Economic Benefit

Within the conception of the Environmentally Integrated Design (dAI), the caña brava (Gynerium sagittatum) particle boards product design and manufactoring process improvements and adhesive fenol - formaldehyde (FF) at 10% and 13% were carried out. The practical investigation was made in the National Laboratory of Forest Products, University of The Andes, Mérida, Venezuela. The design of the product and analysis of results phase was made in the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), Spain. The results were compared with the Venezuelan standards (COVENIN) and the Cuban standards (Tecnoazúcar). From the integrative vision of the Environmentally Integrated Design positive results were determined in the design of the product, in the manufactoring process and the values in the physical and mechanical properties. For Venezuela, the proposal of elaborating boards starting from caña brava and other gramineous is innovative and it allows, among others, to diminish the industrial pressure ...

Ensuring acceptance of dedicated biomass feedstocks by landowners, agricultural communities, environmental and public interest groups, requires that the environmental benefits, concerns, and risks associated with their production be quantified. Establishment and management measures to benefit soil and water quality are being identified by ongoing research. Field studies are showing that nutrients are retained within the rooting zone of dedicated feedstocks, subsurface herbicide transport does not occur, and off-site chemical transport is minimal compared with traditional agricultural crops. The amounts and timing of fertilizer application were critical to minimizing off- site transport of nutrients. Maintaining soil cover decreased runoff, sediment losses, and nutrient transport compared with traditional agricultural crops. Conversion of traditional croplands to biomass and no-till crop production improved soil quality and soil carbon storage. Subsurface nutrient losses were less fr...

Cotton farmers in many developing countries are facing decreasing marginal returns due to stagnating yields and high input costs. Conversion to organic management could offer an alternative. In a two year comparative study in central India covering 170 cotton fields, organic farms ...

The Edwards Dam, located on the Kennebec River of Maine, in the state’s capitol city, was removed in 1999 to restore fisheries such as alewives, striped bass, American shad, and endangered short-nosed sturgeon. The dam removal was ordered by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the express purpose of restoring fisheries, the first time ever this was done in American history. This article examines the local environmental advocacy for river and fisheries restoration and the process resulting in dam removal and fisheries restoration. It argues that the Edwards Dam removal was critical in proving the environmental benefits of river restoration through removal as well as some economic benefits. This contributed to other U.S. efforts to remove dams to restore fisheries and assisted the expansion of this stage of American environmentalism. The article uses a number of primary sources including local newspapers, environmental group materials, and a number of interviews collected by the author.

Despite a plethora of research in the area, none of the mechanisms proposed so far for Denial-of-Service (DoS) mitigation has been widely deployed. We argue in this paper that these deployment difficulties are primarily due to economic inefficiency, rather than to technical shortcomings of the proposed DoS-resilient technologies. We identify economic phenomena, negative externality---the benefit derived from adopting a technology depends on the action of others---and economic incentive misalignment---the party who suffers from an economic loss is different from the party who is in the best position to prevent that loss---as the main stumbling blocks of adoption. Our main contribution is a novel DoS mitigation architecture, Burrows, with an economic incentive realignment property. Burrows is obtained by re-factoring existing key DoS mitigation technologies, and can increase the "social welfare," i.e., economic benefit, of the entire Internet community---both infrastructure ...

A central tenet in sociology holds that positions in social structure influence the attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes of the actors occupying those positions. Though this proposition underlies much sociological thinking, perhaps the clearest instantiation of it appears in the literature collectively referred to as 'social network theory'. Research in this area investigates both the structure of the relations between social

The Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) partners with small and medium enterprises (SME) in high-risk R&D enabling technologies with strong potential for economic benefits to Taiwan. This paper provides evidence that SBIR policy can help SME innovation. It delivered the evidence by studying the effects of government funding on the R&D behavior of SMEs in Taiwan. By adapting the methodology recently proposed by Wallsten (2000) to firm-level data, this research shows that government funding subsidy helps SMEs.

The risk that tropical storm occurrence may alter as a result of global warming presents coastal managers, particularly in vulnerable areas, with a serious challenge. Many countries are hard-pressed to protect their coastal resources against present-day hazards, let alone any increased threat in the future. Moreover, the threat posed by climate change is uncertain making the increased costs of protection difficult to justify. Here, we examine one management strategy, based on the rehabilitation of the mangrove ecosystem, which may provide a dual, “winwin” benefit in improving the livelihood of local resource users as well as enhancing sea defences. The strategy, therefore, represents a precautionary approach to climate impact mitigation. This paper quantifies the economic benefits of mangrove rehabilitation undertaken, inter alia, to enhance sea defence systems in three coastal Districts of northern Vietnam. The results of the analysis show that mangrove rehabilitation can be desirable from an economic perspective based solely on the direct use benefits by local communities. Such activities have even higher benefit cost ratios with the inclusion of the indirect benefits resulting from the avoided maintenance cost for the sea dike system which the mangrove stands protect from coastal storm surges.

Drugs and methods to improve physical performance among athletes have been used since the beginning of sport history, but the use of performance enhancing drugs has not always been regarded as cheating. In short, the motives for doping are improving and maintaining physical functioning, coping with the social/psychological pressures and striving for social and psychological goals, including economic benefits. Factors such as, "doping dilemma", "win at all costs", cost versus benefit, and the specificity of some specific doping agents, also play major roles. It seems that action on the athletes' attitude about the achievement of physical improvement and creating effective methods to reveal the drug abuse, are two main ways in winning the struggle against doping.