Evolving national park models: The emergence of an economic imperative and its effect on the contested nature of the 'national' park concept in Northern Ireland.

National park models have evolved in tandem with the emergence of a multifunctional countryside. Sustainable development has been added to the traditional twin aims of conservation and recreation. This is typified by recent national park designations, such as the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland. A proposed Mournes national park in Northern Ireland has evolved a stage further with a model of national park to deliver national economic goals envisaged by government. This seeks to commodify the natural landscape. This paper compares Cairngorm and Mourne stakeholders’ views on the principal features of both models: park aims, management structures and planning functions. While Cairngorm stakeholders were largely positive from the outset, the model of national park introduced is not without criticism. Conversely, Mourne stakeholders have adopted an anti-national park stance. Nevertheless, the model of national park proposed possessing a strong economic imperative, an absence of the Sandford Principle as a means to manage likely conflicts, and lacking any planning powers in its own right, may still be insufficient to bring about widespread support for a Mourne national park. Such a model is also likely to accelerate the degradation of the Mourne landscape. Competing national identities (British and Irish) provide an additional dimension to the national park debate in Northern Ireland. Deep ideological cleavages are capable of derailing the introduction of a national park irrespective of the model proposed. In Northern Ireland the national park debate is not only about reconciling environmental and economic interests but also political and ethno-national differences.

Structural Breaks in Mortality Models and their Consequences

In recent years, the issue of life expectancy has become of upmost importance to pension providers, insurance companies and the government bodies in the developed world. Significant and consistent improvements in mortality rates and, hence, life expectancy have led to unprecedented increases in the cost of providing for older ages. This has resulted in an explosion of stochastic mortality models forecasting trends in mortality data in order to anticipate future life expectancy and, hence, quantify the costs of providing for future aging populations. Many stochastic models of mortality rates identify linear trends in mortality rates by time, age and cohort, and forecast these trends into the future using standard statistical methods. The modeling approaches used failed to capture the effects of any structural change in the trend and, thus, potentially produced incorrect forecasts of future mortality rates. In this paper, we look at a range of leading stochastic models of mortality and test for structural breaks in the trend time series.