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The purpose of this paper is to review and assess the role of relevant explanatory variables that influence individual purchase decisions for “environmentally responsible” food consumption. In particular, we provide a detailed review of the key empirical studies in the area of consumer demand for those foods which can be broadly considered as environmentally responsible products (ERPs). We give this definition because the choice of ERPs is a consequence of individual concerns towards environmental and health issues and consumers are directly and indirectly responsible for the environmental and health effects of their food consumption choices. The decision to purchase ERPs should reduce negative environmental effects from intensive agricultural practices, helping to preserve a public good like the environment. Consumption of ERPs should also curb health risks from chemicals for all the household members eating the food purchased in the shops. Therefore, the choice of ERPs reflects both “public” and “private” demands.

This section provides an in-depth analysis of the challenges faced in security and justice service delivery. It explains why security and justice are crucial to development efforts, outlines the objectives of justice and security delivery in fragile states, and provides guidance on how to overcome the challenges of providing security and justice delivery in fragile environments.

The OECD Competition Committee debated issues related to proving dominance / market power in June 2006. This document includes an executive summary and the documents from the meeting: an analytical note by the OECD and written submissions from Canada, Chinese Taipei, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the European Commission, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, the Russian Federation, Switzerland, Türkiye, the United Kingdom, the United States as well as an aide-memoire of the discussion.

A policy reform such as trade liberalisation can accelerate structural change in an economy, causing an exogenous shift in relative factor demands. For some developing countries, the result may be an increase in skills demand associated with the adoption of newly available foreign technology and lower-cost imported capital goods. This demand shift may be permanent or only temporary, but in either case the skills supply should eventually increase in response to higher returns. One concern, however, is that with an initially highly skewed distribution of education the skilled labour supply adjustment may be prolonged; likewise any transitional increase in skill-based wage inequality.

Cyclical fluctuations in economic activity have moderated over time but the extent and dynamics of volatility remain different across OECD countries. A reason behind this heterogeneity is that countries exhibit different degrees of resilience in the face of common shocks. This paper traces divergences in resilience back to different policy settings and institutions in labour, product and financial markets. Using pooled regression analysis across 20 OECD countries over the period 1982-2003, the paper identifies the impact of policy settings on two dimensions of resilience: the impact effect of a shock and its subsequent persistence. Policies and institutions associated with rigidities in labour and product markets are found to dampen the initial impact of shocks but to make their effects more persistent, while policies allowing for deep mortgage markets lower persistence and thereby improve resilience. Combining these two dimensions of resilience, the paper then uses the estimated equations to derive indicators of resilience for the OECD countries concerned, based on their current or recent policy settings. Three groups of countries emerge. In English-speaking countries, simulations suggest shocks have a significant initial effect on activity but this impact then dies out relatively quickly. By contrast, in many continental European countries the initial impact of shocks is cushioned but their effect linger for longer, with the cumulated output loss tending to be larger than in English-speaking countries. Finally a few, mostly small, European countries combine cushioning of the initial shock with a fairly quick return to baseline.

Climate change, the world’s unquenchable thirst for power and the geopolitical tensions and price instability associated with oil have combined to spark a renewed interest in nuclear energy. None of these factors would mean much if the nuclear industry had been plagued with significant safety concerns, but it has been 28 years since the Three Mile Island incident and 21 years since Chernobyl. In the interim, nuclear energy has provided a reliable source of base-load electricity to the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.1 As of July 2007, over three-quarters of the operating nuclear reactor units in the U.S. have renewed or are seeking renewal of their operating licences for extended periods of up to 20 years.2 There are 19 separate locations at existing plants in the south eastern and north eastern United States, as well as Texas, which are currently considering constructing new nuclear reactors...

International nuclear law has developed over the last 50 years and during most of its history its main focus has been on protecting people and property. Protection of the environment has only made an occasional appearance, and the international conventions on nuclear third party liability amply illustrate this point. Under the Paris Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy (1960) and the Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage (1963) the notion of nuclear damage is understood to cover personal injury and property damage causally related to a nuclear incident. The conventions do not refer to environmental damage at all.

The objective of this study is to analyse what the quantitative funding requirements for pension funds with defined benefit plans would be, if Solvency II (based on the QIS 3 methodology) would be applied. Also possible extensions of the Solvency II methodology that seem necessary in order to reflect the specifics of pension funds will be discussed.