Funding for basic conservation research is chronically lacking. The potential for ecotourism to fund conservation research exists, but has been little explored. One branch of ecotourism with funding potential is volunteer tourism, where conservation scientists and recruiting agencies develop research projects and volunteers provide funding and labor. We examine the costs and benefits of a three...

BACKGROUND Brazil boasts a health scheme that aspires to provide universal coverage, but its surgical system has rarely been analysed. In an effort to strengthen surgical systems worldwide, the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery proposed a collection of 6 standardised indicators: 2-hour access to surgery, surgical workforce density, surgical volume, perioperative mortality rate (POMR) and prot...

Do socioeconomic inequities in body mass index (BMI) widen across the adult lifecourse? BMI data for 29,104 male and 32,454 female person-years aged 15 years and older (21,403 persons in total) were extracted from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia between 2006 and 2012. Multilevel linear regression was used to examine age and gender specific trajectories in BMI by quintiles...

Are there general principles governing the process by which certain products or ideas become popular relative to other (often qualitatively similar) competitors? To investigate this question in detail, we have focused on the popularity of movies as measured by their box-office income. We observe that the log-normal distribution describes well the tail (corresponding to the most successful movie...

This paper contributes to our understanding of minority entrepreneurs in the US by showing that ethnicity alone should not be used to describe or categorize small business owners. We examine a sample of 508 entrepreneurs from three minority groups (African, Mexican, and Korean Americans) and a white group using cluster analysis to explore a categorization pattern that best describes the differe...

This paper opens by expressing disappointment in the disparities between published estimations of the effectiveness of foreign aid to developing countries and effectiveness data which arise from the application of complex econometric methods. The new dilemmas for aid policy include the fact that aid increasingly devoted to human development at the expense of productive activity is unlikely to ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The relationship between population health and inequality in income distribution has attracted much attention during the last two decades. The purpose of this paper is to examine that relationship using Israeli time-series data, and considering three types of income: economic, pre-tax, and disposable. METHODS Israeli time series (1979-2000) on life expectancy of men ...

Aset of simulations were used to estimate the impact of improvements in cattle breeding efficiency and other management factors on gross margins in extensive pastoral systems in Western Australia. The output from the simulations was integrated into a statistical model of gross margin as a function of breeding and management variables. The simulations showed that gross margin was an increasing f...

Among the models that the Congressional Budget Office uses to analyze the economic effects of changes in federal fiscal policy is a life-cycle growth model with overlapping generations of heterogeneous households. In this paper, we extend a similar dynamic model by incorporating a population that ages in a manner consistent with projections for the United States. Under that extension, gross dom...

Estimates are made, from time series data on real gross domestic products, of the standard deoiation of returns in markets for perpetual claims on countries’ incomes. The results indicate that there is much fundamental uncertainty to be hedged. Evidence is shmun that there may be only minimal ability to cross hedge these returns in existing capital markets. Methods of establishing markets fm pe...