Persistence of cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon: A spatial analysis of the rationale for beef production

Fed by demand for beef within Brazil and in global markets, the Brazilian herd grew from 147 million head of cattle in 1990 to ≈200 million in 2007. Eighty-three percent of this expansion occurred in the Amazon and this trend is expected to continue as the industry bounces back from a recent agricultural downturn. Intensification of the cattle industry has been suggested as one way to reduce pressure on forest margins and spare land for soybean or sugarcane production, and is the cornerstone of Brazil's plan for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. To this end, federal credit programs and research and development activities in Brazil are aligning to support intensification goals, but there is no guarantee that this push for intensification will decrease the demand for land at the forest margin and as result curb CO₂ emissions from deforestation. In this paper we use a spatially explicit rent model which incorporates the local effects of biophysical characteristics, infrastructure, land prices, and distance to markets and slaughterhouses to calculate 30-year Net Present Values (NPVs) of extensive cattle ranching across the Brazilian Amazon. We use the model to ask where extensive ranching is profitable and how land acquisition affects profitability. We estimate that between 17% and 80% of land in the Amazon would have moderate to high NPVs when ranched extensively if it were settled, i.e. if the rancher does not buy the land but acquires it through land grabbing. In addition, we estimate that between 9% and 13% of land in the Amazon is vulnerable to speculation (i.e. areas with positive NPVs only if land is settled and not purchased), which suggests that land speculation is an important driver of extensive ranching profitability, and may continue to be in the future. These results suggest that pro-intensification policies such as credit provision for improved pasture management and investment in more intensive production systems must be accompanied by implementation and enforcement of policies that alter the incentives to clear forest for pasture, discourage land speculation, and increase accountability for land management practices if intensification of the cattle sector is to deter new deforestation and displace production from low-yield, extensive cattle production systems in frontier regions of the Brazilian Amazon.     

Concerns of the ceo

Interviews with 26 CEOs across a wide variety of industries reveals their concerns as well as agenda and behavior. The issues discussed have been placed against four intellectual frameworks to get a better picture of CEO concerns. These executives frequently ponder institutional and corporate strategy but very seldom business strategy and competitive markets. The plurality of the concerns deal with issues of management development and human resource management. Where the question is one of changing or redirecting the strategy of the firm, it is often put in the context of looking inside the firm at top managers and organization culture.     

A tale of two gravities*

The flows of traded goods across countries are known to follow a gravity pattern: Their volumes are greater between countries that are larger in size and closer to each other. We find a similar pattern in the flows of territories across countries between 1870 and 2008. During this period, countries experienced inflows and outflows of territories, mirroring the international flows of goods. We find three other pieces of critical evidence supporting that the two flows interact through similar economic motives. Our findings illustrate the usefulness of international trade models for understanding international politics.     

Embedding environment and sustainability into corporate financial decision-making

The business case for sustainability can be built upon: (i) cost reduction from efficient resource utilisation, (ii) revenue enhancement, (iii) risk management, and (iv) intangible assets. However, executives often adopt a short-term perspective owing to executive compensation, investor pressure, and decision-making criteria tied to fixed financial reporting systems. We propose an integrated conceptual framework, which highlights how firms could embed environment and sustainability into their long-term financial decision-making framework. To give this goal structure, the firm could adopt: (i) longer-term executive compensation plans, (ii) longer-term financial reporting, and (iii) flexible financial decision-making models which embed intangibles.     

From immersion to intention? Exploring advances in prosocial storytelling

Little empirical work has explored the psychological processes triggered by immersive technologies and how they might lead to more effective desirable prosocial outcomes. Thus, the current study explores two different modalities for presenting 360 videos—YouTube and head-mounted display (HMD)—as strategies for engaging audiences with cause-related stories. Across three stories, using these technologies led to the highest levels of presence, but there was no association between presence and increased attitudes towards the story content. Only narrative engagement impacted prosocial attitudes towards the video content. Data suggest that regardless of the technology used, telling engaging narratives that increase the viewer's self-efficacy is key to behavioral intentions—immersive technologies help viewers feel closer to the physical location of the narrative, but not the narrative itself.     

ENDOGENOUS HUMAN CAPITAL INVESTMENT AND THE INTERACTION OF FRONTIER AND ADOPTIVE KNOWLEDGE ON GROWTH AND WAGE INEQUALITY

A three-sector, overlapping-generations growth model endogenizes the opportunity cost of human capital formation and the relative skill requirements of invention, innovation, and adoption of general-purpose technologies. As a result, the relative wage of skilled workers is a function of the endogenous ratio of total-to-adoptive knowledge (where the difference in knowledge stocks is frontier knowledge). Comparative statics are examined for the model's seven parameters. Simulations (representing a transition with phases to a more complex level of economic development) are presented for simultaneous exogenous shocks capable of matching (i) observed inverse movements of the relative wage and the detrended relative supply in the USA, (ii) the sharp slowing and recovering US multifactor productivity growth data since the 1970s, and (iii) a reconciliation of data used to support or deny skill-biased technological change as a major force driving up the relative wage since 1980.     

The place of education in W. S. Jevons's political economy

The paper begins with the question of what became, in Jevons's new economics, of the imperative in classical political economy to educate the masses. Much of the core of classical thought, including the Malthusian principle and the wages-fund theory, together with Mill's new arguments about market failure, rationalized the need for state-supported general education as a benefit to both the labouring classes and society at large. Jevons's strong claim that Ricardo-Mill economics must be abandoned would seem to leave education policy without a strong mooring. However, he re-anchored it in his productivity approach to wage theory, his utility maximization approach to value theory and public works spending, and his empirical analyses of business cycles, the potential of long-term austerity, and poor consumption-saving behaviour of the working classes. The end result was similar to that of classical political economy, a multi-dimensional rationale for a policy of State-supported general education.     

Tracing the utility of injury surveillance data in Pretoria (South Africa) and Borås (Sweden)

Our research attempted to study the factors that influenced the use of injury data in two cities, representing different injury and socio-economic profiles. In Pretoria, the South African capital city, injury data uptake was constrained by, among other factors, the transitional institutional environment, stakeholders' suspicion of research and the absence of safety promotion champions. In the Swedish city of Bor?s, injury data uptake was facilitated by well-established research agency-municipality partnerships, injury prevention champions, a receptive political and knowledge driven environment and dedicated resources. The study signified the role of a range of content issues, contextual arrangements, social actors who may or may not operate from a perspective of sufficient consensus and institutional communication processes that may either facilitate or hinder the multiple employment and rapid movement of data along the 'ladder of knowledge utilisation'. Safety promotion researchers may need to expand their roles beyond data production to improve data utility.