Relationships between rural inhabitants and their landscapes in areas of intensive agricultural use: A case study in Quebec (Canada)

An understanding of the relationships between local populations and the landscape is crucial for reintroducing the multifunctional character of landscapes in areas of intensive agricultural use. This study proposes to identify and compare the relationships that local populations, both farmers and non-farmers, maintain with their landscapes in areas of intensive agricultural use based on a detailed case study in Quebec, Canada. It relies on the dialectical conceptual model of individual–landscape interactions and introduces the notion of “community of relationships to the landscape” to compare populations. Following semi-structured interviews, we performed an analysis of the links between the attributes of the valued landscape, the motives for having those values and the practices tied to those values. This led to distinguish between four main types of relationships with the landscape: the hedonistic relationship, the emotional relationship, the utilitarian relationship, and the relationship with the social environment. Then, on the basis of the relative weight of each relationship and the interactions between the multiple relationships that local inhabitants have with the landscape, four communities of relationships to the landscape were identified, most including both farmers and non-farmers. Beyond the apparent uniformity of the landscapes in areas characterized by intensive agriculture, the results highlight the diversity of the local populations and confirm the heuristic significance of the notion of community of relationships to the landscape. Finally, our analysis of the differences with regard to values and visions between the communities suggests that the vitality of these rural areas can only be ensured by recognizing, maintaining and possibly increasing the current diversity of communities.     

X-inefficiency in the use of income to attain economic satisfaction

This investigation uses a subjective well-being approach to provide a novel empirical answer to an old normative debate in economic literature: whether consumers use efficiently their income. Based on a large database from Mexico, the paper shows that there exists substantial X-inefficiency in the use of income; even when a relaxed criterion to define the thick frontier is followed. X-inefficiency in the use of income can emerge from personal errors and from social-organization deficiencies. Sustainable development concerns make it critical to focus on reducing X-inefficiency as an alternative way to increase economic well-being.     

A note on replacement policy comparisons from NBUC lifetime of the unit

Age and block replacement policies are commonly used in order to reduce the number of in-service failures when the systems are functioning indefinitely. In reliability theory, the lifetime of a system can be modeled by means of the NBUC aging class that is characterized throughout comparisons of the residual lives in the sense of the icx order. The purpose of this paper is to establish stochastic comparisons between the age (block) replacement policy and a renewal process with no planned replacements when the lifetime of the unit is NBUC. Supported by Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under grant BFM2000-0362     

Some Relationships Between Skew-Normal Distributions and Order Statistics from Exchangeable Normal Random Vectors

The article explores the relationship between distributions of order statistics from random vectors with exchangeable normal distributions and several skewed generalizations of the normal distribution. In particular, we show that the order statistics of exchangeable normal observations have closed skew-normal distributions, and that the corresponding density function is log-concave when the order statistic is extreme. Special attention is given to the bivariate case, which is related to the univariate skew-normal distribution. The applications discussed focus on the lifetimes of coherent systems.     

Some characterizations of multivariate distributions using products of the hazard gradient and mean residual life components

We give a general procedure to characterize multivariate distributions by using products of the hazard gradient and mean residual life components. This procedure is applied to characterize multivariate distributions as Gumbel exponential, Lomax, Burr, Pareto and generalized Pareto multivariate distributions. Our results extend the results of several authors and can be used to study how to extend univariate models to the multivariate set-up.     

Nonlinear filters based on taylor series expansions ∗

The nonlinear filters based on Taylor series approximation are broadly used for computational simplicity, even though their filtering estimates are clearly biased. In this paper, first, we analyze what is approximated when we apply the expanded nonlinear functions to the standard linear recursive Kalman filter algorithm. Next, since the state variable α_t and α_t-t are approximated as a conditional normal distribution given information up to time t - 1 (i.e., I_t-1) in approximation of the Taylor series expansion, it might be appropriate to evaluate each expectation by generating normal random numbers of α_t and α_t-1 given I_t-1 and those of the error terms θ and η_t. Thus, we propose the Monte-Carlo simulation filter using normal random draws. Finally we perform two Monte-Carlo experiments, where we obtain the result that the Monte-Carlo simulation filter has a superior performance over the nonlinear filters such as the extended Kalman filter and the second-order nonlinear filter.     

The past,present and future of policy modeling

We evaluate the past, present, and future of policy modeling from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. We do this through an extensive review and analysis of papers published in the Journal of Policy Modeling between 1978 and 2018. Over the years the focus of the policy modeling literature (and the Journal) changed. The changes were in research topics, approaches, techniques, theories, methods, and analytical tools as required for the rigorous analysis of complex and dynamic economic phenomena in policy modeling.