Forest transition in Northern Spain: Local responses on large-scale programmes of field-afforestation

Public field-afforestation schemes have been designed and widely implemented as a measure to alleviate uneven distribution, generate economic growth in rural areas and maintain or improve natural resources. The literature on forest management and planning has improved land-related information systems, allowing policy-makers to design and implement future policies on the allocation of forestland uses, and to forecast the land requirements of the target population more closely. The aim of this article is to empirically examine and validate the temporal and spatial land use changes and the socioeconomic effects linked to field-afforestation on private lands in the province of Lugo (Galicia, Northern Spain) at the municipal, parish and individual farm holding levels. Two main top-down field-afforestation programmes are reviewed in the study area: the national programme of public afforestations started with the implementation of Ley de Patrimonio Forestal del Estado (National Forest Estate Act; NFE) from 1941 to 2000, and the European aid scheme for forestry measures established under European Council Regulation No. 2080/1992 from 1993 to 1997. The results of a survey, targeted at 1355 farmers and conducted through questionnaires in the province of Lugo in 2004, complete the analysis of public intervention in forest management. The results indicate that the specific social, economic and environmental context of an agricultural and forestry area involves a differential heritage of land customs that determines a differential response model to forest programmes of land allocation and planning. Therefore, this must not be underestimated by the quantitative or qualitative general objectives of large-scale policies.     

A Note on Student Academic Performance

ABSTRACT This study compares the educational performance of both highly rural and highly urban area students to students from areas of moderate population density. The results suggest (1) that students from both highly rural and highly urban areas perform similarly, but less well, in terms of educational achievement than students from moderate areas, and (2) that empirical studies of student educational performance should include measures of both cognitive skills and educational market competition as explanatory variables. The policy implications of this research include our recommendation that policymakers consider students from highly urban areas to be subjects of concern similar to students from highly rural areas in attempts to affect expected student achievement. Implications also include our recommendation that policymakers recognize that competitive educational market systems that allow educational consumers greater choice in the acquisition of educational services are those systems within which student academic achievement is higher.     

Pitfalls in estimates of the relationship between stock returns and inflation

Empirical tests of the Fisher hypothesis give conflicting results, regardless of whether income growth is accommodated in the estimates. This paper shows theoretically and empirically that standard methods of testing the Fisher hypothesis give biased results and that the bias depends on the specification of the Fisher equation, the process governing inflation, measurement of inflation expectations, and the time aggregation of the data. Alternative tests show that share markets take several years to adjust to innovations in inflation and therefore that the Fisher hypothesis cannot be maintained. Helpful comments and suggestions from Hans Christian Kongsted, Darrel Turkington and seminar participants at the University of Western Australia, and University of Konstanz and, particularly, two referees, are gratefully acknowledged.     

Economic and Monetary Union – Current Fiscal Disturbances and the Future

At the moment of its setting up the Economic and Monetary Union did not meet the criteria of the optimum currency area. Neither does it today. The crisis of public finance in the eurozone results from the abandonment public finance reforms, lack of consistency in enforcing the decision of the Stability and Growth Pact and, additionally, economic recession and financial crisis. Further functioning of the eurozone will depend on radical reforms of public finance and structural reforms enhancing efficiency of the market as an adjustment mechanism, and competitiveness of economies. The very establishment of the European Stabilization Mechanism and European Financial Stability cannot make up for the above mentioned necessary undertakings. It is important to change the socioeconomic model existing in the EU member countries.     

An approximation method to derive confidence intervals for quantiles with some applications

Standard jackknife confidence intervals for a quantile Q _y (β) are usually preferred to confidence intervals based on analytical variance estimators due to their operational simplicity. However, the standard jackknife confidence intervals can give undesirable coverage probabilities for small samples sizes and large or small values of β. In this paper confidence intervals for a population quantile based on several existing estimators of a quantile are derived. These intervals are based on an approximation for the cumulative distribution function of a studentized quantile estimator. Confidence intervals are empirically evaluated by using real data and some applications are illustrated. Results derived from simulation studies show that proposed confidence intervals are narrower than confidence intervals based on the standard jackknife technique, which assumes normal approximation. Proposed confidence intervals also achieve coverage probabilities above to their nominal level. This study indicates that the proposed method can be an alternative to the asymptotic confidence intervals, which can be unknown in practice, and the standard jackknife confidence intervals, which can have poor coverage probabilities and give wider intervals.