Rising Food Prices hit the Poor, shake Development Agendas

26 April 2008 in Africa, Development, Environment, Rural Economies, Trade, WTO

With food and other commodity prices skyrocketing in recent months, energy and climate change have been all over the news.
Prices for rice, the staple food for about half of the world’s 6 billion people, have soared to record highs, with key benchmarks touching $1000-per-tonne earlier this month, more than double the rate at the start [...]

Cluster Management: A Practical Guide, by GTZ

11 February 2008 in Clusters, Development, Publications, Research, Rural Economies

This GTZ-manual provides an encompassing and concise overview of methods and instruments of cluster management. It was developed in Croatia commissioned by the GTZ and financed by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It is, however, not only applicable to Croatia and to other transformation countries, but by all means suitable for [...]

GTZ-Reader: Knowledge Management and Knowledge Systems for Rural Development

11 February 2008 in Development, Publications, Rural Economies

Knowledge Management (KM) is a relatively novel management concept. It has been pushed by the rapid developments of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). ICT facilitates a speedy exchange of data, information and documents. There is groupware for communication; content management systems to organise and retrieve documents; expert systems, data mining and text mining systems, tracing [...]