Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
281,664
result(s) for
"TRUST FUND"
Sort by:
Sustainable Solutions for Green Financing and Investment in Renewable Energy Projects
The lack of long-term financing, the low rate of return, the existence of various risks, and the lack of capacity of market players are major challenges for the development of green energy projects. This paper aimed to highlight the challenges of green financing and investment in renewable energy projects and to provide practical solutions for filling the green financing gap. Practical solutions include increasing the role of public financial institutions and non-banking financial institutions (pension funds and insurance companies) in long-term green investments, utilizing the spillover tax to increase the rate of return of green projects, developing green credit guarantee schemes to reduce the credit risk, establishing community-based trust funds, and addressing green investment risks via financial and policy de-risking. The paper also provides a practical example of the implementation of the proposed tools.
Journal Article
What makes an environmental trust fund successful? A case study of the Maldives
Despite the wide array of Environmental Trust Funds (ETFs) created and utilized globally, limited information is available on the characteristics that make such funds successful, particularly as they relate to the experiences of Small Island Developing States (SIDS). This study evaluates the Climate Change Trust Fund (CCTF) of the Maldives as a case in point. Experiences from the energy component of the CCTF indicate that while technology transfer is needed, the project approach did not help to overcome the lack of human resource capacity to manage the transition to renewable energy in Thinadhoo. A comparison of the CCTF with Bhutan’s experience suggests that instead of implementing projects directly by the ETF, as done by CCTF, it would be more suitable for an organization to facilitate the implementation. In addition to having a fund, stakeholder participation, institutional development, and focusing on broader goals with co-benefits from projects would increase the prospect of success for ETFs.
Journal Article
Water funds and payments for ecosystem services: practice learns from theory and theory can learn from practice
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are emerging worldwide as important mechanisms to align investments in human and natural well-being. PES projects are often defined as voluntary transactions where well-defined environmental/ecosystem services (or land uses likely to secure those services) are bought by a minimum of one service buyer, from a minimum of one service provider, if and only if the service provider continuously secures service provision (conditionality). Further criteria of PES include limiting additional objectives and ensuring that payments reward behaviour that would otherwise not occur (additionality). Together these best practices for PES are increasingly accepted as the most efficient means to achieve desired outcomes and are guiding funding for PES projects. We used a series of water funds (watershed-oriented PES projects based on a trust fund model) to examine how theoretical best practices could inform and improve practice and also how theory could learn from practical efforts. We conclude that thoughtful consideration is required when evaluating the promise of a PES approach against a theoretical ideal. We found that requiring conditionality may limit the use of creative finance mechanisms such as trust funds that can provide long-term benefits for conservation and human well-being, and that requiring additionality can exclude benefits from social diffusion and result in the inefficient targeting of PES funds. Finally, public–private partnerships in water funds lead to multiple additional/side objectives but partnerships are likely to lower transaction costs and provide transparent, long-term landscape-scale watershed management.
Journal Article
Tilting at windmills: Reparations and the International Criminal Court
More than 20 years on from the signing of the Rome Statute, delivering victim-centred justice through reparations has been fraught with legal and practical challenges. The Court’s jurisprudence on reparations only began to emerge from 2012 and struggles to find purchase on implementation on the ground. In its first few cases of Lubanga, Katanga, and Al Mahdi the eligibility and forms of reparations have been limited to certain victims, subject to years of litigation, and faced difficulties in delivery due to ongoing insecurity. This is perhaps felt most acutely in the Bemba case, where more than 5,000 victims of murder, rape and pillage were waiting for redress, and the defendant was not indigent, but where he was later acquitted on appeal, thereby extinguishing reparation proceedings. This article critically appraises the jurisprudence and practice of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on reparations. It looks at competing principles and rationales for reparations at the Court in light of comparative practice in international human rights law and transitional justice processes to consider what is needed to ensure that the ICC is able to deliver on its reparations mandate. An underpinning argument is that reparations at the ICC cannot be seen in isolation from other reparation practices in the states where the Court operates. Reparative complementarity for victims of international crimes is essential to maximize the positive impact that the fulfilment of this right can have on victims and not to sacrifice the legitimacy of the Court, nor quixotically strive for the impossible.
Journal Article
EXPERIENCE RATING AND THE DYNAMICS OF FINANCING UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE
The surge of new claims for unemployment insurance (UI) following the COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly depleting states’ UI trust fund reserves. By early July, the trust funds of three of the four largest states (California, New York, and Texas) were already insolvent, requiring them to borrow to cover benefits. We first describe the condition of the states’ trust funds before the start of the pandemic-related recession and examine how the states’ different methods of financing UI were related to those conditions. States that indexed their UI payroll tax base to state average wages had reserves roughly twice those of states that did not index. We then analyze the dynamics of UI trust funds using vector autoregression. Our main finding is that, following a shock to benefit payments and the consequent drop in UI reserves, states’ reserves recover at different rates depending on their method of experience rating tax rates and whether they index their tax base. The trust funds of states using the most common type of UI financing — reserve-ratio experience rating and a fixed tax base — tend to require more than a decade to recover, whereas the trust funds of states using the benefit-ratio method tend to recover within five years whether or not they index. Federal legislation passed in March in response to the pandemic has implications for financing UI that we discuss in light of our findings.
Journal Article
May I Come In? EU Policies to Control Migration: The EUTF
What types of policies has the European Union (EU) implemented to control migration flows in recent decades, and what are their strategies? This paper aims to explore the measures developed by the EU to manage migration flows and identify how they operate. While a securitisation approach, such as activities of border control, has been widely discussed by scholars in this field, it is worth exploring and understanding other kinds of instruments aimed at curbing irregular flows through executing programs such as the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), developed in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings to address the “root causes” of the displacement. In light of this, this research conducts a case study and qualitative content and descriptive analysis of documents on the EUTF. Preliminary findings indicate patterns in what motivated the EU to undertake these actions and present the main strategies of the Fund in the North Africa region. However, some factors may have led to disappointing outcomes for the EUTF, such as the increase, in 2019, of nationals leaving the North Africa region towards Europe, as reported by UNDESA.
Journal Article
European External Migration Funds and Public Procurement Law
Since 2014, the European Union has established three funds (for Africa, Syria, and refugees in Turkey) to implement its external migration policy. In this Article, we analyse whether these funds and their implementation are compatible with EU public procurement law. This leads to a mixed picture. The wholesale exemption of expenditure under the EU Trust Fund for Africa from public procurement is incompatible with EU law; the exemption is not motivated, and it is implausible that there is a crisis in all 26 African countries where the Trust Fund operates thorough the duration of the Trust Fund. However, some more limited exceptions may apply, allowing for exempting particular projects from public procurement. Whether or not public procurement has taken place is often not transparent. It is remarkable that the notion of emergency is used in a cursory manner. It is equally remarkable that European public procurement law is not well integrated in external migration policy.
Journal Article
Good intentions and bad consequences: The general assistance mandate of the Trust Fund for Victims of the ICC
Recognizing the needs of victims in international criminal justice, the International Criminal Court (ICC or the Court) has introduced an innovative reparation scheme including the establishment of the Trust Fund for Victims. Besides the Fund’s role to implement reparation orders, a second mandate has been developed to provide immediate help to victims independent from a criminal conviction: the general assistance mandate. Surprisingly, this mandate has to date attracted little attention from scholars and remains vastly under-researched. By exploring in detail the work of the general assistance mandate, this article exposes its structural weaknesses as well as the negative impact it has on the procedures of the Court as a whole. It will demonstrate how the general assistance mandate weakens the legitimacy of the ICC as it undermines the presumption of innocence, risks compromising international and national Court proceedings, and masks the weaknesses of the Court. While there is no doubt that humanitarian assistance is urgently needed in situations that are investigated by the ICC, the mechanism chosen, namely the Trust Fund’s general assistance mandate is not an adequate solution. This article argues that general assistance has no place in an international criminal court and should, therefore, be completely separated from the ICC.
Journal Article
Performance profiling of the unit trust funds in Malaysia with data mining techniques version 1; peer review: 2 approved
Background: Millennials are exposed to many investment opportunities, and they have shown their interest in gaining more income via investments. One popular investment avenue is unit trusts. However, analysing unit trusts' financial data and gaining valuable insights may not be as simple because not everyone has the required financial knowledge and adequate time to perform in-depth analytics on the numerous financial data. Furthermore, it is not easy to compile the performance of each unit trust available in Malaysia. The primary objective of this research is to identify unit trust funds that provide higher returns than their average peers via performance profiling.
Methods: This research proposed a performance profiling on Malaysia unit trust funds using the two data mining techniques, i.e., Expectation Maximisation (EM) and Apriori, to assist amateur retail investors to choose the right unit trust based on their risk tolerance. EM clustered the unit trust funds in Malaysia into several groups based on their annual financial performances. This was then followed by finding the rules associated with each cluster by applying Apriori. The resulted rules shall serve the purpose of profiling the clustered unit trust funds. Retail investors can then select their preferred unit trust funds based on the performance profile of the clusters.
Results: The yearly average total return of the financial year 2018 and 2019 was used to evaluate unit trust funds' performance in the clusters. The evaluation results indicated that the profiling could provide valuable and insightful information to retail investors with varying risk appetites.
Conclusions: This research has demonstrated that the financial performance profiling of unit trust funds could be acquired via data mining approaches. This valuable information is crucial to unit trust investors for selecting suitable funds in investment.
Journal Article