Markets are central institutions of Western societies and their main mechanism of coordination; however, we do not know much about their functioning. How are prices formed? By which ways do buyers and sellers meet? What kind of rule are necessary for markets to function? The purpose of this...

During discussions at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the need was identified for refinement of the agro-edaphic element in the revision of FAO's \f2Agro-Ecological Zones\f1 AEZ methodology carried out by IIASA and FAO and in the IIASA's \f2Modeling Land Use and...

Recently we analyzed important classes of nonsmooth and nonconvex risk control problems which can not be solved by standard optimization techniques. The aim of this article is to develop computational procedures enabling us to bypass some of the obstacles identified in this paper. We illustrate...

The extent and fate of cultivated land in China has been the subject of intense debate in academia and the cause for major public concerns in China and abroad. This paper discusses statistics recently compiled by China's State Land Administration on conversions from and to cultivated land. To...

This paper was prepared for and presented at the so-called IIASA Days in Kiev, Ukraine held on 18-19 March 1999. <p>The paper discusses the possible long-term development of the international forest sector and endeavors to put the Ukrainian forest sector development into this perspective. It is...</p>

The report provides a concise and comprehensive review of available data on past demographic trends in the region and combines this analysis with expert opinion on alternative future demographic trends (as described in Lutz, 1996) to calculate likely ranges of future population growth. A very...