Effect of Consumption Values on Women’s Choice Behavior Toward Organic Foods: The Case of Organic Yogurt in Iran

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of consumption values (i.e., functional value, social value, emotional value, conditional value, epistemic value, environmental value, and health value) on women’s choice behavior toward organic yogurt. Structural equation modeling is used to assess data collected by a questionnaire survey. The results indicate that functional value–quality, functional value–taste, and functional value–price; conditional value; epistemic value; and health value have positive effects on choosing organic yogurt by women, and social value, emotional value, and environmental value have no effects on the subject. Among variables, epistemic value and health value have the highest impact on consumer choice behavior toward organic yogurt. So this study concludes that the main influence factors on choice behavior regarding organic yogurt are epistemic value and health value. In fact, consumers have high knowledge about organic yogurt benefits related to their health.     

Tourism,tourist learning and sustainability: an exploratory discussion of complexities,problems and opportunities

Learning is often a central element of tourism. Tourists can learn actively, i.e. with a specific purpose, as well as passively through the comparison of values, norms and customs. It has been argued that travel supports active learning that has positive outcomes for sustainability, for instance, in the context of conservation. Yet, the complexity of active and passive learning processes and their outcomes for environmental sustainability and sustainable lifestyles remain insufficiently understood. Against this background, the paper discusses selected learning outcomes for transportation (air travel), accommodation (hotels) and activities (theme park visits). Findings suggest that “desirable” learning (defined as pro-sustainable development learning) in tourism may be very limited, while in particular, passive learning processes which redefine social norms frequently have outcomes that are largely detrimental to sustainable lifestyles. They include forms of moral licensing, the diffusion of responsibilities as well as the attenuation of the negative consequences of travel. Given the economic, social and cultural importance of tourism vís-a-vís its global implications for environmental sustainability, learning outcomes in tourism deserve to be studied in greater detail, while strategies need to be devised to enhance sustainable learning effects.     

文化差异对消费者奢侈品购买行为的影响——以中国和英国市场为例

越来越多的企业开始参与国际化进程。而在这其中,企业为了更成功地实施全球营销策略,文化是其中一个不容忽视的关键因素。顾客的购买动机和消费行为都会因为文化环境的不同而各异。本文意在研究跨文化差异对中英消费者奢侈品消费行为的影响——中国以集体主义文化为代表,英国以个人主义文化为代表。英国近年来奢侈品消费市场正迅猛增加而中国更是成为世界最大奢侈品消费国。在前人研究的基础上,本文将着重研究文化差异对奢侈品消费行为的影响。通过比较分析,希望本文的研究能够为营销者们在一个文化多元的全球市场中提供一些建议和参考。     

中国能耗增长的阶段性特征:基于LMDI模型的实证研究

本文运用与SDA法相结合的LMDI分解模型,根据能耗增长特点分四个阶段探讨了包含能源强度、中间投入结构变动的技术效应和包含消费、投资、出口变动的最终需求效应对中国能源消耗增长的时段驱动模式。结果表明:(1)1997-2010年间,各阶段"三驾马车"引领的最终需求效应不单是规模庞大,也应相对稳定,能耗增长的异常波动主要取决于技术效应;(2)能源强度效应一直起着节能降耗的积极作用,而中间投入结构自2002年后向高耗能依存特征转变,成为能耗增长的推动因素;(3)2006年开始实施的能源强度政策有效改变了能耗增长轨迹,而国际金融危机的突然爆发扭曲了政府政策执行的初衷、方式和效率。     

海外学者关于中国收入和财富分配不平等问题的研究综述

文章首先分析了海外学者关于中国收入和财富分配不平等问题研究的观点;其次,分析了海外学者对改革与分配相关问题研究的方法与特点;最后在研究的基础上结合我国实际并提出相关的建议。     

金融发展影响能源消费结构吗?——跨国经验分析

金融发展经常被认为是经济增长的一个重要推动因素.同样的,金融发展也可能会影响能源需求.金融发展可以通过促进金融系统发展、带动经济增长并促进产业结构调整这样的传导途径,使能源消费结构发生变动.本文对全球55 个国家23 年(1985～2007)的面板数据库的研究发现,金融发展的确会影响能源消费与需求,进而影响能源消费结构的变动.实证结果表明,金融发展会促进"化石燃料"能源和替代能源消费的增加,减少可再生能源的消费,对能源消费结构的改善有着一定的促进作用.所以,在制定能源相关政策和对高能耗部门进行产业调整时,要考虑金融发展的影响.     

A theory of persistent income inequality

This paper explores the dynamics of income inequality by studying the evolution of human capital investment and neighborhood choice for a population of families. Parents affect the conditional probability distribution of their children's income through the choice of a neighborhood in which to live. Neighborhood location affects children both through local public finance of education as well as through sociological effects. These forces combine to create incentives for wealthier families to segregate themselves into economically homogeneous neighborhoods. Economic stratification combines with strong neighborhoodwide feedback effects to transmit economic status across generations, leading to persistent income inequality.     

Aggregate and distributional impacts of China’s household responsibility system

It is 40 years since China started to abandon collective farming, with initial rural reforms in 1978 that culminated in adoption of the household responsibility system (HRS). Existing studies of impacts of these reforms do not consider nonrandom spread of the HRS, spillovers from early adopters, or distributional effects. In this paper, the synthetic control method and spatial autoregressive panel models with autoregressive errors are used to estimate impacts of the HRS that account for these features. The HRS had a significant positive effect on grain output and food supply in China, while also helping to reduce regional inequality.     

Asset indexes and the measurement of poverty,inequality and welfare in Southeast Asia

Using data on household consumer durables from the Asian Barometer Survey, this paper examines the evolution of inequality, poverty and welfare in six countries of South East Asia: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. We start by deriving the most common order of acquisition of these durables, using first an algorithm proposed by Paroush (1965), and then Item Response Theory. We also compute the frequency distribution of the number of durables owned by households. We then use these results to compute inequality, poverty and achievement or welfare indices adapted to the case of ordinal variables.Our empirical results confirm the existence of an order of acquisition. The results show that inequality was higher in Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines and lower in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. A similar classification of countries was obtained when computing multidimensional poverty indices.Finally, using the welfare or achievement index recently introduced by Apouey et al. (2019), we found that welfare was generally higher in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia and lower in Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines.     

Critical representations of Southern African inequality: Transcending outmoded exhibition and museum politics

ABSTRACT

Illustrating inequality to a more general public – beyond those concerned purely with public policy and research – presents various challenges. Museums have often served a function of memorialising both the impressive steps forward and major barriers to social progress, as a form of remembrance and understanding, although the twentieth century format in South Africa was generally embedded within colonial and racist self-glorification. The potential to transcend outmoded exhibition and museum politics with a new approach based on dialogical not didactic presentation, arises with inequality. In this exploration of how such an approach might unfold in the world's most unequal major city (as judged by the Palma Ratio), Johannesburg, the concept of threshold is introduced. Physical and conceptual access through overcoming thresholds is explored through a specific site, the Old Post Office, and through two artifacts that reveal structural power that generates inequality: Durban's sanitation system and Eastern Zimbabwe's diamond fields.