In India’s forests, the tribal people who have lived there for untold generations are being forced off the land to make way for the large-scale extraction of bauxite from the mines – this is a messy, dangerous but very profitable business which is fully embraced by India’s modern, ‘market-friendly’ approach.
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Philip Roth’s astonishing late flourish (long may it continue, of course) takes an even darker turn with this short novel. In fact, it is really more of a novella in that it contains the seeds of a longer work which are treated with great rapidity and intensity. It begins with the protagonist facing up to the loss of his ability to work – he is a famous stage actor in America, the last great classical actor, indeed – and he finds it difficult to cope with this emasculation, especially since it gives his most recent wife the opportunity to leave him.
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Back to the middle of the fifteenth century and Niccolo and his band of not always merry men face a new set of challenges: the merchants of the great Italian city states are seeking to extend their control over the East and to protect what they have against the invasion of the dreaded Turks.
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One of the most notable features of the international economy in recent years has been the willingness of nearly every government in the world to embrace ‘market-friendly’ policies. This has made some people very rich, of course and a large number of people very poor and unhappy.
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A recently released book revealed that more than half of all Americans now live alone – a phenomenon that has never existed before. The tendency to live alone is also affecting just about every developed or developing country.
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The conundrum of uneven development has occupied some of the world’s finest minds for many years without ever being fully resolved. The basic issue is that some parts of the world are more developed than others – but not just at the national scale.
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A new initiative from Thailand called CO2 for I offers a new approach to dealing with carbon dioxide emissions. As a tropical country, Thailand has a hot climate and so buildings, especially in the capital city of Bangkok, use a great deal of energy on keeping people inside cool. As much as 60% of all electricity costs are spent on air-conditioning: as a result, anything that can affect the use of energy in this respect must be very important.
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Around the world there are something like 500 million farming smallholdings that support some two billion people. These smallholdings are not just essential for the farmers themselves and their families but also for society as a whole because the food and other agricultural products that they contribute to the country, some of which can be used as exports.
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Announcing: Apivantanaporn, Thanan and John Walsh, “Driving Force for Service Innovation through Creating Unique Value Proposition: Capitalizing on Cultural Identity in the Spa Industry of Chiang Mai, Thailand,” Information Management and Business Review, Vol.4, No.5 (May, 2012), pp.242-51, available at: http://ifrnd.org/IMBR/Vol%204/4(5)%20May%202012/2.pdf.
Abstract:
The Thai spa industry is recognized as one of the driving forces for economic development in terms of revenue and employment. However, the current economic downturn and intensifying competition from neighboring countries pose substantial challenges and threats to the industry. The Royal Thai Government has initiated an innovative development model that capitalizes on the country’s unique cultural capital. This paper investigates a specific case study of Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, where the legends and ancient wisdom of the now defunct Lanna state have been developed over the course of decades and now constitute significant constructive and creative cultural capital. It investigates these issues through examination of government policy and measures, expert opinions, literature review and field observations. It is found that three factors are relevant to the development of the industry: (1) knowledge based service; (2) collective cluster effort and (3) business ecology system; together, these contribute to new service innovation which in turn contributes to new business value propositions. Keywords: Value creation; service strategy; creative industry; spa industry; Thailand
If there is to be any hope of keeping average temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees centigrade, it is clear that radical changes will be needed to every aspect to daily life.
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