Suchergebnisse

Facing one of the most dangerous conservation crises in history - acid rain - lawmakers, industry leaders, and activists embraced an attitude of civil engagement that sought common ground and acceptance of compromise solutions on all sides. As a result, they achieved a spectacular outcome. This approach was also at work when another planet-threatening event - ozone depletion - was reversed. In this book, the author, former head of the Izaak Walton League, takes stock of what has been accomplished and what has been squandered in the many environmental contests in which he was involved during his forty-year career as a conservationist. In seeking to identify the strategies that worked and to pinpoint why progress on so many important issues never materialized, the author realized that the most important predictor of success or failure was the willingness of opposing interests to find common ground and to compromise in order to attain mutually important goals. Polling demonstrates that, overwhelmingly, Americans care about the environment but are less enthusiastic about environmentalists. Accordingly, the author issues a pointed critique for activism of the "rather fight than win" variety. But he is also critical of conservative interests that oppose environmental legislation as a matter of principle while forgetting that a long string of cost-effective environmental legislation - from the Clean Air Act to the Wilderness Act - was passed by overwhelming bipartisan margins and signed into law by Republican presidents in the 1970s. The author makes a convincing case that thinking and acting ideologically rather than strategically is ultimately bad for the environment. More than a simplistic call for civility or yet another admonition that we all "work together," this book offers practical lessons and a positive vision from a seasoned veteran on how to create support instead of opposition, how to recognize natural allies, and how to acknowledge common purpose in the name of progress.

ABSTRACTL. K. C. Chan (1983) and R. B. Barsky et al. (1986) have demonstrated that a tax cut financed by bonds to be repaid from proportional income taxes on uncertain future income, by reducing the latter's riskiness, stimulates current consumption ‐ Ricardian equivalence does not hold. However, their two‐period models exclude the possibility that future taxes are uncertain. In this paper a three‐period model is developed that, by allowing the government two periods in which to collect taxes, introduces ex ante tax rate uncertainty. This renders the result concerning Ricardian equivalence ambiguous. By comparison, taxes levied as lump sums and via a 'lottery' respectively produce the 'usual' effects (zero and negative) on consumption.

AbstractWe present a new method for determining the point values for additive multi‐attribute value models with performance categories. The method, which we refer to as PAPRIKA (Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives), involves the decision‐maker pairwise ranking potentially all undominated pairs of all possible alternatives represented by the value model. The number of pairs to be explicitly ranked is minimized by the method identifying all pairs implicitly ranked as corollaries of the explicitly ranked pairs. We report on simulations of the method's use and show that if the decision‐maker explicitly ranks pairs defined on just two criteria at‐a‐time, the overall ranking of alternatives produced by the value model is very highly correlated with the true ranking. Therefore, for most practical purposes decision‐makers are unlikely to need to rank pairs defined on more than two criteria, thereby reducing the elicitation burden. We also describe a successful real‐world application involving the scoring of a value model for prioritizing patients for cardiac surgery in New Zealand. We conclude that although the new method entails more judgments than traditional scoring methods, the type of judgment (pairwise rankings of undominated pairs) is arguably simpler and might reasonably be expected to reflect the preferences of decision‐makers more accurately. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Models of endogenous economic growth typically assume that aggregate production is characterised by increasing returns to scale, often as a result of the accumulation of physical and human capital. In this paper, an international data‐set on formal educational attainments is used to disaggregate total employment in order to estimate a Cobb‐Douglas aggregate production function. The function is estimated, using a pooled cross‐section time‐series model, for a selection of high income OECD countries for five years in the period 1960‐85. The estimation results suggest that increasing returns to scale prevailed.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a rating and scoring tool for measuring small and medium enterprises' (SMEs) reputation, engagement and goodwill (REG), including internet presence and following on social media, by an exploratory study undertaken in New Zealand.


Design/methodology/approach
A discrete choice experiment (DCE) applying the PAPRIKA method via an online survey was conducted to determine weights representing the relative importance of six indicators related to SMEs' REG. Usable responses were received from 159 people involved with SMEs. Cluster analysis to identify participants with similar patterns of weights was performed.


Findings
The six indicators, in decreasing order of importance (mean weights in parentheses), are: "captured" customer opinions about the business (0.28); contact with customer database (0.19); website traffic (0.16); Google Search ranking (0.15); size of customer database, (0.11); and following on social media (0.11). These indicators and weights can be used to rate and score individual SMEs. The cluster analysis indicates that participants' age has some influence on their weights.


Research limitations/implications
Only 159 usable responses for the DCE.


Practical implications
The indicators and their weights provide a practical and inexpensive tool for measuring SMEs' REG.


Originality/value
This is the first study to use a DCE to determine weights representing the relative importance of indicators included in a tool for measuring SMEs' REG. The tool is innovative because it includes readily available indicators of firms' internet presence and following on social media.