Time Preferences, Land Tenure Security and the Adoption of Sustainable Land Management Practices in Southeast Nigeria

Sustainable land management (SLM) practices are important for tackling agricultural land degradation. This study investigates the association between farmers’ time preferences and their adoption of SLM practices (agroforestry, terracing, and land fallow practices) with intertemporal benefits, and further documents the moderating role of land tenure security in this relationship. The analysis in the paper is based on data from a survey of 480 farmers in south-east Nigeria, complemented by semi-structured interviews. Farmers’ time preferences were elicited using both a survey and experiments with hypothetical payouts. Land tenure was conceptualised as a composite concept to suit the legally pluralistic context of the study area. This study found that many of the sampled farmers have high discount rates. The result further shows that farmers’ time preferences are negatively associated with their adoption of agroforestry and land fallow practices. Moreover, the result shows that both legal and de facto tenure security encourage the adoption of SLM practices. Other factors influencing the adoption of SLM practices include gender, household size, education, credit constraints, marital status, risk attitude, farming experience, and farm characteristics (e.g., erosion problems and steepness of slope). Furthermore, this study found that the security-enhancing effect of land tenure security (de facto) can alleviate the negative influence of time preferences on farmers’ adoption of SLM practices. The findings suggest that farmers with higher discount rates, who have secure tenure rights to land, are more likely to adopt SLM practices, compared to similar farmers without tenure security

Analysis of the enabling environment for delivering land degradation neutrality in Nigeria: perspectives from the sub-national to local level

The discourse around the planning, monitoring, and assessment of land degradation neutrality (LDN) has been communicated strongly on global and national scales; however, there is relatively little information on the enabling environment that will support the achievement of LDN targets locally. Recognising the dearth of studies that apply the LDN concept at the local scale, this study investigated local stakeholders’ perspectives on the progress towards, and challenges around, establishing the enabling environment for achieving LDN. It developed and used an extended LDN enabler framework that incorporates the gender component of LDN. The data for this study were collected from stakeholders from sub-national and local institutions concerned with LDN in Nigeria. The study findings indicate the presence of several relevant institutions and policy instruments to support progress towards LDN. However, this did not create an enabling environment for land users due to the lack of sufficient funding, weak systemic capacities of the relevant institutions, and the operational challenges for delivering policy incentives. Moreover, shortcomings in the regulatory framework give rise to land tenure insecurity and gender-biased land administration systems. Also, the findings indicate that entrenched traditional norms are a major challenge in achieving gender-balanced LDN outcomes. The extended LDN-enabler framework developed in this study will extend the scope of future studies examining progress toward LDN at regional and local scales

On reminder effects, drop-outs and dominance: evidence from an online experiment on charitable giving

We present the results of an experiment that (a) shows the usefulness of screening out drop-outs and (b) tests whether different methods of payment and reminder intervals affect charitable giving. Following a lab session, participants could make online donations to charity for a total duration of three months. Our procedure justifying the exclusion of drop-outs consists in requiring participants to collect payments in person flexibly and as known in advance and as highlighted to them later. Our interpretation is that participants who failed to collect their positive payments under these circumstances are likely not to satisfy dominance. If we restrict the sample to subjects who did not drop out, but not otherwise, reminders significantly increase the overall amount of charitable giving. We also find that weekly reminders are no more effective than monthly reminders in increasing charitable giving, and that, in our three months duration experiment, standing orders do not increase giving relative to one-off donations

Pharmacogenetics: data, concepts and tools to improve drug discovery and drug treatment

Variation in the human genome is a most important cause of variable response to drugs and other xenobiotics. Susceptibility to almost all diseases is determined to some extent by genetic variation. Driven by the advances in molecular biology, pharmacogenetics has evolved within the past 40 years from a niche discipline to a major driving force of clinical pharmacology, and it is currently one of the most actively pursued disciplines in applied biomedical research in general. Nowadays we can assess more than 1,000,000 polymorphisms or the expression of more than 25,000 genes in each participant of a clinical study – at affordable costs. This has not yet significantly changed common therapeutic practices, but a number of physicians are starting to consider polymorphisms, such as those in CYP2C9, CYP2C19, CYP2D6, TPMT and VKORC1, in daily medical practice. More obviously, pharmacogenetics has changed the practices and requirements in preclinical and clinical drug research; large clinical trials without a pharmacogenomic add-on appear to have become the minority. This review is about how the discipline of pharmacogenetics has evolved from the analysis of single proteins to current approaches involving the broad analyses of the entire genome and of all mRNA species or all metabolites and other approaches aimed at trying to understand the entire biological system. Pharmacogenetics and genomics are becoming substantially integrated fields of the profession of clinical pharmacology, and education in the relevant methods, knowledge and concepts form an indispensable part of the clinical pharmacology curriculum and the professional life of pharmacologists from early drug discovery to pharmacovigilance

International meta-analysis of stated preference studies of transportation noise nuisance

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11116-014-9527-4This paper reports the first meta-analysis and most extensive review of stated preference studies of transportation noise nuisance. The meta-analysis is based on a newly compiled data set of 258 values from 49 studies and 23 countries and spanning more than 40 years. Contrast this with the most extensive meta-analysis of the more conventional hedonic pricing approach which includes 53 noise valuations. Moreover, the sample compares favourably with the 444 observations from the very first meta-analysis of the value of travel time savings which is by far the most widely examined parameter in transport planning. A particularly significant finding of the study is that the intertemporal income elasticity is close to one, somewhat larger than the cross-sectional income elasticity typically obtained from individual studies. This demonstrates the importance of distinguishing the effects of 2 income variations that occur over time, which tend to drive policy, from variations across individuals at one point in time, and such findings are typical of those observed in other markets. Importantly, the values derived are transferable across countries and may be used to benchmark existing evidence and provide values in contexts where none exist. Other key results are that values for aircraft noise exceed those for other modes, whilst those exposed to higher noise levels and those who are highly annoyed also have higher values in line with expectations. A wide range of design effects were tested but few were significant and these included the consumer surplus measure, the representation of noise and the context