Traffic Demand Management In Three Historic Cities: Results Of A Multivariate Analysis of Business Attitudes.

The problem of traffic congestion and pollution in cities has become a major focus of UK transport policy in recent years. The government consultation paper, Breaking the Logjam (DETR, 1998), considered two specific traffic demand management policies: road user charges (RUC) and workplace parking levies (WPL). Legislation is now before Parliament to allow local authorities to introduce these policies. A major issue affecting the introduction of traffic demand management policies is the possible economic impacts on the urban business sector. There has been little research on the link between transport factors and urban business performance. There is general evidence that firms located in conurbations tend to perform more poorly than firms located in other areas (see, for example, Moore et al., 1980; Fothergill and Gudgin, 1982; Fothergill et al., 1984). There is also evidence that inner city firms perform more poorly than those in outer city locations. For example, Dobson and Gerrard (1991) find that engineering firms located in the inner Leeds area tend to have a lower level of profitability than engineering firms located in the outer Leeds area. Transport problems are one possible important cause of these location effects on business performance. This is supported directly by evidence that transport factors are an important influence on commercial location decisions (Nelson et al., 1994). Of all of the possible business reactions to the introduction of traffic demand management policies in urban areas, the potentially most important in economic terms is the relocation of businesses out of the urban core. Any significant degree of business evacuation of the urban core would have a profound impact on the ability of the urban economy to support the local population. In addition, any spatial restructuring of the local economy would have implications for traffic flows, shifting the locations of major traffic attractors from the urban core to the periphery. Although this may alleviate congestion in the urban core, it may serve only to create congestion elsewhere rendering traffic demand management policies somewhat counter-productive in the long run. The objective of this paper is to report the results of a multivariate analysis of business perceptions of current transport conditions and attitudes to traffic demand management policies based on a survey of firms in three historic cities - Cambridge, Norwich and York. A key component of the survey is the information provided on whether firms are currently considering relocation and the likely impact of the introduction of RUC and WPL on the next location decision. Basic data analysis of the survey responses indicates that the overwhelming majority of firms would definitely or possibly consider relocation as a response to the introduction of traffic demand management. The multivariate analysis seeks to identify those factors that have a statistically significant effect on the probability of relocation as a response. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 briefly outlines the methodology of the multivariate analysis. Section 3 provides details of the data set used for the multivariate analysis. Section 4 presents the results of the multivariate analysis of the factors influencing the perception of acute transport problems, current relocation considerations, and relocation as a response to RUC and WPL. The final section provides a summary of the findings and a discussion of the policy implications

Growing Up Healthy in Minnesota

An evaluation of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation's Growing Up Healthy Program. In spring 2002, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota Foundation made grants to nine organizations around the state to improve access to and use of preventive medical and dental services for children and teens. Focused particularly on the needs of immigrant communities and communities of color, the $1.4 million Growing Up Healthy program aimed ultimately to improve the health of Minnesotans at highest risk for lifelong health disparities.In keeping with the goals of the initiative, over 90 percent of children who received or were connected with a preventive health or dental exam were in communities of color. Growing Up Healthy reached an estimated 17,500 people in two years

Production costs across the EU in 2006

We have recently been involved in an EU project which is looking at farm accountancy cost estimation, the FACEPA (Farm Accountancy Cost Estimation and Policy Analysis of European Agriculture) project. Our part of this project was a relatively small section but very interesting as it involved looking at costs of production for a variety of organic products across several EU countries. The main products considered were milk, wheat and potatoes and the countries were UK, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, France, Italy, and Netherlands. The data were obtained for the year 2006 and all currencies were converted to Euros for ease of comparison. The main lessons learnt from this project (and found by previous authors prior to this) were that there is great variation between countries both in terms of costs and in terms of data collection

Innovation through discussion: the LibChats initiative at the University of Kent

This article outlines the new initiative that was set up at the University of Kent to encourage innovation and improve community in the Information Services department. We are a team of three para-professionals from different departments in the library who have developed the programme into a successful series of talks that has now become integrated into the culture of the departmen

Inventory of data collecting and publishing institutions(= Deliverable 2.1 of the OrganicDataNetwork project: Report on data collectors)

Despite the continuous growth of the organic market in Europe, in most countries only very basic statistics about this sector exist. Individual country governments collect data which are published nationally and by EUROSTAT (the statistical office of the European Union), on the number of certified organic holdings, organic and in-conversion land areas and livestock numbers. Important market statistics, however, such as the amount of production, consumption, retail sales, international trade and prices at the farm or consumer level are lacking in most European countries. To understand the availability of data on the organic market and to assist in improving data quality and availability, it is first necessary to be aware of the organisations that currently collect, analyse and/or disseminate such data across Europe and the methods that they use. To assess the current status of organic market data collection in the EU and its neighbours, an online survey was developed and nearly 600 organisations within the EU27, EFTA, the rest of Europe and the Mediterranean were invited to participate. The useable response rate was 28% once very incomplete responses had been removed from the sample. Based on this survey it is difficult to state definitively that no data collection/analysis/publication occur within certain countries or within certain areas of the market. The survey may not have detected any, but there may still be some carried out that have not been detected by the survey. The survey has been used to produce an inventory table, summarising the data collection effort in each country to inform further work in the project. The data were analysed for the entire sample and were split into responses from EU27+EFTA, other European and non-European countries to provide an overview of the data collection effort in each of these country groups. A comparison of EU15 and newer member states was also carried out and Mediterranean countries (MOAN) were considered separately. The relatively low response rate made comparisons difficult and means that only general observations can be made. The data types that are most commonly collected are production data, especially land area, followed by production volume; whereas production value is much less commonly collected. However, production area data are not the main focus of the survey or of the OrganicDataNetwork project. Price data and retail sales data are the next most commonly collected market data. Export data are more commonly collected in non-European countries than in the EU, perhaps reflecting a higher importance to their economies. The product categories most often represented in EU27+EFTA market data collection are meat, milk and dairy products, fruit and vegetables. Across the other groups of countries (e.g. other European, non-European) the pattern of data collection of individual product categories varies with regards to the most popular products. Data on non-food products are rarely collected. Data collection methods vary with the type of data collected, but surveys are a commonly used method across data types. Censuses are often used to collect production volume data and other types of data such as international trade data (they are not used to collect data in non-European countries). Expert estimates are occasionally used across most of the country categories. For retail data and consumer price data, consumer/household panels or retail panels (scanner data) are likely to be used, whereas catering sales data are collected by surveys. Import and export data are generally collected using surveys and sometimes censuses but some reliance is also placed on expert estimates. The data analysis carried out in the different countries (across all of the categories) tends to be compilation or basic analysis (such as averages, and ranges). Other methods mentioned include time-evolution, comparison to averages or totals, and sense-checking with other data (particularly for export data). The responses to the question about data publication suggest generally low publication rates (especially for data other than production data); with less than 50% of the sample in each disaggregated group of countries giving a positive answer. Of all the data types that were asked about, production data are most likely to be freely available, but not all production data that are collected are also published. Data are usually published annually; price, retail or export data are occasionally published more frequently. Conclusions The purpose of this survey was to produce an inventory and an overview of collectors of organic market data in Europe and its neighbouring countries. The results have delivered a good picture of the situation in Europe and have shown that the recent claims, coming from various sources,regarding a lack of organic market data were definitely justified. Overall it can be concluded that the market data collection effort remains very varied across Europe and that not all data that are collected are also published. This is problematic, as without good quality, accurate and timely information it is difficult for stakeholders to make decisions about the risks and benefits of investment. There is also a need to understand the reasons why there is currently not more organic market data collection undertaken as well as to understand the barriers to good quality data collection and dissemination. This is the basis for further work on harmonisation of data collection approaches and for improvement in data quality, which is planned as part of the OrganicDataNetwork project

Organic farm incomes in England and Wales 2010/11 (OF 0373)

This report presents results of research on the financial performance of organic farms in the 2010/11 financial year (with 2009/10 data for reference. Carried out for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), this research continues project OF0373. An analysis of the FBS/Defra Data Archive for 2010/11 found a total of 250 businesses with some organic land. To ensure the analysis undertakes a reasonable comparison of organic and conventional farms, the organic sample comprises holdings with at least 70% fully organic land (>=70% of UAA ha). Farms identified as “in-conversion” or those with less than 70% fully organic certified land were excluded from the analysis, providing a sample of 217 organic holdings. In total, data from 212 organic farms were suitable for inclusion in the analysis, as it was not possible to identify comparable conventional businesses for four organic farms, and one organic specialist pig farm was also not utilised (due to minimum sample size restrictions). The data was analysed as two samples; a full sample and an identical sample. The full sample analysis utilised data from all 212 organic farms and provides the best comparison of organic and comparable conventional farm income data in 2010/11, (2009/10 data is only provided for reference). The identical sample identifies year to year changes within systems, though the sample sizes are smaller as not all farms will be part of the FBS dataset for two years

GOVERNMENT MARKET INTERVENTION: AN ECONOMETRIC STUDY OF TANZANIAN FOOD GRAIN MARKETS

The paper is organized into six major sections. Background and trends in agricultural production and trade are presented in Section II. The extent of government intervention in food grain production and trade is described in Section III. This provides a foundation for Section IV where the behavioral equations for defining government intervention in food grain markets are specified. These equations, along with the retail demand and farm level supply equations, yield six equations in six endogenous variables for each of the food grain crops, maize, wheat and rice. It is shown in Section V that the model provides a good fit to the data. In the concluding sections, simulations are performed to obtain insights into the effect on and motivation for government intervention in food grain markets.Agricultural and Food Policy,

The management of de-cumulation risks in a defined contribution environment

The aim of the paper is to lay the theoretical foundations for the construction of a flexible tool that can be used by pensioners to find optimal investment and consumption choices in the distribution phase of a defined contribution pension scheme. The investment/consumption plan is adopted until the time of compulsory annuitization, taking into account the possibility of earlier death. The effect of the bequest motive and the desire to buy a higher annuity than the one purchasable at retirement are included in the objective function. The mathematical tools provided by dynamic programming techniques are applied to find closed form solutions: numer-ical examples are also presented. In the model, the trade-off between the different desires of the individual regarding consumption and final annuity can be dealt with by choosing appropriate weights for these factors in the setting of the problem. Conclusions are twofold. Firstly, we find that there is a natural time-varying target for the size of the fund, which acts as a sort of safety level for the needs of the pensioner. Secondly, the personal preferences of the pensioner can be translated into optimal choices, which in turn affect the distribution of the consumption path and of the final annuity

Choosing the Optimal Annuitization Time Post Retirement

In the context of decision making for retirees of a defined contribution pension scheme in the de-cumulation phase, we formulate and solve a problem of finding the optimal time of annuitization for a retiree having the possibility of choosing her own investment and consumption strategy. We formulate the problem as a combined stochastic control and optimal stopping problem. As criterion for the optimization we select a loss function that penalizes both the deviance of the running consumption rate from a desired consumption rate and the deviance of the final wealth at the time of annuitization from a desired target. We find closed form solutions for the problem and show the existence of three possible types of solutions depending on the free parameters of the problem. In numerical applications we find the optimal wealth that triggers annuitization, compare it with the desired target and investigate its dependence on both parameters of the financial market and parameters linked to the risk attitude of the retiree. Simulations of the behaviour of the risky asset seem to show that under typical situations optimal annuitization should occur a few years after retirement.defined contribution pension scheme, de-cumulation phase, stochastic optimal control, optimal annuitization time