Determinants of healthy eating: a cross-national study on motives and barriers

The paper investigates the impact of motives and barriers to healthy eating on individuals' healthy eating intention and behaviour using a cross-national design. Data were collected from the UK and the Czech Republic via a self-completion questionnaire. Findings highlight the significance of intrinsic motives and psychological barriers in predicting both intention and healthy eating behaviour for both UK and Czech consumers, albeit their weight as well as the variance captured by these factors differs across the two national cultures. Findings also indicate that physical barriers are in fact unimportant when it comes to adopting a healthy eating diet. These findings are discussed in the light of previous research, while their implications for policy makers and researchers are highlighted.

The national dialogue on behaviour change in UK climate policy: some observations on responsibility, agency and political dimensions

This chapter explores the politics around the role of agency in the UK climate change debate. Government interventions on the demand side of consumption have increasingly involved attempts to obtain greater traction with the values, attitudes and beliefs of citizens in relation to climate change and also in terms of influencing consumer behaviour at an individual level. With figures showing that approximately 40% of the UK’s carbon emissions are attributable to household and transport behaviour, policy initiatives have progressively focused on the facilitation of “sustainable behaviours��. Evidence suggests however, that mobilisation of pro-environmental attitudes in addressing the perceived “value-action gap” has so far had limited success. Research in this field suggests that there is a more significant and nuanced “gap” between context and behaviour; a relationship that perhaps provides a more adroit reflection of reasons why people do not necessarily react in the way that policy-makers anticipate. Tracing the development of the UK Government’s behaviour change agenda over the last decade, we posit that a core reason for the limitations of this programme relates to an excessively narrow focus on the individual. This has served to obscure some of the wider political and economic aspects of the debate in favour of a more simplified discussion. The second part of the chapter reports findings from a series of focus groups exploring some of the wider political views that people hold around household energy habits, purchase and use of domestic appliances, and transport behaviour-and discusses these insights in relation to the literature on the agenda’s apparent limitations. The chapter concludes by considering whether the aims of the Big Society approach (recently established by the UK’s Coalition Government) hold the potential to engage more directly with some of these issues or whether they merely constitute a “repackaging” of the individualism agenda.

The effect of the national setting on employment practice: the case of downsizing

Although there is now a sizeable body of academic literature that tries to explain cross-country differences in terms of corporate control, capital market development, investor protection and politics, there is as yet very little literature on the degrees of protection accorded to other corporate stakeholders such as employees, based on a systematic comparison of firm level evidence. We find that both theories of legal origin and the varieties of capitalism approach are poor predictors of the relative propensity of firms to make redundancies in different settings. However, the political orientation of the government in place and even more so the nature of the electoral system are relatively good explanators of this propensity. In other words, political structures and outcomes matter more than more rigid institutional features such as legal origin. We explore the reasons for this, drawing out the implications for both theory and practice.

Children’s perspectives on their working lives and on public action against child labour in Burkina Faso

The majority of children in Burkina Faso undertake work and, compared to other West African countries, it has the highest rate of children involved in hazardous work (Diallo 2008; NISD 2008), which is one working child out of two. Based on a qualitative survey, this chapter presents the perspectives of Burkinabe children working in two of the hazardous sectors: a quarry and an artisanal mine. The findings show that children acknowledge very difficult working conditions in these sites. However a variety of reasons maintain them in work, which they perceive as a solution and thus challenging action against child labour in Burkina Faso.

Municipalities secession and uncertainty on public goods provision

This paper investigates the causes of municipalities secession in Brazil. The theoretical model proposes that the median voter is not fully informed about the efficiency effect of secession on public good provision and uses the break up decision undertaken by neighbor’s municipalities within the state to account for his voting. Our empirical results confirms that prediction

How national culture on consumers' decision-making styles: a comparative study among Americans, Brazilians, Chinese, and japanese in the purchase of cell phones.

The influence of the national culture on consumer decision-making styles is investigated using a sample of Americans, Brazilians, Chinese, and Japanese consumers who have purchased a cell phone in the past three years. To make the research possible, a survey was used as a method of data collection. It relates Hofstede’s cultural classification typology with Sproles and Kendall’s consumer style inventory (CSI). The multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) results indicate six decision-making styles together with other consumer behavioral characteristics that can be used to distinguish and profile consumers who purchase cell phones. Empirical findings reveal that among Americans, Brazilians, and Japanese; Americans are the most quality conscious, brand conscious, innovative, and hedonistic shoppers; Brazilians are the most loyal, and Japanese, the most confused by overchoice consumers. Conceptual contributions and managerial implications are discussed.

Comments on public debt indexation and denomination, the case of Brazil

In this work I analyze the model proposed by Goldfajn (2000) to study the choice of the denomination of the public debt. Some potential shortcmomings of the mo dei in explaining the data are discussed. Measures of the overestimation of the welfare gains of reducing distortions from taxation, under the model's simplified time frame, are also provided. Assuming a time-preference parameter of 0.9, for instance, welfare gains associated with a hedge to the debt that reduces to half a once-for-all 20o/o-of-GDP shock to governemnt spending run around 1.43% of GDP under the no-tax-smoothing structure of the model. Under a Ramsey allocation, though, welfare gains amount to just around 0.05% of GDP.