The Czech economy was characterized by a high nominal and real appreciation which was caused by great foreign direct investment inflow in 2002. The paper analyzes the effect of the Czech currency appreciation on industrial branches and the industry as a whole using a simple model based on a corporate accounting. The outcome of the model is then compared with actual y-o-y data of non-financial corporations in 2002. There is significant difference between industrial branches in sensitivity to appreciation. Foreign owned branches are able to limit the negative impact of appreciation, whereas the worst situation is in branches owed only by residents and public. The property structure and in addition the labor intensity of production have had a great effect on corporate finance after the rapid crown appreciation.
currency appreciation | property structure | investment inflow | corporate accounting | value added | profit before tax
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PROVIDENCE — The House Judiciary moved quickly to advance a bill that would impose fines for damaging or building on protected open space.
By a unanimous vote at its Jan. 24 meeting, the committee sent bill H5116 to the House floor for a full vote. The bill is already on the Jan. 26 House calendar.
The legislation amends state theft and trespass laws to grant land trusts and other owners of open space legal action against someone who intentionally steals items, cuts down trees, builds roads or paths, or commits other damage on their property.
Currently, there are no penalties for such acts. The proposed penalty requires the guilty party to restore the land to its original condition and pay $5,000 in damages.
The bill is expected to pass to the House and then move to the Senate. The legislation passed the House last year, but was never taken up by the Senate.
During recent testimony, Rupert Friday, director of Rhode Island Land Trust Council, said local land trust need the law to deter and seek damages for a number of violations, such as stealing rocks from stone walls and neighbors clearing trees to improve their views.
The bill is sponsored by Rep. Cale Keable, D-Burrillville. It was modeled after legislation passed in Connecticut in 2006.
Last January as many as nine bald eagles were sighted together on the Seekonk River, which is now considered the most reliable place to find the birds in Rhode Island. (Peter Green/Providence Raptors)
They’ve been observed eating Canada geese on highway medians, soaring over shopping center parking lots, perched in trees in Providence, and hunting for fish at nearly every large lake in the state. All of which suggests that sightings of bald eagles in the Ocean State are no longer the rare occurrence that they used to be.
In winter, they have become almost commonplace. Last January alone, bird watchers reported seeing bald eagles at Brickyard Pond in Barrington, Watchaug Pond in Charlestown, Tiogue Lake in Coventry, Stump Pond in Smithfield, Trustom Pond and the Great Swamp in South Kingstown, the Pawcatuck River in Westerly, and flying over numerous other locations. As many as nine bald eagles were sighted together on the Seekonk River, which is now considered the most reliable place to find the birds in Rhode Island.
Experts say that eagle numbers are expected to climb even higher. According to Tom French, assistant director of the Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, who has been monitoring bald eagle numbers in New England for more than two decades, many of the eagles sighted in Rhode Island in winter are year-round residents, but they are less noticeable during the breeding season.
He said Rhode Island has four nesting pairs of eagles, and most of their young probably stick around the area for a few years before dispersing to find breeding territories of their own.
“At our latitude, most adult eagles don’t migrate,” French said. “Rhode Island also gets some spillover in the winter of eagles from Massachusetts and Connecticut. Plus, we have a contingent of eagles from Maine and southern Canada that migrate. How far they go is questionable — some definitely go as far as Chesapeake Bay — but many of them only go as far as they have to to find open water. So some of them probably stop along the Rhode Island coast.”
How many bald eagles spend the winter in Rhode Island is difficult to say, since some of the birds move around when ponds and lakes freeze.
“The number you have in winter is not only based on increases from breeding, but also based on the weather,” French said. “A good winter for eagles in Rhode Island means it’s probably been a bad winter weather-wise elsewhere. The colder the winter in the north, the more eagles you’ll have in Rhode Island.”
That’s what may account for the dearth of bald eagle observations in Rhode Island so far this winter. Rachel Farrell, a member of the Rhode Island Avian Records Committee, said reported eagle observations in December have been about half of what they were last year.
“Perhaps the eagles have stayed to the north so far this winter,” she said. “We may see a huge number of reports in January, which is often the case.”
Rhode Island hasn’t always had significant numbers of eagles in winter, however. Farrell said bald eagles were fairly common winter residents in Rhode Island up until the 1960s, after which they nearly disappeared from the state for 30 years. Only two bald eagles were observed during the annual Christmas bird counts between 1962 and 1988.
The decline, according to both Farrell and French, was caused by the use of the pesticide DDT, which made its way into lakes and ponds and accumulated in the tissues of fish. When eagles ate the fish, the toxin caused reproductive failure, resulting in a precipitous decline of bald eagle populations throughout the lower 48 states.
DDT was banned in 1972, but it has taken a surprisingly long time for the birds to rebound. Ospreys, the fish-eating hawks that are now common throughout the region, were similarly affected by DDT, but they recovered their populations much more quickly than have bald eagles. It took many years of work by wildlife officials, including French, to relocate eagle chicks from other parts of the country and place them with “foster parents” at the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts before the New England eagle population began to grow on its own.
French said bald eagles have now recovered in the region and are still experiencing exponential growth. Eventually, that population growth will level off, when the birds are so abundant that there is no longer enough nesting habitat or food resources to sustain them.
Is there a downside to having so many eagles in the region? That’s a question Peter Paton has pondered. An ornithologist and professor at the University of Rhode Island, Paton said researchers have found that the approximately 900 pairs of bald eagles breeding in Maine are eating so many gulls, eiders and great cormorants that populations of those birds are declining. And many of the eiders and cormorants that summer in Maine spend their winter in coastal southern New England, which means that eagle predation in Maine may be causing a decline in winter eider and cormorant numbers in Rhode Island.
French, who assesses eagle prey whenever he visits a nest to band young eaglets, said the most common food items he observes in nests are fish, primarily brown bullhead and chain pickerel. But he also commonly finds the remains of Canada geese, wild turkeys and gray squirrels.
“Most of what they eat aren’t things we really need to worry about,” he said. “Sure, they’ll take a few things that you wish they hadn’t, like common loons and osprey chicks, but they won’t impact other species at the population level.