Two spatially explicit econometric land use change models are presented, focusing on tropical deforestation caused by agricultural expansion in the southern Yucatán peninsula, Mexico. The two models developed are both based on conceptually similar theoretical models of farmer behavior. However, there are different empirical specifications of this theoretical model according to the scale of the ...

The importance of shea tree to the people of south-western Nigeria cannot be over emphasized considering both the economic and environmental uses of the tree. However, efforts have not been made to propagate its production by the farmers as the shea tree still grows in the wild state. It would be worthwhile to investigate farmers’ perception of shea nut tree as an economic tree and their attitu...

Social Deprivation and Exclusion of Immigrants in Germany This paper aims at providing empirical evidence on social exclusion of immigrants in Germany. We demonstrate that when using a conventional definition of the social inclusion index typically applied in the literature, immigrants appear to experience a significant degree of social deprivation and exclusion, confirming much of the economic...

OBJECTIVES To examine the association between education level and food purchasing behaviour and the contribution of dietary knowledge to this relationship; and the association between household income and purchasing behaviour and the contribution made by subjective perceptions about the cost of healthy food. DESIGN AND SETTING The study was conducted in Brisbane City (Australia) in 2000. The ...

BACKGROUND During the last two decades, differential consumption patterns in health-related behaviours have increasingly been highlighted as playing an important role in explaining persistent and widening health inequalities. This period has also seen government public health policies in England place a greater emphasis on changing 'lifestyle' behaviours, in an attempt to tackle social inequali...

Rural households in Nigeria are vulnerable to shock because of their limited capacity to make informed decision on secured coping strategies which is further aggravated by some households’ specific socio-economic characteristics. Attempts were made to identify shocks being faced by households’ heads and coping strategies. Multistage sampling technique was used to select 80 respondents and well ...

BACKGROUND Access to health insurance is expected to have positive effect in improving access to healthcare and offer financial risk protection to households. Ghana began the implementation of a National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in 2004 as a way to ensure equitable access to basic healthcare for all residents. After a decade of its implementation, national coverage is just about 34% of th...

energy consumption in the residential sector is a complex socio-technical problem that can be explained using acombination of physical, demographic and behavioural characteristics of a house and its occupants. in this paper, byusing the energy consumption data for the residential sector of shiraz in iran, the effect of built area (ba) andoccupant number (occ) on annual energy consumption (ec) w...