The paper is a comprehensive review of the Spanish National Hydrological Plan, which proposes to transfer water from the lower part of the Ebro River up to the Levante basins, around 912 km away. The National Hydrological Plan is a conventional, static plan, which focuses primarily on supply management. The plan is based on the explicit assumption that the world will change only incrementally during its entire economic life of 100-200 years. The analysis indicates that much of the increased water demands forecasted are unlikely to materialize due to increasing emphasis on demand management practices, major structural changes in the agricultural sector that will occur by 2020 and the requirements of the Water Directive of the European Union, which must be fulfilled by 2010. Even now, the cost per cubic metre of water delivered at the end of the transfer is nearly twice the cost of desalinated water. The National Hydrological Plan in its present form cannot be justified for economic, environmental and social reasons. In addition, the plan will not be necessary if demand management practices are implemented. 相似文献
In technology adoption, herd behaviour can lead to a suboptimal outcome as shown, among others, by Choi (1997). However, empirics
find little support for the idea that a less efficient technology can conquer the market and lock out a more efficient one.
Accordingly, we improve and generalize Choi's results, by introducing an additional source of uncertainty: the economic environment.
We investigate how the economic environment can affect herding and consequently the efficiency of the technology choice. The
result is a smaller adoption bias. In the limit, firms may optimally experiment with the new technology that turns out to
be social welfare improving. 相似文献
We explore the impact of macroeconomic volatility on the distribution of income. Using a cross‐section of developed and developing countries, we find that greater output volatility, defined as the standard deviation of the rate of output growth, is associated with a higher Gini coefficient and income share of the top quintile. The coefficients suggest that a strong effect on inequality resulting from a reduction in volatility: the Gini coefficient of a country like Chile would fall by 6 points if it were to reduce its volatility to the same level as Sweden or Norway. Our results seem not to be driven by the high‐inequality/high‐volatility Latin American countries. 相似文献
We evaluate the effect of performance-based scholarship programs for post-secondary students on student time use and effort and whether these effects are different for students we hypothesize may be more or less responsive to incentives. To do so, we administered a time-use survey as part of a randomized experiment in which community college students in New York City were randomly assigned to be eligible for a performance-based scholarship or to a control group that was only eligible for the standard financial aid. This paper contributes to the literature by attempting to get inside the “black box” of how students respond to a monetary incentive to improve their educational attainment. We find that students eligible for a scholarship devoted more time to educational activities, increased the quality of effort toward and engagement with their studies, and allocated less time to leisure. Additional analyses suggest that students who were plausibly more myopic (place less weight on future benefits) were more responsive to the incentives, but we find no evidence that students who are arguably more time constrained were less responsive to the incentives.
This article presents the process of creation and expansion of the Fundação Abrinq pelos Direitos da Criança et do Adolescente (Abrinq Foundation for Rights of Children and Adolescents). Established in 1990 by a group of entrepreneurs from the Brazilian Toy Manufacturers’ Association (ABRINQ), the Fundação Abrinq has been successful at raising the issue of children in Brazilian society by bridging business and several other sectors of society. This article more particularly examines (1) the societal challenges related to the situation of children in Brazil; (2) the creation and development of the Abrinq Foundation; and (3) the achievements of this innovative bridging organization over 15 years. 相似文献