Valuing a Natura 2000 network site to inform land use options using a discrete choice experiment: An illustration from the Basque Country

One of the main problems that public institutions face in the management of protected areas, such as the European Natura 2000 network, is determining how to design and implement sustainable management plans that account for the wide range of marketed and non-marketed benefits they provide to society. This paper presents an application of a stated preference valuation approach aimed at evaluating the social preferences of the population of the Basque Country, Spain, for the key attributes of a regional Natura 2000 network site. According to our results, individuals’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) is higher for attributes associated with non-use values (native tree species and biodiversity conservation) than for attributes associated with use values (agricultural development and commercial forestry). The paper concludes that management policies related to Natura 2000 network sites should account for both for the importance of non-use values and the heterogeneity of the population's preferences in order to minimize potential land use conflicts.     

Did rent deregulation alter tenure choice decisions in the Czech Republic?

Our study is the first that explicitly links rent deregulation and the choice between owning and renting (the tenure choice) using household decisions over a 1‐year period. The rent deregulation process in the Czech Republic started in 2006, two years after joining the European Union. By design, the maximum regulated rent appreciation depended explicitly on real estate prices, which accelerated the pace of deregulation due to rapidly rising prices at the time. A unique dataset enables us to track the tenure choice of households from consumption surveys for subsequent years. The proportion of households that switched from renting to owning sharply increased among renters of regulated apartments. We show that this change was caused by the deregulation process. In contrast, rent deregulation makes owners and renters paying market rent less likely to change ownership status.     

Creationism versus Evolutionism in Economics: Societal Consequences of Economic Doctrine

In the 1940s and 1950s, institutionalist economists rapidly lost their influence over American economics. In parallel, a new mainstream emerged, and the institutionalists were extremely dissatisfied with the path taken by the economic science. We analyze the opinions and feelings about this context to shed light on the institutionalists’ understanding of the new mainstream economics. We construct a historical account of the institutionalists’ dissatisfaction with post-war economics based on archival material from the personal papers of Allan Gruchy, John Gambs, John Blair, and Clarence Ayres. In the period analyzed, the economists, who would later found the Association for Evolutionary Economics, acted as dissenters rather than institutionalists. In part, this explains the pluralistic path that the association has followed ever since its foundation.