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Global environmental phenomena like climate change, major extinction events or flutype pandemics can have catastrophic consequences. By properly assessing the outcomes involved – especially those concerning human life – economic theory of choice under uncertainty is expected to help people take the best decision. However, the widely used expected utility theory values life in terms of the low probability of death someone would be willing to accept in order to receive extra payment. Common sense and experimental evidence refute this way of valuing life, and here we provide experimental evidence of people's unwillingness to accept a low probability of death, contrary to expected utility predictions. This work uses new axioms of choice defined by Chichilnisky (2000), especially an axiom that allows extreme responses to extreme events, and the choice criterion that they imply. The implied decision criteria are a combination of expected utility with extreme responses, and seem more consistent with observations.
Numerous epidemiological studies have found a link between air pollution and health. We are reviewing a collection of published intervention studies with particular focus on studies assessing both improvements in air quality and associated health effects.
Interventions, defined as events aimed at reducing air pollution or where reductions occurred as a side effect, e.g. strikes, German reunification, from the 1960s onwards were considered for inclusion. This review is not a complete record of all existing air pollution interventions. In total, 28 studies published in English were selected based on a systematic search of internet databases.
Overall air pollution interventions have succeeded at improving air quality. Consistently published evidence suggests that most of these interventions have been associated with health benefits, mainly by the way of reduced cardiovascular and/or respiratory mortality and/or morbidity. The decrease in mortality from the majority of the reviewed interventions has been estimated to exceed the expected predicted figures based on the estimates from time-series studies.
There is consistent evidence that decreased air pollution levels following an intervention resulted in health benefits for the assessed population.
Lorsque le bien-être d’un individu est influencé par l’activité d’une tierce personne qui ne prend pas en compte ses retombées lors de son processus de prise de décision, l’évaluation économique parle d’externalité. Si les externalités peuvent parfois être positives, elles sont clairement négatives et très importantes dans le cas de la pollution atmosphérique.
Afin de pallier les défaillances du marché qu’elles provoquent, la théorie économique recommande de les chiffrer en termes monétaires. On dispose alors de guides visant à les internaliser, c’est-à-dire à les incorporer – partiellement ou totalement – dans les coûts associés aux activités qui les génèrent.
Après avoir présenté et discuté rapidement les méthodes de valorisation économique disponibles dans le cadre particulier de la pollution atmosphérique, nous aborderons quelques incertitudes et défis de l’évaluation économique et les illustrerons par certains résultats de l’étude européenne Aphekom (www.aphekom.org).
While international and national policies call for containing urban expansion to conserve agricultural and natural lands, France is still experiencing a relatively strong sprawl. So we analyze the determinants of land-use plans favoring a parsimonious allocation of land to urban development. A state of the art of theoretical models as well as quantitative and qualitative empirical studies is confronted with a qualitative field study (semi-directive interviews among municipal elected officials in South-Eastern France). This allows a typology of municipalities according to their urban development strategies. Thus, determinants such as agricultural activity?s dynamism and image, elected official?s political legitimacy, previous or surrounding municipality?s policies and existing built-up patterns are outlined while they are usually not considered in theoretical models and their empirical validation. Finally, we sketch a model of local determinants of non-built land conservation more in line with the French context.
We explore the influence of a neutral cheap talk script in three typical scenarios used in the CV literature devoted to the valuation of air pollution effects. We show that cheap talk has a differentiated effect depending on the scenario implemented. It decreases protest responses with no effect on WTP values in the scenario based on a new drug. When a move to a less polluted city is involved, it has no effect on protest responses but decreases WTP values. Surprisingly, cheap talk increases protest responses but decreases WTP values when new regional air pollution regulations are at stake.
Vaccination campaigns to prevent the spread of epidemics are successful only if the targeted populations subscribe to the recommendations of health authorities. However, because compulsory vaccination is hardly conceivable in modern democracies, governments need to convince their populations through efficient and persuasive information campaigns. In the context of the swine-origin A (H1N1) 2009 pandemic, we use an interactive study among the general public in the South of France, with 175 participants, to explore what type of information can induce change in vaccination intentions at both aggregate and individual levels. We find that individual attitudes to vaccination are based on rational appraisal of the situation, and that it is information of a purely scientific nature that has the only significant positive effect on intention to vaccinate.
Les relations transports et environnement ont considérablement évolué ces dernières années. Les manifestations les plus visibles de ce jour relèvent tant de la taxe carbone, du bonus/malus écologique… que des concertations territoriales pour les projets d'équipement. Le calcul socio-économique fut logiquement mobilisé pour évaluer les nuisances environnementales, mais ces évaluations n'ont que peu irrigué la prise de décision, elle-même soumise à des évolutions de fond : territorialisation, institutionnalisation du débat public et quête de compromis par le développement durable.
Cet ouvrage confronte les réflexions de chercheurs de champs différents et d'acteurs de secteurs et institutions multiples sur l'appropriation des méthodes d'évaluation socio-économique de l'environnement. Partant d'un inventaire actualisé des méthodes et données disponibles sur les coûts environnementaux des transports, il offre ensuite des clés pour comprendre les enjeux, limites et perspectives de telles évaluations. Elles pourraient s'avérer, sous conditions, le vecteur de négociations et de compromis entre acteurs, en vue de politiques de transport plus durables.
Le porte-monnaie électronique (PME) est l’une des dernières innovations technologiques de paiement fondée sur la technologie « carte à puce ». Toutefois, le PME Monéo peine à se généraliser en France alors même que d’autres PME dans le monde connaissent le succès. Nous nous appuyons sur un échantillon test de 100 consommateurs de la région marseillaise pour examiner les facteurs expliquant la décision d’adopter Monéo, et la fréquence de son usage chez 50 utilisateurs. En modélisant la dépendance entre ces deux décisions par un modèle de sélection, cette étude liminaire et exploratoire indique que le revenu du ménage n’affecte pas le niveau d’utilisation mais uniquement l’adoption.
This article contributes to the recent empirical literature on financial repression and focuses on the French case since the end of World War II. We find that the fiscal adjustment needed to lower the debt ratio has been smaller during the years of financial repression in comparison with those of liberalized financial markets. This was possible because the real interest rates were low. We conduct a counterfactual analysis to see whether the vulnerability of public finances would have been different, if, since the late 1980s, the governments had continued carrying out the same financial repression policies. We answer affirmatively showing that the cost of debt service would have been reduced
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