sustainable development in a transition economy business case studies from poland abstract in general examples from developed countries are cited when making reference to good practice in sustainable development while there is limited access to case studies from transition economies our aim is to analyse case studies from poland which has recently undergone the transition to a market based economy in order to identify and critically assess both the drivers of and barriers to sustainable development in polish business by demonstrating that evidence of good practice is available within poland we also aim to motivate key stakeholders to follow these examples in an addition to importing practice from developed countries together the 11 case studies analysed in the article demonstrate that while constraints exist to sustainable development there are nonetheless positive examples of best practice from which to learn this review therefore complements other studies conducted on sustainable development in transition economies by indicating that lessons can be drawn on promoting sustainable development within this context and in other similar states undergoing economic political and social transition

entrepreneurship social mobility and income redistribution in south india development economists have been preoccupied with the problem of increasing the size of the gnp pie to the relative neglect of its distribution despite the recent disenchantment with the viewpoint that all classes share in the benefits of industrial growth empirical data on the distribution of income business opportunity and economic power are in short supply many of the studies on entrepreneurship and economic development when they are not apologetics for ruthless capitalist exploitation as paul baran suggests extol the achievements of the capitalist entrepreneur without examining class origins and monopoly advantage joseph schumpeter sees entrepreneurs irrespective of class origin as heroic figures with the dream and will to found a private kingdom to conquer adversity to achieve success for its own sake and to experience the joy of creation for gustav papanek 1967 the private entrepreneur who is frugal diligent far sighted remarkably able and willing to take political risks is in large part responsible for the success of pakistan in achieving rapid industrialization

a time preference measure of the social discount rate for the uk in this study the social discount rate for the uk is estimated the result compared with the treasury approved rate and the main associated policy implications considered a case is argued for reducing the official discount rate in appraisals involving all long term social projects the estimate of the elasticity of the marginal utility of consumption an important component of the discount rate is supported by plausible and statistically valid regression results the need for further work relating to other major european countries is identified so that discount rate comparisons can be made on a consistent basis

the effects of changes in household demographics and employment on consumer demand patterns this study examines to what extent changes in consumer demand patterns over the last two decades in the netherlands can be attributed to changes in household demographics employment and total expenditures the dominating changes in consumer demand are decreasing budget shares of food beverages and clothing footwear and increasing budget shares of housing and services the changes in households composition away from the traditional one earner family with children together with the increase in household total expenditures account for about one third of the decrease in the budget share of food beverages half of the increase in the budget shares of services and only a minor part of the increase in housing once controlled for budget effects the quadrupling of the proportion of employed women with young children accounts for about one third of the increase in the budget shares of personal health care including childcare and food away holidays entertainment

consumption patterns in sri lanka a decomposition analysis knowing consumer reaction to changes in prices and income is important in formulating microeconomic policies such as public utility prices and commodity taxation this paper analyses the consumpti

a cross country analysis of consumption patterns this paper uses the system wide approach to analyse the consumption patterns in 18 oecd countries the results show that on average the oecd per capita consumption increased by 3 per annum and prices increased by about 7 per annum oecd consumers spend about half of their income on food housing and transport it is also shown that in most oecd countries food housing and medical care are necessities and clothing durables transport and recreation are luxuries and that the demand for all goods considered are price inelastic the controversial hypothesis of stigler and becker 1977 that tastes are the same across countries is also tested and it is found that the oecd consumption data do not support their claim

conspicuous consumption and race evidence from south africa abstract a century ago thorstein veblen introduced socially contingent consumption into the economic literature this paper complements the scarce empirical literature by testing his conjecture on south african household data and finds that black and coloured households spend relatively more on visible consumption than comparable white households following the approach of charles et al 2009 this paper explores whether the differences in visible expenditures can be explained with a signaling model of status seeking moreover it is assessed to which extent positional concerns motivate conspicuous consumption although the socially contingent share in visible consumption increases with income different incentives to consume conspicuously seem to explain that at every level of income black households spend relatively more on visible consumption than comparable white households in contrast to the findings of charles et al 2009 where differential spending on conspicuous consumption can be found also within each group separately the model s core hypothesis fails to hold within the group of white south africans

can interest rate volatility be extracted from the cross section of bond yields most affine models of the term structure with stochastic volatility predict that the variance of the short rate should play a dual role in that it should also equal a linear combination of yields however we find that estimation of a standard affine three factor model results in a variance state variable that while instrumental in explaining the shape of the yield curve is essentially unrelated to garch estimates of the quadratic variation of the spot rate process or to implied variances from options we then investigate four factor affine models of the models tested only the model that exhibits unspanned stochastic volatility usv generates both realistic short rate volatility estimates and a good cross sectional fit our findings suggest that short rate volatility cannot be extracted from the cross section of bond prices in particular short rate volatility and convexity are only weakly correlated c 2009 elsevier b v all rights reserved

predicting within country household food expenditure variation using international cross section estimates there is a long and distinguished literature involving demand analysis using international cross section data such models are widely used for predicting national per capita consumption however there is nothing in this literature testing the performance of estimated models in predicting demands across the income spectrum within a single country this paper fills the gap we estimate an aidads model using cross section international per capita data and find that it does well in predicting food demand across the income distribution within bangladesh this suggests that there may be considerable value in using international cross section analysis to study poverty and distributional impacts of policies

empirical regularities in south african consumption patterns this article investigates a number of empirical regularities in the south african consumption patterns the data support the following empirical regularities 1 variability in consumption systematically exceeds the variability in prices 2 law of demand 3 income flexibility is about 0 5 4 engel s law and 5 the demand hypotheses demand homogeneity and slutsky symmetry are acceptable in contrast to the findings for a number of other countries another important empirical regularity that consumer s utility function is additive is rejected for the south african consumers based on the implied demand elasticity estimates from the preferred model it is found that food housing and medical care are necessities and clothing furniture transport and recreation are luxuries and demand for all the commodities are price inelastic

stochastic volatilities and correlations of bond yields i develop an interest rate model with separate factors driving innovations in bond yields and their covariances it features a flexible and tractable affine structure for bond covariances maximum likelihood estimation of the model with panel data on swaptions and discount bonds implies pricing errors for swaptions that are almost always lower than half of the bid ask spread furthermore market prices of interest rate caps do not deviate significantly from their no arbitrage values implied by the swaptions under the model these findings support the conjectures of collin dufresne and goldstein 2003 dai and singleton 2003 and jagnnathan kaplin and sun 2003

meat and fish consumption patterns in saudi arabia abstractthis study analyses the demand for meat beef chicken and lamb and fish in saudi arabia in a system wide framework using data for the period 1985 2010 a preliminary data analysis reveals that in saudi arabia the relative consumption of beef chicken and fish has a positive growth while lamb has a negative growth the average relative price growth rates of beef chicken and fish are negative while that of lamb is positive the expenditure shares of beef chicken and fish have increased while that of lamb has fallen the estimation results of the demand system reveal that there is an autonomous trend out of lamb into beef chicken and fish the implied income elasticities indicate that beef lamb and fish are considered to be luxuries while chicken is a necessity the demand for all meat products and fish are price inelastic these elasticities are key inputs for policy analysts in terms of devising policies in relation to meat production meat imports taxation and food security issues in s

exploiting the conditional density in estimating the term structure an application to the cox ingersoll and ross model we propose an empirical method that utilizes the conditional density of the state variables to estimate and test a term structure model with known price formulae using data on both discount and coupon bonds the method is applied to an extension of a two factor model due to cox ingersoll and ross 1985 cir our results show that estimates based on only bills imply unreasonably large price errors for longer maturities we reject the original cir model using a likelihood ratio test and conclude that the extended cir model also fails to provide a good description of the treasury market

fundamental similarities in consumer behaviour diversities and similarities in international consumption patterns are highlighted a large body of data is used to identify cross country consumption differences and to understand these in terms of the familiar utility maximizing framework in which observed differences in prices and incomes play the key role taken as a whole the results reveal a surprising degree of similarity in international consumption patterns and support the idea that tastes are constant at least with respect to broad commodity groups

fossil fuel subsidies and environmental constraints fossil fuel subsidies are applied in many countries for different policy reasons such as maintaining jobs in fossil fuel sectors securing national energy supply or lowering the energy costs of selected industries to strengthen competitiveness the current economic costs of fossil fuel subsidy policies can be substantially increased by future environmental constraints we illustrate this point in the framework of a general equilibrium analysis for germany where we quantify the economic costs of alternative hard coal subsidy policies at different co2 reduction levels our calculations show that german hard coal subsidies as a means of retaining jobs can get very expensive with additional specific costs of up to annual 70 000 dm per job for a given co2 reduction target of 35 though the empirical analysis is focused on germany the general conclusion that current subsidy policies of fossil fuels must be fundamentally reconsidered in view of forthcoming environmental constraints is also relevant for other countries

environmental financing in european economies in transition the paper offers a perspective on environmental predicament of economies in transition emphasis is put on how these economies finance their environmental needs it is observed that the demand for environmental financing can be affected both by environmental policy measures such as internalization of externalities and by other factors such as the softness of budget constraints faced by firms the role of subsidies in many countries of the central and eastern european region provided through special purpose environmental funds is then scrutinized in particular the question is asked whether such funds crowd out commercial capital from the market conditions are discussed that would allow the funds to play their constructive environmental roles without crowding out private financing

the reliability of ml estimators of systems of demand equations evidence from oecd countries in large demand systems when the unknown error covariance matrix is approximated by its usual maximum likelihood estimator the coefficient estimates are known to suffer from two problems 1 the asymptotic standard errors severely understate the sampling variability of the estimates and 2 the efficiency of the maximum likelihood coefficient estimates is greatly impaired in this paper the author proposes an alternative estimator for the covariance matrix and evaluates its performance using time series data for oecd countries the author finds that there is a spectacular improvement copyright 1991 by mit press

divisia moments of australian consumption abstract quarterly australian consumption data 1959 1978 are used to compute divisia price and quantity indexes together with divisia variances and covariances the quantity variances tend to exceed the price variances and the price quantity covariances are mostly negative estimates of the income flexibility are also presented

estimates of the demand for energy using cross country consumption data using cross country consumption data we estimate a system of demand equations in a piecewise manner to investigate whether price and expenditure elasticities for energy differ between broad groups of countries the empirical results reject the assumption of constant parameters across regimes of poor and rich countries the derived elasticities suggest that the own price elasticity for energy is higher in poor than in rich countries we find no evidence for the commonly held view that expenditure elasticities for energy decline with income

pooling international consumption data pooling consumption data from different countries for demand system estimation is attractive because it increases both sample size and therange of v ariation of relative prices and income the major objection to pooling is that d ifferent countries may have different demand system parameters this paper propo sed and estimates specifications that permit pooling while allowing both short r un andlong run demand systems to differ across countries using data from belgi um the united kingdom and the united states the authors findthat although p ooling was accepted for some pairs of countries and some specifications it was rejected for most they conclude that caution is appropriate in pooling internat ional consumption data copyright 1987 by mit press

testing restrictions in a flexible dynamic demand system an application to consumers expenditure in canada traditionally restrictions on systems of demand equations have been tested using static models whilst being estimated with time series data this paper develops a vector time series model of expenditure shares in the context of a singular dynamic demand system the model allows for non symmetric and non homogeneous short run behaviour the homogeneity and symmetry restrictions are only examined in the long run structure results based on canadian time series data are presented and reject the current practise of static modelling while restrictions suggested by economic theory are not rejected when imposed on the long run structure

the family of inverse demand systems abstract a set of inverse demand systems derived from some well known utility functions is presented in which the hotelling wold identity has been used for such a derivation the functional forms of the inverse demand systems obtained by this study are theoretically integrable and empirically operations

world food demand long term projections of global food demand are heavily dependent on which functional form of the food demand equation is used given that real incomes can change substantially over the long term key elements are the dependence of the income elasticity on income which ensures that the food budget share always lies within the 0 1 range and the role of income inequality this article analyzes these issues proposes a new functional form that deals with them and presents estimates of income and price elasticities for food in 138 countries copyright 2012 oxford university press

are the costs of cleaning up eastern europe exaggerated economic reform and the environment widespread concern has been expressed that the costs of reducing environmental pollution in eastern europe will divert substantial investment resources from the pool available for industrial modernization in fact apart from a number of severely damaged areas the general level of exposure to major pollutants in eastern europe is not high by comparison with the oecd countries even without specific environmental policies the process of general economic reform combined with energy conservation induced by higher energy prices will reduce emissions by nearly 50 percent a modest fraction of general investment in industrial modernization will deal with the remaining problems of current emissions provided that sensible systems of environmental charges are enforced the countries will then be faced with the problem of cleaning up the debris of past industrial activity which can be tackled over an extended period of years as in other industrial economies copyright 1991 by oxford university press

unspanned stochastic volatility in affine models evidence from eurodollar futures and options unspanned stochastic volatility usv refers to the inability of bonds to replicate volatility sensitive derivative securities affine term structure models require special restrictions on the parameters to exhibit usv we use a joint eurodollar futures and options data set to estimate affine three factor models with and without usv restrictions the unrestricted model captures prices of futures and options well option pricing errors are much larger in the usv model the usv model is rejected in favor of the unrestricted model based on the likelihood ratio and wald tests we use the implications of the unrestricted model as a benchmark for understanding the extant evidence that favors usv specifically we replicate extant tests in samples simulated from the unrestricted model we show that none of the existing findings contradict the model without usv restrictions

regional welfare weights for the uk england scotland wales and northern ireland evans d kula e and sezer h 2005 regional welfare weights for the uk england scotland wales and northern ireland regional studies 39 923 937 in relation to public spending and regional policy the importance of distributional issues is stressed and regional welfare weights are derived from an appropriate underlying social welfare function estimates of these weights are then provided for the four countries comprising the uk welfare weights now have a very high policy profile following the special emphasis placed by the uk treasury in its recently revised guidance on appraisal and evaluation in government on the assessment of the distributional impacts of social projects and policies from an empirical perspective the critical component of each welfare weight measure is the elasticity of marginal utility of income e alternative estimation approaches based on demand analysis and income tax data are used to determine e and a preferred measure of 1 60 emerges the resulting regional we

unspanned stochastic volatility evidence from hedging interest rate derivatives most existing dynamic term structure models assume that interest rate derivatives are redundant securities and can be perfectly hedged using solely bonds we find that the quadratic term structure models have serious difficulties in hedging caps and cap straddles even though they capture bond yields well furthermore at the money straddle hedging errors are highly correlated with cap implied volatilities and can explain a large fraction of hedging errors of all caps and straddles across moneyness and maturities our results strongly suggest the existence of systematic unspanned factors related to stochastic volatility in interest rate derivatives markets

world product and income international comparisons of real gross product the volume reports on the third phase of the united nations international comparison project icp the main results provide comparisons of real gross domestic product gdp per capita for thirty four countries in 1975 quantity and price comparisons are given also for personal consumption capital formation and public consumption and further subdivisions of final expenditures on gdp are estimated

costing an international public good the case of the baltic sea abstract the paper discusses an economically efficient and internationally equitable provision of a specific public good the good in question the baltic sea satisfies a number of needs but economic values implied may be different in various countries polluting and using the sea the level of eutrophication has been identified as a key characteristic of the baltic sea relevant for its value the chander tulkens model of cost sharing is used to determine a hypothetical allocation of abatement costs across the countries around the sea the application of the model is based on estimates of national abatement costs as well as national willingness to pay for reduced eutrophication estimating willingness to pay in a collection of countries some of which undergo a transition from centrally planned systems has been the main challenge of this study the results were derived from a coordinated series of contingent valuation surveys in lithuania poland and sweden combined with benefit transfer studies to cover the rest of the region predictions of cost sharing schemes obtained from the chander tulkens model are confronted with actual data on abatement expenditures and international assistance several recommendations on how to optimize the baltic wide programmes conclude the paper