Much attention has been addressed to the question of whether Europe or the UnitedStates adopts a more precautionary stance to the regulation of potential environmental, health, and safety risks. Some commentators suggest that Europe is more risk-averse and precautionary, whereas the US is seen as more risk-taking and optimistic about the prospects for new technology. Others suggest that the US is more precautionary because its regulatory process is more legalistic and adversarial, while Europe is more lax and corporatist in its regulations. The flip-flop hypothesis claims that the US was more precautionary than Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s, and that Europe has become more precautionary since then. We examine the levels and trends in regulation of environmental, health, and safety risks since 1970. Unlike previous research, which has studied only a small set of prominent cases selected non-randomly, we develop a comprehensive list of almost 3,000 risks and code the relative stringency of regulation in Europe and the US for each of 100 risks randomly selected from that list for each year from 1970 through 2004.Our results suggest that: (a) averaging over risks, there is no significant difference in relative precaution over the period, (b) weakly consistent with the flip-flop hypothesis, there is some evidence of a modest shift toward greater relative precaution of European regulation since about 1990, although (c) there is a diversity of trends across risks, of which the most common is no change in relative precaution (including cases where Europe and the US are equally precautionary and where Europe or the US has been consistently more precautionary). The overall finding is of a mixed and diverse pattern of relative transatlantic precaution over the period.

This article provides a framework and offers strategies for theorizing and generalizing about risk assessment and regulation developed in the context

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may ABSTRACTOur study extends research on the feminization of poverty by analyzing the variation in women's, men's and feminized poverty across affluent democracies from 1969 to 2000. Specifically, we address three issues. First, we provide more recent estimates of adult women's and men's poverty and the ratio of women's to men's poverty with two different poverty measures. We suggest that by incorporating the elderly, the feminization of poverty may be greater than previously estimated. The feminization of poverty is nearly universal across affluent Western democracies 1969-2000. Second, we show that women's, men's and overall poverty are highly correlated, but the feminization of poverty diverges as a distinct social problem. Third, we find that women's, men's and overall poverty share several correlates, particularly the welfare state, though some differences exist. At the same time, several of our findings differ with past research. The feminization of poverty is only influenced by social security transfers, single motherhood, and the sex ratios of the elderly and labor force participation. While power resources theory probably best explains women's, men's and overall poverty, structural theory may best explain the feminization of poverty. We conclude by discussing how analyses of the feminization of poverty contribute to debates on poverty and gender inequality.

In the first decade of the 21st Century, calls for interdisciplinary research are commonplace. Yet, relatively few papers discuss how to complete such research successfully. In this paper, I describe the details of data collection focused on five, six and seven-year old children. The project examined the effect of environmental contaminants on children's educational outcomes. It included a primary caregiver interview, a skill test with the child, and a venous blood draw from the child to test for lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, nicotine, and cotinine. This paper describes key issues and the solutions I adopted. Challenges discussed here include navigating the Institutional Review Board Process, analyzing the blood, obtaining the supplies needed to draw blood, banking blood for future research, hiring a phlebotomist, and recruiting subjects. While not all details will apply directly to other research projects, this paper provides some perspective on the current realities facing social scientists who decide to collect biological samples.

increased production to the twin goals of healthy farms and food security. Specific forms of farmer support must include rebuilding rural social services in health, sanitation and education, a fair distribution of land, water and genetic resources ('farmers rights' as an alternative to corporate IPRs), and international reforms such as "binding agreements on farmers rights and food security, a means to control TNCs and to reform development and trade organizations so that they are more democratic and food security-minded" (210). Buckland also suggests ways in which the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture could be reformed to benefit the South: cracking down on the EU and US's massive subsidies and dumping practices, tightening the rules that have allowed powerful states to exempt many of these subsidies, allowing special food security and development exemptions for the South, and supporting the existence of state marketing boards that protect smaller farmers.Overall, Ploughing Up the Farm is an excellent overview of the most pressing policy issues facing farmers worldwide. Given its wealth of empirical data, the book can be read, in part, as the evidence-based case for the food sovereignty/farmers' rights movement's critique of neoliberal policy. These data are nevertheless descriptive, and readers should not expect any statistical models. The clarity with which Buckland presents the logic of neoliberal reform, which may reflect his training in economics, is a key strength of the book. This lends credibility to Buckland's critique, as it proceeds by judging the neoliberal track-record based on its own promises. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic theory may be the best represented social theory (if it can be considered such) in the book, as Buckland tends to bypass discussion of current social science theorizing on globalization, development and rural societies. This book can serve as an essential primer in contemporary policy issues for students and scholars of the global food system, but one that could be supplemented with more theoretical material in an academic context.