Recreation and the Environment as Cultural Dimensions in Contemporary American Society

This paper broadly explores changing outdoor recreation demands, environmental opinions and demographics in the United States. With this country's population predicted to more than double by the end of this century, it is imperative that we understand these trends and their implications for better managing our natural environment and providing opportunities for outdoor recreation in that environment. Using national survey data, we have described differences in recreation behavior (participation) and environmental attitudes nationwide across six socio-demographic factors-race, country of birth, rural-urban residence, region of the country, age and income. Results indicate that demographic differences, recreation activity choices and people's environmental positions are linked.     

Managerial Commitment to Sustainable Supply Chain Management Projects

Most companies are under pressure to improve the environmental sustainability of their supply chains. However, there is considerable variance in companies' ability to successfully deploy environmental management projects. One important factor, according to articles in the academic and business press, is the ability of champions of sustainable supply chain management (SCM) projects within organizations to gain the commitment of colleagues (e.g., other managers from a variety of functions) to help these projects succeed. Therefore, this paper examines variables that affect a project champion's ability to gain this commitment from colleagues. In particular, building on existing research, this research employs a video‐based experimental design to examine the effect of the influence approach that the project champion employs, the values of the person the champion is trying to influence, and the organizational climate. The results suggest that organizational climate and certain individual values directly affect commitment. There are also interactions between values and influence tactics. The research adds to the field's growing knowledge on the antecedents of sustainable SCM within companies while providing valuable guidance for environmental champions and for top managers.     

Theory of planned behaviour: predicting tourists’ pro-environmental intentions after a humpback whale encounter

Nature-based experiences can contribute to individuals’ connection to nature and intentions toward sustainable environmental behaviours. Conservation psychology can use tourism as a platform to modify tourists’ intentions and behaviours regarding key marine threats such as single-use plastics. This study examined changes to pro-environmental intentions, particularly regarding plastic use, in 267 nature-based tourists from Australia and Tonga who completed a whale watching/swim experience. A theory of planned behaviour (TPB) framework was used incorporating moral norms and environmental identity, which have been previously implicated in explaining pro-environmental actions. This study found that including moral norms in the TPB model significantly increased the ability to predict pro-environmental intentions. Further, when controlling for the TPB and moral norm variables, environmental identity explained a further 15% of tourists’ pro-environmental intentions. The findings suggest the original TPB model may be less suitable within a marine conservation context. Collectively, positive nature-based experiences, environmental identity, and moral norms are important in understanding tourist’s intentions to engage in sustainable environmental behaviours.     

Housing tenure choice and the dual income household

Housing tenure choice has been the subject of a very large literature. Many treatments have sought to estimate the effect of household income on the likelihood of home ownership. To date, no study has ever disaggregated the household income of married couples into the separate labor income components to see if one partner’s income has a different effect than the other. Using a derived likelihood function to control for censoring in the wife’s income, this paper estimates the effect of separate incomes on housing tenure choice, accounting for possible endogeneity of the wife’s income. To compare the results of this estimation method, the paper also estimates the standard IV models, 2SLS and IV probit. While the results show that there is no endogeneity of the wife’s income, ignoring the censoring of the endogenous variable (when a large fraction of observations are censored) can possibly lead to biased coefficient estimates. Also, this paper confirms the importance of total household income, which has a larger effect than the total disaggregated components.     

Book Review

Following review of definitions of New Public Management (NPM), the paper assesses whether Canada has adopted the NPM, organized by Kernaghan and Charih's (1997) categories and using Loeffler's (1997) definition. Canada has reorganized the machinery of government, changed management methods and reduced the federal public sector substantially. Despite high debt, Canada's federal government reduced its expenditures and/or public service as much or more than the UK and New Zealand. Its expenditures as a proportion of GDP are now similar to those of the UK and New Zealand, the major proponents of NPM.     

Cost-effectiveness of subdermal implantable buprenorphine versus sublingual buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder

Aims: Subdermal implantable buprenorphine (BSI) was recently approved to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) in clinically-stable adults. In the pivotal clinical trial, BSI was associated with a higher proportion of completely-abstinent patients (85.7% vs 71.9%; p?=?.03) vs sublingual buprenorphine (SL-BPN). Elsewhere, relapse to illicit drug use is associated with diminished treatment outcomes and increased costs. This study evaluated the cost-effectiveness of BSI vs SL-BPN from a US societal perspective.

Methods: A Markov model simulated BSI and SL-BPN cohorts (clinically-stable adults) transiting through four mutually-exclusive health states for 12 months. Cohorts accumulated direct medical costs from drug acquisition/administration; treatment-diversion/abuse; newly-acquired hepatitis-C; emergency room, hospital, and rehabilitation services; and pediatric poisonings. Non-medical costs of criminality, lost wages/work-productivity, and out-of-pocket expenses were also included. Transition probabilities to a relapsed state were derived from the aforementioned trial. Other transition probabilities, costs, and health-state utilities were derived from observational studies and adjusted for trial characteristics. Outcomes included incremental cost per quality-adjusted-life-year (QALY) gained and incremental net-monetary-benefit (INMB). Uncertainty was assessed by univariate and probabilistic sensitivity analysis (PSA).

Results: BSI was associated with lower total costs (?$4,386), more QALYs (+0.031), and favorable INMB at all willingness-to-pay (WTP) thresholds considered. Higher drug acquisition costs for BSI (+$6,492) were outpaced, primarily by reductions in emergency room/hospital utilization (?$8,040) and criminality (?$1,212). BSI was cost-effective in 89% of PSA model replicates, and had a significantly higher NMB at $50,000/QALY ($20,783 vs $15,007; p?Conclusions: BSI was preferred over SL-BPN from a health-economic perspective for treatment of OUD in clinically-stable adults. These findings should be interpreted carefully, due to some relationships having been modeled from inputs derived from multiple sources, and would benefit from comparison with outcomes from studies that employ administrative claims data or a naturalistic comparative design.     

The KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (KIDS) third wave: methods,first findings and an agenda for future research

The panel study known as the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (KIDS) has been extended by a new wave of data collection conducted in 2004. This third wave of the study interviewed 865 households containing core adult members from 760 of the households contacted in 1993. It also conducted interviews in next-generation households that have split off from the parental households and in the current households of children who have been fostered out. The study finds that the proportion of people aged 20–44 dying between the second and third waves was nearly three times the proportion dying between the first two waves. The pattern of income distribution is one of increasing poverty and inequality since 1993, although the partial reversal of these trends in the post-1998 period is hopeful, as are signs of relative prosperity among those who established independent next-generation households. In addition, access to services has improved.