Effects of Governmental Intervention on Foodborne Disease Events: Evidence from China

Foodborne disease events (FDEs) endanger residents’ health around the world, including China. Most countries have formulated food safety regulation policies, but the effects of governmental intervention (GI) on FDEs are still unclear. So, this paper purposes to explore the effects of GI on FDEs by using Chinese provincial panel data from 2011 to 2019. The results show that: (i) GI has a significant negative impact on FDEs. Ceteris paribus, FDEs decreased by 1.3% when government expenditure on FDEs increased by 1%. (ii) By strengthening food safety standards and guiding enterprises to offer safer food, government can further improve FDEs. (iii) However, GI has a strong negative externality. Although GI alleviates FDEs in local areas, it aggravates FDEs in other areas. (iv) Compared with the eastern and coastal areas, the effects of GI on FDEs in the central, western, and inland areas are more significant. GI is conducive to ensuring Chinese health and equity. Policymakers should pay attention to two tasks in food safety regulation. Firstly, they should continue to strengthen GI in food safety issues, enhance food safety certification, and strive to ensure food safety. Secondly, they should reinforce the co-governance of regional food safety issues and reduce the negative externality of GI.

Of Old Men, Country Clubs, and Atrocities: The Visualities and Externalities of Detaining Elderly Human Rights Violators in Chile

This article explores a pair of powerful but competing symbols in the Chilean human transitional justice process: ‘pobres viejitos’ (poor little old men) and country club prisons. The symbol of the ‘pobres viejitos’ is used very effectively by conservative elements of Chilean society to argue the futility or even inhumanity of punishing perpetrators of human right violations so long after the commission of their crimes. In turn, to victims and more liberal segments of society, the country club or ‘five star’ prison for human rights violators stands as a symbol of impunity and the failure of the Chilean state to do justice for the crimes of the dictatorship. This article examines the power of these symbols in undermining support for transitional justice efforts, as well as the externalities of the debate. The fate of the ‘pobres viejitos’ and whether to release the from even their relatively comfortable places of confinement has bled into debates on penal reform for other elderly prisoners. This mostly negative externality suggests the need for international and regional courts (or countries not in the throes of transitional justice processes, particularly delayed ones) to lead the way on the articulation of human rights norms related to the trial and punishment of elderly prisoners.

Suboptimal Climate Policy

There is a scientific consensus that human activities, in the form of emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, cause global warming. These emissions mostly occur in the marketplace, i.e., they are undertaken by private individuals and firms. Governments seeking to curb emissions thus need to design policies that influence market behavior in the direction of their goals. Economists refer to Pigou taxation as “the” solution here, since the case of global warming can be seen as a pure (negative) externality. We agree. However, given the reluctance of policymakers to agree with us, there is an urgent need to consider, and compare, suboptimal policies. In this paper we look at one such instance: setting a global tax on carbon at the wrong level. How costly are different errors? Since there is much uncertainty about how much climate change there will be, and how damaging it is when it occurs, ex-post errors will most likely be made. We compare different kinds of errors qualitatively and quantitatively and find that policy errors based on over-pessimistic views on climate change are much less costly than those made based on over-optimism. This finding is an inherent feature of standard integrated assessment models, even though these models do not feature tipping points or strong linearities.

Private Benefits, Public Vices: Railways and Logrolling in the Nineteenth-Century British Parliament

Vote trading among lawmakers (logrolling) can enable political rent-seeking but is difficult to identify. To achieve identification, we explore the rules governing voting for railway projects in the U.K. Parliament during the Railway Mania of the 1840s. Parliamentary rules barred MPs from voting directly for their interests. Even so, they could trade votes to ensure their interests prevailed. We find that logrolling was significant, accounting for nearly one-quarter of the railway bills approved. We also quantify a negative externality to society from logrolling ranging from 1/3 to 1 percent of contemporary GDP.

NP-Hardness and Approximation Algorithms for Iterative Pricing on Social Networks with Externalities

We study how a monopolist seller should price an indivisible product iteratively to the consumers who are connected by a known link-weighted directed social network. For two consumers [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], there is an arc directed from [Formula: see text] to [Formula: see text] if and only if [Formula: see text] is a fashion leader of [Formula: see text]. Assuming complete information about the network, the seller offers consumers a sequence of prices over time and the goal is to obtain the maximum revenue. We assume that the consumers buy the product as soon as the seller posts a price not greater than their valuations of the product. The product’s value for a consumer is determined by three factors: a fixed consumer specified intrinsic value and a variable positive (resp. negative) externality that is exerted from the consumer’s out(resp. in)-neighbours. The setting of positive externality is that the influence of fashion leaders on a consumer is the total weight of links from herself to her fashion leaders who have owned the product, and more fashion leaders of a consumer owning the product will increase the influence (external value) on the consumer. And the setting of negative externalities is that the product’s value of showing off for a consumer is the total weight of links from her followers who do not own the product to herself, and more followers of a consumer owning the product will decrease this external value for the consumer. We confirm that finding an optimal iterative pricing is NP-hard even for acyclic networks with maximum total degree [Formula: see text] and with all intrinsic values zero. We design a greedy algorithm which achieves [Formula: see text]-approximation for networks with all intrinsic values zero and show that the approximation ratio [Formula: see text] is tight. Complementary to the hardness result, we design a [Formula: see text]-approximation algorithm for Barabási–Albert networks.

Measuring costs of noise pollution generated by freight transport: Case of the Slovak and Czech Republic

The paper focuses on measuring and quantification of the negative externality of noise pollution generated by freight transport in the Slovak Republic and the Czech Republic. The paper describes negative impacts and significance of noise externalities, whereas it is established that noise causes psychological and physiological harm to affected persons. A separate part of the paper is dedicated to the current status of the European legislation dealing with the issues of the negative externality of noise pollution, in particular Directive 2002/49/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council and Communication COM(2008) 435. The actual measurement of the total, average and marginal costs of noise pollution is implemented in line with the defined methodology and using expert studies defined in the paper. The measurement results show that the costs of the negative externality of noise pollution are high in both countries. According to authors’ calculations, the total costs of the negative externality of noise pollution amount to EUR 100.8 mil in the Czech Republic and EUR 16.9 mil in the Slovak Republic. The paper contains a proposal of internalisation of these costs in the form of performance charges applied to operation of heavy goods vehicles.