Future images of meat consumption in 2030

The issue of meat consumption has been a subject of interest that has been looked at from environmental, animal and human perspectives. This paper contributes to the discussion by clarifying the diversity of views with regard to the future of meat consumption. Two round Delphi expert interviews and a consumer survey were conducted in order to collect information. Five coherent future images were constructed: Traditional Approach, Business as Usual, Humans First, Wellness and Vegetarian Society. The discussion part of the paper presents possible ways of influencing meat consumption according to the holders of these different images of the future.     

Land reforms and population growth

One of the greatest puzzles in demographic history is why in the rich and urbanized England, fertility declined much later than in the poor and rural France. We consider the effects of a land reform on demographic growth by a family-optimization model where relative per capita wealth generates social status and welfare. We show that tenant farming is the major obstacle to escaping the Malthusian trap with high fertility and low productivity. A land reform provides peasants with higher returns for their investments, inducing them to increase their productivity and status rather than their family size. Consequently, the population growth rate slows down, but the productivity of land increases.     

Investment, expropriation, and unionization

In this paper, I examine an economy where output is produced from labor, capital and public services, and where firms and labor unions bargain over labor conditions and lobby the government over union bargaining power and public services. I compare three institutional cases: (a) competitive wage settlement, (b) bargaining over wages and employment, and (c) bargaining over wages only. I show that in cases (a) and (b) the government expropriates investment rents, but right-to-manage bargaining (c) protects investors from this expropriation.      

Optimal patent length and breadth in an economy with creative destruction and non-diversifiable risk

In this paper, I examine the optimal patent shape in an economy in which R&D firms innovate and imitate, households face non-diversifiable risk and there is externality in production and R&D. With non-diversifiable risk, a household’s consumption and investment decisions are interlinked. This economy contains industries of two kinds: monopoly industries with an innovator only, and duopoly industries with an innovator and an imitator. I define patent length as the expected time in which an innovation is imitated, and patent breadth as the innovator’s profit share in an industry after a successful imitation. The government can control patent length by the requirements for accepting a substitute for a patented good, and patent breadth by imposing compulsory licensing and royalties for the patentee after a successful imitation. I show that the stronger the externality in production relative to R&D is, the slower the optimal growth rate, the larger the optimal proportion of duopoly industries, and the longer and narrower the optimal patent.