Analysing the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we present a new empirical method to investigate the extent to which households reduce their financial risk exposure when confronted with background risk. Our novel modelling approach - termed a deflated fractional ordered probit model -...

São Tomé and Príncipe (STP) is one of the world's smallest organic cocoa exporting countries, whose product has a positive socio-cultural and economic impact. Small producers who ensure it, are associated into two cooperatives that experience several difficulties and dilemmas including...

Climate change mitigation can be achieved, according to many, by means of Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in the Tropics (REDD). Within the climate change policy debate we thus find discussions on how to reduce GHG emissions by designing appropriate REDD programmes...

Calculation of vegetation indices, especially Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), has become one of the most successful, popular and traditional attempts in biogeographical research methods, because NDVI has certain advantages over other vegetation indices or band combinations. The...

Ezra Mishan's (1967) famous articulation of the costs of economic growth included amongst others the rearrangement and loss of nature. This paper builds on this theme by recourse to two important concepts in science, namely the assimilative capacity of nature and the entropy of law of...

Contrary to the near global consensus among the scientific community, public perceptions of climate change are known to differ between nations and to have fluctuated over time. To study such a stylised fact, this article develops a small-scale agent-based model that allows for feedback effects...

The natural capital concept is generating broad interest that extends well beyond economists. Economics has a long history of applying capital theory to natural resources. However, measurement of the value of ecosystems has mostly focused on income flows rather than valuing stocks of natural...

As the increasing loss of ecosystem services severely affects life perspectives of today's poor and future persons, governing access to, and use of, ecosystem services in an intragenerational and intergenerational just way is an urgent issue. Therefore, I argue that theories of distributive...

The recognition of two important concepts in science, namely the assimilative capacity of nature and the entropy of law of thermodynamics enables the formulation of an alternative framework for factor-utilization in economics. This framework, which includes environmental capital (KN) as a...