I n the article " Substance abuse and developments in harm reduction " (page 1697 of this issue 1) Dr. Yuet Cheung concludes that in the 21st century harm reduction should be welcomed as an important player in addressing the use of currently illicit drugs, alongside prohibition and legalization. Other strategies that have become part of the discourse on how to resolve the drug problem include m...

China started forest land tenure reform in the early 1980s. The household responsibility system (HRS) was usually referred to as reform even though various forms of reforms have been developed from region to region. More importantly, the approaches to reform have been evolving through time. A trend toward privatization became more apparent when the Central Government started a pilot experiment ...

Tenure reform began in 1988 with the establishment of a committee under the Ministry of Agriculture to look into ways to increase security of tenure and to make land more freely available for investment. Research into tenure systems was conducted with the support of USAID and the Wisconsin Land Tenure Center. Inevitably, the direction and scope of identified tenure change needed altered and exp...

This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis to measure scale and technical efficiencies of 925 farms in rural Colombia and a Tobit model to identify the effects of land market characteristics on efficiency. Findings indicate that although larger farms are more scale efficient, they are not more technical efficient than small farms. Participation in land markets increases technical efficiency, ind...

OBJECTIVE One justification for a statutory ban on physical punishment is that passage of such legislation changes public attitudes towards the use of this form of parental discipline. The experience in Sweden is often cited as an example of legislation which changed public opinion. The aim of this brief article is to review the public opinion findings in Sweden in order to evaluate in greater ...

Panarchy provides a heuristic to characterize the cross-scale dynamics of social-ecological systems and a framework for how governance institutions should behave to be compatible with the ecosystems they manage. Managing for resilience will likely require reform of law to account for the dynamics of social-ecological systems and achieve a substantive mandate that accommodates the need for adapt...

It has been ten years since the welfare reform law was signed by President Clinton amid predictions of disaster from the left. Thanks to provisions in the legislation itself that provided millions of dollars for research, to an unprecedented level of research sponsored by foundations, to data reported by states to the federal government, and to national data collected and reported on a routine ...