scholarly journals Logging Industry in the United States: Employment and Profitability

Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1720
Author(s):  
Mingtao He ◽  
Mathew Smidt ◽  
Wenying Li ◽  
Yaoqi Zhang

This study analyzed logging industry employment and profitability in recent decades in the U.S. based on Occupational Employment Statistics (OES), Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), and Timber Product Output (TPO) Reports. The logging industry in the U.S. has experienced reduced employment with an aging workforce over the past two decades. The changes might be related to increased productivity from mechanization, combined with reduced demand for logging, but estimates of capital and labor productivity for logging are not available. To overcome the data limitation, a simple and cost-effective economic model, Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) Model, was applied to estimate the profitability of the entire industry at a state level. It was found that the reduced demand and increased operating costs led to poor profitability and a wave of closures of logging firms but also accelerated the adjustment in the logging industry. Serious challenges facing the forestry sector include the lack of an effective monitoring tool for the logging industry, structural shortage of logging labor, and rising operating costs.

Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Chacón

In the fifteen years since the enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act—the U.S. legislation implementing the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children—every state in the United States has enacted its own, state-level antitrafficking law. This paper presents a multistate survey of state-level antitrafficking laws and the criminal prosecutions that have been conducted pursuant to those over the past decade. The comparative treatment of noncitizens and citizens in antitrafficking prosecutions is of particular concern. This research reveals that while subfederal implementation of antitrafficking laws has the potential to complement stated federal and international antitrafficking objectives, it also has the power to subvert and undermine those goals. State-level enforcement both mirrors and amplifies some of the systemic problems that arise when the criminal law is used as a tool to combat trafficking, including the manipulation of antitrafficking tools and rhetoric to perpetuate racial subordination and migrant criminalization. Ultimately, this research offers broader theoretical insights into the promises and pitfalls of overlapping criminal jurisdiction both within federalist systems and within frameworks of international regulation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hammel

AbstractThe responses of the U.S. and Europe to increased crime from the 1960s to the 1990s differed starkly: the U.S. enacted a punitive agenda, while penal polity and incarceration rates in Western (and Eastern) Europe remained gener­ally stable. To explain this divergence, many commentators invoke cultural or historical factors such as America’s ‘frontier mentality” or Calvinist religious heritage. This article proposes another focus: differing cultures of criminal law-making. During the Enlightenment, a pattern of expert control over penal law emerged in most European nation-states. The pattern still holds - even today, major changes to penal polity are still entrusted to groups of elite professors, jurists and senior civil servants, who create coherent codes covering the entire national territory. In the United States, no tradition of expert control took hold. Criminal law is made at the state level, there is little emphasis on logical code-drafting and shifting local majorities can pass new criminal laws almost at will This structural difference in who writes criminal laws has far-reaching effects not only on the how crime is defined, but on other factors such as public expectations of the criminal justice system and the values penal legislation is thought to express.


2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Mahin ◽  
James O. Malley ◽  
Ronald O. Hamburger ◽  
Michael Mahoney

Considerable research has been conducted worldwide to assess the unexpected damage to welded steel moment-frame buildings during the 1989 Loma Prieta, 1994 Northridge, and 1995 Hyogo-ken Nanbu earthquakes, as well as to find effective and economical remedies that can be incorporated into analysis, design, and construction practices. A major six-year program has been undertaken with the sponsorship of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to synthesize and interpret the results of this research, and to conduct additional investigations to develop reliable, practical, and cost-effective guidelines for the design and construction of new steel moment-frame structures, as well as for the inspection, evaluation and repair or upgrading of existing ones. Topics investigated as part of this program include (1) performance of steel buildings in past earthquakes; (2) material properties and fracture issues; (3) joining and inspection; (4) connection performance; (5) system performance; (6) performance prediction and evaluation; and (7) social, economic, and political impacts. The project utilizes a performance-based engineering framework and addresses issues pertaining to various types of steel moment-resisting frames including those utilizing welded, bolted, and partially restrained connections. The guidelines are applicable to regions of low, medium, and high seismicity throughout the United States. This paper reviews the overall organization and management of this program of research, guideline development, training and peer evaluation, the scope of the investigations undertaken, and the general organization and contents of the guidelines developed.


2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 503
Author(s):  
Yongrui Hou ◽  
Tianyuan Luo ◽  
Jing Hao

As the demand for organic products quickly grows in the U.S., the domestic supply of organic commodities has stagnated and failed to meet the increasing needs. To expand the organic supply capacity in the country, it is crucial to identify the key factors that could effectively promote the scale of organic farming in the U.S. Using a multivariate analytic model and state level data from multiple sources and years, this study examines a wide range of determinants that could affect organic agriculture. The results show that research funding would significantly increase organic vegetable production and the number of organic farms. The development of organic farming could be greatly encouraged by the support of research institutions. In addition, the evidence shows that abundant farm workers are essential for the organic farming sector, which is labor-intensive. Finally, a large population base could create a more stable consumer group that would promote the development of organic agriculture. These results suggest the importance of exploring and expanding consumer groups for organic commodities. These findings provide insightful implications that research support, labor availability, and a solid consumer base are crucial to boost the organic sector in the U.S. and other countries.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Maria Blancero ◽  
Edwin Mouriño-Ruiz ◽  
Amado M. Padilla

There are a variety of trends that are enabling and forcing organizational change. A crucial trend that has implications for a changing and growing demographic workforce includes Millennials and in particular Latinos/Hispanics as the world and particularly the U.S. workplace continues to have an increased aging workforce. Yet, while Latinos are members of the largest and also the fastest growing minority group in the United States, they are disproportionately underrepresented in more highly compensated professional and leadership roles across corporate America. The majority of existing career development and acculturation literature in the United States has focused narrowly on Anglo-oriented acculturation as a linear process. Unfortunately, as society has evolved so has the form of prejudices and biases. This is supported by the fact that well more than 50% of Hispanics experience discrimination through a variety of means including micro-aggressions. We believe that developing and maintaining an overlapping and compatible bicultural identity might not be enough and that we need to rethink what acculturation and biculturalism means for millennials and broaden our thinking to include cosmopolitanism as more encompassing of the millennials and their place in the world. We believe this article begins the dialogue for more research into this growing part of the U.S. workforce along with practical implications and applications.


Author(s):  
Emily Zackin

Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give no explicit guarantees of governmental help. This book argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the American rights tradition. The United States actually has a long history of enshrining positive rights in its constitutional law, but these rights have been overlooked simply because they are not in the U.S. Constitution. The book shows how they instead have been included in America's state constitutions, in large part because state governments, not the federal government, have long been primarily responsible for crafting American social policy. Although state constitutions, seemingly mired in trivial detail, can look like pale imitations of their federal counterpart, they have been sites of serious debate, reflect national concerns, and enshrine choices about fundamental values. This book looks in depth at the history of education, labor, and environmental reform, explaining why America's activists targeted state constitutions in their struggles for government protection from the hazards of life under capitalism. Shedding light on the variety of reasons that activists pursued the creation of new state-level rights, the book challenges us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the American constitutional tradition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (12) ◽  
pp. 3671-3674
Author(s):  
Arielle Elmaleh-Sachs ◽  
Eric C. Schneider

AbstractThis perspective describes federal efforts in the United States (U.S.) to integrate care for an especially complex, vulnerable, and costly patient population: adults eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid insurance. The goal of the paper is to demystify for clinical policy leaders and practicing clinicians the origins and evolution of the Dual-Eligible Special Needs Plans (D-SNPs) recently permanently authorized by the U.S. Congress and to explore the potential for these policy changes to help such health plans improve care for the sickest and most vulnerable Americans.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Kaye

AbstractSome countries' laws favoring good-faith purchasers over the victims of theft make it difficult to recover stolen artworks. Nonetheless, the loan of such artworks for exhibition abroad may create opportunities to utilize the host country's legal system for recovery. This article examines representative cases illustrating legal options available to plaintiffs in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the United States, laws at the federal and state level may prevent the seizure of artworks loaned for temporary exhibition, but recent cases show that immunity is not absolute and that such artworks may be subject to suit in the United States. The United Kingdom recently enacted a similar law. That law, however, has been criticized, and future interpretations by U.K. courts will be needed before its true affect can be seen. The article also discusses the backgrounds against which the U.S. and U.K. laws were enacted, illustrating the link between the laws and Russian concerns about protecting cultural artifacts that were nationalized after the Russian Revolution or taken by Soviet troops during World War II.


2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (18) ◽  
pp. 5107-5112 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Durham ◽  
Martial L. Ndeffo-Mbah ◽  
Laura A. Skrip ◽  
Forrest K. Jones ◽  
Chris T. Bauch ◽  
...  

Every year in the United States more than 12,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer, a disease principally caused by human papillomavirus (HPV). Bivalent and quadrivalent HPV vaccines protect against 66% of HPV-associated cervical cancers, and a new nonavalent vaccine protects against an additional 15% of cervical cancers. However, vaccination policy varies across states, and migration between states interdependently dilutes state-specific vaccination policies. To quantify the economic and epidemiological impacts of switching to the nonavalent vaccine both for individual states and for the nation as a whole, we developed a model of HPV transmission and cervical cancer incidence that incorporates state-specific demographic dynamics, sexual behavior, and migratory patterns. At the national level, the nonavalent vaccine was shown to be cost-effective compared with the bivalent and quadrivalent vaccines at any coverage despite the greater per-dose cost of the new vaccine. Furthermore, the nonavalent vaccine remains cost-effective with up to an additional 40% coverage of the adolescent population, representing 80% of girls and 62% of boys. We find that expansion of coverage would have the greatest health impact in states with the lowest coverage because of the decreasing marginal returns of herd immunity. Our results show that if policies promoting nonavalent vaccine implementation and expansion of coverage are coordinated across multiple states, all states benefit both in health and in economic terms.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 1180
Author(s):  
Toshiyuki Sueyoshi ◽  
Youngbok Ryu

This study aims to overview the U.S. sustainable development by measuring the environmental performance of 50 states over the period of 2009–2018. To attain the objective, we employ data envelopment analysis for environmental assessment where we prioritize the minimization of CO2 emissions first and the maximization of gross state product later under the concept of managerial disposability (i.e., an environment-based performance measure). Then, we examine how the state-level environmental performance measures are associated with their political and spatial contexts. For the purpose, we conduct the Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test across groups of states characterized by their political transitions in the presidential and gubernatorial elections and defined by the regions of the U.S. Economic Development Administration and Environmental Protection Agency. Based on our empirical results, we find that (a) overall environmental performance has gradually enhanced over time, (b) there are statistically significant differences in the environmental performance measures along with the political transitions, and (c) states on both coasts have outperformed those of the middle in the measurement.


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