We examine an economy whose consumers have different discount factors for utility, possibly not exponential. We characterize the properties of efficient allocations of resources and of the shadow prices that would decentralize such allocations. We show in particular that the representative agent has a decreasing discount rate when, as is usually posited, all of a group’s members have a constant...

Several international conservation organizations have recently produced global priority maps to guide conservation activities and spending in their own and other conservation organizations. Surprisingly, it is not possible to directly evaluate the relationship between priorities and spending within a given organization because none of the organizations with global priority models tracks how the...

It is with great interest that I read the report on maternal and congenital syphilis in Haiti in which Lomotey and colleagues reported on a very high prevalence of maternal syphilis and concluded that, “This prevalence combined with late entry into prenatal care contributes to adverse pregnancy outcomes and a high estimated rate of congenital syphilis” (1). Indeed, there have been several effor...

Taxonomic inventories (or species censuses) are the most elementary data in biogeography, macroecology and conservation biology. They play fundamental roles in the construction of species richness patterns, delineation of species ranges, quantification of extinction risk and prioritization of conservation efforts in hot spot areas. Given their importance, any issue related to the completeness o...

RESERVE BANK OF NEW ZEALAND: Bulletin Vol. 66 No. 1 1 In t roduc t ion In modern market-based economies, day-to-day activity involves many millions of transactions for goods, services and financial assets, the payment for which results in the transfer of money. In New Zealand, a total of around $35 billion is processed through domestic payment systems on average every business day, equivalent t...

The health care spending share of gross domestic product (GDP) remained steady between 1993 and 1999 as moderate-to-strong economic growth coincided with a rapid shift to managed care. This shift, along with decelerating growth in Medicare spending, appears to have generated a mostly one-time saving that lowered aggregate health expenditure growth.

Traditional economic theories stress the relevance of political, institutional, geographic, and historical factors for economic growth. In contrast, human-capital theories suggest that peoples' competences, mediated by technological progress, are the deciding factor in a nation's wealth. Using three large-scale assessments, we calculated cognitive-competence sums for the mean and for upper- and...

Land use/land cover (LULC) has a profound impact on economy, society and environment, especially in rapid developing areas. Rapid and prompt monitoring and predicting of LULC's change are crucial and significant. Currently, integration of Geographical Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) methods is one of the most important methods for detecting LULC's change, which includes image p...

1. Introduction By any measure, the communication sector is important. The combined revenues of the U.S. telephone and postal industries are larger than military spending for that country, and almost three times higher than the revenues of the airline industry. (Table 1, taken from Odlyzko (2000), gives further comparisons.) The sector has been expanding for many centuries. The postal service a...

Changes in forest carbon stocks are a determinant of the regional carbon budget. In the past several decades, China has experienced a pronounced increase in forest area and density. However, few comprehensive analyses have been conducted. In this study, we employed the Forest Identity concept to evaluate the changing status of China's forests over the past three decades, using national forest i...