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Purpose: Risk is a multifaceted concept, and its identification requires complex approaches that are often misunderstood. The consequence is that decisions are based on limited perception rather than the full value and meaning of what risk is, as a result, the way it is being tackled is incorrect. The individuals are often limited in their perceptions and ideas and do not embrace the full multifaceted nature of risk. Regulators and individuals want to follow norms and checklists or overuse models, simulations, and templates, thereby reducing responsibility for decision-making. At the same time, the wider use of technology and rules reduces the critical thinking of individuals. We advance the automation process by building robots that follow protocols and forget about the part of risk assessment that cannot be programed. Therefore, with this study, the objective of this study was to discover how people define risk, the influencing factors of risk perception and how they behave toward this perception. The authors also determine how the perception differed with age, gender, marital status, education level and region. The novelty of the research is related to individual risk perception during COVID-19, as this is a new and unknown phenomenon. Methodology: The research is based on the analysis of the self-administered purposely designed questionnaires we distributed across different social media platforms between February and June 2020 in Europe and in some cases was carried out as a interview over communication platforms such as “Skype,” “Zoom” and “Microsoft Teams.” The questionnaire was divided into four parts: Section 1 was designed to collect demographic information from the participants; Section 2 included risk definition statements obtained from literature and a preliminary discussion with peers; Section 3 included risk behavior statements; and Section 4 included statements on risk perception experiences. A five-point Likert Scale was provided, and participants were required to answer along a scale of “1” for “Strongly Agree” to “5” for “Strongly Disagree.” Participants also had the option to elaborate further and provide additional comments in an open-ended box provided at the end of the section. 466 valid responses were received. Thematic analysis was carried out to analyze the interviews and the open-ended questions, while the questionnaire responses were analyzed using various quantitative methods on IBM SPSS (version 23). Findings: The results of the analysis indicate that individuals evaluate the risk before making a decision and view risk as both a loss and opportunity. The study identifies nine factors influencing risk perception. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that we can continue to develop models and rules, but as long as the risk is not understood, we will never achieve anything.

The chapter investigates: (1) Do married parents efficiently allocate time to children’s health care? (2) Are parents willing to sacrifice consumption for health improvements at an equal rate for all family members? (3) How does family structure affect health trade-offs parents make? (4) Are parental choices consistent with maximization of a single utility function?

A model is specified focusing on how parents allocate resources between consumption and goods that relieve acute illnesses for family members. Equivalent surplus functions measuring parental willingness to pay to relieve acute illnesses are estimated using data from a stated-preference survey.

Results provide limited support for the prediction that married parents allocate time to child health care according to comparative advantage. Valuations of avoided illness vary between family members and are inconsistent with the hypothesis that fathers’ and mothers’ choices reflect a common utility function.

Prior research on children’s health valuation has relied on a unitary framework that is rejected here. Valuation researchers have focused on allocation of resources between parents and children while ignoring allocation of resources among children, whereas results suggest significant heterogeneity in valuation of health of different types of children and of children in different types of households.

Results may provide a justification on efficiency grounds for policies to provide special protection for children’s health and suggest that benefit–cost analyses of policies affecting health should include separate estimates of the benefits of health improvements for children and adults.

The purpose of this chapter is to ask and answer the question of what would happen if Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) plant materials were banned. We report on two studies – one with United States only ban and one with a global ban. We used a global computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP), for the analysis. This model has been used in hundreds of published papers on trade, energy, land use, and environmental issues. Our use of the model was to estimate the crop yield benefits for the major GMO crops, and then to convert this to a loss if the GMO traits were banned. We then shocked the GTAP model with the yield losses and estimate economic, land use, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission impacts. We found that losing the GM technology would cause commodity and food prices to increase and also bring about a significant increase in GHG emissions. The increase in emissions is caused by the need to convert forest and pasture to compensate for the lost production. Another interesting conclusion of the global ban study is that economic well-being for the United States, the world’s largest GMO user, actually increases with a ban. Many regions that ban or use little GMO varieties like the European Union, India, China, and Japan all see economic well-being decrease. These counterintuitive results are driven mainly by trade patterns. Therefore GMO technology helps agriculture reduce its carbon footprint. Without this technology, agricultural land-use GHG emissions increase as do food prices. Some groups would like to see GMOs banned and also see GHG emissions fall. You cannot have it both ways.

The notion of sustainability broadly builds upon the development of the present without hampering the needs of the future generation. Accordingly, the contemporary development programmes, in general, emphasise on minimising the adverse bearings of climate change and arresting the irreversible ecological degradation following the implementation of the growth-oriented economic models. While such idea of sustainable development is expected to be applied across different sectors, the traditional urban development projects such as the Integrated Development of Small and Medium Towns (IDSMT) (1979), the Mega-City Scheme (1993), and the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) (2005) focussed mainly on physical infrastructure with inadequate emphasis on the ecological aspects and sustainability. However, with the experiences of globalisation and the negative impact of changing climate, the recent urban development initiatives across the world have gone through considerable redesigning, and the idea of eco-city, compact city, sustainable city, etc., have taken the central place in the project proposals. In this connection, the Smart City Mission (SCM) (2015) of the Government of India has emerged as an important initiative to facilitate improvement in the standard of living along with economic growth through the development of urban infrastructure and integration with intelligent technologies. This chapter attempts to understand how the projects under the SCM have incorporated various ecological aspects to transform the cities into liveable and sustainable ones for the future generation. Using secondary data and carrying out a comparative analysis of selected smart city proposals, this chapter finds that there is still a lack of adequate emphasis on ecological sustainability in many smart city proposals. This chapter suggests revisiting the smart city proposals, and initiatives should be made towards the development of urban areas in a sustainable way.

At the beginning of the 20th century, three intertwined ambitions drove federal legislation over wildlife and biodiversity: establishment of multiple-use federal lands, the economic development of natural resources, and the maintenance of option values. We examine this federal intervention in natural resource use by analyzing roll call votes over the past century with a Random Utility Model (Manski, 1977) and conclude that economics mattered. So did ideology, but not uniformly. After World War II, the pro-environment vote which had been conservative shifted to being liberal. All these votes involved decisions regarding public land that reallocated the returns to users by changing the asset’s physical character or its usage rights. We suggest that long-term consequences affecting current resource allocations arose from disparities between broadly dispersed benefits and locally concentrated socioeconomic and geophysical (spatial) costs. We show that a primary intent of public land management has become to preserve multiple-use option values and identify important factors in computing those option values. We do this by demonstrating how the willingness to forego current benefits for future ones depends on the community’s resource endowments. These endowments are defined not only in terms of users’ current wealth accumulation but also from their expected ability to extract utility from natural resources over time.

This paper examines the corporate income tax compliance costs and their determinants by analyzing survey and financial statements data from firms operating in Greece. We find that corporate tax compliance costs are of considerable size and vary with several firm-specific characteristics, including the firm’s size, its age, the sector in which it operates, its location, and its legal form. The paper intends to raise awareness regarding the impact of tax compliance costs, especially for countries, such as Greece, that were significantly affected by the economic and financial crisis.