RESPONSIBILITY AND CAPABILITY

This paper explores the issue of responsibility and links it to the concept of capability. The paper begins by looking at what it means to be responsible and connects this to the now common distinction in public policy between blame and task. It is argued that responsibility should be internalised rather than externalised and placed in the hands of the state. This can be done through the extension of property rights and so the paper offers a brief justification for the link between responsibility and property rights. The final part of the paper considers the ideas of capability and competence and uses these to argue for the placing of personal responsibility at the heart of public policy.     

LACK OF RIGOUR IN DEFENDING FAIRTRADE: A REJOINDER TO ALISTAIR SMITH

Smith (2010 ) does not deny that he made errors in economic theory, logic and fact, and that he had misused evidence. He says that I misrepresented a large body of theory, that I distorted what he said in four places and that I was wrong in one sentence. These statements are false.     

The Value of Changes in Deer Season Length: An Application of the Nested Multinomial Logit Model

Increasing deer populations can be controlled through manipulatingharvest limits or season length. While such actions often result in benefitsto hunters, both motorists and the agricultural sector also benefit as alower deer population leads to fewer incidences of harmful human-deerencounters. Traditional recreation demand models are often employed toexamine the welfare implications of changes in daily hunting bag limits.Studies measuring the effects of changes in season length, however, arenoticeably absent from the literature. This study uses a nested randomutility model to examine hunter choice over site and season selection toderive the values of changes in season length.     

The Growth of Jobless Households in Australia

In this article it is shown that individual-based measures of joblessness and household measures of joblessness have diverged over the last twenty years with joblessness becoming increasingly concentrated in certain households.     

Foreign Competition and Wage Inequality

The author argues that increased foreign competition can affect technical choice and skill differentials even when actual imports do not rise significantly. A model is presented of general oligopolistic equilibrium (GOLE) in which a reduction in import barriers (whether technological or policy–imposed) encourages more strategic investment by incumbent firms. The predictions accord with many of the stylized facts: higher skill premia; higher ratios of skilled to unskilled workers employed in all sectors and throughout the economy; little change in import volumes or prices; and rapid technological progress with rather little change in total factor productivity.     

Perceived risk and consumer decision making related to health services: a comparative study

It is acknowledged[Weinstein, N. and Nicolich, M. (1993) ‘Correct and Incorrect Interpretations of Correlation Between Risk Perceptions and Risk Behaviours’, Health Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 235–45.] that with the development of services marketing specifically related to health services comes a need to understand the aspects of consumer risk behaviour. This paper examines differences in perceived risk between health services, general services and goods and will seek to substantiate and develop a previous US study,[Murray, K. B. and Schlacter, J. L. (1990) ‘The Impact of Services Versus Goods on Consumer's Assessment of Perceived Risk and Variability’, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 51–65.] utilising a quantitative methodology with repeated measures and nested factors. The conclusions support the hypotheses that there are significant differences in perceptions of social and psychological risks when purchasing health services. Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications     

Small-sample inference with spatial HAC estimators

This paper examines the small-sample performance of spatial HAC (SHAC) estimators of the standard errors on parameters. We find that, in small to moderately-sized datasets, the use of HAC estimators may be recommended only with a relatively large degree of cross-sectional interdependence.     

The Austrian School of Economics: A view from London

The Review of Austrian Economics - This paper explores the intellectual context of the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) during the 1930s. We...