Soil conservation in Swiss agriculture—Approaching abstract and symbolic meanings in farmers’ life-worlds

This paper explores the significance of ‘life-worlds’ for better understanding why farmers adopt or reject soil conservation measures and for identifying basic dimensions to be covered by social learning processes in Swiss agricultural soil protection. The study showed that farmers interpret soil erosion and soil conservation measures against the background of their entire life-world. By doing so, farmers consider abstract and symbolic meanings of soil conservation. This is, soil conservation measures have to be feasible and practical in the everyday farming routine, however, they also have to correspond with their aesthetic perception, their value system and their personal and professional identities. Consequently, by switching to soil conservation measures such as no-tillage farmers have to adapt not only the routines of their daily farming life, but also their perception of the aesthetics of cultivated land, underlying values and images of themselves. Major differences between farmers who adopt and farmers who reject no-tillage were found to depend on the degree of coherence they could create between the abstract and symbolic meanings of the soil conservation measure. From this perspective, implementation of soil protection measures faces the challenge of facilitating interactions between farmers, experts and scientists at a ‘deeper’ level, with an awareness of all significant dimensions that characterise the life-world. The paper argues that a certain level of shared symbolic meaning is essential to achieving mutual understanding in social learning processes.     

Choosing for others

Experiments conducted in the US and France were used to study how individuals make trade-offs between health and taste for themselves and others. When someone receives a choice made for them that differs from their preference, they experience a welfare loss; at least in the short-term. We measure the empirical magnitude of this loss, and suggest it play a role in assessing the desirability of paternalistic policies motivated by behavioural economics. We show that the welfare loss changes with the provision of new information and the impact of this information differs for the two countries.     

Overlapping Generations or Infinitely-Lived Agents: Intergenerational Altruism and the Economics of Global Warming

Do we need an overlapping generations model for the economics of global warming? To answer this question, an infinitely-lived agent (ILA) approach and an overlapping generations (OLG) model are contrasted. ILA and OLG can be viewed as polar representations of intergenerational altruism. With ILA an immortal agent acts through his investment/savings decisions as trustee on the behalf of the future generations. With OLG, agents need not behave altruistic. They simply save during working years and dissave completely during retirement. Nevertheless, ILA and OLG must not differ in their implication for greenhouse policy. Greenhouse gas abatement is a straightforward alternative to physical capital formation and, even without altruism, each age cohort has an incentive to provide current abatement in order to reduce future damages attributable to climate change. Indeed, under reasonable assumptions and parameter values, our simulations reveal such an invariance result. Provided carbon taxes are the only policy tool and tax revenues are recycled through socially mandated rules, projections of economic growth, climate change and energy consumption are only insignificantly affected by the choice of approach.     

(Finding) Pathways out of homelessness: An engaged,trans-disciplinary collaborative in the City of Tshwane

ABSTRACT

Street homelessness in the City of Tshwane was brought to public attention in the winter of 2014. This led to a composite research project involving different constituencies, including homeless people, to reflect on ways of addressing street homelessness in the city. This article serves as a conceptual and epistemological introduction to this collaborative research project entitled Pathways Out of Homelessness. The article argues for the use of a broad working definition of street homelessness that allows for complexities of homelessness to emerge, in order to discern diverse and appropriate alternatives.     

Environmental Impact of Foreign vs. Domestic Capital Investment in China

We compare environmental impacts associated with incoming foreign direct investment vs. domestic capital in China. We use aggregate data on Chinese provinces’ economic and pollution indicators to explore the effects of the financial origin of fixed capital. Our simultaneous models consider three prime channels through which these effects work: economic scale, sectoral composition and pollution intensity. Results show that emissions associated with foreign‐financed capital are lower than with domestically financed capital for some but not all of the considered types of pollution.     

Does foreign aid promote recipient exports to donor countries?

This paper uses the gravity model of trade to investigate the effect of foreign aid on exports of aid recipients to donor countries. Most of the theoretical work emphasises the possible negative impact of aid on recipient countries’ exports, primarily due to exchange rate appreciation, disregarding possible positive effects of aid in overcoming supply bottlenecks and promoting bilateral trade relations. Using non-stationary panel (cointegration) estimators to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias, we find that the net effect of aid on recipient countries’ exports is insignificant, both for our sample (of 123 countries) as a whole and for important regional sub-samples. This finding is in line with the small or insignificant macroeconomic impact of aid found in earlier studies and also suggests that exporters in recipient countries are not benefiting from improved trade relations with donors.