No abstract

O impacto de veículos na praia foi investigado através de uma pesquisa efetuada ao longo de um setor da ilha barreira localizada na costa sul-rio-grandense. Nesta área, fatores culturais, geomorfológicos e políticos vêm provocando um impacto sem precedentes no ambiente. A faixa de praia está sendo severamente modificada por um tráfego intenso de veículos, num processo de degradação que já compromete o habitat de espécies importantes à sobrevivência do ecossistema. O estudo procurou determinar parâmetros físicos normalmente relacionados à compactação de areias, como a resistência à penetração e condutividade hidráulica, em pontos situados nas áreas onde o impacto é mais intenso e pontos de controle, sobre áreas sem tráfego. Deste modo, foi possível evidenciar alterações físicas em várias zonas da praia com repercussão sobre a vegetação pioneira, formação de dunas e sobrevivência das espécies.

This paper uses the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) to test the hypothesis of per capita convergence in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for a multi-sectorial panel of countries. The empirical strategy applies conventional estimators of random and fixed effects and Arellano and Bond's (1991) GMM to the main pollutants related to the greenhouse effect. For reasonable empirical specifications, the model revealed robust evidence of per capita convergence in CH emissions in the agriculture, food, and services sectors. The evidence of convergence in CO emissions was moderate in the following sectors: agriculture, food, non-durable goods manufacturing, and services. In all cases, the time for convergence was less than 15 years. Regarding emissions by energy use, the largest source of global warming, there was only moderate evidence in the extractive industry sector-all other pollutants presented little or no evidence.

In this article, we focus on the role of political and economic institutions in Mozambique's development. We produce a set of institutional indicators for Mozambique for the period 1900–2005. The first index tracks political freedoms and is unique in its duration and complexity. The second index is a measure of property rights for Mozambique, and such a measure has not existed previously and certainly not for this length of time. The construction of these indices is a painstaking process through historical records but it provides us with a richness of institutional data previously not available. The new institutional indices will allow us to explore the role of the institutional environment in determining economic growth and development in Mozambique over time.

Despite the huge evidence documenting the adverse impact of extractive policies, we still lack a framework that identifies their determinants. Here, we lay out a two-region, two-social class model for thinking about this issue, and we exploit its implications to propose a novel account of the present-day economic divide between North and South of Italy. In contrast with the extant literature, we document that its opening is the result of the region-specific policies selected between 1861 and 1911 by the elite of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which annexed the rest of Italy in 1861. To elaborate, pre-unitary regional revenues from land property taxes per capita and railway diffusion are only driven by the contemporaneous region's farming productivity but not by the region's political relevance for the Kingdom of Sardinia's elite, whereas the opposite is true for the post-unitary ones. Moreover, tax-collection costs, the regional political relevance, and tax distortions shaped the growing North-South gap in post-unitary development, culture, and literacy. Crucially, our framework clarifies the incentives of dominating groups in other political and economic unions, e.g., post-Civil War USA and EU.