This paper discusses the contribution made by American social scientists to thestudy of poverty in the past twenty five years. It has three parts. The firstconcentrates on the measurement of poverty and the fact that the US povertyline remained unchanged in that period despite its increasingly...

[...]Our research on seven ‘weak marketcities’ in five European countriessupported by the Joseph RowntreeFoundation was completed and theresulting book, Phoenix Cities by AnnePower, Jörg Plöger and Astrid Winkler,will be published in March 2010.However, we were delighted that...

This paper addressed the puzzling resistance of Presidents of southern African countries to food aid in 2002, given near certain starvation and long-term negative health effects of malnutrition of their constituents. First, I show that NGOs led by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are...

Public debate continues over whether the United States should regulate genetically modified (GM) foods by imposing a mandatory labeling policy. This paper develops a model that shows that a voluntary GM-labeling policy results in higher welfare than a regulated mandatory GM-labeling policy, if...

We analyze the long-term impacts of large-scale expansion of biofuels on land-usechange, food supply and prices, and the overall economy in various countries or regions using amulti-country, multi-sector global computable general equilibrium model augmented with an explicitland-use module and...

The literature assessing the efficacy of the Food Stamp Program, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has long puzzled over positive associations between food stamp receipt and various undesirable health outcomes such as food insecurity. Assessing the impact of food...

This paper presents evidence on the impact of individual as well as regionalcharacteristics on changes in fat, protein, alcohol and cigarette consumption, and on diet’sdiversity between 1994 and 2004. The results from a dynamic econometric model suggestthat among individual determinants such...

Based on an econometric analysis of the data obtained from a survey of meat plants( ) in Iowa in summer 2007, this paper identifies the factors impacting the meatplants’ voluntary adoption of forward and backward traceability activities. The resultssuggest that the ownership type (corporate...

Food products containing genetically modified (GM) ingredients have entered themarket over the past decade. The biotech industry and environmental groups have disseminatingconflicting private information about GM foods. This paper develops a unique methodology forvaluing independent third-party...