Obligations to future generations and acceptable risks of human extinction

This paper addresses the question, ‘what is the acceptable risk of human extinction?’ Three qualitative obligations to future generations - The Fairness Criterion, The Unfinished Business Criterion, and the Maintaining Options Criterion - are used to produce quantitative estimates of the acceptable risk. The resulting acceptable risks are all at or below 10⁻²⁰, a very stringent standard.     

Surviving progress: managing the collective risks of civilization

As optimism is becoming ever more apparent, progress carries with it both promise and pitfalls. Though it is quite natural for humans to take an optimistic view of life, this optimism must at the same time be tempered with realism. We cannot therefore let a focus on average, or expected, outcomes cause us to ignore possible high-stakes (existential) risks associated with what is becoming an increasingly complex world. In this paper, we argue that a more complete view is necessary for a proper assessment of not only the technical aspects of high-stakes risk management, but also the social, political, and economic framework within which it is carried out. Unfortunately, attention to such crucial details is not often the case.     

World problems and human potential: A data interlinkage and display process

“World problems” have been the subject of intense debate for some time. Concern and action have tended to focus on “important” problems as determined by their visible effects and consequent political significance, so that it is rare for more than ten problems to be named in the same context. The author argues for the representation of problems, and the organised resources brought to bear on them, by interlinked networks, thus permitting computer-assisted, non-quantitative analysis and display of such structures to aid detection and comprehension of their strengths and weaknesses of policy-making significance.     

Negotiating ecology: Marine bioregions and the destruction of the Southern California Bight

Bioregional studies tend to focus on landscapes and associated cultural and biological diversity. This essay provides a general overview of the ecology of the Southern California Bight (SCB), which is the coastal marine bioregion of southern California. The bioregion is considered one of the most threatened ‘hot spots’ for biodiversity in the world. The SCB includes the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, the Channel Islands National Park, and a designated ‘biosphere reserve’ of the United Nations Man and the Biosphere Program. The essay describes the destruction of southern California's coastal watersheds and wetlands, and provides a summary of the significant decline in ecological productivity of the marine bioregion. Despite the decline in general marine ecosystem integrity, there has been no large-scale planning effort that focuses on the entire coastal marine bioregion. With this in mind, the essay provides an overview of recent policy initiatives that call for the establishment of Marine Protected Areas or MPAs to protect marine ecosystems. Without a new institutional approach to the entire bioregion the future of the coastal marine ecosystems of the system is rather dim. With this in mind, the author recommends a number of institutional changes that support large-scale bioregional planning.     

人民币汇率研究的方法论基础——理想世界与现实世界的分合

近十多年来,人民币汇率研究持续高涨,积累起大量文献.梳理这些文献,揭示过往研究中普遍存在的方法谬误,对评价现有研究成果的价值和促进今后研究的进步具有重要意义.本文论述了理想世界与现实世界、科学概念与日常概念的关系.在详尽论证他们之间本质区别的基础上揭示了过往研究中混淆理想世界与现实世界、科学概念与日常概念而引起的方法谬误.在批判如上方法魔障之后,本文归纳了学术界处理理论模型与现实世界之间关系的两类主流观点,并指出其各自的不足之处.坚实的方法论基础是人民币汇率研究有效进行的必备前提.     

The World of Cross-Listings and Cross-Listings of the World: Challenging Conventional Wisdom*

There has long prevailed a conventional wisdom rationalizingwhy firms pursue overseas listings. It argues that firms seeksuch opportunities to benefit from a lower cost of capital thatarises because their shares become more accessible to globalinvestors. Much recent evidence challenges this conventionalwisdom. In fact, several new research initiatives have beenproposed that factor into the overseas listing decision manymore complex risks that globalization can create at the firmlevel, such as agency conflicts, transparency and disclosureconcerns, and other corporate governance problems. The goalof this article is to survey, synthesize and critically reviewthis new literature and to identify yet unresolved questionsto answer.     

Stepping into futures: Exploring the potential of interactive media for participatory scenarios on social-ecological systems

In this paper, we present a strategy for the development of interactive media scenarios to help communicate uncertainties and complexities in coupled human and natural systems. Insights arising from Complex Adaptive Systems theory advocate the need for more adaptive perspectives on natural resources management. For the collaborative exploration of future complexities and uncertainties, participatory scenario development has proven to be a powerful approach. A range of communication strategies with benefits for conveying complexity, however, has not yet been adopted by scenario developers. We present a framework of criteria with which we structurally analyze the benefits of interactive media communication. First, we consider requirements of feasibility, flexibility and stakeholder contributions. Then, we synthesize criteria for the communication of Complex Adaptive Systems. Finally, we set criteria for communicatory clarity and engagement. Using this framework, we review several science communication fields, including landscape visualization, serious gaming and visual analytics. We then develop a strategy for interactive media communication in participatory scenario development, including two work-in-progress examples. This strategy employs mixed media, micro-games and accessible stakeholder contributions in a geo-web context, and is suitable for participatory work in live settings as well as on-line, from a local to a global scale.     

Bounding the future: The use of scenarios in assessing climate change impacts

This paper investigates the contribution of socio-economic scenarios to improve decisions and policies in climate assessments. We specifically looked at adaptation projects in the Dutch Climate changes Spatial Planning programme. Based on the four decision failure criteria neglect of internal information, bounded rationality, insufficient expansion of existing mental models and stickiness and lack of friction of information and knowledge, it was concluded that in these projects, socio-economic scenarios appear to generate useful data, but that their full potential to reduce decision failure is not likely to be exploited. Therefore adaptation options suggested by these studies may not be ‘future-proof’: they may be appropriate in some future societies, but fail in others. We believe similar results would be obtained in other contexts. Possible decision failures are caused by neglecting socio-economic developments, limiting the number of storylines generated by scenario studies to one or two, lack of stakeholder involvement in the scenario development and ignoring discontinuities.     

Profiting from destruction: The Iraq reconstruction,auditing and the management of fraud

While several US corporations have benefited tremendously from the Iraq reconstruction, the Iraqis and US taxpayers have not done as well. This paper argues that the Bush Administration's neoliberal agenda in Iraq created a corrupt, lawless environment in which corporations could reap huge profits through what would normally be called malfeasance. It further demonstrates how the audit reports produced by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction helped to manage the impact of this massive fraud by giving the perception that the laissez-faire policies of the Bush administration were innocent mistakes, making the failures appear to be independent of one another, reconstructing corporate malfeasance as waste while criminalizing low level employees, and blaming the government agencies, the war and the Iraqis for the fraud.     

Governing the transition to low-carbon futures: A critical survey of energy scenarios for 2050

There is a growing scientific consensus that limiting the increase in global average temperature to around 2 °C above pre-industrial levels is necessary to avoid unacceptable impact on the climate system. This requires that the developed countries’ emissions are radically reduced during the next 40 years. Energy scenario studies provide insights on the societal transitions that might be implied by such low-carbon futures, and in this paper we discuss how a greater attention to different governance and institutional issues can complement future scenario exercises. The analysis is based on a critical review of 20 quantitative and qualitative scenario studies, all of relevance for meeting long-term climate policy objectives. The paper: (a) analyzes some key differences in energy technology mixes and primary energy use patterns across these studies; (b) briefly explores the extent and the nature of the societal challenges and policy responses implied; and (c) discusses a number of important implications for the design and scope of future scenario studies. Our review shows that in previous scenario studies the main attention is typically paid to analyzing the impact of well-defined and uniform policy instruments, while fewer studies factor in the role of institutional change in achieving different energy futures. We therefore point towards a number of strategies of integrating issues of transition governance into future scenario analyses, and argue for a closer synthesis of qualitative and quantitative scenario building.     

A partial race to the bottom: corporate tax developments in emerging and developing economies

This paper assembles a new dataset on corporate income tax regimes in 50 emerging and developing economies over 1996–2007 and analyzes their impact on corporate tax revenues and domestic and foreign investment. It computes effective tax rates to take account of special regimes, such as tax holidays, temporarily reduced rates and increased investment allowances. There is evidence of a partial race to the bottom: countries have been under pressure to lower tax rates in order to lure and boost investment. In the case of standard tax systems (i.e. tax rules applying under normal circumstances), the effective tax rate reductions have not been larger than those witnessed in advanced economies, and revenues have held up well over the sample period. However, a race to the bottom is evident among special regimes, most notably in the case of Africa, creating effectively a parallel tax system where rates have fallen to almost zero. Regression analysis reveals higher tax rates adversely affect domestic investment and FDI, but do raise revenues in the short run.     

Unravelling the complexity of collective mental models: A method for developing and analysing scenarios in multi-organisational contexts

In multi-organisational contexts, scenario building has been used to engage stakeholders in a critical discussion on issues of mutual importance, and to gain their support with regards to possible future responses. A review of existing literature suggests that much has been written regarding the process of scenario development and the benefits of the process, but the detailed analysis of scenario building outcomes, which encompass a large number of issues and their complex interconnections, has not been made explicit for studying and enhancing understanding of a complex societal problem. This paper presents a systematic method for analysing such complex outcomes in order to facilitate reflective thinking on important issues within the wider context for policy development. The method was employed in a series of participative scenario development workshops, which yielded several causal maps around the theme of construction industry skills. A collective map merging the individual subject-specific causal maps was created to help provide a more holistic overview of the pertinent issues surrounding the construction skills debate. The analysis of this collective map promotes a better understanding of the issue in the wider context, the consequence of possible future events and actions, and of the pre-requisition required for certain events/desired outcomes to take place. The main benefit that could be derived from the method is the opportunity to help facilitate and encourage debate and discussion amongst key stakeholders regarding scenario theme, in this case skills improvement within construction. Due to its flexibility and adaptability, the method could potentially be applied to other areas requiring longer range planning and which contain multiple stakeholder perspectives.     

Efficiency and the Bear: Short Sales and Markets Around the World

We analyze cross‐sectional and time‐series information from 46 equity markets around the world to consider whether short sales restrictions affect the efficiency of the market and the distributional characteristics of returns to individual stocks and market indices. We find some evidence that prices incorporate negative information faster in countries where short sales are allowed and practiced. A common conjecture by regulators is that short sales restrictions can reduce the relative severity of a market panic. We find strong evidence that in markets where short selling is either prohibited or not practiced, market returns display significantly less negative skewness.     

China in the World Trade Organization: Antidumping and Safeguards

China finds itself in a unique situation on antidumping andsafeguard issues. It is by far the main target of antidumpingmeasures, but (so far) one of the smallest users of such measures.China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession protocol includesstringent antidumping and safeguard provisions that its tradingpartners may use against its exports. The article examines threerelated concerns: how quickly large developing economies canbecome intensive users of antidumping measures, an evolutionraising concerns about China's recent antidumping enforcement;how China could minimize its exposure to foreign antidumpingcases, a recipe for both improving trade outcomes and for China'staking a leading role in reforming WTO antidumping; and theopportunities that the Doha Round of trade negotiations offerto China for negotiating stricter disciplines both on WTO contingentprotection and on the use by China's trading partners of thespecial provisions included in China's accession protocol.     

Experiences of the development and use of scenarios for evaluating Swedish environmental quality objectives

This paper presents and evaluates a method for encouraging long-term thinking and for considering a variety of scenarios in environmental policy processes. The Swedish environmental policy is based on 16 environmental quality objectives (EQOs) that national authorities are obliged to observe. These objectives are reviewed annually and evaluated in depth every four years. Here we describe and explore a futures study project for introducing more long-term thinking into work on the EQOs, which we tested in the in-depth evaluation in 2008. We found it difficult to design a collective scenario for a case with a wide variety of objectives and individuals with different backgrounds. However, this difficulty makes it even more important to incorporate futures studies into the work of the relevant authorities. Scenario work is often subcontracted, leading to a constant lack of futures studies expertise and thinking within authorities. Despite the difficulties, we found that experts within the authorities did begin to recognise the opportunities provided by futures studies. The project revealed an interest and need for futures studies within the authorities in charge of Swedish environmental quality objectives and our findings show that the authorities need to build up their own skills in futures studies.