modelling seasonality in residential water demand the case of tunisia this article proposes to model seasonal patterns of residential water demand using the techniques of seasonal integration and cointegration the methodology is applied to quarterly aggregate time series data for tunisia 1980 2007 applying the same increasing multi step pricing scheme in the whole country first a seasonal cointegration analysis demonstrates the relevance of a pricing policy that increases the size of the lower consumption block in summer second the nonseasonal cointegration analysis reveals a relatively high price elasticity for the highest consumption block therefore we also propose to increase the tariff progressivity to promote water savings this modified pricing scheme will help to achieve goals of environmental protection and social equity

an environmental performance index for products reflecting damage costs abstract several studies have demonstrated how to use dea data envelopment analysis based techniques to estimate environmental performance indices none of these studies however are taking information on the environmental damage costs of the pressure types considered into account this study is bridging a gap between environmental indices founded in physical pressures and damage costs founded in welfare economics the aim of the paper is twofold first to demonstrate how to implement the information on environmental damage costs within a dea based environmental performance index and second to estimate these indices at product level by using danish input output data and environmental data from 1997

input versus emission taxes environmental taxes in a mass balance and transaction costs perspective the standard policy recommendation to limit pollution is to use taxes or tradeable quotas on emissions a general emphasis on emissions does not however take proper account of the characteristics of the material flow through the economy an analysis of the relationships between transaction costs and features of this flow shows that it may be less costly to tax inputs into the economy the paper focuses on the advantages of a mass flow perspective in environmental economics the trade off between the precision of an environmental regulation and its implementation costs and develops criteria for choosing between input and emission related instruments

the demand for gasoline abstract sufficient time must be allowed to elapse to assess fully the response of gasoline demand to price changes hitherto empirical work on the subject has generally not examined the period beyond 1975 moreover the extant time series studies concentrate almost exclusively on the usa this study extends both the observation period and the country coverage a vehicle stock adjustment model is estimated via its reduced form without explicit consideration of the vehicle stock itself however the estimation procedure incorporates the structure by way of constraints on the parameters cross section analysis offers additional evidence concerning the truly long run price elasticity the results suggest that there is no need to resort to elaborate models to explain adequately gasoline demand gasoline demand exhibits a long run price elasticity near unity with time lags exceeding six years while there is tentative evidence that the duration of these lags is not fixed

assessing regional eco efficiency from the perspective of resource environmental and economic performance in china a bootstrapping approach in global data envelopment analysis abstract eco efficiency has been receiving increasing attention across the world this paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model which combines global benchmark technology directional distance function and a bootstrapping approach to investigate the dynamic trends of regional eco efficiency in china from 2003 to 2014 moreover a developed slacks based measure is utilized to decompose the performance fluctuations into resource environmental and economic efficiency then the key factors responsible for the changes in eco efficiency are explored using the global malmquist luenberger index the empirical results demonstrate an upward trend of eco efficiency in china during the study period this trend was high in eastern and northern areas but low in northwestern areas however it should be noted that some eco efficient regions still consume much land water and energy and emit much environmental pollutants in absolute terms the whole of china performs well on the economic front while resource and environmental performances are not encouraging particularly on environmental efficiency the eastern and northern regions have experienced the greatest advances in both resource and environmental efficiency while the undeveloped areas have not shown much progress which further widens the gaps between developed areas and undeveloped areas the decomposition of productivity growth indicates that technical progress is the decisive factor in promoting china s eco efficiency while decreasing management level is the major obstacle hampering the improvement in eco efficiency

sufficiency or efficiency to achieve lower resource consumption and emissions the role of the rebound effect a frequent criticism of eco efficiency strategies is that an increase in efficiency can be offset by the rebound effect sufficiency is discussed as a new strategy involving self imposed restriction of consumption but can also be subject to the rebound effect we show that the range of possible secondary effects of efficiency and sufficiency strategies goes beyond the rebound effect the rebound effect can indeed also be linked to eco sufficiency strategies but there are further secondary effects of both eco efficiency and eco sufficiency strategies such as double dividend effects we develop an eco efficiency sufficiency matrix to logically order eco efficiency and sufficiency measures to attain lower resource consumption and emissions

environmental efficiency with multiple environmentally detrimental variables estimated with sfa and dea abstract the objective of this paper is to estimate comprehensive environmental efficiency measures for dutch dairy farms the environmental efficiency scores are based on the nitrogen surplus phosphate surplus and the total direct and indirect energy use of an unbalanced panel of dairy farms we define environmental efficiency as the ratio of minimum feasible to observed use of multiple environmentally detrimental inputs conditional on observed levels of output and the conventional inputs we compare two methods for the calculation of efficiency namely stochastic frontier analysis sfa and data envelopment analysis dea this paper reveals the strengths and weaknesses for estimating environmental efficiency of the methods applied both sfa and dea can estimate environmental efficiency scores the mean technical efficiency scores output oriented sfa 89 dea 78 and the mean comprehensive environmental efficiency scores sfa 80 dea 52 differ between the two methods sfa allows hypothesis testing and the monotonicity hypothesis is rejected for the specification including phosphate surplus dea can calculate environmental efficiency scores for all specifications because regularity is imposed in this method

relating life cycle assessment indicators to gross value added for dutch dairy farms sustainable dairy production requires farms that are economically viable environmentally sound and socially acceptable a low environmental impact of milk production is not necessarily associated with an economically viable farm to gain insight into a possible trade off between economic and environmental sustainability the relation between the environmental and economic indicators of dairy farms was quantified and farm characteristics that influence this relation were identified economic and environmental indicators were quantified for 119 specialized dairy farms in 2005 based on data from the dutch farm accountancy data network fadn economic indicators used were gross value added expressed per kg fat and protein corrected milk fpcm or expressed per unit of labour i e labour productivity environmental indicators used were land use per kg fpcm energy use per kg fpcm global warming potential per kg fpcm eutrophication and acidification potential per kg fpcm or per ha of land environmental indicators were deduced from a life cycle assessment high labour productivity on dairy farms was associated with low on farm energy use total and on farm land use total and on farm global warming potential and total and off farm acidification potential per kg fpcm high labour productivity however was associated also with high on farm eutrophication and acidification potential per hectare from partial least squares regression analysis it was concluded that relations between economic and environmental indicators were affected mainly by milk production per ha annual milk production per cow farm size and amount of concentrates per kg fpcm an increase in annual milk production per cow for example not only increased labour productivity reduced energy use and global warming potential per kg fpcm but also in the case of an unchanged stocking density increased eutrophication and acidification per ha to be economically and environmentally sustainable animal production in the netherlands therefore should focus on high animal productivity i e high annual milk production per cow and efficient use of feed per kg milk and moderate stocking density provided that a good animal welfare standard is guaranteed

accumulation of assets in farms covered by the fadn farm accountancy system in poland the economic and eco efficiency context the primary objective of the article is to identify the accumulation processes in farms in poland based on the economic size as well as the context of eco efficiency from the perspective of environmental sustainable value in addition the importance of subsidies in generating accumulation was specified and the context of eco efficiency was taken into account analysis of the environmental context was carried out with the use of the assessment of subsidies for public goods and return to cost ratio rtc based on the concept of sustainable value sv cross analysis has shown that with the transition to groups of farms with an increasing economic size the situation was more favourable from the perspective of the accumulation rate and its level per 1 ha subsidies play a significant role in shaping accumulation it was observed that the higher rate of accumulation associated with the transition to groups of farms with greater economic strength is accompanied by an increase in eco efficiency through the prism of the rtc indicator larger but not the largest farms are more efficient in using the transformation of environmental inputs into production output which does not mean that they exert an absolutely lower environmental pressure

the structure of technical efficiency it is common practice to decompose measures of efficiency into component measures of technical and allocative efficiency in this paper we show how and why to decompose a general measure of technical efficiency into component measures of purely technical efficiency congestion and scale efficiency and we investigate the properties of each measure we do so for a multiple output technology which satisfies a weak axiom system that does not include either constant returns to scale or strong input disposability

seasonal cointegration for monthly data abstract in this paper we propose an extension of the maximum likelihood seasonal cointegration procedure developed by johansen and schaumburg j economet 88 1999 310 for monthly time series we compute the finite sample critical values of the associated test statistics in monthly seasonal time series we also apply this seasonal cointegration procedure to the retails and stocks in us monthly manufacturing industrial data

valuation of environmental goods a shadow value perspective abstract this paper proposes a shadow value based methodology for the economic valuation of environmental goods the proposed method derives from a cost of production perspective this type of approach represents advantages with respect to usual methods linked with demand perspective when the interests of future generations is under consideration the computational procedure is simple and the required information easy to obtain we explain how the methodology works with the help of a forestry example

agri environmental policy and urban development patterns a general equilibrium analysis this paper investigates the spatial effects that the provision of environmental public goods have on residential location choices in a suburban context specifically a spatial general equilibrium framework is developed to analyze the consequences of adopting an agri environmental policy promoting the provision of positive farming externalities we use a static monocentric model of an open city where agricultural bid rents and agricultural amenities vary endogenously in space and where the positive externalities associated with agricultural production are valued by households consistent with empirical evidence of the potential side effects that conservation policies may have in terms of urbanization patterns and land price changes we show that under certain conditions implementing an agri environmental policy may promote additional suburban development moreover we demonstrate that the emergence of disconnected suburban areas may be significantly influenced by the location of land regulated by an agri environmental policy finally we discuss distributional aspects and show that while introducing an agri environmental policy has a negative impact on most residential land value it can have positive effects on farmland and residential land located within the regulated areas suggesting the non neutrality of such policies regarding the agents assets

the if how and where of assessing sustainable resource use in today s economies those who sustain the burden of resource use those using resources and those providing resources are not necessarily identical with this separation come three fundamental but interrelated decision making perspectives on the sustainability assessment of resource use these three perspectives correspond to the three assessment questions if how and where resources should be used most sustainability assessment approaches do not make their underlying assessment perspectives explicit the goal of this paper is to provide structure and organisation to existing approaches this structuring suggests that any discussion on the appropriateness and validity of different assessment approaches and their results must take into account the underlying assessment perspective the three questions if how and where resources should be used correspond to the requirements of a sustainable resource use while existing assessments do address the three questions in isolation it is all the more important that the limitations and implications of focusing on a single perspective are spelled out as the main contribution the paper distinguishes the rationale of each assessment perspective and develops on their interlinkages and thus provides the context and structure for a more informed and fruitful debate on the assessment of sustainable resource use

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

cap mtr versus environmentally targeted agricultural policy in marginal arable areas impact analysis combining simulation and survey data on june 2003 the final version of the common agricultural policy mid term review cap mtr was published the driving forces of this policy change include inter alia the compliance with world trade organization wto negotiations requirements improvement of social support for agricultural policy adjustment to budget constraints and adaptation of agricultural practices to environmental requirements this article reviews how this policy performs in marginal areas regarding one of those objectives the provision of environmental outputs related to agricultural activity as an alternative to this reform a policy based on agri environmental measures designed to maximize environmental outputs is proposed both options are evaluated from a cost effectiveness point of view data from a farm survey and a positive mathematical programming model for a cereal steppes agro system in spain are combined in order to simulate the effects of this reform and our alternative instrument on several environmental indicators results show that in marginal areas where land abandonment is a clear threat more environmental output can be achieved for the same cost while maintaining if not increasing the levels of achievement for the other goals

agricultural externalities and environmental regulation evaluating good practice in citrus production economic activity takes place in a scenario characterized by an increasing number of environmental regulations aimed at bringing under control the emission of contaminating wastes in this paper we evaluate the impact of transforming a code of good practice in nitrogen fertilization on spanish citrus fruit farms into an environmental regulation of compulsory fulfilment using data envelopment techniques we calculate unrestricted and environmentally regulated short run maximum profits both profit values are then used to compute an index of the cost of regulation our results suggest that the cost of shifting from a merely recommended practice to a binding rule is low on average the loss of profit computed is only about 4 furthermore we find that farms overall efficiency is low and that the current gap between observed and regulated fertilization practices could be overcome by improving overall management efficiency

curbing agricultural exceptionalism the eu s response to external challenge from 1948 to 1994 the agricultural sector was afforded special treatment in the gatt we analyse the extent to which this agricultural exceptionalism was curbed as a result of the gatt uruguay round agreement on agriculture discuss why it was curbed and finally explore the implication of this for eu policy making we argue that in particular two major changes in gatt institutions brought about restrictions on agricultural exceptionalism first the uruguay round was a single undertaking in which progress on other dossiers was contingent upon an outcome on agriculture the eu had keenly supported this new decision rule in the gatt within the eu this led to the macsharry reforms of the common agricultural policy cap in 1992 paving the way for a trade agreement on agriculture within the gatt second under the new quasi judicial dispute settlement procedure countries are expected to bring their policies into conformity with wto rules or face retaliatory trade sanctions this has brought about a greater willingness on the part of the eu to submit its farm policy to wto disciplines

ranking farms with a composite indicator of sustainability the assessment of sustainability at farm level has been growing in popularity over the last few years this article contributes to this line of research by building up composite indicators for different facets social economic environmental and global of farm sustainability using a methodological approach that combines data envelopment analysis dea and multicriteria decision making mcdm methods and assigns common weights to each individual sustainability indicator this approach is applied to a database of 163 farms located in the campos county a region belonging to the dry lands of the spanish northern plateau using 12 individual indicators of sustainability our findings show that both economic and environmental composite sustainability indicators are positively correlated but that this is not the case for the social indicator we also check the influence of a set of variables on farm sustainability using bootstrapping statistical techniques and showing that increasing farm size membership in agricultural cooperatives and farmers medium and upper agricultural specific technical education all exert a significant positive influence on sustainability these results provide clues for policy makers that intend to design sustainability increasing structural agricultural policies

the environmental performance of dutch government bond funds we investigate the implications of using different indicators to assess the sustainability performance of investment funds in particular we look into the environmental performance of dutch government bond funds we find that it does matter a lot which particular indicator is used this suggests that funds should be very transparent and straightforward about their non financial performance we argue that basically they have three options first the industry comes up with a benchmark against which the responsibility of their investments is measured and reported by all funds second the funds make very clear and transparent which particular aspects of sustainability they specifically target and how they keep score third the dashboard approach where the funds report their performance on a well defined set of indicators

private valuation of carbon sequestration in forest plantations abstract approval of the clean development mechanism provided for in the kyoto protocol enables countries with afforested land to trade in carbon emissions reduction certificates related to carbon dioxide equivalent quantities co 2 e stored within a certain forest area potential co 2 e above base line sequestration was determined for two forest sites on commercial eucalyptus plantations in northern brazil bahia compensation values for silvicultural regimes involving rotation lengths greater than economically optimal were computed using the faustmann formula mean values obtained were us 8 16 mgco 2 e 1 and us 7 19 mgco 2 e 1 for average and high site indexes respectively results show that carbon supply is more cost efficient in highly productive sites annuities of us 18 8 mg c 1 and us 35 1 mg c 1 and yearly payments of us 4 4 m 3 and us 8 2 m 3 due for each marginal cubic meter produced were computed for high and average sites respectively the estimated value of the tonne of carbon defines minimum values to be paid to forest owners in order to induce a change in silvicultural management regimes a reduction of carbon supply could be expected as a result of an increase in wood prices although it would not respond in a regular manner for both sites price elasticity of supply was found to be inelastic and increased as rotation length moved further away from economically optimal 0 24 and 0 27 for age 11 years in average and high productivity sites respectively this would be due to biomass production potential as a limiting factor beyond a certain threshold value an increase in price does not sustain a proportional change in carbon storage supply the environmental service valuation model proposed might be adequate for assessing potential supply in plantation forestry from a private landowner perspective with an economic opportunity cost the model is not applicable to low commercial value forest plantations

measuring the immeasurable a survey of sustainability indices sustainability indices for countries provide a one dimensional metric to valuate country specific information on the three dimensions of sustainable development economic environmental and social conditions at the policy level they suggest an unambiguous yardstick against which a country s development can be measured and even a cross country comparison can be performed this paper reviews the explanatory power of various sustainability indices applied in policy practice we show that these indices fail to fulfill fundamental scientific requirements making them rather useless if not misleading with respect to policy advice

measuring macroeconomic performance in the oecd a comparison of european and non european countries abstract we study the macroeconomic performance of 19 oecd countries over the period 1970 1990 performance is defined in terms of the ability of a country s macroeconomic managers to provide four services to their citizens a high level of real gdp per capita a low rate of inflation a low rate of unemployment and a favorable trade balance we use linear programming techniques to construct a best practice macroeconomic performance frontier and to measure the performance of each country in each year relative to the frontier we then add two environmental disamenities carbon and nitrogen emissions to the service list and repeat the analysis to see if the performance rankings change throughout the analysis emphasis is placed on a comparison of the performance of 14 european oecd countries with that of five non european oecd countries we find that performance rankings do change and that the relative performance of the european countries declines when the environmental disamenities are added to the service list

it pays to be green a premature conclusion it has been claimed that good environmental performance can improve firms economic performance however because of e g data limitations the methods applied in most previous quantitative empirical studies on effects of environmental performance on economic performance of firms suffer from several shortcomings we discuss these shortcomings and conclude that previously applied methods are unsatisfactory as support for a conclusion that it pays for firms to be green then we illustrate the consequences of these shortcomings by performing several regression analyses of the effect of environmental performance on economic performance using a panel data set of norwegian plants a pooled regression where observable firm characteristics like e g size or industry are controlled for confirms a positive effect of environmental performance on economic performance however the estimated positive effect could be due to omitted unobserved variables like management or technology when the regression model controls for unobserved plant heterogeneity the effect is generally no longer statistically significant hence although greener plants tend to perform economically better the analysis provides little support for the claim that it is because they are greener these empirical findings further indicate that a conclusion that it pays to be green is premature

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

reconsidering heterogeneity and aggregation issues in environmental valuation a multi attribute approach the economic valuation of complex environmental goods composed of multiple attributes is an expanding field of research in ecological and environmental economics however several issues are still subjects of debate this paper focuses on three of them the linearity of the valuation function in the attributes aggregation criteria for obtaining social values and the heterogeneity of individuals utility functions a methodological approach based on multi attribute utility theory which enables us to contrast the impact of these concerns on the valuation of environmental goods is proposed we employ the methodology to value a protected natural area and from the results obtained we can conclude that the non linearity and the heterogeneity of the individual utility function are relevant aspects of environmental valuation that need to be taken into account when valuing environmental goods

operationalizing sustainable development dynamic ecological economic models abstract since the mid eighties a vast literature has evolved around the concept of sustainable development it shows a wide support for changes in policy making and decision making for instance to integrate environmental interests in national and international political processes remarkably recommendations of contours and new elements of research methods and policy analysis for sustainable development are rare although this is just as essential as the renewed attention for the political dimension a clear view on how to use and change adequately existing techniques and models for sustainable development will contribute to a more satisfactory operationalization of it this paper examines the implications of ecologically sustainable economic development for integrated dynamic modelling after a concise discussion of sustainable development it is suggested that five concepts are central to it intergenerational equity the regional scale multiple use long term uncertainty and economic ecological integration the discussion of each of these issues is focused on the implications for model elements and uses thereby old ideas are reviewed and new ones are proposed the aim is not to come up with a rigid framework for dealing with sustainable development but rather to suggest which alternatives are available to deal with the central concepts although in a section on economic ecological integration general requirements for dynamic economic ecological models are mentioned explicitly in order to offer a general frame of reference these requirements are fairly general and may be taken up in ensuing discussions of the methodological aspects related to sustainable development the main conclusions are the following we view economic ecological integration in the sense of combining processes instead of one process and a variable to deal with intergenerational equity one may choose objectives various constraints or a combination of both for regional models one may consider various types of conditions on cross boundary flows and external factors of regional processes multiple use can be modelled as an intermediate stage between single resource models with a partial view and complex models with a general view sensitivity probability and scenario analyses can be used to deal partially with the various types of long term uncertainty although this remains difficult for the very important class of unexpected events or catastrophes such surprises can at best be turned into risk by scenario analyses and examination of dynamic behaviour of the system as a whole

measuring farm sustainability and explaining differences in sustainable efficiency abstract a major objective of european agricultural policy is to have a sustainable and efficient farming sector that is applying environmentally friendly production methods policy makers aim to combine a strong economic performance and a sustainable use of natural resources therefore it is important to measure and to assess farm sustainability for a large dataset of flemish dairy farms a valuation method that is based on the concept of opportunity costs is used to calculate and analyze differences among the sample farms with respect to the creation of sustainable value but more important than measuring the creation of sustainable value is to analyze differences in sustainable efficiency therefore sustainable efficiency measures are calculated and differences in sustainable efficiency are explained using panel data an effect model captures the determinants of sustainable efficiency of the studied farms the empirical model shows that in general larger farms have a higher sustainable efficiency also farmer s age and dependency on support payments proved to be determining characteristics for observed differences in sustainable efficiency

capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development an indicator of weak sustainability the measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction in this paper we present one form that a weak sustainability indicator can take derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non decreasing although subject to qualification at this stage some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries

willingness to pay for other species well being abstract benefit cost analysis of environmental policies typically focuses on benefits to human health and well being for other species economists have attempted to measure human wtp for changes in the numbers of individuals for different types of wildlife and to preserve biodiversity when it comes to humans wtp for improvements in the quality of life for other species however the evidence is limited morbidity and quality of life considerations may be particularly important to the task of valuing non fatal harm to wildlife in the wake of an environmental disaster we argue that the other species morbidity reduction component of wtp should be calculated net of any outrage component associated with the cause of the harm this net wtp is likely to be correlated with the premium that people are willing to pay for chicken products from birds for which the quality of life has been enhanced by improved animal welfare measures this paper uses a conjoint choice stated preference survey to reveal the nature of systematic heterogeneity in preferences for humanely raised versus conventionally raised chicken we also use latent class analysis to distinguish between two classes of people those who are willing to pay a premium for humanely raised chicken and those who are not

ecology sustainability and environment as capital abstract the idea of environment as capital has found widespread support in both the economic and ecological literature it is often suggested in a related sustainability literature that natural capital should remain intact if possible the popularity of this approach to exploring the human environment relationship is due in part to the way it is seemingly legitimised by ecological theory and practice this legitimation is important for emerging areas of human environment study such as ecological economics because ecology and other natural sciences have often dismissed economic constructions of the environment however a closer examination of the state of contemporary ecology suggests that there are problems with an ecological legitimation of the environment as capital approach first ecology itself is a troubled discipline and its ability to provide a comprehensive theory of human environment interactions is limited second emerging ecological discourse tends to undermine the ecological rationale for many natural capital related resource management recommendations this does not mean that the environment as capital concept is without considerable heuristic power it does imply however a need to return to a social construction of the environment in which different environmental possibilities are valued in terms of their potential contribution to human well being

multicriteria decision analysis and environmental economics an approximation abstract a multicriteria approach to address basic problems in environmental economics is proposed in this paper the methodology is underpinned by the wellknown multicriteria method called compromise programming together with some recent results relating the compromise sets with the traditional optimisation of the utility functions to illustrate the proposed methodology the following two cases are suggested 1 the reconciliation between economic environmental as well as recreational objectives inherent to the management of an environmental asset such as forestry system and 2 its application to the appraisal of environmental improvements or damages when nonmonetary objectives are involved

between ostrom and nordhaus the research landscape of sustainability economics abstract we survey the emerging research area of sustainability economics through a quantitative full text analysis of peer reviewed journal publications from 1987 to 2013 to identify relevant contributions we draw on existing definitions of sustainability economics for a keyword based identification strategy a combined focus on a the human nature relationship b the long term uncertain future c normative orientation towards sustainability and d economic analysis our analysis of a random subsample of 343 relevant papers reveals that i sustainability economics is a rapidly developing research area ii while theoretical contributions shaped the area in earlier years applied work now constitutes the largest share of contributions iii the research landscape can be clustered into eleven research clusters these range from participatory governance of social ecological systems associated with the work of elinor ostrom to questions of intertemporal allocation and distribution applied to climate economics associated with the work of william nordhaus iv the research area is broad in scope and heterogeneous and there is relatively little interaction between important clusters v relevant contributions are published in more than 100 journals ten journals publish half of all contributions led by ecological economics and 40 appear in non economics journals underscoring the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue

approaching the environmental sustainable value in agriculture how factor endowments foster the eco efficiency abstract small and labor intensive farms guarantee a higher degree of environmental sustainability compared to rich capital intensive farms this paper offers a methodological contribution to the value based sustainability approach consisting in computing a modified indicator of environmental sustainable value using this approach the authors test how factor endowments such as capital land and labor contribute to environmental sustainable value using a long term panel of region representative european union farm accountancy data network farms in 2004 2015 the seminal within between specification was employed to control time variant and time in variant space heterogeneity of european regions the articles main finding is that higher capital endowment and lower labor intensity is beneficial for environmental sustainable value the result that farming with higher labor endowment might be less eco efficient contradicts the commonly known perception of this problem in light of our findings we conclude that the pro investment direction of the common agricultural policy should be followed but one size fit all policy is not working

analysis of environmental efficiency variations a nutrient balance approach recent literature has argued that environmental efficiency ee which is built on the materials balance mb principle is more suitable than other ee measures in situations where the law of mass conversation regulates production processes in addition the mb based ee method is particularly useful in analysing possible trade offs between cost and environmental performance identifying determinants of mb based ee can provide useful information to decision makers but there are very few empirical investigations into this issue this article proposes the use of data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis techniques to analyse variation in mb based ee specifically the article develops a stochastic nutrient frontier and nutrient inefficiency model to analyse determinants of mb based ee the empirical study applies both techniques to investigate mb based ee of 96 rice farms in south korea the size of land fertiliser consumption intensity cost allocative efficiency and the share of owned land out of total land are found to be correlated with mb based ee the results confirm the presence of a trade off between mb based ee and cost allocative efficiency and this finding favouring policy interventions to help farms simultaneously achieve cost efficiency and mp based ee

cointegration analysis of seasonal time series this paper reviews various recent approaches to cointegration analysis of seasonal time series in addition to the usual decisions concerning data transformations and univariate time series properties it is necessary to decide how seasonal variation is included in the multivariate model and how standard cointegration methods should accordingly be modified seasonal cointegration and periodic cointegration methods are discussed as are some of their recent refinements an overview of further research topics is also provided

georgescu roegen daly versus solow stiglitz revisited there are two key issues which are not fullyelaborated in the papers in a recent special issueof ecological economics the contribution ofnicholas georgescu roegen vol 22 no 3 1997 i the operational meaning of substitutionin production function and ii the effect of tech nological improvement on resource utilization inthis piece we examine these two issues based on i georgescu roegen s conceptualization of pro duction process and ii jevons paradox neoclassical production functions whether forindividual rms or the aggregate economy as sume that any factor can always be substituted forany other factor except the cases of xed coef cients and or the existence of limitational factors the implication or entailment of this assumptionis that an increase in the input of any factoralways yields an increase in output this is thebasis for solow s contention that t he world can in effect get along without natural resources solow 1974 however those neoclassical economists adopt ing the substitution assumption have not paid dueattention to the essential distinction between ows quantities of materials qualitatively trans formed in the process and funds agents trans forming a given set of in ows into a given set ofout ows in the material production process georgescu roegen 1971 neglecting this dis tinction results in a systematic indifference to thebiophysical foundation of economic activities infact according to georgescu roegen 1990 fordesigning a blueprint of a factory process anexpert has to consider a set of three relationships i the normal rate of output

what does corporate strong sustainability actually mean in the real market world a response to bjorn and ropke abstract in a recent issue of the journal of cleaner production bjorn and ropke 2018 publish an article titled what does it really mean to be a strongly sustainable company a response to nikolaou and tsalis through which they express their concerns over the methodological framework developed by nikolaou and tsalis 2018 bjorn and ropke point out some weaknesses of this methodology suggesting some possible amendments to improve it specifically they raise doubts over the selection of environmental indicators and the definition of thresholds taking into consideration the points discussed by bjorn and ropke this paper aims to analyze the relevant theoretical background on which our framework was built by clarifying the concepts of corporate strong sustainability it also underlines some misconceptions of bjorn and ropke in relation to our framework and their proposed approach as well as making some suggestions for a possible new framework for corporate strong sustainability business oriented approach which encompasses the united nation un 2030 agenda for sustainable development and the corporate strong sustainability principles

value standards in sub sustainable development on limits of ecological economics abstract sustainable development is hard to conceptualize as an economic problem and an economic problem is also ambiguous thus there is room for several kinds of ecological economics this paper analyses different ways of relating ecological and economical thinking to each other and how expertise in these fields relates to politics available methods are delimited in scope where some are suitable for the analysis of sustainable development and others are not it is concluded that the promotion of sustainable development as a basic value assumes an explicit value strategy it is argued that neoclassical economics for example cost benefit analysis is suitable for analysis of sustainable development only as a special case and alternatives are at hand for other cases to illustrate a non neoclassical analysis an empirical investigation using the sustainable development records approach is briefly reported upon

technical efficiency and farm size a conditional analysis the relationship between technical efficiency and size might be affected by farm heterogeneity we analyse this relationship conditional on a set of control variables these control variables are chosen using a production model where technical efficiency is introduced as a parameter as a result technical efficiency affects both the input demand and the output supply of a profit maximising producer the empirical application explores these issues using panel data of dairy farms in spain

measuring sustainability a time series of alternative indicators for scotland this paper presents results from a time series analysis of seven alternative measures of sustainability for scotland the measures chosen are green net national product genuine savings ecological footprint environmental space net primary productivity the index of sustainable economic welfare and the genuine progress indicator these are all measures at the national or macro level we note arguments in the literature that no one single measure of sustainability is likely to be sufficient however very different messages concerning the sustainability of scotland over the period in question 1980 1993 emerge from these measures chosen we also argue that different indicators provide different insights for policy making

an aggregate resource efficiency perspective on sustainability a sustainable value application to the eu 15 countries the sustainable value approach integrates the efficiency with regard to environmental social and economic resources into a monetary indicator it gained significant popularity as evidenced by diverse applications at the corporate level however its introduction as a measure adhering to the strong sustainability paradigm sparked an ardent debate this study explores its validity as a macroeconomic strong sustainability measure by applying the sustainable value approach to the eu 15 countries concretely we assessed environmental social and economic resources in combination with the gdp for all eu 15 countries from 1995 to 2006 for three benchmark alternatives the results show that several countries manage to adequately delink resource use from gdp growth furthermore the remarkable difference in outcome between the national and eu 15 benchmark indicates a possible inefficiency of the current allocation of national resource ceilings imposed by the european institutions additionally by using an effects model we argue that the service degree of the economy and governmental expenditures on social protection and research and development are important determinants of overall resource efficiency finally we sketch out three necessary conditions to link the sustainable value approach to the strong sustainability paradigm

the sustainable value approach a clarifying and constructive comment recently the original benchmarking methodology of the sustainable value approach became subjected to serious debate while kuosmanen and kuosmanen 2009b critically question its validity introducing productive efficiency theory figge and hahn 2009 put forward that the implementation of productive efficiency theory severely conflicts with the original financial economics perspective of the sustainable value approach we argue that the debate is very confusing because the original sustainable value approach presents two largely incompatible objectives nevertheless we maintain that both ways of benchmarking could provide useful and moreover complementary insights if one intends to present the overall resource efficiency of the firm from the investor s viewpoint we recommend the original benchmarking methodology if one on the other hand aspires to create a prescriptive tool setting up some sort of reallocation scheme we advocate implementation of the productive efficiency theory although the discussion on benchmark application is certainly substantial we should avoid the debate to become accordingly narrowed next to the benchmark concern we see several other challenges considering the development of the sustainable value approach 1 a more systematic resource selection 2 the inclusion of the value chain and 3 additional analyses related to policy in order to increase interpretative power

measuring and explaining scale efficiency with the parametric approach the case of greek tobacco growers estimates of technical and scale inefficiencies of tobacco farms in greece during the period 1991 1995 are obtained by using the parametric approach the degree of technical efficiency was found to be lower than the degree of scale efficiency and thus a greater portion of overall inefficiency is due to producing below the production frontier than to producing at an inefficient scale in addition the vast majority of farms in the sample exhibited suboptimal scale implying that output should be expanded to reach the optimal scale empirical results are provided to determine the impact of various socioeconomic demographic and geoclimatic indicators on technical and scale efficiency

reconsidering agri environmental policy permitted by the uruguay round agreement agri environmental policies are increasingly being used to redress the balance between jointly produced agricultural and environmental outputs and are permitted by the uruguay round ur agreement with the general provision that they not distort trade in this paper we argue that any market consequences of efficient welfare enhancing agri environmental policies should not be considered trade distorting to consider them so is inconsistent with economic efficiency and with ecological integrity social cost benefit analysis cba is a more appropriate test and guide of trade consistency for agri environmental policies and using trade effects as the test may not enhance social welfare moreover specific provisions in the ur agreement restricting payments under agri environmental policies to opportunity costs are not warranted on economic efficiency grounds and consign the environment to a status subsidiary to agricultural output

the demand for gasoline a comment on the cross section analysis by drollas abstract a recent article 1 used data for 1977 from different countries to estimate the long run price elasticity of demand for gasoline some aspects can be criticized particularly the interpretation of the results and the model used an alternative is developed which accepts that the key factor influencing gasoline consumption is the stock of cars however energy use per car will vary depending on the size of the country and its average income and price of fuel this model gives a non linear equation which is estimated using the same data all the coefficients are significant with the price elasticity being inelastic

not measuring sustainable value at all a response to kuosmanen and kuosmanen abstract in their article in this issue of ecological economics kuosmanen and kuosmanen kuosmanen t and kuosmanen n this issue how not to measure sustainable value and how one might ecological economics aim to criticise the measurement of sustainable value as proposed in our previous research by adopting a production perspective and based on a productive efficiency analysis they claim that the proposed way of measuring sustainable value represents an invalid simplification that rests on restrictive and unrealistic assumptions our response is to show that their argument rests on a fundamental misspecification of the sustainable value approach we identify three conceptual misfits a mismatch in the perspective of the analysis a misspecification of opportunity costs and the irrelevance of production functions ultimately kuosmanen and kuosmanen s train of thought rests entirely within the realm of productive efficiency analysis whereas sustainable value builds on the foundations of financial economics and consequently adopts a macro rather than a firm perspective it is thus not surprising that the findings of kuosmanen and kuosmanen appear to contradict the sustainable value approach however this is due to their fundamental misspecification of the sustainable value approach as a result rather than providing novel insights into how sustainable value might be measured in a better way they do not measure sustainable value at all

tests of seasonal integration and cointegration in multivariate unobserved component models this paper considers tests of seasonal integration and cointegration for multivariate unobserved component models first the locally best invariant lbi test of the null hypothesis of a deterministic seasonal pattern against the alternative of seasonal integration is derived for a model with gaussian i i d disturbances and deterministic trend then the null hypothesis of seasonal cointegration is considered and a test for common nonstationary components at the seasonal frequencies is proposed the tests are subsequently generalized to account for stochastic trends weakly dependent errors and unattended unit roots asymptotic representations and critical values of the tests are provided while the finite sample performance is evaluated by monte carlo simulation experiments finally the tests are applied to the series of industrial production of the four largest countries of the european monetary union it is found that germany does not appear to cointegrate with the other countries at most seasonal frequencies while there seems to exist a common nonstationary seasonal component between france italy and spain copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

agri environmental relationships and multi functionality further considerations multi functionality is a currently fashionable argument especially within the eu for continued support of the farming sector however there is a substantial danger that this will be used and be seen to being used as a facade for continued traditiona l support and protection if so the current trend towards liberalised agricultural markets on which much of the developing world depends will be frustrated nevertheless farming does matter to many communities over and above its marketable surplus and the incomes so generated it follows that any negotiations aimed at liberalising agricultural trade have to take these arguments seriously to do so requires that the critical elements of the debate be widely understood this paper outlines these critical elements in the light of a previous contribution from hodge 2000 it argues that there are ways in which quasi market systems can be used to correct market failures implicit in the notion of multi functionality it also argues that proper compensation to existing supported farmers is a necessary and separate condition for sensible policy reform much of the commentary on farm trade liberalisation confuses the two separate conditions for reform multi functionality and compensation this confusion threatens progress towards agricultural trade liberalisation without generating any reliable benefits of a more multifunctional agriculture

does corporate social responsibility make over educated workers more productive this article provides first evidence on whether corporate social responsibility csr influences the productivity effects of over education by relying on detailed belgian linked employer employee panel data covering the period 1999 2010 our empirical results exhibit a positive and significant impact of over education on firm productivity moreover they suggest that the effect of over education is positively enhanced when the firm implements a csr process especially when it aims to have i a good match between job requirements and workers educational level ii a diverse workforce in terms of gender and age and iii a long term relationship with its workers when focussing on required education and over education the results suggest that csr besides representing an innovative and proactive approach for the firms stakeholders may also be beneficial for the firm itself through a bigger increase in productivity for each additional year of required education or over education

justifying the incorporation of the materials balance principle into frontier based eco efficiency models frontier based models are an alternative to traditional eco efficiency ratio indicators this paper considers two different types environmentally adjusted production efficiency models and frontier eco efficiency models and tries to find justification for incorporating the materials balance principle mbp in them similar importance is attached to the economic and environmental outcomes of a production process like economic outcomes can be derived from inputs and outputs and respective prices some cases allow for deriving environmental outcomes from the production function with the mbp after an overview of attempts to incorporate environmental issues in production efficiency models and some reflections why mbp has been neglected in environmental economics and production efficiency analysis the paper gives basic principles to incorporate the mbp in conventional production efficiency methods and shows how this adjustment leads to a more diversified diagnosis of eco efficiency finally potentialities and bottlenecks are discussed exploiting the mbp in production efficiency and eco efficiency analysis will facilitate more pro active eco efficiency research

an activity analysis model of the environmental performance of firms application to fossil fuel fired electric utilities the productivity of firms when some outputs pollution are undesirable has been studied in the literature for some time in this paper we introduce an environmental performance indicator based on the decomposition of overall factor productivity into a pollution index and an input output efficiency index this indicator is compared to the more conventional jaggi and freedman 1992 model results are given for illustrative purposes using data from u s fossil fuel fired electric utilities the rankings of the utilities obtained with the two models show significant divergence which is due to the different ways in which the undesirable outputs are dealt with as well as due to the different possible tradeoffs between the pollutants released into the atmosphere and the resources used as inputs

how not to measure sustainable value and how one might abstract sustainability is a complex multidimensional concept that entails economic environmental and social aspects the sustainable value sv method developed by f figge and t hahn ecol econ 48 2004 173 187 is one of the most promising attempts to measure sustainability performance of firms sv measures corporate contributions to sustainability by valuing resource use based on the opportunity cost which must be estimated this paper critically examines figge and hahn s estimator for opportunity cost and shows that the proposed estimator rests on a number of strong unrealistic assumptions evidence from monte carlo simulations conducted by authors shows that the proposed estimator performs very poorly even under ideal conditions having identified shortcomings in the sv method we review some econometric approaches with a proven statistical foundation which might be usefully applied in the present context

agri environmental policies in the eu and united states a comparison abstract agri environmental policies aeps in the united states and the european union are examples of payments for environmental services that pay farmers to reduce the negative externalities of agricultural production while serving as a means to transfer public funds to farmers we show that despite similar origins aeps in the two regions differ both in their specific objectives and in their implementation for example aeps in most member states of the eu 15 have the additional objective of using agriculture as a driver for rural development this objective is achieved by compensating farmers for the private delivery of positive public goods such as attractive landscapes produced by agriculture the rationale is market failure and there is empirical evidence that europeans are willing to pay for such positive externalities no comparable provision exists in u s policy by contrast u s aeps focus almost entirely on reducing agriculture s negative externalities such as soil erosion second we find that u s programs are more targeted than their eu counterparts and take opportunity cost into account the eu programs on the other hand address a wider range of externalities and are focused more on the paying for a particular farming process than reducing specific negative externalities the eu takes a broader view of aeps than does the united states both in terms of type of activity that can be funded and by using less targeting by land characteristics and so the european program could be more easily used as a mechanism for transferring income to producers despite this we find evidence that many of the amenities targeted by the programs are demanded by the population

interactions between agricultural and environmental policies a conceptual framework agricultural policy has a well documented impact on farmers production decisions and those decisions land water and agricultural chemical use may in turn affect the environment there is a public perception that existing agricultural policies are linked to agricultural pollution as exemplified by the conclusions of the recent national research council report alternative agriculture 1989 there is only limited theoretical or empirical research addressing these linkages however this paper develops a conceptual framework that can be used to analyze the interactions between agricultural and environmental policies and pollution this framework integrates physical and economic models at a disaggregate level necessary to capture the heterogeneity of the physical environment and the economic behavior of farmers following e hochman and d zilberman 1978 the disaggregate units can be statistically aggregated to a level useful for policy analysis agricultural and environmental policies can be categorized according to their effects on the intensive and extensive margins combining the different policy instruments with the microeconomic heterogeneity we find that existing agricultural and environmental policies can have either positive or negative effects of nonpoint source pollution to infer an aggregate effect requires data that do not currently exist our framework provides a basis for empirical investigations of these effects given adequate data moreover we find that agricultural policy instruments can be used to mitigate pollution if used appropriately

towards indicators of sustainable development for firms a productive efficiency perspective sustainable development can be reflected by various economic social and environmental factors that are closely interconnected with each other and with the additional dimension of time which stresses the long term perspective of several factors due to their central role in human activities and development firms should play an important part in the attainment of sustainability goals the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the methodology of indicators that allow for the assessment of business participation into sustainable development a fundamental standpoint adopted is to view economic social and environmental efficiency as a necessary but not sufficient step towards sustainability to work out indicators we build on both the concepts of cost benefit analysis and the principles of productive efficiency we assume that we have observations on economic social and environmental factors for a set of decision making units dmus e g firms in an industrial sub sector the efficiency of each dmu is computed from a set of observed data using mathematical programming techniques resulting in dmus that are efficient and define the efficiency frontier among the set of dmus and dmus that are inefficient to cope with the multidimensionality of sustainable development it is important not to base decisions on one unique aggregate sustainability indicator instead it is suggested to develop two or three partial indicators that stress different aspects of the problem the proposed indicators could be used as an aid to detect so called factors of unsustainability and hence to provide for recommendations as to the regulations and incentives or managerial practices that will contribute to overall sustainability c 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved