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Since attaining independence, Kenya has been keen on development. Recently, the development discourse in Kenya has adopted sustainable development sentiments by adopting the concepts of sustainable development within its development frameworks. This is due to the realization that whilst striving to fulfill the needs and aspirations of the current generation, it must also guarantee the ability of future generations to meet their needs. This research discusses the challenges bedeviling the attainment of sustainable development in Kenya through the lenses of gender, environmental and natural resource governance, infrastructure as well as food security. These themes have been debated a lot, without yielding a consensus on the suitable approach to sustainable development. This has resulted to more abstract development frameworks whose legal status is unclear. This chapter posits that the ideas and frameworks of sustainable development in Kenya are not well articulated, have no proper legal standing and do not bind on the government. It concludes that there should be a paradigm shift from statements of intention to a sound, inclusive and binding framework that guides successive governments.

The paper analyzes the effects of present-biased preferences on the transfer of resources to future generations in the framework of renewable resource harvesting. The paper assumes that the current generation has other-regarding motivations for future generations, expressed through the adherence to spontaneous other-regarding preferences or social norms. Because the short-sighted behavior imposed by the “dictatorship of the present” can cause a reduction in the well-being of future generations, despite the existence of social preferences, the model presented in this study demonstrates that if the social preferences are also expressed through social norms that prescribe no reevaluation of the harvesting decisions, a mitigation of the effect of present bias on intergenerational equity can occur. In this paper, the model presented shows the properties that a social norm should have to avoid the intergenerational inequality that can be derived from present-biased preferences in intergenerational renewable resource management. Additionally, the model defines the necessary and sufficient conditions such that the implementation of the social norm can neutralize the effect of present-biased preferences, guaranteeing the optimal harvesting path defined at the beginning.

One of the key concerns associated with large deficit spending is unfair debt burden to be born by future generations that such spending gives rise to. Massive pandemic relief spending financed by debt in the US in the past several months, as expected, has raised serious concerns about its implications for the well-being of future generations. However, debates have featured more passion and rhetoric than in-depth analyses, leaving obscure what the crux of the matter really is. This note is an attempt to clarify. Key points spelled out in the article indicate that, for the US, and particularly in the present situation where the Fed is following a very accommodative policy, the burden of current deficit spending on the future generation should be less of a concern than commonly perceived. This ought to be an important consideration as policy makers proceed to consider the cost and benefits of additional relief packages to address the economic fallout of the pandemic.

Cohabitation is a new alternative family arrangement that has come to be accepted in this current generation. There is no universally accepted definition of cohabitation. However, it may be defined as “an emotional, physical and intellectually intimate relationship which includes a common living place and which exists without the benefit of legal, cultural and religious sanction” However, later in this paper it will be seen that cohabitation is recognized by common law since it originated there. In most of the court cases, it is referred to as the presumption of marriage. In another definition, cohabitation, also known as ‘come we stay marriage’, is “a marriage formation in which a man and a woman get together in a union that would formerly be deemed legally, culturally and religious unacceptable” . It has to be understood that African traditional society does not value cohabitation and the main reason for the definitions aforementioned. In this paper, I will discuss the place of cohabitation in Kenya and further look at the decided court cases which will make us further understand how courts have dealt with the issue of presumption of marriage. In the end I will give my stand on this issue of cohabitation.

The IPCC Special Report finds that current policies are not sufficient to limit global warming to well below 1.5°C, and that the gap between the actions on the ground and the required changes in order to meet the global goal is widening rapidly. One reason is that scientific assessments based on mitigation scenarios have so far focused on the required measures and investments rather than the role of the finance sector in mobilising the resources needed. The lack of consideration of climate-related financial risks and opportunities makes the current generation of climate scenarios less useful for implementation and in many cases also unrealistic. We propose thus a novel research agenda to integrate the role of the financial sector and its climate sentiments into the scenarios and models used by the climate research community, including the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. These innovations should help align policies, economy and society with the climate goals.

In the complex issue of growth and development of countries general rules may not apply. Working on a ‘laundry list’ of measures may even backfire. Each country is a human society or a civilization having values of its’ own. It is imperative to look for them as complementarities to any prescriptive economic solution. Indian’s approach of ‘slow and steady wins the game’ will keep it in great stead. It needs to work on certain structural impediments. Since their origin lies in the ‘de-learning’ of its cultural ethos, the solution needs to stress on a scientific ‘relearning’ of the same. Since Epics and contemporary philosophical writings speak of the ‘mode of thinking’ of the society at large, it would be useful to educate the current generation of Indians on those ideas. Since spiritual wealth was India’s competitive advantage over others when it was materially quite wealthy, it would be appropriate to accumulate them again to regain the same status as before. As such, solutions to issues in the nature of ‘sharing of economic wealth across the populace equally’, ‘imparting health and education as a social good to everyone’, ‘use of women as a massive economic force’ etc. may not be found through regression equations, one has to necessarily go back to the basics.

Sustainability or Sustainable development has been commonly defined as "Economic and social development that meets the needs of the current generation without undermining the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (WCED, 1987). This definition brought together what is now known as the three pillars of sustainable development; economic development, social development and ecological development under one societal goal of sustainability. This is a short study of the three pillars and the domain of Sustainability.

This paper explores how the importance that farmers place on the dimensions of land, water, profit, family, community, and lifestyle affects their decision-making in response to the current generation of Australian water policies. Using factor analysis we identify and describe three value and attitude constructs: Succession, Caretaking, and Commerce and show how these can help to explain farmers’ decision-making. These value-constructs might help when designing and communicating new environmental policies so that farmers’ management responses will be more in line with policy expectations and thereby potentially reduce unwanted environmental, social and economic impacts of policies designed to address environmental and climate change issues.

This essay considers whether it would be morally acceptable for a nation to use massive intergenerational borrowing to pursue a no-growth policy, under which the anticipated standard of living of members of future generations would be no higher than the standard of living of members of the present generation. The essay examines whether justification for such a policy can be found in either the political theory of John Rawls or in the application of utilitarian principles to intergenerational ethics. It concludes that under a Rawlsian analysis there is a strong argument that the current generation has no obligation to strive for higher standards of living for future generations, but that under utilitarian principles there is such an obligation.

We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. We reweight the NLSY79 to look like the NLSY97 along a number of dimensions that are related to labor market success, including race, gender, parental background, education, test scores, and variables that capture whether individuals transition smoothly from school to work. We then use the re-weighted sample to examine how changes in the distribution of observable skills affect employment and wages. We also use more standard regression methods to assess the labor market consequences of differences between the two cohorts. Overall, we find that the current generation is more skilled than the previous one. Blacks and Hispanics have gained relative to whites and women have gained relative to men. However, skill differences within groups have increased considerably and in aggregate the skill distribution has widened. Changes in parental education seem to generate many of the observed changes

In this research we compare the risk preference attitudes and behavior between a sample of 470 Chinese workers and a sample of 2,671 Americans from the Survey of Consumer Finances. Our findings show that Chinese in our sample are more risk tolerant than Americans in their financial decisions, both in attitudes and behavior. Alternative explanations such as a lack of knowledge about the relationship between risk and return among the current generation Chinese are also explored. Theoretical and practical implications of this research are discussed.

I. INTRODUCTION Since the establishment of the theory of network effects, economists have been concerned with the question of whether a market with network effects will tend to settle on the socially optimal standard. It has been postulated that markets may exhibit excess inertia: Once a technological standard is in place, a new, superior standard may not displace it because of installed base effects. Alternatively, markets may exhibit excess momentum: Consumers may adopt a new standard too quickly, ignoring the stranding effect they are having on previous users. Similar issues arise in the adoption of language and social norms. The literature has investigated various conditions under which one of these inefficiencies arises. Such inefficiencies are of particular concern for open technologies, such as the QWERTY and Dvorak keyboards. (1) The situation is somewhat different when individual firms own standards. In that case, a simple argument seems to indicate that there is no possibility that an inefficient standard will persist. If a new standard is superior in any objective sense, there are gains to be made from switching to it. Once the standard has been adopted, the firm can appropriate these gains. Therefore, the firm has incentive to lower the initial price enough to induce adoption of the standard. The preceding argument is made in Liebowitz and Margolis (1999) and repeated in Spulber (2002). Spulber expresses a general skepticism about the likelihood of inefficiencies when property rights are defined and markets exist. Critics might claim that previous models that imply inefficient standard adoption are unrealistic in some way, and that if such models were modified slightly, the inefficiency would disappear. I reconsider the issue of inefficient standard adoption using a parsimonious yet compelling model. Assuming only that there are successive generations of finitely lived consumers, that preferences are heterogeneous, and that there are network effects among users, adoption decisions can be inefficient. This is true even if consumers can coordinate efficiently within a generation and a firm can act as a coordinating device across generations. The model presented here generates some of the same results found in other papers collectively but in a more general setting and with more robust results. If there is an established standard and a superior alternative emerges, no single generation of consumers will be willing to switch to the new standard if the switching cost (the loss of network benefit from breaking with past users) is too high. It may be that the benefits to future generations of consumers are large enough that from a social standpoint it would be efficient for one generation to adopt the new standard, even if it is privately optimal for that generation to retain the old standard. On the other hand, the current generation considers only its own switching cost and not the cost it imposes on the previous generation, leading to potential overadoption of new technology. Even for proprietary standards, it is not clear that the incentive of the firm to induce adoption matches the social incentive. In particular, if consumer preferences are heterogeneous, the firm will not be able to price in such a way to extract all of the additional surplus gained from the new standard. On the other hand, the firm will be able to appropriate some of the surplus generated by the network effect itself, which is present for any standard and thus does not affect the social incentive to change standards. It is not possible to address this issue with a two-period model, as in some of the previous literature (see, for example, Choi, 1994; Choi and Thum, 1998; Katz and Shapiro, 1986). If a new technology is introduced in the second period but then the game ends, the welfare of future generations of consumers is neglected. (2) This article also differs from previous infinite-horizon models of technology adoption. …

We use a cake-eating model with a non-renewable resource and a backstop technology to describe the effect of migration of poor workers into a rich country with surplus labor. Migrants receive a large transfer from natives. If future migration is anticipated, natives' flow of utility increases discontinuously at the time of migration. Migration at time 0 may cause the initial flow of natives' utility to be higher. However, the present discounted value of the stream of per capita utility falls. Thus, when migration occurs, it may benefit the current generation of natives, although it harms other generations.