The economics of housing is a subject of increasing interest to economists as well as policy makers. For a typical household in the U.S., housing is not only the single most important consumption good but also the dominant component of wealth. Recent research has focused on the link between house price changes and consumption allocations. This literature, how ever, has been mostly empirical and cannot address the welfare consequences of house price changes for individual households.
When markets are complete, households can fully insure against their intertemporal consumption and income risks. House price changes will not have a significant impact on their consumption and welfare. In reality, however, lacking proper financial products to generate full risk-sharing, households are exposed to house price uncertainties. Owning a home can alleviate the problem by purchasing future housing services at today’s price. The hedging, however, is imperfect. Institutional and borrowing constraints frequently prevent young households with low levels of cash in hand from purchasing a house that matches their lifetime consumption need. Senior homeowners, in the meantime, are often forced to hold an equity position in their houses that lasts longer than their expected length of occupancy. This mismatch between life-cycle housing consumption need and housing investment position is worsened by the presence of lumpy adjustment costs in housing and mortgage markets.
Financial risk management has undergone much change and greater regulation in the last twenty years following, and in many ways in response to, the major stock-market crash (“Black Monday”) of October, 1987. Now, another major market incident, the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008-09, has prompted calls for more and different financial regulation. In order to better control the risk of financial institutions and to protect them against large unexpected losses, the group of G-10 countries agreed in 1988 to sponsor and subsequently form the original Basel Capital Accord.
Amazonia is home to a number of Amerindian groups who make a living by some combination of swidden horticulture, hunting, fishing and foraging. These populations have been disappearing at a rapid rate since the turn of the century as areas of forest and cerrado have been developed (Ribeiro, 1967), but there are still a number of Amerindian groups that are self-sufficient, or almost self sufficient, in food production, and have diets that appear to be traditional. The purpose of this paper is to review what is known of the diet and nutritional status of these groups.
Ideally we would like to be able to define Amerindian diets in terms of ecological variables, the characteristics of food resources, patterns of food selection and use, and the implications that these have for dietary adequacy, nutritional status and health. We would also like to understand how these change with contact and assimilation into Western society. However, much of what is known about diet in Amazonia is anecdotal. This kind of information is useful in providing a preliminary description of the diet, but provides little on which to judge the adequacy of the diet or potential nutritional problems. There is somewhat better information available on nutritional status, especially anthropometric indicators of nutritional status, but the interpretation of these indices is not straight forward because they are sensitive to a variety of environmental variables, as well as diet.
