renewable energy investment and job creation a cross sectoral assessment for the czech republic with reference to eu benchmarks the development of renewable energy sources has been primarily justified on the ground of environmental policies and energy security but new jobs opportunities and establishment of new economy sectors may be equally important co benefits from investments in this sector the main goal of this paper is to assess the employment benefits of investments in renewable energy in the czech republic we examine the level and rate of the development of the renewable energy sector in the czech republic in terms of green job creation for the period 2008 2013 in comparison to data from other eu countries including germany as a leading early investor in renewables whilst the deployment of renewable energy in the czech republic has succeeded to create a significant number of jobs more than 20 000 employees in 2010 our analysis illustrates a strong dependency of job creation on the continuation of financial incentives we also find that biomass and waste energy processing offer the highest employment per mwh which benefits employment in economically fragile rural areas we discuss the question of competitiveness of a country that was not amongst the early adopters of renewables arguing that the technical skills of the labour force in the czech republic provide a potential for more sustained investments in the sector

evaluating forecasts from setar models of exchange rates we consider the forecasting performance of two setar exchange rate models proposed by krager and kugler j int money fin 12 1993 195 assuming that the models are good approximations to the data generating process we show that whether the non linearities inherent in the data can be exploited to forecast better than a random walk depends on both how forecast accuracy is assessed and on the state of nature evaluation based on traditional measures such as root mean squared forecast errors may mask the superiority of the non linear models generalized impulse response functions are also calculated as a means of portraying the asymmetric response to shocks implied by such models

testing for nonlinear dependence in daily foreign exchange rates the purpose of this article is to investigate whether daily changes in five major foreign exchange rates contain any nonlinearities although the data contain no linear correlation evidence indicates the presence of substantial nonlinearity in a multiplicative rather than additive form further examination reveals that a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model can explain a large part of the nonlinearities for all five exchange rates copyright 1989 by the university of chicago

employment factors for wind and solar energy technologies a literature review abstract in this paper we present an up to date literature review on employment opportunities associated with the deployment of renewable energy technology we identified approximately 70 studies and data sources published over the past decade that report analysed or observed employment impacts of renewable energy growth these publications cover many different countries and several technology options and present widely varying results derived from distinct methodological approaches our first overall conclusion is that there is clear lack of authenticity of findings in this literature since recursive referencing abounds and relatively few studies yield truly original research when we omit non authentic analyses as well as those that aggregate results in a way that does not allow us to calculate employment factors defined as the number of jobs or amount of work generated per unit of electricity production capacity the total list of references is brought to 31 independent items of these only 14 references provide separate estimates of the employment factors for the stages of manufacturing and installation respectively as opposed to employment factors for these two activities combined a total of 23 items provide values for operation and maintenance o m employment factors we observe significant uncertainties in quoted figures for job creation both across and within publications

agro energy districts contributing to environmental and social sustainability in rural areas evaluation of a local public private partnership scheme in greece abstract the current economic downturn has put public budgets under pressure reducing investments and revenues for local stakeholders to cope among other things with contemporary demands of environmental protection local based partnerships may provide an efficient tool by adopting integrating and implementing actions based on awareness and participation of a set of different players this need is even more evident in rural areas in which a proposed decentralized bio energy production model established in agro energy districtscan provide incentive and create a comfortable ground for the development of an energy production plant based on a mixed public private partnership drawing on the implementation of a european co funded research project the paper presents the efforts being made to build a partnership at a local level in order to cover the lack of an institutional plan and public investment for handling biomass production our aim is not primarily to present the best technical solution to bio energy production but rather to illustrate the networking between different players the public consultation and the agreements being made under the form of public private partnerships as well as the levels of commitment and the risks taken the gist of this study is that despite the civic engagements the inconsistent administrative environment the dominance of the public sector and the state intervention through legislation and different political decisions makes it still difficult for local partnerships to exercise their power and turn from government to governance in order to cope with the environmental challenges and tackle inequalities faced in rural areas

assessing employment in renewable energy technologies a case study for wind power in brazil abstract environmental concerns and the search for climate change mitigation have led to the deployment of renewable energy technologies ret in several countries the adoption of incentive policies especially those based on heavy subsides has motivated the discussion of social and economic benefits brought about by these technologies mainly on the impact on employment rates in this context several studies have been conducted to quantify job creation by ret concluding that the latter are more labor intensive than traditional fossil fueled technologies however results for different assessments vary largely due to distinct methodological approaches and are frequently highly aggregated thus results are not comparable or applicable to other contexts previous studies have failed to quantify the effects of imports and exports of ret equipment in total employment usually associating employment and installed capacity in the year studied this study has aimed to address these issues creating an index for employment quantification based on production instead of installed capacity we have estimated both direct jobs in manufacture construction and operation and management and indirect jobs both in the upstream supply chains of materials and inputs to manufacture of wind turbines and construction of wind farms we have also performed an assessment of jobs created in wind energy projects which are expected to begin operation in brazil until 2017 the resulting job potential in brazil corresponds to13 5 persons year equivalent for each mw installed between manufacture and first year of operation of a wind power plant and 24 5 persons year equivalent over the wind farm lifetime results show that major contribution from wind power for job creation are in the construction stage and despite of the low amount of jobs created in operation and maintenance relative to new installed capacity those stable jobs stand out as they persist over the entire wind farm s life time

endogenous risk in a portfolio balance rational expectations model of the deutschemark dollar rate abstract a portfolio balance model of the dm s rate under rational expectations is specified in which systematic risk induced deviations from uncovered interest parity are allowed this leads to a reduced from containing a potentially time varying risk premium which we approximate and estimate using an arch in mean approach the maximum likelihood estimator and a lagrande multiplier test for arch in mean are developed the estimation results indicate a small but non negligible time varying risk premium

non linearities in foreign exchange markets a different perspective abstract in this paper we estimate self exciting threshold autoregression setar models for five currencies using weekly data over the last ten years the study is motivated by the conjecture that the system of managed floating which prevailed in the 1980s leads to different behavior of moderate and large exchange rate changes in all cases considered statistically significant threshold effects could be found in most cases these are in line with the a priori expected pattern however the application of the brock dechert scheinkman test to the setar residuals and an analysis of stability over time point to some misspecifications of the models similar results are obtained when the standard garch model is applied to our data jel f31

regional employment and economic growth effects of south africa s transition to low carbon energy supply mix abstract this paper examines the long run regional economic effects within south africa of changing the electricity generation mix towards less coal to do so a regional computable general equilibrium cge model of south africa is employed for the analysis the overall result stemmed from all scenarios suggest that the effect of a transition to an energy supply mix with smaller share of coal generation is sensitive to other economic and policy conditions in particular the reaction of the global coal market and hence south africa s coal exports under conditions in which surplus coal resulting from lower domestic demand cannot be readily exported the economies of coal producing regions in south africa such as the mpumalanga province are the most severely affected the subsequent migration of semi skilled labour from that province to others within the country require appropriate and timeous planning by energy policymakers and urban planners

valuing reduced morbidity a household production approach individuals frequently apply a household technology to combine public and private goods in the production of nonmarket commodities for final consumption hori 9 demonstrates that in these situations market prices of private goods together with production function parameters may encode enough information to value both public goods used as inputs and nonmarket final consumption commodities although this valuation methodology is objective and market based it seldom has been applied for three reasons first underlying technical relations either are unknown or data needed to estimate them are unavailable second even if relevant technical information is at hand the consumer s budget surface in commodity space may not be differentiable when joint production and other complicating factors are present as a consequence the commodity bundle chosen is consistent with an infinite number of marginal rates of substitution and values of public goods and nonmarket commodities remain unknown third joint production and nonconstant returns to scale also pose serious difficulties when taking the closely related valuation approach of estimating the area behind demand curves for private good inputs and final consumption commodities 2 this paper presents a unique application of the household production approach to valuing public goods and nonmarket commodities which allows for certain types of joint production and addresses key problems identified by previous authors technical relationships are estimated between health attributes private goods and air quality data used in the analysis are drawn from a special survey designed to implement the household production approach econometric estimates allow for censored dependent variables and cross equation error correlations in panel data using tobit models with individual specific variance components key results are 1 attempts

a monte carlo study of the forecasting performance of empirical setar models in this paper we investigate the multi period forecast performance of a number of empirical selfexciting threshold autoregressive setar models that have been proposed in the literature for modelling exchange rates and gnp amongst other variables we take each of the empirical setar models in turn as the dgp to ensure that the non linearity characterises the future and compare the forecast performance of setar and linear autoregressive models on a number of quantitative and qualitative criteria our results indicate that non linear models have an edge in certain states of nature but not in others and that this can be highlighted by evaluating forecasts conditional upon the regime

a setar model for canadian gdp non linearities and forecast comparisons this paper investigates the forecasting performance of the non linear time series setar model by using canadian gdp data from 1965 to 2000 besides the within sample fit the forecasting performance of a standard linear arima model for the same sample has also been generated for comparative purposes two forecasting methods one step ahead and multi step ahead forecasting are compared for each type of model

non hbox co _2 co 2 generating energy shares in the world cross country differences and polarization the aim of this paper is to examine the spatial distribution of non hbox co 2 generating energy sources in the world for the period 1990 2009 paying special attention to the evolution of cross country disparities to this end after carrying out a classical convergence analysis a more thorough investigation of the entire distribution is presented by examining its external shape the intra distribution dynamics and the long run equilibrium distribution this analysis reveals the existence of a weak rather insignificant convergence process and that large cross country differences are likely to persist in the long run next as polarization indicators are a proper way of appraising potential conflict in international environmental negotiations we test whether or not the distribution dynamics concurs with the presence of polarization our results indicate that two poles can be clearly differentiated one with high and other with low non hbox co 2 generating energy shares in view of these findings and to ensure a fair transition to a sustainable energy system the paper calls for the development of an ambitious clean energy agenda especially in countries with low non hbox co 2 generating energy shares

the impact of clean energy investments on the greek economy an input output analysis 2010 2020 the aim of this paper is twofold first to calculate the green energy investments by industrial sector that greece would need in order to satisfy a number of energy and environmental targets adopted in the context of the european commission s energy and climate change package and second to calculate the macro economic impacts of these green investments on production and employment in the greek economy to this end the input output analysis has been exploited for estimating the direct indirect and induced macroeconomic effects associated with the implementation of selected energy conservation measures the promotion of renewable energy technologies etc our findings show that the required investments would reach the amount of 47 9 billion over the period 2010 2020 these investments will result in an average annual increase of the national product by 9 4 billion creating simultaneously 108 000 full time equivalent jobs for the entire period under consideration the employment generated per 1 million investment is relatively higher in energy saving projects in buildings and transport in comparison with the development of res in power generation sector

employment creation potential of renewable power generation technologies a life cycle approach abstract the present study analyses the employment characteristics of nine different renewable power generation technologies two types of solar photovoltaic wind small scale hydro geothermal wood biomass and three types of biogas the analysis uses a renewable energy focused input output model that the authors developed to analyse life cycle environmental and socio economic impacts of renewable power generation technologies and policies the analysis reveals that there are distinctive differences among the nine technologies impacts on employment the total employment creation potential over the life cycle is estimated to be in the range of 1 04 5 04 person years per gwh furthermore the nine technologies have unique features regarding how many and what kinds of jobs are created across the whole life cycle the introduction of these technologies into an economy directly and indirectly induces jobs in different industrial sectors reflecting their technological characteristics on the other hand the nine different technologies have a common employment effect in that they create relatively high employment opportunities in the service sectors such as wholesale trade non life insurance and judicial financial and accounting services the present study reveals quantitative employment characteristics of the different types of renewable power generation technology to provide valuable information for renewable energy policy making

forecasting job creation from renewable energy deployment through a value chain approach abstract this paper introduces a new approach to the study of the socioeconomic impact of renewable technologies through the analysis of the reinforcing effects of the expansion of this industry and the specific characteristics of the employment along the value chain the method proposed is based on the collection critical analysis and presentation of the results obtained using primary information sources the model design includes contributions extracted from a prior analysis of the existing assessment methods to lessen the uncertainty of the job ratios often used in these types of analysis one factor to be taken into account is the high degree of development in the sector and above all the maturity of the technology considered from the point of view of the industry fabric the economy of scale and technological development actually influences the human resources needs sometimes increasing the demand for professionals within the scope of r d and sometimes reducing jobs in the manufacturing industry which is gradually applying processes with a greater degree of automation the influence of these experience curves is different for every single stage of the value chain trade balance of technologies is also crucial for local employment generation an analytical model was developed based on the above assumptions and applied to the spanish pv industry this industry has been playing a leading role in the expansion of renewable energy and offers a high potential towards the short term development of the smart grids in this country this model represents very well the history of the spanish pv industry reflected through the evolution of the jobs and is shown to be the foundation of a methodology for prospective studies in the social and economic impacts of renewables

long memory in foreign exchange rates using the geweke porter hudak test we find evidence of long memory in exchange rate data this implies that the empirical evidence of unit roots in exchange rates may not be robust to long memory alternatives fractionally integrated autoregressive moving average arfima models are estimated by both the time domain exact maximum likelihood ml method and the frequency domain approximate ml method impulse response functions and forecasts based on these estimated arfima models are evaluated to gain insight into the long memory characteristics of exchange rates some tentative explanations of the long memory found in the exchange rates are discussed

a nonlinear stochastic rational expectations model of exchange rates abstract this paper constructs an example of a nonlinear stochastic rational expectations exchange rate with an explicit solution which is consistent with nonlinearities in short term movements in exchange rates the model consists of risk neutral agents who know the intervention rule of the central bank the resulting exchange rate switches between two linear stochastic processes one when intervention is present and another when intervention is absent nonlinearity enters through the probability of intervention which is time varying and depends on past outcomes this model is consistent with the empirical observations that the rate of change of the exchange rate has little autocorrelation but it exhibits strong nonlinear dependence and its variance changes over time jel j31 g15

economic effects of renewable energy expansion a model based analysis for germany abstract the increasing utilization of renewable energy sources res is a major energy policy strategy in many countries worldwide germany is a forerunner in the deployment of res and has ambitious goals for the future the support and use of renewables affects the economy it creates business opportunities in sectors producing renewable energy facilities but comes with costs related to supporting its deployment this paper analyses and quantifies the net balance of economic effects associated with renewable energy deployment in germany until 2030 to this end we use a novel model the sectoral energy economic econometric model this is an econometric multi country model which for germany contains a detailed representation of industries including 14 renewable energy technology sectors our results show that renewable energy expansion can be achieved without compromising growth or employment the analysis reveals a positive net effect on economic growth in germany net employment effects are small but also positive their size depends strongly on labour market conditions and policies results at the industry level indicate the size and direction of the need for restructuring across the sectors of the germany economy

distributional employment impacts of renewable and new energy a case study of china abstract the main goal of this paper is to argue for the necessity and significance of studying the distributional employment impacts of renewable and new energy development rne based on the comprehensive review of the methodology and conclusions of existing literatures this paper builds up an extended input output model to study rne s distributional employment impacts on gender and personnel structure the case study of china s power sector in this paper affirmed earlier doubts that rne development will indeed aggravate the gender inequality problem and add to the level of mismatch between the structure of labor demand and supply causing structural unemployment problems the quantitative analysis in this paper outlined here implies that from 2011 to 2020 the development of rne will bring about 7 million employment gains but only 81 8 of which can be realized due to the mismatch problem the study of china may alert other countries to be less optimistic about rne s employment impacts and reaffirm the need to carry out the distributional employment impacts analysis this paper concludes with policy suggestions such as providing suitable training and equal promotion opportunities for women offering courses and vocational trainings to rne related majors in order to reduce the structural unemployment problem and further speed up the development of rne

employment and environmental protection one of the most pressing problems in an economy intransition is that of unemployment hitherto the costs of this unemployment have either focused onthe value of the lost production or on the costs tothe government of supporting the unemployed from asocial viewpoint this is inappropriate in this paper we discuss the costs of unemployment in terms of theirimpacts on human welfare particularly the healtheffects on the positive side as inefficient industries areshut down and as production responds to marketpressures wasteful government subsidies are reduced as is the level of environmental pollution clearly therefore there is a trade off between theenvironmental and economic benefits on the one handand the welfare costs of unemployment on the other in this paper a simple model is developed to analyzethis trade off a single firm has a short runproduction function in which output is dependent onthe level of employment the present position ischaracterized by inefficiency in that the firm ismaking a loss and overproduction is taking place environmental damage is a function of the level ofoutput the efficient production point is known asare the efficiency prices the problem to be solved is to minimize the costs ofmoving to the efficient point the papercharacterizes the efficient dynamic path and givessome illustrations of such a path for the coal sectorin russia for given values of the efficiency losses the environmental costs of using coal and the costs ofunemployment

potential for renewable energy jobs in the middle east abstract based on employment factors derived from a recent review of publications investigating opportunities for work associated with the diffusion of renewable energy technology we here present an analysis of the potential for renewable energy jobs in the middle east we use energy system optimisation results from the regionally disaggregated tiam ecn model as input to our study this integrated assessment model is utilised to inspect the energy technology requirements for meeting a stringent global climate policy that achieves a stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere with a maximum additional radiative forcing of 2 9 w m 2 this climate control target implies a massive deployment of renewable energy in the middle east with wind and solar power accounting for approximately 60 of total electricity supply in 2050 900 twh of an overall level of 1525 twh would be generated from 210 gw of installed renewable energy capacity by the middle of the century for this pervasive renewables diffusion scenario for the middle east we estimate a total required local work force of ultimately about 155 000 direct and 115 000 indirect jobs based on assumptions regarding which components of the respective wind and solar energy technologies can be manufactured in the region itself all jobs generated through installation and o m activities are assumed to be domestic

renewable energy and employment in germany abstract the positive impacts of an increasing share of renewable energy on the mitigation of climate change as well as on the decrease of the dependency of energy imports are indisputable however one persistent problem for the german economy has been its high level of unemployment in the recent past therefore any policy strategy will be measured also by its net impact on the labor market the paper describes the results of a study that models this impact and is novel within three respects firstly an input output vector for the renewable energy sector was developed based on the results of more than 1000 interviews with an extensive questionnaire secondly gross and net effect of two different policy scenarios for germany until 2030 were calculated and thirdly the approach varies from earlier studies by its explicit modeling of export and foreign trade effects

an in depth economic restructuring framework by using particle swarm optimization abstract the aim of this paper is the development of an integrated framework based on environmental input output analysis for optimizing the economic structure of an economy the restructuring process is approached as a constraint optimization problem where the optimized variables are the elements of the matrix of domestic technical coefficients a method for determining the optimal level of the productive linkages of an economy in order to maximize its output with the minimal greenhouse gas emissions the possible is suggested the proposed methodology is able to join both environmental and economic policy targets in the form of predefined constraints the objective function which is going to be minimized expresses the greenhouse gas emissions ghg intensity or ghg emissions per unit of output a particle swarm algorithm is employed for the solution of the optimization problem an illustrative application to the greek economy was carried out the experimental results revealed that if the greek economy will apply policies for boosting the sectors of high and medium high r d intensity then the greenhouse gas emission per unit of gross domestic product of greece would be reduced furthermore the promotion of high and medium high r d intensity sectors is connected with an important improvement of the production linkages to a wide range of sectors highlighting the important spillover effect of the suggested restructuring process

quantification and monetization of employment benefits associated with renewable energy technologies in greece abstract this paper formulates and implements an integrated approach for estimating the employment benefits associated with the exploitation of renewable energy sources res in the power sector it builds up on well known techniques and makes all the necessary modifications in order to take into account the specific conditions of the res market more specific the proposed approach exploits the input output methodology for estimating the direct indirect and induced employment effects associated with the energy technologies in question and the opportunity cost of labour approach for expressing these effects in monetary terms this framework has been implemented to estimate the employment benefits resulting from the development of different res technologies in greece taking into account both the construction and operation phases of the relative projects the results of the analysis clearly show that the exploitation of res in the greek power sector presents significant employment benefits which are at the same order of magnitude or in several cases even higher compared to the corresponding benefits attributed to the operation of fossil fueled power plants e g lignite and natural gas therefore the fulfillment of the national target for increasing the penetration of res into the greek power sector from approximately 12 today to 40 in 2020 will contribute apart from the significant environmental improvements to the overall economic development and the increase of the employment

the evolution of green jobs in scotland a hybrid approach in support of its ambitious target to reduce co2 emissions the scottish government is aiming to have the equivalent of 100 of scottish electricity consumption generated from renewable sources by 2020 this is at least in part motivated by an expectation of subsequent employment growth in low carbon and renewable energy technologies however there is no official data source to track employment in these areas this has led to a variety of definitions methodologies and alternative estimates being produced building on a recent study bishop and brand 2013 we develop a hybrid approach which combines the detail of bottom up surveys with top down trend data to produce estimates on employment in low carbon environmental goods and services lcegs we demonstrate this methodology to produce estimates for such employment in scotland between 2004 and 2012 our approach shows how survey and official sources can combine to produce a more timely measure of employment in lcegs activities assisting policymakers in tracking consistently developments applying our approach we find that over this period employment in lcegs in scotland grew but that this was more volatile than aggregate employment and in particular that employment in this sector was particularly badly hit during the great recession

the long term effect of renewable electricity on employment in the united kingdom abstract assessment of the employment impact of renewable electricity technologies is generally implemented through either complex and data intensive methods such as computable general equilibrium models or simplistic approaches normally focused on specific energy generation technologies such as employment factors in contrast this article proposes a transparent and easily reproducible econometric methodology based on the vector error correction model that uses aggregated and widely available data the model is applied to the power generation sector in the united kingdom using annual data from 1990 onwards and provides evidence that the long term employment impact of renewable technologies is much higher than the impact arising from deploying nuclear or natural gas technologies the impulse response function analysis indicates that a permanent 1 gigawatt hours increase in annual electricity supply generated by renewable technologies creates 3 5 jobs in the long term period finally this study derives the implications of the findings in the context of decarbonisation scenarios for the power sector in the united kingdom and assesses the extent to which decarbonisation pathways based on renewable electricity contribute to stimulating employment in the generation sector