The designation and management of federal wilderness areas has generated much controversy in the United States. The decade of the 1980s has been a difficult one for public land managers as there has been growing opposition to their traditional "conserve but use philosophy." Public lands are to be managed for the public benefit. Unfortunately there has been little survey research to find out what the attitudes of the public are towards the management of federally designated wilderness. We report the results of a national survey of 2670 residents of wilderness counties. We found that the presence of wilderness is an important reason why 53% of the people moved to or live in the area; 81% felt that wilderness areas are important to their counties; and 65% were against mineral or energy development in wilderness areas. Qn some issues there was less agreement as 43% of the respondents wanted more access to wilderness, and 39% were in favor of additional wilderness with 26% undecided. There were no large differences between counties and regions despite the differences in economic and social characteristics and the historical contexts within which they evolved.
The world-system perspective has been little employed for the examination of foreign direct investment (FDI) distributions in the world economy. We approach FDI distributions as a function of the structural hierarchy of the world economy. The goal is to examine some fundamental relationships between the structure of the world economy and the flows and stocks of FDI. A state-space approach is used such that the world-economy classification serves as a dependent variable to be explained by FDI behavior. An FDI capital distribution model is developed to generate hypotheses for statistical validation. Results of the analyses suggest that, while the world-economy classification accounts for a significant proportion of variability, FDI is more complex than the core-periphery capital distribution model predicts. Differences in average profit rate, investment risk, and investment purpose all serve to adjust variation in the FDI distributions. Investment risk exhibits a stable relationship among world-economy classes over at least a twenty-year period and seems to be a primary driver of investment behavior. FDI may therefore be a statistically reasonable covariate with country-level position in the world economy as well as a predictor of development potential.
Nordic companies have been leaders in the rapid expansion of Western business into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the St Petersburg area of Russia. While joint ventures were being developed prior to the demise of the USSR, investment rose sharply in early 1992. Our survey of companies from Nordic countries revealed a pattern of location and of adaptation to the conditions of former Soviet infrastructure, culture, politics and economy. Initial Nordic investment has renewed economic ties across the Baltic Sea, with inter‐country links stronger between specific countries. Frustrations with changing government rules, communications, work ethic, quality expectations and other conditions were expressed in interviews with managers of Nordic companies in the Baltic area. Optimism was tempered by continued uncertainty about Russian governmental policies and market potential.
Innovation diffusion among farmers is a spatial process involving a large number of independent decisions, whose aggregate indicates the communication patterns and behavioral characteristics of individual decision makers. Contour strip cropping is an innovation which has been widely adopted in southwestern Wisconsin. Its spread is simulated using Hagerstrand's Monte Carlo technique modified to account for the influence of major community centers on communication patterns among farmers. The diffusion process appears to be directed by a decline with distance of neighborhood communication among area farmers within the framework of larger community trade areas. KEY WORDS: Communication, Diffusion, Simulation, Strip Cropping, Wisconsin. HE diffusion of ideas and innovationsT through farm populations has long been of concern to people involved in communications, marketing, advertising, rural sociology, agricultural extension services, and other areas of researchel They have approached the process in terms of individual social, economic, and behavioral characteristics in attempting to explain, primarily, the rate of diffusion and population segments adopting at each stage. Geographers have become interested in diffusion because of its inherent spatial implications. Their studies have dealt with the process itself and with the factors responsible for resulting spatial patterns.? Data on the actual spread of innovations over space, categorized by time of adoption, provide the necessary information for pattern replication via stochastic models.Generally, these simulation attempts have not ventured far from the diffusion model developed by Hagerstrand.3 His analysis was
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