Consumer Ethics in the European Union: A Comparison of Northern and Southern Views

There is a growing interest in understanding consumer ethical actions in relation to their dealings with firms. This paper examines whether there are differences between Northern and Southern European Union (EU) consumers' perceptions of ethical consumer behaviour using Muncy and Vitell's (1992) Consumer Ethics Scale (CES). The study samples 962 university students across four Northern EU countries (Germany, Denmark, Scotland, The Netherlands) and four Southern EU countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece). Some differences are identified between the two samples, which might question the ability of organisations to consider the EU as one homogeneous market.     

Which Firms are More Sensitive to Public Disclosure Schemes for Pollution Control? Evidence from Indonesia’s PROPER Program

This paper analyzes differences in firms’ responsiveness to PROPER, Indonesia’s public disclosure program for industrial pollution control. The overall effectiveness of this program at achieving emissions reductions and its low regulatory costs have earned it a good reputation around the world. PROPER had no deterrents or incentives other than those that arose indirectly from publicly disclosing information about the environmental performances of firms. We analyzed plant-level data to relate short- and longer-term environmental responses to facility characteristics. The results revealed that foreign-owned firms were consistently more likely to respond to the environmental rating scheme, compared to private domestic firms. This is a clear and important insight with consequences for a number of issues, such as understanding the pollution haven debate. Also, firms located in densely populated regions, particularly in Java, responded more positively to the public disclosure of PROPER ratings. The main observed effect was however given by the initial level of environmental performance of firms. Those firms that had bad environmental performance records felt pressure to improve, but if the initial abatement steps had already been taken, the incentives to improve further appeared to diminish.     

Extending the SAM with Social and Environmental Indicators: An Application to Bolivia

Extending economic accounts with sets of social and environmental indicators is a first step towards a more integrated analysis of aspects of sustainability problems. In this article, therefore, a proposal is made to nest social and environmental indicators into an existing economic accounting framework. The Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is taken as a basis, because of its flexibility regarding extensions with non-monetary data addressing social and environmental concerns. The main thrust of the paper is methodological. From the discussion of methodological issues and the application to the SAM for Bolivia for the year 1989, it is concluded that it is, in principle, feasible and relatively simple to extend the SAM with the two sets of indicators. However, additional data will have to be collected to be able to address, more adequately, the problems of sustainability.     

Are Ethical Banks Different? A Comparative Analysis Using the Radical Affinity Index

This article studies the differences between traditional financial intermediaries (commercial banks, savings banks and cooperative banks) and ethical banks based on property rights, in which the owner decides the ideology, principles, standards and objectives of the organisation. In ethical banking, affinity centres on positive social and ethical values. The article consequently focuses on an index proposed both to differentiate ethical banks from other types of banks, and also to pinpoint the differences between the various ethical banks themselves. This is the Radical Affinity Index (RAI), which groups banks together in terms of their stance on ethical commitment, concentrating on ethical ideology and principles (information transparency, placement of assets, guarantees and participation) and using a sample of 114 European banks. The evidence shows that transparency of information and placement of assets are factors that differentiate ethical banks from other financial intermediaries. Guarantees and participation are characteristics specific to ethical banks; these variables, however, do not offer clear evidence to our analysis.     

A QUARTERLY MODEL FOR THE EEC BEEF SECTOR

The aim of the paper is to forecast the behaviour of the EEC-9 beef and veal sector-particularly exports-starting from a quarterly econometric model explaining past developments of the principal macro-economic variables from 1976 to 1982 inclusive. Attention is focused on production as its evolution has been and is considered to continue to be the most important factor influencing the development of the EEC-9 external trade of beef and veal. The paper presents firstly a theoretical approach as a basis for formulating the econometric model. Then, the parameters of the structural model are estimated for forecasting purposes; conclusions follow.     

Household Composition and Brazilian Food Purchases: An Expenditure System Approach

The use of household level data for food demand analysis requires the researcher to address issues such as purchase censoring and the impacts of household age/gender composition on such demand. This analysis adopts an estimation approach to modeling censored food expenditures. The major methodological contribution of this analysis is our incorporation of an endogenous equivalence scale measure within the expenditure system. Our empirical application is concerned with Brazilian household food expenditures. We use the estimated adult equivalence scales to evaluate a measure of household welfare represented by per-adult equivalent food expenditures. We find a significant shift of the distribution of per capita food distributions when comparing member count versus adult equivalent-based per capita distributions.