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This is the first study in South Africa analysing the impact of the child support grant (CSG) on higher-order fertility behaviour based on a nationally representative dataset. The study uses the fifth wave of national income dynamics study (NIDS) survey data covering women from age 15 to 58 years to undertake the propensity score matching technique to ascertain whether the CSG grant drives fertility behaviour. The findings indicate that, while the CSG does not have a significant impact on fertility rates among teen mothers, older mothers from the age of 20 upwards to 58 years receiving the CSG have significantly more children compared to those that do not receive the grant, even after controlling for other relevant precursors and factoring in self-selection issues. This study underscores the need to consider the perverse incentives while designing social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offsetting is emerging as an important but controversial approach for managing environment-development conflicts. Biodiversity offsets are designed to compensate for damage to biodiversity from development by providing biodiversity gains elsewhere., Here, we suggest how biodiversity offset policies can generate behaviours that exacerbate biodiversity decline, and identify four perverse incentives that could arise even from soundly designed policies., These include incentives for (i) entrenching or exacerbating baseline biodiversity declines, (ii) winding back non-offset conservation actions, (iii) crowding out of conservation volunteerism and (iv) false public confidence in environmental outcomes due to marketing offset actions as gains., Synthesis and applications. Despite its goal of improving biodiversity outcomes, there is potential for best-practice offsetting to achieve the opposite result. Reducing this risk requires coupling offset crediting baselines to measured trajectories of biodiversity change and understanding the potential interaction between offsetting and other environmental policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a purposive rereading ofRobinson Crusoe(1719) in light of the account given inThe Political History of the Devil(1726) of the superiority of “historically ordered narrative” to epic poetry. Completed in the wake of the Salters’ Hall controversy in which the ongoing conflict between Trinitarian orthodoxy and proponents of the Arian Heresy loomed large and provoked further denominational schism,Robinson Crusoewas conceived as a rebuttal toParadise Lostas well as, more broadly, the narrative techniques underlying epic poetry. In representing the tutelage in consequential logic that Friday undergoes, Defoe challenges the liberties that Milton takes with continuity and chronology in his poem. InThe Political History of the Devil, Defoe later argues that in its discontinuity and use of startling, absorbing imagery, poetry promotes moral hazard and covertly imports theological heresies into its scriptural glosses. ReadingRobinson CrusoeagainstParadise Lostdemonstrates that Defoe's musings on genre are rooted in an express fascination with the new actuarial sciences and emerging categories of risk and influence, and that it is out of this fateful encounter between insurance and theology that the novel emerges. By transforming the theological notion of sin into an economic theory of risk, Defoe used actuarial logic to rationalize Christianity as a teaching based on normative principles of narrative causality for its students to apply in the management of the contingencies of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest ecosystems, including plantation forests, provide goods and services that are marketable and non-marketable. Positive externalities produced by forest ecosystems are rarely considered in pricing of marketable products that result in economic inefficiencies. Internalizing externalities is required to improve the economic efficiency. The traditional way to internalize an externality is by providing subsidies or imposing taxes. Recently, payments for environmental services are receiving more attention as an instrument for internalizing externalities provided by forest ecosystems. This promising alternative to improve our environment needs to be studied more extensively. In this paper, it can be indicated theoretically that the Pigovian tax, as a traditional way of addressing environmental problems, is able to mimic the result derived from the employment of environmental services payment. The difference is that environmental services payment improves the welfare of environmental service producers, whereas the Pigovian tax reduces it. A positive Pigovian tax increases the optimal rotation, which is positively associated with environmental improvement, but certainly reduces forest owner's welfare. This difference should be taken into account in the public policymaking so that perverse incentive may be avoided. Payment for environmental services as an additional income to forest growers, not as alternative source of income, is a potential tool to address simultaneously issues of environment and poverty that are frequently contested.

For many decades, the top generation of social pensioners, mainly older women, have represented the main income earners for poor South African households whose working-age members cannot find employment. Since the introduction of the child support grant in 1998, the younger and middle generations of women have increasingly come to share the financial burden in poor households. However, able-bodied male household members who are unemployed fall through the social security net and remain financially dependent unless they can access a disability grant. The paper provides an overview of South Africa's social security system and its impact on intergenerational solidarity. It also reports a study of the 'perverse incentive' that explores the motivations for youth to fraudulently access social assistance in order to contribute to family welfare. The survey results are supportive of calls to reconsider welfare reform to fill the gaps in South Africa's social security net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1975 to mid-1980s the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) had struggled to establish collective farming in the south. The Party leaders believed that collective farming would increase agricultural productivity and production, and improve people's living standards. However, the result was different from the Party leaders' expectations. By examining and comparing two localities in the south, Quang Nam Province in the central coastal region and An Giang Province in the Mekong Delta, this paper illustrates how villagers' everyday politics and local cadres' corruption and malpractices contributed to derailing the VCP's agrarian policy. In other words, due to local politics, collective farming failed badly throughout the regions of the south in fulfilling the above objectives. Despite the Party's continual efforts and policy modification to improve collective farming, in the mid-1980s the country faced severe food shortage and even the economic crisis, which led to the Party leaders finally deciding to reverse their agrarian policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nuclear proliferation, lax security standards in the storage of fissile materials, and international apathy in the prosecution of terrorists make nuclear terror a serious threat to the United States and its allies, yet no doctrine of retaliation has been established. To decrease the probability of terrorist use of nuclear weapons, a doctrine of retaliation—a negligence doctrine—should be considered. If the United States can distinguish whose fissile material was used for a nuclear terror event, a negligence doctrine would prescribe retaliation against that state. Where the proximate cause—terrorists—is unavailable for deterrent retaliation, deterring an accessible mediate cause—a state that has failed to adequately secure its fissile material—is one of a few effective alternatives. In the absence of such a negligence doctrine, the United States and its allies are increasingly vulnerable to a nuclear terror attack and the ensuing negative consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality metrics have a long history in the field of kidney transplantation. These metrics are highly visible, with significant ramifications to transplantation centers based on their use in regulatory review and other stakeholders. In this perspective, we review the history of quality metrics in this field, discuss the perceptions and empirical evidence evaluating the impact of metrics on care delivery, and summarize the current landscape of quality oversight. Based on the research findings and opinions of the transplantation community, we suggest that significant reforms are needed for the evaluation of quality in the field based on more appropriately aligning metrics with optimizing patient outcomes. Moreover, there are vast potential uses of the current data that should be emphasized in a learning environment rather than a highly punitive system. In our view, these reforms would enhance care delivery, improve patient care, and better align incentives for providers of care that treat transplantation patients., (Copyright © 2019 National Kidney Foundation, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)