Product ecolabelling, competition and the environment

The paper explores the impact of a third-party product ecolabel (i.e. green label) on competition and the environment, and the firms' strategies during the negotiation of the minimum environmental requirements underlying a product's eligibility for the ecolabel. The introduction includes some empirical observation about the development of the European ecolabel. The second part presents the model. We assume Cournot competition in a homogenous industry made up of multi-product firms each selling the whole range of product-variants, from green to brown. Green consumers "trust" the ecolabel. We derive demand, supply, prices and profits at the equilibrium before and after ecolabel. We first assume that firms do not innovate on their products. We then introduce environmental innovation into the model. The third part analyses the impact of the ecolabel on competition (firms' profits) and the environment (green innovation and market shares). The conclusion contrasts the results with the ones obtained in the case of a heterogeneous industry - i.e., an industry made up of mono-product firms each selling a product having an environmental profile different than that of the other firms' products- and draws policy considerations. The paper expands the literature on product ecolabelling by considering imperfect competition, giving thus the possibility for the firms to undertake green innovations affecting non marginal costs, and by taking into account the type of industry concerned by the ecolabel. We find that firms in a homogenous industry are better off with an ecolabel than without and might even be willing to adopt environmentally effective criteria if the green demand is important and innovation costs are low. This contrasts with results obtained in a previous paper for a heterogeneous industry, in which part of the firms will always lose from the implementation of an environmentally effective ecolabel and oppose its development. Cross-industry comparison suggests that regulators should start developing ecolabelling programs with homogenous industry in which innovation costs are likely to be negligible as compared to the costs of production

Enabling small-scale water providers in Kibera

The small-scale providers are significant actors in the provision of services to the urban poor. This paper focuses on preparing pragmatic tasks to enable the water providers operating in informal settlements and deals with the issues of price, quality and abstraction. It is conceived in the context of the present government reforms in Kenya and addresses the water needs of the urban poor. This is also part of the present interest of the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP)- Africa that is working with clients to find pragmatic ways to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in Africa

The improvement of the sanitation services in Moshi (Tanzania). Demand Analysis and Sector Regulation

Following an invitation to tender of the French Foreign Office on research on management of urban waste-water in developing countries, a consortium of institutions from France and Tanzania has been created in 2000. The proposition of the consortium has been accepted; it included a research project on the improvement of the sanitation services in Moshi (Tanzania). This research, presented in this document, was divided into two parts: the first one was the analysis of the households' demand; the second one was about the sector regulation.Sanitation, Regulation, Tanzania, Willingness to pay, Demand,

Marc-Henri Piault, Anthropologie et Cinéma. Passage à l’image, passage par l’image

Depuis le milieu des années 1970, des ethnocinéastes réfléchissent aux principes et aux orientations qui devraient être ceux d’une anthropologie visuelle. Marc-Henri Piault est l’un d’eux. Livre-manifeste, Anthropologie et cinéma expose, avec une certaine ténacité, les ambitions d’une sous-discipline qui lui semble en mesure de « conduire à une reconsidération de la discipline dans son ensemble » (p. 260). Si l’anthropologie visuelle n’est pas qu’une nouvelle appellation du bon vieux cinéma e..

Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit & Béatrice Fleury-Vilatte, eds, Les Institutions de l’image

Actes d’un colloque sur le thème « Images et sciences sociales », ce livre prolonge les réflexions initiées par Marc Ferro sur les relations entre société, politique et production cinématographique, au moyen de vingt-trois contributions traversées par plusieurs interrogations. Comment les événements sont-ils traités par les cinéastes, quelles questions se sont-ils posés en les mettant en scène ? Leur propos est-il convenable pour les pouvoirs en place et pour le public ? En réponse à ces ques..

Un conseiller critique, un chercheur exigeant, un homme chaleureux

Alors qu’aujourd’hui il semble qu’il n’y ait plus de domaine de prédilection pour l’ethnologie si bien que celle‑ci investit tous les compartiments de la société contemporaine, du garage au nucléaire en passant par les supporters, on a oublié qu’en 1980 l’ethnologie de la France était encore très axée sur le monde rural et restait pour une bonne part ancrée dans les musées. En 1981, après la victoire de la gauche, Jack Lang, devenu ministre de la Culture, décide de faire rentrer dans le Conse..

From where do Cancer-Initiating Cells Originate?

International audienc

Identité et patrimoine

How can one interpret the wish to preserve, more and more extensively, the traces, whatever their form, of societies and cultures that have preceded those existing nowadays ? What signifiance can one give to the unrestrained classification of the culture’s common features as heritage ? Amongst other finalities, what is taken in consideration here is the social investment for constituting personal and collective identities to which individuals want to give more consistency and consolidation, and even entrenchment. To this end, the past is subject to different operations, the purpose of which are to transfonn it into cultural heritage. Classified as such, objects and social practices acquire the qualifying virtue which is sought : they symbolise and mark out. Local communities appropriate and encourage this extensive classification as cultural heritage

Quality of abstracts in 3 clinical dermatology journals

Background Structured abstracts have been widely adopted in medical journals, with little demonstration of their superiority over unstructured abstracts.Objectives: To compare abstract quality among 3 clinical dermatology journals and to compare the quality of structured and unstructured abstracts within those journals. Design and Data Sources: Abstracts of a random sample of clinical studies (case reports, case series, and reviews excluded) published in 2000 in the Archives of Dermatology, The British Journal of Dermatology, and the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology were evaluated. Each abstract was rated by 2 independent investigators, using a 30-item quality scale divided into 8 categories (objective, design, setting, subjects, intervention, measurement of variables, results, and conclusions). Items applicable to the study and present in the main text of the article were rated as being present or absent from the abstract. A global quality score (range, 0-1) for each abstract was established by calculating the proportion of criteria among the eligible criteria that was rated as being present. A score was also calculated for each category. Interrater agreement was assessed with a {kappa} statistic. Mean ± SD scores were compared among journals and between formats (structured vs unstructured) using analysis of variance. Main Outcome Measures: Mean quality scores of abstracts by journal and by format. Results: Interrater agreement was good ({kappa} = 0.71). Mean ± SD quality scores of abstracts were significantly different among journals (Archives of Dermatology, 0.78 ± 0.07; The British Journal of Dermatology, 0.67 ± 0.17; and Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 0.64 ± 0.15; P = .045) and between formats (structured, 0.71 ± 0.11; and unstructured, 0.56 ± 0.18; P = .002). The setting category had the lowest scores. Conclusions: The quality of abstracts differed across the 3 tested journals. Unstructured abstracts were demonstrated to be of lower quality compared with structured abstracts and may account for the differences in quality scores among the journals. The structured format should be more widely adopted in dermatology journals