Do recipients of cash transfer scheme make the right decisions on household food expenditure? A study from a rural district in Pakistan.

OBJECTIVES: To assess spending by beneficiaries of Benazir Income Support Programme on monthly food commodities, and contribution of the cash grant programme on purchase of nutritious foods. METHODS: The descriptive cross-sectional survey of households enrolled in the Benazir Income Support Programme was conducted during July and August, 2013, in Matiari district of the Sindh province of Pakistan. Monthly household food expenditure on food commodities and use of the cash grant on type of food purchased was assessed through structured interviews of the beneficiaries. Results were computed in 2013 Pak rupees and converted to 2018 United States dollar. Women beneficiaries were also interviewed on decision-making regarding the use of the cash grant and on household food expenditure. RESULTS: The survey comprised 421 households. with a mean monthly expenditure on food of Rs 7,577, r 80.73 dollars. Women made decisions on food spending in only 135(32%) households, but in 235(56%) households, women were the primary decision-makers on cash grant spending. CONCLUSIONS: Unconditional cash grant did not meaningfully translate into the purchase of nutritious foods even though it played an important role in increasing women's agency.

Evaluating the consumption of chemical products and articles as proxies for diffuse emissions to the environment.

In this study we have evaluated the use of consumption of manufactured products (chemical products and articles) in the EU as proxies for diffuse emissions of chemicals to the environment. The content of chemical products is relatively well known. However, the content of articles (products defined by their shape rather than their composition) is less known and currently has to be estimated from chemicals that are known to occur in a small set of materials, such as plastics, that are part of the articles. Using trade and production data from Eurostat in combination with product composition data from a database on chemical content in materials (the Commodity Guide), we were able to calculate trends in the apparent consumption and in-use stocks for 768 chemicals in the EU for the period 2003-2016. The results showed that changes in the apparent consumption of these chemicals over time are smaller than in the consumption of corresponding products in which the chemicals are present. In general, our results suggest that little change in chemical consumption has occurred over the timespan studied, partly due to the financial crisis in 2008 which led to a sudden drop in the consumption, and partly due to the fact that each of the chemicals studied is present in a wide variety of products. Estimated in-use stocks of chemicals show an increasing trend over time, indicating that the mass of chemicals in articles in the EU, that could potentially be released to the environment, is increasing. The quantitative results from this study are associated with large uncertainties due to limitations of the available data. These limitations are highlighted in this study and further underline the current lack of transparency on chemicals in articles. Recommendations on how to address these limitations are also discussed.

Targeting health subsidies through a nonprice mechanism: A randomized controlled trial in Kenya.

Free provision of preventive health products can markedly increase access in low-income countries. A cost concern about free provision is that some recipients may not use the product, wasting resources (overinclusion). Yet, charging a price to screen out nonusers may screen out poor people who need and would use the product (overexclusion). We report on a randomized controlled trial of a screening mechanism that combines the free provision of chlorine solution for water treatment with a small nonmonetary cost (household vouchers that need to be redeemed monthly in order). Relative to a nonvoucher free distribution program, this mechanism reduces the quantity of chlorine procured by 60 percentage points, but reduces the share of households whose stored water tests positive for chlorine residual by only one percentage point, substantially improving the trade-off between overinclusion and overexclusion.

Getting essential health products to their end users: subsidize, but how much?

Although coverage rates and health outcomes are improving, many poor people around the world still do not benefit from essential health products. An estimated two-thirds of child deaths could be prevented with increased coverage of products such as vaccines, point-of-use water treatment, iron fortification, and insecticide-treated bednets. What limits the flow of products from the producer's laboratory bench to the end users, and what can be done about it? Recent empirical research suggests a crucial role for heavy subsidies.

Maize flour fortification in Africa: markets, feasibility, coverage, and costs.

The economic feasibility of maize flour and maize meal fortification in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia is assessed using information about the maize milling industry, households' purchases and consumption levels of maize flour, and the incremental cost and estimated price impacts of fortification. Premix costs comprise the overwhelming share of incremental fortification costs and vary by 50% in Kenya and by more than 100% across the three countries. The estimated incremental cost of maize flour fortification per metric ton varies from $3.19 in Zambia to $4.41 in Uganda. Assuming all incremental costs are passed onto the consumer, fortification in Zambia would result in at most a 0.9% increase in the price of maize flour, and would increase annual outlays of the average maize flour-consuming household by 0.2%. The increases for Kenyans and Ugandans would be even less. Although the coverage of maize flour fortification is not likely to be as high as some advocates have predicted, fortification is economically feasible, and would reduce deficiencies of multiple micronutrients, which are significant public health problems in each of these countries.

Learning to dislike safe water products: results from a randomized controlled trial of the effects of direct and peer experience on willingness to pay.

Low-cost point-of-use (POU) safe water products have the potential to reduce waterborne illness, but adoption by the global poor remains low. We performed an eight-month randomized trial of four low-cost household water treatment products in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Intervention households (n = 600) received repeated educational messages about the importance of drinking safe water along with consecutive two-month free trials with each of four POU products in random order. Households randomly assigned to the control group (n = 200) did not receive free products or repeated educational messages. Households' willingness to pay for these products was quite low on average (as measured by bids in an incentive-compatible real-money auction), although a modest share was willing to pay the actual or expected retail price for low-cost chlorine-based products. Furthermore, contrary to our hypotheses that both one's own personal experience and the influence of one's peers would increase consumers' willingness to pay, direct experience significantly decreased mean bids by 18-55% for three of the four products and had no discernible effect on the fourth. Neighbor experience also did not increase bids. Widespread dissemination of safe water products is unlikely until we better understand the preferences and aspirations of these at-risk populations.

Sensing design and workmanship: the haptic skills of shoppers in eighteenth-century London.

This article explores how eighteenth-century shoppers understood the material world around them. It argues that retail experiences exposed shoppers to different objects, which subsequently shaped their understanding of this world. This article builds on recent research that highlights the importance of shop environments and browsing in consumer choice. More particularly, it differentiates itself by examining the practice of handling goods in shops and arguing that sensory interaction with multiple goods was one of the key means by which shoppers comprehended concepts of design and workmanship. In doing so, it affirms the importance of sensory research to design history. The article focuses on consumer purchases of ceramic objects and examines a variety of sources to demonstrate the role of haptic skills in this act. It shows how different literary sources described browsing for goods in gendered and satirical terms and then contrasts these readings against visual evidence to illustrate how handling goods was also represented as a positive act. It reads browsing as a valued practice requiring competence, patience and haptic skills. Through an examination of diary sources, letters and objects this article asks what information shoppers gained from touching various objects. It concludes by demonstrating how repetitive handling in search of quality meant that shoppers acquired their own conception of what constituted workmanship and design.

Estimating chemical emissions from home and personal care products in China.

China's economy has grown significantly and concomitantly so has the demand for home and personal care (HPC) products. The detection of chemicals used in HPC products is increasing in profile as China strives to improve its environmental management. China is developing robust exposure models for use in regulatory risk-based assessments of chemicals, including those chemicals used in HPC products. Accurate estimates of chemical emissions play an important role within this. A methodology is presented to derive spatially refined emissions from demographic and economic indicators with large variations in emissions calculated, showing product usage being higher in East and South China. The less affordable a product, the greater the influence per capita Gross Domestic Product has on the product distribution. Lastly, more spatially resolved input data highlights greater variation of product use. Linking product sales data with population density increased the observed variability in absolute usage distribution of HPC products at the county > province > regional > country scale.

Vacuum cleaner emissions as a source of indoor exposure to airborne particles and bacteria.

Vacuuming can be a source of indoor exposure to biological and nonbiological aerosols, although there are few data that describe the magnitude of emissions from the vacuum cleaner itself. We therefore sought to quantify emission rates of particles and bacteria from a large group of vacuum cleaners and investigate their potential determinants, including temperature, dust bags, exhaust filters, price, and age. Emissions of particles between 0.009 and 20 µm and bacteria were measured from 21 vacuums. Ultrafine (<100 nm) particle emission rates ranged from 4.0 × 10(6) to 1.1 × 10(11) particles min(-1). Emission of 0.54-20 µm particles ranged from 4.0 × 10(4) to 1.2 × 10(9) particles min(-1). PM(2.5) emissions were between 2.4 × 10(-1) and 5.4 × 10(3) µg min(-1). Bacteria emissions ranged from 0 to 7.4 × 10(5) bacteria min(-1) and were poorly correlated with dust bag bacteria content and particle emissions. Large variability in emission of all parameters was observed across the 21 vacuums, which was largely not attributable to the range of determinant factors we assessed. Vacuum cleaner emissions contribute to indoor exposure to nonbiological and biological aerosols when vacuuming, and this may vary markedly depending on the vacuum used.

Power to the people: working-class demand for household power in 1930s Britain.

The 1930s witnessed an intense struggle between gas and electricity suppliers for the working class market, where the incumbent utility­gas­was also a reasonably efficient (and cheaper) General Purpose Technology for most domestic uses. Local monopolies for each supplier boosted substitution effects between fuel types­as alternative fuels constituted the only local competition. Using newly-rediscovered returns from a major national household expenditure survey, we employ geographically-determined instrumental variables, more commonly used in the industrial organization literature, to show that gas provided a significant competitor, tempering electricity prices, while electricity demand was also responsive to marketing initiatives.

Local practice and global data: loyalty cards, social practices, and consumer surveillance.

Monitoring of consumers has become the most widespread mode of surveillance today. Being a multi-billion dollar business, the collected data are traded globally without much concern by the consumers themselves. Loyalty cards are an element with which such data are collected. Analyzing the role of loyalty cards in everyday practices such as shopping, I discuss how new modes of surveillance evolve and work and why they eventually make communication about data protection a difficult matter. Further, I will propose an alternative approach to the study of surveillance. This approach is concerned with local practices, focusing on subjective narratives in order to view surveillance as an integral part of culturally or socially manifested contexts and actions and not to view surveillance as something alien to society and human interaction. This will open up other possibilities to study modes of subjectivity or how individuals situate themselves within society.

Competition and product quality in the supermarket industry.

This article analyzes the effect of competition on a supermarket firm's incentive to provide product quality. In the supermarket industry, product availability is an important measure of quality. Using U.S. Consumer Price Index microdata to track inventory shortfalls, I find that stores facing more intense competition have fewer shortfalls. Competition from Walmart­the most significant shock to industry market structure in half a century­decreased shortfalls among large chains by about a third. The risk that customers will switch stores appears to provide competitors with a strong incentive to invest in product quality.

Working women households and time-saving consumption: empirical evidence from Kerala.

This article explores the impact of labour force participation of Indian women on the consumption expenditure of their households. Field survey data were collected from working-wife and non-working wife households in Kerala, the state in India with the highest labour market participation of women in the organised sector. Differences in time-saving consumption expenditures of working and non-working wife households and different variables influencing consumption expenditures were researched. The study shows that among the variables which positively affect the time-saving consumption expenditure of the households, non-economic factors influence the time-saving consumption expenditure of the working-wife households more prominently than in non-working wife households.

Crazy for bargains: inventing the irrational female shopper in modernizing English Canada.

Between the 1890s and 1930s, anglophone politicians, journalists, novelists, and other commentators living in western, central, and eastern Canada drew upon established connections among greed, luxury, hysteria, and femininity to describe women who went shopping as irrational. Their motivations for doing so included their desires to assuage feelings of guilt about increased abundance; articulate anger caused by spousal conflicts over money; assert the legitimacy of male authority; and assign blame for the decline of small communities' sustainability, the degradation of labour standards, and the erosion of independent shopkeeping. By calling upon stock stereotypes of femininity, and by repositioning them to fit the current capitalist moment, English-Canadian commentators constructed disempowering representations of women to alleviate their anxieties about what they perceived as the ills of modernization.

The carbon-consuming home: residential markets and energy transitions.

Home heating and lighting markets have played crucial and underappreciated roles in driving energy transitions. When historians have studied the adoption of fossil fuels, they have often privileged industrial actors, markets, and technologies. My analysis of the factors that stimulated the adoption of anthracite coal and petroleum during the nineteenth century reveals that homes shaped how, when, and why Americans began to use fossil fuel energy. Moreover, a brief survey of other fossil fuel transitions shows that heating and lighting markets have been critical drivers in other times and places. Reassessing the historical patterns of energy transitions offers a revised understanding of the past for historians and suggests a new set of options for policymakers seeking to encourage the use of renewable energy in the future.

Improving emissions estimates of home and personal care products ingredients for use in EU risk assessments.

REACh introduces environmental release categories (ERCs) used to describe chemical emissions to the environment. These ERCs contain a number of default values that are combined with product usage data to estimate environmental exposure concentrations for use in risk assessment. The methodology presented in the present work constitutes a novel approach that allows for the coupling of population density and country-specific usage statistics for a range of home and personal care products. Spatially explicit usage estimates are presented for European Union (EU) hypothetical regions (200 × 200-km grid), as described in EU risk assessment frameworks. Recent sales and population density data are combined to assess the relevance of current default assumptions; that 10% of a product will be used in an EU hypothetical region that is inhabited by 20 million people. It is demonstrated that these assumptions are conservative and their relevance geographically limited. The highest usage estimates for hypothetical regions are located in southern England and a transboundary area in Europe consisting of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. The maximum identified usage of 9 home and personal care product types, in an EU hypothetical region, ranges from 4.3% to 11.4%. The 99.5th percentile values, representative of an EU hypothetical region with a population of 20 million, range from 3.6% to 9.0%, which suggests that the current default parameterization of the ERCs may be overly protective for ingredients used in a number of home and personal care product types. Accordingly, it may be justified to use such an analysis to refine the default values in order to provide more realistic exposure estimates for use in REACh assessments.

Energy implications of product leasing.

A growing number of advocates have argued that leasing is a "greener" form of business transactions than selling. Leasing internalizes the costs of process wastes and product disposal, placing the burden on the OEMs, who gain from reducing these costs. Product leasing results in closed material loops, promotes remanufacturing or recycling, and sometimes leads to shorter life cycles. This paper provides two case studies to quantitatively test these claims for two distinct product categories. Life cycle optimization and scenario analysis are applied, respectively, to the household appliance and computer industries to determine the effect that life spans have on energy usage and to what extent leasing the product versus selling it may influence the usage life span. The results show that products with high use impacts and improving technology can benefit from reduced life cycles (achieved through product leases), whereas products with high manufacturing impacts and no improving technology do not.

A "theatre of rule?" Domestic service in aristocratic households under the Third Republic.

E. P. Thompson developed the notion of "cultural hegemony" to analyse the power of the ruling class over the working class in eighteenth-century England. This article examines the aristocracy's endeavour to maintain its cultural hegemony in the France of the Third Republic. Drawing on the private archives of noble families, it documents servants' roles in supporting the "conspicuous consumption" of their employers, the hierarchy and wages of male and female servants and the language and gestures used in employer-servant interaction. It then looks at working-class responses to nobles' hegemonic ritual of hunting and concludes with discussion of the post-war socio-economic climate in which the distinctive features of domestic service in aristocratic households were gradually abandoned.