
Albert Norström

0
1
0
Présentation intermédiaire publique de la vision stratégique pour l'économie luxembourgeoise en 2050
I very much enjoyed the Luxembourg Strategy event on 5 June 2023 presenting its draft vision for the Economy in 2050. Here is a country leading the way by setting out how to reach a zero-carbon future.
Adrian Taylor
Actualization of Czech republic 2030 strategy
The aim of this study was to serve as one of the inputs to the update and to initiate a discussion on the possibilities of updating the Czech republic 2030 strategy. In order to ensure that this strategic document reflects the dynamic developments on the global and domestic scene, mechanisms for regular reviews and updates of the objectives and measures have been proposed. Given the events of the last 3 years (especially the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine), it is relevant to review the relevance of the assumptions regarding the long-term development of the Czech Republic, which served as the basis for the original wording of the strategic objectives and targeting of the document.The role of České priority was to provide foresight exercises in order to reach two goals:· Assess the relevance of existing goals: the problems and challenges facing society are changing and so are the definition of objectives for further development. The task of this section is therefore also to determine whether the original ČR 2030 goals are still relevant in the context of change and respond to the major challenges that society is facing and will continue to face in the coming decades.· Identify blind spots: there may be issues or opportunities that the document does not cover - i.e. blind spots. The next task of this part of the update is to identify such gaps to increase the comprehensiveness of the document.The project was implemented in the form of workshops, which were attended by experts and representatives of public institutions and ministries. On the basis of pre-prepared scenarios of development, the participants had to identify the resulting challenges, opportunities and areas that have not yet been covered in the CR 2030. The list of these areas was subsequently consulted with representatives of public institutions. These expert consultations were complemented by input from the general public through a creative competition held in September 2022.
10226
2

Smart Futures Tunisia – Exploring the digital skills of tomorrow (a foresight journey into the year 2035)
Smart Futures Tunisia aims to explore what Tunisia and its digital economy could and should look like in 2035. For this purpose, normative future scenarios were created from which inspiring future job profiles could be derived. In a final step, recommendations identify options for action through which the envisioned future can be approximated.The results are based on a three-stage methodology approach. First, key thematic areas were outlined through baseline research and expert interviews. Second, a foresight workshop was conducted to create a room to elaborate on different future scenarios and job profiles while also developing a digital skills map and initially discuss recommendations. Third, the results were refined through expert validation loops and expert interviews.The future scenarios were created to explore what urban areas, smaller cities and rural areas might look like in 2035. A future is drawn in which Tunisia is characterized by smart and self-powered buildings, increasing e-mobility, and public services delivered digitally. Apart from that, digital progress offers the opportunity to provide more equitable education, to conduct various types of commercial activities via e-commerce, and to improve access to health. Such a future in its variety of facets has been visually depicted in the graphic above.Furthermore, future job profiles are derived on this basis. In a desirable Tunisian development, these will be found primarily in the areas of food production, fintech, e-commerce, health tech, mobility, ed-, gov-, and green tech. Specific job profiles range from farm drone operators, who operate and maintain drones that monitor, measure and analyze crop growth and health, to cybersecurity experts, who protect government data from digital attacks. To be prepared for the changing profiles, digital competencies need to be developed, which can be categorized into the following four pillars: digital literacy and data literacy, technology-specific skills, digital product literacy, and digital transformation literacy.After developing future scenarios and outlining future job profiles, recommendations were finally drawn up that will enable Tunisia to proactively strive for the future outlined. General recommendations manifest themselves, for example, in the promotion of a "digital culture" that includes all strata of the population in order to make appropriate use of the potential of digitization. A specific example of a topic area recommendation is to strive for leadership in green tech solutions. Here, it is recommended to promote green tech culture, for example by including environmental sustainability and green tech solutions in education and public campaigns. In addition to content recommendations, Foresight Journey recommendations aim to improve and deepen the methodological applications of foresight for potential future ventures in this thematic field.Smart Futures Tunisia is part of the Special Initiative “Decent Work for a Just Transition” Invest for Jobs of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by the Digital Transformation Programme Tunisia of the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. Invest for Jobs aims to team up with companies to create good jobs in eight African partner countries and to improve local working conditions.
18348
0

Travelling into the [future]
Travelling into the [future] (spanish: Viajando al [futuro]) is a long-term project aimed at developing desirable future scenarios for sustainable tourism in Spain together with local stakeholders and experts in the field. The project is funded by the European Climate Foundation and implemented in a collaboration between Futures Probes and Tipi. Process & Methodology The project was structured into three main phases Research Crowdsourcing Storytelling In the research phase, a PESTLE analysis and the elaboration of local stakeholder maps identified environmental key factors and networks. In the crowdsourcing phase, participatory workshops with local stakeholders and a Delphi survey with tourism experts were run in parallel, built upon and at the same time challenging the knowledge gathered in the previous phase. In the Storytelling phase, the results were used as the fundament for building six future scenarios, visualised as a written narrative accompanied by an illustration. Outcome Building up and strengthening local stakeholder networks and generating ideas for future sustainable tourism(s). Gathering of key insights on desirable, possible and likely future developments of tourism in Spain. Identification and discussion of needs, desires, worries and attitudes of tourism stakeholders – in its complexity and diversity. Six future scenarios to inspire can activate communities, organisations and citizens to define measures that accelerate the transformation towards a better, more sustainable tourism. Next steps Developing indicators to measure the performance of (future) touristic activities in terms of their sustainability. Creating a network of change agents within the tourism sector to exchange experiences, needs, knowledge and to collectively identify possible synergies and action steps to be taken. Designing experimental pilot projects focusing on solving some of the concrete challenges identified as common to one or all of the regions observed.
15802
0

Rapid Exploration: The Interpenetration of Criminal and Lawful Economic Activity
This rapid exploration is part of the
As legal order evolves, crime evolves too. Being unbound by the rule of law, crime is a very innovative “sector”, in which innovation is driven by the incentive of high gains as rewards for taking some risks of legal consequences in case the crime is recognised as such and reported to law enforcement agencies. In the case of economic crimes, experts regularly refer to especially low detection and prosecution rates. Among other reasons this is attributable to three particularities being quite special to economic crime:
Depending on the modus operandi used for commiting the crime, the victim(s) might not even be aware of the incident.
In fear of e.g. losses of reputation and/or customers' trust that may in future cause revenues to decline, companies that have been victims are reluctant to report crimes to law enforcement agencies.
Even if crimes are reported, there frequently is a mismatch between the criminal act itself and the offense reported. For example, a business might be aware that a computer has been stolen and reports this incident to the police while the actual target might not be the computer itself but the (sensitive) business information stored on it.
About this topic
The area of economic crime includes a multitude of quite diverse offenses. Thus, the first relevant question is: What ist the aim or target of the offense? Three main areas of economic crime can be distinguished:
Financial crimes, such as blackmailing, embezzlement and tax evasion, often tied to attempts of cutting social security costs
Cybercrime, which comprises a wide range of activities from digital scam of sensitive information and spam mails to manipulation of websites and thec onstruction of fake websites or profiles
Manipulation of stock exchanges (either for economic gain or for creating geopolitical tensions)
A second relevant question relates to who commits economic crime. Next to organised crime groups using criminal proceeds in the legitimate economy (e.g. money laundering, corrupting politicians and government officials, etc.), there are also legitimate businesses facilitating unlawful economic activities (e.g. accountants and lawyers advising criminals) or acting unlawfully (e.g. supporting companies in tax evasion). And there are novel and innovative economic activities that enter new terrain where no clear-cut legal rules exist yet (e.g. in the early days of crypto-currencies).
Another question concerns responsibility for prevention as well as for prosecution. Is economic crime a relevant issue to policy-makers, especially for R&I policy-makers? And if not, who should assume responsibility for it (e.g. law enforcement agencies, private security agencies,...). For instance, data can be stolen either by internal perpetrator or external perpetrators. The responsibility for prevention is likely to be different in these cases. A related issue is to identify the causes of non-detection of these crimes, e.g. lack of legal and other experts.
There are different types of “illegal earnings”, e.g. (i) criminal acts gaining a large amount of money at once, (ii) digitally receiving small amouts of money from many people over a longer period of time, unnoticed but evnatually amounting to a large sum for the criminals, (iii) a legal enterprises engaged in illegal/ criminal activities (on purpose or without noticing that this is illegal or a grey zone).
As the world economy operates more and more through interconnected computerised transactions, new possibilities for intertwining criminal and legal economic activities open up as well as new opportunities for law enforcement.There is a view that the proceeds of crime can be tracked and removed, and thus the interpenetration of criminal markets and legal markets can be controlled.
However, there is also a view that establishing the lawful origins of funds used in every transaction is impossible and even undesirable. What level of control is technically feasible and socially desirable?
There are at least three types of S&T associated with tracking, managing and fighting crime. One is ICT related, from monitoring, analysing, tracking etc. An interesting issue is whether technological solutions to full tracability can be applied to money (e.g. those applied to products using chemicals)? A second is regulatory techniques for preventing “innovators” from moving outside the sphere of lawful activities, from going too far and entering a grey zone that is unregulated. The third is forensics: techniques of reconstituting what took place and thus attributing responsibility for crimes.
DRIVERS AND BARRIERS
Major drivers for crime are linked to motivation (high gains because of low perceived low risk, that is, the ‘cost-benefit calculation’ suggests that committing a certain crime is going to be profitable). Technological innovation in digitalisation is an essential precondition for further development of new and already existing crime potential in digital fields, from payment systems to crypto circumvention. We can distinguish roughly several types of motivation for crimes: the intrinsic motivation of engineers to research and innovate can be exploited by criminals; the (felt) marginalised individual or government that is searching for its niche to find extra income, even if it comes illegally; the politically motivated wish to spy on or threaten other countries. The primaeval motivations might be the wish for power, influence, and greed.
There are also interesting technological developments emerging that might open up new avenues for criminal activity, often enabled by digitalisation of economic activities. For instance, digitally enabled human enhancement technologies open up possibilities for biohacking, and the ambition to better monitor supply and value chains may open doors to new forms of mis-using this kind of information. Fake profiles and ‘deep fakes” technologies can also be misused to commit digital crimes while staying anonymous on the internet.
It seems to be a competition, a kind of race and mutual pushing and pulling between law-makers, police and criminals of who finds a new niche, that is, new opportunities with software, hardware or regulation, to occupy and exploit. On the side of law enforcement agencies, skills and motivation for long search or detection of crime in cyberspace are often missing. It is a matter of resources that are available and time that may be spent on detecting and fighting this kind of crime.
One facilitating condition for criminal economic activities is the recent deregulation of financial markets. That opens up windows of opportunity for making money in a grey zone or illegally. In addition, the rate of innovation in digitalisation is so high that regulation can possibly be enacted only with a considerable delay - creativity in crime always leads to new means faster than the introduction of appropriate regulation As the complexity of these issues increases, there is a lack of experts to support law enforcement and we observe a skill mismatch in the technical, social, and legal personnel but also a lack of legal entities to follow up.
People are more and more vulnerable to digital fraud and other kinds of crime in the virtual world as new possibilities are constantly emerging. However, if people do not use digital technologies (as a protective measure), they would be excluded from certain economic activities and social life forms. When there is two much security (e.g. with two or more factor authentication), technical hurdles are high and patience is needed.
FUTURES
What if criminals are ahead of lawful companies, regulatory bodies, law enforcement agencies, regulatory organisations and other decision-makers in digital innovations?
What if criminals offer significantly higher “salaries” to experts, e.g. skilled personnel, or personnel for law-enforcement, personnel that is rare or has high specialisation?
What if criminals become major R&D funders? What if they invest and their investment proceeds from illegal activities directly in R&I and people are dependent on this research?
What if the full traceability of money poses a risk to creativity and innovation?
What if the reliance on self-regulation facilitates economic misdemeanour?
What if the world/ parts of our societies are threatened by crime and prosecution of crime digitally?
What if the criminal elements control a large part of the economy?
What if rogue states facilitate illegal activities, e.g. via cryptocurrencies? What if a large number of companies under financial pressure decide to resort to criminal “service providers” in specific fields, e.g. for waste disposal?
19111
0

bottom of page