Circular economy and the city: an urban political economy agenda

ABSTRACT

The circular economy (CE) has become a matter of urban development. A literature review shows that the CE debate is biased toward technology-driven industrial change, while bracketing broader socio-political interests. We address this gap by exploring the political economy of scale of the CE. Looking into the case of Brussels (Belgium), a city that has recently adopted the CE as part of its socio-economic strategy, we explore how the anticipated transition to a ‘circular city’ chimes with long-standing urban development agendas. While there is little evidence of stable growth coalitions between corporate and political elites, we argue that the CE provides an ‘urban sustainability fix’ by selectively incorporating ecological goals in urban governance strategies. We further scrutinise the landscape of diverse and heterogenous CE practices in food and transport, highlighting how they are regulated and organised, what labour conditions they offer, and how they are anchored in urban space.     

Bayesian penalized smoothing approaches in models specified using differential equations with unknown error distributions

A full Bayesian approach based on ordinary differential equation (ODE)-penalized B-splines and penalized Gaussian mixture is proposed to jointly estimate ODE-parameters, state function and error distribution from the observation of some state functions involved in systems of affine differential equations. Simulations inspired by pharmacokinetic (PK) studies show that the proposed method provides comparable results to the method based on the standard ODE-penalized B-spline approach (i.e. with the Gaussian error distribution assumption) and outperforms the standard ODE-penalized B-splines when the distribution is not Gaussian. This methodology is illustrated on a PK data set.     

Stepparent Family Membership Status

In this study, 143 participants experiencing a parental divorce completed surveys regarding their relationship with a stepparent. Using semantic-differential items, participants were asked to indicate how much they trusted their stepmother, stepfather, or both. Participants were then asked to indicate why (and if) they considered the stepparent to be family. Most participants considered their stepparent to be part of their family, and were able to articulate reasons or events that caused them to see the stepparent as a family member. These reasons were coded and compared to trust scores. Results indicate that participants reporting positive, positive-neutral, neutral, negative-neutral, and negative responses about their stepparent were significantly different on trust scores. Analyses also reveal that stepfather trust scores were significantly related to the participant residing with the stepfather, but this was not the case for stepmothers.     

An Introduction to ‘Benefit of the Doubt’ Composite Indicators

Despite their increasing use, composite indicators remain controversial. The undesirable dependence of countries’ rankings on the preliminary normalization stage, and the disagreement among experts/stakeholders on the specific weighting scheme used to aggregate sub-indicators, are often invoked to undermine the credibility of composite indicators. Data envelopment analysis may be instrumental in overcoming these limitations. One part of its appeal in the composite indicator context stems from its invariance to measurement units, which entails that a normalization stage can be skipped. Secondly, it fills the informational gap in the ‘right’ set of weights by generating flexible ‘benefit of the doubt’-weights for each evaluated country. The ease of interpretation is a third advantage of the specific model that is the main focus of this paper. In sum, the method may help to neutralize some recurring sources of criticism on composite indicators, allowing one to shift the focus to other, and perhaps more essential stages of their construction. An abridged version of this paper was presented at the Workshop on European Indicators and Scoreboards, organised by DG Education and the Joint Research Centre within the auspices of CRELL, in Brussels, October 24–25, 2005.     

New perspectives on a more-or-less familiar poverty index

In this article, we examine some properties and extensions of a particular poverty index, which is already passingly familiar to poverty analysts. Our investigation leads to a new perspective on the family of additively decomposable and scale-invariant poverty indices and provides new insights into the class of poverty measures proposed by Foster et al. (Econometrica 52:761–766, 1984). Finally, our work leads to a clarification of the different roles of transfer properties and distribution sensitivity in poverty measurement.     

Risk Analysis: Celebrating the Accomplishments and Embracing Ongoing Challenges

As part of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Society for Risk Analysis and Risk Analysis: An International Journal, this essay reviews the 10 most important accomplishments of risk analysis from 1980 to 2010, outlines major accomplishments in three major categories from 2011 to 2019, discusses how editors circulate authors’ accomplishments, and proposes 10 major risk-related challenges for 2020–2030. Authors conclude that the next decade will severely test the field of risk analysis.     

Assimilation versus multiculturalism: The views of urban Americans

Parents of children in public schools in a large American urban center, representing a number of different ethnic groups, were interviewed about their personal views and feelings toward cultural and racial diversity in America today. Three main issues were addressed: respondents' attitudes toward the maintenance of heritage cultures versus assimilation; their attitudes toward bilingualism; and their attitudes toward other groups in the community. The analyses revealed important differences in attitudes between ethnic minority groups and established white and black groups. Nonetheless, strong support was shown for the retention of heritage cultures, even among middle-class white and working-class black Americans. The working-class white American sample was distinctive in its rejection of multiculturalism and in its negative attitudes toward other ethnic and racial groups. All groups supported the idea of bilingualism for their children, and certain groups thought that public schools had an important role to play in its promotion. Overall, the results delineate a series of factors that affect intragroup and intergroup harmony and the processes of adjustment that transpire within a social system when it has to cope with ethnic and racial diversity.     

Rethinking productivity: The perspective of the Earth as the primary corporation

Productivity and its consequences touch everything. Its comprehensive embrace includes Wall Street and rain forests, automobile output, diminishing Earth stocks, satisfying insatiable consumerism, chemical toxins, increasing population, and loss of topsoil. We ride the postindustrial roller coaster with its upside and downside. Thus, economically, we can cheer as the stock market goes up, up, up. Ecologically, we can lament this trajectory as sending a message that the life systems of the planet are going down, down, down.A rising environmental awareness is recognizing that the Earth is in a deficit position. Hence, the logical warrant for rethinking productivity. Here, our metaphors become a powerful communication system; specifically, the justification for rethinking productivity from the normative perspective of the Earth as the primary corporation. Wearing such an accountability lens, the business person understands the language and the judgment that, if the Earth falls to bankruptcy, then everything else collapses.To explore this critical issue positively, a framework is used setting forth ten guiding principles toward an ecological consciousness. Immediately following each principle, specific connections are made to initiate the process of rethinking productivity. The purpose is to offer not only concrete thinking and creative alternatives but actionable ideas or applications in the workplace and in our industrial and commercial settings; and to stimulate the beginnings of dialogue with the business community. The proposal builds toward a potential commitment worth the full investment of our human energies.The guiding principles emphasize the shamanic attitude which sees all things swayed by sacred meanings; shifting from object-domination to the experience of a subject radiating an interior richness; experiencing the infinitely differentiated splendor of the Earth; taking time to listen to the voices of divine presence; recovering insights of the mind and insounds of the heart to live in compassionate harmony with the Earth; becoming passionately engaged with life as an experience of celebration, with human happiness rescaled to Earth needs; becoming educated to the genius of the Earth and the human as its most original mode of expressiveness; with the full substance of our humanity, relating in mutually enhancing ways to the entire Earth community; inspired by the Dream of the Earth, finding enterprises worthy of our human energy; in the unfolding of this New Story, putting on a new imagination, Re-VISION-ing the human and being shaped by an ecological consciousness as a way into the future.Corresponding to each of these guiding principles, actionable ideas and applications are offered: choosing appropriate quality of life indicators; energizing people in organizations through the systematic elimination of all forms of waste; building upon the George Winter model for installing an environmental business management system; addressing three strategic levels of listening; enlarging lessons of world-class manufacturing organizations to planetary scope; extending the insights of a "geologian" to Earth dynamics; drawing upon the power of storytelling; contrasting the Dominant Social Paradigm and the New Environmental Paradigm. In summary, an extraordinary future awaits business leaders whose vision of this new productivity paradigm is inspired by a Dream of the Earth.     

On the use of extreme value tail modeling for generalized pairwise comparisons with censored outcomes

In randomized clinical trials, methods of pairwise comparisons such as the ‘Net Benefit’ or the ‘win ratio’ have recently gained much attention when interests lies in assessing the effect of a treatment as compared to a standard of care. Among other advantages, these methods are usually praised for delivering a treatment measure that can easily handle multiple outcomes of different nature, while keeping a meaningful interpretation for patients and clinicians. For time-to-event outcomes, a recent suggestion emerged in the literature for estimating these treatment measures by providing a natural handling of censored outcomes. However, this estimation procedure may lead to biased estimates when tails of survival functions cannot be reliably estimated using Kaplan–Meier estimators. The problem then extrapolates to the other outcomes incorporated in the pairwise comparison construction. In this work, we suggest to extend the procedure by the consideration of a hybrid survival function estimator that relies on an extreme value tail model through the Generalized Pareto distribution. We provide an estimator of treatment effect measures that notably improves on bias and remains easily apprehended for practical implementation. This is illustrated in an extensive simulation study as well as in an actual trial of a new cancer immunotherapy.     

Testing the proportional odds assumption in multiply imputed ordinal longitudinal data

A popular choice when analyzing ordinal data is to consider the cumulative proportional odds model to relate the marginal probabilities of the ordinal outcome to a set of covariates. However, application of this model relies on the condition of identical cumulative odds ratios across the cut-offs of the ordinal outcome; the well-known proportional odds assumption. This paper focuses on the assessment of this assumption while accounting for repeated and missing data. In this respect, we develop a statistical method built on multiple imputation (MI) based on generalized estimating equations that allows to test the proportionality assumption under the missing at random setting. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated for two MI algorithms for incomplete longitudinal ordinal data. The impact of both MI methods is compared with respect to the type I error rate and the power for situations covering various numbers of categories of the ordinal outcome, sample sizes, rates of missingness, well-balanced and skewed data. The comparison of both MI methods with the complete-case analysis is also provided. We illustrate the use of the proposed methods on a quality of life data from a cancer clinical trial.