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Economic Framework (economic + framework)
Selected AbstractsPreventing the Spread of Invasive Species: Economic Benefits of Intervention Guided by Ecological PredictionsCONSERVATION BIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008REUBEN P. KELLER bioeconomía; economía de las invasiones; invasiones biológicas; Orconectes rusticus; predicciones ecológicas Abstract:,Preventing the invasion of freshwater aquatic species is the surest way to reduce their impacts, but it is also often expensive. Hence, the most efficient prevention programs will rely on accurate predictions of sites most at risk of becoming invaded and concentrate resources at those sites. Using data from Vilas County, Wisconsin (U.S.A.), collected in the 1970s, we constructed a predictive occurrence model for rusty crayfish (Orconectes rusticus) and applied it to an independent data set of 48 Vilas County lakes to predict which of these were most likely to become invaded between 1975 and 2005. We nested this invasion model within an economic framework to determine whether targeted management, derived from our quantitative predictions of likely invasion sites, would increase the economic value of lakes in the independent data set. Although the optimum expenditure on lake protection was high, protecting lakes at this level would have produced net economic benefits of at least $6 million over the last 30 years. We did not attempt to determine the value of nonmarket benefits of protection; thus, our results are likely to underestimate the total benefits from preventing invasions. Our results demonstrate that although few data are available early in an invasion, these data may be sufficient to support targeted, effective, and economically rational management. In addition, our results show that ecological predictions are becoming sufficiently accurate that their application in management can produce net economic benefits. Resumen:,La prevención de la invasión de especies dulceacuícolas es la manera más segura de reducir sus impactos, pero a menudo es costosa. Por lo tanto, los programas de prevención más eficientes dependerán de predicciones precisas de los sitios con mayor riesgo de ser invadidos y concentrarán recursos en esos sitios. Utilizando datos recolectados en los 70s en el Condado Vilas, Wisconsin (E.U.A.), desarrollamos un modelo predictivo de la ocurrencia de Orconectes rusticus y lo aplicamos en un conjunto de datos independientes de 48 lagos en el Condado de Vilas para predecir cuales fueron más susceptibles de ser invadidos entre 1975 y 2005. Anidamos este modelo de invasión en un marco económico para determinar si los objetivos de manejo, derivados de nuestras predicciones cuantitativas de sitios susceptibles a la invasión, incrementarían el valor económico de los lagos del conjunto independiente de datos. Aunque el gasto óptimo para la protección de lagos fue alto, la protección de lagos a este nivel podría haber producido beneficios económicos por un mínimo de $6 millones en los últimos 30 años. No intentamos determinar el valor de los beneficios no comerciables de la protección; por lo tanto, es probable que nuestros resultados subestimen los beneficios totales de la prevención de invasiones. Nuestros resultados demuestran que, aunque se disponga de pocos datos del inicio de una invasión, esos datos pueden ser suficientes para fundamentar acciones de manejo efectivas y económicamente racionales. Adicionalmente, nuestros resultados muestran que las predicciones ecológicas se están volviendo tan precisas que su aplicación en el manejo puede producir beneficios económicos netos. [source] COMMUNITY GARDENS AND POLITICS OF SCALE IN NEW YORK CITY,GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, Issue 2 2003CHRISTOPHER M. SMITH ABSTRACT. New York City community gardens have been the subject of political contestation over the course of their thirty-year existence. In 1999, 114 gardens were slated for public auction and redevelopment. This article examines the controversy over the garden auction as a politics of scale in which garden advocates successively raised the scope of the controversy beyond the scale of individual gardens, and ultimately beyond that of the city. Analysis of this land-use conflict highlights the significance of politics of scale for grassroots organizations within a market-centric, neoliberal economic framework. [source] An econometric analysis of regional adoption patterns of Bt maize in GermanyAGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 3-4 2010Nicola Consmüller Bt maize; Genetically modified organisms (GMO); Germany; Panel data analysis Abstract In this study, our goal is to identify and explain the underlying factors that drive regional adoption of Bt maize MON810 in Germany. Since regional differences cannot be explained by the occurrence of the target pest alone, we assume that under the given regulatory framework for genetically modified (GM) crop production in Germany, farm structures as well as the sociopolitical environment have also influenced regional adoption rates during the past years. Following a description of the relevant legal and economic framework in Germany, we develop theoretical hypotheses for regional variation in Bt maize adoption and test them econometrically with unique data at the federal state (Laender) and county (Landkreis) level. According to our analysis at the federal state level, the maize acreage per farm is the main driver of Bt maize adoption. In addition, there are signs that public opposition to GM cultivation as measured by membership in the German Friends of the Earth association significantly dampens GM cultivation. At the level of Brandenburg counties, the regional infestation frequency of the European Corn Borer, the target pest of Bt-Maize, is the major determinant of adoption. Although Bt maize is a scale-neutral technology for controlling damages caused by the Corn Borer, additional fixed costs due to regulation make the technology scale dependent. [source] Using private demand studies to calculate socially optimal vaccine subsidies in developing countriesJOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2009Joseph Cook Although it is well known that vaccines against many infectious diseases confer positive economic externalities via indirect protection, analysts have typically ignored possible herd protection effects in policy analyses of vaccination programs. Despite a growing literature on the economic theory of vaccine externalities and several innovative mathematical modeling approaches, there have been almost no empirical applications. The first objective of the paper is to develop a transparent, accessible economic framework for assessing the private and social economic benefits of vaccination. We also describe how stated preference studies (for example, contingent valuation and choice modeling) can be useful sources of economic data for this analytic framework. We demonstrate socially optimal policies using a graphical approach, starting with a standard textbook depiction of Pigouvian subsidies applied to herd protection from vaccination programs. We also describe nonstandard depictions that highlight some counterintuitive implications of herd protection that we feel are not commonly understood in the applied policy literature. We illustrate the approach using economic and epidemiological data from two neighborhoods in Kolkata, India. We use recently published epidemiological data on the indirect effects of cholera vaccination in Matlab, Bangladesh (Ali et al., 2005) for fitting a simple mathematical model of how protection changes with vaccine coverage. We use new data on costs and private demand for cholera vaccines in Kolkata, India, and approximate the optimal Pigouvian subsidy. We find that if the optimal subsidy is unknown, selling vaccines at full marginal cost may, under some circumstances, be a preferable second-best option to providing them for free. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. [source] Organisational susceptibility to fraud and theft, organizational size and the effectiveness of management controls: some UK evidenceMANAGERIAL AND DECISION ECONOMICS, Issue 3 2007Paul Barnes This paper examines the principal determinants of an organization's susceptibility to theft and fraud in the context of a rational economic framework in which the level of protection is determined by the minimization of cost. The empirical study shows that, adjusting for differences in organizational type and industrial sector, both organizational susceptibility and the size of a typical theft or fraud increase with organizational size. Access to resources and the manner in which the theft or fraud is perpetrated are also important determinants of the money lost. However, they are unaffected by management controls or the nature of their violation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] With Friends Like These: Endogenous Labor Market Segregation with Homogeneous, Nonprejudiced AgentsAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2009Article first published online: 3 JUN 200, Tavis Barr In the economics literature, labor market segregation is typically assumed to arise either from prejudice (Becker 1971) or from group differences in human capital accumulation (Benabou 1993; Durlauf 2006; Fryer 2006). Many sociological studies, by contrast, consider social network structure as an embodiment of various forms of social capital, including the creation of obligations, information channels, and enforceable trust (Coleman 1988; Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993). When firms hire by referral, social network segregation can lead to labor market segregation (Tilly 1998). Various social network structures may arise from the actions of self-interested individuals (Watts and Strogatz 1998; Jackson 2006); by incorporating concepts of social capital into an economic framework of profit-maximizing firms, this article develops a model of labor markets in which segregation arises endogenously even though agents are homogeneous and have no dislike for each other. Firms hire through referrals, and can enforce discipline by bribing a referrer to prevent a hiree from getting any outside job offers from other friends if he or she shirks. This is possible only if social networks are reasonably closed, so that the referee knows a majority of his or her friends' friends. By segregating into small communities, workers can more effectively create closed social networks. Social networks with different reservation wages will receive different wages; firms can induce such segregation and wage discrimination in the interest of profit. Workers may not benefit from such segregation, except as a best response to being in a society where it already exists; the "friends" in these social networks act as a worker discipline device, and in this way treat each other inimically. [source] Der späte Fluch des Dritten Reichs: Pfadabhängigkeiten in der Entstehung der bundesdeutschen WirtschaftsordnungPERSPEKTIVEN DER WIRTSCHAFTSPOLITIK, Issue 2 2005Albrecht Ritschl The present article takes a critical look at this myth, and examines the continuity between the economic framework of the Third Reich and the Social Market Economy. In a whole array of sectors of the German economy, regulations from the Nazi period continued to be in force after the war, or were even reintroduced. To accommodate these regulations, the Anti-Cartel Act of 1957 defined these areas as exempt from its general ban on cartels. In this sense, Germany's current reforms may be viewed as the laborious transformation of an economic system whose substance originated not in the Social Market Economy of the 1950s, but rather in the command economy of the 1930s. The findings of this article confirm that the impact of the Third Reich on the economic policies of post-war Germany was significantly greater than hitherto known. [source] "Specialized" Production in Archaeological Contexts: Rethinking Specialization, the Social Value of Products, and the Practice of ProductionARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Issue 1 2007Rowan K. Flad The contributions to this volume are introduced via a critical review of terms and concepts used in craft production studies today. Recent detailed contextual and technological analyses of artifacts from all aspects of complex societies have revealed interesting patterns that are difficult to conceptualize using a purely economic framework. Furthermore, interest in practice theory, and sociocultural theory in general, has shifted some foci of archaeological investigation toward the social aspects of production and specialization. New data, methods, and theories require a rethinking of what is meant by specialized production, and this chapter represents an introduction to this endeavor. [source] Workers compensation and occupational health and safety in the Australian agricultural industryAUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF RURAL HEALTH, Issue 2 2009Robert Guthrie Abstract Objectives:,The objective of this paper is to review the available workers compensation and occupational health and safety data and the legal framework in relation to the agricultural industry to explore whether any factors highlight the need to pay special attention to the particular circumstances of those engaged in the industry. Design:,This paper explores some of the special features of the agricultural industry, looking first at agricultural worker fatalities and injuries as a matter of ongoing concern for all participants in this industry, government, as well as occupational health and workers compensation authorities. The paper analyses how occupational health and workers compensation laws may have special application to this industry. Finally, the paper considers some workers compensation provisions that have particular application to the agricultural industry. Conclusions:,Our survey of the available data and literature leads to the conclusion that the dangerous nature of agricultural work and the special legal and economic framework in which that work is undertaken identify the agricultural industry as presenting Australian Governments and specialist authorities with particular challenges in relation to improving workplace safety and reducing workplace injury. [source] | |||||||||||||