The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and structural adjustment: A cross-national analysis of forest loss

We test competing hypotheses drawn from neo-liberal economic theory and dependency theory regarding the effects of International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment on deforestation. In doing so, we analyze cross-national data for a sample of sixty low and middle income nations from 1990 to 2005. We find substantial support for dependency theory that both International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment lending are associated with higher rates of forest loss. We also find that a number of factors linked to other theoretical perspectives help to explain deforestation. These include non-governmental organizations, gross domestic product per capita, economic growth, primary sector economic activity, democracy, total population growth, non-dependent population growth, rural population growth, urban population growth, tropical climate, and natural forest stocks. We conclude with a discussion of the findings, theoretical implications, methodological implications, policy implications, and possible directions for future research.     

Status claims, performance expectations, and inequality in groups

We state and test two new theoretical assumptions regarding effects of explicit status claims upon others' performance expectations and the consequent group hierarchy: (1) that any such claim is aggregated with other status information, and (2) that the weight of the effect of a claim is a direct function of the status position of the person expressing it. Added to the core assumptions of theories of status generalization, the new assumptions account for phenomena also called “second-order expectations” and “status cues.” Results from a six-condition experimental test support the ideas, and permit comparing our assumptions with two variant mechanisms. We consider some uses of the extended theory, including interventions to control status effects within groups and legitimating and de-legitimating group hierarchies.     

Economic deprivation and racial segregation: Comparing Superfund sites in Portland, Oregon and Detroit, Michigan

The research presented here weighs the ability of two major explanations of social inequality—Massey and Denton’s racial segregation explanation and Wilson’s emphasis on economic deprivation (concentrated poverty)—to predict environmental inequality. Two sets of logistic regression analyses are used to predict the location of Superfund sites in Portland, Oregon and Detroit, Michigan providing a conditional understanding of environmental inequality within a larger sociological context. The analysis includes a general examination of the two theories in all census tracts in both cities and a set of analyses focusing upon Black neighborhoods in Detroit. The findings indicate that there is support for explanations of environmental inequality that include both racial segregation and economic deprivation, but that the more powerful of the two is economic deprivation. The results suggest that even though African-American neighborhoods disproportionately house Superfund sites, these facilities are more likely to be located in Black neighborhoods that are economically deprived.     

Societies consuming nature: A panel study of the ecological footprints of nations, 1960-2003

Sociology is poised to greatly enhance our collective understanding of the various sustainability challenges facing the world today. To contribute to this endeavor, the authors conduct panel analyses of the per capita ecological footprints of nations to evaluate multiple theoretical traditions within environmental sociology and its sister approaches. Findings indicate that the consumption-based environmental impacts of nations are tied to economic development, urban population, militarization, and the structure of international trade. Ecological conditions in the context of climate and biogeography also prove to partially shape the environmental harms of human activities. Ultimately, this research suggests that political-economic factors, ecological milieu, and structural associations between nations all influence society/nature relationships. Considering the globally unsustainable levels of resource consumption and concomitant increases in pollution for a growing number of nations throughout the world, the authors contend that theoretically inclusive and methodologically rigorous investigations on such topics should be more central to the discipline.     

Decoupling reconsidered: Does world society integration influence the relationship between the environment and economic development?

This study advances scholarship on environment and development by examining whether nations more embedded in the pro-environmental world society are more or less likely to experience a relative decoupling between economic development and carbon emissions over time. The authors calculate a network centrality measure using national-level membership data on environmental international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and then employ the measure to create four subsamples of nations that are relatively more or less integrated in the environmental world society. The authors use interactions between measures of economic development and time in two-way fixed effects models to estimate the potentially changing effects of development on carbon emissions for the four subsamples of nations from 1970 to 2009. Results indicate that nations that are the most embedded in the environmental world society experienced a moderate decrease through time in the effect of development on carbon emissions, while the effect of development on emissions increased through time in the most peripheral nations.     

经济伦理研究有待澄清的三个问题——反思新自由主义经济思潮影响下的经济伦理研究

2008年爆发于华尔街的全球性的金融危机,宣告了新自由主义经济学神话的破灭,也使得以新自由主义经济学为背景的西方经济伦理学处在了十分尴尬的境地.中国学界在反思新自由主义经济思想的同时,也需要反思原有的经济伦理研究,需要从新自由主义经济思潮束缚下解放出来,以实现新的突破.     

汞环境地球化学特征

本文讨论了汞在土壤、水、大气、生物环境中的含量、形态、迁移、富集、污染等环境地球化学特征,探讨了汞对人体健康的重大影响。汞在环境中的循环途径是非常复杂的,各种形态的汞由一种转化为另一种,而毒性最大的是甲基汞(CH3Hg+)。更为严重的是,汞可富集于土壤、沉积物、鱼类和其他各种野生动物,或通过挥发作用进入大气圈。     

Wages, earnings, and occupational status: did World War II veterans receive a premium?

Over 16 million men served during World War II (WWII), and we know that veterans obtained more education and earned higher incomes than did non-veterans and that these premiums were more substantial for Blacks and less educated men. However, we know very little about the reasons for such veteran premiums. Using several distinct, yet connected, theoretical traditions that have been used to link military service to subsequent outcomes—theories of the life course, the status attainment perspective, relatively new conceptualizations of social capital, economic theories of human capital, and theories of selectivity—we seek to redress this lack of understanding. We use survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Mature Men (NLSMM) to examine the long-term effects of military service during WWII on occupational and income attainments. We find that the effects associated with being a veteran of WWII are modest and are mostly limited to less advantaged veterans, and can be largely explained by differences in human capital investment or selectivity. The one finding that cannot be explained by differences in family background, human capital investments, and selectivity is a higher hourly wage rate associated with being a Black veteran.     

Internal labor markets, promotions, and worker skill: An indirect test of skill ILMs

The determinants of intrafirm mobility within the internal labor markets (ILMs) of one large, regional bank and one small town bank are examined. The literature on the banking industry suggests that internal labor markets exist there, and that job changes within these markets are based on the development of skill rather than on seniority. It is suggested that in skill ILMs, promotions will be a positive function of the employees' duration in the present job; while in a seniority-based ILM, promotions will be a positive function of tenure with the firm prior to the present job. These findings, for men but not women, support the hypothesis that skill rather than seniority-based ILMs are present in each bank. The findings for women suggest that they work in “firm” or secondary labor markets. While the two banks are similar in the way other factors determine mobility, differences are also found which may be explained by the size and sectoral location of each bank.     

Career mobility and job flocking

Flocking is oftentimes used to metaphorically describe social behavior. Do people actually flock in a way that avian species do? This paper develops a purely ecological mechanism for explaining similarity in human behavior by distinguishing between social networks of person-to-person ties and ecological networks of ties of observability. I test the “information center hypothesis” [Ibis 115 (1973) 517] from bioecology on the career mobility of professional managers who all graduated from the same university. In this case, spatial proximity in birds is replaced with sociodemographic homophily on an acquired status characteristic among persons. The results indicate that homophilous individuals exchange information about a favorable destination state by ecological ties of observability, that is, they follow the career mobility of fellow alumni and “flock” along with them.     

Are environmental attitudes influenced by survey context? An investigation of the context dependency of the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale

General environmental attitudes are often measured with questions added to surveys about specific environmental or non-environmental issues. Using results from a large-scale national survey on the protection of threatened and endangered marine species, we examine whether the context of the survey in which New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale items are asked influence measured environmental concern. In this application the role that specific threatened or endangered species play in affecting responses to NEP Scale items is explored using a combination of non-parametric and parametric approaches. The results in this case suggest that context does influence stated general environmental attitudes, though the effects of context differ across NEP items.     

Globalization, the structure of the world economy and economic development

How does the structure of the world economy determine the gains from participation therein? In order to answer this question, we conduct a state of the art network analysis of international trade to map the structure of the international division of labor (IDL). We regress cross-national variation in economic growth on positional variation and mobility of countries within the IDL from 1965 to 2000. We find that the highest rates of economic growth occurred to countries in the middle of the IDL over the course of globalization. Second, we find that upper tier positions in the IDL are converging with each other, but diverging from the lower tier. This suggests that the mechanism underlying the rapid economic growth in intermediate positions was their uniquely high rates of upward mobility, in turn a function of their middling position. Taken together, these findings suggest that a country’s long-term economic development is conditioned by its position in the IDL.     

Red unions and bourgeois democracy: A quantitative-historical analysis of worker militancy and socialist electoral power

This paper investigates how workers’ “economic struggle” determines the “democratic class struggle,” and extends socialist electoral constituency. This paper argues that political outcomes, namely, electoral behavior, may not be understood independently of the labor process, especially its most militant manifestation, strikes. Rather than follow the customary conceptual dichotomy between the sphere of production and the political sphere, it is suggested that both strike activity and electoral participation are compatible political strategies that, under specific historical circumstances, may jointly determine the fate of the Socialist party. The leading question is how did the wave of strikes in post World War I Italy affect the electoral power of the Italian Socialist party, in comparison with another mass party, the Popular Catholic Party. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) is employed to analyze census, strike, and electoral data. It is found that strike activity and electoral democracy increased the electoral power of the Socialist party, whereas they had little effect on the power of the Catholic party. It is suggested that this was due to the Catholic non-revolutionary program which was ambivalent about the political role of strikes. It is concluded that the socialists’ political success was determined by their dual political strategy in both spheres, electoral participation, and organizing strikes.     

Latent structures of vertical control in intergovernmental relations

Much of the work on interorganizational (IO) relations focuses on intracommunity bases of resource exchange, or what a number of writers have referred to as the “horizontal axes” of community organization and resource control. Building on earlier work in the field, the present paper extends this conceptual framework to include “vertical” dimensions of resource control as they pertain to the work relations of governmental units at the local and extralocal level. In this context, vertical control is viewed as a power-dependence relation between county-based public service agencies and their “parent” units at the state and federal level. Variations in these control relations are used to identify alaternate structures of vertical control within a set of public service programs spanning several units of government. The analysis reveals three basic types of vertical control structure each of which is shown to foster a distinct pattern of exchange relations among these units.     

Life satisfaction across nations: The effects of women’s political status and public priorities

Feminist scholars suggest that improving the quality of life of individuals living in nations around the world may be more readily achieved by increasing women’s political power and by reorienting public-policy priorities, than by focusing primarily on economic growth. These considerations raise the question of which characteristics of societies are associated with the quality of life of the people in those societies. Here, we address this issue empirically by statistically analyzing cross-national data. We assess the effects of gender equality in the political sphere, as well as a variety of other factors, on the subjective well-being of nations, as indicated by average self-reported levels of life satisfaction. We find that people report the highest levels of life satisfaction in nations where women have greater political representation, where military spending is low, and where health care spending is high, controlling for a variety of other factors. GDP per capita, urbanization, and natural resource exploitation are not clearly associated with life satisfaction. These findings suggest that nations may be able to improve the subjective quality of life of people without increasing material wealth or natural resource consumption by increasing gender equality in politics and changing public spending priorities.     

Neighborhoods, employment, and welfare use: Assessing the influence of neighborhood socioeconomic composition

We draw upon data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study to examine the effect of neighborhood socioeconomic composition on two key economic outcomes, and in doing so to test the validity of the index of concentration at the extremes (ICE) as a measure of neighborhood circumstances. Methodologically, we find that the index succinctly captures economic variation within neighborhoods in a way that avoids problems of colinearity that have characterized prior studies. Neighborhoods can be characterized as falling on a continuum ranging from concentrated disadvantage to concentrated advantage; the ICE measure does a good job capturing this variation and differentiating the neighborhood circumstances experienced by different groups. Substantively, we show that neighborhood economic circumstances are related to new mothers’ welfare use and employment, above and beyond their individual socioeconomic characteristics.     

Intergenerational transmission of sex-specific differential treatments: The allocation of education resources among siblings

Using a unique data set of 3-generation education information, in this article we extend the analysis of Greenhalgh [Greenhalgh, Susan, 1985. Sexual Stratification: The other side of ‘growth with equity’ in East Asia. Population and Development Review 11, 265–314] and study the question of intergenerational transmission of sex-specific differential treatments. The rich data are obtained from Taiwan’s Panel Study of Family Dynamics project. As far as the macro pattern is concerned, we found that although there is a clear tendency of differential treatment against females in the old generation, this tendency is significantly weakened and nearly vanishes in the young generation. Furthermore, the supporting effect of senior siblings in the old generation becomes a crowding (resource-dilution) effect in the young generation. However, within each micro lineage, there is a mild “habitus” effect in the sense that parents who experienced gender-specific differential treatment tend to treat their children in a similar fashion. We find that parents’ education contributes to the elimination of sex-based differential treatment, consistent with the finding in Thronton et al. [Thornton, Arland, Alwin, Duane F. and Camburn, Donald, 1983. Causes and consequences of sex-role attitudes and attitude change. American Sociological Review 48, 211–227].     

The importance of survey content: Testing for the context dependency of the New Ecological Paradigm Scale

Using a regression-based analysis of a survey of U.S. households, we demonstrate that both environmental concern, as measured by the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale, and facets of environmental concern, as measured by three NEP factors, are influenced by survey context. Survey respondents were presented with detailed information about two to four threatened and endangered marine species in the United States, including the Endangered Species Act listing status of the species and threats to the survival of the species. All else being equal, measures of environmental concern are influenced by both which species were included in the survey and by the concern expressed about these species. As such, measures of environmental concern are found to be context dependent since they are correlated with the species included in each survey. We also demonstrate that NEP-based measures of environmental concern are affected by socio-demographic variables, opinions about government spending, and environmental knowledge. Given the wide, multi-disciplinary use of the NEP Scale, it is important for researchers to recognize that NEP-based measures of environmental concern may be sensitive to information included in surveys.     

The environmental efficiency of well-being: A cross-national analysis

Recent research has conceptualized sustainability as the environmental efficiency of well-being (EWEB). This concept takes into account the benefits societies are able to produce from their demands on the environment. Research along these lines indicates that countries vary widely in the efficiency with which they transform the Earth’s resources into well-being. Here, we take up this finding as a puzzle to be explained. We construct a new measure of EWEB using the ecological footprint per capita (a measure of environmental consumption) and average life satisfaction (a measure of subjective well-being). We draw hypotheses from political economy, modernization, and sustainable consumption theories in the environmental social sciences. Using full information maximum likelihood estimation, we test the effects of climate, political, economic, and social factors on EWEB with a sample of 105 countries. Key findings include a negative quadratic effect of economic development on EWEB, a negative effect of income inequality, and a positive effect of social capital.     

Towards climate justice: How do the most vulnerable weigh environment–economy trade-offs?

The world’s poor are especially vulnerable to environmental disasters, including the adverse consequences of climate change. This creates a challenge for climate justice advocates who seek to ensure that those least responsible for causing climate change do not bear unwanted burdens of mitigation. One way to promote climate justice could be to pay particular attention to the environmental policy preferences of citizens from poorer, lower-emitting countries. This paper examines opinions on environment–economy trade-offs and willingness to make personal financial contributions to protect the environment among residents of 42 developed and developing countries using data from the 2005–2008 World Values Survey, the 2010 Climate Risk Index, and World Bank development indicators. Results reveal that individuals in developing countries are less likely to support policies to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth but are more willing to donate personal income for pro-environmental efforts compared to citizens of more developed nations.