Can Direct Payments Facilitate Agricultural Commercialisation: Evidence from a Transition Country

We investigate the impact of direct payments on agricultural commercialisation in Kosovo. Kosovo is one of the poorest countries in Europe but, with European assistance, provides substantial funds to support agriculture, made up of many small and often semi‐subsistence farms. Thus, the effect of this support is a central policy issue. Identifying the effect of direct payments on market participation faces endogeneity issues arising from the possible simultaneous determination of participation in support programmes and market participation. In order to achieve proper identification of the endogenous direct payments, we use a strategy of targeted identification search that employs several different methodological approaches. We find that direct payments for fruit and vegetables, and those for cereals and oilseeds have a positive effect on market participation. However, we cannot identify any definite effect of livestock payments.     

Host tourism aspirations as a point of departure for the sustainable livelihoods approach

The sustainable livelihoods (SL) approach offers a holistic framework and a practical toolkit to analyze tourism's impacts and interactions within a community. This study argues that the usefulness of the SL approach in tourism can be enhanced by ensuring that the approach is built on a genuine people-centered starting point. The exploration of the local community's representations of, and aspirations for, their roles in tourism as a future livelihood choice meets this need. To verify the value of this approach empirically, this study examined the case of Lhasa, Tibet, and local youth as the research respondents. The findings suggest that the young hosts in Lhasa urban area were heterogeneous in their responses to tourism as a future livelihood choice. They fell into four subgroups: in-betweeners, ambivalent supporters, alternative supporters, and lovers. Further, this study examined the profiles of these four subgroups and explored their responses. The study enhances the SL approach by taking tourism as an example and clearly defining the departure point for its adoption within the context of broader livelihoods portfolios. Additionally, it suggests some potential directions for tailored management strategies to meet youth and community perspectives.     

Does a Crisis Matter? Forest Policy Responses to the Mountain Pine Beetle Epidemic in British Columbia

“[a]n epidemic of catastrophic proportions”?Larry Pedersen, Chief Forester in 2003, in describing the impact of the outbreak. What factors are responsible for the introduction of new policies (especially those involving substantive change) is a phenomenon that is still poorly understood. Researchers have identified policy windows where a confluence of events, such as a change in government, the emergence of a new issue, and ongoing policy processes, come together to create the opportunity for new policy development. Natural disasters can open such policy windows by drawing attention to an issue and mobilizing political will. Yet at the same time, even if policy windows do open, they may not result in effective policy development. The institutional setting in which such policies are developed also plays a key role. In the case of the Canadian forest sector, the combination of public resources and private capital make policy development especially challenging. Although the scale of the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic in British Columbia is unprecedented, and will change the nature of the forest resource (and by extension the industry and communities that rely upon it), the policy response has been limited to short‐term measures. Although some policy reform was introduced, policy makers have yet to address the question of whether more fundamental changes are required in order to address the full consequences of the epidemic. La détermination des facteurs responsables de l’introduction de nouvelles politiques (particulièrement celles qui comportent des changements substantiels) demeurent un phénomène mal compris. Des chercheurs ont déterminé des fenêtres d’opportunité politique où divers événements, tels qu’un changement de gouvernement, l’émergence d’une nouvelle préoccupation et des processus politiques continus, convergent pour créer l’occasion d’élaborer de nouvelles politiques. Les catastrophes naturelles peuvent créer ces fenêtres d’opportunité politique en attirant l’attention sur une préoccupation et en mobilisant la volonté politique. Pourtant, même si des fenêtres d’opportunité politique s’ouvrent, elles peuvent ne pas se solder par l’élaboration de politiques efficaces. Le cadre institutionnel dans lequel ces politiques sont élaborées joue aussi un rôle important. Dans le cas du secteur forestier canadien, la combinaison de ressources publiques et de capitaux privés rend l’élaboration de politiques particulièrement délicate. Bien que l’étendue de l’épidémie de dendroctone du pin ponderosa en Colombie‐Britannique soit sans précédent et modifiera la nature de la ressource forestière (et par extension, l’industrie et les collectivités qui en dépendent), la réaction politique s’est limitée à des mesures à court terme. Malgré une certaine réforme des politiques, les décideurs doivent s’interroger sur la nécessité d’apporter ou non des changements fondamentaux supplémentaires pour surmonter les conséquences de l’épidémie.     

Casinos,casino size,and crime: A panel data analysis of Michigan counties

Growth in legal gaming in the United States over the past quarter century or so is well-documented. One important factor fueling this growth was the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which permitted Native American tribes to establish, under agreements or “compacts” with the states in which they are located, casinos offering what is known as Class III gaming: slot machines, blackjack, roulette, and other games. Since the passage of the Act, there have been 21 Native American casinos established in Michigan. Also, three non-Native American casinos opened in Detroit in 1999 and 2000. This growth in the number of casinos has sparked a wide-ranging debate over the social and economic impacts of casino development.The purpose of this research is to focus on the crime issue in the broader casino debate. We investigate the impact of these Michigan casinos on the rates of burglary, robbery, larceny and motor vehicle theft (property crimes) in casino host counties as well as in nearby counties. We employ a panel data set with annual observations on all 83 Michigan counties for the period 1994–2010. The dataset includes crime rates taken from the FBI crime data series, variables for the presence of a casino in a county or in a nearby county, the scale of a casino's operations as measured by revenues, and a variety of control variables suggested by the broader literature investigating the factors that determine crime rates generally.Our results suggest that in most cases the property crime rates studied are not affected by the presence or size of a casino in a county or in a nearby county. The largest such impact, which is negative, is for motor vehicle theft. The size of a casino does have a small positive effect on the motor vehicle theft rate.     

中国被忽视的非正规经济：现实与理论

中国的“非正规经济”就业人员（即没有工作保障,缺少福利和不受国家劳动法保护的劳工）已占今天2．83亿城镇就业人员总数中的1．68亿,比正规就业人员要多出一倍半。但是,今目的中国国家统计机构尚未真正正视非正规经济就业人员统计。其部分原因是当前的主流经济（以及社会）理论——即主要来自20世纪60年代在美国盛行的“二元经济”理论、“三部门理论”和“橄榄型”社会结构理论——的误导。这些理论共同构成了50年代和60年代风行美国的“现代化”模式。本文扼要论述该模式的关键论点,进而回顾70年代和80年代发展经济学“革命”中有关学者对其所作的批评,以及后来新古典经济学在美国新保守主义领导下进行的“反革命”辩驳,重在揭示论争双方的意识形态化偏颇,并突出各自的洞见,提倡适当结合双方正确的见解,由此建立去意识形态化的理论观点,以助于理解今天非正规经济的现实。     

Consuming dark tourism: A Thanatological Perspective

Despite increasing academic attention paid to dark tourism, understanding of the concept remains limited, particularly from a consumption perspective. That is, the literature focuses primarily on the supply of dark tourism; less attention, however, has been paid to the demand for ‘dark’ touristic experiences. This theoretical paper seeks to address this gap in the literature. Drawing upon the contemporary sociology of death, it explores the relationship between socio-cultural perspectives on mortality and the potential of dark tourism as a means of confronting death in modern societies. In so doing, it proposes a model of dark tourism consumption within a thanatological framework as a basis for further theoretical and empirical analysis of dark tourism.     

A typology of students based on academic entitlement

Two hundred ninety-three university business students were surveyed using an academic entitlement (AE) scale updated to include new technologies. Using factor analysis, three components of AE were identified: grade entitlement, behavioral entitlement, and service entitlement. A k-means clustering procedure was then applied to identify four groups based on the relative strength of the AE components: the model student, under the radar, instructor as servant, and the privileged. These groups were further characterized by additional demographic (i.e., parental income) and classroom variables (i.e., instructor response times). Findings can help business educators gain better insight into the AE construct and devise more effective instructional strategies.     

Analysis of the Service Dominant Logic network,authors, and articles

The present study analyses research conducted in Service Dominant Logic (S-D logic), providing an overview of its intellectual structure. For that purpose, a structured approach was adopted through the implementation of bibliometric methods, using co-citation analysis combined with performance analysis and an integrative science mapping approach, which considered a timeline, a graph, and a distance-based perspective. This allowed the identification of the leading authors and of six clusters of articles based on bibliographic coupling, along with the most prominent research themes clustered in five subdomains of research based on co-occurrence of terms. The networks extracted show the associations between the main articles and concepts treated by the S-D logic community, unveiling the salient challenges and prospective expansion facing its future theoretical and practical context.