Toward Environmental Responsibility of Thai Shrimp Farming through a Voluntary Management Scheme

The implementation of voluntary adoption of the Code of Conduct (CoC) to promote environmental responsibility and sustainable development of Thai shrimp industry is examined. Farmers perceived- benefits, risks and uncertain-ties associated with the adoption and their perceived extra fixed cost are found to be the critical conditions to the success of the program. Improvement of farmers perception through increased information and knowledge, develop-ment of supportive policies and mechanisms (i.e. a Group CoC system, insur-ance program, a combination of environmental policy approaches) and strengthening farmer organizations and networks among and between the play-ers throughout the market chain are suggested as to enhance the adoption and implementation of the scheme

Health-Status Insurance: How Markets Can Provide Health Security

None of us has health insurance, really. If you develop a long-term condition such as heart disease or cancer, and if you then lose your job or are divorced, you can lose your health insurance. You now have a preexisting condition, and insurance will be enormously expensive -- if it's available at all.Free markets can solve this problem, and provide life-long, portable health security, while enhancing consumer choice and competition. "Heath-status insurance" is the key. If you are diagnosed with a long-term, expensive condition, a health-status insurance policy will give you the resources to pay higher medical insurance premiums. Health-status insurance covers the risk of premium reclassification, just as medical insurance covers the risk of medical expenses. With health-status insurance, you can always obtain medical insurance, no matter how sick you get, with no change in out-of-pocket costs. With health-status insurance, medical insurers would be allowed to charge sick people more than healthy people, and to compete intensely for all customers. People would have complete freedom to change jobs, move, or change medical insurers. Rigorous competition would allow us to obtain better medical care at lower cost. Most regulations and policy proposals aimed at improving long-term insurance -- including those advanced in Barack Obama's presidential campaign -- limit competition and consumer choice by banning risk-based premiums, forcing insurers to take all comers, strengthening employer-based or other forced pooling mechanisms, or introducing national health insurance. The individual health insurance market is already moving in the direction of health-status insurance. To let health-status insurance emerge fully, we must remove the legal and regulatory pressure to provide employer-based group insurance over individual insurance and remove regulations limiting risk-based pricing and competition among health insurers

A Fork in the Road: Obama, McCain, and Health Care

Healthcare reform will be one of the top issues of the 2008 presidential election. In the face of widespread public demand for changes in the U.S. health care system, both Barack Obama and John McCain have offered detailed proposals for reform. Senator Obama's approach relies heavily on government mandates, regulations, and subsidies. He would mandate that employers provide health care coverage for their workers and that parents purchase health insurance for their children. He would significantly increase regulation of the insurance industry, establishing a standard minimum benefits package, and requiring insurers to accept all applicants regardless of their health. He would offer a variety of new and expanded subsidies to middle- and low-income Americans. In contrast, John McCain emphasizes consumer choice and greater competition in the health care industry. He would move away from our current employment-based insurance system by replacing the current tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance with a refundable tax credit for individuals. At the same time he would sharply deregulate the insurance industry to increase competition. Senator McCain's proposal is far from perfect, but from a free-market perspective, it appears superior to Senator Obama's plan. Obama's plan, with its heavy reliance on government, leads to the same problems that bedevil universal health care systems all over the world: limited patient choices and rationed care. McCain's proposal is much more consumer centered and taps into the best aspects of the free market

Mandating Environmental Liability Insurance

Plant cuticles are extracellular membranes covering aerial organs of plants, whose main functions rely on the protection against water loss, mechanical injury from the environment, attack of microorganism, and also regulation of gas exchange. Among the several constituents of plant cuticles, waxes are those that play an important role in their barrier properties. In order to enhance the mechanical properties of wax, NFC was applied in. In the project, mainly two kinds of methods were used to prepare wax-NFC composites. One way was wax and NFC were dissolved in toluene and casted to be a film, another way was to prepare NFC aerogel firstly, and then, impregnated the aerogel into wax liquid. After pressing it the structure was more compact. In order to characterize the properties of samples, SEM, XRD, TGA, DSC, Contact angle testing, tensile test and oxygen permeability methods were applied in

Reinsurance in State Health Reform

Based on the experiences of three states, formal modeling, quantitative estimates, and qualitative assessments, explores the impact of and issues involved in publicly funding reinsurance for insurers as a way to expand or maintain private coverage

Employment-Based Health Insurance: 2010

[Excerpt] This report uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the characteristics of people with employer-provided health insurance coverage as well as characteristics of employers that offer health insurance. This documentation of the current distribution of employment-based health insurance coverage across socioeconomic characteristics is needed to establish the changes associated with recent health care legislation. The report is composed of two sections. The first section provides a brief overview of historical trends in employer-provided coverage rates by source of coverage as well as the reasons for nonparticipation in health insurance from 1997 to 2010. The second section focuses on data collected in 2010 and describes health insurance offer and take-up rates by employee and employer characteristics. In addition, the report describes the insurance status of workers not participating in an employer’s plan and the reasons for nonparticipation

An Unemployment Re-Insurance Scheme for the Eurozone? Stabilizing and Redistributive Effects: Summary of the study

The study summarized here is the first analysis to evaluate an unemployment re-insurance scheme for the euro area as regards potential stabilizing and redistributive effects. The results show that such a scheme can stabi- lize economies in the euro area and could thus contribute to cushioning large labor market shocks. More specifically, this study runs a series of simulations to show that an unemployment re-insurance scheme would have had a counter-cyclical effect in all euro area countries during the simulation period and would not have led to permanent transfer payments. The novel feature of the study is that it separates the stabilization effects of the unemployment re-insurance scheme into two channels relevant to the current political debate: First, it indicates the potential for stabilization through payments between countries (so-called interregional stabilization). Stabili- zation through this channel arises because labor market fluctuations differ across countries, i.e., shocks are not completely "symmetric". Second, the study estimates the so-called intertemporal stabilization potential. This channel describes the stabilization that member states can achieve when taking out loans in times of crisis and repaying them in good times. Thus, this channel is indicative of the stabilization potential of loan-based re-insur- ance models as set out in the BMF proposal. The distinction between the two stabilization channels is crucial for assessing the possible value added of different reform options. Intertemporal stabilization can be achieved through national debt or through financial assistance programs of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) in the case of loss of market access. By contrast, interregional stabilization only arises by pooling contribution pay- ments within a common fund and disbursing transfers from it if a member state is hit by a large labor market shock