Combining Supply and Demand Estimates for Ecosystem Services from Cropland

Payment-for-Ecosystem-Services (PES) programs are gaining appeal as flexible approaches to inducing the voluntary provision of ecosystem services (ES). Farmers, who manage agricultural ecosystems, provide important nonmarket ecosystem services to the public by their choice of production inputs and management practices. Although there exist various PES programs in the United States and Europe, we are aware of none that was designed based on a comprehensive understanding of the underlying supply and demand of ecosystem services. Taking advantage of unique, coupled datasets of stated preferences, this paper combines a supply-side cost function of farmers’ willingness to adopt practices that provide increased ES with a demand-side social benefit function of residents’ willingness to pay (WTP) for these ES. The result is an empirically based, welfare-maximizing price and quantity of ES that can inform the design of future PES programs.Payment-for-Ecosystem-Services (PES), Contingent valuation, Aggregate supply and demand, Cropland, Eutrophication, Greenhouse gas, Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Q11, Q51, Q57, Q58,

The politics of curating Japonisme: International art exhibition and soft power in contemporary Japanese cultural diplomacy

This article studies the Paris exposition Japonismes 2018, organized by the Japanese government to introduce the European public to the profundity of Japanese culture. It examines the organizational deliberations leading up to the exposition; the curation of individual exhibits held within its ambit; and the cultural politics of ‘Japan expositions’ that began with Japonismes and continue to this day. It argues that the organizers and exhibits in Japonismes make political use of the trope of a timeless, mystical, and animistic Japanese sense of beauty that supposedly unites prehistoric pottery and contemporary comics and animation. This Japanese aesthetic vision claims to provide an alternative to Western norms, thereby promising to resolve contemporary problems, such as anthropocentrism, by influencing Western aesthetics as it had in the late nineteenth century. Japonismes exemplifies how Japanese soft power diplomacy can employ Western tropes about Japan, such as Japonisme, for its economic and nation-branding efforts

Western elegance, Yokohama style: college fashion, urban redevelopment, and the rise of feminine Motomachi in Post-1970 Japan

Motomachi, a small shopping street on the outskirts of Yokohama’s old town, is architecturally designed with a European aesthetic and caters primarily to a clientele of women in their early twenties. This article traces the history of Motomachi’s construction as a site for feminine con- sumption. It identifies its origins in the late 1970s with three principal actors: the readers of a new genre of magazines targeting young and highly-educated women; economic planners in Yokohama concerned with preserving the traditional civic functions of shopping streets; and the businessmen in Motomachi’s shopping street association interested in remaining eco- nomically competitive. Through the pages of the magazine JJ, young women discovered in Motomachi traditional Japanese craftsmanship and “Yokohama traditional” (Hamatra) style. Concurrently, city bureaucrats encouraged Motomachi and other shopping streets to revitalize themselves by capitalizing on their heritage, prompting Motomachi’s savvy businessmen to project this demographic’s fantasies onto urban space. Through archival study of planning documents and fashion magazines combined with aesthetic analyses of Hamatra fashion and Motomachi’s architecture, this article shows how urban space can be impregnated with particular gendered and subcultural forms. It also interrogates the political, economic, and gendered origins of local history and how Occidentalism persists despite a discursive rejection of Western norms in favor of Japanese tradition. Lastly, the article argues that Motomachi’s history is also one of the development of neoliberalism in contemporary Japan, and that future research ought not to overlook neoliberalism’s gendered aspects

Obtaining the Neutrino Mixing Matrix with the Tetrahedral Group

We discuss various "minimalist'' schemes to derive the neutrino mixing matrix using the tetrahedral group $A_{4}.