mncs and sustainable business practice the case of the colombian and peruvian petroleum industries abstract multinational corporations mncs play an increasingly important role in the economic development strategies of many less developed countries ldcs at the same time the sustainable development of ldcs requires economic growth to be accompanied by environmental protection and greater social equity this paper contributes to the literature concerned with mncs contribution to the sustainable development of ldcs the concept of sustainable business practice sbp is proposed as relevant to understanding mncs contribution and an analytical framework incorporating the content context and process of sbp is used to examine what sbp might consist of as well as those conditions important for its widespread adoption results from a study examining the colombian and peruvian petroleum industries show that despite important contributions by mncs to sustainable development sbp is not yet widespread the study also shows the importance of external institutional pressures principally in the form of local legislation for mncs contribution to the sustainable development of ldcs finally the paper shows how the process of change toward more sbp is closely linked to the external context in which mncs operate the characteristics of their internal context and the internal and external processes linking these contexts

food preferences and nutrition in rural bangladesh t he dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance in many countries such as bangladesh national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods however little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake the design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross price elasticities for both target and non target groups the net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption in this study demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5 750 rural bangladeshi households estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis such as household size occupation and employment status that are typically lost in aggregation there is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data this is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest moreover the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters previous econometric analysis of income class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory pinstrup anderson de londono and hoover 1976 estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using frisch s scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid alderman and timmer 1980 who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in indonesia the inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income i the formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section ii below section iii presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables section iv summarizes our findings

calm after the storms income distribution and welfare in chile 1987 94 after rising during most but not all of the 1960 85 period inequality in chile seems to have stabilized since around 1987 following the stormy period of economic and political reforms of the 1970s and 1980s no statistically significant lorenz dominance results could be detected since 1987 scalar measures of inequality confirm this picture of stability but suggest a slight change in the shape of the density function with some compression at the bottom being compensated for by a stretching at the top as inequality remained broadly stable sustained economic growth led to substantial welfare improvements and poverty reduction according to a range of measures and with respect to three different poverty lines poverty mixed stochastic dominance tests confirm this result all of these findings are robust to different choices of equivalence scales

the determinants of an environmentally responsive firm an empirical approach abstract our empirical results indicate that a firm s formulation of an environmental plan is positively influenced by customer pressure shareholder pressure government regulatory pressure and neighborhood and community group pressure but negatively influenced by other lobby group pressure sources and a firm s sales to asset ratio firms which view environmental issues as important in the next 5 years are also more likely to have a plan relative to the manufacturing sector firms in the natural resource sector are more likely to formulate environmental plans while firms in the service sector are less likely to have plans our results provide insight into how firms react to environmental issues they also offer policymakers a list of determinants which can be used either as an alternative or complement to environmental regulation

distribution and redistribution in postindustrial democracies this paper analyzes the processes of distribution and redistribution in post industrial democracies we combine a pooled time series data base on welfare state effort and its determinants assembled by huber ragin and stephens 1997 with data on income distribution assembled in the luxembourg income survey lis archive in the case of the lis data we re calculate the micro data in order to remove the distorting influence of pensioners on pre tax pre transfer income distribution we examine the determinants of three dependent variables pre tax pre transfer income inequality post tax post transfer income inequality and the proportional reduction in inequality from pre to post tax and transfer inequality we hypothesized that pre tax pre transfer income inequality would be determined by labor market institutions union density bargaining centralization labor market conditions unemployment and economic structures post industrialism third world imports we hypothesized that the reduction in inequality would be determined by political configurations directly by left government and indirectly via their effect on welfare state generosity by left government and christian democratic government post tax and transfer income inequality was hypothesized to be a product of the combination of labor market variables and political variables the results broadly confirms our hypotheses and the overall fit is very good

industry self regulation without sanctions the chemical industry s responsible care program industry self regulation the voluntary association of firms to control their collective action has been proposed as a complement to government regulation proponents argue that the establishment of

land contingent poverty alleviation schemes abstract target groups for rural poverty alleviation schemes in south asia and elsewhere have often been identified in terms of their landholding class with landless or near landless households being the intended beneficiaries this paper offers a quantitative approach to the analysis and design of land contingent poverty alleviation schemes an application to bangladesh suggests that when income is generally unobserved landholding class is a good instrument for targeting poverty relief in that it is strongly correlated with the informationally feasible allocations which minimize aggregate poverty for a given budget it is however far from being a perfect instrument even under otherwise ideal conditions the maximum feasible reduction in poverty which is attainable by relying solely on land based targeting is substantially less than that attainable with perfect income information indeed the poverty alleviation impact of domestically financed and revenue neutral transfers across 10 landholding classes in rural bangladesh could also be achieved without targeting by simply giving every household a lump sum payment equivalent to 10 of mean rural income political restrictions on tax powers or errors made in administration will further reduce the gains from land contingent targeting greater impact on poverty for a given budgetary cost will require more precise targeting within landholding classes

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage given incomplete factor markets appropriate time paths of flow variables must be chosen to build required stocks of assets that is critical resources are accumulated rather than acquired in strategic factor markets barney barney j 1986 strategic factor markets expectations luck and business strategy management sci october 1231 1241 sustainability of a firm s asset position hinges on how easily assets can be substituted or imitated imitability is linked to the characteristics of the asset accumulation process time compression diseconomies asset mass efficiencies inter connectedness asset erosion and causal ambiguity

slipping into and out of poverty the dynamics of spells this paper examines the dynamics of poverty previous analyses have examined either fluctuations in the male heads earnings or the frequency of poverty periods over a fixed time frame our approach depends on a definition of spells of poverty using this methodology we find that the majority of poor persons at any time are in the midst of a rather long spell of poverty the methodology also allows us to estimate that less than 40 percent of poverty spells begin because of a drop in the heads earnings while 60 percent of the spells end when the heads earnings increase thus researchers must focus on household formation decisions and on the behavior of secondary family members there has been a dramatic resurgence recently of discussion of the underclass the discussion is reminiscent of debates about poverty during the 1960s when the notions of a culture of poverty particularly as popularized by michael harrington s other america 1962 dominated both intellectual and policy thinking the idea of an underclass seems inconsistent however with much of the research on the dynamics of poverty during the 1970s that research using new longitudinal data seemed to show that the bulk of the poor were poor for only a few years the research also showed that the poor were a very heterogeneous group including a small minority of persistently poor the persistence of poverty is of interest both for understanding the phenomenon and for developing policy claims about dependency and separate life styles among the poor rest on assumptions about the long term nature of poverty questions

how well do static indicators identify the chronically poor abstract we investigate how well the most widely used static welfare indicators perform in identifying the chronically poor we propose a normative measure of performance the cost of a given impact on chronic poverty when transfers are contingent upon a purely static indicator using longitudinal household data from rural india we find that current consumption is not always a better indicator of chronic poverty than current income both however perform much better than other common indicators such as food share and access to land

corporate strategy and international environmental policy this paper analyzes the interactions between international environmental policy and multinational corporate strategy the main contribution is building a new conceptual framework to analyze the type of corporate strategy developed in the presence of both national an international environmental regulations this framework distinguishes between firm level compliance with environmental obligations and the development of resource based green capabilities it also classifies major environmental regulations and incorporates a discussion of public policy

an index of inequality with applications to horizontal equity and social mobility horizontal equity and social mobility are discussed in terms of a non utilitarian social welfare function which takes account of the process by which an ex ante distribution is mapped into an ex post distribution by the tax system for example an index of inequality is proposed which decomposes into two components corresponding to vertical and horizontal equity respectively a functional form for the social welfare function is derived for the purposes of empirical work and an application to data for 5895 uk households is presented the paper contains a theoretical application of the index to a model of optimal taxation it is conventional to assess the merits of alternative public policies in terms of a trade off between equity and efficiency in practice however a change in say the tax system involves three effects first it may have incentive or disincentive effects leading to efficiency gains or losses secondly it may alter the distribution of welfare levels thirdly it may alter the ranking of individuals or households within the distribution these three effects correspond to efficiency vertical equity and we shall argue certain aspects of horizontal equity respectively and any assessment of a tax change must take into account all three the principal assumption of this paper is that government is concerned about the trade off between these three effects a strict utilitarian is concerned only with the consequences of an action and in the evaluation of a particular reform a utilitarian measure of social welfare is defined over the vector of ex post utilities no account is taken of the process by which the vector of ex ante utilities is mapped into the ex post vector and no ethical status is awarded to the ex ante distribution one does not have to adopt an entitlement theory of justice to believe that the utilitarian approach may ignore some relevant considerations such as the fairness of the redistributive process a striking example of this arises in the model used by mirrlees 11 to examine optimal income taxation in that model individuals have identical preferences defined over consumption and leisure and differ only in respect of their potential wage rates or ability levels clearly in the absence of taxation individual utility is an increasing function of ability suppose the government uses redistributive lump sum taxes to achieve the first best optimum then as mirrlees 11 12 shows the first best optimum for a utilitarian social welfare

poverty in palanpur the meaning and identification of poverty are examined using three indicators of standard of living in the north indian village of palanpur the first is intended as a measure of apparent prosperity based on the personal assessments of investigators after intensive field work in the village over the full agricultural year 1983 84 the other two are income in 1983 84 and a measure of permanent income obtained by averaging incomes from four surveys conducted over a twenty six year interval a comparison of these three indicators shows that income measured in any one year may give a misleading impression of the incidence of poverty the risk of poverty for households is calculated vulnerability is high among low caste households and those which are involved in agricultural labor categories however are not homogeneous for example whereas the landless and widows are more likely to be poor some of such households are quite well off it is argued that poverty in a good agricultural year is a better indicator of sustained poverty than poverty in a bad year occupational mobility out of agricultural labor is low and changes in the distribution of land are largely accounted for by demographic processes such as household splits

optimal intertemporal consumption decisions under the threat of starvation abstract this paper studies consumption and saving decisions over time in a life cycle model in which survival from one period to the next is endogenous survival probabilities depend on health which is a capital stock subject to depreciation and which can be augmented by consumption nutrition borrowing is ruled out in our model and we investigate optimal consumption decisions when income fluctuates at seasonal frequencies and when income follows a stochastic process among other results we show that understanding the pattern of income is necessary for understanding consumption decisions when survival is probabilistic and endogenous

household income dynamics a four country story in this article we analyse the dynamics of household per capita incomes using longitudinal data from indonesia south africa spain and venezuela we find that in all four countries reported initial income and job changes of the head are consistently the most important variables in accounting for income changes overall and for initially poor households we also find that changes in income are more important than changes in household size and that changes in labour earnings are more important than changes in other sources of household income

guns and butter regime competition and the welfare state during the cold war scholars from a number of disciplines have argued that the massive expansion of the welfare state in the postwar period was at least in some part a byproduct of the cold war and the associated political competition between two rival regime blocs however the question of whether regime competition fuelled welfare state growth has never been subject to systematic examination applying spatial econometrics this article offers the first empirical test of this argument the authors findings support the notion that regime competition stimulated the expansion of the welfare state on both sides of the iron curtain in the postwar period

the political economy of imprisonment in affluent western democracies 1960 1990 research showing an association between business cycles and imprisonment is suspect on both theoretical and empirical grounds most research on this topic uses an impoverished notion of business cycles and pays no attention to differences in the institutional contexts of economic policymaking this article reexamines this issue using data from 15 affluent capitalist democracies observed over 30 years from 1960 to 1990 pooled regression techniques are used to test hypotheses regarding the effects of business cycles political power and the structure of labor market institutions results from simple models show the expected associations between business cycles and imprisonment rates but these associations disappear in models that include measures of politics and institutional structure this suggests that the business cycle imprisonment relationship is not causal but is instead an artifact of antecedent differences between neoliberal and corporatist societies

the impact of decentralized data entry on the quality of household survey data in developing countries evidence from a randomized experiment in vietnam computers were provided to randomly selected districts participating in a household survey in vietnam to assess the impact on data quality of entering data within a day or two of completing the interview rather than several weeks later in the provincial capital provision of computers had no significant effect on the observed distribution of household expenditures and thus no effect on measured poverty provision of computers reduced the mean number of errors per household by 5 23 percent depending on the type of error given the already low rate of errors in the survey however the goal of increasing the precision of the estimated mean of a typical variable can be achieved at a much lower cost by slightly increasing the sample size provision of additional computers did substantially reduce the time interviewers spent adding up and checking the data in the field with the value of the time saved close to the cost of purchasing desktop computers

identifying the poor in developing countries do different definitions matter abstract this paper compares several commonly used definitions of poverty household survey data from cote d ivoire are examined to see whether different definitions choose the same people as poor we find that they often do not choose the same people even though we a priori set all the definitions so that 30 of the population is classified as poor this implies that different definitions of poverty may lead to different policy recommendations which suggests that more attention should be given to the choice of a particular definition of poverty when analyzing the effects of economic policies on the poor

testing a social safety net abstract standard benefit incidence analysis does not distinguish policy impacts on persistent poverty from transient poverty we offer an alternative approach based on actual and simulated joint distributions of consumption over time which allows us to distinguish the extent of protection against poverty from promotion out of poverty the approach is illustrated by an analysis of the distributional impact of changes in cash benefits introduced to compensate for other policy reforms in hungary cash benefits protected many from poverty but promoted few out of poverty the safety net s impact on poverty was largely due to higher average outlays rather than improved targeting

the distributional impacts of indonesia s financial crisis on household welfare analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is an ever more pressing need if policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely affected they need to identify those who have been hurt most and estimate the magnitude of the harm they have suffered they must also respond in a timely manner this article develops a simple methodology for measuring these effects and applies it to analyze the impact of the indonesian economic crisis on household welfare using only pre crisis household information it estimates the compensating variation for indonesian households following the 1997 asian currency crisis and then explores the results with flexible nonparametric methods it finds that virtually every household was severely affected although the urban poor fared the worst the ability of poor rural households to produce food mitigated the worst consequences of the high inflation the distributional consequences are the same whether or not households are permitted to substitute toward relat

safety first consumption abstract this paper develops a model of safety first consumption behavior in which the likelihood of survival to the next period depends on current consumption levels below a threshold asset level individuals follow a decumulation path and above that level they follow an accumulation path saving rates then vary discontinuously with asset level generating a poverty trap and divergence in incomes an increase in the likelihood of surviving raises aggregate saving a more equitable distribution of assets can be consistent with greater aggregate savings and growth because of declining marginal propensity to save over some asset intervals

asset smoothing consumption smoothing and the reproduction of inequality under risk and subsistence constraints abstract a growing literature asks whether low wealth agents can accumulate assets over time or whether they are trapped in poverty this paper develops a stochastic dynamic programming model with endogenous asset price risk to explore savings and portfolio decisions in a resource poor environment characterized by risk and subsistence constraints optimal portfolio strategies are found to bifurcate despite divisible assets and fully rational agents wealthier agents acquire a higher yielding portfolio and pursue conventional consumption smoothing poorer agents acquire a less remunerative portfolio and pursue asset smoothing rather than consumption smoothing asset based risk coping thus results in positive correlation between initial wealth and portfolio rate of return

context dependent biodiversity conservation management regimes theory and simulations ecosystem degradation hasmotivated a search for successful conservation approaches the perceived failure of state directed protected areas in the tropics has prompted experimentation with community management and co management strategies numerous case studies suggest that none of these are effective universally there exists however little analytical or empirical work to identify under what conditions one arrangement will be more effective than another this paper develops a model of statedependent equilibrium conservation management design that identifies the comparative advantage of different managers in the interest of appropriately locating authority for conservation tasks as a function of prevailing biophysical economic and sociopolitical conditions

multinational oil companies and the adoption of sustainable development a resource based and institutional theory interpretation of adoption heterogeneity sustainable development is often framed as a social issue to which corporations should pay attention because it offers both opportunities and challenges through the use of institutional theory and the resource based view of the firm we shed some light on why more than 20 years after sustainable development was first introduced we see neither the adoption of this business model as dominant nor its converse that is the total abandonment of the model as unworkable and unprofitable we focus on multinational corporations mncs because they were among the organizations first called to take action in order to illustrate the institutional pressures mncs face and their strategic response to these pressures we analysed four major oil and gas multinationals subject to similar sustainable development pressures climate change biodiversity renewable energy development and social investment we argue that normative and coercive isomorphism does not occur at the global level because sustainable development is largely a stakeholder driven rather than a broad social pressure that is host country interpretation of sustainable development pressures varies across an mnc s subsidiary network based on the analysis of the four major mncs annual reports from 2000 to 2005 we argue that mimetic isomorphism may occur but since it implies the use of complex and intangible resources mimetic processes are slow rare and discretionary

the transformation of prison regimes in late capitalist societies recent studies argue that cultural and political economic shifts have led to a sea change in penal regimes among modern western societies resulting in more punitive social policies in general and a trend toward higher incarceration rates in particular this is a special case of a wider argument that globalization has led to a decline in state autonomy and convergence on a market based model of economic and social policy this thesis has been challenged by the empirical literature on welfare states which finds persistent cross national diversity in institutional structures policies and patterns of inequality focusing on incarceration rates as the outcome of interest this study evaluates these arguments by applying a bayesian change point model to four decades of data from 15 countries results show that a regime shift did occur but that incarceration rates increased mainly among countries with unregulated labor markets decentralized polities or weak labor unions profound institutional differences

economic mobility along the business cycle the case of peru the performance of latin american countries in reducing poverty and expanding the middle class has been remarkable by taking a close look at the peruvian experience we examine how this aggregate

the distributional impacts of indonesia s financial crisis on household welfare a rapid response methodology analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is an ever more pressing need if policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely affected they need to identify those who have been hurt most and estimate the magnitude of the harm they have suffered they must also respond in a timely manner this article develops a simple methodology for measuring these effects and applies it to analyze the impact of the indonesian economic crisis on household welfare using only pre crisis household information it estimates the compensating variation for indonesian households following the 1997 asian currency crisis and then explores the results with flexible nonparametric methods it finds that virtually every household was severely affected although the urban poor fared the worst the ability of poor rural households to produce food mitigated the worst consequences of the high inflation the distributional consequences are the same whether or not households are permitted to substitute toward relatively cheaper goods households with young children may have suffered disproportionately large adverse effects

politics markets and life satisfaction the political economy of human happiness little is known about the political determinants of subjective well being across nations the dominant theoretical approaches comparison and trait theory suggest that cross national differences will be either nonexistent or largely independent of political conditions i argue instead that although culture does appear to play a significant role the results of democratic competition have even more dramatic effects upon national levels of life satisfaction specifically i demonstrate that subjective appreciation of life is positively affected by the ideological complexion of governments and by qualitative features of the welfare state the implications for social policy electoral politics and our theoretical understanding of life satisfaction are discussed

on the microeconomics of food and malnutrition under endogenous discounting abstract this paper explores the microeconomics and dynamics of food and nutrition it examines the linkages between malnutrition and the incentive to invest and accumulate capital the analysis focuses on a dynamic model where preferences about the future depend on nutrition and health situations of malnutrition cover both ends of the spectrum from nutrient deficiency to obesity the model involves preferences that are not time additive and exhibit endogenous discounting this provides a framework to investigate the factors affecting consumption and investment behavior the adverse investment incentives of malnutrition are examined

economic globalization the macro economy and reversals of welfare expansion in affluent democracies 1978 94 a key question in debates over globalization is its effect on the welfare states in particular on welfare retrenchments programmatic retractions of the scope and coverage of social programs we conceptualize such retrenchments as discrete policy events and we offer a comprehensive model of their occurrence that integrates domestic economic political and institutional factors as well as those related to the global economy our analysis of all such retrenchments in organization for economic cooperation and development oecd nations between 1978 and 1994 indicates that the effects of globalization are complex with trade openness and financial liberalization clearly operating against such retrenchments but outward foreign direct investment perhaps pressuring for them in addition we uncover support for a dynamic of self limiting immoderation economic and demographic pressures for costly welfare expenditures provoke actions to roll back eligibility and benefit rates that link increasing numbers of unemployed and retired persons to increased social spending in short the same demographic pressures that gave often been noted to substantially drive welfare spending may trigger welfare cutbacks our thanks to a a alderson bob jackman lane kenworthy joakim palme duane swank john stephen and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and discussions as well as to kendralin freedman for her work preparing the final manuscript all remaining errors are our own previous versions of this article were presented at the annual meetings of the american political science association and the american sociological association the views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of the national science foundation or the u s government all data and commands necessary to replicate the analyses presented here are available at our web site http polisci emory edu zorn hz index html

are the welfare losses from imperfect targeting important we quantify and compare the size of the welfare losses arising from the use of alternative imperfect welfare indicators as substitutes for the conventionally preferred consumption indicator we find that the size of the welfare losses associated with different indicators varies considerably an asset based index and the share of food as targeting indicators were found to have the highest welfare losses relative to all other targeting indicators examined our preferred welfare index implies that the losses from the two best targeting indicators i e reported expenditures and reported income are statistically significant but very low less than 5

plumbing the depths utilizing o g reserve profiles to develop forward looking risk assessments for exploration and production activities abstract the deepwater horizon accident may have shaken the sustainability ratings and indices credibility but it also reinforced their importance the objective of this article is to contribute to the improvement of corporate sustainability valuations by investigating if reserves profiles can affect the environmental risk exposure of an oil gas og 2 water is more of an issue with companies with higher bitumen and natural gas reserves and 3 there is significant regional bias in the reporting of the environmental risk factors these findings have broad implications for the financial industry governments investors and lenders alike

from domestic to international justice the welfare state and foreign aid foreign aid often is interpreted as an international projection of domestic income redistribution mechanisms and many authors suggest that differences between welfare states account for variations in donor behavior a new understanding of the welfare state can improve traditional explanations of this linkage existing studies of the welfare aid relationship use two welfare state indicators domestic spending and partisan politics we propose a third type of indicator the institutional attributes of the welfare state and demonstrate its relevance the level of foreign aid provided by a country varies with social spending but even more so with the degree to which its welfare state embodies socialist attributes this finding helps explain how domestic political institutions influence the evolution of international cooperation and specifically how welfare principles institutionalized at the domestic level shape the participation of developed countries in the international aid regime

political resources and the growth of welfare in affluent capitalist democracies 1960 1982 explanations of welfare effort in affluent postwar democracies are partially integrated within a political resource framework political resource models of welfare effort fare well when tested with pooled time series data for 1960 82 use of governmental authority by the left use of disruption by the working class and the petty burgeois and use of lobbying voting and or entitlement rights by the elderly and the unemployed constitute means of political action among more diffusely available infraresources state revenue expansion economic growth and inflation appear to buoy welfre expansion as do left corporatism and bureaucratic paternalism some mediating effects of economic epoch and state structure are explored

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

savings and nutrition at low incomes while many development theorists assume saving propensities vary among different groups there has been limited theoretical justification for this view this paper analyzes two complementary theories stressing the effect on saving of physiological consequences of poor nutrition at low incomes one influence is on the probability of survival another is on workers productivity either effect means that the average propensity to save can rise with income issues considered include annuities exogenous changes in survival and efficiency implications for the efficiency wage theory of unemployment and distinctions between wage and nonwage income implications of nutritional effects for econometric specification of saving functions are stressed

the mediating role of social workers in the implementation of regional policies targeting energy poverty abstract this paper aims to provide a socio political reflection of the role played by social workers in regional policies and of the real needs of households affected by energy poverty the paper also examines the impact of technical specialised training on the ability of social workers to prevent and mitigate conditions of household energy poverty in europe the adoption of a research action participation methodological framework and a training research approach has permitted the opinions of social workers to be collected through surveys and their central role in implementing regional policies to be highlighted the conclusions obtained have made possible the construction of a self diagnosis and data collection tool which increases the ability of social workers to mediate and implement urgent mitigation measures for energy poverty finally regional policies which aim to mitigate household energy poverty are examined from the professional perspective of social workers

on the costs of food price fluctuations in low income countries abstract conventional welfare measures of the costs of food price fluctuations in low income countries are extended to allow for both economic growth and food security effects the analysis reveals that growth and food security effects may dominate more conventional welfare costs of food price fluctuations although estimating the empirical magnitude of the effects is hampered by the lack of consensus on the extent to which food price fluctuations actually reduce economic growth and food security even if the welfare costs of food price fluctuations are high there are many challenges to the design and successful implementation of price stabilization schemes

population aging class context and age inequality in public spending although recent experiences in the united states suggest that population aging for both demographic and political reasons favors public spending for the elderly relative to children many european nations with different political environments show no shuch pattern this paper investigates age inequality or bias in public spending for these two age based dependent groups using annual time series data for 18 advanced industrial democracies the results show that a large aged population reduces age inequality in favor of the eldearly in the presence of 1 class based corporatism and 2 strong leftist parties whereas a large aged population increases age inequality in the absence of these two factors

expected poverty under risk induced welfare variability two of the most widely accepted stylised facts about agriculture in south asia sub saharan africa and elsewhere are that income is highly uncertain from one year to another and that deep and widespread poverty exists and yet there has been very little analysis of the joint problems of poverty and risk this paper offers a methodological approach to the issue of how risk affects poverty and applies it to household level data for dry areas of rural india the following questions are addressed under what conditions can one expect an increase in the riskiness of an income or consumption stream to increase poverty how should one measure the contribution of risk to poverty and what long term benefits in terms of reduced poverty can be expected from policies aimed at stabilising incomes of the poor such policies have been widely discussed in the indian subcontinent of late and their effect on rural

the impact of environmental management on firm performance environmental management has the potential to play a pivotal role in the financial performance of the firm many individuals suggest that profitability is hurt by the higher production costs of environmental management initiatives while others cite anecdotal evidence of increased profitability a theoretical model is proposed that links strong environmental management to improved perceived future financial performance as measured by stock market performance the linkage to firm performance is tested empirically using financial event methodology and archival data of firm level environmental and financial performance significant positive returns were measured for strong environmental management as indicated by environmental performance awards and significant negative returns were measured for weak environmental management as indicated by environmental crises the implicit financial market valuation of these events also was estimated cross sectional analysis of the environmental award events revealed differences for first time awards and between industries first time award announcements were associated with greater increases in market valuation although smaller increases were observed for firms in environmentally dirty industries possibly indicative of market skepticism this linkage between environmental management and financial performance can be used by both researchers and practitioners as one measure of the benefits experienced by industry leaders and as one criterion against which to measure investment alternatives

a critical review of sustainable business indices and their impact most studies into the performance of socially responsible investment vehicles have focused on the performance of sustainable or socially responsible mutual funds this research has been complemented recently by a number of studies that have examined the performance of sustainable investment indices in both cases the majority of studies have concluded that the returns of socially responsible investment vehicles have either underperformed or failed to outperform comparable market indices although the impact of sustainable indices to date has been limited the recent launch of sustainable indices by dow jones and ftse suggests that more attention is being paid to the subject by financial markets investors and companies this development raises a number of important issues which are reviewed in this article a the performance of indices compared with their benchmark indices b the methodologies employed in compiling the indices and c the impact of the indices on companies and the investment community the article concludes with a number of suggestions for areas that merit future research

analysis of energy poverty intensity from the perspective of the regional administration empirical evidence from households in southern europe abstract the current economic situation has increased the number of households in europe experiencing restrictions and or limitations of affordability of energy services demonstrating the urgent need to intervene in those extreme cases in which households suffer the daily consequences of what is internationally defined as energy poverty in such a context this paper presents the results obtained in a case study characterising a sample of 615 households with demonstrated energy poverty in the region of aragon spain in parallel the intensity of energy poverty in the studied cases is examined by measuring the percentage of energy expenditures with respect to income in the households that suffer it and a descriptive analysis of the main determinants of energy poverty in the homes studied is presented as well as the policy implication at regional level

the political economy of policies for smallholder agriculture summary as the experience of the 20th century has shown implementing policies that increase agricultural productivity among smallholders is a particularly promising strategy to achieve pro poor growth however history also reveals major political challenges to adopting this strategy the paper compares the experience of asian countries that were able to launch a smallholder based green revolution with the experience of african countries that are still struggling with this goal it then reviews the political economy literature to identify the factors that account for these divergent experiences finally the paper develops a conceptual framework to guide empirical research to close the knowledge gaps identified by the review

class forces political institutions and state intervention subnational economic development policy in the united states 1971 1990 the united states has experienced a major devolution of social and economic policy responsibilities to the states subnational industrial policies to create jobs and qualitative economic growth are key to this devolution the authors examine the development of these policies in terms of 1 the articulation of class interests 2 state level political institutions 3 prior political legacies 4 underlying production regimes and 5 interactions of strong political institutions and class mobilization an annual pooled cross sectional time series analysis of three state level economic development policies entrepreneurial industrial recruitment and labor market regulation shows that in addition to business power and strong state capacities the political legacies of 1930s welfare policy innovations and mezocorporatist bargaining potential condition the effects of business power

output prices and the distribution of consumption in rural india this article analyzes the relation among agricultural output inflation and the distribution of consumption in rural india using both the singh maddala and dagum families to model the entire distribution parametrically employing a benchmark case in which growth is distributionally neutral and idiosyncratic shocks are completely smoothed and using a gmm estimator to deal with potential simultaneity between output and consumption we conclude that i growth was not distributionally neutral ii good harvests relative to trend yielded improvements according to first order stochastic dominance iii slow growth before 1980 went with decreasing inequality iv accelerated growth thereafter tended to increase inequality though yielding improvements according to first order stochastic dominance v consumption smoothing was incomplete

social welfare orderings a life cycle perspective life cycle theories emphasize the fact that consumption is allocated intertemporally on the basis of a long term concept of resources that differs from household income because life cycle income is unobserved the distribution of this variable cannot be recovered it is shown that within a suitably defined class a predictor of life cycle income based on household income and expenditure entails a distribution dominated in a social welfare sense by the distribution of life cycle incomes a predictor constructed from socio demographic variables induces a distribution that welfare dominates the distribution of life cycle incomes

a framework linking intangible resources and capabilities to sustainable competitive advantage this article is concerned with the role of intangible resources in business strategy in particular it is concerned with identifying the intangible sources of sustainable competitive advantage sustainable competitive advantage results from the possession of relevant capability differentials regulatory and positional capabilities are concerned with intangible assets functional and cultural capabilities are concerned with competencies a framework linking intangible resources to capabilities has been devised and is used as the basis of a new technique for identifying the relative contribution which the different intangible resources make to competitive advantage the results of the use of this technique in six case studies are reported

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

morals or economics institutional investor preferences for corporate social responsibility this article presents the results of a study that analysed whether social responsibility had any bearing on the decision making of institutional investors being that institutional investors prefer socially aligned organizations this study explored to what extent the corporate actions and or social environmental investments influenced their decisions our results suggest that there are specific variables that affect the perceived value of the organization leading to decisions to not only invest but whether to hold or sell the shares and therefore having a consequential impact on the capital market s valuation

the paradox of redistribution and strategies of equality welfare state institutions inequality and poverty in the western countries the structure of welfare state institutions 2 a trade off exists between the degree of low income targeting and the size of redistributive budgets 3 outcomes of market based distribution are often more unequal than those of earnings related social insurance programs we argue that social insurance institutions are of central importance for redistributive outcomes using new data our comparative analyses of the effects of different institutional types of welfare states on poverty and inequality indicate that institutional differences lead to unexpected outcomes and generate the paradox of redistribution the more we target benefits at the poor and the more concerned we are with creating equality via equal public transfers to all the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality social scientists and social reformers have long debated how the welfare state and social policies should be designed so as to best reduce poverty and inequality this debate involves two different issues one question concerns whether social policies should be targeted or universal that is should they be organized for the poor only or should the welfare state include all citizens in the context of nontargeted programs another question concerns the level of benefits should benefits be equal for all or should they be related to previous earnings and in

the simplicity of competitive repertoires an empirical analysis this research explores the notion of competitive simplicity a tendency of some firms to concentrate intensely on just a few central activities our focus here is the simplicity inherent in the repertoire of concrete market oriented actions used by companies to compete these actions include product introductions pricing or advertising decisions and changes in market scope the simplicity of a competitive repertoire can be assessed by its range of actions and its degree of concentration on one or a few dominant types of actions we argue that competitive simplicity is largely a function of organizational and environmental properties that attenuate managerial search or restrict knowledge of competitive alternatives these properties include good performance munificent homogeneous or certain markets a lack of breadth in competitive experiences and the complacency that may accompany age and size paradoxically although good past performance may contribute to simplicity simplicity can hurt subsequent performance especially during periods of uncertainty and growth many of these ideas were borne out in a study of the major carriers of the post deregulation domestic airline industry

does household consumption behave as a martingale a test for rural south india abstractthe hypothesis that consumption evolves over time as a martingale process is tested on household panel data for three villages in south india a novel feature of the methodology is that it gives consistent estimates of dynamic effects in short panels the estimated coefficients of lagged consumption are generally smaller than unity and a number of the lagged income and wealth variables are statistically significant the results are inconsistent with the proposition that consumption equals permanent income this is also true when the data are disaggregated by household wealth

uncertain lifetime risk aversion and intertemporal substitution abstract this paper describes a simple utility function for dynamic choice problems under uncertain lifetime preferences are time consistent and similar to selden s ordinal certainty equivalent hypothesis for yaari s model of consumption savings decisions holding intertemporal substitution fixed the consumption growth rate is increasing decreasing in the mortality rate if risk aversion is lower higher than under expected utility preferences

the end of cheap oil current status and prospects abstract this paper analyses the factors impacting the price of crude oil in order to examine the likely evolution of the oil market and attempts to answer the question whether cheap oil is already a thing of the past based on data made publicly available mostly by the major oil companies it examines the effects of demand and supply the evolution of world oil reserves the trends in new discoveries of new oilfields the evolution of world gross domestic product gdp and the depletion of oil resources the analysis concludes that the world peak in conventional oil production the point beyond which oil production will irreversibly start declining is approaching and will be reached even according to the most optimistic scenarios before 2040 and quite possibly much sooner if the appropriate solutions for substituting crude oil and for conserving the use of energy are not implemented in time then the current upward trend in oil prices is bound to continue

imprisonment and social classification in five common law democracies 1955 1985 rates of imprisonment have risen in many western democracies over the past few decades most dramatically in the united states the development of a systematic and general explanation of imprisonment trends has been impeded because of the theoretical and methodological limitations of prior quantitative studies most use data from a single country or jurisdiction and focus narrowly on the rusche kirchheimer labor surplus hypothesis with little attention to alternative explanations this study takes a cross national perspective using longitudinal data from australia canada new zealand the united kingdom and the united states to offer an institutional account of imprisonment rates the labor surplus effect is treated as a special case of a more general process by which individuals are allocated among alternative life course paths this allocation process is likely to be influenced by macrolevel institutional arrangements and contests for political power hypotheses are tested using pooled time series

calm after the storms after rising during most but not all ofthe 1960 85 period inequality in chile seems to have stabilized since around 1987 following the stormy period of economic and political reforms of the 197

sustainable development the ethics support the economics within their value chains of suppliers through customers many businesses are becoming more aware of the environmental aspects and impacts of their organizations viewed as a continuum of behavior business environmentalism can range from simply complying with the law to accepting and pursuing a goal of sustainable development the point on the continuum at which an organization chooses to operate is reflected in its environmental mission policies and actions attributes of the various levels of behavior and classification of some organizational mission statements are examined in this paper

wage wars institutional politics wpa wages and the struggle for u s social policy the wpa was the most expensive and politically prominent u s social program of the 1930s and the generosity and very nature of u s social policy in its formative years was contested through the wpa in this article an institutional politics theory of social policy is elaborated that incorporates the influence of both institutional conditions and political actors institutions mediate the influence of political actors specifically it is argued that underdemocratized political systems and patronage oriented party systems dampen the cause of generous social spending and the impact of those struggling for it state actors left party regimes and social movements spur social policy but only under favorable institutional conditions to appraise this theory key senate roll call votes on wpa wage rates are examined as well as state level variations in wpa wages at the end of the 1930s the analyses which include multiple regression and qualitative comparative analysis support the theory

partisan governance women s employment and the social democratic service state the causes of the expansion and cross national variation in the provision of welfare state goods and services are examined social democratic governance is by far the most important determinant of the public delivery of services and is one of the most important determinants of the public funding of the provision of welfare state goods and services christian democratic governance is an important determinant of public funding of services but is not related to public delivery state structure is also an important determinant women s labor force participation is an important determinant of the expansion of public social welfare services net of other social political and historical factors the analysis also shows an interactive effect of women s labor force participation and social democratic governance on public delivery of welfare state services we conclude that public delivery of a wide range of welfare state services is the most distinctive feature of the social democratic welfare state and that this feature is a product of the direct and interactive effects of social democracy and women s mobilization

paradoxes in biodiversity conservation biodiversity is important for human wellbeing but it is declining measures to conserve biodiversity are essential but may be a waste of effort if several paradoxes are not addressed the highest levels of diversity are in nations least able to practise effective conservation the flow of funds to international biodiversity conservation appears trivial when compared to the scale of biodiversity loss international agreements may not actually protect or conserve more than what would have been conserved anyway protected areas may be paper parks protected in name but not in practice the very act of protection may contain self destructive features because local communities can easily suffer loss of income and assets making them unwilling partners in the act of protection in turn this places the protected area at risk and may also divert unsustainable harvesting activities to non protected but equally diverse ecosystems in tackling these issues the real biodiversity challenge is redesigning conservation effort making it truly additional and making it compatible with poverty reduction

towards a theory of famine relief policy abstract this paper examines how famine mortality is related to the distribution of food consumption a theoretical model is proposed of how individual survival chances are affected by changes in consumption uncertainty in survival prospects arises from the errors made by any observer in assessing health at given current consumption the theory is used to explore two policy issues in famine relief the choice of budgetary rules for allocating emergency aid and the case for price stabilization policies during famines applications to data for two famines in south asia suggest that successful price stabilization would have had substantial benefits in reducing mortality