Why do people give? Social scientists have long been interested in the motives behind individual charitable giving. However, few studies have looked at the effects of social context on charitable activity, particularly in a cross-national context. This chapter uses multilevel modeling techniques to examine the effects of national context on membership in charitable and humanitarian organization...

We consider a simple model of energy saving investments under uncertainty of energy costs. Adjustment delays in replacing energy-intensive capital follow from two natural elements: uncertainty and heterogeneity of the existing capital structure. They imply a simple dichotomy where short-run output contracts, but the long-run output recovers and increases above the initial output, despite the in...

Three features of China’s trade patterns suggest that elements beyond factor abundance explain its export performance. The high penetration in world markets of labourintensive products has been accompanied by: (i) a high share in exports of productivityadvanced foreign-owned enterprises (FIEs), (ii) a high penetration of FIEs in labourintensive sectors, and (iii) a relative high sophistication ...

Many political economists believe that competition among countries—or regions within them—to attract mobile capital disciplines their governments, motivating them to invest more in infrastructure, reduce waste and corruption, and spend less on non-productive public goods. The result should be convergence on business-friendly policies and clean government. This expectation informs debates on bot...

Article history: Received 20 December 2004 Received in revised form 23 September 2005 Accepted 23 September 2005 Available online 16 November 2005 Ecovillages, co-housing communities, and other types of intentional communities (ICs) have proliferated in recent years. There are currently several thousands of these communities worldwide and their numbers are increasing rapidly. We surveyed a subs...

Payment for ecosystem services programs are being implemented in a wide variety of settings, but whether and in what contexts such programs present ‘win–win’ scenarios that simultaneously improve human wellbeing and achieve conservation goals remains poorly understood. Based on semi-structured interviews with early program participants enrolling either collectivelyor individually-held land, we ...

Household livelihood strategies are embedded in the natural and socioeconomic contexts in which people live. Analyzing the factors that influence household livelihood choice and defining their consequences can be beneficial for informing rural household policies. In turn, this has great significance for fostering sustainable livelihood strategies. We grouped household livelihood strategies base...

Economic theory predicts that the current change in national wealth, broadly defined to include natural and human capital as well as produced capital (“genuine savings”), determines whether the present value of future changes in consumption is positive or negative. Theoretical research has focused on the effects of population growth on this relation, but no rigorous empirical investigation has ...

We develop an interactive simulation model that links ecological and economic systems, and explore the dynamics of harvest patterns as they simultaneously affect natural and human capital. Our models represent both single and multiple systems. The level of natural capital is influenced by interactions of (1) natural capital growth and (non-human influenced) depletion, (2) ecological fluctuation...