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A PUBLICATION which is an event of much importance is the list of books suitable for British Public Libraries which, under the title Interpreting the United States, has just been issued from the National Central Library. Our readers will no doubt have received copies of it by this time, because the obvious intention of the Ministry of Information, which fathers it and the Carnegie Trustees who paid for it, is that it should have definite beneficial influence in all parts of these islands. The actual choice of books has been made for “the light their authors cast on the history, institutions and foibles that seem peculiarly American,” by the A.L.A. using a group of representative librarians whose choice has been submitted to some twenty literary critics and professors and to the comment of some European refugees now in the United States. A feature of the list is that arrangements have been made to overcome the great difficulty the shipping position imposes on the importing of American books. The books can actually be obtained, some from the National Central Library and the others from English booksellers. It therefore becomes possible for any library to acquire the reasonably authentic collection, long desired, of books that are really representative of the great other half of the English‐speaking family. Among the six hundred books are, fortunately, many which are already on the shelves of any well‐selected library. Books of all prices are included, among them some rather expensive ones, but the average cost per volume is about twelve shillings. Of the importance of bringing the truth about America to our people no librarian needs to be persuaded and we are sure that the welcome we extend to this list will be echoed everywhere.

This paper aims to provide a theoretical conception that establishes growth rate dynamics for co-operatives and studies Moroccan co-operatives’ start-ups and closures, by analyzing the co-operatives’ growth rate speed of adjustment (SOA).

This paper documents the basic patterns of entry and exit flow for agricultural, artisanal, housing and fishery co-operatives; highlights, with econometric tests, whether co-operatives’ growth rate is mean reverting or a unit root random walk; and estimates the growth rate adjustment speed, using a quadratic interval reverting model to capture both the upward and downward speeds of adjustment.

The empirical results indicate that co-operatives’ growth rate is significantly mean reverting for all sectors. Also, it concludes that the upward and downward adjustment speeds are significantly different within and between sectors, with negative indicator for artisanal co-operatives. The paper discusses these results, which are of interest to academics and policymakers.

The study does not investigate the causes of the growth rate SOA. Further, in-depth work with the results of this study would help scholars and policymakers to get close to the accurate research questions that characterize the mean reverting and affects the adjustment processes for Moroccan co-operatives.

The suggested model – with upward and downward adjustment speeds– could be valuable for policymakers’ strategies on co-operatives’ emergence.

The paper moves policymakers closer to social work and socio-economic trends to explain the empirical regularities of co-operatives’ dynamics. The model could be of value to avoid a volatile rate of entries and exits, to ensure continuity, to avoid fast failure of co-operative memberships and then to achieve the social inclusion.

The paper provides empirical evidence and results for co-operatives’ start-ups and closures adjustment speed and determines the conditions in which government policy must be clarified and specified. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first empirical analysis for the co-operatives’ SOA over entry and exit dynamics.

The study presents and evaluates a proposition that there is market information bundled with the mobile money (m-money) system. Also, that such information is disseminated to farmers in the process of their normal financial transactions and business interactions. This market information is important to mitigate the price uncertainty of farm products.

The empirical analysis is conducted with a two-stage econometric procedure. First, a probit model is used to estimate the likelihood of m-money take-up by farm entrepreneurs. Second, the ordinary least squares model is used to regress the farming price uncertainty index on the m-money take-up, which is quantified with a set of predicted values from the probit model in the first stage. The data used in econometric estimation come from Kenya's FinAccess Household Survey published in 2016.

The results of this paper show a negative effect of m-money service take-up on the price uncertainty index. A one unit increase in the m-money system is associated with a 12% reduction in the price uncertainty index. The authors interpret this as saying that access to the m-money system by farm business has a beneficial spillover effect on product risk mitigation, ceteris paribus.

The implication of this research is that policy initiatives which support farm entrepreneurs to access the m-money system should be encouraged not only for their financial inclusion advantage but also for their positive externality on product risk amelioration for rural farm businesses.

The paper introduces an idea that the m-money system is bundled with relevant information for mitigating price risk to the benefit of rural farm businesses.

This paper aims to discuss the experiences designing and conducting an experiential learning virtual incident response tabletop exercise (VIRTTX) to review a business's security posture as it adapts to remote working because of the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). The pandemic forced businesses to move operations from offices to remote working. Given that this happened quickly for many, some firms had little time to factor in appropriate cyber-hygiene and incident prevention measures, thereby exposing themselves to vulnerabilities such as phishing and other scams.

The exercise was designed and facilitated through Microsoft Teams. The approach used included a literature review and an experiential learning method that used scenario-based, active pedagogical strategies such as case studies, simulations, role-playing and discussion-focused techniques to develop and evaluate processes and procedures used in preventing, detecting, mitigating, responding and recovering from cyber incidents.

The exercise highlighted the value of using scenario-based exercises in cyber security training. It elaborated that scenario-based incident response (IR) exercises are beneficial because well-crafted and well-executed exercises raise cyber security awareness among managers and IT professionals. Such activities with integrated operational and decision-making components enable businesses to evaluate IR and disaster recovery (DR) procedures, including communication flows, to improve decision-making at strategic levels and enhance the technical skills of cyber security personnel.

It maintained that the primary implication for practice is that they enhance security awareness through practical experiential, hands-on exercises such as this VIRTTX. These exercises bring together staff from across a business to evaluate existing IR/DR processes to determine if they are fit for purpose, establish existing gaps and identify strategies to prevent future threats, including during challenging circumstances such as the COVID-19 outbreak. Furthermore, the use of TTXs or TTEs for scenario-based incident response exercises was extremely useful for cyber security practice because well-crafted and well-executed exercises have been found to serve as valuable and effective tools for raising cyber security awareness among senior leadership, managers and IT professionals (Ulmanová, 2020).

This paper underlines the importance of practical, scenario-based cyber-IR training and reports on the experience of conducting a virtual IR/DR tabletop exercise within a large organisation.