阿拉斯加观鲸记(上)

<正>阿拉斯加有着比美国东西海岸都漫长的海岸线,游览阿拉斯加不应该少了海这个主角,虽然这片海域的低温并不适合下海游泳,但也正因如此保留下来了完整的生态系统,使得观看海洋野生动物和壮观的冰川成为了世界驰名的游览项目。     

阿拉斯加观鲸记（下）

<正>从地图上看,阿拉斯加在安克雷奇以北的海岸线,一道弧线勾勒出了海岸线长度比美国西海岸还要长的阿拉斯加湾,几乎所有阿拉斯加的重要城市都在海湾岸边。这条长长的海岸线上又包含了无数个小的"海湾",因此无论是看海洋野生动物还是探索冰川,这里都有很多选择,除了前文提到的西沃德之外,惠蒂尔是另一个不错的选择。     

The Alaskan Eskimo at the crossroads

Klausner, Samuel Z., and Edward F. Foulks. Eskimo Capitalists: Oil, Politics and Alcohol. Totowa, New Jersey: Allanheld, Osmun Publishers, 1982. xii + 343 pp. including appendix, references, and index. $37.50 cloth.

Fienup‐Riordan, Ann. The Nelson Island Eskimo: Social Structure and Ritual Distribution. Anchorage: Alaska Pacific University Press, 1983. xxxvii + 419 pp. including illustrations, references, index. $9.95 paper.     

Oil age ethnographies: Alaskan anthropologists address the world

Fienup‐Riordan, Ann. Eskimo Essays: Yup'ik Lives and How We See Them. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990. xxii + 269 pp. including notes, references, and index. $25.00 cloth, $11.95 paper.

Jorgensen, Joseph G. Oil Age Eskimos. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. xix + 401 pp. including appendices, bibliography, and index. $40.00 cloth.

Oswalt, Wendell H. Bashful No Longer: An Alaskan Eskimo Ethnohistory, 1778–1988. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. xviii + 270 pp. including notes, references, and index. $21.95 cloth.     

The Equity and Legitimacy of Markets for Ecosystem Services

Markets for ecosystem services are being promoted across the developing world, amidst claims that the provision of economic incentives is vital to bring about resource conservation. This article argues that equity and legitimacy are also critical dimensions in the design and implementation of such markets, if social development goals beyond economic gains are to be achieved. The article examines this issue by focusing on two communities involved in a project for carbon sequestration services of forests in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The perceived legitimacy of the activities and the distribution of economic outcomes and project‐related information are found to be mediated by organizational allegiances and the history of social relations regarding access to property and forest resources. Political affiliation determines the project's legitimacy, while the poorest farmers and women have been excluded from project design and implementation. The authors argue that pitfalls such as these contribute to reinforcing existing power structures, inequities and vulnerabilities, and suggest that this is a product of the nature of emerging markets. Markets for ecosystem services are, in effect, limited in promoting more legitimate forms of decision making and a more equitable distribution of their outcomes.     

Emerging Markets for Nature and Challenges for the Ecosystem Service Approach

Ecosystem services (ESS) are a burdened concept. They are supposed to function as a protective mechanism to make nature economically visible, while simultaneously contributing to economic development. At the core of the concept is the ideal of concisely valued and well‐accounted‐for goods traded in markets by rational and moral actors. This virtual idea is being challenged by real local processes of short‐term commodification and market‐based incentives for profit making in ‘messy’, unequal and illegitimate ESS markets. This article presents a local case‐study perspective focusing on the thatch grass ESS in the Kavango Regions of Namibia, where harvesters have become involved in an emerging capitalist value chain. It shows how, against the background of a post‐colonial political‐institutional setting that leaves plenty of leeway for exploitation, the real‐life conflation of market incentives and cash desires transforms local subsistence, causes a revaluation of ESS, and poses a real challenge to the virtual ESS conservation approach. Instead of viewing ESS as countable items involved in beneficial market interactions, we need to come to a more precise understanding of the consequences, local vulnerabilities and externalities of ESS marketizations.     

Testing for the Law of One Price and Identifying Price-Leading Markets: An Application to Corn Markets in Benin

A data-determined method is proposed to test for the law of one price as a long-run equilibrium condition and to identify which markets in a network of spatially dispersed commodity markets quote the reference price. The method consists of supplementing Johansen's FIML cointegration procedure with a permanent-transitory decomposition and rules of inference in linear time-series models with unit roots. As an example, we apply our method to prices of six corn markets in Benin. We find that the law of one price holds in the long-run. It appears that two rural markets quote the reference price: their prices adjust fastest towards the permanent change induced by the common stochastic trend.     

Markets,Resources, Environments

Orthodox economists argue, in this country as elsewhere in the developed world, that many of the issues of environmental damage and resource use over which governments, corporations and community groups tussle could be resolved if appropriate markets for environmental goods were established. This paper argues that markets are commonly not appropriate mechanisms to resolve environmental disputes: much of the problem is to determine the effects rather than to allocate them; when the rate of discount of the future is positive, the social need is different from the sum of rational individual decisions; and markets ignore equity. Furthermore, the limits on sustainability seem to be quantitative rather than qualitative - to rest on the magnitude of resource discovery, or on the rate of improvement of environmental quality per dollar invested for example. Again, the central question concerns the data rather than a means of allocating costs and benefits. These difficulties in using market mechanisms imply that legal systems may be preferable as means of regulating environmental use.     

‘Milking The Elephant’: Financial Markets as Real Markets in Kenya

Financial liberalization policies in the 1990s were intended to raise formal sector interest rates, enhance competition and expand access for users. This article investigates patterns of provision and use in a local financial market in Karatina, Kenya, at the end of the 1990s after a period of financial and economic liberalization. It takes a holistic approach, examining both formal and informal financial arrangements and microfinance interventions. This is because the role of the informal financial sector is particularly important for poor people and has received relatively little attention in the discussion of the consequences of reform. The author does this using a ‘real’ markets approach that sees markets as socially regulated and structured. Significant provision by the mutual sector (formal and informal), and poor lending performance by the banking sector is explained through an examination of the characteristics of the services on offer and their embeddedness in social relations, culture and politics.     

Search and Fetter's Law of Markets

Fetter's law, a classical result of location theory, is respecified to include search costs. Then the implied partition of the market space is derived.     

Modeling Interaction in a System of Markets

This paper develops a nested family of market interaction models for the general case of spatial or aspatial goods. Market structure effects are identified in the form of intraregional and extraregional competition. The competing destinations and competing central place models are shown to be special cases of the general modeling framework. An empirical example, using survey data collected from Chicago-area Management and Public Relations (SIC 874) firms, illustrates how the family of models may be used to identify market structure.     

An Overview of Alaskan Late Pleistocene Archaeology: Historical Themes and Current Perspectives

Alaska has long held an important role in the late Pleistocene prehistory of the New World. Alaska being situated at the juncture between the Old and New Worlds, scholars have long looked to the Alaskan archaeological record to provide clues into the initial peopling of the New World. As such, Alaska figures prominently in most models of the peopling of the New World. In recent years, however, it has become clear that the late Pleistocene archaeological record of Alaska is characterized by great technological and adaptive diversity, and no single interpretive model can adequately explain that diversity. This paper traces the development of Pleistocene Alaskan archaeology by outlining the history of site discoveries and interpretations. In so doing, it provides a historical perspective on current frameworks of Alaskan Pleistocene prehistory. Based primarily on a search for the first inhabitants of the New World, however, the research questions traditionally guiding Alaskan archaeology have tended to complicate rather than clarify the picture. In some cases, this has led to false expectations and oftentimes contradictory interpretations, many of which still persist, and which can only be resolved by addressing the Alaskan record on its own terms.     

Markets,Transaction Costs and Institutions: Compensating for Nuclear Risk in Japan

This article explores the nature, role and effectiveness of compensation mechanisms in managing the political constraints to the siting or development of nuclear projects in Japan. Statistical analysis reveals that the relationship between compensation and income is a key dynamic characterising the history of the marketplace for nuclear facilities in Japan. The commodification and trading of risks for benefits is governed by a sophisticated institutional and policy framework which acts to lower the transaction costs of market exchange. The interaction between the market and the institutional dynamic has generated a curious pattern of both NIMBY ('not in my backyard') and YIMBY ('yes, in my backyard') responses to nuclear development in Japan.     

Optimality in Two Spatially Separated Periodic Markets

A recursive analysis is made of a two market, trader-coupled, periodic marketing system with collapsing and recovering, nonlinear, demand and supply schedules. It yields time series in all prices and commodity flows. Conditions are established for maximum weekly social surplus, for the existence, uniqueness, and asymptotic stability of steady states, and for an optimal number of days for the marketing week.     

Spatial Price Discrimination in Two-Dimensional Competitive Markets

Intuition suggests that firms that can apply price discrimination make higher profits than firms that are restricted in their pricing policy. In this paper, we show that, in general, this is not the case. In the framework of a two-dimensional spatial model with elastic demand à la Lösch, we further investigate the interplay of transport costs, competition, and price policy. One of our results is that under realistic specifications of parameters each firm gains a monopolistic area in the center of its market that has the same shape as the entire market, but with a convexly or concavely distorted separating line, depending on the extension of the market.     

Optimal Timing and Location in Competitive Markets

The choice of a good location strategy is one of the most crucial decisions facing a retailer. While a number of recent articles have addressed the issue of site selection, the related issue of optimal timing and preemption has been largely ignored. In this paper, we present an integrated location allocation model that allows a retailer to formulate an overall location strategy by addressing the questions of how many stores to open, where to open them, and when to open them. In addition, the model explicitly incorporates demand growth scenarios and takes into account the dynamics of competitive actions. As an illustration of its use, the model is applied to a simple yet realistic decision scenario.