All in Economics

What’s next for the EU Green Deal? EU Organic Farming

The European Commission has initiated a public consultation on organic farming as part of their broader goal of implementing the many ambitious goals of the European Green Deal (EGD). The process of developing an organic farming action plan begins with a solicitation of public input by 23 October 2020. The resulting action plan will address two of the EGD’s multiple strategies: Farm to Fork and Biodiversity. Read more…

Reinforcing the EU’s resilience via the EGD

As part of its ambition to establish the European Union as a leader on the international stage, the EU is focusing on the protection of biodiversity and on building a sustainable food chain.

Recently the EU has proposed these two issues as key elements of the European Green Deal (EGD). Both initiatives have been adopted to consider implementation in the context of COVID-19 recovery. The European Parliament will now consider the proposals.

Saving the HighStreet by Creating Brand Ambassadors

In 2019, a year into our engagement with the Dorking Town Partnership, Dorking was recognised by the Telegraph as one of Britain’s top five highstreets.

Engaged to develop and implement a social media strategy and website to support its digital transformation goals, we also suggested our client engage in a brand ambassador programme via social media training with local businesses and community partners; visual storytelling via three promotional films; and a content generation programme that empowered customers to take ownership of the HelloDorking brand we created.

Our success is reflected in increased footfall at events, positive social media sentiment and engagement, and increased exposure in national and regional media.  

Prime Day is a fight for humanity

On Prime Day, I stopped to think about the real fight for the highstreet and came to this conclusion: it is really a fight for humanity and local identity. When you consistently buy online you dissassociate from the highstreet retailers. Buyers have become more savyy about supply chain and ethical practices in the past decade or so. They want to know where their products come from.

The highstreet has become a battlefield and customers are losing. Shopping online has become just as exciting an experience as shopping on the highstreet - if not moreso. Now more than ever it is important to look at the impact of consistently shopping online has on the highstreet.

Why quotas don’t work for gender equality (and how to really shrink the wage gap)

International women’s day approaches on the 8th of March and the anthem is #PressforProgress. We have made progress as a society for women – but is it enough? I for one think we need to reframe the conversation. I don’t mean to take away from the #metoo or #timesup or #vote100 movements. I think we should be doing less pressing and more pushing for progress for parity and it all starts with how we talk about women and our roles in the workforce.

Ten years ago, there was a call in Europe to promote more women – “golden skirts” they called them – to the board level. If firms didn’t comply, they faced sanctions by the “30% Club”, a group of companies that campaigns on the basis that boards should be composed of that proportion of women, globally.

So, countries that included Norway, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands and Britain implemented quotas to increase women’s participation at the board level. Firms that didn’t comply were fined, banned, dissolved or faced other sanctions.

Why we must teach – and learn – the skills machines can’t master

According to Business Insider, machines will not only surpass humans at playing Angry Birds and assembling LEGO; in 30 years, it estimates machines will be able to perform more complex tasks like surgery. In the case of artificial intelligence, it is clear that humanity must differentiate itself from its robot counterparts.

We should focus on investing in the arts, music, theatre, dance, languages, culinary arts, and other creative pursuits that are inherently human and incorporate these skills into our lives. If we invest in these pursuits, we are also investing in preserving our culture and our own humanity. By focussing on our innately human qualities, embracing them and incorporating them into our technology-laden lives, we can also positively impact social mobility on a wider scale.