At the dawn of Europe, an extraordinary Greek philosopher-engineer--biologist named Aristotle strove to develop a code that the good person could live by. Aristotle's concepts have much resonance with us today. Although there are differences in the way in which we perceive things, basically we all share the same aspirations and needs.This new edition will be of value to the globally-focused engineer and scientist; it includes case studies from both developed and developing nations to help students and practitioners unravel the (...) complexities of ethical practice in the 21st Century. It is testament to the global and indefatigable nature of our scientific community that 2,300 years after Aristotle, we might derive the same conclusions as he did. (shrink)

The effective functioning of a modern enterprise necessitates the awareness of the owners and managers of its strategic orientations, the state of the internal and external environment, its competitive advantages, entrepreneurial potential and development prospects. A well-built business model of the enterprise helps to face these urgent and permanent challenges. However, the formation of a real business model of the enterprise necessitates mastering of theoretical and methodological bases and implementation of long-term practical measures in the field of assessment, shaping, (...) organization and control. This study offers a comprehensive business model of the enterprise that systematically identifies key factors which influence business activity of the enterprise and provide value logic for doing business in the global economic environment. (shrink)

Economics takes an individualistic approach to human behaviour. This is reflected in the use of 'contingent valuation' surveys to conduct cost benefit analysis for economic policy evaluation. An individual's valuation of a policy is assumed to be unaffected by the burdens it places on others. We report a survey experiment to test this supposition in the context of climate change policy. Willingness to pay for climate change mitigation was higher when richer individuals were to bear higher costs than when, (...) as is usual, no explicit information was provided about cost distribution. This result is inconsistent with the usual interpretation of contingent valuation data. It also suggests that the data may be biased indicators of policy acceptance. Additional survey questions suggest that a collective mode of reasoning is common. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the essence of economic security in the Internet environment, to identify and analyze statistical data on this issue. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time a comparison with foreign practice is made. As a result, some places that require improvement in this area are identified, the essence and understanding of new terms are revealed, and the principle of neural networks is explained. This (...) work is devoted to the problem of the spread of economic crime associated with the use of new technologies. In view of the development of the innovative sphere, the emergence of new technologies, there are also new threats to economic security. The article examines the history of cybercrime in the economic sphere, the basic principles of economic security from the side of new technologies, and provides current statistics on economic crimes from the point of view of the loss of information security by economic entities. Recommendations for reducing the level of economic crime in the information environment are formulated. (shrink)

The productivity gains generated by innovation are the root cause of long-term economic growth. In this paper, two empirical hypotheses are proposed to clarify our view: the trade turnover of technology market and intellectual property protection are important factors to stimulate innovation; The main channel of communication is through the increase of research staff and R&D funds. The empirical research result show that: The greater the technology trade volume, the greater the incentive to regional innovation activities, the greater the (...) number of regional patents; About the intellectual property protection, The higher the protection intensity is, the greater the incentive is to regional innovation activities and the greater the number of regional patents. Different from relevant researches, this paper discusses the decisive role of market activity and legal environment on regional innovation behavior from the perspective of technology trade and patent protection, and emphasizes the theoretical significance of market and legal system from a more general perspective. (shrink)

This paper presents the benefits they can obtain business which aim to protect the environment. The environment protection has found its place and affects the process of systemic change of the Polish economy. This article assumes that building a competitive economy and enterprise development based on the principle of sustainable development requires the development of mechanisms for mutual benefits. These will be the economic mechanisms, technical and technological, and social. All these mechanisms are concentrated in clusters. Pursue (...) sustainable development policies, an emphasis on environmental protection will be the general element for them a competitive advantage. Sustainable development will in this case be both the agent and the goal of economic and entrepreneurship development. Basing on the assumption that economic development is possible through the achievement of competitive advantage, sustainable development should be treated as its source. (shrink)

As the answer to sustainability concerns, green economic growth has gradually attracted considerable attention. Notably, the optimization of the institutional environment contributes to green economic growth from the perspective of new institutional economics. However, few studies have systematically explained the connection between the institutional environment and green growth. In this study, the institutional environment was divided into three dimensions: governmental, legal, and cultural subenvironments. We adopted econometric models with the effect of every dimension on green (...) growth and empirically analyzed with the generalized method of moments, based on Chinese provincial panel data from the years 2000–2016. The results indicated that there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between China’s institutional environment and its green growth. That is, the institutional environment can initially promote China’s green growth but, if it is not changed, will eventually inhibit it. In addition, the analysis on the three dimensions of the institutional environment highlighted that the role of the cultural subenvironment in green growth is greater than those of the governmental and legal subenvironments. (shrink)

The concept of “the good life” is not one that receives much attention from conventional economic theory.1 About the closest it comes to such attention is in the area of welfare economics and here it is mostly concerned with the distribution of costs and benefits of various economic choices and wherein benefits are measured in terms of utility and costs in terms of disutility or utility foregone. It is usually taken for granted that utility is a function of (...) consumption of goods and services, and disutility is a function of the “toil and trouble” associated with the effort to acquire goods and services. Labor, therefore, is typically taken to be a major source of disutility. Even many economists will admit that .. (shrink)

Marie Oldfield, Pro Bono Economics & Refugee Council. Over half the total applications for asylum the UK receives each year are initially rejected, yet nearly a third of these initial rejections are subsequently overturned on appeal. This process that fails to get decisions right first time imposes significant costs, not just on the applicants themselves, but also more widely on UK taxpayers. Asylum seekers are not entitled to welfare benefits nor employment except in some limited cases, and are often placed (...) in unsuitable conditions with lack of appropriate support to prepare their case for asylum. These unfortunate circumstances mean that they are unable to gather and present all the required evidence first time, even when the case for asylum is legitimate. As a result, the application is rejected and thus begins a cycle of appeals that might eventually lead to a successful outcome for the asylum seeker but will, in the process, burden the taxpayer with unnecessary administrative cost and cause the asylum seeker needless distress and prevent them from accessing suitable economic opportunities. • Our study estimates that there are approximately 4,000 initial rejections that are successfully appealed each year and, with each appeal incurring direct administrative costs of around £1,000, the price tag of incorrect initial decisions adds up to a hefty £4 million per year in unnecessary administrative costs alone. • There are other costs, too, that negatively impact asylum seekers and taxpayers, albeit in a more indirect manner. The longer the appeals process is dragged out, the more delay there is to successful asylum seekers entering the labour market which means lost economic activity and forgone tax revenue for the Exchequer. Long periods of unemployment also result in skills attrition and lower the probability of the asylum seeker successfully entering the labour market in the future. • A lengthy appeals process heightens stress and worsens mental health in asylum seekers, a group arguably already more vulnerable on this front. Unnecessary human suffering aside, there is also a monetary cost borne by the taxpayer should NHS mental health services become involved. Thus, there is a pressing and viable case for providing asylum seekers a stable environment in which to complete their applications for asylum. This would increase the likelihood of reaching correct decisions in the first instance, avoid unnecessary administrative costs of an arduous appeals process, enable successful asylum seekers to access the labour market and contribute to the Exchequer, and avoid placing extra demands on already strained NHS mental health services. (shrink)

First published in 1997, this volume addressed the growing preoccupation of scientists at the time had in environmental phenomena, such as global warming, ozone layer depletion, acid rains, fresh water and ocean pollution, desertification, deforestation and the loss of bio-diversity. The crucial and pressing nature of these issues spawned says the author a new wave of research in environmental economics. The volume provides broad surveys of the developments in the economics of the environment and reports on the developing set (...) of environmental problems, analytical tools and economic policies. The importance of the developing approach was that environmental problems are no longer isolated from all other economic dimensions. Throughout the volume they are analysed in an open, generally non-competitive economy with transnational or global externalities. The first part deals with the relationship between the environment, economic growth and technological innovation. The second part analyses the optimal design of environmental taxation, while the third part considers the international dimension of environmental policy. (shrink)

Environmental policy is high on the political agenda in many countries. This book identifies the failures of the market mechanism in the face of environmental problems and shows how economic policy should be designed to overcome them. Special attention is paid to the possible benefits from a green tax reform.

The end of the cold war has elevated environmental issues to the highest level of concern for humanity while creating a world order dominated by the United States of America and other Western nations. This new power structure may likely lead to increased business activity in many parts of the world, as nations formerly preoccupied with the cold war turn their attention to economic development. This paper examines the linkages among ethics, economic development and protection and restoration of (...) the environment in The New World Order. (shrink)

Valuing conservation and biodiversity outcomes in economic analysis is difficult, as it is in health economics. Because health economics has previously had to respond to the many challenges currently faced by conservation economics, health economists have developed very successful tools for responding to these challenges which conservation economists can draw upon. What is surprising is that despite rhetorical support for the use of these economic analysis tools in conservation valuations, in practice, these economic tools are used far (...) less frequently in conservation and biodiversity decision then they are in health decisions. Drawing on a simple database search and an analysis of universities that lead in both economics and environmental studies, this paper considers why conservation economists stick with philosophically and pragmatically difficult economic tools when they have other options, and argues that part of the reasons is the way conservation economics is framed and conceptualised. (shrink)

Nonuse values are a potentially very important, but controversial, aspect of the economic valuation of the environment. Since no use is envisaged by the individual, a degree of altruism appears to be the driving force behind nonuse values. Whilst much of the controversy has focused upon measurement issues associated with the contingent valuation method, this paper concentrates on the underlying motivations, whether ethical or economic, that form the basis for such values. Some fundamental aspects of defining and (...) quantifying economic nonuse values are considered, and possible motives for attributing value to the environment are analysed, making a clear distinction between 'selfish' altruism and 'selfless' altruism. The difference has crucial implications for economic valuation and for assessing individuals' willingness to pay for environmental quality. The concept of Safe Minimum Standards is introduced as a means of supplementing purely economic methodology to incorporate ethical concerns into decision making. (shrink)

The physical properties that signify objects differ dramatically, so that the organization of sensory systems must reflect those differences. Although all senses may encode peripheral sensory information using across-fiber firing distributions, an economical coding system for each sense will necessarily differ. An economical code must maximize information about objects, whether they are predators or foods.

Abstract:By combining normative philosophy and empirical social science, we craft a research framework for assessing differential expectations embodied in normative conceptions of the economic social contract in the United States. We argue that there are distinct views of such a contract grounded in individualist and communitarian philosophical ideologies. We apply this framework to organizational downsizing, postulating that certain human resource practices, in combination with the respective ideological orientations, will affect perceptions of the justice of downsizing policies.

Organisational citizenship behaviour towards the environment (OCBE) aids in both environmental protection and in harnessing sustainable competitive organisational advantage. This study proposed a conceptual research model which investigated managerial perceptions of the relationship between OCBE and economic cost performance (ECP) in the UAE hospitality sector, with green innovative behaviour (GIB) mediating and green training moderating the relationship. Drawing on the theory of planned behaviour and abilities motivation opportunity theory, the study administered 479 structured questionnaires to hotel managers in (...) the UAE using purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was applied to test the hypotheses in SmartPLS3.3. Findings showed that OCBE had a direct and significant impact on ECP, with GIB emerging both as a direct and mediating predictor. Additionally, green training directly and significantly moderated the OCBE–cost performance relationship. These results evince the integration of sustainable philosophies with innovative mindsets to encourage green innovative endeavours among hotel managers. (shrink)

This paper is a twenty-five year retrospective on the development of environmental consciousness in the US The Clean Air Act is taken as proxy for companion measures in water and other areas of the environment, and the emphasis on "efficiency" and "market compatibility" is noted with a mixture of caution and hope. The work of an eminent pragmatic ethicist, Ado Leopard, is re-visited. From the pages of A Sand County Almanac, his notion that right and wrong, good and bad, (...) be assessed in terms of the tendency to produce or preserve "the integrity, beauty, and stability of the biotic community" is explicitly adopted. Leopold''s ethical consciousness raises a question: what reasons do we have to believe that an efficient, booming economy can be made compatible with a finite natural system? Are there boundaries that the economy must respect, or can we "out run" those limits with our technology and expertise? (shrink)

By combining normative philosophy and empirical social science, we craft a research framework for assessing differential expectations embodied in normative conceptions of the economic social contract in the United States. We argue that there are distinctviews of such a contract grounded in individualist and communitarian philosophical ideologies. We apply this framework to organizational downsizing, postulating that certain human resource practices, in combination with the respective ideological orientations, will affect perceptions of the justice of downsizing policies.Living up to one’s word (...) is a decisive measure of moral character. Within the microsocial realm of the family, promises and commitments derive their social force and cultural meaning from the idea that love or biology binds people together in an absolute way. But outside of this world, in the larger society, the only thing binding people together is a sense that there is a social contract, a set of common obligations held collectively by society as a whole. But today’s workers say no one seems to care whether these promises are kept. (shrink)

Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logics are used to model events with imprecise, incomplete, and uncertain information. Researchers have developed numerous methods and techniques to cope with fuzziness or uncertainty. This research intends to introduce the novel concepts of complex neutrosophic relations and its types based on the idea of complex neutrosophic sets. In addition, these concepts are supported by suitable examples. A CNR discusses the quality of a relationship using the degree of membership, the degree of abstinence, and the degree (...) of nonmembership. Each of these degrees is a complex number from the unit circle in a complex plane. The real part of complex-valued degrees represents the amplitude term, while the imaginary part represents the phase term. This property empowers CNRs to model multidimensional variables. Moreover, some interesting properties and useful results have also been proved. Furthermore, the practicality of the proposed concepts is verified by an application, which discusses the use of the proposed concepts in statistical decision-making. Additionally, a comparative analysis between the novel concepts of CNRs and the existing methods is carried out. (shrink)

In times of current crisis, the voices of women are needed more than ever. The accumulation of war and environmental catastrophes teaches us that exploitation of people and nature through violent appropriation and enrichment for the sake of short-term self-interest exacts its price. This book presents contributions on the currently most relevant and most urgent issues: reshaping the economy, environmental problems, technology and the re-reading of history from the non-western and western tradition. With an outlook into the problems of class, (...) race and gender in its intersectional framing, the collection offers a unique overview of current research in these fields and contributes to the renewal and contemporary presentation of feminist thought from partly concrete perspectives with regard to factual issues. (shrink)

Problems of fuel ethanol production have been the subject of numerous reports, including this analysis. The conclusions are that ethanol: does not improve U.S. energy security; is uneconomical; is not a renewable energy source; and increases environmental degradation. Ethanol production is wasteful of energy resources and does not increase energy security. Considerably more energy, much of it high- grade fossil fuels, is required to produce ethanol than is available in the energy output. About 72% more energy is used to produce (...) a gallon of ethanol than the energy in a gallon of ethanol. Ethanol production from corn is not renewable energy. Its production uses more non- renewable fossil energy resources in growing the corn and in the fermentation/distillation process than is produced as ethanol energy. Ethanol produced from corn and other food crops is also an unreliable and therefore a non-secure source of energy, because of the likelihood of uncontrollable climatic fluctuations, particularly droughts which reduce crop yields. The expected priority for corn and other food crops would be for food and feed. Increasing ethanol production would increase degradation of agricultural land and water and pollute the environment. In U.S. corn production, soil erodes some 18- times faster than soil is reformed, and, where irrigated, corn production mines water faster than recharge of aquifers. Increasing the cost of food and diverting human food resources to the costly and inefficient production of ethanol fuel raise major ethical questions. These occur at a time when more food is needed to meet the basic needs of a rapidly growing world population. (shrink)

The economic stability of a country, such as Pakistan is dependent on the construction of mega-projects, such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. However, certain external factors and project characteristics may delay the construction of infrastructure projects; scholars have not investigated the development of CPEC from this perspective. In addition, the COVID-19 outbreak has hindered CPEC initiatives. This analysis will examine the effect of external environment factors on CPEC, and benchmark the project’s effects on economic stability through (...) CPEC’s development by incorporating 523 samples obtained from employees of various CPEC projects. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze all hypotheses proposed here on AMOS 21.0 tools. According to the findings of this study, the CPEC external environment and project benchmark characteristics have a negative effect on the construction of CPEC development. Furthermore, the development of CPEC is found to have a significant effect on economic stability. However, fear of COVID-19 has weakened the relationship between CPEC development and economic stability. Finally, we also discuss the implications and limitations of the study. (shrink)

Ethics of Inclusion captures fairness and social justice for all from an ethical perspective in our post-pandemic world. The book discusses inequality in Healthcare, Economics & Finance, Education, Digitalization, and the Environment, in order to envision economics of diversity and a transition to a more inclusive society. A wide-ranging approach addresses issues of inequality in access to innovations such as telemedicine and artificial intelligence, economic gains of robotics, and big data insights. A rising performance gap between the finance (...) sector and the real economy opens in the post-COVID-19 era, with system-inherent inequality, given elevated inflation levels and disparate impacts of low interest rate regimes around the globe. Education offers social transfer hubs and inclusion potential for societal advancement and international development. The transition to a greener economy is addressed in an analysis of the Green New Deal and European Green Deal including the Sustainable Finance Taxonomy. The book sets out a hopeful agenda for equality and social justice to deliver a post-pandemic Renaissance. (shrink)

A fact of life for farmers, hunter-gatherers, and fishermen in the rural parts of the world are that crops fail, wild resources become scarce, and winds discourage fishing. In this article we approach subsistence risk from the perspective of "coexistence thinking," the simultaneous application of natural and supernatural causal models to explain subsistence success and failure. In southwestern Madagascar, the ecological world is characterized by extreme variability and unpredictability, and the cosmological world is characterized by anxiety about supernatural dangers. Ecological (...) and cosmological causes seem to point to different risk minimizing strategies: to avoid losses from drought, flood, or heavy winds, one should diversify activities and be flexible; but to avoid losses caused by disrespected spirits one should narrow one's range of behaviors to follow the code of taboos and offerings. We address this paradox by investigating whether southwestern Malagasy understand natural and supernatural causes as occupying separate, contradictory explanatory systems (target dependence), whether they make no categorical distinction between natural and supernatural forces and combine them within a single explanatory system (synthetic thinking), or whether they have separate natural and supernatural categories of causes that are integrated into one explanatory system so that supernatural forces drive natural forces (integrative thinking). Results from three field studies suggest that (a) informants explain why crops, prey, and market activities succeed or fail with reference to natural causal forces like rainfall and pests, (b) they explain why individual persons experience success or failure primarily with supernatural factors like God and ancestors, and (c) they understand supernatural forces as driving natural forces, so that ecology and cosmology represent distinct sets of causes within a single explanatory framework. We expect that future cross-cultural analyses may find that this form of "integrative thinking" is common in unpredictable environments and is a cognitive strategy that accompanies economic diversification. (shrink)

The importance of addressing the existential threat to humanity, climate change, has grown remarkedly in recent years while conflicting views and interests in societies exist. Therefore, climate change agendas have been weaponized to varying degrees, ranging from the international level between countries to the domestic level among political parties. In such contexts, climate change agendas are predominantly driven by political or economic ambitions, sometimes unconnected to concerns for environmental sustainability. Consequently, it can result in an environment that fosters (...) antagonism and disputes over power and position and increases the risk of prolonged confrontations, hindering the collective global efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Through the current discourse, we aim to provide a preliminary definition of the weaponization of climate change and environmental degradation and examine its risks and consequences on international relations, political dynamics, public perception, and the comprehensive integrity of climate action. We also recommend embracing a globally coordinated, scientifically substantiated approach to circumvent climate change by building an eco-surplus cultural value system. (shrink)

This paper addresses problems related to transferring market concepts to non-market domains. More specifically it is about fallacies following from the use of the commodity concept in environmental valuation studies. First of all, the standard practice tends to misconstrue the ethical aspects related to environmental choices by forcing them into becoming ordinary trade-off problems. Second, the commodity perspective ignores important technical interdependencies within the environment and the relational character of environmental goods. These are all properties that have made many (...) such goods escape the commoditisation pressure of markets in the first place. Further, it is shown that these interdependencies are the source of some of the ethical dilemmas observed. Finally, inherent characteristics of the environment tend to make the concept of the margin, so indispensable to economic calculus, either difficult or irrelevant to define. The commodity 'fiction' twists the perception of the environment from systems preservation to items use or transformation. This is a problem of increased importance as we approach potential systems perturbations. (shrink)

At the time of its introduction in the end of the 1980s, the concept of natural capital represented new, more ecologically aware thinking in economics. As a symbol of novel thinking, the metaphor of natural capital stimulated a debate between different disciplinary traditions on the definitions of the concept and research priorities and methods. The concept became a means to control the discourse of sustainable development. In this paper, I focus on the power/ knowledge implications of the use of the (...) concept, and I follow the career of the concept of natural capital in ecological economic publications between the years 1988 and 2000. The main interests are in the use of the concept to affect the rules according to which claims concerning sustainable development can be made and in the constitution of objects of environmental knowledge. (shrink)

Many economic problems are also ethical problems: should we value economic equality? how much should we care about preserving the environment? how should medical resources be divided between saving life and enhancing life? This book examines some of the practical issues that lie between economics and ethics, and shows how utility theory can contribute to ethics. John Broome's work has, unusually, combined sophisticated economic and philosophical expertise, and Ethics Out of Economics brings together some of his (...) most important essays, augmented with an updated introduction. The first group of essays deals with the relation between preference and value, the second with various questions about the formal structure of good, and the concluding section with the value of life. This work is of interest and importance for both economists and philosophers, and shows powerfully how economic methods can contribute to moral philosophy. (shrink)