Socioeconomic predictors of forest use values in the Peruvian Amazon: A potential tool for biodiversity conservation

Conservation is a crisis discipline requiring rapid action with limited funds. This study examines the potential of socioeconomic variables to predict forest use values. If natural resource use can be predicted from socioeconomic data, conservation planners could rapidly identify and focus conservation programs on the sectors of local populations that most intensively utilize local flora and fauna. Families in three communities in the northern Peruvian Amazon were surveyed over a 6-month period. Data were collected on use of flora and fauna from six locally determined use categories (food, medicine and poisons, wood, weavings, adornments, and “other”) in forest types of three age classes (fallow fields—very young forests, young secondary forests, and old secondary forests). Forest use values were the dependant variables calculated in $/ha/year. Socioeconomic variables included: age, education, family size, residence time, land worked, land owned, number of fishing nets, chickens, pigs, cows, and/or mules owned (all proxies for productive assets), and level of ecological knowledge (ability of informants to correctly identify forest species and answer basic questions about their biology). Ordinary least square multiple regressions were run independently for each forest type. Regressions were also run separately for the two most valuable use categories, food and wood. Low R² adjusted values (all < 0.3) reflect the difficulty in predicting human behavior due to confounding variables and complex interactions. Residence time and a household's community of residence were the most significant predictors of forest use values. Households in Vista Alegre, the community with the highest density of people and smallest landholdings per household, extracted the highest value of forest products per hectare. The longer a family stayed in any community the higher the value of forest goods they extracted. If families that lived in an area longest are the most intensive extractors of forest products, they should be a major focus for conservation programming. In addition, the higher value of products extracted from forests by some families may make them more open to strategies seeking to protect long-term viability of the resources they utilize. The importance of residence time also indicates that planners need to account for changes in the resource use patterns of stakeholders over time.     

根深蒂固的自由主义和压迫性的社群关系——道德教育主体面临的一个两难困境

现代西方道德政治理论中,自由主义主体这个概念作为道德经验、阐释、批评的中心一直非常繁荣。然而,本文认为某种道德上意义重大的关系——那种通过分等级的权力结构由互相联系的社会群体构成的关系——构成的一种不同的主体意识需要更多的理论和实践上的注意。和自由主义的四种核心特征相对应,本文从个体是怎样成为一些特殊的社会群体的成员来论述一种主体意识视角。文章认为,除非道德教育能认识到这种主体意识,否则道德教育本身就冒着为压迫形式(如种族歧视)作贡献而不是同它搏斗的风险。     

On the individual moving average inequality

Summary A very simple deduction of a recently treated inequality is presented and some variations on this proof, drawing together various properties, are discussed. Closure of moving average processes undermultiplication is also mentioned.     

Property taxes and the timing of urban land development

This paper develops an optimal timing model which extends our understanding of the effects which property taxes have on the timing of land development. Comparative static effects of changes in property tax rates are investigated and policy rules are developed for the use of differential pre- and post-development tax rates to affect the timing of development. Changes in the property tax rate are found to be non-neutral with respect to the timing of development in most cases, accelerating or delaying development depending upon specific market conditions.     

（某些）品德教育对自由主义民主的危害

本文以在加拿大多伦多市一大郊区开发的一个研究项目为案例,批评了北美“品德教育”的某些方面是怎样对维持一个健康的自由主义民主社会造成危害的。作为这种批评之基础的假设认为,把自由主义的动机作为一种政治理论确定下来,并且认为这种动机就表现在民主的原则和实践中,是为了解决生活在同一社会中的人们之间的(几种)冲突,而且要做到这一点,只要把公民的角色分化出来,按照这个目的进行建构即可。以此为抓手,本文把关注的焦点集中在这种观点的危险性上,认为这种观点无法区分好人和好公民这两个概念,尤其是在文化多元主义已经深入人心的背景中。     

Academic Economic Opinion in East Asia

Surveys of economists' opinions have been reported from around the world over the past two decades, but never (as far as we are aware) from a non-Western country. This article presents the results of our survey of academic economists drawn from ten East Asian nations. Respondents gave their views on a number of economic propositions ranging across issues of deregulation, government business enterprises, micro-economic and labour market reform, income distribution, and attitudes to the market. Finally, the article reports the results of multidimensional scaling techniques which were used to compare the attitudes of East Asian academic economists toward the market with those of their international colleagues. Overall, we found that while our colleagues in Asia make some allowances for circumstances unique to fast-growing developing economies, their predilection toward market solutions to economic problems reflects that of their (predominantly) Western training. Economists in the ‘Tiger’ nations (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea) more closely reflect the views of colleagues in the market-friendly West (especially North America, Australia and Germany) than do economists in the newly emerging (‘non-Tiger’) nations such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.     

Market clearing and derivative pricing

Summary. We develop a method of assigning unique prices to derivative securities, including options, in the continuous-time finance model developed in Raimondo (2001). In contrast with the martingale method of valuing options, which cannot distinguish among infinitely many possible option pricing processes for a given underlying securities price process when markets are dynamically incomplete, our option prices are uniquely determined in equilibrium in closed form as a function of the underlying economic data.Received: 14 April 2003, Revised: 7 January 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: G13, D52.This paper is dedicated to Birgit Grodal, whose strength and character we greatly admire. We are very grateful to Darrell Duffie, Steve Evans, Botond Koszegi, Roger Purves, Jacob Sagi, Chris Shannon, Bill Zame and an anonymous refereee for very helpful discussions and comments. The work of both authors was supported by Grant SES-9710424, and Andersons work was supported by Grant SES-0214164, from the National Science Foundation.     

On the existence of rational expectations equilibrium

We prove a theorem on the existence of rational expectations general economic equilibrium when agents condition on prices as well as on private information, and maximize the expectation of a state-dependent utility function. The key to the result is a new idealization of what it means for a set of empirical distributions to support agents' expectations. This idealization depends on the notion that agents compare their expectations with continuous versions of the random empirical distributions that are generated by the workings of the economy. The existence theorem covers all strictly concave utility functions, arbitrary distributions of the state variable, and situations in which the dimension of the state variable is large relative to the number of commodities.     

OPPORTUNISTIC MATCHING IN THE HOUSING MARKET*

We construct a model of the housing market in which agents differ in their flow values while searching. Agents enter the market relaxed (with high flow values) but move to a desperate state (low flow values) at a Poisson rate if they have not already transacted. We characterize the equilibrium steady‐state matching pattern and the joint distribution of price and time to sale (for sellers). The expected price conditional on time to sale falls with time spent on the market, whereas the conditional variance of price first rises and then falls with time on the market.