Children aged 9-14 living in disadvantaged areas in England: Opportunities and barriers for cycling

The aim of this paper is to take a holistic perspective to explore levels of cycling and opportunities and barriers to increase children’s safer cycling in disadvantaged areas in England. The study was one part of a larger study which explored the factors underlying the high level of road traffic casualties especially among children in the most disadvantaged areas of England and to explore how this impacts on mobility and quality of life. The methods involved a cross sectional survey comprising school based questionnaire surveys with children aged 9-14 and focus groups with parents who had children within this age range. The surveys were conducted in 2007 and the focus groups during 2008. 4286 children completed the survey and eight focus groups were held. Bike ownership (77%) was high, use in previous week moderate (39%) but only 2% cycled to school. Ownership was significantly lower in minority ethnic groups. Despite young children’s strong preference to travel by cycle (30%) than walk or go by car, most parents felt it was too hazardous. It is unlikely that these findings would be any different from the rest of England, however the combination of environmental and social factors may elevate the risks for young cyclists in these areas. This paper concludes that a number of barriers exist to increasing levels of cycling among children living in disadvantaged areas particularly amongst ethnic groups. These barriers could be addressed by environmental modifications to reduce speeds and by reducing the levels of antisocial driving and riding in residential areas and around destinations where children travel, by providing cycle training to improve children’s skills and parent’s confidence, and by providing secure storage facilities for bikes. Until these barriers are addressed it is unlikely that cycling will increase despite the strong preferences children have to travel by bike. Such preferences to cycle provide an opportunity for local authorities to act on.     

Inequalities for the De Pril approximation to the distribution of the number of policies with claims

In the present paper, we give sufficient conditions for an ordering of De Pril approximations of the distribution of the number of claims in an insurance portfolio of independent policies. Possible extensions are discussed, both for the De Pril approximation and the Kornya approximation. A numerical example is given.     

Inequalities of opportunity in the access and use of telecommunication services in Togo

The liberalization of the telecommunications sector in Togo aimed at ensuring access to a better quality of telecommunication services at affordable prices to everyone. While the liberalization policy has increased competition in the sector and reduced significantly telecommunication services prices charged to costumers, statistics on the access and use of telecommunication services in Togo reveal disparities with respect to individuals' socio-economic characteristics which could be an indication of the existence of inequalities of opportunities in the access and use of these services.This paper investigates the inequalities of opportunity in the access and use of telecommunication services in Togo using a parametric approach. The results of estimations indicate that, inequalities of opportunities are larger for men and the elderly than respectively women and youths and are more pronounced in urban areas and regions such as the Plateaux and Savanna regions. Moreover, the circumstance variables such as the ‘place of residence’ and the ‘region’ are the key variables in explaining the inequalities of opportunities in the access and use of telecommunication services in Togo. So, policies toward reducing inequalities of opportunity in the access and use of telecommunication services in Togo should be designed with regards to men, the elderly, and people living in urban areas and regions such as the Plateaux and Savanna regions.     

Inequalities in the London bicycle sharing system revisited: impacts of extending the scheme to poorer areas but then doubling prices

Cycling confers transport, health and environmental benefits, and bicycle sharing systems are an increasingly popular means of promoting urban cycling. Following the launch of the London bicycle sharing system (LBSS) in 2010, women and residents of deprived areas were under-represented among initial users. This paper examines how the profile of users has changed across the scheme’s first 3 years, using total-population registration and usage data. We find that women still make fewer than 20% of all ‘registered-use’ LBSS trips, although evidence from elsewhere suggests that the introduction of ‘casual’ use has encouraged a higher overall female share of trips. The proportion of trips by registered users from ‘highly-deprived areas’ (in the top tenth nationally for income deprivation) rose from 6% to 12%. This was due not only to the 2012 LBSS extension to some of London’s poorest areas, but also to a steadily increasing share of trips by residents of highly-deprived areas in the original LBSS zone. Indirect evidence suggests, however, that the twofold increase in LBSS prices in January 2013 has disproportionately discouraged casual-use trips among residents of poorer areas. We conclude that residents in deprived areas can and do use bicycle sharing systems if these are built in their local areas, and may do so progressively more over time, but only if the schemes remain affordable relative to other modes.     

Inequalities and fluctuations in a dynamic general equilibrium model

   Summary. In the present paper a tractable two-sector neo-classical growth model with heterogeneous agents is considered. The local dynamic properties of the equilibrium path are analyzed in relation with the underlying characteristics of the economy. In particular, the existence of fluctuations is related to the degree of heterogeneity in labor and in capital endowments. When applied to international trade theory, the analysis shows that free trade may distabilize a world economy that is originally stable under the regime of autarky. Received: December 28, 1998; revised version: October 29, 1999     

Brand inequalities in the loyalty-effects of purchases

Choice models in marketing have generally included the effects of loyalty on individual choice behavior.Loyalty has been typically measured as proportion of purchases or as an exponentially smoothed index of past purchases. An underlying assumption of both measures is that all brands gain the same increase in loyalty with a purchase. However, such an assumption may not hold when the competing brands are not comparable. We propose a new exponential smoothing measure which incorporates brand-specific parameters for the loyalty effects of purchases. A choice model, calibrated on individual level data for the detergent category, is used to compare the proposed measure with its traditional version. This comparison reveals that the new approach improves both the fit and predictive performance of the choice model. The results also suggest that the loyalty effects of purchases are likely to be lower for brands which are purchased on price promotions and higher for expensive brands.     

Upper and lower bounds for expected utility

Summary.   The decision-theoretic literature has developed very few techniques to bound the expected utility of a random variable when only simple statistics like its median or mode or mean are known. One reason for this lack of results is that we are missing a convenient way to link probability theory and expected utility. This paper is written to demonstrate a general (and genuinely probabilistic) technique to obtain upper and lower bounds for the expected utility of a lottery. Received: December 14, 1999; revised version: March 8, 2000     

Whites,Blacks, and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Brown</Emphasis> in the Labor Market in Brazil: A Study About Inequalities

This paper examines inequalities between white and black and brown populations in Brazil within occupations that require university degree. The main result confirms that once reached the university degree, blacks/brown usually obtain smaller but comparable income to that of whites. Although some racial discrimination in labor market may exist, such result corroborates other studies that identify schooling differentials as the main reason for the high income inequality found in Brazil.     

Impact of institutional determinants on income inequalities in Indonesia during the Era Reformasi

This article examines the links between a selected group of institutional factors and income inequalities. The Indonesian transformation process, referred to as the Era Reformasi, which started in 1999, was a substantial institutional change in the social, political, and economic sphere that could have impacted income inequalities. We conducted an analysis based on Engle and Granger’s (1987) cointegration technique and the autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) model, which allowed us to assess the short-run and long-run links, as well as causal relationships between variables. Particular attention was paid to governance indicators and economic freedom as factors that influence other economic and political institutions. The results show that improvements in institutional factors, namely economic freedom, corruption control, government effectiveness, regulation quality, and voice and accountability, significantly reduced income inequalities during the Era Reformasi in Indonesia.