Western Households’ Water Knowledge,Preferences, and Willingness to Pay

Water conflicts are intensifying as the population grows in the American West. Stakeholders seek a better understanding of households’ water knowledge, preferences, and willingness to pay (WTP) as they contemplate various water allocation initiatives. An Internet survey provides insight into western households’ perceptions and preferences regarding water use and management, their familiarity with water terminology, and their WTP a fee in support of eight potential water initiatives regarding water acquisition, conservation, and reallocation. Further analysis identifies factors that influence the decision. Just over half of all respondents express a WTP the fee, with an estimated median WTP among survey respondents of $15.65 per summer month. Respondents with higher self-reported water knowledge are more likely to support the fee. The probability of supporting the fee is also influenced by respondents’ demographic characteristics and attitudes toward water scarcity and management. Les conflits liés à l’eau s’intensifient à mesure que la population s’accroît dans l’Ouest américain. Les parties prenantes cherchent à découvrir les connaissances sur l’eau, les préférences et le consentement à payer des ménages étant donné qu’elles envisagent divers schémas d’allocation de l’eau. Un sondage en ligne a donné un aperçu des perceptions et des préférences des ménages de l’Ouest américain concernant l’utilisation et la gestion de l’eau, de leur degré de connaissance de la terminologie de l’eau et de leur consentement à payer une taxe pour appuyer huit projets éventuels d’acquisition, de conservation et de réallocation de l’eau. Une analyse plus détaillée a déterminé les facteurs qui influençaient les décisions. Un peu plus de la moitié des répondants ont indiquéêtre prêts à payer une taxe. Chez les répondants, le consentement à payer médian s’élevait à 15,65 $ par mois durant la saison estivale. Les répondants qui ont indiqué avoir de bonnes connaissances sur l’eau sont plus susceptibles d’appuyer l’imposition d’une taxe. Les caractéristiques démographiques et les attitudes des répondants envers la rareté et la gestion de l’eau influencent la probabilité d’appuyer l’imposition d’une taxe.     

The Tyranny of Concepts: CUDIE (Cumulated, Depreciated, Investment Effort) Is Not Capital

The cost of public investment is not the increment to the value ofpublic capital. Unlike with private investors, there is no plausiblebehavioral model in which every dollar that the public sectorspends as ``investment' creates economically valuable ``capital.'While this simple analytic point is obvious, it has so far beenuniformly ignored in the empirical literature on economic growth,which uses—at best—cumulated, depreciated, investmenteffort (CUDIE) as a proxy for capital stocks. However, particularlyfor developing countries the difference between investment costand capital value is of first-order empirical importance: governmentinvestment is half of more of total investment, and calculationspresented here suggest that in many countries government investmentspending has created little useful capital. This has implicationsin three broad areas. First, none of the existing empirical estimatesof the impact of public spending has identified the productivityof public capital. Even where public capital has a potentiallylarge contribution to production, public-investment spendingmay have had a low impact. Second, it implies that all estimatesof total factor productivity in developing countries are deeplysuspect as there is no way to empirically distinguish betweenlow growth because of investments that create no factors andlow growth due to slow productivity growth. Third, multivariateregressions to date have not adequately controlled for capitalstock growth, which leads to erroneous interpretations of regressioncoefficients.     

A Multicultural Examination of Business Ethics Perceptions

This study provides an evaluation of ethical business perception of busIness students from three countries: Australia, Taiwan and the United States. Although statistically significant differences do exist there is significant agreement with the way students perceive ethical/unethical practices in business. The findings of this paper indicate a universality of business ethical perceptions.     

Indicator targeting in a political economy: Leakier can be better

In LDCs, policymakers sometimes cannot observe income among the poor. One oft-proposed approach to redistribution is indicator targeting: targeting transfers on corrrelations between income and “indicators” like geography, gender, or occupation. We build a simple model in which maximizing poverty reduction from a fixed budget requires indicator targeting. Because insurance motives drive political support for redistribution, the budget depends on the degree of targeting. When middle income agents receive targeted transfers sufficiently rarely, introducing targeting reduces poor agents’ welfare. The converse holds when middle income agents receive targeted transfers sufficiently rarely, i.e. if the redis-tributive bucket is sufficiently leaky.     

Growth Accelerations

Unlike most cross country growth analyses, we focus on turning points in growth performance. We look for instances of rapid acceleration in economic growth that are sustained for at least 8 years and identify more than 80 such episodes since the 1950s. Growth accelerations tend to be correlated with increases in investment and trade, and with real exchange rate depreciations. Political-regime changes are statistically significant predictors of growth accelerations. External shocks tend to produce growth accelerations that eventually fizzle out, while economic reform is a statistically significant predictor of growth accelerations that are sustained. However, growth accelerations tend to be highly unpredictable: the vast majority of growth accelerations are unrelated to standard determinants and most instances of economic reform do not produce growth accelerations.     

Where Has All the Education Gone?

Cross-national data show no association between increases inhuman capital attributable to the rising educational attainmentof the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker.This implies that the association of educational capital growthwith conventional measures of total factor production is large,strongly statistically significant, and negative. These are"on average" results, derived from imposing a constant coefficient.However, the development impact of education varied widely acrosscountries and has fallen short of expectations for three possiblereasons. First, the institutional/governance environment couldhave been sufficiently perverse that the accumulation of educationalcapital lowered economic growth. Second, marginal returns toeducation could have fallen rapidly as the supply of educatedlabor expanded while demand remained stagnant. Third, educationalquality could have been so low that years of schooling createdno human capital. The extent and mix of these three phenomenavary from country to country in explaining the actual economicimpact of education, or the lack thereof.     

Civil Liberties, Democracy, and the Performance of Government Projects

This article uses a cross-national data set on the performanceof government investment projects financed by the World Bankto examine the link between government efficacy and governance.It demonstrates a strong empirical link between civil libertiesand the performance of government of projects. Even after controllingfor other determinants of performance, countries with the strongestcivil liberties have projects with an economic rate of return8–22 percentage points higher than countries with theweakest civil liberties. The strong effect of civil libertiesholds true even when controlling for the level of democracy. The interrelationship among civil liberties, civil strife, andproject performance suggests that the possible mechanism ofcausation is from more civil liberties to increased citizenvoice to better projects. This result adds to the evidence forthe view that increasing citizen voice and public accountability—throughboth participation and better governance—can lead to greaterefficacy in government action.     

The Effect of Regional Growth Characteristics on Regional Housing Prices

As contrasted with strictly national housing reports, this article highlights the regional variations in population growth patterns and recently built owner-occupied housing as a means of determining single-family housing price components (i.e., developed lot values, homebuilding costs, and builder's profit and overhead) by region. The assertion that escalating lot costs and increases in new housing costs will limit the demand for single-family housing is challenged on a national basis and treated individually for the West, Northeast, South, and North Central Regions of the country.