Definition of adventure travel: Conceptual framework for empirical application from the providers’ perspective

The growth of adventure travel has been accompanied by an enormous variety and availability of adventure travel products in international travel and tourism. This study attempts to search for a comprehensive definition of adventure travel from the providers’ perspective in order to build a conceptual framework for empirical application. A qualitative analysis of past leisure or recreation theories identified six major component variables which define adventure travel. Together with these six components, several alternative definitions of adventure travel are studied in detail as part of the research. This study proposes a new definition of adventure travel, as a standard tool for measuring and segmenting the adventure travel market.     

Measuring productivity growth when technological change is biased–a new index and an application to UK agriculture

Productivity growth is conventionally measured by indices representing discreet approximations of the Divisia TEP index under the assumption that technological change is Hicks-neutral. When this assumption is violated, these indices are no longer meaningful because they conflate the effects of factor accumulation and technological change. We propose a way of adjusting the conventional TFP index that solves this problem. The method adopts a latent variable approach to the measurement of technical change biases that provides a simple means of correcting product and factor shares in the standard Tornqvist-Theil TFP index. An application to UK agriculture over the period 1953–2000 demonstrates that technical progress is strongly biased. The implications of that bias for productivity measurement are shown to be very large, with the conventional TFP index severely underestimating productivity growth. The result is explained primarily by the fact that technological change has favoured the rapidly accumulating factors against labour, the factor leaving the sector.     

Poverty functions and the aged population

This article examines trends in poverty among the elderly in the United States from two perspectives. "First, we are interested in changes that took place in the magnitude, characteristics and incidence of poverty within this sector, as a result of the functioning of the economy as well as the poverty programme during the past decade. Our second primary objective is to present analytical models of the severity of poverty and use these models to describe techniques that might be employed in evaluating ways of alleviating poverty in one category of the aged poor where it seems most acute and most intractable, i.e. aged women living alone."