Genetic engineering in agriculture: New approaches for risk management through sustainability reporting

Genetically modified crops and foodstuff have been highly controversial for environmental, health, and ethical reasons. The controversies have been worldwide, but most prominent in the European Union, for reasons that include distrust of the regulatory authorities, scientists and technocratic decision making. An informal moratorium in the EU came recently to an end, without solving the underlying problems. In response to the criticisms, the European governments have attempted to improve the risk assessment methods and their scientific basis, and to tailor public policies to the growing demand for transparency, accountability, and public participation.This paper proposes a novel approach to including the public in evaluating the impacts of food and agricultural biotechnology and present and future applications modeled after the growing practice of sustainability reporting by companies. The most visible among those, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), when implemented properly, includes a wide range of stakeholders, including the financial institutions, companies, NGOs and the civil society, in an interactive multi-stakeholder discourse and collaboration. The reporting exercise would open the discussion about the R&D around new GMO products, and could mitigate potential adverse effects in an early stage (Constructive Technology Assessment). We specifically propose initiating a broadly based societal initiative aimed at developing of a new sectoral supplement of GRI Guidelines, specifically designed for the food and agricultural biotechnology sector.This approach can be conceptualized as experimentation on a small scale with a multitude of stakeholders involved (Bounded Socio-Technical Experiment or BSTE) which is an effective venue for higher-order learning among participants. Sustainability reports and BSTEs have been so far applied in limited cases, none of which included highly controversial technologies such as biotechnology; they need further elaboration and testing to become possibly highly effective concepts and tools for mitigating conflicts on the societal implications of emerging technologies, and to lead to better public policies and greater social trust.     

美国农业生物技术研发投资与专利保护

现代农业生物技术在缓解全球粮食安全、资源枯竭、环境恶化等一系列重大问题中发挥了极其重要的作用。美国农业生物技术研究和产业化发展非常迅速，与其相关的知识产权制度立法也经过多次调整完善，巩固了其技术和市场优势。本文通过介绍美国农业生物技术研发投资现状，梳理其知识产权制度的发展历程，并从授权专利的申请单位类型、技术类型和前十强企业的专利集中度等方面，分析农业生物技术的专利保护进展，总结美国农业生物技术研发及其知识产权保护制度的成功经验，以期为促进我国农业生物技术创新及其知识产权保护制度的完善提供经验借鉴。     

The threat of regulatory environmental inspection: impact on plant performance

The expected costs of violating a regulation would typically increase if the probability of regulatory inspection increases. Thus, changes in the anticipated threat of inspection should affect firm compliance. Like environmental protection agencies in several other countries, the Norwegian agency typically emphasizes compliance with institutional requirements (e.g. firm-internal routines and auditing systems) rather than emission caps. Using a panel dataset of polluting Norwegian plants, we find that the threat of inspection significantly reduces the probability of serious violation. However, emissions are not significantly affected. We point at various reasons for the regulator to emphasize institutional requirements, but we also argue that the lack of effect on emissions encourages the agency to review the pros and cons of the common emphasis on institutional requirements over emissions.      

An interview with Steven A. Schroeder

In 1972, with a ! billion endowment from the immense personal fortune left by the late Robert Wood Johnson, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation became the world's largest health care philanthropic organization. Now, with a new chairman of the board, Sidney F. Wentz, and president, Steven A. Schroeder, MD, the foundation has revised its overall grant-making prospectus. In this interview, Dr. Schroeder discusses the foundation's grant-making strategies and health manpower projects, forces affecting the U.S. health care system, and his vision for health care over the next decade.     

Forget English Freedom,Remember Atlantic Slavery: Common Law,Commercial Law and the Significance of Slavery for Classical Political Economy

Is the liberty to pursue individual self-interest in the capitalist market all that remains of the grand Enlightenment promise of human emancipation? The article addresses this question by returning to eighteenth century scholarship on the relationship between English common law and commercial law. Specifically, I explore the fundamental challenge posed to common law by the regulation, through commercial law, of enslaved Africans as labouring ‘things’. I show how key British scholars in the eighteenth century traditions of jurisprudence, moral philosophy and political economy struggled to address the radical unfreedom of the enslaved and the meaning of her/his radical emancipation. I explore how this Atlantic challenge was ‘indigenised’ to speak to the threat posed by enclosures in Britain, in particular, the possible destruction of the qualified unfreedoms and freedoms extant in the paternal social order upheld by common law. I explore how political economy traditions pre and post abolition and emancipation sought to deal with this challenge. And I conjecture on the significance of remembering the most radical process of commodifying labour – in Aimé Césaire's terms, thingification – for present day interpretations of the relationship between capitalism and freedom.     

Energy, property, and the industrial revolution narrative

The Industrial Revolution (IR) story is the core of a mainstream economic history narrative of energy/development relationships, celebrating Modern Economic Growth (MEG) as the increase in per capita energy consumption in the last two centuries. Such a narrative emphasizes mineral technology and private property as the key elements of growth processes. I will criticize the above narrative, from a socio-environmental history perspective, for its inability to account for two crucial aspects of energy history: 1. the role of social power as key determinant in how energy sources are used and to what ends; 2. the socio-ecological costs associated with the increase of energy consumption. I will then review Environmental History studies on energy/industrialization and highlight possible future developments in the field. The article makes a strong point for the need to look at energy transitions as social processes, and to include the unequal distribution of environmental, health, and social costs of mineral energy into global history narratives.     

Biotechnology: the emerging battlefield for US and Japanese pharmaceutical companies

The Japanese pharmaceutical industry has lagged behind the US in developing and marhting innovative new compounh. A gap anabsis rebing on international publication and patenting stahtics as well as market survgs shows that the US is the clear leader in biophannaceuticals. Recent Japanese public and private efforts to close the gap have posed no immediate threat to US pharmaceutical companies. The conflict over industrial policy among the ministries involved will take some time to be resolved. However, information networking activities and cross-border technology linkages of Japanese companies should not be underestimated. Biotechnology is current4 transforming theJapanese pharmaceutical induse, and the US will have to deal with a gowing Japanese challenge in the long run. Preventive US counter-measures should include investments in in-house biotechnology research, acquisitions of smaller biotechnology start-up ventures, global commercialization o f biophannaceuticals, and proactive management o f technology linkages with Japanese companies.     

Prices vs. quantities: Public finance and the choice of regulatory instruments

Since Montgomery [1972. Markets in licenses and efficient pollution control programs. Journal of Economic Theory 5, 395-418] and Weitzman [1974. Prices vs. quantities. Review of Economic Studies 41, 477-491], it has generally been assumed that, in a full-information setting, tradable quotas and taxes are equivalent regulatory instruments. We demonstrate that, if the government is movitated by public-finance concerns, this equivalence holds only if quotas are short lived. Moreover, the government prefers quotas with the shortest possible lifetime, or, what is equivalent in our setting, taxes.     

Estimating a health production function for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)

The paper estimates a health production function for Sub-Saharan Africa based on the Grossman (1972 Grossman M 1972 The Demand for Health: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation, NBER New York ) theoretical model that treats social, economic, and environmental factors as inputs of the production system. In estimating this function, socioeconomic and environmental factors such as income per capita, illiteracy rate, food availability, ratio of health expenditure to GDP, urbanization rate, and carbon dioxide emission per worker are specified as determinants of health status. The parameters of the function are estimated by one-way and two-way fixed and random effects model of panel data analyses. The results of the two-way random effect model suggest that an increase in income per capita, a decrease in illiteracy rate, and an increase in food availability are strongly associated with an improvement in life expectancy at birth. Overall, the results imply that a health policy which may focus on the provision of health services, family planning programs, and emergency aids to the exclusion of other socioeconomic and environmental aspects may do little to improve the current health status of the region.     

China’s direct investment in the European Union: challenges and policy responses

The dramatic rise of Chinese direct investment into the European Union (EU) has sparked a debate about the control that China may be seeking to take over European economies. Quite naturally, these concerns have led to repeated calls that action be taken to slow down, if not to halt entirely, this growing trend. The objective of the article is to shed light on this debate. Following a thorough analysis of Chinese direct investment in the EU, this article suggests that the challenges posed by these inflows are widely overblown. Despite this, the article concludes that it is necessary to have a systematic approach to regulating inbound foreign investment (including from China) in the EU. Such an approach may help guard against the risk of a protectionist drift inside the EU, as well as the possibility that some investors may one day pose a threat to national security. This article concludes that although the current fragmented regulatory approach is unsatisfactory, because of the difficulties associated with a unified EU-wide review process, the most realistic option is to promote a more systematic and coordinated use of existing mechanisms such as competition policy. Also, pushing for the negotiation of a China–EU BIT is certainly a promising avenue to enhance the EU’s bargaining leverage based on the principle of positive reciprocity.     

Constitutional secession clauses

Taking the view that constitutions are devices whereby people coordinate to specific equilibria in circumstances that allow multiple equilibria, we show that a constitutional secession clause can serve as such a device and, therefore, that such a clause is more than an empty promise or an ineffectual threat. Employing a simple three-person recursive game, we establish that under certain conditions, this game possesses two equilibria—one in which a disadvantaged federal unit secedes and is not punished by the other units in the federation, and a second equilibrium in which this unit does not secede but is punished if it chooses to do so. This research was partially funded by a grant from the United States Institute of Peace at the California Institute of Technology. We wish to thank several anonymous referees who brought to our attention a number of things that we had not previously considered.     

Long-term Nexus Between Openness,Income, and Environmental Quality

In this paper we examine the dynamic relationship between income, trade, and environmental quality as measured by carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, disaggregated by source (oil, gas, and coal). Using time series data spanning from 1980 to 2006, 21 countries, including G7, BRIC, and middle and low income economies, we consistently find the existence of a long-run relationship between income, trade, and carbon emissions (from oil in particular). This is important because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently determined that CO₂ emissions indeed pose a threat to human health and welfare.     

FORECASTING THE DEMAND FOR HEALTH CARE IN OECD NATIONS AND CHINA

This article argues that the nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are facing a potential disaster: intergenerational conflicts between the large number of workers approaching retirement at an earlier age than ever before in history and the smaller number entering the labor market. These nations are confronted with the choice of whether to default on commitments to pensions and health care, to reduce benefits, or to increase the taxes borne by younger workers. The author argues that this new intergenerational conflict is the result of technophysio evolution , a synergism between technological and physiological improvements that has produced a form of human evolution that is biological but not genetic, rapid, culturally transmitted, and not necessarily stable. The author goes on to argue that an important aspect of technophysio evolution has been a change in the structure of consumption and in the division of discretionary time between work and leisure. The ongoing debate over whether or not the rapid advances in biotechnology will spare OECD nations' health systems from a financial crisis is addressed. Finally, the implications this argument has for forecasting China's future health care costs are discussed.     

Who Defended Monetary Stability in a Specie Regime? Evidence from the Chinese History

Despite the lack of political accountability, ancient autocracies maintained a level of monetary stability that rivals modern democracies. This paper hypothesizes that it is the threat of counterfeiting that has constrained currency debasement. Unwilling to share seigniorage with counterfeiters, who are active only if currency is debased, the government refrains from debasement unless in extreme fiscal situations. To document the facts, we build a database of historical Chinese copper coins that covers the period from the Qin dynasty (221 BC–207 BC) to the Republic of China. We also use the introduction of the steam press in late Qing China as a natural experiment to test the theory. The steam press produced coins of fine patterns that counterfeiters were unable to mimic. As the theory predicts, the removal of the threat of counterfeiting triggered the most serious debasement in the history of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).     

‘The Navigator Network’: a New Zealand futurewatch case study

New Zealand's ‘Navigator Network’ is a national scanning network of scientists and policy analysts providing ‘early alert’ advice about emerging areas of science and technology. It was established by the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology (MoRST) to enhance the government's readiness to respond to the opportunities and risks around new technologies, particularly in biotechnology and nanotechnology. The Navigator Network has been tailored to the New Zealand context, which is characterised by a small, well-connected government sector and a strong focus on agricultural biotechnology and food. The network builds on these features, and is ‘people-centric’ rather than ‘information-centric’, using dialogic approaches to generate new knowledge between diverse stakeholder groups. It also focuses on building futures capability in the government and science sectors. Representatives from government agencies are integrated into the process as scanners to facilitate uptake. It also has an adaptive development process via an action learning component.     

生物技术产业的特征及作用

生物技术产业属于高技术、高投入、高风险和高回报的行业,因其前期投入大、科技含量高、生产工艺复杂、质量要求严格、受国家扶持,所以进入壁垒高、垄断性强、利润丰厚,蕴藏着巨大的经济潜能。生物技术产业的作用是：改善医疗卫生水平;解决粮食短缺问题;对传统工业的改造;加快改变能源格局。     

Scenarios on the future of biotechnology

The major areas of research and development in biotechnology are maturing at a rapid rate, and may soon converge with one another. These emerging biotechnology areas range from the development of new medicines and drugs, genetically engineered foods, biologically controlled industrial manufacturing processes, and biologically based computing devices to the creation of new industrial materials and devices based upon biological structures and the use of biotechnology in food production. Each of these research areas carries the potential for strong societal reaction. To explore the potential impact of biotechnology on society, two fundamental drivers that influence societal acceptance of biotechnology are described. First, the extent to which technological integration proceeds may strongly impact the way society uses and perceives biotechnology. Second, the degree to which the public eventually accepts biotechnologically derived products and processes as legitimate and reliable alternatives to current products may shape both market demand and public policy. Taken together, these drivers suggest four discrete alternative scenarios for the future of biotechnology. Implications of these scenarios are discussed.     

Economics in Institutional Perspective,Memorial Essays in Honor of K. William Kapp

In the past, the standard discussions of market failures in economics textbooks confined themselves to issues involving externalities, public goods, and common property (open access). Subsequent to George Akerlof’s famous article “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” discussions of the problems created by asymmetric information gradually became standard fare, but the issues raised by thinking of asymmetric information in economic matters extend far beyond the used car and health insurance markets that are normally used as the paradigm cases. In fact, consideration of the problems of information will inevitably lead to an examination of the problems of market manipulation and fraud, especially in light of the 2008 financial crisis. Akerlof has travelled this path himself as indicated by his recent book with Robert Shiller, Phishing for Phools (2015). Akerlof and Shiller provide a litany of examples of manipulation and deception in advertising and in many markets including financial markets. They also have a chapter on “The Resistance and its Heroes” that highlights some of the people and agencies that have worked to expose and reduce phishing, but this chapter is remarkably sparse. What this article attempts to do is to fill out some of this history by focusing on the work of American institutional economists from Veblen to Galbraith, who critically examined the issues of manipulation and deception in advertising, salesmanship, and finance. Some general considerations relating to the problem of fraud are also discussed.     

Beyond the bureaucratization of US biotechnology

Drawing upon extensive interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government oficials, this discussion sketches out several of the unresolved public policy issues associated with the development of a globally competitive biotechnology industry in the USA. Paramount among these issues are the determination of appropriate levels and types of gouernmental research support; the design of effective, as well as efJicient, regulatory regimes; and the establishment of tax, Jinancing and patent policies which facilitate the optimal industrial organization. If allowed to follow conventional patterns of resolution, these issues threaten to add to overall bureaucratization (both public and private). In turn, if bureaucratization continues unabated, it may become increas-ingly difficult to sustain the basic entrepreneurial character of the industry, as well as other elements which are crucial to scientifically intensive enterprises.