This conversation addresses the impact of artificial intelligence and sustainability aspects on corporate governance. The speakers explore how technological innovation and sustainability concerns will change the way companies and financial institutions are managed, controlled and regulated. By way of background, the discussion considers the past and recent history of crises, including financial crises and the more recent COVID-19 pandemic. Particular attention is given to the field of auditing, investigating the changing role of internal and external audits. This includes a discussion of the role of regulatory authorities and how their practices will be affected by technological change. Further attention is given to artificial intelligence in the context of businesses and company law. As regards digital transformation, five issues are reflected, namely data, decentralisation, diversification, democratisation and disruption.

During the 1760s, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue created a lively public forum to address colonial agricultural concerns that metropolitan learned societies largely ignored. Colonists enthusiastically embraced the same rhetoric of emulation and civic-mindedness as their counterparts in France while vigorously asserting intellectual authority based in practice. They sought to improve the cultivation of older but challenging crops, such as indigo and cotton, and to introduce new crops that would enhance the colony’s profitability, provide gainful employment for their society’s poorer members, and occupy unexploited ecological niches. To assess proposed innovations, they staged trials witnessed by expert practitioners; circulated information through manuscripts; and wrote up public answers to questions posed by the Affiches. This chapter also shows the limitations of local improvisations to solve agricultural problems as competing claims to intellectual authority based in experience created rifts between groups of colonists, colonists and the editors of their periodicals, and colonists and elite metropolitan institutions.

We focus on exogenous and unanticipated shocks, negative or positive, to the supply of any of the four main crucial factors of production: land, labor, physical capital, and human capital. Among the causes of such shocks are plagues, wars, migrations, and new technologies. Supply shocks matter politically because they threaten a sudden change in factors’ relative returns: a loss of labor, absent intervention, raises wages but lowers returns to land and capital; an infusion of human capital lowers skill premia but raises wages and the rents of land and physical capital. Owners of adversely affected factors will attempt to adjust, usually in one of three (increasingly costly) ways: through factor substitution, exit to another sector or region, or adoption of a factor-saving technology. (Hence innovation is usually endogenous but sometimes, by overshooting, can itself occasion a supply shock.) Only where none of these options avail will they resort to the (usually) costliest option of coercion: enslaving labor, seizing land, conscripting capital. What determines how a society adapts, or whether it does so at all, are such objective factors as soil, climate, and proximity to markets.

We build on the model of Chapter 3 to explain how sedentism could have developed in response to better climate conditions involving higher means and lower variances for temperature and rainfall. Sedentism is defined to mean a willingness of human populations to stay at the same site for multiple generations despite occasional periods of low productivity in relation to other sites. We identify three causal channels leading to sedentism. First, there is a short-run channel where climate improvement leads agents to remain at sites when weather there is temporarily bad, because when conditions are harsh, they are less harsh than they were under the previous climate regime. Second, there is a long-run channel where better climate leads to higher regional population. This causes some people to remain at sites where weather is temporarily bad because sites with good weather are now more heavily occupied than before. Finally, there is a very-long-run channel where higher regional population leads to the use of previously latent resources and technological innovation. These mechanisms help to explain the rise of large sedentary communities in southwest Asia during the Epi-Paleolithic and in Japan during the early Holocene.

Population dynamics are central to any theory of economic prehistory. This chapter explains the Malthusian framework widely used by economists. We rely on these ideas throughout the book. The exposition is graphical and should be accessible to non-economists. We define a production function and the average and marginal products of labor. With fixed natural resources and a fixed technology, food per person decreases as the population of a geographic area increases. Decreasing food per person tends to lower fertility and raise mortality. These demographic effects yield an equilibrium with a stable long-run population. If technology improves, food per person rises at a given population level. In the short run this raises the standard of living for the existing population, but in the long run, population growth brings the standard of living back down to its previous level. The main implication is that in the long run, technological innovation or a better climate raises population but not living standards. We discuss the relationship of these ideas to the concepts of migration, carrying capacity, population density, and population pressure. We conclude with a review of empirical evidence supporting the relevance of Malthusian models for pre-industrial societies.

Article 7.1 of the Paris Agreement establishes that parties should aim at enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience, and reducing vulnerability to climate change. While many climate hazards and vulnerabilities are beyond territorial control, a readiness to withstand and recover from them must be delivered locally. This chapter discusses climate-related vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience of the Greater Bay Area of China (GBA), an area that has been identified by the Chinese government as an engine of economic development but which has historically been vulnerable to flooding. After providing a contextual introduction to the GBA project, the chapter reviews key studies on past, current, and future climate trends focusing on meteorological, climatological, hydrological, and geophysical hazards. It then surveys adaptation policies and plans already implemented in GBA cities to assess what works and what does not and where the gaps are. Finally, the discussion focuses on the drivers and barriers for the uptake of technology for flood prevention and for the deployment of emergency responses. The aim of this discussion is to identify the opportunities and risks of technology in building future-ready local skills and citizen engagement for climate resilience. Given the ambitious plans for the GBA to contribute to the economic development of China, existing and projected vulnerabilities to climate hazards and their potential impact on the developed environment and physical infrastructure, business and industry, energy supply, financial services, human health, water resources, and biodiversity may not only hamper GBA plans but also put its businesses and citizens at risk. Technological innovation diminishes this vulnerability, but drivers and barriers to its uptake must be either identified and enhanced or removed accordingly.

This chapter illustrates how some dictionaries published under the Collins imprint deal with aspects of language variation. It provides three case studies: the first looks at how dictionaries portray languages where multiple norms enjoy a similar level of prestige, using the example of Irish; the second looks at how a large monolingual dictionary of English acknowledges the existence of variation within the language; and the third investigates how variations in spelling, pronunciation and lexis are dealt with in two English dictionaries designed for learners of English. These case studies reveal how different target readerships can determine the treatment of language variation in different dictionaries. In the final sections of the chapter, the focus shifts to the impact of technology on the process of publishing dictionaries, showing how different considerations come into play when creating materials for online access and suggesting how this medium may eventually allow for a dictionary concept that reflects the full variety of language in use rather than being orientated towards a single prestigious standard variety.

This chapter examines the treatment of regulations in a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Regulations are “command and control” policies that mandate changes in producer or consumer behavior. We study two types of regulations: nontariff measures that can create barriers to international trade and regulations designed to reduce negative externalities in production. We demonstrate the mechanisms used to introduce a technical nontariff measure into a standard CGE model. We describe process-based and outcome-based regulations of externalities and explain their direct and indirect economic impacts. Simple partial equilibrium diagrams illustrate the theoretical effects of the regulations on economic activity and economic efficiency. The results of highly stylized regulatory policy experiments using a CGE model support the theoretical predictions and illustrate modeling methodologies.

This book is about how the technological advances in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) that have fundamentally changed the nature of the US markets for futures contracts and other derivatives are necessitating, in some areas, changes to the legal and regulatory framework for these markets. To arrive at policy solutions to address the ways that AI systems are altering the markets, this book examines how algorithmic robots – algo bots, for short – have largely taken over trading in the futures markets, analyzes how regulators have responded to these changes thus far, and explores what steps policy makers should take in the future. But before diving into any of those topics, allow me to put the societal impact of these advances in computer science technologies in a broader context, beyond finance and derivatives.