A common challenge in analyzing urbanization is the data. The United Nations (UN) compiles information on urbanization (urban population and its share of total national population) that is reported by various countries but there is no standardized definition of 'urban', resulting in inconsistencies. This situation is particularly troublesome if one wishes to conduct a cross-country analysis or determine the aggregate urbanization status of the regions (such as Asia or Latin America) and the world. This paper proposes an alternative to the UN measure of urban concentration that we call an agglomeration index. It is based on three factors: …/ Keywords: agglomeration index, urbanization, accessibility map, cost surface JEL classification: R11, O18 The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s). Publication does not imply endorsement by the Institute or the United Nations University, nor by the programme/project sponsors, of any of the views expressed.• Population density• The population of a 'large' city centre• Travel time to that large city centre.The main objective in constructing this new measure is to provide a globally consistent definition of settlement concentration in order to conduct cross-country comparative and aggregated analyses. As an accessible measure of economic density, the agglomeration index lends itself to the study of concepts such as agglomeration rents in urban areas, the 'thickness' of a market, and the travel distance to such a market with many workers and consumers. With anticipated advances in remote sensing technology and geo-coded data analysis tools, the agglomeration index can be further refined to address some of the caveats currently associated with it.

Pursuit of the triple bottom line of economic, community and ecological sustainability has increased the complexity of fishery management; fisheries assessments require new types of data and analysis to guide science-based policy in addition to traditional biological information and modeling. We introduce the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a broadly applicable and flexible tool for assessing performance in individual fisheries, and for establishing cross-sectional links between enabling conditions, management strategies and triple bottom line outcomes. Conceptually separating measures of performance, the FPIs use 68 individual outcome metrics—coded on a 1 to 5 scale based on expert assessment to facilitate application to data poor fisheries and sectors—that can be partitioned into sector-based or triple-bottom-line sustainability-based interpretative indicators. Variation among outcomes is explained with 54 similarly structured metrics of inputs, management approaches and enabling conditions. Using 61 initial fishery case studies drawn from industrial and developing countries around the world, we demonstrate the inferential importance of tracking economic and community outcomes, in addition to resource status.

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This paper investigates Japanese consumers' willingness to pay for Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) ecolabelled seafood using a sealed bid, second price auction. Participants in an experiment in Tokyo were provided varying degrees of information about the status of world and Japanese fisheries and the MSC program in sequential rounds of bidding on ecolabelled and nonlabelled salmon products. A random-effects tobit regression shows that there is a statistically significant premium of about 20 per cent for MSC-ecolabelled salmon over nonlabelled salmon when consumers are provided information on both the status of global fish stocks and the purpose of the MSC program. This premium arises from a combination of an increased willingness to pay for labelled products and a decreased willingness to pay for unlabelled products. However, in the absence of experimenter-provided information, or when provided information about the purpose of the MSC program alone without concurrent information about the need for the MSC program, there is no statistically significant premium.