Wood-based bioenergy in the US South is a key element in a sociotechnical imaginary that brings together rural development, energy independence, and environmental sustainability; it is also a key element in another imaginary in which powerful interest groups from the private sector and government collude in ways that enrich them regardless of success of the endeavor, while simultaneously posing...

M any policy problems have frustratingly long histories of inefficient regulation that can be difficult or impossible to reverse, even where large efficiency gains might be had from doing so. Climate change is an exception, however, because little real action has been undertaken to date. It presents an unusual opportunity for an efficient economic policy to be employed right from the beginning....

Increased urbanization in the Eastern Mediterranean Region has led to a significant rise in the prevalence of diabetes. Caring for diabetes under conditions of endemic uncertainty, violence and poverty is a great challenge. The micro-clinic model establishes a public domain of social and community interaction whereby friends, families and neighbours can collectively engage in education, treatme...

In a reciprocal market model with imperfectly competitive firms, domestic policies will differ across countries that are economically and politically diverse. We explore the implications of this standard result with regard to harmonization of environmental policies between corrupt and non-corrupt countries. Imposing a more stringent policy on a non-corrupt government will be welfare reducing to...

convened its third annual symposium, gathering academics, practitioners, campaigners and policymakers. This year’s theme was the ‘local’: what does it mean in terms of food policy? Who does it, what is it for, and how is it faring in these economically and politically challenging times? Speakers came from Britain, Brazil and Canada, and part of the session was devoted to working groups, where d...

The Federal District is a politically and economically important part of Brazil, which suffers from water stress. Exploratory analyzes were conducted using data on rainfall in the Federal District from the monthly precipitation time series to assess the rainfall variability in January, a month that falls in the middle of the rainy season in the region. A time series of 30 years (1981–2010), rec...

The establishment of irrevocable democracy, the rule of law, free market economic relations, and the protection of fundamental human rights have not yet assumed key significance in the South Caucasus countries. Consequently, all pressing problems of the region continue to intensify, keeping the region politically and economically unstable. Given contending geopolitical and geoeconomic interests...

Why do some individuals of sub-Saharan Africa express stronger ties to their own ethnic group than others? Using a compilation of Afrobarometer Round I surveys, I test the influence of economic conditions, good governance, and ethnic pride on individual ethnic strengths. Although my hypotheses predict that ethnic identity is politically and economically utilitarian in nature, multivariate OLS r...

Although scholars have examined antecedents to agglomeration, we understand less than we should about the impact of institutional environments. We theorize that characteristics of a country’s institutional environment encourage firms to agglomerate. To test our hypotheses, we examine the location pattern of 948 plant investments made by 274 firms across 29 countries in the global semiconductor ...

Is the Innovation Society sustainable? We argue that the way in which our society organizes its innovation processes generates endogenous crises, and the ideology that sustains this organization makes it difficult to confront this meta-crisis economically or politically. We claim that the key to constructing a socially sustainable future is the mobilization of civil society, with respect to two...