the nature of diversified business groups a research design and two case studies diversified business groups dominate the private sectors of most of the world s economies several of these economies have undergone sudden policy changes that significantly increase domestic competitive intensity the authors demonstrate how the changes in corporate scope that accompany such competitive shocks can be used to weigh the importance of different explanations for the existence of diversified business groups the authors illustrate their reasoning by studying the restructuring of two of india s largest business groups following a comprehensive post 1991 package of policy reforms the case studies also elucidate aspects of the restructuring process that should inform larger sample empirical analyses copyright 1998 by blackwell publishing ltd

inequality of opportunity in energy consumption in china abstract this paper proposes an empirical implementation of the concept of inequality of opportunity in energy consumption expenditure and applies this to data from chinese general social survey cgss we examine the role played by circumstances beyond the control of individuals for instance gender hukou status family background and region of birth in generating inequality in energy consumption expenditure in china this study shows that the relative share of inequality of opportunity ior in energy consumption expenditure in china is 10 02 for the entire sample ior turns out to be larger for the older cohort peaking at 14 40 for the 1955 64 cohort a shapley value decomposition presents that hukou status and region of birth are the two largest contributors to inequality of opportunity across birth cohorts a heterogeneity analysis further shows that more disadvantaged groups for instance female individuals born in the west of rural china with worse family backgrounds are facing more unequal opportunities in energy consumption in china these results suggest that energy policies focused on zero discrimination in opportunities should be encouraged

turkish bank efficiency bayesian estimation with undesirable outputs this paper analyzes the productivity and efficiency of turkish banks from 2002 to 2010 we obtained estimates of efficiency productivity growth and efficiency growth using a bayesian stochastic frontier approach and focused on accounting for non performing loans npls for use in our model specifically we introduce npls as a bad output in an input distance function and estimate a system of non linear equations subject to endogeneity we confirm that the productivity growth of turkish banks was positive over the period of this study which was mainly due to the improvement in technology while efficiency growth continued to be negative over the same period methodologically we also prove that not accounting for npls in estimating the frontier model might seriously distort the efficiency and productivity results the study also provides measures of shadow prices for npl and discusses the results in terms of several interesting trends in turkish banking finally the paper provides efficiency and productivity comparisons between domestic and foreign banks

a performance assessment of mozambique banks a bayesian stochastic frontier abstractthis article analyses the technical efficiency of mozambican banks from 2005 to 2014 with a bayesian stochastic frontier model the intermediate approach is adopted and the results reveal that efficiency varies amongst the banks analysed foreign ownership of mozambican banks is also analysed as is public ownership the role of mergers and acquisitions big banks and active dividend policy within the context of bank costs policy implications are then derived

the effect of urbanization on energy use in india and china in the ipets model abstract urbanization is one of the major demographic and economic trends occurring in developing countries with important consequences for development energy use and well being yet it is only beginning to be explicitly incorporated in long term scenario analyses of energy and emissions we assess the implications of a plausible range of urbanization pathways for energy use and carbon emissions in india and china using the integrated population economy technology science ipets model a computable general equilibrium cge model of the global economy that captures heterogeneity in household types within world regions and into which we have introduced income effects on household consumption preferences we find that changes in urbanization have a somewhat less than proportional effect on aggregate emissions and energy use a decomposition analysis demonstrates that this effect is due primarily to an economic growth effect driven by the increased labor supply associated with faster urbanization the influence of income on household consumption is strong and indicates a potentially rapid transition away from traditional fuel use and toward modern fuels such as electricity and natural gas results also indicate important directions for future work including the implications of alternative types and driving forces of urbanization over time a better understanding of possible changes in consumption preferences associated with income growth and the urbanization process and modeling strategies that can produce disaggregated household consumption outcomes within a cge framework

exploring the effect of producer services agglomeration on china s energy efficiency under environmental constraints abstract this paper makes an empirical analysis of the effect of producer services agglomeration on china s energy efficiency under environmental constraints eee by using spatial durbin model the results show that at the national level the urbanization agglomeration of producer services not only improves the local eee significantly but also has an obvious spatial spillover effect on the surrounding regions while the localization agglomeration of producer services is only beneficial to the improvement of the local eee from the regional perspective both the urbanization and localization agglomeration of producer services show significant promotion effect and spatial spillover effect on china s eee in the east region and the promotion effect of the urbanization agglomeration of producer services is greater while the improvement of eee in the central and west regions mainly depend on the mar externality of producer services agglomeration and its spatial spillover effects are not obvious moreover the above empirical results exhibit strong robustness based on these empirical findings this paper puts forward some specific suggestions for improving china s eee so as to achieve the multi win of economic growth energy conservation and environmental protection the study contributes to improving the environmental quality and speeding up the construction of beautiful china

asymmetries and interdependencies in time use between italian parents in recent decades changes in parents attitudes towards the importance of spending time with children to optimise their future behaviour and cognitive development have greatly affected patterns of time allocation among both working and non working parents in all developed countries we compare the two waves of the italian time use dataset 1988 and 2002 to analyze how family time allocation changed over time in a country that was undergoing a marked increase in female employment rate and a continuous decline in total fertility rate we focus especially on how parents time with their children depends on their employment status and household characteristics using a simultaneous sequential approach we consider links among the different time uses of individuals and correlations with spouses decisions we find that wives time at work time strongly influences the time spent by both spouses with their children in 2002 but not in 1988 fathers were much more involved in childcare and rearing in 2002 than in 1988 in general as women s work time increased substitutes for their childcare time were found within the household fathers or other co resident adults

environmental regulation capital output and energy efficiency in china an empirical research based on integrated energy prices abstract how to improve environmental quality and achieve high quality development of economy have become important challenges for china in the new era based on the klems framework this paper analyzes the relationship between environmental regulation factor substitution and energy saving effect by using panel structure vector autoregression model and panel data of china industry from 2004 to 2014 the following conclusions are drawn 1 china s environmental regulation can promote the substitution of capital to energy however benefit of this substitution in the long run is greater than that in the short run 2 only in the long run can china s environmental regulations have significant energy saving effect technological innovation is the main reason for the improvement of energy saving effect of environmental regulation 3 china s environmental regulation will not significantly improve the structure of capital which makes the economic benefits low finally the paper discusses the possible ways to improve china s environmental regulation from the aspects of forming a scientific environmental supervision system improving energy pricing mechanism and capital structure

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

indirect carbon emissions in household consumption evidence from the urban and rural area in china abstract resident energy consumption can be divided into direct and indirect parts and the indirect part is often considered to be much more important than direct part by some scholars in this paper on the basis of consumer lifestyle approach cla and the estimation of net primary productivity npp energy ecological footprint eef of indirect energy consumption is calculated using statistical data of chinese urban and rural areas from 1999 to 2010 and then improved stirpat stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology model is used to empirically study the influences of urbanization level economic level engel coefficient energy intensity and industry structure on indirect energy consumption given the consideration of potential multicollinearity the model is estimated using partial least square pls regression the results indicate that for urban residents the eef of indirect energy use is on the rise it is positively influenced by urbanization level per capita income and the ratio of tertiary industry but negatively influenced by engel coefficient and energy intensity for rural residents the eef is declining it is positively influenced by engel coefficient energy intensity and tertiary industry proportion while negatively influenced by urbanization level and per capita income combining these empirical findings and china s specific circumstances some policy recommendations are made

understanding china s renewable energy technology exports abstract china became a major player in renewable energy re technology during the 2000s chinese solar pv cell and module makers quickly dominated global sales in that industry while the country s wind turbine producers became poised for significant exports after capturing their rapidly growing home market in countries like the us chinese re technology strength has been met with claims of excessive governmental support of exports this study examines to what extent chinese firms solar pv and wind technology successes have been enabled by policy supports and whether those policies appear to have been driven by broader goals versus re export promotion per se the evidence suggests that governmental policy toward both wind and solar originated in a push for export competitive chinese companies but the specifics differed substantially due to the particular requirements of building technological capabilities in each export readiness necessitated substantial support for domestic installation of wind but not solar pv power the findings also suggest that as the decade of the 2000s progressed environmental goals played an increasing role alongside export promotion in motivating and shaping chinese re technology policies

tobit or ols an empirical evaluation under different diary window lengths researchers analysing time use data often estimate limited dependent variable models because time spent must be nonnegative and cannot be more than the total amount of time in a given observation period while the traditional empirical technique applied to such cases is maximum likelihood estimation of a tobit censored regression model recent debate has questioned whether linear models estimated via ordinary least squares ols are preferable on the one hand tobit models are deemed necessary to address the significant censoring i e large numbers of zeroes typically found in time use data in the face of which ols estimators would be biased and inconsistent yet optimization occurs over a longer period than that covered by the typical time diary often a day and thus some argue that reported zeroes represent a measurement problem rather than true nonparticipation in the activity in which case ols would be preferred we provide direct empirical evidence on this question using the australian time

how does energy consumption affect china s urbanization new evidence from dynamic threshold panel models abstract energy consumption may play different roles at different stages of urbanization and economic growth given china s rapid economic development and urbanization process this study tries to explore the possible nonlinear relationship between energy consumption and urbanization in china against the background of promoting new type urbanization the level of china s urbanization is evaluated comprehensively using the entropy method a newly developed dynamic threshold panel model is employed to examine the nexus of energy consumption and comprehensive urbanization with full consideration of heterogeneous characteristics the panel data vector autoregression or pvar model is also used to estimate the direct effects of various energy consumption patterns on the urbanization the empirical results indicate that the nexus of energy consumption and urbanization is indeed nonlinear and that energy consumption is conducive to promote china s urbanization at the current stage of development however the positive effect decreases when there is an increase in energy consumption intensity and energy consumption scale whereas the effect increases with the promotion of energy consumption structure

does financial development increase energy consumption the role of industrialization and urbanization in tunisia this paper assesses the relationship among energy consumption financial development economic growth industrialization and urbanization in tunisia from 1971 to 2008 the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach to cointegration and granger causality tests is employed for the analysis the result confirms the existence of long run relationship among energy consumption economic growth financial development industrialization and urbanization in tunisia long run bidirectional causalities are found between financial development and energy consumption financial development and industrialization and industrialization and energy consumption hence sound and developed financial system that can attract investors boost the stock market and improve the efficiency of economic activities should be encouraged in the country nevertheless promoting industrialization and urbanization can never be left out from the process of development we add light to policy makers with the role of financial development industrialization and urbanization in the process of economic development

labor supply differences between married heterosexual women and partnered lesbians a semi parametric decomposition approach i introduction partnered lesbian women have substantially higher labor supply than married women leppel 2008 tebaldi and elmslie 2006 what might account for the sexual orientation gap in partnered female labor supply everyday conversation and casual empiricism suggests that partnered lesbian women have a stronger attachment to the labor market relative to married women because of their choice to have fewer children than their married counterparts yet this has not been formally analyzed the primary goal of this study is to determine the role observable characteristics particularly children play in explaining the differences in labor supply between partnered lesbian women and married women while empirical research on the determinants of partnered lesbian women s labor supply is limited 1 the determinants of married women s labor supply have been studied in great detail see blundell and macurdy 1999 for a survey of the literature in general married women s labor supply is found to be positively related to own wages negatively related to spouse wages and nonlabor income and negatively related to the presence of children particularly young children in the household 2 importantly the same control variables are not found to have the same effect on married men s labor supply in particular men are not responsive to their wife s earnings and tend to have higher labor supply because of the presence of children these findings are consistent with a traditional division of labor into market and household work which results in married men being viewed as the primary earners and married women being viewed as the secondary earners 3 in particular becker 1981 argues that increasing returns from investments in specific human capital encourages a division of labor in market work and household work among household members the sexual division of labor however arises from intrinsically different comparative advantages of men and women e g in the production of children which would determine the direction of the division of tasks by gender this in turn leads to differences in specific human capital accumulation which reinforces the intrinsically different comparative advantages of men and women even in the face of rising female labor force participation increased divorce rates and lower fertility male and female earnings would not be equalized becker 1985 specifically becker argues that married women with household responsibilities e g child care and food preparation would expend less energy on market work make lower investments in market oriented human capital face lower hourly earnings and choose less demanding jobs occupations than married men even when they work the same number of hours because household responsibilities are time and effort intensive relative to leisure and other nonmarket uses of time by men moreover married women would have lower labor force participation than their husbands because of the lower earnings they would face because of less energy expended on market work and lower investments in market oriented human capital and a full equilibrium could involve complete specialization by married women in household production although married men have increased their time spent on child care production there is strong evidence that married women continue to spend more time on child care production than their spouses bianchi robinson and milkie 2006 drago and lee 2008a 2008b kalenkoski ribar and stratton 2005 2007 lundberg pabilonia and ward batts 2007 in addition the sociology literature argues that married women are more likely to identify themselves in the context of family and market work while married men are more likely to identify themselves in the context of market work alone see e g bielby and bielby 1989 finally there is a large literature that tests the specialization hypothesis bardasi and taylor 2008 daniel 1992 gray 1997 hersch and stratton 2000 kenny 1983 loh 1996 stratton 2002

residential electricity demand dynamics in turkey abstract this article provides fresh empirical evidences for the income and price elasticies of the residential energy demand both in the short run and long run for turkey over the period 1968 2005 using the bounds testing procedure to cointegration the computed elasticities of income and price are consistent with the previous studies and as expected the long run elasticities are greater than the short run elasticities an augmented form of granger causality analysis is implemented among residential electricity income price and urbanization in the long run causality runs interactively through the error correction term from income price and urbanization to residential energy but the short run causality tests are inconclusive the parameter stability of the short run as well as long run coefficients in the residential energy demand function are tested the results of these tests display a stable pattern

factors influencing renewable energy consumption in china an empirical analysis based on provincial panel data abstract the development of renewable energy is the key to deal with climate change and low carbon economy development in china here based on a balanced panel dataset of 30 provinces in china cover the period of 1996 2013 this paper explores the effect of economic growth co 2 emissions foreign trade exports or imports and urbanization on renewable energy consumption at the national and regional levels by using a dynamic system gmm panel model the empirical results show that the influence of economic growth co 2 emissions foreign trade and urbanization on the renewable energy consumption is heterogeneous across regions first economic development has an important positive impact on renewable energy consumption in the four panels we consider and the impact is the greatest in the eastern region follows by the national central and western regions second co 2 emissions have a significant positive impact on renewable energy consumption in the central and national regions however co 2 emissions have a weak negative impact on the consumption of renewable energy in the eastern region and have no impact in the western region third per capita exports are found to have a positive effect on the renewable energy consumption with the greatest impact in the central region followed by the eastern and national regions and have a weak negative impact in the western regions fourth per capita imports have a negative effect on renewable energy consumption in the eastern western and national regions and have a weak positive effect in the central region finally the changes in the urbanization level significantly affect the renewable energy consumption in the four panels we consider and the impact is the greatest in the eastern region with high level of urbanization follow by the central and western regions on the basis of this study we put forward the corresponding countermeasures and suggestions to achieving sustainable development in china

efficient energy saving targets for apec economies abstract energy saving target ratios estr for 17 apec economies during 1991 2000 are computed in a total factor framework all nominal variables are transformed into real variables by the purchasing power parity ppp at the 1995 price level the data envelopment analysis dea approach is used to find the energy saving target est for apec economies without reducing their maximum potential gross domestic productions gdps in each year energy labor and capital are the three inputs while gdp is the single output our major findings are as follows 1 china has the largest est up to almost half of its current usage 2 hong kong the philippines and the united states have the highest energy efficiency 3 the energy efficiency generally increases for apec economies except for canada and new zealand 4 chile mexico and taiwan have significantly improved their energy efficiency in the last 5 years 5 an inverted u shape relation exists between per capita est and per capita gdp 6 estr has a positive relation with the value added percentage of gdp of the industry sector and a negative relation with that of the service sector

impacts of urbanization on renewable energy consumption in china abstract in this paper we used the logarithmic mean divisia index method to investigate the impact of urbanization on renewable energy consumption growth recg the growth in renewable energy consumption is attributed to the urbanization effect energy mix effect energy intensity effect economic effect and population effect recg can be roughly divided into the slow growth stage the fluctuant growth stage and the accelerated growth stage the results showed that the energy mix effect economic effect and population effect positively affected recg however a significantly negative relationship was found between energy intensity and recg furthermore the contribution of urbanization differed in recg stages and urbanization contributed more to the total energy consumption growth than to recg this study would thus provide policymakers with insights about the link between urbanization and renewable energy consumption

comparing structural decomposition analysis and index to analyze and understand historical changes in economic environmental employment or other socio economic indicators it is useful to assess the driving forces or determinants that underlie these changes two techniques for decomposing indicator changes at the sector level are structural decomposition analysis sda and index decomposition analysis ida for example sda and ida have been used to analyze changes in indicators such as energy use co2 emissions labor demand and value added the changes in these variables are decomposed into determinants such as technological demand and structural effects sda uses information from input output tables while ida uses aggregate data at the sector level the two methods have developed quite independently which has resulted in each method being characterized by specific unique techniques and approaches this paper has three aims first the similarities and differences between the two approaches are summarized second the possibility of transferring specific techniques and indices is explored finally a numerical example is used to illustrate differences between the two approaches

ecological total factor energy efficiency of regions in china most existing energy efficiency indices are computed without taking into account undesirable outputs such as co2 and so2 emissions this paper computes the ecological total factor energy efficiency etfee of 30 regions in china for the period 2005 2009 through the slack based model sbm with undesirable outputs we calculate the etfee index by comparing the target energy input obtained from sbm with undesirable outputs to the actual energy input findings show that china s regional etfee still remains a low level of around 0 600 and regional energy efficiency is overestimated by more than 0 100 when not looking at environmental impacts china s regional energy efficiency is extremely unbalanced the east area ranks first with the highest etfee of above 0 700 the northeast and central areas follow and the west area has the lowest etfee of less than 0 500 a monotone increasing relation exists between the area s etfee and china s per capita gdp the truncated regression model shows that the ratio of r d expenditure to gdp and the degree of foreign dependence have positive impacts whereas the ratio of the secondary industry to gdp and the ratio of government subsidies for industrial pollution treatment to gdp have negative effects on the etfee

evaluation of china s electric energy efficiency under environmental constraints a dea cross efficiency model based on game relationship abstract the traditional data envelopment analysis dea model ignores the cooperation relationship among decision making units dmus so it is difficult to evaluate the dmus efficiency reasonably in this study we use a cross efficiency model considering the game relationship of dmus to evaluate and analyze the provincial electric energy efficiency of china the power industry panel data of china s 30 provinces from 2005 to 2014 are used to evaluate the energy efficiency of china s provincial power industry under environmental constraints in addition based on the obtained values of electric energy efficiency clustering analysis is implemented and the regional similarity in electric energy efficiency is analyzed the results indicate that in the past decade china s provincial electric energy efficiency has not significantly improved and efficiency values have a certain degree of volatility especially in western china in general the electric energy efficiency of eastern china is significantly higher than central and western china the clustering analysis further demonstrates that there is no polarization phenomenon in china s electric energy efficiency in recent years the electric energy efficiency of western china has been greatly improved with significant volatility it reveals that the electric energy efficiency of western china is sensitive to the environment the implementation of energy policies should be adapted to local conditions in the process of formulating policies for improving electric energy efficiency the provincial government should improve the regional opening up layout and establish effective coordination mechanisms among different regions

total factor energy efficiency of coal consumption an empirical analysis of china s energy intensive industries abstract improvement of coal consumption efficiency is very important both for china in solving its problems of energy security and environmental pollution and for the world in addressing the issue of greenhouse gas emissions using a total factor framework this paper employs a data envelopment analysis dea approach to evaluate the coal consumption efficiency of six energy intensive sub industries in china in 2015 coal consumption efficiency is factorized into economic efficiency and environmental efficiency with sulfur dioxide nitrogen oxide and industrial smoke dust and soot emissions treated as undesirable outputs of energy consumptions the results show the following 1 of the six energy intensive sub industries studied two exhibit both dea effective coal economic efficiency and coal environmental efficiency coal economic efficiency is found to be greater than coal environmental efficiency indicating that the benefits of economic efficiency have masked the negative effects of the environmental impact china should therefore pay more attention to the clean utilization of coal 2 low environmental efficiency mainly resulted from the joint effects of pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency therefore enterprises in these industries must engage in management efforts to improve their ability to manage large enterprises 3 the energy intensive industries characterized by coal environmental efficiency that failed to achieve pure technological effectiveness all exhibited input redundancy or output inadequacy of varying degrees while showing a potential for energy conservation and emissions reductions

effects of urbanisation on energy consumption in china as a key issue in china s economic development urbanisation creates increasing pressure on energy supply and the natural environment thus a better understanding of the relationship between urbanisation and energy consumption is necessary for chinese decision makers at various levels to address energy security and sustainable economic and social development this paper empirically investigates the effects of china s urbanisation on residential energy consumption rec and production energy consumption pec through a time series analysis the results show that compared with rural areas urbanisation slows per capita rec growth because of the economy of scale and technological advantages associated with urbanisation but has greater promotional effects on the growth of rec and the improvement of rec structure the economic growth caused by urbanisation most significantly contributes to an increase in pec whereas technological advancement was found to reduce the scale of pec except from 2001 to 2005 finally the structural effect of the energy supply increased rather than decreased china s pec and the effect of industrial structure adjustment on pec was found to be insignificant

the measurement and influences of china s urban total factor energy efficiency under environmental pollution based on the game cross efficiency dea abstract in recent years urban energy efficiency has received much attention from researchers however ignorance of the competitive relationships among regions results in inaccurate energy efficiency game cross efficiency data envelopment analysis dea which can account for the competitive relationships is a reliable method to measure energy efficiency first this paper applies game cross efficiency dea to analyze the urban total factor energy efficiency utfee of 26 chinese prefectural level cities from 2005 to 2015 under environmental constraints then a comparative analysis and a concrete analysis are conducted based on the urban energy efficiency finally a tobit model is used to examine the effects of 10 potential influence factors the measurement results show that the urban energy efficiency considering the competitive relationship is lower than the traditionally calculated efficiency additionally the urban energy efficiency did not improve during the research period furthermore regression analysis suggests that economic development and city scale can promote urban energy efficiency while government expenditure industrial structures energy prices foreign investments research investments and production endowment have negative impacts on urban energy efficiency according to our results some implications of theory and practice are discussed for researchers and policy makers

how does income inequality affect energy efficiency empirical evidence from 33 belt and road initiative countries abstract at present income distribution and environmental pollution are serious issues faced by the belt and road initiative bri countries and exploring the impact of income inequality on energy efficiency is meaningful for the sustainability of bri countries using the panel data of 33 bri countries from 2000 to 2016 we first evaluate the energy efficiency of the countries by dynamic dea model and then adopt the tobit regression model to investigate the nonlinear effect of income inequality on energy efficiency the results suggest that first during 2000 2016 the overall energy efficiency of 33 bri countries is relatively low falling to 0 38 while the overall energy efficiency of high income bri countries is much higher than that of the middle and low income bri countries second the average energy efficiency of the bri countries has declined since year 2013 third there is an inverted u type effect of income inequality on energy efficiency in the whole sample but the impact of income inequality on energy efficiency is heterogeneous for countries at different income levels specifically in high income bri countries income inequality shows a u type effect on energy efficiency while in middle and low income bri countries the relationship between income inequality and energy efficiency is an inverted u type moreover economic growth positively impacts the energy efficiency while industrialization and energy structure negatively influence the energy efficiency

total factor energy efficiency of regions in china abstract this paper analyzes energy efficiencies of 29 administrative regions in china for the period 1995 2002 with a newly introduced index most existing studies of regional productivity and efficiency neglect energy inputs we use the data envelopment analysis dea to find the target energy input of each region in china at each particular year the index of total factor energy efficiency tfee then divides the target energy input by the actual energy input in our dea model labor capital stock energy consumption and total sown area of farm crops used as a proxy of biomass energy are the four inputs and real gdp is the single output the conventional energy productivity ratio regarded as a partial factor energy efficiency index is computed for comparison in contrast to tfee our index is found fitting better to the real case according to the tfee index rankings the central area of china has the worst energy efficiency and its total adjustmentof energy consumption amount is over half of china s total regional tfee in china generally improved during the research period except for the western area a u shape relation between the area s tfee and per capita income in the areas of china is found confirming the scenario that energy efficiency eventually improves with economic growth

measuring the relative productivity of multitasking to sole tasking in household production experimental evidence the standard household production model does not incorporate multitasking although time diary data reveal that individuals regularly multitask we incorporate multitasking into a household production model in which time spent in childcare can be sole tasked or multitasked with another household production activity and we present the results of an experiment designed to measure the productivity parameters of this model because utility and productivity are intertwined and difficult to disentangle in any household production model we vary the utility pay offs our experimental participants receive in order to determine how our estimated productivity parameters are affected by a change in the utility parameters our estimates of the relative multitasking productivities indicate that while a minute of sole tasked time produces more of a single commodity than a minute of multitasked time total household output increases when two outputs are produced simultaneously hence confirming the economic motivation f

multilevel lmdi decomposition of changes in aggregate energy consumption a cross country analysis in the eu 27 abstract this paper aims at analysing the factors behind the change in aggregate energy consumption in the eu 27 also identifying differences between member states the logarithmic mean divisia index method lmdi is applied to multiplicatively decompose at the country level the variation in aggregate energy consumption in the eu 27 member states for the 2001 2008 period we also analyse the sensitivity of the results when several aggregation levels are considered with energy intensity used as the criterion to aggregate countries this allows us to check robustness of results also enabling an improved understanding of both inter and intra unit effects results indicate that improvements in energy efficiency in the eu 27 were not enough to overcome the pressure of european economic activity on aggregate energy consumption mediterranean countries and especially former communist states increased their energy consumptions most of them favoured by structural change the analysis also reveals that the impact of intra group movements on aggregate energy consumption is partially offset when moving from higher to lower aggregation levels

estimation of electricity demand function for algeria revisit of time series analysis abstract this paper aims to empirically re examine whether economic growth has effect on electricity consumption for algerian economy we have incorporated urbanization and trade openness in electricity demand function as additional determinants of electricity consumption for the period of 1971 2012 for empirical purpose we have applied the recently developed combined cointegration test proposed by bayer and hanck 2013 and bounds testing approach to cointegration by pesaran et al 2001 for establishing the cointegration between the variables by accommodating structural breaks the results expose that income growth leads to higher electricity demand along with urbanization being another major contributing factor of rising electricity demand in contrast trade openness leads to reduce electricity demand the causal association between the variables is further examined with the application of innovation accounting approach of vector autoregressive var the empirical evidence indicates the presence of the neutral effect between income growth and electricity use urbanization causes electricity use and electricity use causes urbanization in granger sense

efficiency evaluation of regional energy saving and emission reduction in china a modified slacks based measure approach abstract china s economic reform and opening policy has resulted in china s rapid growth especially in terms of economy unfortunately the growth has brought about huge consumption of energy and increasing emission of environmental pollution little research has been done which pays close attention to the efficiency evaluation of regional energy saving and emission reduction even though such evaluation is considered a crucial method in the fight to save resources and protect the environment aiming at evaluating the efficiency of regional energy saving and emission reduction of china we firstly construct an evaluation index system for input and output selection then a modified slacks based measure model is applied to measure the performance of energy saving and emission reduction an empirical study is done on 30 of mainland china s provincial level regions the results show that the energy saving and emission reduction efficiencies of the regions in china are generally at a low level more precisely china s regional regions performed really badly in energy saving although their emissions results are passable barely to resolve this problem several policy recommendations are proposed to improve the efficiency of regional energy saving and emission reduction of china

subsidies in carbon finance for promoting renewable energy development abstract faced with decreasing exhaustible nonrenewable resources and climate change resulting from the use of fossil energy it is urgent to accelerate the development of renewable energy but the development of renewable energy requires abundant financial support both from banks and governments this article considers bank loans to develop renewable energy and highlights the effects of government subsidies by using a microeconomic model and taking all stakeholders including the government banks and shareholders of the firm into consideration this study finds that government subsidies raise outputs and debt levels of renewable energy firms and improve shareholder value as well more importantly financial debts stimulate firms outputs but decrease the net profit per unit of debt due to the limited liability effects finally subsidy policy plays a critical role in renewable energy development because environmental efficiencies of subsidies decrease with the subsidy degree other valuable conclusions would be achieved if principal agent problem and other corporate governance factors are employed

does urbanization lead to less energy use and lower co2 emissions a cross country analysis despite the relationship between urbanization energy use and co2 emissions has been extensively studied in recent years little attention has been paid to differences in development stages or income levels most previous studies have implicitly assumed that the impact of urbanization is homogenous for all countries this assumption can be questionable as there are many characteristic differences among countries of different levels of affluence this paper investigates empirically the effects of urbanization on energy use and co2 emissions with consideration of the different development stages using the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat model and a balanced panel dataset of 99 countries over the period 1975 2005 the findings suggest that the impact of urbanization on energy use and emissions varies across the stages of development surprisingly urbanization decreases energy use in the low income group while it increases energy use in the middle and high income groups the impact of urbanization on emissions is positive for all the income groups but it is more pronounced in the middle income group than in the other income groups these novel findings not only help advance the existing literature but also can be of special interest to policy makers and urban planners

assessing productive efficiency of banks using integrated fuzzy dea and bootstrapping a case of mozambican banks performance analysis has become a vital part of the management practices in the banking industry there are numerous applications using dea models to estimate efficiency in banking and most of them assume that inputs and outputs are known with absolute precision here we propose new fuzzy dea level models to assess underlying uncertainty further bootstrap truncated regressions with fixed factors are used to measure the impact of each model on the efficiency scores and to identify the most relevant contextual variables on efficiency the proposed models have been demonstrated using an application in mozambican banks to handle the underlying uncertainty findings reveal that fuzziness is predominant over randomness in interpreting the results in addition fuzziness can be used by decision makers to identify missing variables to help in interpreting the results price of labor price of capital and market share were found to be the significant factors in measuring bank efficiency managerial implications are addressed

can we meet targets for biofuels and renewable energy in transport given the constraints imposed by policy in agriculture and energy abstract the deployment of biofuels is significantly affected by policy in energy and agriculture in the energy arena concerns regarding the sustainability of biofuel systems and their impact on food prices led to a set of sustainability criteria in eu directive 2009 28 ec on renewable energy in addition the 10 biofuels target by 2020 was replaced with a 10 renewable energy in transport target this allows the share of renewable electricity used by electric vehicles to contribute to the mix in achieving the 2020 target furthermore only biofuel systems that effect a 60 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared with the fuel they replace are allowed to contribute to meeting the target in the agricultural arena cross compliance which is part of eu common agricultural policy dictates the allowable ratio of grassland to total agricultural land and has a significant impact on which biofuels may be supported this paper outlines the impact of these policy areas and their implications for the production and use of biofuels in terms of the 2020 target for 10 renewable transport energy focusing on ireland the policies effectively impose constraints on many conventional energy crop biofuels and reinforce the merits of using biomethane a gaseous biofuel the analysis shows that ireland can potentially satisfy 15 of renewable energy in transport by 2020 allowing for double credit for biofuels from residues and ligno cellulosic materials as per directive 2009 28 ec through the use of indigenous biofuels grass biomethane waste and residue derived biofuels electric vehicles and rapeseed biodiesel

regional energy efficiency evaluation in china a super efficiency slack based measure model with undesirable outputs abstract with the rapid development of global economy the demand for energy has increased significantly therefore energy efficiency improvement is essential for global energy and economic transformation in the chinese context study on the energy efficiency of various provinces can contribute to better understand china s energy utilization status and provide policy implications for improving china s energy utilization efficiency in this study based on the super efficiency slack based measure model with undesirable outputs the energy efficiency of china s 30 provinces in 2013 and 2014 was investigated then the energy efficiency of the eastern central and western china was compared and further discussed finally according to the results the relevant policy implications were put forward the results showed that china s overall energy efficiency had decreased while taking the undesirable outputs into consideration in addition eastern china had the highest energy efficiency and the energy efficiency of western china was relatively low the energy efficiency gap among china s provinces was still large therefore it was necessary to improve china s overall energy efficiency by developing targeted policies considering regional conditions

decomposition analysis of patenting in renewable energy technologies from an extended lmdi approach perspective based on three five year plan periods in china abstract renewable energy technological innovation is greatly influenced by renewable energy markets and policies in this regard the paper decomposes nine influencing factors of patents of a specific renewable energy technology using the extended logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi method from 2001 to 2015 the differences in a specific renewable energy technological innovation and development during the three five year plan periods is prioritized at the national level the contribution of the increase in patents of renewable energy technologies mainly lies in the patents of solar energy technology and wind energy technology but during the 12th five year plan period the increments of their patent counts significantly decline due to priority given to the development of innovation in a specific renewable energy technology the improvement in the efficiency of r d spending the increases in the share of r d spending and the share of renewable energy low carbon economy concept advocacy and carbon scale expansion the patent counts of a specific renewable energy technology will increase additionally the factors affecting innovation in a specific renewable energy technology at the different economic development levels as well as different resource distribution levels are investigated

total factor energy efficiency in developing countries this paper uses a total factor framework to investigate energy efficiency in 23 developing countries during the period of 1980 2005 we explore the total factor energy efficiency and change trends by applying data envelopment analysis dea window which is capable of measuring efficiency in cross sectional and time varying data the empirical results indicate that botswana mexico and panama perform the best in terms of energy efficiency whereas kenya sri lanka syria and the philippines perform the worst during the entire research period seven countries show little change in energy efficiency over time eleven countries experienced continuous decreases in energy efficiency among five countries witnessing continuous increase in total factor energy efficiency china experienced the most rapid rise practice in china indicates that effective energy policies play a crucial role in improving energy efficiency tobit regression analysis indicates that a u shaped relationship exists between total factor energy efficiency and income per capita

possibilities and challenges of china s forestry biomass resource utilization abstract forestry biomass resource has many advantages which makes it a significant new energy to substitute fossil energy as an important role of biomass resources for the utilization of china s forestry biomass resources this paper analyzed the possibilities of its development from the aspect of policy resource endowment market and technology and discussed its development challenges from the aspect of policy economy society technology and resource endowment forestry biomass resources are very abundant in china it has made a significant breakthrough in forest biomass resource utilization with great prospects although there are still some difficulties and challenges in the policy resource endowment and other aspects these challenges are not insurmountable therefore forestry biomass resources should develop in a way with chinese characteristics considering the national condition

industrial energy efficiency and driving forces behind efficiency improvement evidence from the pearl river delta urban agglomeration in china abstract improving energy efficiency of industrial sectors is essential to achieve energy conservation in the pearl river delta urban agglomeration prdua in china this study adopted stochastic frontier analysis sfa to evaluate the industrial total factor energy efficiency tfee of nine cities in prdua during 2004 2016 and then to decompose the growth of tfee into technical change tc technical efficiency change tec and economies of scale sc effects results show that the tfee of industrial sectors of prdua had an overall downward trend during the study period and that technical change was the major driving force behind the growth of tfee the tobit model was then adopted to further investigate the determinants of energy efficiency improvement and test the robustness of empirical results the main contributions of this study to the existing literature lie in showing that 1 the degree of openness local government spending foreign direct investment factor input structure environmental regulation strength and gdp per capita have positive impacts on the industrial tfee 2 enterprise scale and energy consumption structure have a negative impact on industrial energy efficiency finally we address policy implications for energy management regarding their economic and environmental aspects in industrial sectors of the prdua

impacts of urbanization on national transport and road energy use evidence from low middle and high income countries abstract few attempts have been made to investigate quantitatively and systematically the impact of urbanization on transport energy use for countries of different stages of economic development this paper examines the influence of urbanization on national transport and road energy use for low middle and high income countries during 1975 2005 using the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat model after controlling for population size income per capita and the share of services in the economy the main results suggest that urbanization influences national transport and road energy use positively however the magnitude of its influence varies among the three income groups changes in urbanization appear to have a greater impact on transport and road energy use in the high income group than in the other groups surprisingly the urbanization elasticities of transport and road energy use in the middle income group are smaller than those of the low income group this study not only sheds further light on the existing literature but also provides policy makers with insightful information on the link between urbanization and transport energy use at the three different stages of development

decomposition of aggregate energy intensity changes in two measures ratio and difference decomposition analysis has been popular in energy demand analysis and has been found useful in policy related studies past studies include decomposition of changes of an aggregate indicator measured in terms of either ratios or differences into several pre defined contributing factors aggregate indicators that are often studied include total national energy demand energy demand in specific consuming sectors aggregate energy intensity and energy related carbon dioxide emissions however the possible linkages between the ratio measure and the difference measure including their decomposition results have seldom been analysed this paper examines this issue using the divisia decomposition technique and a unique pair of decomposition formulae numerical examples based on singapore and taiwan industrial electricity demand data are presented

the impact of urbanization on co2 emissions evidence from developing countries abstract this paper analyzes the impact of urbanization on co2 emissions in developing countries from 1975 to 2003 it contributes to the existing literature by examining the effect of urbanization taking into account dynamics and the presence of heterogeneity in the sample of countries the results show an inverted u shaped relationship between urbanization and co2 emissions indeed the elasticity emission urbanization is positive for low urbanization levels which is in accordance with the higher environmental impact observed in less developed regions among our contributions is the estimation of a semi parametric mixture model that allows for unknown distributional shapes and endogenously classifies countries into homogeneous groups three groups of countries are identified for which urbanization s impact differs considerably for two of the groups a threshold level is identified beyond which the emission urbanization elasticity is negative and further increases in the urbanization rate do not contribute to higher emissions however for the third group only population and affluence but not urbanization contribute to explain emissions the differential impact of urbanization on co2 emissions should therefore be taken into account in future discussions of climate change policies

is there a single frontier in a single european banking market abstract this paper attempts to estimate comparable efficiency scores for european banks operating in the single market in the eu using a data set of more than 5000 large commercial banks from all major european banking markets over the period 1993 2004 the application of meta frontiers enables us to assess the existence of a single and integrated european banking market we find evidence in favor of a single european banking market characterized by cost and profit meta frontiers however compared to the meta frontier estimations pooled frontier estimations tend to underestimate efficiency levels and correlate poorly with country specific frontier efficiency ranks

parental child care in single parent cohabiting and married couple families time diary evidence from the united kingdom the time that parents spend caring for their children is a topic of intense interest among researchers policymakers and parents themselves parental inputs of time are enormously valuable investments in children s well being and development however the declining prevalence of two parent married couple families and the steady influx of mothers into the labor market are generally believed to have placed these investments at risk we use time diary data from the united kingdom 2000 time use study uktus to investigate how parents time spent in child care differs with their marital status and other characteristics unlike previous economic studies which have analyzed alternative child care activities but only among two parent families e g peter kooreman and arie kapteyn 1987 daniel hallberg and anders klevmarken 2003 we examine differences among married cohabiting and single parent families the household production model indicates that single parent households may differ from married and cohabiting households either because there are fewer time resources or because there are fewer opportunities for economies of scale or specialization in household activities gary becker 1985 if marital relationships are more stable than cohabiting relationships the type of union may matter

impact of urbanization on energy demand an empirical study of the yangtze river economic belt in china abstract this paper provides an empirical assessment of the effects of china s urbanization on its energy demand for 2003 2014 using a dataset of 108 cities located in the yangtze river economic belt both demographic urbanization du and land urbanization lu are considered in the empirical analysis the results show that urbanization exerts significant and positive impacts on energy demand during the study period our empirical suggest that one unit rises in du and lu rises the energy demand by 48 85 91 62 and 65 54 68 09 respectively without with considering control variables the energy demand effects of urbanization still hold when considering spatial and heterogeneity factors these results are robust to alternative measures of urbanization and empirical model specifications our results indicate that policymakers should improve the quality of urbanization to promote the growth of high tech and high quality industries avoiding excessive energy consumption with extensive urbanization large cities should not be allowed to grow unchecked more attention should be paid to promote the development of medium sized cities and implement a balanced population distribution among different cities the energy demand structure industrial and residential primary and secondary renewable and nonrenewable should be optimized by introducing cleaner low carbon technology and its transformation

the formation of cooperatives a game theoretic approach with implications for cooperative finance decision making and stability this paper departs from the traditional organization oriented approach to cooperative analysis it exploits cooperation s functional similarity to vertical integration to examine individuals incentives to form cooperatives a model of formation of a purchasing cooperative is presented and developed as an n person game with the core as a solution concept core existence is examined for both single and multiple cooperative configurations and cooperative finance methods are examined relative to finding core compatible allocation rules the results provide insight into a cooperative s equilibrium output stability decision making financing methods and choice of open or restricted membership

energy decomposition analysis iea model versus other methods abstract in energy decomposition analysis the international energy agency iea model which is based on the laspeyres index method is included in a recent international collaborative initiative on energy indicators for sustainable development for possible adoption iaea 2005 energy indicators for sustainable development guidelines and methodology international atomic energy agency vienna www pub iaea org mtcd publications pdf pub1222 web pdf from an empirical analysis using the data of the united states we found that the residual term given by the iea model could be significant and that the estimates of the impacts of structure and intensity changes given by the model could be quite different from those given by other decomposition methods the residual term tends to be large when changes in structure and or energy intensity variables are significant since changes in these variables over time are generally larger in the developing countries than in the iea countries there is the question about whether the iea model is an appropriate decomposition method for the developing countries

exploring the relationship between urbanization energy consumption and co2 emission in mena countries abstract this study explored the relationship between urbanization energy consumption and co2 emission in the mena countries the panel model was utilized taking the period 1980 2009 into consideration pedroni cointegration test results showed that urbanization energy consumption and co2 emission were cointegrated the dynamic ols results also showed that there was a long run bi directional positive relationship between urbanization energy consumption and co2 emission however the significance of the long run relationship between urbanization energy consumption and co2 emission varied across the countries based on their level of income and development moreover long and short run bi directional causal relationships were found between the variables based on the granger causality test results from the results of this study it is important for the urban planners and policy makers in the mena countries to slow the rapid increase in urbanization the level of energy consumption and co2 emission in the mena countries increased more than double thus slowing down the urbanization level can help reduce the level of pollution and energy consumption in addition the increased energy efficiency implementation of energy savings projects energy conservation and energy infrastructure outsourcing reduce the level of pollution produced by urban areas

renewable energy policies and contradictions in causality a case of next 11 countries abstract numerous studies on the causal relationship between economic growth energy consumption and carbon dioxide co2 emissions have shown divergence in policy recommendations which arises mainly due to the choice of methodology and the period of study this inconclusiveness in policy prescriptions might turn out to be critical when the renewable energy policies of the developing nations are considered our study analyses the causal relationship between economic growth carbon emissions fossil fuel and renewable energy consumption in next 11 countries during the period of 1990 2016 along with conducting parametric and non parametric causality tests together introducing the geweke 1982 causality test in the literature of energy economics we attempt to establish a wholesome aspect of policy design by comparing and complementing results of different causality analysis and how the causality directions should comply with the context setting our empirical evidence confirms that robust renewable energy policy can be designed by complementing the various causality test results rather than focusing on one particular causality test

how urbanization affects energy use in developing countries abstract this paper identifies mechanisms whereby urbanization affects energy consumption industrialization and urbanization accompany each other during economic development but urbanization exerts a number of independent influences on energy use it permits economies of scale in production but requires more transportation food must be transported to urbanized populations and relatively smaller agricultural populations must modernize entailing considerable increases in agricultural energy use in cities a number of production activities which were domestically provided in rural areas using human or animal energy shift to sources outside the household using modern energy sources the largest single source of change in energy use is personal transportation passenger transport in cities is heavily weighted towards fuel using modes particularly as incomes increase to assess the overall impact a regression analysis of 59 developing countries for 1980 is conducted holding constant per capita income and the extent of industrialization the elasticity of energy consumption per capita and per dollar of gdp is between 0 35 and 0 48

factors impacting diverging paths of renewable energy a review abstract considered an essential factor for countries development energy demand is growing worldwide unlike conventional sources the use of renewable energy sources has multiple benefits including increased energy security sustainable economic growth and pollution reduction in particular greenhouse gas emissions nevertheless there is a considerable difference in the share of renewable energy sources in national energy portfolios this study conducts a systematic literature review to identify drivers and barriers which could help understanding the diverging paths of renewable energy deployment for countries among a total of 1431 academic studies 60 qualitative and quantitative studies were identified using a multistage selection process designated manuscripts were explored in detail including publication years length of the studies countries represented and renewable energy sources referenced factors explaining countries renewable energy deployments were defined and organized into seven main categories economic environmental political regulatory social technical potential and technological within these categories economic considerations appeared most frequently across manuscripts while environmental factors were least represented these categories were then classified as drivers barriers or undetermined towards renewable energy deployment based on a one sample proportion statistical test economic environmental and social factors were found to be drivers whereas political regulatory technical potential and technological factors were not classified as either a driver or a barrier i e undetermined each main category contains several subcategories among which only national income was found to have a positive impact whereas all other subcategories were considered undetermined no significant barriers to the deployment of renewable energy sources were found over the analyzed period

analysis of energy efficiency and energy savings potential in china s provincial industrial sectors abstract because industrial sectors in china are energy intensive improving energy efficiency and promoting energy savings in these sectors are of great importance for the further sustainable development of china s economy using a proposed meta frontier data envelopment analysis dea this paper analyzes the total factor energy efficiency and energy savings potential in china s provincial industrial sectors for the years 2000 2014 from three perspectives namely the technology gap management and scale the results indicate that 1 driven by technological progress energy efficiency during the sample period was greatly improved though the expansion of technology gaps between regions and the decline in scale efficiency represented two significant handicaps 2 the current energy efficiency in china s industrial sectors remains extremely low indicating that there is considerable potential for energy efficiency improvement and energy savings and 3 the sources of energy inefficiency and energy savings potential in china s industrial sectors exhibit spatially distinct characteristics accordingly it is determined that most of china s eastern provinces should focus on improving scale and management efficiency whereas most of its central and western provinces should concentrate on three factors narrowing the regional technology gap improving management efficiency and optimizing the industrial scale

self employed mothers and the work family conflict we analyse how self employed and employed mothers allocate their time throughout the day in order to balance their work and family responsibilities to that end we use time diary information from spain a country with a low level of women s participation in the labour market spanish time use survey stus 2002 2003 we find that self employed mothers devote less time to market work and more time to tertiary e g sleeping eating and leisure activities than employed mothers in a working day we also find differences between employed and self employed mothers in the timing of market work child care and housework throughout the day and we find complementarities between the timing of market work of working mothers and the timing of child care of their male partners our results on timing are consistent with the hypothesis that self employment stands as a possible way for mothers to have greater control over the timing of work flexible hours and that they may therefore be able to work odd shifts