Environmental Impact Evaluation,Land Use Planning,and the Housing Consumer*

A number of states are following the federal government's lead and requiring environmental impact reviews of new development proposals. This paper examines ambitious EIR programs in Florida and California with the aim of assessing the costs and benefits of their programs, and, by extension, of state-mandated EIR programs in general. The focus is on new housing production. The findings are that EIR shows some promise of enabling communities to better protect themselves from adverse side effects of new development. At the same time, EIR adds what appears to be a modest increment to the overall costs of new housing. However, because EIR has expanded local government planning options, one of the side effects of EIR is likely to be the enhanced ability of localities to exclude moderate income families from new housing.     

Achieving the first best in small economies

It is shown in the context of a simple example with a small two-class population, that the first best utilitarian allocation can sometimes be achieved as a dominant strategy equilibrium, even though leisure is a normal good. This occurs because person's optimal lump-sum tax depends both on his own announced ability and the distribution of announced abilities. It is also demonstrated that, in a wider class of cases, the first best can be achieved as a Bayes-Nash equilibrium.     

Nutritional functional classification study of Panama

Despite significant progress, wide-spread malnutrition persists in Panama. This article describes a study which found that over half the malnutrition in the country is clustered in functional groups economically connected to the agricultural sector and which indicates that food availability is a serious problem for 25% of the population. Food intake deficits were equally prevalent among the urban and rural populations. Dietary composition was not seen as the principal problem; rather malnutrition problems are linked to low wages and poor access to public services. A nutrition policy for Panama must be centred first on employment and income generation, and then on extending and maintaining public health and nutrition services, particularly for the extremely poor in the central provinces. Food policy per se would not seem a priority area for public intervention.     

中国金融体系的比较：现在和未来

健全的金融体系应该具有以下理想的特性：市场允许风险分担、为公司控制提供活跃的市场、完全的透明度使投资有效配置。中国金融体系采用的是一种“混合策略”。一方面,为了追赶领先的工业国家,银行部门将大量资金投放到国有企业,投放到关键性的工业,支持这些工业的发展。另一方面,依靠金融市场大力发展并力求获得在某些特定领域的新兴产业。对中国来说,美国式的金融制度不一定最优,其他很多金融体制模式都可借鉴和选择。因此,发展现有的金融体系,走不同的改革与发展之路也许是最佳的。     

The Social,Spatial, and Economic Roots of Urban Inequality in Africa: Contextualizing Jane Jacobs and Henry George

Unravelling the social and economic roots of urban inequality in Africa has remained a thorny issue in African political economy. Stripped to its bare essentials, the critical questions are who causes urban inequality, what causes it, and how it is caused? While all different, the questions are interrelated. Answering the “who causes inequality” question requires a related analysis of what and why, and that is connected to the how question. Indeed, the how question has two parts—how inequality is caused and how it can be addressed. Both are connected to the why question and to its resolution. Unfortunately, while studies about urban inequality abound, they tend to hive off one aspect or another of the tripartite questions on inequality and, even worse, they study the three questions separately. This article tries to overcome the existing atomistic and piecemeal approach to the study of urban inequality in Africa by contextualizing the work of Jane Jacobs and Henry George, who took a holistic view of urban inequality. It argues that Jacobsianism and Georgism have much to offer in terms of understanding urban inequality in Africa, but neither analysis goes far enough to be able to serve as a solid foundation for policy. Ultimately, it is in their approach to urban analysis—the emphasis on context, on actual urban problems, inductivism, and some of their mechanisms for change such as George's land tax and cautious abstraction, in that order, along with their combined vision—which I call “diversity in equality”—that can add to the insights of postcolonialism in understanding and transforming urban inequality in Africa.     

A metric for assessing the “goodness” of income distributions and the effect of price changes

Social welfare evaluation depends in part on value judgments as to income distribution. This paper proposes a metric for assessing the “goodness” of particular income distributions. That metric is then used to examine the effect of price changes on the “goodness” of a given distribution. Consider an increase in the price of a commodity that is disproportionately consumed by households with incomes that are high relative to the preferred income distribution. One naturally supposes that such a price increase will make the given income distribution appear less bad. Surprisingly, this is not invariably the case.