The shocked reaction of commentators to the recent Canadian Supreme Court decision (Chaoulli v. Quebec) overturning Quebec's ban on private healthcare insurance is difficult to square with the facts and policy options realistically open to provincial governments. The problem is that rhetoric has centred on preserving a single-tier universal system that has never existed in the form its supporte...

We propose that institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court can lead individuals to update their perceptions of social norms, in contrast to the mixed evidence on whether institutions shape individuals' personal opinions. We studied reactions to the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. In a controlled experimental setting, we found that a favorable ruling, when pre...

Farming Systems Research studies agricultural systems and their interaction with the natural environment and ecosystems. Agro-ecosystems are highly complex due to the many feedbacks between natural processes, high geographical diversity and human factors involved both as the farmer’s decisions at farm household level and as the policy implementations at regional, national or European levels. Th...

Development of alternative livelihoods has become a popular policy to uplift the socioeconomic status of small-scale fishers and to reduce fishing pressure on overexploited fisheries. Seaweed farming has been incorporated into many community-based coastal resources management projects and fisheries management initiatives as an alternative livelihood option for fishers in tropical developing cou...

This paper argues that the assumptions underlying the neo-classical economic paradigm of perfect competition are not realistic. In particular, assuming exogenously fixed production technology and consumer preferences, as well as the availability of perfectly symmetric information at zero cost contradicts the findings on the inherent bounded rationality of human behavioural decisions. The paper ...

The main objective of this paper is to review the progress that has been made in South Africa with respect to whole-farm economic modelling over the past 2 decades. Farming systems are complex and careful consideration to the stochastic dynamic nature of irrigation farming processes and their linkages with the larger water system is necessary when conducting whole-farm modelling. Both simulatio...