green goods are they good or bad news for the environment evidence from a laboratory experiment on impure public goods green goods such as recycled paper stationary or carbon neutral flights provide increasingly popular examples of impure public goods motivated by theoretical treatments of green goods as a bundle of private and public characteristics in proportions fixed by the provider we design an experiment with two linked treatments to test how the presence of impure public goods affects behaviour towards public good causes we set parameters such that from a standard economic perspective the presence of the impure public good is behaviourally irrelevant in a treatment where the impure public good provides only small contributions to the public good we observe that on aggregate pro social behaviour is lower in the presence of the impure public good on the contrary in the treatment where the impure public good is more generous towards the public good component at the expense of private earnings individuals are unaffected in their behaviour we observe that impure public goods that are theoretically irrelevant and are mostly self interested may hinder pro social behaviour and look for explanations in social psychology such as the phenomenon of thoughtful anchoring motivated reasoning and reluctant altruism the results from this experiment question the role of green goods in enhancing environmentally friendly behaviours

is there a glass ceiling in sweden using 1998 data we show that the gender log wage gap in sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail we interpret this as a strong glass ceiling effect we use quantile regression decompositions to examine whether this pattern can be ascribed primarily to gender differences in labor market characteristics or in the rewards to those characteristics even after extensive controls for gender differences in age education both level and field sector industry and occupation we find that the glass ceiling effect we see in the raw data persists to a considerable extent

conformity and the demand for environmental goods the existing literature on eco labeling and green consumerism has been framed within a classical market context where price and quality are the drivers of consumer choice however it seems possible that consumers are also concerned about the choices made by other consumers in fact it is unclear that people s consumption decisions are made independently of social context for instance under the desire to conform to certain social norms or in the presence of status concerns some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society we test this hypothesis using a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans share of fair trade beans and price three treatments were used differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers we find different responses to the treatments across individuals and we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women have

residential energy demand and the interaction of price and temperature british experimental evidence the responsiveness of heating energy demand to pricing is shown to be dependent on temperature and vice versa this is investigated empirically using residential electricity demand data obtained under conditions of price variation from a british time of use pricing experiment results confirm that consumer responses to higher electricity prices are conditional on temperature levels particularly during the daytime and for households with high overall levels of electricity consumption and previous experience of time of use tariffs

payback period for residential solar water heaters in taiwan abstract taiwan is a leaf shaped island straddling the tropic of cancer with abundant and reliable supply of solar energy under the individual circumstances solar radiation ambient temperature and hot water consumption pattern solar heating could be economically competitive with conventional heating fuels electricity natural gas or liquefied petroleum gas in this context the market of residential solar water heaters swhs in taiwan has been highly developed with subsidy programs offered by the government of taiwan so far next the economic viability of residential swhs is determined by the life cycle savings this study develops a procedure for estimating the payback period of residential swhs in terms of operation cost and effective energy savings over conventional heating fuels a case study in southern taiwan indicates that the increase in daily load volume per area of solar collector installed has a beneficial effect an end user should determine the economically optimal solar collector area of an swh according to the hot water consumption pattern of each household payback period is shorter when the substituted conventional fuel is electricity with the subsidy program an swh is in a favorable situation when compared with an electrical water heater findings of the present study would assist partially system design of residential swhs and help accrue more monetary benefit to the end users

environmental quality competition and eco labeling abstract a three stage game of investment environmental quality provision and price competition is developed to study the impact of green technology investment eco labeling in a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation the firms incentives to invest in green technologies depend on their relative cost structure when firms are identical with respect to fixed costs both firms will always invest but if one firm is more efficient in investing then the other firm may or may not invest depending on the level of unit cost of investment quality competition will be tighter when the low quality firm is more efficient and looser when the high quality firm is more efficient in investing socially optimal investment for both firms is always positive but lower than in the duopoly solution in the absence of environmental externalities the quality dispersion chosen by profit maximizing firms may be too high or too low while environmental externalities increase the possibility low quality dispersion that is too low within the market solution finally and importantly ecolabeling can be used as a means of reducing excessive investment and increasing environmental quality that is too low

confronting the coffee crisis can fair trade organic and specialty coffees reduce small scale farmer vulnerability in northern nicaragua summary this paper links changing global coffee markets to opportunities and vulnerabilities for sustaining small scale farmer livelihoods in northern nicaragua changing governance structures corporate concentration oversupply interchangeable commodity grade beans and low farm gate prices characterize the crisis in conventional coffee markets in contrast certified fair trade and organic are two alternative forms of specialty coffee trade and production that may offer opportunities for small scale producers a research team surveyed 228 farmers to measure the impact of sales on organic and fair trade markets the results suggest that participation in organic and fair trade networks reduces farmers livelihood vulnerability 2004 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

the implicit price for fair trade coffee does social capital matter abstract this study aims to ascertain whether the implicit price paid for fair trade coffee in regular supermarkets is influenced by the stock of social capital in the territory where consumers live a hedonic regression set up is adopted based on italian scanner data taken at nuts3 level regressors include attributes described on the label which include separate certifications for fair trade and organic eco label status plus various indicators of social capital and their interactions with the fair trade and organic eco label attributes the implicit consumer price paid for the fair trade attribute is significantly and positively affected by a social capital proxy the ratio of co op members to total employment

reducing greenhouse gas emissions by inducing energy conservation and distributed generation from elimination of electric utility customer charges this paper quantifies the increased green house gas emissions and negative effect on energy conservation or efficiency penalty due to electric rate structures that employ an unavoidable customer charge first the extent of customer charges was determined from a nationwide survey of u s electric tariffs to eliminate the customer charge nationally while maintaining a fixed sum for electric companies for a given amount of electricity an increase of 7 12 in the residential electrical rate was found to be necessary if enacted this increase in the electric rate would result in a 6 4 reduction in overall electricity consumption conserving 73 billion kw hrs eliminating 44 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and saving the entire u s residential sector over 8 billion per year as shown here these reductions would come from increased avoidable costs thus leveraging an increased rate of return on investments in energy efficiency energy conservation behavior distributed energy generation and fuel choices finally limitations of this study and analysis are discussed and conclusions are drawn for proposed energy policy changes

are positional concerns stronger in some domains than in others for more than one hundred years economists have discussed the concept of positional goods that the utility conferred by many perhaps even most goods depends not only on the amount the individual consumes but also on the amount others consume e g thorstein veblen 1899 james duesenberry 1949 john k galbraith 1958 robert frank 1985 while economic interest in positional goods is increasing e g mark pingle and mike mitchell 2002 kenneth arrow et al 2004 ed hopkins and tatiana kornienko 2004 the literature remains largely theoretical rather than empirical if status concerns affect all items in the utility function equally leisure as well as goods the positional effect would operate like a lump sum tax reducing well being without changing the allocation of time or money arrow et al 2004 however if positional concerns are stronger for some things than for others then in order to understand how people can become better off in well being not simply in wealth we must investigate how interpersonal competition interacts with material gains frank 1997 evidence about what goods are more positional than others is essential for correct policy recommendations gregory besharov 2002 but little is actually known about the relative positional rankings of items in the typical consumer s utility function four hypotheses proposed in the literature are

financial deregulation and household saving the last decade has seen widespread domestic financial deregulation in the industrial world particularly in the united states united kingdom and the nordic countries resulting in an increase in competition both between banks and saving institutions thrifts or building societies as they moved into each others services and within each sector this opened up new financial options particularly for households the sector that was probably most affected by government regulation for example there was a significant increase in equity withdrawals from personal housing wealth in both the united kingdom and united states over the ig8os 2 this period also saw a significant change in household consumption behaviour the most dramatic illustration being the fall in the household saving ratio in those countries where the process of deregulation has gone furthest this paper reports the results from estimating a model of household saving using regional data for the united kingdom with a particular emphasis on the interaction between household saving and financial deregulation the estimates are used to calculate the relative importance of different factors in the fall in personal saving over the i98os i conclude that deregulation lowered the equilibrium level of saving over the i98os probably 2 percentage points per annum as well as making saving significantly more dependent on changes in wealth income and real interest rates there have been a number of earlier empirical studies looking at the interaction between financial deregulation and household behaviour manchester and poterba i 989 miles i 992 and koskela et al i 992 present empirical evidence on the interaction between deregulation the housing market and saving in the united states united kingdom and finland respectively others have estimated saving functions which include variables representing the effects of financial deregulation or have considered the impact of financial deregulation on liquidity constraints in consumption 3 the

are choice experiments incentive compatible a test with quality differentiated beef steaks this study compares hypothetical and nonhypothetical responses to choice experiment questions we test for hypothetical bias in a choice experiment involving beef ribeye steaks with differing quality attributes in general hypothetical responses predicted higher probabilities of purchasing beef steaks than nonhypothetical responses thus hypothetical choices overestimate total willingness to pay for beef steaks however marginal willingness to pay for a change in steak quality is in general not statistically different across hypothetical and actual payment settings

power sector reform in south asia why slow and limited so far although south asian developing countries had initiated some form of electric power sector reform in the 1990s often under external lending agency pressures not much progress has been made so far and there is hardly any noteworthy example of a successful reform in the region this paper provides a brief review of power sector reform efforts in five south asian countries and uses an institutional economics framework to identify the factors shaping the success of power sector reforms four factors namely instability of rule makers poor overall acceptance slow adaptation and poor transition management are identified and their effect on the reform process of south asia are analysed the paper finds that political instability has affected the power sector reform of the region making hard decisions difficult to take slow progress of reform has also affected the sector viability as signs of adverse effects on the power sector investment and performance are already visible

on the taxation of polluting products in a differentiated industry this paper studies the provision of environmental quality in an imperfectly competitive market it uses a vertical differentiation model in which the free entry equilibrium results in an under provision of quality the following main results are obtained first a commodity tax may have a significant impact on the market structure in this setting it tends to increase the number of active firms second through its impact on market structure a commodity tax may be welfare improving even though quality creates a positive externality third a commodity tax may bring about an equilibrium that is arbitrarily close to a pareto efficient allocation

analysis of the policy effects of downstream feed in tariff on china s solar photovoltaic industry abstract the chinese government initiated the feed in tariff fit policy for downstream power generation in august 2013 the effectiveness of the downstream fit policy has attracted the attention of academia and government using the quarterly data of listed solar pv companies between 2009 and 2015 this paper provides an empirical analysis regarding the effects of the downstream fit policy we find that 1 the fit policy has significantly enhanced the inventory turnover of listed pv firms and improved their profitability 2 the fit policy has significant effects on the inventory turnover of midstream companies and mixed industry chain companies mainly engaged in downstream operations 3 fit policy is more favorable towards increasing the inventory turnover of private enterprises our results indicate that the fit policy can have substantial effects on the sustainable development of china s solar photovoltaic industry

environmental quality competition and taxation in the presence of green network effect among consumers we examine the impact of a green network effect in a market characterized by consumers environmental awareness and competition between firms in terms of both environmental quality and product prices the unique aspect of this model comes from the assumption that an increase in the number of consumers of green brown product increases the satisfaction of each green brown consumer we show that paradoxically when the network effect of a green product is higher than that of a brown product this externality reduces product environmental quality and raises consumption of the green product conversely when the network effect of the brown product is higher the externality improves product environmental quality and raises consumption of the brown product in both cases the network effect does not affect the overall pollution level the externality correction requires the use of three optimal fiscal policies an ad valorem tax on products an emission tax and a subsidy or a tax on the green purchase a second best optimum can also be reached through the green taxation

inflation capital markets and household saving in the nordic countries household saving ratios in the nordic countries are very low by international standards and have declined markedly during the 1980s aggregate quarterly time series data for the period 1970 89 are used to study the development of household saving behavior over time the evidence suggests that the household saving ratio responds positively to both the inflation rate and real income growth there is also some weak evidence to support the view that the rate of change in real housing prices has a negative effect on household saving ratios copyright 1992 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

saving and capital market imperfections the italian experience italy s saving rate is high by international standards even when differences in growth are taken into account we argue that credit and insurance market imperfections provide a plausible explanation for the high italian saving rate we also reject the potential roles of the public sector informal financial arrangements bequests and the slope of the earnings profile as alternative explanations of the evidence

saving and liquidity constraints this paper is concerned with the theory of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow and with the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior the models presented in the paper seem to account for important aspects of reality that are not explained by traditional life cycle models copyright 1991 by the econometric society

gender specific starting point bias in choice experiments evidence from an empirical study abstract in this paper we test whether preferences and willingness to pay estimates obtained in a choice experiment study are susceptible to starting point bias as is often the case in dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies on the basis of a multinomial probit model we find that preferences are indeed susceptible to starting point bias in a split sample design our results suggest that varying the price levels displayed in a so called instructional choice set presented prior to the actual preference eliciting choice sets significantly impacts respondents preferences and willingness to pay for protecting danish nature areas from new motorway development in particular our results show that the bias is gender specific only female respondents are significantly affected results further reveal that the impact of the starting point bias decays as respondents evaluate more and more choice sets this supports the discovered preference hypothesis and on the basis of this we suggest a number of ways to potentially mitigate the starting point bias

trade liberalization and trade performance of environmental goods evidence from asia pacific economic cooperation members in this article we study the impact of trade liberalization including reductions in both tariff and nontariff trade barriers on environmental goods egs exports using bilateral trade data from 20 asia pacific economic cooperation members we find that tariff reduction in an exporting country has a larger positive impact on its exports of egs than tariff reduction in an importing country our results also show that a lower nontariff barrier in an importing country increases its imports of egs a considerable amount of heterogeneity also exists in subsample results based on countries income levels

willingness to accept local wind energy development does the compensation mechanism matter wind power development projects often include compensation for the affected communities but little is known about the efficacy of the alternative compensation mechanisms this study addresses this question by examining the relative potential of private and public compensation we conduct a choice experiment ce that investigates household preferences of compensation for the local siting of a hypothetical wind park households chose among different alternatives where each alternative was characterized by three varying attributes the number of turbines the level of private compensation and the level of public compensation results indicate the wind park imposes welfare losses to local residents and non local recreational users with about 35 of these losses corresponding to non use values findings show that households prefer public compensation to private compensation with household s willingness to accept being lower with public compensation than private compensation this finding suggests that estimates of local resistance to wind development depends on the compensation mechanism

policies to accelerate the growth of offshore wind energy sector in india abstract india s power generation capacity needs to be augmented to support the growing demands for electricity india which has predominantly used fossil fuels to power its generators need to make a switch to clean energy fuels but renewable sources form a miniscule portion 26 gw 12 of india s overall installed power capacity 210 gw there is no contribution from offshore wind farms to the energy basket for india as there is no policy framework to encourage the development of offshore wind farms several european countries have tapped the offshore wind energy potential to reduce their dependence on adopted by these countries to identify the core components 21 of them of robust policy intervention a detailed questionnaire was administered to 181 stakeholders of wind energy in india to seek their feedback on these building blocks these core components variables in research parlance are then subjected to factor analysis to understand the underlying structure of the variables the factor analysis logically reduces these 21 variables into five factors government support fiscal and quota based incentives availability of local expertise capital for investments and building an enabling r d ecosystem which are then fed into a logistic regression model as independent variables to predict the probability of growth of offshore wind energy dependent variable in the country the logistic regression model gives the weight the impact of these independent variables in influencing the growth of offshore wind energy in india it emerges that government support fiscal and quota based incentives and building an enabling r d ecosystem have a much higher impact on the growth of offshore wind energy for india this paper fills the gap of absence of an empirically tested framework on offshore wind energy policy for india

short and long run elasticities in us residential electricity demand a co integration approach abstract co integration techniques show promise in the analysis of short and long run effects of economic variables on energy use we use these techniques to develop an error correction model of annual us residential electricity demand we construct equipment stock indices and estimate the model for 1949 1993 our analysis suggests a structural shift in consumption during the 1960s we discuss reasons for this shift report the short and long run elasticities provide forecasts for 1994 1995 and compare the model s forecasts with other published forecasts

do hypothetical and actual marginal willingness to pay differ in choice experiments application to the valuation of the environment abstract in this paper we test the validity of choice experiments with donations for environmental projects in particular we test whether or not there are differences in preferences between a hypothetical and an actual choice experiment our experiments indicate no differences in addition internal tests of validity indicate transitive and stable preferences in both experiments although there are some indications of possible learning effects during the experiment

household savings and debts the experience of the nordic countries the paper discusses the development of savings and household debt in the nordic countries during the last two decades the main conclusion is that the timing of political reforms in the 1980s and 1990s was fundamental for the development of consumption and household savings in general financial deregulation took place before tax reforms and lifting of foreign exchange controls the wrong timing of these reforms resulted in households accumulating high debt burdens which in turn led to a deep and longer recession or process of debt deflation than might otherwise have occurred copyright 1994 by oxford university press

international differences in saving rates and the life cycle hypothesis a comment abstract in a recent paper john graham 1987 has argued that the life cycle approach performs rather well in accounting for intercountry differences in household saving rates so that the negative evidence sometimes reported is not warranted this comment presents pieces of evidence against this view some new evidence from a somewhat larger data set from the 1970s and 1980s casts considerable doubt on the ability of the conventional life cycle and demographic variables to explain intercountry differences in household saving rates graham s results though taken at face value are robust neither to data sample nor to time period

overview of the photovoltaic technology status and perspective in turkey abstract the republic of turkey located in southeastern europe and southwestern asia that portion of turkey west of the bosporus is geographically part of europe nowadays turkey with its young population and growing energy demand per person its fast growing urbanization and its economic development has been one of the fast growing electrical energy markets of the world for the last two decades unfortunately turkey s energy is largely dependent on foreign countries and the country s energy is imported spending billions of dollars each year on the other hand the effects on global and environmental air quality of pollutants released into the atmosphere from fossil fuels in electric power plants provide strong arguments for the development of renewable energy resources solar energy is one of the best available among renewable energy sources there are possess many advantages of solar energy such as relativity viability silent non polluting little maintenance suitable for remote site application not require any fuel and independent from electricity network turkey has advanced a great deal in the generation of electricity from solar energy because of much higher solar energy potential than lots of developed countries on solar energy applications this study is taken into account that overview of the photovoltaic technology status and perspective in turkey and the contains of photovoltaic power systems utilization and potential status in the world energy consumption and demand in turkey geographic description of the solar energy in turkey pv industry current and potential status in turkey solar energy legislation framework in turkey r d status of photovoltaic industry in turkey future strategy of pv industry in turkey current and future status photovoltaic power systems economics in the world also this paper on the basis of this subjects is analyzed the swot of turkey s photovoltaic industry its advantages weaknesses opportunities and threats

using cheap talk as a test of validity in choice experiments abstract in two experiments on the choice of consumer goods the estimated marginal willingness to pay for food is found to be lower in the survey version with cheap talk our test can be seen as a test of hypothetical bias this implies that we cannot reject the hypothesis of a hypothetical bias for marginal wtp in choice experiments

is more always better a survey on positional concerns abstract we use survey data to provide some empirical information about concerns regarding relative standing respondents chose between a world where they have more of a good than others and one where everyone s endowment of the good is higher but the respondent has less than others questions asked about education attractiveness and intelligence for one s child and oneself income vacation time approval and disapproval from a supervisor and papers to write half of the respondents preferred to have 50 less real income but high relative income concerns about position were strongest for attractiveness and supervisor s praise and weakest for vacation time

consumer benefits of labels and bans on gm foods choice experiments with swedish consumers the european union has been relatively cautious about using biotechnology in food production a label regime combined with the right of individual member states to ban introduction of new genetically modified gm strains means that gm food products in effect are banned in many countries we show how it is possible to empirically test whether a ban can be motivated by reference to potential negative externalities this is followed up by results from a choice experiment we cannot reject the hypothesis of equal wtp for a ban and a labeling scheme

in search of homo economicus behavioral experiments in 15 small scale societies we can summarize our results as follows first the canonical model is not supported in any society studied second there is considerably more behavioral variability across groups than had been found in previous cross cultural research and the canonical model fails in a wider variety of ways than in previous experiments third group level differences in economic organization and the degree of market integration explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation the greater the level of cooperation in experimental games fourth individual level economic and demographic variables do not explain behavior either within or across groups fifth behavior in the experiments is generally consistent with economic patterns of everyday life in these societies

end of pipe or cleaner production how to go green in presence of income inequality and pro environmental behavior in this paper we consider a vertically differentiated duopoly model in which a green producer competes with a brown rival in a market in which consumers are environmentally concerned in particular consumers are assumed to value not only the intrinsic quality of a certain product but also its environmental impact this environmental valuation has a positional content consumers attach a positive attribute to the green product while penalizing the brown one in this context we consider the choice of the green firm between cleaner and end of pipe abatement efforts we find that the interplay between the intensity of market competition consumers income disparity and environmental concern can play a crucial role in directing the green producer towards one or the other technological choice more precisely the adoption of cleaner production technologies can be discouraged by low average income and by tough competition while it can be spurred by the moral social incentive towards pro environmental behavior

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

measuring future grandparents preferences for equality and relative standing individuals aversion to risk and inequality and their concern for relative standing are measured through experimental choices between hypothetical societies it is found that on average individuals are both fairly inequality averse and have a strong concern for relative income the results are used to illustrate welfare consequences based on a utilitarian swf and a modified crra utility function it is shown that the social marginal utility of income may then become negative even at income levels that are far from extreme

subsidy programs on diffusion of solar water heaters taiwan s experience abstract financial incentives are essentially one of the key factors influencing diffusion of solar water heaters in many countries two subsidy programs were initiated by the government of taiwan in 1986 1986 1991 and 2000 2000 present respectively those long term national programs are considered to be the driving force on local market expansion in 2008 the regional subsidy programs for solar water heaters were announced by kaohsiung city and kiemen county which resulted in the growth in sales a revised subsidy was also initiated by the government of taiwan in 2009 the subsidy is 50 more however the tremendous enlargement of market size with a high level ratio of subsidy over total installation cost might result in a negative impact on a sustainable swh industry and long term development of the local market which is associated with system design and post installation service this paper aims to address the relative efficiency and pitfalls of those national and regional programs

endogenous imperfectly competitive business cycles abstract we investigate how imperfect competition affects the occurrence and the properties of endogenous rational expectations business cycles in an overlapping generations model with constant returns to scale in production the model has explicit product and labor markets all characterized by monopolistic competition an implicit assumption of barriers to entry justifies that the number of firms is fixed even when positive profits occur it turns out that both market power of firms on the product markets and market power of unions on the labor markets make the occurrence of cycles more likely in particular imperfect competition on the product markets and the positive profits associated with it may have the effect that there is a cycle even if the labor supply curve is increasing in the real wage rate for competitive cycles is required not only a decreasing labor supply curve but a wage elasticity below 1 2 at stationary equilibrium market power on the labor markets may have the effect that imperfectly competitive cycles are in accordance with certain empirical regularities some well known some reported in the paper concerning fluctuations in output and involuntary unemployment since involuntary unemployment does not occur under perfect competition such regularities are incompatible with competitive cycles

effects of cheap talk on consumer willingness to pay for golden rice a large body of literature suggests willingness to pay is overstated in hypothetical valuation questions as compared to when actual payment is required recently cheap talk has been proposed to eliminate the potential bias in hypothetical valuation questions cheap talk refers to process of explaining hypothetical bias to individuals prior to asking a valuation question this study explores the effect of cheap talk in a mass mail survey using a conventional value elicitation technique results indicate that cheap talk was effective at reducing willingness to pay for most survey participants however consistent with previous research cheap talk did not reduce willingness to pay for knowledgeable consumers

can conformity overcome the yuck factor explaining the choice for recycled drinking water abstract of the 17 sdgs the united nations has recently revealed that countries are not on track to receive the water and sanitation goals by the deadline as climatic events decrease the reliability of traditional drinking sources especially in cities recycled drinking water rdw is becoming an increasingly important policy option yet the implementation of rdw remains mired in difficulties with the psychological yuck factor as a key obstacle studies of successful cases of rdw implementation show that trust information and social norms are important however no studies of rdw have directly compared the relative importance of information to the power of social norms this paper explores the role of conformity as a social norm in increasing public acceptance of recycled water for drinking using a simple choice experiment we find that conformity per se appears to provide sufficient reason for behavioural change relating to recycled water rather than information or economic incentives this study is one of the first to present empirical evidence from a choice experiment on rdw and has practical implications on the use of conformity as motivation to taking difficult decisions

do fair trade and eco labels in coffee wake up the consumer conscience abstract in this study a face to face survey was conducted in order to reveal consumer preferences for ethical and environmentally sound labeling programs in coffee valuation questions regarding the fair trade shade grown and organic coffee labels were asked using a payment card format after consumers were previously informed about each of the labeling programs results suggest that consumers are very receptive toward both fair trade and shade grown coffee labels and consequently are willing to pay higher premiums for these labeling programs than for the organic coffee

housing and financial wealth financial deregulation and consumption the swedish case the effects of using wealth disaggregated as housing and net financial wealth are investigated in an error correction function model data for sweden 1970 92 are used in the analysis unit root tests indicate that consumption income and wealth are all integrated of order one and that the variables cointegrate if wealth is disaggregated financial wealth is crucial in explaining consumption and wealth in disaggregated form improves the models significantly household debt is an important determinant of short run behavior indicating credit rationing there is also evidence that the observed dramatic increase in savings is a consequence of the recent tax reform copyright 1995 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

testing viability of cross subsidy using time variant price elasticities of industrial demand for electricity indian experience abstract indian electric tariffs are characterized by very high rates for industrial and commercial classes to permit subsidized electric consumption by residential and agricultural customers we investigate the viability of this policy using monthly data for 1997 2003 on electric consumption by a few large industrial customers under the aegis of a small distribution company in the state of uttar pradesh for a given price cost ratio it can be shown that if the cross subsidizing class electricity demand is sufficiently elastic increasing the class rates fail to recover incremental cross subsidy necessary to support additional revenues for subsidized classes this suboptimality is tested by individually estimating time variant price elasticities of demand for these industrial customers using box cox and linear regressions we find that at least for some of these customers cross subsidy was suboptimal prior to as late as october 2001 when rates were changed following reforms

recreation demand models with taste differences over people we estimate random parameter logit models of anglers choice of fishing site the models generalize logit by allowing coefficients to vary randomly over anglers rather than being fixed the models do not exhibit the restrictive independence from irrelevant alternatives property of logit and can represent any substitution pattern estimation explicitly accounts for the fact that the variation in coefficients over anglers induces correlation in unobserved utility over trips by the same angler willingness to pay for improved fish stock and the value to anglers of specific sites are calculated from the models and compared with the estimates obtained from a standard logit model

the analysis on photovoltaic electricity generation status potential and policies of the leading countries in solar energy abstract energy which is the main agenda of our world is crucially important for the people many countries frequently held meetings and discussions with energy agenda these countries are working to balance the energy demand and supply for finding the solution are researched researches should be attempted to present a more efficient way to use energy as well as renewable energy resources effectively photovoltaic energy power systems take place as the most dominant source among renewable energy technologies the most important reason is that it is unlimited and clean energy of the solar power systems many studies show that photovoltaic power systems will have an important share in the electricity of the future in this study to generate electricity from solar energy using photovoltaic systems have a leading position in some european countries united states of america china and japan s current status and future policies will be analyzed in various comments were made

impacts of increasing renewable energy subsidies and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies in china abstract subsidies to fossil fuel consumption have made china s energy system fragile and unsustainable it is necessary for china to reform fossil fuel subsidies and reflect the resource cost and environmental cost in energy prices considering the life cycle external costs this paper estimates the scale of fossil fuel subsidy and the true cost of renewable energy in 2010 and evaluates impacts of increasing renewable energy subsidies and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies on macro economy and energy system in china based on scenario analysis simulation results show that the negative impacts on economic growth can be reduced from 4 460 to 0 432 if only 10 of fossil fuel subsidies were removed increasing subsidies for renewable energy has positive impacts on macroeconomic variables although the economic benefits per unit of subsidies for renewable energy are lower than those for fossil fuels by 0 06 0 19 cny the revenue gap can be narrowed by shifting more subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables increasing subsidies for renewable energy helps optimize china s energy system in three ways the first is making energy consumption structure cleaner the second is improving energy efficiency and the third is addressing the problem of imbalanced distribution and consumption of energy

competition in the swedish coffee market 1978 2002 abstract are multinationals exploiting their market power in national coffee markets by keeping consumer prices too high and thereby limiting demand for imports of coffee beans the purpose of this study is to address this issue by testing if there is market power in the swedish market for roasted coffee the market structure is typical of many consumer markets for coffee with four very large roasting companies two of which are multinationals plus many small ones to analyze the degree of market power an oligopoly model is estimated using market time series data the econometric approach is to first test for long run relationships between the variables with cointegration analysis and then to estimate a system of equations for demand and pricing behavior our key finding is that there is evidence of some market power in the short run but none in the long run

the demand for electricity in israel quarterly data for israel are used to compare and contrast three dynamic econometric methodologies for estimating the demand for electricity by households and industrial companies these are the dynamic regression model and two approaches to cointegration ols and maximum likelihood since we find evidence of seasonal unit roots in the data we also test for seasonal cointegration we find that the scale elasticities are similar in all three approaches but the ols price elasticities are considerably lower moreover ols suggests non cointegration the paper concludes by stochastically simulating the drms to calculate upside risk in electricity demand

subsidy policy and the enlargement of choice abstract development is the enlargement of people s choices optimal subsidy policy is intended to create the right incentives for each of the value chain participants this paper contends that the interest subsidy offered by the indian federal ministry of new and renewable energy for solar thermal systems through mainstream banking channels is superior in intent and outcome compared to the capital subsidy as currently offered for solar pv systems routed through government controlled delivery channels the interest subsidy enhances innovation improves service delivery and expands the range of product available to consumers enjoying a wide range of endowments thus leading to more inclusive development the simple monopoly model developed by atkinson atkinson ab capabilities exclusion and the supply of goods in basu k pattanaik p suzumura k editor choice welfare and development oxford university press 1995 is applied to the context of solar home systems to demonstrate price reduction and choice expansion in a liberalized market facilitated by an interest subsidy scheme