The environmental,social and economic effects of recent technological changes in sugarcane on the State of São Paulo,Brazil

From 2007 to 2017, the Agro‐Environmental Protocol of the Sugar and Energy Sector was in force, an agreement between sugarcane mill owners and the State Government of São Paulo, Brazil, proposing to eliminate sugarcane burning as a method to facilitate the harvest. Simultaneously, the sugarcane harvest was becoming widely mechanized while, under the interests of capital accumulation, the mills were entering the information and communication technology era and providing the agricultural processes with more precise and immediate management and technological controls, similar to those implemented in the mills' administrative and industrial operations in the 1990s. Short‐term factors, including environmental factors, favoured sugarcane technological changes. As a result, there was a mass layoff of rural workers and an increasing number of people/workers in agricultural mechanization, transportation and maintenance of machinery and administrative as well. The whole process highlighted the differences between mills, resulting in small and medium sugarcane farmers and mills to become the most impacted, in operational and financial terms, by the accelerating mechanization of the sugarcane industry as a whole.     

Impact of airport green atmospherics on mental health value,image, and loyalty among visitors and workers

Nature‐based solutions (NBS) are becoming increasingly crucial as NBS brings diverse health‐related benefits to travelers and workers in the tourism business sector. This research explored the influence of green atmospherics as NBS on airport occupants' mental health value, image, and loyalty generation processes. A quantitative approach with a field survey method was employed. A structural equation modeling and metric invariance test were used as data analysis technique. Our empirical result revealed that green atmospherics as NBS significantly improve the occupants' mental health value and image of the airport, and these variables contribute to their loyalty enhancement for the airport. The effect of green spaces and natural surroundings on loyalty was maximized through mental health value and image. In addition, the linkages from natural surroundings to mental health value and image were stronger in the visitor group whereas the mental health value—loyalty relation was stronger in the worker group.     

Influence of brand equity on the behavioral attitudes of customers: Spanish Tourist Paradores

Quality & Quantity - The objective of this research is to contrast an explanatory model of how brand equity influences the customer’s behaviour and behavioural intentions. It will take...     

Of warnings and waiting: an examination of the path of information for two communities hit by Typhoon Haiyan

Abstract

Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines in 2013, causing billions in damage, and taking thousands of lives. Media and researchers claimed that people did not have enough information about the storm, or did not understand the information given to them, and therefore did not evacuate. This research departs from the assumption of a knowledge deficit: it asks how people understood warnings and how information flowed from the government. This research focuses on Guiuan, a municipality that sustained heavy damage and loss of life, and the entry point of many typhoons in the Philippines. Guided by Stuart Hall’s Encoding-Decoding Theory, the researcher carried out focus group discussions with citizens and interviews with local government officials from one coastal and one inland village. Through systematic qualitative analysis of interviews and discussions, the researcher found that participants from different locations in the same municipality understood warning information differently, based on unique epistemological frames. While local government framed people as deficient in knowledge, the citizens actually called upon their previous experiences with storms in order to make evacuation decisions. However, they could not project worse scenarios from previous experience and needed a phenomenon to match an experience in real time before making an evacuation decision. These findings imply that disaster imagination, disaster memory, and disaster knowledge are all distinct concepts, and future research should examine how specific contexts frame risk. Early warning systems for storms must also take into account unique epistemological frames as a means to localize communication and engage communities in the decision-making process.     

International migration and universal healthcare access: evidence from Mexico’s ‘Seguro Popular’

Although ‘Seguro Popular’ (SP), a healthcare programme for the uninsured, has been in place in Mexico for more than a decade, its consequences for international migration both to and from the country have received little scholarly attention. Using the spatial variation in the programme’s coverage generated through the rollout over time, this paper examines the effects of SP on the number of emigrants and return migrants per household. Based on data from Mexico’s National Survey on Demographic Dynamics for 1997–2014, the analysis confirms that being affiliated to SP does not reduce the number of emigrants per household, but such affiliation is, however, positively related to the number of returnees per household. These results are valid across different subsamples of the population and time periods and are robust to omitted variable bias. Our findings have important implications for understanding the effects of social protection policies on international migration patterns.     

Sudden stops of international fund flows: Occurrence and magnitude

Using data of 65 economies from January 2000 (2008) to June 2015, we examine the covariates of sudden stops in fund equity and bond flows. Our results suggest that global, contagion and domestic factors are all related to the likelihood of sudden stops. For sudden stops in equity flows, global factors play a more important role in high‐income economies. For sudden stops in bond flows, global variables are the most important covariates in emerging economies, whereas domestic variables play a more important role in high‐income economies. We also find that global and contagion factors are correlated to the magnitude of sudden stops.     

Revisiting the trans-situationality of values in Schwartz’s Portrait Values Questionnaire

Quality & Quantity - Schwartz in his famous theory of basic values follows Parsons and Rokeach in arguing that human values are trans-situational or context free. For any individual, the same...     

Optimizing the Life-Cycle Path of Pension Premium Payments and the Pension Ambition in the Netherlands

De Economist - We determine the optimal life-cycle path of pension premiums during the working ages and pension benefits during retirement, assuming that households can choose these freely. We...     

The luck of being of the right gender and color: a detailed discussion about the wage gaps in the Brazilian manufacturing industry

Quality & Quantity - This work analyzed the wage discrimination in the Brazilian manufacturing industry. By recurring to the most updated database, several gaps were analyzed between white and...