The Impact of Land-Use Change on Ecosystem Services,Biodiversity and Returns to Landowners: A Case Study in the State of Minnesota

Land-use change has a significant impact on the world’s ecosystems. Changes in the extent and composition of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems have large impacts on the provision of ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation and returns to landowners. While the change in private returns to landowners due to land-use change can often be measured, changes in the supply and value of ecosystem services and the provision of biodiversity conservation have been harder to quantify. In this paper we use a spatially explicit integrated modeling tool (InVEST) to quantify the changes in ecosystem services, habitat for biodiversity, and returns to landowners from land-use change in Minnesota from 1992 to 2001. We evaluate the impact of actual land-use change and a suite of alternative land-use change scenarios. We find a lack of concordance in the ranking of baseline and alternative land-use scenarios in terms of generation of private returns to landowners and net social benefits (private returns plus ecosystem service value). Returns to landowners are highest in a scenario with large-scale agricultural expansion. This scenario, however, generated the lowest net social benefits across all scenarios considered because of large losses in stored carbon and negative impacts on water quality. Further, this scenario resulted in the largest decline in habitat quality for general terrestrial biodiversity and forest songbirds. Our results illustrate the importance of taking ecosystem services into account in land-use and land-management decision-making and linking such decisions to incentives that accurately reflect social returns.     

Citizen Participation,the -Knowledge Problem- and Urban Land Use Planning: An Austrian Perspective on Institutional Choice

At the forefront of the argument for government-directed land use planning is the notion that -citizen participation- in urban land use decisions can avoid the problems associated with bureaucratic governance and tackle widespread instances of -market failure-. Using illustrations from the British land use planning system this paper argues that participatory planning models are insufficiently attuned to the problems of social co-ordination generated by the absence of market prices and of the importance of private property rights in facilitating -experiments in urban living-.     

Adapting Rubbish Theory for heritage tourism

Michael Thompson's Rubbish Theory explains how the values of objects change and that to understand how we value objects we need to understand ‘rubbish’, that is, objects which hold no value. He explained that most objects lose value after they are created and eventually become rubbish. However, there are some objects that maintain their value, which he calls ‘durables’. His theory explains how some objects move from rubbish to having durable value. When this theory is adapted to illustrate the multiple values attributed to objects at heritage sites, it is possible to explain how heritage tourism can result in conflict at a destination and how durable objects can lose their value, which is not possible according to Thompson.     

Environmental Markets vs. Environmental Deliberation: A Hayekian Critique of Green Political Economy

The article argues that in order to grasp fully Brazilian and Korean post-WWII developmental and growth experiences, it is first necessary to account for global-economy dynamics and the transformations in the International Division of Labour. These, together with local factors that particularly affect the objective conditions for the valorisation of capital in different productive sectors, explain the specific characteristics of capitalism in both countries. The article claims that capital has accumulated in Brazil and Korea under two different specific forms. In Brazil, capital has accumulated while producing on an internationally small-scale for domestic markets and compensating the resultant high production costs through the appropriation of a portion of the abundant ground-rent. While before the mid-1960s capital accumulated in Korea under that same specific form (though ground-rent was complemented with a portion of small agrarian capital profits and foreign aid), it afterwards began to do so through the production of specific industrial goods for world markets using the relatively cheap and disciplined labour-force available in the country. World-scale technological changes associated with computerisation and electronics-based automation have changed Korea's ‘competitive advantages’ as they resulted in sharp advances in the codification of technical knowledge and, thus, in the reduction of the tacit know-how and skills necessary to perform several labour processes. Though resulting in strong growth, these processes have created new contradictions and challenges for Korea which it may be incapable of overcoming.     

Managing impressions using distorted graphs of income and earnings per share: The role of memory

This study investigates the role that memory plays in interpreting and using distorted graphs that mislead the user of the financial information. It draws upon the literatures concerning memory, impression management and effective graph design. In order to examine whether reliance on memory for distorted graphs leads to different impressions of the data, we conduct an experiment in which we manipulate the type of graph distortion and whether memory of the graph is required by the decision. We present evidence that individuals receiving misleading graphs are more likely to misinterpret underlying data trends and that memory moderates the effect depending upon the type of distortion used to mislead the individual. The resulting data interpretation errors lead to more positive judgments and investment decisions than would otherwise be warranted. Thus our findings suggest that graph distortions mislead users into incorrect conclusions about the underlying data and that these interpretation errors persist in memory and affect judgments and investment decisions. We extend the prior literature, which has not considered the direct effects of graph interpretation or the effects of memory, and provide a baseline for investigating the effects of memory on impression management.     

A cost-effectiveness analysis of celecoxib compared with diclofenac in the treatment of pain in osteoarthritis (OA) within the Swedish health system using an adaptation of the NICE OA model

Objectives:

Celecoxib for the treatment of pain resulting from osteoarthritis (OA) was reviewed by the Tandvårds- och läkemedelsförmånsverket–Dental and Pharmaceutical Benefits Board (TLV) in Sweden in late 2010. This study aimed to evaluate the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of celecoxib plus a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) compared to diclofenac plus a PPI in a Swedish setting.

Methods:

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK developed a health economic model as part of their 2008 assessment of treatments for OA. In this analysis, the model was reconstructed and adapted to a Swedish perspective. Drug costs were updated using the TLV database. Adverse event costs were calculated using the regional price list of Southern Sweden and the standard treatment guidelines from the county council of Stockholm. Costs for treating cardiovascular (CV) events were taken from the Swedish DRG codes and the literature.

Results:

Over a patient’s lifetime treatment with celecoxib plus a PPI was associated with a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gain of 0.006 per patient when compared to diclofenac plus a PPI. There was an increase in discounted costs of 529kr per patient, which resulted in an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of 82,313kr ($12,141). Sensitivity analysis showed that treatment was more cost effective in patients with an increased risk of bleeding or gastrointestinal (GI) complications.

Conclusions:

The results suggest that celecoxib plus a PPI is a cost effective treatment for OA when compared to diclofenac plus a PPI. Treatment is shown to be more cost effective in Sweden for patients with a high risk of bleeding or GI complications. It was in this population that the TLV gave a positive recommendation. There are known limitations on efficacy in the original NICE model.     

Jobs-housing balance in an era of population decentralization: An analytical framework and a case study

Despite the well-established theoretical understanding on the benefits of compact cities to the attainment of sustainable transport goals, there has been a worldwide trend of population decentralization in cities. In this paper, an analytical framework, which can be applied to other cities to quantify the potential commuting travel savings and environmental benefits of different job policies in cities having different rates and patterns of population decentralization, is presented. A case study of Hong Kong in the 1992-2002 decade is used to illustrate the analytical framework. The findings suggest that a city’s population patterns did have significant implications on the commuting travel savings from alternative job relocation policies. With a dispersed population pattern, the expected environmental benefits from a job decentralization policy can be very substantial.     

南卡人圆"美国梦"——亚伦·格雷斯潘的奋斗传奇

在大学的学生经常听到：当实习生是你毕业后找工作最好的敲门砖。对于亚伦．格雷斯潘(Allen Gillespie),实习生给他的不仅是开始,也是一个起飞的发射台。他的实习生机会对他及对他的雇主是双赢的。亚伦是住在南卡州的Ander- son市,离乔治亚州的亚特兰大市东北2小时车程。他就读于弗吉尼亚州的华盛顿李大学,一心想进