THE DESIGN AND DIFFUSION OF IMPROVED COOKING STOVES

The poorer half of the world's people have long relied for theirenergy needs on woodfuels. Since the oil shocks of the 1970s,pressure on forest resources has increased and the costs oftraditional use of woodfuels have been growing—to thehouseholder, in cash or collection time, and to society in inefficientenergy use, deforestation, and local and global harm to healthand the environment. Modern, efficient stoves can alleviatesome of these problems; programs to design and disseminate themwould seem a worthwhile pursuit for development activity. But do such programs in fact warrant the investment? Why haveso many failed to catch on as expected? The authors find thatprograms have been most successful when targeted to specificareas where woodfuel prices or collection times are high. Fieldtesting, consumer surveys, and involvement of local artisansfrom the outset have been critical to the ultimate adoptionof the stoves. With these elements in place, external supportfrom governments and donors can be useful; lacking them, subsidiesmay succeed only in distributing stoves that ultimately molderaway unused. This article's review of what makes for successand failure is instructive for the design of stove programsin particular, and of development projects that propagate improvedmethods and technologies in general.      

Are long-term wage elasticities of labor supply more negative than short-term ones?

Standard models imply that the wage-elasticity of labor supply is more negative the longer a wage change lasts. I observe decreasing daily hours during short-term wage increases, but not during a long-term one: daily income goals adjusted in the long-term.     

Cyberspace as a medium for terrorists

Given that terrorists are quickly acquiring technical skills that increase the utility of cyberspace to an effective distributed organizational network and the likelihood of potential attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure and defense systems, we consider the value of cyberspace to terrorists. To this end, it is necessary to address the following questions pertinent to the attributes of cyberspace to examine why and how terrorists may utilize cyberspace to advance their goals: (1) What is cyberterrorism? (2) Is cyberterrorism warfare? (3) Why would terrorists use cyberspace? (4) What do we know or anticipate that terrorists want to do in cyberspace? (5) How do we deal with terrorists in cyberspace? We conclude with an assessment of the cyberterrorism threat facing the U.S. today and recommendations that address increasing technical capabilities and security measures for intelligence gathering, digital control and supervisory control and data acquisition (DC/SCADA) systems, and emergency response systems.     

The Private Finance Initiative: Has the Accounting Standards Board Reduced the Scheme's Value for Money?

This article examines the state of PFI in the UK following an amendment published by the ASB to FRS 5. It was predicted that this amendment would mean that most properties constructed by the private sector, on behalf of the public sector, would have suddenly to appear on the balance sheets of the latter. This would have led to an unacceptable level of public sector borrowing and could have undermined the entire rationale for the scheme. Having outlined the objectives of PFI and explained the attitude adopted by the ASB, the article examines the reaction of HM Treasury. The article then demonstrates the likely consequences of the main parties in PFI contracts passing on as much risk as possible to the private sector so as to ensure that the assets remain off balance sheet. It concludes by assessing the expected impact that these actions will have on value for money.     

The new WTP: Willingness to participate

A key concept underlying competitive strategy is that of WTP, representing the consumer's ‘willingness to pay’ a premium price for goods or services. Through branding and other efforts, companies strive to push their message out and create a high willingness to pay, whereby consumers feel there are few or no substitutes for what these companies are selling. Social media, however, are making push-based marketing anachronistic. Users of social media typically eschew professional communications forced on them by faceless and impersonal organizations, in favor of more personal conversations. These individuals seek greater engagement with their preferred brands, and involvement—with or without the company's approval—in creating brand personalities. Their affinity for these preferred brands might well auger the dawn of a new WTP: willingness to participate. This article presents a model of consumer engagement through social media, and argues for re-conceptualizing WTP by utilizing a series of examples which show how companies that engage consumers via social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) stand to reap the benefits of long-term competitive advantages.     

The effect of the human pheromone androstenol on product evaluation

The chemical communication between humans has received considerable attention recently. Among the findings in psychology and anthropology have been the effects of putative human pheromones on the evaluation of persons. This article investigates if the finding that the pheromone androstenol influences person evaluation extends to the evaluation of products. In a laboratory experiment, 120 participants randomly assigned to either an experimental or control group rated three magazines. It was found that male consumers evaluate male magazines as more masculine and more positively under the influence of the putative male pheromone androstenol, whereas no such effects were found for magazines rated neutral or feminine and with respect to female consumers. Possible contextual and other factors influencing these results are discussed. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Limits to Ecological Modernisation as a framework for sustainable fresh water governance

An important point of debate in contemporary environmental governance literature is the design of institutional arrangements for natural resource governance in Western democracies in the face of long-term ecological challenges. Informed by this debate, we ask in this paper to what extent does Ecological Modernisation precepts provide a governance framework for resolving freshwater management conflicts in the context of New Zealand's political economy? The paper draws on the region of Canterbury whose water resources have become the site of intense political conflict due to the rapid growth of dairy farming. We firstly argue how the precepts of Ecological Modernisation are promoted in natural resource governance through the discourses of a variety of stakeholders at both the national and regional level and secondly, demonstrate how the adoption of these precepts in institutional design reflect a broadly techno-corporatist interpretation of Ecological Modernisation theory which struggles to sustain ecological carrying capacity of freshwater resources.     

Nontraditional crops,traditional constraints: The long‐term welfare impacts of export crop adoption among Guatemalan smallholders

This article documents the long‐term welfare effects of household nontraditional agricultural export (NTX) adoption. We use a panel dataset that spans the period 1985–2005, and employ difference‐in‐differences estimation to investigate the long‐term impact of nontraditional agricultural export adoption on changes in household consumption status and asset position in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. Given the heterogeneity in adoption patterns, the analysis differentiates the impact estimates based on a classification of households that takes into account the timing and duration of nontraditional agricultural export adoption. The results show that while, on average, welfare levels have improved for all households irrespective of adoption status and duration, the extent of improvement has varied across groups. Long‐term adopters exhibit the smallest increase in the lapse of two decades, in spite of some early gains. Conversely, early adopters who withdrew from nontraditional agricultural export production after reaping the benefits of the boom period of the 1980s are found to have fared better and shown greater improvements in durable asset position and housing conditions than any other category.     

Co-operation in Risky Environments: Evidence from Southern Ethiopia

The semi-arid and arid rangelands of Sub-Saharan Africa arecharacterised by high variability and by heavy reliance of herderson access to common resources, predominantly pasture and water.In these systems, the capacity of the community to co-operateover resource management is critical and the effectiveness ofmanagement has a direct impact on exploitation rates and landallocation patterns. In this paper, we develop a model to capturethe impact of climatic variability on capacity to co-operateand on resulting land use and allocation patterns, and applythe model to data collected from communities located on theBorana Plateau in southern Ethiopia. Results indicate that rainfallvariability has a negative impact on stock densities, consistentwith risk-averse producer behaviour, but has no statisticallysignificant impact on land allocation patterns in this marginalarea. Furthermore, co-operation has a direct negative impacton stock densities and land allocated to private pastures. Theresults support the hypothesis that individual incentives toovergraze and encroach on common pastures can be mitigated incommunities with high co-operative capacity.