A comprehensive approach for habitat restoration in the Columbia Basin

The Columbia Basin once supported a diversity of native fishes and large runs of anadromous salmonids that sustained substantial fisheries and cultural values. Extensive land conversion, watershed disruptions, and subsequent fishery declines have led to one of the most ambitious restoration programs in the world. Progress has been made, but restoration is expensive (exceeding US $300 M/year), and it remains unclear whether habitat actions, in particular, can be successful. A comprehensive approach is needed to guide cost-effective habitat restoration. Four elements that must be addressed simultaneously are (1) a scientific foundation from landscape ecology and the concept of resilience, (2) broad public support, (3) governance for collaboration and integration, and (4) a capacity for learning and adaptation. Realizing these in the Columbia Basin will require actions to rebalance restoration goals to include diversity, strengthen linkages between science and management, increase public engagement, work across traditional ecological and social boundaries, and learn from experience.This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by Taylor & Francis and can be found at: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ufsh20#.VUEib2MywS

The Perfect Finance Minister: Whom to Appoint as Finance Minister to Balance the Budget?

The role and influence of the finance minister within the cabinet are discussed with increasing prominence in the recent theoretical literature on the political economy of budget deficits. It is generally assumed that the spending ministers can raise their reputation purely with new or more extensive expenditure programs, whereas solely the finance minister is interested to balance the budget. Using a dynamic panel model to study the development of public deficits in the German states between 1960 and 2009, we identify several personal characteristics of the finance ministers that significantly influence budgetary performance. Namely her professional background seems to affect budget deficits. During times of fiscal stress, our results can guide prime ministers in the nominating of finance ministers in order to assure sound budgeting

Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague

Abstract This paper explores some perverse features that can emerge when social contracts are moved from a social vacuum to a setting of social interdependence. In particular we note incentives that might exist in conjunction with externality problems that yield situations in which: (1) social contracts reduce social wealth; (2) sub-global social contracts are Pareto inferior to the absence of social contracts; (3) there are no incentives for global social contracts. While previous works emphasized the benefits of contracts, this paper focuses on their costs. A conclurion reached is that perhaps justice and efficiency demand not a single global social contract but rather a rich melange of sub-global contracts with appropriate interstices of anarchy. Thomas Hobbes is generally regarded as the originator of the contractual explanation of the emergence of society. Hobbes' (1909: 96 -97) characterization of the pre-contractual society is both pessimistic and well known: Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, . . . the life of man [will be] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes saw the social contract as the means by which individuals escape the harsh environment of anarchy and realize the fruits of a more civilized order. In the past two decades, renewed interest in social contractarianism has been spurred by the work of Joh