Suchergebnisse

The High Plains region of the U.S. is one of the most important agricultural regions in the world. Much agricultural production in this semi-arid region, however, depends on the consumption of nonrenewable groundwater from the High Plains Aquifer. Although the problem has drawn significant attention from policymakers and citizens for over forty years, depletion of the Aquifer has worsened. Why does depletion persist despite widespread and ongoing concern? We explore this conundrum by placing the region into an historical, political-economic context. We focus specifically on the case of Western Kansas, and argue that the contemporary problem is rooted in the ways in which this region was articulated into broader circuits of capital and exchange. Private capital and the state incorporated the region as a source of primary raw materials, mainly agricultural products. Water-dependent agricultural resource extraction opened up a metabolic rift in the hydrological cycle that has only been exacerbated over time through unequal ecological exchange with more politically and economically central places. These structural dynamics associated with political-economic incorporation have impeded efforts to develop more sustainable uses of groundwater consumption in the region.Key words: groundwater management, metabolic rift, High Plains, Kansas

This paper is a summary of the major findings of a large research project on the distributional impacts of government policies in Switzerland. First, the budget incidence of the entire public sector, including the social security system, is presented. The results indicate a substantial redistribution from upper-income to lower-income classes. The effect is largely due to public spending rather than to taxation. Second, the distributional impacts of public policy in selected policy areas—transportation, social security, agriculture, and health—are investigated. Redistribution is pro the poor for transportation and health, and pro the rich for agriculture. A mixed picture is found for social security. Within groups of the same marital status or sex, redistribution is pro the poor. Between these groups, it is pro the rich. Third, the distributional impacts of changes in selected macroeconomic variables are analyzed. The major conclusion is that macroeconomic growth policies, if successful, lead to a reduced equality of income distribution.

Abstract Kassab (1990) makes an important methodological contribution by urging the use of robust regression methods in the study of community economic impacts and by indicating the utility of the bootstrap in assessing standard errors in robust regression. By introducing the notion of a contaminating distribution, we reconcile differences between her claim that ordinary least squares (OLS) regression is biased when outliers are present and standard linear model theory that does not make assumptions about the shape of the residual distribution in proving OLS an unbiased estimator. The contaminating distribution provides a framework for rural sociologists to link their statistical assumptions to a substantive understanding of the phenomena being studied. We suggest an alternative regression estimation strategy that may be more robust than the technique she uses. We also discuss an approach to bootstrapping that is more appropriate for macro‐level social indicator data than the one she describes. An appendix discusses the software available for implementing these methods.

Dependency theorists have become increasingly interested in examining the effects of international economic dependence on such measures of national development as economic growth, income inequality, and overurbanization. Yet limited systematic research exists examining the effect of economic dependence on urban primacy. Panel regression analysis was used to examine the effects of economic dependence and several control variables on urban primacy for a sample of 53 nations. That is, circa 1970 primacy (based on Davis's 4-city index of first-city primacy) was regressed on circa 1955 measures of urban primacy, economic dependence (investment dependence or export dependence on raw materials), gross national product per capita, land area size, and population growth between 1950 and 1970. Results of the analyses indicated that both measures of economic dependence had positive-albeit nonsignificant-effects on urban primacy.

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Includes index and chonological table of statutes. ; Bulletin No. 23 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Legislative Reference Bureau. ; Mode of access: Internet.

We present a search for gravitational waves from 116 known millisecond and young pulsars using data from the fifth science run of the LIGO detectors. For this search, ephemerides overlapping the run period were obtained for all pulsars using radio and X-ray observations. We demonstrate an updated search method that allows for small uncertainties in the pulsar phase parameters to be included in the search. We report no signal detection from any of the targets and therefore interpret our results as upper limits on the gravitational wave signal strength. The most interesting limits are those for young pulsars. We present updated limits on gravitational radiation from the Crab pulsar, where the measured limit is now a factor of 7 below the spin-down limit. This limits the power radiated via gravitational waves to be less than similar to 2% of the available spin-down power. For the X-ray pulsar J0537-6910 we reach the spin-down limit under the assumption that any gravitational wave signal from it stays phase locked to the X-ray pulses over timing glitches, and for pulsars J1913+1011 and J1952+3252 we are only a factor of a few above the spin-down limit. Of the recycled millisecond pulsars, several of themeasured upper limits are only about an order of magnitude above their spin-down limits. For these our best (lowest) upper limit on gravitational wave amplitude is 2.3 x 10(-26) for J1603-7202 and our best (lowest) limit on the inferred pulsar ellipticity is 7.0 x 10(-8) for J2124-3358. ; Australian Research Council ; Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India ; Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare of Italy ; Spanish Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia ; Conselleria d'Economia Hisenda i Innovacio of the Govern de les Illes Balears ; Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research ; Royal Society ; Scottish Funding Council ; Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education ; Foundation for Polish Science ; Scottish Universities Physics Alliance ; National Aeronautics and Space Administration ; Carnegie Trust ; Leverhulme Trust ; David and Lucile Packard Foundation ; Research Corporation ; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada ; Commonwealth Government ; Astronomy