“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Abraham Lincoln in 1862 already warned us to renew our thoughts and actions.

This book helps the Reader in this process by understanding dynamics and change, the role of resilience and opening the world by regarding i...

We are living on a finite planet. Mankind is overstepping planetary boundaries, however. In 2021, worldwide consumption has exceeded the yearly bio-capacity of the Earth (what we call the overshoot day) on the 29th of July. For industrialised countries, the situation is far worse: In 2022, Belgium reached that overshoot day on the 26th of March. In the face of these urgent challenges of sustainable resource use, there is wide agreement on the need for a transition, a fundamental societal shif...

Standards play an important role within society, shaping many transactions between consumers and companies, citizens and governments, as well as customer/supplier relationships in the broadest sense. This book investigates the economic and strategic importance of standards in a small, strongly globalised economy. The case of Belgium is developed from both a macro-economic and micro-economic perspective.

Based on an econometric model, the macro-economic part quantifies the impact of standards ...