Who's Minding the Kids? Pollucion,Public Schools,and Environmental Justice in Los Angeles

Objective . Although previous environmental justice research has focused on analysis of the disproportionate burden of environmental hazards on minority residents, few studies have examined demographic inequities in health risks among children. This article evaluates the demographic distribution of potentially hazardous facilities and health risks associated with ambient air toxics exposures among public schoolchildren in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Methods . We combine Geographic Information System analysis with multivariate statistics to compare enrollment and demographic information for students who attend district schools with the spatial pattern of land use, locations of toxic emissions and facilities, and calculated indices of estimated lifetime cancer risk and respiratory hazards associated with exposures to toxic air emissions. Results . District schools are more likely to be located in census tracts containing potentially hazardous facilities; however, these tracts actually have slightly lower cancer and respiratory health risks associated with air toxics when compared to other tracts in the district. Demographic comparisons among school sites indicate that minority students, especially Latinos, are more likely to attend schools near hazardous facilities and face higher health risks associated with outdoor air toxics exposure. Conclusions . These patterns of hazard exposure and health risk should be considered both in the process of siting new schools to house the rapidly growing regional student population and in remediation efforts at existing schools.     

Intentional exposure studies of environmental agents on human subjects: assessing benefits and risks

In this article, I assess the benefits and risks of studies that intentionally expose research subjects to environmental agents. I describe these types of studies, identify their benefits and risks, compare them to other research methods that can be used to investigate the relationship between environmental exposures and disease, and discuss some issues related to research design and risk minimization. I argue that the benefits of intentional environmental exposure studies outweigh the risks when 1) the knowledge gained is likely to improve our understanding of the relationship between environmental exposure and disease, 2) this knowledge cannot be obtained by other methods, 3) the experiments are well designed, 4) the subjects will receive some benefits, such as medical evaluations, 5) risks are minimized, and 6) the risks to human subjects are less than those encountered in a typical Phase I drug study. Only in rare circumstances (i.e., when an intentional environmental exposure study is needed to implement an important environmental or public health intervention or regulation) may such studies expose research subjects to risks as high as those encountered in a typical Phase I drug trail.     

Intentional Exposure Studies of Environmental Agents on Human Subjects: Assessing Benefits and Risks∗

In this article, I assess the benefits and risks of studies that intentionally expose research subjects to environmental agents. I describe these types of studies, identify their benefits and risks, compare them to other research methods that can be used to investigate the relationship between environmental exposures and disease, and discuss some issues related to research design and risk minimization. I argue that the benefits of intentional environmental exposure studies outweigh the risks when 1) the knowledge gained is likely to improve our understanding of the relationship between environmental exposure and disease, 2) this knowledge cannot be obtained by other methods, 3) the experiments are well designed, 4) the subjects will receive some benefits, such as medical evaluations, 5) risks are minimized, and 6) the risks to human subjects are less than those encountered in a typical Phase I drug study. Only in rare circumstances (i.e., when an intentional environmental exposure study is needed to implement an important environmental or public health intervention or regulation) may such studies expose research subjects to risks as high as those encountered in a typical Phase I drug trail.     

Apportioning the House of Representatives in 2000: The Effects of Alternative Policy Scenarios*

Objective. The goal of this article is to develop and examine eight different scenarios in which the U.S. House of Representatives is reapportioned for the year 2000 on the basis of eight scenarios in which the apportionment population is differentially defined. In each scenario we adjust the 2000 apportionment population of each of the 50 states on the basis of various aspects of immigration, eligibility to vote, the overseas population, and statistical sampling. Method. The method we use to apportion the House under each of the eight scenarios is the method of Equal Proportions, a divisor method that has been used to apportion the House since 1940. It endeavors to assign equitably to the 50 states, on the basis of population size, the 385 House seats that are available to be apportioned. Not all 435 House seats are assigned to the states using this method because each state automatically gets one seat. Results. We show that when the House of Representatives is reapportioned on the basis of any of the eight scenarios, there is a varying amount of redistribution of seats among the states. Many states end up gaining or losing seats, but not all are affected. Conclusion. There have been several legal challenges following the 2000 and earlier apportionments. The results of our analyses suggest that there will continue to be legal challenges to the 2000 and later apportionments. Since it is not likely that the Congress will permit a larger number of representatives than 435, apportionment challenges are really a zero‐sum game. Some states will gain political power, and others will lose it. This redistribution of power and its politically relevant consequences lead us to expect that apportionment challenges regarding the kinds of political and demographic issues raised in this article are not at all unlikely in the future.     

A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush? When Do We Prefer Something Certainly Dirty to Something Perhaps Clean?

We analyze the problem of introducing a new substitute for a polluting process. The environmental effects of this substitute are uncertain but will be resolved over time. In a two-period model where two stock pollutants are substitutes in the abatement cost function, we show that the consequences of uncertainty depend critically on the degree of substitutability. As opposed to independent pollutants, for potentially large damages a further increased level of uncertainty leads to a decrease in risky emissions at the expense of emitting more of the old pollutant with known environmental effects. We illustrate how the effects of revealed uncertainty on the emission levels are affected by increasing substitutability.     

The Ecology of Terror Defense

We draw on an ecological metaphor to analyze terror defense by governments and individuals. Governments can combat terror in part by targeting what we call the “stock of terror capacity” accumulated by a terrorist organization. The optimal control of terror stocks relies on both periodic cleanup and ongoing abatement, a lesson derived from the optimal control of other stocks of public bads, such as pollution. Citizens can protect themselves from terror by avoiding exposure to threats and by reducing the harm they suffer if an attack occurs—actions we call “avoidance” and “amelioration,” respectively. Such measures may exert positive or negative externalities on other individuals. A simple model shows how individual responses to collective threats may undermine the effectiveness of government policies to address such threats. The model uncovers a strong analogy between the problem of individual responses to terror and the familiar congestion externality.     

Noise and bias in eliciting preferences

In the context of eliciting preferences for decision making under risk, we analyse the features of four different elicitation methods—pairwise choice, willingness-to-pay, willingness-to-accept, and the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism—and estimate noise, bias and risk attitudes for two different preference functionals, Expected Utility and Rank-Dependent Expected Utility. It is well-known that methods differ in terms of the bias in the elicitation; it is rather less well-known that methods differ in terms of their noisiness. It has also been reported that risk attitudes are not stable across different elicitation methods. Our results suggest that elicited preferences should only be used in the context in which they were elicited, and the bias in the certainty-equivalent methods should be kept in mind when making predictions based on the elicited preferences. Moreover, conclusions should be moderated to take into account the various methods’ noise, which is generally lowest in the case of pairwise choice.     

Do Painless Environmental Policies Exist?

This paper reports an experimental test of the Porter Hypothesis that environmental regulations create innovation offsets that would not otherwise be undertaken. Using a process analysis framework to consistently account for non-separabilities in production and pollution abatement practices, the findings suggest productivity gains can appear to be greater with environmental regulations than without even though they are not. This result which would seem to support the Porter argument, is the result of inadequacies in the methods used to decompose the influences to productivity change. Thus, the experiments offer one explanation for why it has been difficult in practice to reject the hypothesis.     

Economics of Radiation Protection: Equity Considerations

In order to implement cost-benefit analysis of protective actions to reduce radiological exposures, one needs to attribute a monetary value to the avoided exposure. Recently, the International Commission on Radiological Protection has stressed the need to take into consideration not only the collective exposure to ionising radiation but also its dispersion in the population. In this paper, by using some well known and some recent results in the economics of uncertainty, we discuss how to integrate these recommendations in the valuation of the benefit of protection.     

Assessing the impact of liberalising the one-child policy on the sustainability of China’s pension system

This article examines the effects of the so-called two-child policy on the future demographic structure and on alleviating the pension payment pressures. To this end, we provide population projections based on the cohort-component method and simulate the total fertility rate in different social-demographic scenarios. Actuarial models for pension fund budgets are calibrated. We found that the economic effects of the new fertility policy involve a time lag, with the predicted system dependency ratio significantly declining after 2035. The overall sustainability of pension balance will be improved, however, with the occurrence of both current and accumulated deficits delayed.     

论中国古代芦苇资源的自然分布、社会利用和文化反映

芦苇是我国分布最为广泛和丰盛的草本资源,唐以前我国北方的生态状况良好,芦苇资源较为丰富。宋以来北方环境恶化,芦苇分布也相对萎缩和减少。唐以前人们对南方的芦苇资源关注不多,中唐以来随着人口增加和经济中心的南移,长江中下游流域和东部沿海地区的芦洲苇区受到重视。我国人民利用芦苇至少有7000多年的历史,芦苇编席绞绳、用作建筑材料的历史最久,新石器遗址即发现芦席、芦泥土块,民间编席、盖屋一直延续至今。芦苇的燃料价值最为重要,先秦时即设官专事积贮,明清时森林资源匮乏,芦柴资源就日见重要。芦苇的食用、药用始见于汉,此后长用不衰。宋元以来,沿江滨海芦洲苇地开始征税,官民之间竞谋其利,构成了经济史上一个特殊的现象,突出体现了芦苇资源的历史价值。芦苇广泛的自然分布和普遍的经济应用,也激发人们广泛的兴趣,相应的文学艺术作品极为丰富。芦苇风景以规模浩渺、江湖生境称胜,备受人们的喜爱。人们通过芦苇意象感受时序的变迁,抒发江湖飘泊的情怀,寄托江湖逍遥的志趣,从而赋予了丰富的人文意义。综合自然资源、历史作用和文化意义诸方面的因素而言,芦苇在我国草本植物资源中极其重要,地位仅次于竹,而超越于其他植物之上。     

空间结构类型与街邻关系:城市社区整合的空间视角

本文基于2014年中国劳动力动态调查数据,探讨社区内部空间结构差异对街邻关系的影响,构建了三类社区空间结构：社区社会空间结构、社区物理空间结构和社区生态空间结构。研究发现,社区社会空间指标中社区职业异质性水平越高,街邻关系越差;社区中本地人口比例越高,社区居民的平均社会组织活动参与率越高,街邻关系就越好;居民参与成为人口异质性负效应的补偿效应。社区物理空间指标中隔离性设施（如楼宇门禁）和社区生态空间指标中失调型生态环境污染均会降低街邻关系水平;绿地覆盖率越高,街邻关系就越好。因此,在社区整合重塑中,降低居住区环境污染程度,建设友好型的社区生态环境,积极鼓励和促进居民参加不同类型的社会组织活动,是提升居民街邻关系的重要手段。     

Population ecology and niche seeking in the development of gay and lesbian rights groups

This paper explores the formation of groups within the framework of the population ecology literature. Specifically, I argue that newly formed groups’ target membership bases and policy agendas will become more focused as the density of interest groups in a population increases, though groups will not necessarily continue this focused trend once the density of the population has reached its upper limits. To test this theory, I utilize Nownes’ [Nownes, A. J. (2004). The population ecology of interest group formation: Mobilizing for gay and lesbian rights in the United States, 1950–1998. British Journal of Political Science, 34, 49–67] dataset on the population ecology of gay and lesbian rights groups and a typology of groups that Bosso [Bosso, C. J. (2005). Environment, Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas] used in explaining the focus of environmental rights groups. I find that as the population of gay and lesbian groups became more dense, the groups that formed tended to narrow down their potential membership populations. However, the results were different for a newly formed group's policy agenda. While niche seeking occurred during the rapid growth of groups in the 1970s and the early 1980s, groups that formed after growth leveled off in the mid-1980s balanced their agendas between being too broad and too narrow. This important finding indicates that niche seeking does not always occur in very dense interest populations.     

State Growth Management and Housing Prices*

Objective. In the United States, growth regulations aimed at environmental protection and better‐quality urban areas have become very popular since the 1960s. Although many studies have examined the housing‐price effects of local and regional growth management regulations, none has examined the effects of a state law. Past research has also tended to be cross‐sectional, rather than longitudinal, and has frequently ignored alternate hypotheses that could explain housing‐price trends. The research presented in this article examines the housing‐price effects of Florida's Growth Management Act of 1985. Methods. Using secondary source data from all 67 counties of the state for the period 1980–1995 and employing pooled time‐series analysis techniques I test the hypothesis that the Act had an inflationary effect on single‐family house prices. Results. After controlling for alternate hypotheses such as population, income, and size of house, I find a statistically significant increase in the price of single‐family houses attributable to statewide growth management. Also, the demand‐side and supply‐side price inflationary effects of growth management are similar in magnitude. Conclusions. Since higher housing prices could become the Achilles heel of growth management programs and thwart their implementation, I suggest a few ways some of the price inflationary effects may be reduced.     

ICT-trade and pollution in Africa: Do governance and regulation matter?

ICT has become a significant factor in the transition towards a low-carbon society in the modern era of increased digitalisation and clamour for environmental sustainability. Considering the significance of this digital transition in pollution abatement, we investigate the moderating effects of effective governance and regulation on the relationship between ICT-trade and pollution for 31 African countries from 2000 to 2020 by employing dynamic heterogeneous panel models robust to cross-sectional dependence. The empirical result suggests that, without adjustment for cross-sectional dependence, ICT-trade increases short and long-run pollution. Also, effective governance enhances pollution over the short and long run, while regulation lowers environmental pollution in the short term but increases long-run pollution. Further, government effectiveness moderates the effect of ICT-trade on pollution in the short and long run, whereas regulation only moderates the effect of ICT-trade on pollution in the long run. Conversely, having adjusted for cross-sectional dependence, ICT-trade, effective governance and regulation substantially lower pollution. Further, effective governance and regulation play essential roles in fostering the effects of ICT-trade on environmental pollution. Therefore, we recommend sensitivity to ICT-trade and fostering government effectiveness and regulation to curtail the adverse impact of ICT-trade on the environment.     

The value of a name: Estimating the economic impact of public land designation

Public land designations have been shown to have significant impact on their contextual regional economies. This paper reviews the existing literature on how public lands impact the proximate regional economies in which they are situated. Based on this collected wisdom the paper synthesizes past lessons into a comprehensive impact methodology. This methodology distinguishes quality effects in terms of visitors’ willingness to pay for sites of higher quality and quantity effects in terms of additional visitation to such sites to give a more comprehensive methodology for characterizing visitation and economic impact of protected area designation. We focus on National Monuments and National Parks, given that these two types of public lands have the broadest popular exposure and feature the most reliable data. A case study is then presented for a hypothetical protected area in Ferry County, Washington, USA, applying this new methodology to assess the likely economic effects of different types of protected areas.     

A note on decisions under uncertainty: the impact of the choice of the welfare measure

The paper addresses the question, how policy decisions under uncertainty depend on the underlying welfare concept. We study three different welfare measures: The first is directly based on the ex ante (expected) utility of a representative consumer whereas the second relies on an ex ante and the third on an ex post valuation of policy changes compared to the status quo. We show that decisions based on these measures coincide if and only if risk-neutral expected utility maximization is applied. Differences between the decisions are analyzed for both, risk-averse expected utility maximization and the MaxiMin criterion. For risk-averse decision makers, differences between the first and the second concept arise if the absolute risk-aversion of the decision maker is not constant in income. For risk-aversion and the MaxiMin criterion, the effort levels to provide a public good based on an optimization of ex post utility changes exceed those based on the first or second concept. Implications for environmental policy decisions based on the concepts of abatement costs and benefits from abatement are discussed.     

Research on environmental health interventions: ethical problems and solutions

This article reviews a variety of ethical issues one must consider when conducting research on environmental health interventions on human subjects. The paper uses the Kennedy Krieger Institute lead abatement study as well as a hypothetical asthma study to discuss questions concerning benefits and risks, risk minimization, safety monitoring, the duty to warn, the duty to report, the use of control groups, informed consent, equitable subject selection, privacy, conflicts of interest, and community consultation. Research on environmental health interventions can make an important contribution to our understanding of human health and disease prevention, provided it is conducted in a manner that meets prevailing scientific, ethical, and legal standards for research on human subjects.     

Research on Environmental Health Interventions: Ethical Problems and Solutions

This article reviews a variety of ethical issues one must consider when conducting research on environmental health interventions on human subjects. The paper uses the Kennedy Krieger Institute lead abatement study as well as a hypothetical asthma study to discuss questions concerning benefits and risks, risk minimization, safety monitoring, the duty to warn, the duty to report, the use of control groups, informed consent, equitable subject selection, privacy, conflicts of interest, and community consultation. Research on environmental health interventions can make an important contribution to our understanding of human health and disease prevention, provided it is conducted in a manner that meets prevailing scientific, ethical, and legal standards for research on human subjects.     

北京与周边地区基于环境保护的区域合作机制研究

区域合作是推动京津冀区域协调发展及一体化的重要举措,同时也是解决北京及周边地区环境保护问题的重要手段。本文通过分析北京与周边地区的经济环境关系以及区域合作、特别是水资源合作的现状,发现了二者在生态环境与产业领域合作中存在的一些突出问题,例如合作项目的前瞻性不足、缺乏统一规划、区域合作信息收集与服务水平较低等。针对这些问题,本文在分析其原因的基础上,构建了北京与周边地区区域合作机制的主体框架,并提出了解决前述问题的若干建议。