* The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the UNCTAD secretariat. Introduction The Kyoto Protocol authorizes four cooperative implementation mechanisms. These include bubbles, emission trades, joint implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism. Emissions trading, the focus of this report, allows trading of Òassigned amountsÓ amon...

The federal government faces a daunting fiscal outlook, which makes the budgetary impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act even more important. The official Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis indicates modest deficit reduction over the next ten years and beyond. We examine the underpinnings of the CBO's projection and conclude that it is built on a shaky foundation of om...

A plea is made for an experiment in unified health care in one or two of the new district health authorities in Inner London. The essence of the proposal is that district health authorities should hold the contracts of independent contractors, that the independence and entitlements of the contractors should be preserved, but that the district health authorities should manage a unified budget. T...

We study the impact of maternal care on early child development using an expansion in Canadian maternity leave entitlements. Following the leave expansion, mothers who took leave spent 48–58 percent more time not working in their children’s first year of life. This extra maternal care primarily crowded out home-based care by unlicensed nonrelatives and replaced full-time work. Our estimates sug...

— The legacy of apartheid had much to do with the extraordinary levels of inequality and human insecurity found by the first ever nationally representative living standards survey undertaken in South Africa in 1993. Drawing on a 1998 re-survey of households in the 1993 study, this paper explores whether this legacy has been superseded, or whether apartheid's end has been only one kind of freedo...

This is the second of two articles on challenges to future food security in the Asia Pacific region. It focuses on five mechanisms, which can be conceptualised as pathways by which pessimistic Malthusian scenarios, described in the first paper, may become manifest. The mechanisms are (1) climate change, (2) water scarcity, (3) tropospheric ozone pollution, (4) impending scarcity of phosphorus a...

1 Fresh data on English grain yields 1268-1480 are combined with revised price series to measure the frequency and scale of serious harvest shortfalls and estimate the elasticity of demand for cereals. Major food availability declines are shown to have been a significant component of most historical subsistence crises, as back-to-back shortfalls were of the worst famines. Although farmers did a...

An extension of the standard rationing model is introduced. Agents are not only identified by their respective claims on some amount of a scarce resource, but also by some exogenous ex-ante conditions (characteristics), different from claims (e.g., endowments, entitlements, wealth, obligations, assets). Inequalities in the ex-ante conditions induce compensations between agents which influence t...

A Two-Levelled Ontology In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues for a two-level ontology along the following lines. Facts on the lower level – which he calls brute facts – can exist independently of human beings and their institutions. Facts on the upper level, which he calls institutional facts, depend on human institutions and above all on an associated ‘collective intention...

Behavior inconsistent with self-interest has been observed in many contexts. We argue that models designed to cope with these anomalies are inadequate to deal with a variety of social values. Our extension of the Fehr & Schmidt ‘inequity aversion’ model is applied to results from dictator experiments in which the money to be divided is generated by the efforts of paired individuals in either on...