A Business Case for Marine Protected Areas: Economic Valuation of the Reef Attributes of Cozumel Island

Tourism to Cozumel Island generates USD 762 million annually in local economic activity, and 111 visitors stay in local hotels for each inhabitant. The island’s coast is its principal attraction, yet water quality and reef health are threatened. This paper studies the link between the local economy and management of Arrecifes de Cozumel National Park, using a choice experiment to assess the economic value visitors assign to underwater visibility, biodiversity, and visitor congestion in reef areas. We found that, on average, tourists are willing to pay USD 190 per visit to avoid a projected decrease in biodiversity, USD 120 per visit to prevent a projected decline in visibility, and USD 98 to avoid high congestion during reef visits. We find high heterogeneity in willingness to pay estimates, which may be useful for targeting both conservation and marketing efforts. On the other hand, increasing the reef access fee from USD 2 to USD 6 could fully fund effective protected area management, with no substantial effect on visitors’ consumer surplus. Results suggest that a conservation surcharge could be added to all tours, with little impact on visitation, and that significantly increasing private sector collaboration and government spending on conservation would be good economic choices.

COVID-19: back to healthcare basics in Philippine prisons

Prisons have not escaped the effects of COVID-19. In countries where there are limited resources and spaces available, there is a need to find innovative ways to keep detainees safe and healthy. We can see various approaches such as the Irish model, which gives due importance to the establishment of contact tracing teams (CTT). In the case of Philippine prisons with high congestion rates, however, we may have to go back to certain healthcare basics to address COVID-19 transmissions.

The role of firm location and agglomeration economies on export propensity: the case of Portuguese SMEs

PurposeThe present study seeks to assess whether the firm's location and agglomeration economies affect the firm's export propensity.Design/methodology/approachThis work is based on a sample of 20,234 Portuguese manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and resort to the estimation of a probit model.FindingsEmpirical results show that the location and agglomeration economies have an important role in determining the firm's export propensity. In particular, the study concludes that SMEs located in coastal areas or close to the border are more likely to export. Furthermore, the study also concludes that specialization economies are an important driver of small and medium-sized firms' export propensity while export spillovers are particularly relevant for micro firms. However, urbanization, measured through firms density in NUTS3 region, negatively affects firms' export propensity, which may be due to high congestion costs in the regions with a high firms density.Originality/valueThis study focus on the determinants of the decision to export or the export propensity, particularly the external factors such as the firm's location and agglomeration economies. This is a relatively neglected topic in the literature that has focused on the determinants of export intensity.

An Extensive Investigation of an Eco-Approach Controller under a Partially Connected and Automated Vehicle Environment

This study evaluated the performance of an eco-approach control system at signalized intersections under a partially connected and automated vehicle (CAV) environment. This system has the first eco-approach controller able to function with the existence of surrounding human-driven traffic. A previous evaluation only confirmed its benefits. The purpose of this study was to conduct a further extensive test on the controller to identify room for improvement. Two different networks were tested, including an isolated signalized intersection and a corridor with two signalized intersections. The measures of effectiveness (MOEs) adopted were throughput and fuel consumption. All the before-and-after MOEs were compared using t-tests. The results indicate that the controller generally improved the fuel efficiency without harm to the mobility, and its environmental performance was affected by the minimum CAV speed, green ratio, congestion level, and marker penetration rate of CAVs. A detailed investigation revealed that no significant environmental benefit was generated under high congestion levels when the minimum speed of CAVs was more than 20 mph, and the shockwaves caused by the eco-approach control may result in a gating effect that reduces the throughput at the upstream intersection of the corridor under high congestion levels.

An Internal Schematic View and Simulation of Major Diagonal Mesh Network-on-Chip

NoC is a competent communication for on chip network architectures. It make more efficient the computational and high congestion communication on a single chip. In this paper, we are proposing a NoC topologies, i.e., Major Diagonal Mesh NoC called MD-Mesh NoC. In MD-Mesh NoC the corner of major diagonal linked with each other so that the efficiency of the communication among the corner can be increase. The internal semantic view and register transfer logic (RTL) View has been shown. As number of connections among the nodes increases and number of hopes decreases, performance of packet traversing will get increases. The synthesis and simulation has been done on Vertex 5 FPGA. The hardware parameters like number of slices and memory usage with respect to increase the number of nodes has been calculated on FPGA Vertex 5.

A Link Distribution Algorithm with Efficient Relay Node Optimization for Congestion Control in Urban Vanets

This research work develops a new algorithm i.e. Link distribution algorithm and efficient link distribution algorithm. A Link distribution algorithm is the distribution of the link to the nodes so that communication between the nodes takes place in case of any link failure whereas efficient link distribution algorithm is distribution of the packets to the nodes which has high transmission power. The technique used in Link distribution algorithm (LDA) is link establishment whenever there is any link failure happen we apply this concept which is LDA whereas the technique used in efficient link distribution algorithm (ELDA) is relay node selection the relay node is selected based upon the received signal strength ratio (RSSI) value and which node is having high RSSI value that node we allocate the link. The above algorithms can be applied wherever there is high congestion on the road due to the high congestion link failure will happen and due to the link failure emergency event occurs. Results of model achieved in a realistic state of affairs validate our theoretical deliberation and confirm the efficiency and the efficacy of our protocol by screening significant expansion in terms of busy ratio, collision rate, deviation, local density and transmission power compared to previous scheme ETSI DCC. The work has been successfully done with the help open source network simulator NS3.

Human-capital spillover, population and R&D-based growth

We study two-sector R&D model with endogenous human capital accumulation. Allowing for fractional human capital spillover from parents to their offspring, which are subject to congestion in fertility rate, we establish non-monotonic relations between population growth and economic growth. These non-monotonic relations, which are polynomial in general, are determined by the base level of human capital spillover and the magnitude of the congestion effect: a U shape relation can arise under low congestion factor, whereas a hump shape may present for high congestion factor. Hence this work contributes to the recent line of modified R&D-based growth models, aimed to align theory with the mixed empirical data on the relation between population growth and economic prosperity.

Characteristics of Traffic Flow at Nonsignalized T-Shaped Intersection with U-Turn Movements

Most nonsignalized T-shaped intersections permit U-turn movements, which make the traffic conditions of intersection complex. In this paper, a new cellular automaton (CA) model is proposed to characterize the traffic flow at the intersection of this type. In present CA model, new rules are designed to avoid the conflicts among different directional vehicles and eliminate the gridlock. Two kinds of performance measures (i.e., flux and average control delay) for intersection are compared. The impacts of U-turn movements are analyzed under different initial conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that (i) the average control delay is more practical than flux in measuring the performance of intersection, (ii) U-turn movements increase the range and degree of high congestion, and (iii) U-turn movements on the different direction of main road have asymmetrical influences on the traffic conditions of intersection.

Airline Frequency Competition in Airport Congestion Pricing

Airport congestion pricing has often been advocated as a way to control demand for airport operations and achieve efficient resource allocation. Competition between airlines affects the extent to which an airline is willing to pay for airport slots. Accurate modeling of competition is critical to determining the effectiveness of a congestion pricing mechanism. This paper develops an equilibrium model of airline frequency competition in the presence of delay costs and congestion prices. A small hypothetical network is used to evaluate the impacts of congestion prices on the various stakeholders and to investigate the dependence of effectiveness of congestion pricing on the characteristics of frequency competition in individual markets. The effectiveness of congestion pricing depends on three parameters of frequency competition. The results show that variation in the number of passengers per flight plays a vital role in determining the degree of attractiveness of congestion pricing to the airlines. A significant part of the impact of congestion pricing cannot be accounted for by using models in the literature, which are based on the assumptions of constant load factors and constant aircraft sizes. It was found that, compared with flat pricing, marginal cost pricing is more effective in reducing congestion without penalizing the airlines with exceedingly high congestion prices.