This paper examines the US corporate law approach to persuading companies to adopt environmentally-conscious management practices, and considers the corresponding Japanese situation. The US Securities Laws have an environmental disclosure system for investors, which helps investors to exert market forces on companies to address ecological management actively. Shareholders have used shareholder proposal systems actively to request that companies better address such issues, including higher-level environmental disclosure. These measures are worth considering, so that both the managers and owners of companies recognize that environmentally-conscious management is a significant part of good corporate governance.

The district hospitals are an integral part of the district health system (DHS) in South Africa fulfilling several important functions. Using data obtained from relevant published reports. The district hospital costs were allocated using the ‘ingredients approach’ that combined a top-down method and step-down sequence. The costs in the treatment of patients were grouped into six cost centres: buildings, drugs, equipment, materials, personnel and utilities. The unit costs were broadly grouped into two categories using the hospital departments (fixed and variable costs) and input use (direct and indirect costs). More than 30% of the total public expenditure on hospitals in the country was on district hospitals between 1996/97 and 1998/99. They had more beds per population (1.08/1000) than other public hospitals. The bed occupancy rates in these hospitals were generally very low varying between 57% and 75%. The average length of stay (ALOS) was within acceptable range in the hospital except in Osindisweni hospital. Personnel costs were more than 70% and drugs only 3% to 6% of the total costs. McCord hospital was the most expensive using total and unit costs. Harrismith hospital had the lowest total costs and Osindisweni hospital the lowest unit cost. Most of the costs were fixed or direct costs in all the hospitals. There is the need for the adoption of measures to ensure that the hospitals are efficiently run while maintaining access for vulnerable groups.

We explore a nondenominational macroeconomic model along the structural axes of endogeneity, exogeneity, manipulability and comparative statics, The outcome is attention to a least understood aspect of bank portfolio behavior: dynamic liability management.

There has been a dramatic increase in the labour force participation of women in South Africa since the mid-1990s. Male participation has also been increasing but at a substantially slower rate, such that a feminisation of the labour force has occurred, mirroring a more general global trend that has been occurring since World War Two. Unlike the experience in many other countries, however, the rise in the labour force participation of women in South Africa has translated mainly into an increase in unemployment. Nonetheless, there has also been some increase in employment among women over the same period. This paper analyses what this rise in employment has ‘bought’ women in South Africa in terms of access to different types of employment and earnings for the period 1995 to 2001. The analysis suggests that the nature of the feminisation of the labour market in South Africa has been such that women’s disadvantaged position in the labour market relative to men’s has not been fundamentally challenged. Women continue to be over-represented in low-income, less secure employment. Where there has been some opportunity for advancement over the period, white women seem to have been the main beneficiaries.

Many governments have promoted eco-labelling schemes as an accurate information-based policy to regulate environmental problems. This paper argues that governments should integrate eco-labelling into their purchasing decisions, both to benefit the environment directly and to reinforce ecolabelling programs as a means to influence private purchasers. Both effects could be quite significant given that governments are large purchasers of goods and services. After reviewing the main barriers and potentialities for greening procurement markets, we explore several ways by which green public procurement can promote the overall diffusion of eco-labelled products. JEL codes: H57; Q 28

The change of century with a new millennium means the conscious beginning of a crucial ”axial time”. The characteristics of this axial time are: (a) the collective conscience born from the global interplanetary knowledge that the world suffers from lack of ethics together with situations characterised by exclusion, violence, exploitation and the need for human rights. (b) at the same time there is an increasing awareness of the need to demand respect and application of other values and attitudes between people and groups co-participating in the global affairs. From the pedagogical point of view this is a problem relating to the cultural reality and the psychological dominance and their relationship from the cultural to the psychic and vice versa. A typology of these realities makes us aware of four models: modernity, post-modernity, ultra-modernity and meta-modernity. Here the meta-modernity is defined as the psycho-cultural pedagogic alternative based on other values and in the new systems of rules generating identities, which make possible responses capable of overcoming the conflicts of the new and complex ”axial time”. Bioeconomics as a science and as a pedagogic tool is well placed in this model.