European Food Quality Policy: The Importance of Geographical Indications, Organic Certification and Food Quality Assurance Schemes in European Countries

In the early 1990s reform of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy led to a change in emphasis away from price into policies to promote rural development, in part through improvements to food quality. Geographic indicators are only one of a range of EU policies designed to foster these goals. Geographic indicators are put within the context of the wider quality enhancement policies that include quality assurance schemes and organic production. There appears to be considerable regional differences within the EU when it comes to the use of the various quality-enhancing policies available. The member states of the EU can be grouped into four different clusters, each characterized by a different quality policy strategy.European Union, food quality, geographic indicators, regional differences, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, International Relations/Trade,

European food quality policy: the importance of geographical indications, organic certification and food quality insurance schemes in European countries

The protection of geographical indications, organic certification and food quality assurance schemes are the cornerstones of European food quality policy. In this paper the importance of these voluntary quality policy schemes in the different Member States of the European Union is investigated. Member States may be grouped into four cluster according to the food quality orientation.food quality policy, protected geographical indications, organic certification, quality assurance schemes, Europe, cluster, PDO, PGI, TSG, Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Consumer Information in the food service industry vs. food retailing

In order to define consumer expectations over a traceability and information system for the entire food supply chain, the information behaviour of consumers in the food service industry has been subject to an analysis for the first time. In comparison to consumers in retailing, significant differences appear in information seeking behaviour as well as in the information desired.meat traceability, consumer behaviour, food service industry, Consumer/Household Economics,

Experts Playing the Traveler's Dilemma

We analyze a one-shot experiment on the traveler's dilemma in which members of the Game Theory Society, were asked to submit both a (possibly mixed) strategy and their belief concerning the average strategy of their opponents. Very few entrants expect and play the unique Nash equilibrium, while we observe a fifth playing the cooperative solution of the game, i.e. a strictly dominated strategy. The experimental data suggest to analyze the game as one of incomplete information. Most strategies observed are in the support of its Bayesian Nash equilibria. A notable exception is the Nash equilibrium strategy of the original game.Traveler's Dilemma; Experiment; Experts; Incomplete Information

Lexicalization and Grammar Development

In this paper we present a fully lexicalized grammar formalism as a particularly attractive framework for the specification of natural language grammars. We discuss in detail Feature-based, Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (FB-LTAGs), a representative of the class of lexicalized grammars. We illustrate the advantages of lexicalized grammars in various contexts of natural language processing, ranging from wide-coverage grammar development to parsing and machine translation. We also present a method for compact and efficient representation of lexicalized trees.Comment: ps file. English w/ German abstract. 10 page

Casino gambling in Germany : development, legal conditions and the exclusion system

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview about the German casino gambling industry as a whole and the identification of its particularities, while putting a special focus on the present exclusion system. To achieve that, the foundations were laid by examining general developments on the market as well as pointing out recent legal changes, like the introduction of the Interstate treaty on gambling and its consequences for the casinos. Additionally, the application process and the basis for regulation of the establishments have been presented in detail. This general part is then followed by an extensive description of the German exclusion system. The program was set in contrast to those present in other, especially North American jurisdictions, in order to illuminate its unique features. Secondly, the focus is shifted on the development of a profile of excluders from German casinos by examining whether the established risk factors are also significant predictors for the number of bans in German communities. To our knowledge, there is no work explicitly analyzing casino patrons. Using a unique dataset, the approach brought some interesting insights. Some of the considered variables can be confirmed to serve this task in the given framework, whilst others did not yield a statistically significant impact. The most important sociodemographic factors are male gender, being between 30 and 39 years old, and not living in a partnership. The shares of the first two variables have a positive, the latter one a negative influence. Education, unemployment, and migration status, which are usually agreed on to be good predictors, did not exhibit significant results. However, it would be wrong to neglect them, as the outcome is probably owed to noise in the data, which lowers the precision of the estimation and could lead to insignificance. The coefficients of the variables that have been included to capture proximity turn out to be significant and bigger in magnitude than those of the sociodemographic factors. Distance to the next casino and the share of exclusions are inversely related, if the distance increases, the share of bans will decrease. The dummy variables capturing immediate proximity to gambling establishments also provide evidence for this pattern. If a classical casino or an annex is present in a community, this has a positive impact on the share of excluders. Considering only the proximity dimension of availability, the results are in favor of the hypothesis that higher availability could be a predictor for an increase of bans, which serve as a proxy for PG. The additionally included control variables also yield significant results. The coefficient of the indicator for a sparsely populated region shows that the share of excluders in said areas is on average higher than in dense ones. Furthermore, the share of assistance centers in a county positively drives the share of bans. The dummy variable indicating communities in the former GDR turns out to be negatively associated with the dependent variable. This makes absolute sense, considering the different developments of the gambling markets in these two regions between 1950 and 1990. However, the magnitude of the distinct effects on the amount of exclusions is rather small and the model is only able to explain about 10% of the variation in the number of bans, which is a rather small fraction. This is very likely owed to the fact that although problematic or pathological gambling is in parts driven by external sociodemographic factors like age, gender or the marital status, a lot of the behavior is facilitated by internal predisposition which cannot be captured with this type of analysis. Nevertheless, many of the proposed risk or, more neutrally stated, influence factors can be confirmed by this approach, which has been specifically adapted to the German terrestrial casino patrons

Auswirkungen geplanter Abstandsregelungen und Regelungen zu Konzessionsgrößen auf Spielhallen am Beispiel Stuttgarts

Während der Glücksspieländerungsstaatsvertrag neben dem Verbot der Mehrfachkonzessionen eine Begrenzung der Anzahl der Spielhallen durch die Anzahl der in einer Gemeinde zu erteilenden Erlaubnisse intendierte, hat das LGlüG von Baden-Württemberg die Begrenzung der Anzahl der Spielhallenstandorte durch eine Mindestabstandregel zwischen Spielhallen umgesetzt. Nach § 42 Abs. 3 LGlüG beträgt die Entfernung, die zu einer bestehenden Einrichtung zum Aufenthalt von Kindern und Jugendlichen eingehalten werden muss, mindestens 500 m Luftlinie. Momentan gibt es in der Stadt Stuttgart 132 Konzessionen für Spielhallen, die sich auf 83 Standorte verteilen. Somit bestehen 49 Mehrfachkonzessionen, die spätestens zum Ende der Übergangsfristen des GlüÄndStV zum 30. Juni 2017 nicht mehr zulässig sind. Von den 83 Spielhallenstandorten unterschreiten 54 Objekte den zulässigen Mindestabstand der Spielhallen untereinander. Unter Berücksichtigung dieser Regelungen verbleiben lediglich 29 Spielhallen im Stuttgarter Stadtgebiet. Somit könnte die Gesamtzahl der Konzessionen im Stuttgarter Stadtgebiet aufgrund der strikten Regelungen in Baden-Württemberg auf ca. 20 Prozent zurückgehen

Auswirkungen geplanter Abstandsregelungen und Regelungen zu Konzessionsgrößen auf Spielhallen am Beispiel ausgewählter Kommunen in Baden-Württemberg

Während der Glücksspieländerungsstaatsvertrag neben dem Verbot der Mehrfachkonzessionen eine Begrenzung der Anzahl der Spielhallen durch die Anzahl der in einer Gemeinde zu erteilenden Erlaubnisse intendierte, haben das LGlüG von Baden-Württemberg und auch die Ausführungsgesetze anderer Bundesländer die Begrenzung der Anzahl der Spielhallenstandorte durch eine Mindestabstandregel zwischen Spielhallen umgesetzt, die sich jedoch von Bundesland zu Bundesland deutlich unterscheidet. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird ein Überblick über die Auswirkungen von Abstandsregelungen und Konzessionsbeschränkungen am Beispiel des Spielhallenbestandes sechs baden-württembergischer Großstädte gegeben (Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Pforzheim, Reutlingen und Ulm)