In the 2016–2018 drought, Cape Town almost ran out of municipal water.

The water crisis that gripped Cape Town over the 2016–2018 period gained global attention. For a brief period of time in early 2018, it looked as if the legislative capital of South Africa would become the first major city in the world to run out of water. The case of Cape Town has broad implications for how we think about water management in a rapidly urbanizing world.

The slippery slope framework of tax compliance emphasizes the importance of trust in authorities as a substantial determinant of tax compliance alongside traditional enforcement tools like audits and fines. Using data from an experimental scenario study in 44 nations from five continents (N = 14,509), we find that trust in authorities and power of authorities, as defined in the slippery slope framework, increase tax compliance intentions and mitigate intended tax evasion across societies that differ in economic, sociodemographic, political, and cultural backgrounds.

Faced with the threat of “Day Zero”, when it was feared that Cape Town's taps could run dry, consumers reduced household water usage from 540 to 280 L per household per day over the 36 months between January 2015 and January 2018. This paper describes the events that prompted this reduction. We look at how changes in water use were affected by official announcements and by public engagement with this news via the social media activity and internet searches. We analysed the water usage of a subset of middle to high income households where smart hot and cold water meters were installed.

This study seeks to examine the effect of government spending and taxation on economic growth in Tanzania for the 1967-2017 period.

Over the last two decades, land acquisition for urbanization has caused a huge loss of farmland on the fringes of Hanoi, Vietnam. Previous studies have often criticized this policy for pushing farmers out of farming and disrupting peri-urban endogenous development. This study provides a case report of a peri-urban commune in western Hanoi to show how this claim is misleading. We found that livelihood transitions in this commune took place early on, and this helped most local laborers prepare to move on from farming when urbanization sped up and land acquisition policies were implemented.

The ongoing ecological crisis has motivated systematic studies on biodiversity loss, mostly pointing to economic and human population pressure as root causes of natural habitat destruction. The present paper proposes to globally assess the case of threatened animal and plant species, discussing whether the cohabitation between human habitat and biodiversity (natural habitat) is peaceful. Thereby, by controlling for species richness and reverse causality, we find that the number of threatened species depicts an inverted U-shaped relationship with income per capita.

For a long-term growth in shrimp farming, a significant increase in shrimp output can only be fully realized by improving both technical and cost efficiency. This study employs data envelopment analysis with the double bootstrapping technique to analyze cost and technical efficiency for aquaculture. This procedure allows statistical inferences about cost and technical efficiency to be made. The case of intensive white-leg shrimp farming in Ninh Thuan, Vietnam is used for analysis. The result shows that the bias-corrected cost and technical efficiency were 0.533 and 0.723, respectively.