Levels Of Goods Research Articles

How good is the evidence to support investment in soil protection?

AbstractWe review options for assembling evidence to support investment in protection from soil degradation by erosion, decline in organic matter, compaction and contamination. Convincing rationales for investment in soil resources need evidence about the benefits of improved soil status and the efficacy of possible actions. Changes in the bulk properties of soil over large areas are difficult to measure within the timescales of policy reviews, so soil monitoring rarely supports timely policy assessment. In addition, there are gaps in our understanding of the impacts of changes in soil properties at landscape scales. There is adequate quantitative evidence about the effects of land use change on soil erosion and soil organic matter (SOM) but rather less for compaction. Quantitative predictions of the effects at above field‐scale on soil properties from altered land management within a given land use are quite limited, but can be described qualitatively. The effects of controls on soil contamination at regional scales are predictable from mass flows. There are accepted narratives about the benefits of reduced erosion and compaction, and enhanced SOM on levels of services and goods, including agricultural productivity and hydrology. However, quantitative models for estimating these benefits require more development. The impacts on greenhouse gas emissions of changes in soil organic carbon levels can be quantified and the impacts of contamination interpreted using threshold levels for protection of food and the environment. Overall, there is an urgent requirement for better quantitative models to predict soil‐based policy outcomes from altered land use and especially land management.

Keynes's attack on the citadel: proportionality, the two-price theory, and monetary circulation

In the Treatise, Keynes claimed that the price levels of consumption and investment goods would not necessarily move in opposite directions. He further argued that the first claim had nothing to do with monetary circulation. If these two claims could be established, they would have constituted a direct attack on Ricardian economics and the economics of Marx, both of which are identified as self-adjustment mechanisms as in Say's law by Keynes. This paper seeks to evaluate these claims through the lenses of sector balance, the two-price theory, and monetary circulation.

An Artificial Neural Network Model for a Wholesale Company's Order-Cycle Management

The purpose of this article is to verify the possibility of using artificial neural networks (ANN) in business management processes, primarily in the area of supply chain management. The author has designed several neural network models featuring different architectures to optimize the level of the company's inventory. The results of the research show that ANN can be used for managing a company's order cycle and lead to reduced levels of goods purchased and storage costs. Optimal neural networks show suitable results for subsequent prediction of the amount of items to be ordered and for achieving reduced inventory purchase and keeping costs down.

Material Flow Analysis as a Decision Support Tool for Waste Management: A Literature Review

SummaryThis article reviews, categorizes, and evaluates the objectives, means, and results of the application of material flow analysis (MFA) in waste management. It identifies those areas where MFA methodologies are most successful in supporting waste management decisions. The focus of this review is on the distinction between MFA on the level of goods and on the level of substances. Based on 83 reviewed studies, potentials, strengths, and weaknesses are investigated for the two levels of MFA when applied for analysis, evaluation, and improvement of waste management systems. The differences are discussed in view of effectiveness, applicability, and data availability. The results show that MFA on the level of goods are instrumental for understanding how waste management systems function, facilitating the connections of stakeholders, authorities, and waste management companies. The substance level is essential to assess qualitative aspects regarding resources and environment. Knowledge about the transformation, transport, and storage of valuable and hazardous substances forms the base for identifying both resource potentials and risks for human health and the environment. The results of this review encourage the application of MFA on both levels of goods and substances for decision making in waste management. Because of the mass balance principle, this combination has proven to be a powerful tool for comprehensively assessing if a chosen system reaches designated waste management goals.

The corruption mark-up: is corruption cost incorporated in the prices of goods and services in emerging and developed countries?

We use panel data models on a dataset covering 32 European countries in order to investigate the effect of corruption on the aggregate price level. Along with modeling the overall price level, we also separately model the price levels of consumer goods and consumer services, controlling for other factors that commonly influence the price level in an economy, such as income, trade openness, fiscal dominance, the intensity of local market competition and real money supply. Our results suggest that, in addition to already established adverse economic outcomes of corruption (such as lower growth, an inefficient public sector, underinvestment and increased cost of doing business), corruption in emerging economies also increases the general price level, thus in turn affecting the overall cost of living. This effect of corruption is twice as strong for consumer services as for consumer goods. Unlike in emerging countries, in developed countries corruption does not seem to affect price level determination.

What Drives Quality of Schools in Africa? Disentangling Social Capital and Ethnic Divisions

Because of limited governmental resources, communities in Africa often rely on collective action to provide basic public goods such as schools. What drives the ability of communities to produce better schools? Two important lines of research shaped our understanding of the ability of communities to engage in collective action. The first line proposes ethnic division as a key determinant, with more ethnically heterogeneous countries having lower economic performances and levels of public goods. Thus, we expect to find better schools where ethnic fractionalization is low. The second line of research focuses on social capital as a major determinant of the ability to engage in collective action. We expect that trust among community members, a widely-used measure of social capital, is an important and positive determinant of school quality. The present work aims to disentangle the relative effects of ethnic fractionalization and social capital on school quality. We use instrumental variable estimations to address reverse causality and other endogeneity issues. We instrument both social capital and ethnic fractionalization by using historical information on the settlement patterns of ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our empirical strategy is implemented by combining four datasets, including Afrobarometer, covering 16 sub-Saharan countries.We find an important and positive effect of trust on the practical aspects of schooling, such as maintaining buildings or providing textbooks. A one percent increase in the level of trust increases the quality of local public goods by 0.18 to 1.05 percent, depending on the measure of school quality under consideration. In sharp contrast, ethnic fractionalization is found to have a very limited effect, if any. Our results suggest that policies designed to enhance social capital are likely to have a positive effect on schools and local public goods in general.

Land Value and Rent Dynamics in an Integrated Walrasian General Equilibrium and Neoclassical Growth Theory

Abstract This paper is concerned with relationship between growth and land value change. It builds a heterogeneous-households growth model with endogenous wealth accumulation and fixed nondepreciating asset (land) in an integrated Walrasian general equilibrium and neoclassical growth theory. The production side consists of one service sector and one industrial sector. We use an alternative utility function proposed by Zhang, which enable us to develop a dynamic growth model with genuine heterogeneity. The wealth and income inequality is due to household heterogeneity in preferences and human capital as well as the households’ initial wealth. This is different from the standard Ramsey-type heterogeneous-households growth models, for instance, by Turnovsky and Garcia-Penalosa (2008), where agents are heterogeneous only in their initial capital endowment, not in preference or/and human capital. We build a model for any number of types of household and provide a computational procedure for simulating model. For illustration we simulate the model for the economy with three types of households. We simulate the motion of the national economy and carry out comparative dynamic analysis. The comparative dynamic analysis provides some important insights. For instance, as the rich group increases its propensity to save, the GDP and land value are increased. In the long term the group accumulates more wealth, consumes more goods and services and accumulates more wealth. But in the long term the other two groups suffer from the rich households’ preference change as their lot sizes, consumption levels of services and goods, and wealth are all reduced.

A generalized impure public good and linear characteristics model of green consumption

This paper provides a general framework for understanding consumer behavior related to goods and services that may be considered environmentally friendly, ethically produced, fairly traded, or some combination thereof. We generalize the impure public good model and derive its comparative static properties. The model accounts for any number of impure public (green) goods and joint production of any number of both private and public characteristics. The generalization provides a bridge between the impure public good model and the well-known linear characteristics model, both of which are special cases of the model developed here. The results show how demand for green goods and characteristics such as environmental quality depends on wealth, exogenously given levels of public goods, and the technologies of joint production. The effects of changes in technology depend critically on whether jointly produced characteristics are complements or substitutes in consumption. Several of the results are rather counterintuitive and differ in meaningful ways from existing models of impure public goods and linear characteristics. The results also illuminate several reasons for greater caution about whether it is reasonable to assume that green goods and services are necessarily beneficial for the provision of public goods.

Study on Route Selection for Hazardous Chemicals Transportation

With the rapid development of the national economy, transportation of hazardous chemicals has aroused widespread concern of different fields including government, industry and academia, due to its huge demand, high frequency of accident and huge losses. The study on optimal route selection is a quite important issue for the safety of hazardous chemicals transportation. In this paper, we firstly analyzed the comprehensive factors influential in road security, such as environment, population density, emergency response time and so on. Start from the index system consists of “comprehensive factors influential in road security”, “safety management level of enterprises” and “transport of hazardous materials”, we defined the risk levels of goods. Meanwhile the weights of influence factor were also obtained by using analytic hierarchy process methods. Then the weighted route length were calculated by normalizing the parameters of each secondary effects. Ultimately, we successfully found out the optimal route by using Dijkstra's algorithm. This work provided a theory basis for the effective and practical use of routing model.

The Effect of Rising Income Inequality on Taxation and Public Expenditures: Evidence from U.S. Municipalities and School Districts, 1970–2000

Abstract The income distribution in many developed countries widened dramatically from 1970 to 2000. Some scholars argue that income inequality contributes to a host of social ills by undermining voters' willingness to support public expenditures. In contrast, we find that growing income inequality is associated with an expansion in government revenues and expenditures on a wide range of services in U.S. municipalities and school districts. Results are robust to a number of model specifications, including instrumental variables that address the endogeneity of the local income distribution. Our results are inconsistent with models predicting that heterogeneous societies provide lower levels of public goods.

State as Chimera: Aid, Parallel Institutions, and State Power

Foreign donors use a variety of mechanisms to effect public goods in aid recipients. The two most common mechanisms, traditional aid and conditionality, are implemented through the domestic institutions of the recipient state. Yet a third mechanism, the “parallel institution,” bypasses domestic institutions to provide public goods within well-defined sectors or territories. Parallel institutions are distinct from other forms of aid. The autonomy and core capabilities of parallel institutions allow them to produce higher levels of public goods, but simultaneously hinder the infrastructural power of the recipient state.

Segregation and Tiebout sorting: The link between place-based investments and neighborhood tipping

Segregation has been a recurring social concern throughout human history. While much progress has been made to our understanding of the mechanisms driving segregation, work to date has ignored the role played by location-specific amenities. Nonetheless, policy remedies for reducing group inequity often involve place-based investments in minority communities. In this paper, we introduce an exogenous location-specific public good into a model of group segregation. We characterize the equilibria of the model and derive the comparative statics of improvements to the local public goods. We show that the dynamics of neighborhood tipping depend on the levels of public goods. We also show that investments in low-public good communities can actually increase segregation.

Public housing units vs. housing vouchers: Accessibility, local public goods, and welfare

We develop a general equilibrium model of residential choice and study the effects of two housing aid policies, public housing units and housing vouchers. Land is differentiated by both residential accessibility and local public goods, and the provision levels of local public goods are determined by property tax revenues and neighborhood compositions. Households differ in their incomes and preferences for local public goods. Housing aid policies are financed by general income taxes. We discuss how the location of public housing units is a fundamental policy variable, in addition to the numbers and sizes of units, and argue that vouchers not only cause less distortion for social welfare compared to public housing, but may also improve overall welfare.

Public Housing Units vs. Housing Vouchers: Accessibility, Local Public Goods, and Welfare

We develop a general equilibrium model of residential choice and study the effects of two housing aid policies, public housing units and housing vouchers. Land is differentiated by both residential accessibility and local public goods, and the provision levels of local public goods are determined by property tax revenues and neighborhood compositions. Households differ in their incomes and preferences for local public goods. Housing aid policies are financed by general income taxes. We discuss how the location of public housing units is a fundamental policy variable, in addition to the numbers and sizes of units, and argue that vouchers not only cause less distortion for social welfare compared to public housing, but may also improve overall welfare.

Relationship Between Gross Doomestic Product and CO2 Emissions in the World Economy – An Emprical Analysis

Economic growth typically refers to increase in the levels of goods and services produced by an economy. The quality of environment determines the welfare function of an economy. Various studies have shown that an increase in GDP in high-income countries has not resulted with a subsequent increase in the levels of happiness and welfare of individuals. But Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) found a robust relationship between increase in GDP and increase in the wellbeing of people in both developed and developing countries. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) is often used to describe the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. It refers to the hypothesis of an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic output per capita and some measures of environmental quality. An increase in per capita GDP is accompanied by an increase in environmental degradation. However, beyond a certain point, an increase in per capita GDP leads to reductions in environmental damage. In this backdrop, an attempt is made to empirically analyse the relationship between gross domestic product and CO2 emissions in the world economy using compound growth rate and regression analysis for the period 1990-2011. The findings of the study show that in 1990, the emissions of CO2 in US was 4.99 billion tonnes . It was the largest emissions compared to other countries. China was the second largest country in CO2 emissions followed by Russia. Till the year 2005, the United States was the top most country in CO2 emissions. In the year 2006, China crossed United States and China was the top most country in emitting CO2. Thailand was the least CO2 emission country in the world. In 2011, the CO2 emission of China was 9.7 2 billion tonnes. It was the highest quantity of CO2 emissions in the world economy. It was on account of highest Gross Domestic Product of China and related increase in fossil fuel consumption. The regression coefficient of Gross Domestic Product was statistically significant at 1 percent level. It had positive relationship with CO2 emissions. It implies that with increase in the Gross Domestic Product , the CO2 emissions will also increase. If the Gross Domestic product increases by $1 million, the CO2 emission would increase by 0.000000769 billion tonnes across countries

Partial Fiscal Decentralization and Public-Sector Heterogeneity: Theory and Evidence from Norway

This paper provides an empirical test of a principal tenet of fiscal federalism: that spending discretion, when granted to localities, leads to public-sector heterogeneity, with public-good levels adjusting to suit local demands. The test is based on a simple model of partial fiscal decentralization, under which earmarking of central transfers for particular uses is eliminated, allowing funds to be spent according to local tastes. The model predicts that partial decentralization generates dispersion in the levels of public services as spending adjusts to local preferences. But the model also yields the more-general prediction that the characteristics of local jurisdictions should play a bigger role in determining the levels of public goods after a decentralization reform than before. Both predictions are confirmed by the paper’s empirical results, which show the effects of the 1986 Norwegian reform.

Urban Structure as Determinant of Short Distance Goods Transport

In this study, data on short distance goods transports is analysed in order to determine if variations in the amounts of goods generated could be explained by geographical and demographical variables. The main purpose is to see if the urbanization and concentration of economic activities has resulted in higher efficiency in the production process, thereby severing the link between increased economic activity and increased transport volumes. The study uses yearly data on freight transport made by truck in 21 Swedish counties between 2000 and 2009, making the number of observations 210. The final model estimated show that after taking geographical and demographical factors into account there is a negative relationship between economic activity and volume of goods transported. This indicates that it is possible to achieve economic growth without necessarily having to accept higher levels of goods transported locally.

ETHICAL FLOURISHING AS AIM OF GLOBAL MEDIA ETHICS

This paper proposes a new and comprehensive goal for global media ethics—the promotion of ethical flourishing across borders. The ideal of ethical flourishing underwrites more specific global principles and provides a target at which responsible global journalism can aim. A major task of global media ethics is to re-conceive journalism ethics around the idea of ethical flourishing. Promoting ethical flourishing is defined as the development of four levels of essential goods that together constitute the idea of the human good: individual goods, social goods, political goods, and ethical goods (or the goods of justice). These goods contribute to a life that has rational, social, political, and ethical dignity. The paper uses work in development theory and Sen's “capacity” theory to identify basic capacities that cross borders and should be protected and promoted by global media.

The Relational Dimension of Identity—Theoretical and Empirical Exploration

Identity has been recently introduced as a “legitimate” subject matter in economics. Whereas the social nature of identity is consensually acknowledged, its relational and moral dimensions are overlooked. We begin by clarifying the role of interpersonal relations in identity formation. Following Honneth (1995) we argue that the development of a positive identity, defined as a person's relation-to-self, depends on the processes of mutual recognition in which a person takes part throughout her/his life. We then frame Honneth's recognition processes in terms of the access to relational and moral goods. An empirical study is presented that illustrates the association between relational and moral goods and “relation-to-self.” Based on European Social Survey (ESS) data, we show that high levels of relational goods (e.g. experiencing intense and positive social relations) and moral goods (e.g. perceiving to be treated with justice and respect) are associated with a positive relation-to-self.

Exploring the sources and benefits of cooperation

PurposeAttempts by mainstream economics to account for cooperative behavior expand the utility‐maximizing framework without questioning the individualistic set‐up on which it is grounded. This paper aims to develop a theory of cooperation that departs from the individualistic framework. “Communal principles” must be introduced in the analysis to account for cooperation and the relational, as opposed to atomistic, nature of individuals must be acknowledged.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical study, based on data from the European Working Conditions and European Social Surveys, aims at illustrating the social benefits of cooperation. A categorical components analysis was carried out to build indicators for the notions of relational and moral goods and civic participation. Regression models were subsequently estimated to study the association between relational/moral goods at work and civic participation.FindingsThe empirical results show that high levels of relational and moral goods at work are associated with high levels of civic participation. However, substantial differences are observed between countries. Nordic countries exhibit high levels of both indicators while some Eastern and Southern European countries perform much more poorly. The study illustrates interaction between certain features of working life and civic behavior.Originality/valueThe theoretical contribution of the paper lies in the proposal of a new account of the sources of cooperative behavior at work. It argues that cooperation within work organizations is supported by three common goods – a common goal, relational goods and moral goods. The “goodness” of these goods does not derive simply from their generating utility but from their being commonly shared.