Inequalities in diet and nutrition

The inequality of nutrition and obesity re-focuses concern on who in society is consuming the worst diet. Identification of individuals with the worst of dietary habits permits for targeting interventions to assuage obesity among the population segment where it is most prevalent. We argue that the use of fiscal interventions does not appropriately take into account the economic, social and health circumstances of the intended beneficiaries of the policy. This paper reviews the influence of socio-demographic factors on nutrition and health status and considers the impacts of nutrition policy across the population drawing on methodologies from both public health and welfare economics. The effects of a fat tax on diet are found to be small and while other studies show that fat taxes saves lives, we show that average levels of disease risk do not change much: those consuming particularly bad diets continue to do so. Our results also suggest that the regressivity of the policy increases as the tax becomes focused on products with high saturated fat contents. A fiscally neutral policy that combines the fat tax with a subsidy on fruit and vegetables is actually more regressive because consumption of these foods tends to be concentrated in socially undeserving households. We argue that when inequality is of concern, population-based measures must reflect this and approaches that target vulnerable populations which have a shared propensity to adopt unhealthy behaviours are appropriate.

The distributional consequences of a fiscal food policy: evidence from the UK

The literature on fiscal food policies focuses on their effectiveness in altering diets and improving health, while this paper focuses on their welfare costs. A formal welfare economics framework is developed to calculate the combined individualistic and distributional impacts of a tax-subsidy. Distributional characteristics of foods targeted by a tax tend to be concentrated in lower-income households. Further, consumption of fruit and vegetables tends to be concentrated in higher-income households; therefore, a subsidy on such foods increases regressivity. Aggregate welfare changes that result from a fiscal food policy are found to range from an increase of 1.41 per cent to a reduction of 2.06 per cent according to whether a subsidy is included, the degree of inequality aversion, and whether substitution among foods is allowed.

General systems perspective on achieving continuous synergy in a project organisation

Studies of construction labour productivity have revealed that limited predictability and multi-agent social complexity make long-range planning of construction projects extremely inaccurate. Fire-fighting, a cultural feature of construction project management, social and structural diversity of involved permanent organizations, and structural temporality all contribute towards relational failures and frequent changes. The main purpose of this paper is therefore to demonstrate that appropriate construction planning may have a profound synergistic effect on structural integration of a project organization. Using the general systems theory perspective it is further a specific objective to investigate and evaluate organizational effects of changes in planning and potentials for achieving continuous project-organizational synergy. The newly developed methodology recognises that planning should also represent a continuous, improvement-leading driving force throughout a project. The synergistic effect of the process planning membership duality fostered project-wide integration, eliminated internal boundaries, and created a pool of constantly upgrading knowledge. It maintained a creative environment that resulted in a number of process-related improvements from all parts of the organization. As a result labour productivity has seen increases of more than 30%, profits have risen from an average of 12% to more than 18%, and project durations have been reduced by several days.

Estimating the benefits of farm animal welfare legislation using the contingent valuation method

This paper presents the method and findings of a contingent valuation (CV) study that aimed to elicit United Kingdom citizens' willingness to pay to support legislation to phase out the use of battery cages for egg production in the European Union (EU). The method takes account of various biases associated with the CV technique, including 'warm glow', 'part-whole' and sample response biases. Estimated mean willingness to pay to support the legislation is used to estimate the annual benefit of the legislation to UK citizens. This is compared with the estimated annual costs of the legislation over a 12-year period, which allows for readjustment by the UK egg industry. The analysis shows that the estimated benefits of the legislation outweigh the costs. The study demonstrates that CV is a potentially useful technique for assessing the likely benefits associated with proposed legislation. However, estimates of CV studies must be treated with caution. It is important that they are derived from carefully designed surveys and that the willingness to pay estimation method allows for various biases. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Integrating socio-economics and ecology: a taxonomy of quantitative methods and a review of their use in agro-ecology

Answering many of the critical questions in conservation, development and environmental management requires integrating the social and natural sciences. However, understanding the array of available quantitative methods and their associated terminology presents a major barrier to successful collaboration. We provide an overview of quantitative socio-economic methods that distils their complexity into a simple taxonomy. We outline how each has been used in conjunction with ecological models to address questions relating to the management of socio-ecological systems. We review the application of social and ecological quantitative concepts to agro-ecology and classify the approaches used to integrate the two disciplines. Our review included all published integrated models from 2003 to 2008 in 27 journals that publish agricultural modelling research. Although our focus is on agro-ecology, many of the results are broadly applicable to other fields involving an interaction between human activities and ecology. We found 36 papers that integrated social and ecological concepts in a quantitative model. Four different approaches to integration were used, depending on the scale at which human welfare was quantified. Most models viewed humans as pure profit maximizers, both when calculating welfare and predicting behaviour. Synthesis and applications. We reached two main conclusions based on our taxonomy and review. The first is that quantitative methods that extend predictions of behaviour and measurements of welfare beyond a simple market value basis are underutilized by integrated models. The second is that the accuracy of prediction for integrated models remains largely unquantified. Addressing both problems requires researchers to reach a common understanding of modelling goals and data requirements during the early stages of a project.

Consumer welfare effects of introducing and labeling genetically modified food

Non-hypothetical valuations obtained from experimental auctions in three United States and two European locations were used to calculate welfare effects of introducing and labeling of genetically modified food. Under certain assumptions, we find that introduction of genetically modified food has been welfare enhancing, on average, for United States consumers but not so for Europeans and while mandatory labeling has been beneficial for European consumers, such a policy would be detrimental in the United States. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Consumer welfare and the loss induced by withholding information: The case of BSE in Italy

The paper develops a measure of consumer welfare losses associated with withholding it formation about a possible link between BSE and vCJD. The Cost of Ignorance (COI) is measured by comparing the utility of the informed choice with the utility of the uninformed choice, under conditions of improved information. Unlike previous work that is largely based on a single equation demand model, the measure is obtained retrieving a cost,function from a dynamic Almost Ideal Demand System. The estimated perceived loss for Italian consumers due to delayed information ranges from 12 percent to 54 percent of total meat expenditure, depending on the month assumed to embody correct beliefs about the safety level of beef.

A spatial–temporal analysis of the impact of access restrictions on forest landscapes and household welfare in Tanzania

This paper explores the impact of the re-introduction of access restrictions to forests in Tanzania, through participatory forest management (PFM), that have excluded villagers from forests to which they have traditionally, albeit illegally, had access to collect non-timber forest products (NTFPs). Motivated by our fieldwork, and using a spatial–temporal model, we focus on the paths of forest degradation and regeneration and villagers' utility before and after an access restriction is introduced. Our paper illustrates a number of key points for policy makers. First, the benefits of forest conservation tend to be greatest in the first few periods after an access restriction is introduced, after which the overall forest quality often declines. Second, villagers may displace their NTFP collection into more distant forests that may have been completely protected by distance alone before access to a closer forest was restricted. Third, permitting villagers to collect limited amounts of NTFPs for a fee, or alternatively fining villagers caught collecting illegally from the protected forest, and returning the fee or fine revenue to the villagers, can improve both forest quality and villagers' livelihoods.

Transfers, contracts and regulation: a new institutional economics perspective on the changing provision of social housing in Britain

Social housing policy in the UK mirrors wider processes Associated with shifts in broad welfare regimes. Social housing has moved from dominance by state housing provision to the funding of new investment through voluntary sector housing associations to what is now a greater focus on the regulation and private financing of these not-for-profit bodies. If these trends run their course, we are likely to see a range of not-for-profit bodies providing non-market housing in a highly regulated quasi-market. This paper examines these issues through the lens of new institutional economics, which it is believed can provide important insights into the fundamental contractual and regulatory relationships that are coming to dominate social housing from the perspective of the key actors in the sector (not-for-profit housing organisations, their tenants, private lenders and the regulatory state). The paper draws on evidence recently collected from a study evaluating more than 100 stock transfer organisations that inherited ex-public housing in Scotland, including 12 detailed case studies. The paper concludes that social housing stakeholders need to be aware of the risks (and their management) faced across the sector and that the state needs to have clear objectives for social housing and coherent policy instruments to achieve those ends.

Essays on labour market dualisation in Western Europe: active labour market policies, temporary work regulation and inequality

European labour markets are increasingly divided between insiders in full-time permanent employment and outsiders in precarious work or unemployment. Using quantitative as well as qualitative methods, this thesis investigates the determinants and consequences of labour market policies that target these outsiders in three separate papers. The first paper looks at Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) that target the unemployed. It shows that left and right-wing parties choose different types of ALMPs depending on the policy and the welfare regime in which the party is located. These findings reconcile the conflicting theoretical expectations from the Power Resource approach and the insider-outsider theory. The second paper considers the regulation and protection of the temporary work sector. It solves the puzzle of temporary re-regulation in France, which contrasts with most other European countries that have deregulated temporary work. Permanent workers are adversely affected by the expansion of temporary work in France because of general skills and low wage coordination. The interests of temporary and permanent workers for re-regulation therefore overlap in France and left governments have an incentive to re-regulate the sector. The third paper then investigates what determines inequality between median and bottom income workers. It shows that non-inclusive economic coordination increases inequality in the absence of compensating institutions such as minimum wage regulation. The deregulation of temporary work as well as spending on employment incentives and rehabilitation also has adverse effects on inequality. Thus, policies that target outsiders have important economic effects on the rest of the workforce. Three broader contributions can be identified. First, welfare state policies may not always be in the interests of labour, so left parties may not always promote them. Second, the interests of insiders and outsiders are not necessarily at odds. Third, economic coordination may not be conducive to egalitarianism where it is not inclusive.

Does orthogonalization really purge equity based property valuations of their general stock market influences?

This paper uses a recently developed nonlinear Granger causality test to determine whether linear orthogonalization really does remove general stock market influences on real estate returns to leave pure industry effects in the latter. The results suggest that there is no nonlinear relationship between the US equity-based property index returns and returns on a general stock market index, although there is evidence of nonlinear causality for the corresponding UK series.

Can portmanteau nonlinearity tests serve as general mis-specification tests?

A number of recent papers have employed the BDS test as a general test for mis-specification for linear and nonlinear models. We show that for a particular class of conditionally heteroscedastic models, the BDS test is unable to detect a common mis-specification. Our results also demonstrate that specific rather than portmanteau diagnostics are required to detect neglected asymmetry in volatility. However for both classes of tests reasonable power is only obtained using very large sample sizes.