How Voluntary Environmental Programs Reduce Pollution

This article investigates the mechanisms that voluntary environmental program (VEP) participants adopt to reduce pollution. The focus of this article is the 33/50 program, a VEP introduced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1991 and discontinued in 1995. The program called for emissions reductions for 17 chemicals reported to the Toxics Release Inventory. Using a sample of approximately 12,000 plants, the relationship between 33/50 program participation and adoption of pollution reduction practices is studied for three time periods, 1991–1995 (program life), 1996–2004, and 2005–2013. These practices include source reduction activities (SRAs) and recycling, recovery, and treatment (RRTs). The major findings are that during the program's life, 33/50 participants showed increased adoption of SRAs and RRTs for both targeted and nontargeted chemicals. However, once the program ended, higher adoption rates persisted for RRTs only, with a shift in emphasis toward treatment over recycling and recovery.     

Strategic Reassessments: Aid and Bureaucracy in Australia-India Relations 1951–1970*

Australia-India relations during the Cold War years were tense. The dominant argument in the current literature that explains this tension is the Nehru-Menzies dissonance, which resulted in fundamentally opposite readings of the Cold War. However, the role of Australian aid to India has been understudied in the bilateral relations literature. India was the largest receiver of Australian aid between 1951–1969, but in 1969, there was a marked decrease in this aid as Indonesia replaced India as the main aid recipient. By drawing on archival material, this article suggests an additional explanation for the dramatic change to the Australia-India relationship. By examining the role of Australian ministers and senior bureaucrats, this paper argues that between 1951–1969, Australia’s aid to India was driven by its strategic interests in India. However, by 1966 Australia’s strategic interests in India became tenuous due to the souring of United States-India relations, primarily because of the stresses of the Vietnam War. Thus, a sizeable cut in Australian aid to India was made in 1969 and the subsequent decision to make Indonesia the foremost beneficiary of its aid was a result of strategic reassessments in Australian foreign policy, to adhere more closely to United States (US) interests in Asia.     

Racing to the Bottom? Trade,Environmental Governance,and ISO 14001

Globalization critics argue that international trade spurs a race to the bottom among national environmental standards. ISO 14001 is the most widely adopted voluntary environmental regulation which encourages firms to take environmental action beyond what domestic government regulations require. Drawing on a panel study of 108 countries over seven years, we investigate conditions under which trade linkages can encourage ISO 14001 adoption, thereby countering environmental races to the bottom. We find that trade linkages encourage ISO 14001 adoption if countries' major export markets have adopted this voluntary regulation.     

The influence of foreign direct investment on contracting confidence in developing countries

This paper examines whether foreign direct investment (FDI) influences confidence in commercial contracts in developing countries. While the research on how host countries’ policy environments encourage FDI inflows has flourished, scholars have paid less attention to how the policy environment and local actors’ beliefs might, in turn, be affected by FDI. This is surprising because multinational enterprises are well‐recognized political and economic actors across the world. We expect that their increasing economic salience will influence the policy environments in which they function. By employing an innovative measure of property rights protection – contract‐intensive money – we examine how foreign direct investment influences host countries’ contract‐intensive money ratio in a large panel time series of both developed and developing countries from 1980 to 2002. Our analysis suggests that higher levels of FDI inflows are associated with greater confidence in commercial contracts and, by extension, the protection of property rights in developing countries.     

Voluntary environmental programs: A comparative perspective

Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) are institutions for inducing firms to produce environmental goods beyond legal requirements. A comparative perspective on VEPs shows how incentives to sponsor and participate in VEPs vary across countries in ways that reveal their potential and limitations. Our brief survey examines conditions under which VEPs emerge, attract participants, and improve participants' environmental performance. We focus on the costs and bene‐fits for actors seeking to supply (or sponsor) these governance mechanisms as well as the costs and benefits for firms who are considering joining VEPs and adhering to their program obligations. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Policy design and public support for carbon tax: Evidence from a 2018 US national online survey experiment

Public support for policy instruments is influenced by perceptions of how benefits and costs are distributed across various groups. We examine different carbon tax designs outlining different ways to distribute tax revenues. Using a national online sample of 1,606 US respondents, we examine support for a $20/ton carbon tax that is: (1) revenue neutral: revenue is returned to citizens via tax cuts; (2) compensation-focused: revenue is directed to helping actors disproportionately hurt by the tax; (3) mitigation-focused: revenue funds projects reducing carbon emissions; and (4) adaptation-focused: revenue is directed to enhancing community resilience to extreme weather events. We find devoting revenue to mitigation raises overall support for carbon tax by 6.3 per cent versus the control (54.9 per cent) where no information on spending is provided. Other frames raise support in specific subgroups only. Revenue neutrality raises support among lower-income households (+6.6 per cent) and political independents (+9.4 per cent), while compensation increases support among lower-income repondents (+6.1 per cent).     

Reappraising the French role in nineteenth-century Egyptian education

This article explores the origins of French influence in Egyptian education by examining the circumstances under which Muhammad Ali Pasha (r. 1805–1848) sent two organized student missions to study in Paris over other European destinations. In the history of modern Egyptian education, French influence on educational institutions is linked to persistent French imperial interest following their occupation of Egypt (1798–1801). French involvement in education was not initially a government project, but rather evolved to become a government project by the end of the Pasha's rule. Using historical evidence, I show that the first mission was a personal venture of ex-Bonapartists who desired to keep the spirit of the Napoleonic expedition alive through informal cultural imperialism despite the Restoration government's disinterest. The French government's official involvement in the second student mission of 1844 was motivated by their colonial interests in North Africa. Previous historians have projected those motivations backwards on the earlier period and that Egyptian choice to make use of French expertise and knowledge was a contingent one.     

Adipocere Formation in Subtropical Climate of Northern India: A Retrospective Study

Adipocere formation depends upon multiple environmental factors. In comparison with temperate countries, it usually develops early in the subtropical climate. We have studied a retrospective data of 31 cases with adipocere formation at Department of Forensic Medicine at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. Most of the cases were recovered during the month of May to October from closed rooms at home, open grounds, open forest areas, various water sources, and riverbanks. The time duration of recovery from the time of death was from 12 h to 7 days 12 h. In 10 cases, adipocere formation was seen within 2 days, and in four male cases among them, the adipocere formed within a day. Most of the bodies showing adipocere formation within 2 days were recovered from land. These facts showed that subtropical climate having hot and humid weather promotes early adipocere formation compared to temperate climate.     

Moistened hands do not necessarily allude to high quality fingerprints: the relationship between palmar moisture and fingerprint donorship

We explored the quality distribution of ninhydrin-developed prints on A4 bond paper in two groups of individuals, in Israel and in India. While the quality distributions of the developed marks in both countries had some dissimilarities, both groups showed the expected bell-shape distribution, with the majority of the donors belonging to the central zone, defined as "average" or "good." Attempt was made to correlate between a physiological feature, palmar moisture, and the fingerprint donorship. As a rule, high fingermark quality could be associated with sweating hands, but there were individuals with moist palms whose fingermarks had a low score and vice versa. This finding supports the logical but hitherto unproven assumption that besides the amount of palmar sweat, the other physiological factor governing the prints' quality is the total amount of substrate, amino acids in this case, in the latent deposits, which depends on the substrate concentration in the sweat.