willingness of rural communities to adopt biogas systems in pakistan critical factors and policy implications abstract biogas is a methane rich gas that is produced by the anaerobic fermentation of organic material such as animal dung pakistan has the sixth largest livestock based economy in the world and thus demonstrates great potential for biogas production the government has already started the biogas support program bsp in a few selected areas of the country with that in mind this study was designed to determine a household s predicted willingness to adopt a biogas system in khyber pakhtunkhwa kp province the study is based on primary data collected from four districts peshawar nowshera charsadda and mardan data was collected from 200 livestock farming households selected through an equal allocation technique probit analysis was used to identify those factors influencing the willingness of a household to adopt a biogas system the results of the probit model reveal that the education level of the respondents total daily electric shortfall the effect of electric shortfall on childrens education and female drudgery and respondents awareness regarding the pros and cons of using biogas were statistically significant factors on the basis of p

aggregate demand for electricity in south africa an analysis using the bounds testing approach to cointegration abstract electricity demand in south africa has grown at a very rapid rate over the past decade as part of reform initiatives to enhance long term sustainability of the country s electricity industry south africa s authorities have in recent years sought to develop an electricity pricing framework that is cost reflective and forms the cornerstone of demand management schemes meant to foster changes in consumption behaviour and enhance efficiency in resource use the effects of any pricing policy on aggregate electricity consumption will depend on a useful understanding of the factors that influence electricity demand and the magnitude to which electricity demand responds to changes in such factors in this context this paper applies the bounds testing approach to cointegration within an autoregressive distributed lag framework to examine the aggregate demand for electricity in south africa during the period 1960 2007 the results indicate that in the long run income is the main determinant of electricity demand with electricity prices having an insignificant effect on aggregate electricity demand future pricing policies will need to ensure that electricity prices are cost reflective and enhance efficiency of electricity supply and use

the impact of biogas technology adoption for farm households empirical evidence from mixed crop and livestock farming systems in indonesia abstract this paper aims to study the impact of biogas technology adoption as a livestock waste technology to support mixed crop and livestock mcl farming among smallholder farmers in indonesia a cross sectional survey was conducted to collect data from 351 farm households 171 biogas adopters and 180 non adopters in the province of yogyakarta this study employed treatment effects analysis based on propensity score matching techniques to evaluate the impacts of biogas technology adoption among the farm households the results showed that the adoption of the biogas technology reduces firewood consumption of smallholder farm households in indonesia unfortunately the impact on the use of slurry for organic fertilizers and the use of gas liquid petroleum gas lpg as another household cooking energy could not be evaluated this study empirically showed that the benefits of the biogas technology had not yet been optimized at the household level which may partly explain the slow rate of biogas technology diffusion among farmers however the consumption reduction of firewood as a benefit of using biogas contributed to behavioral changes of the women in the households especially with respect to firewood collection and cooking activities

adoption of improved maize varieties in southern ethiopia factors and strategy options abstract this paper identifies factors that influence the decision behavior of farmers in southern ethiopia in adopting improved maize varieties by estimating a logistic regression data for this study came from 222 farmers interviewed as part of a national adoption survey conducted in three selected maize growing administrative zones of southern ethiopia in 1998 the paper also assesses the impact of pure and mixed strategy options on the probability of adoption of improved maize varieties through simulation under different scenarios as far as pure strategies are concerned the credit strategy is more powerful than the others in terms of raising the probability of adoption however results from the analysis of pure versus mixed strategies imply that mixed strategies are no necessarily much better than pure strategies

consumer renewable energy technology adoption decision making comparing models on perceived attributes and attitudinal constructs in the case of solar water heaters in lebanon climate change and environmental problems are of major concern to governments organisations and consumers this stresses the need for a transition towards clean renewable energy systems to enable the diffusion of cleaner energy technology it is not enough to just have supportive policies in place the challenge is to ensure that consumers adopt them this article integrates insights from different research traditions into a research model to analyse consumers adoption decision making behaviour the innovation diffusion model by rogers was used and hypotheses from environmental psychological models were later added a survey was conducted among householders to assess the adoption of solar heating systems in the metn neighbourhood in lebanon n 200 the results revealed that adopters and non adopters differ significantly according to socio demographic factors such as income and household size the study confirmed the significance of typical variables of the diffusion of innovation model such as relative advantage observability independent judgment making and novelty seeking even when testing integrative analytical models furthermore the results indicate that by integrating hypotheses from environmental psychology models to the diffusion of innovation model a reasonable fit was achieved which is higher than the value of each model tested separately the results can be of use to policy makers the article ends with suggestions for future research

energy consumption and economic growth revisited does the size of unrecorded economy matter abstract we analyze the long run relationship between energy consumption and real gross domestic product gdp in turkey taking into account the size of unrecorded economy since in developing countries mainly due to the unrecorded economic activities the official gdp is not measured correctly the investigation of the linkage between energy consumption and official gdp may not give reliable results in this study empirical results for the case of turkey over the period 1970 2005 suggest that there is a long run equilibrium relationship between the officially calculated gdp and energy consumption besides using the error correction modeling technique we find out that unidirectional causality runs from official gdp to energy in both short and long runs however when we take into account unrecorded economy we detect neither cointegration nor causality between energy consumption and true gdp these empirical findings imply that first energy conservation policies can be implemented in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without any adverse effect on the recorded economic activities second the production function in the unrecorded economy is not stable furthermore economic policies to combat unrecorded economy may not serve as a complement to energy conservation policies

biogas energy from family sized digesters in uganda critical factors and policy implications dependence on fossil energy sources is increasingly becoming unsustainable due to ecological and environmental problems and rapid depletion biogas energy could augment these conventional energy sources but despite its advantages and favourable conditions for its production biogas energy use in uganda remains low due to technical economic and socio cultural impediments based on primary data on households in central and eastern uganda and the use of logistic regression this study analyses factors affecting the adoption of biogas energy in uganda the empirical results suggest that the probability of a household adopting biogas technology increases with decreasing age of head of household increasing household income increasing number of cattle owned increasing household size male head of household and increasing cost of traditional fuels in contrast the likelihood of adoption decreases with increasing remoteness of household location and increasing household land area policy options and recommendations including educational and awareness campaigns on biogas benefits and successes the provision of financial and non financial incentives to households and establishment of an institutional framework could bolster wider biogas energy acceptance in uganda

energy consumption and gdp causality relationship in g 7 countries and emerging markets abstract the causality relationship between energy consumption and income is a well studied topic in energy economics this paper studies the time series properties of energy consumption and gdp and reexamines the causality relationship between the two series in the top 10 emerging markets excluding china due to lack of data and g 7 countries we discover bi directional causality in argentina causality running from gdp to energy consumption in italy and korea and from energy consumption to gdp in turkey france germany and japan hence energy conservation may harm economic growth in the last four countries

impact of government subsidies on household biogas use in rural china abstract in this paper we evaluate empirically the impact of biogas subsidies on household biogas energy use in rural china special attention was given to the problem of sample selection bias in assessing the impact of subsidies on biogas energy use because biogas subsidies often change the propensity for installing biogas digesters using data from a large scale household survey the results indicate that biogas subsidies did promote the construction of biogas digesters the results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in subsidy cost ratio would lead to a 3 increase in digester installations we also found that biogas subsidies correlated negatively with average time of digester use a 10 percentage point increase in the subsidy cost ratio would result in a 4 3 reduction in the average working time of digesters these results suggest that the net effect of the current subsidy policy on rural household biogas use was near negligible indeed a 10 percentage point increase in the subsidy cost ratio resulted in a mere 1 15 increase in biogas use these findings indicate that biogas subsidies have possibly not been targeted effectively at households that would actually prefer to use biogas energy

exploring the depth of energy penetration in economic advancement perspective of bangladesh abstract developing countries consume a tiny share of world commercial energy this tempts policymakers in developing countries to sort out ways to increase commercial energy demand so that their invaluable resources are best utilized country like bangladesh may fall in trap if quickly declining and immensely valuable energy is wasted in unsustainable growth this urges for better use of its scarce resources for sustainable growth in this paper we aim to identify how energy consumption in bangladesh is related to various growth indicators like national income financial development industrialization and urbanization in the long run in search of a right path for sustainable development in this study we try to assess the relationship among energy consumption financial development economic growth industrialization and urbanization from 1980 to 2010 a number of cointegration techniques are employed to examine whether there is a long run relationship besides these we also employed augmented granger causality test to examine the causality if presents this study finds that financial development economic growth industrialization and urbanization have positive impact on energy consumption in short run but industrialization has no impact in the long run our causality test ensures that the above mentioned variables granger cause energy consumption for sustainable growth industrialization should be given priority as future consumption of energy in industrial sector will be greater than any other sector this future demand can only be fulfilled by injecting more and more renewable energy through solar wind and other technology as nonrenewable energy are declining quickly

motives to adopt renewable electricity technologies evidence from sweden the diffusion of renewable electricity technologies rets has to speed up for countries to reach their often ambitious targets for renewable energy generation this requires a large number of actors including individuals companies and other organizations to adopt rets policies will most likely be needed to induce adoption but there is limited knowledge about what motivates ret adoption the purpose of this paper is to complement and expand the available empirical evidence regarding motives to adopt rets through a survey to over 600 ret adopters in sweden the main finding of the study is that there are many different motives to adopt rets and that ret adopters are a heterogeneous group with regard to motives although environmental concerns interest in the technology access to an re resource and prospects to generate economic revenues are important motives in general adopters differ with regard to how large importance they attach to the same motive and each adopter can also have several different motives to adopt there are also differences in motives between adopter categories especially independent power producers vs individuals and diversified companies and between rets especially wind power vs solar power this implies that a variety of policy instruments might be needed to induce further adoption of a variety of rets by a variety of adopter categories

the dynamics of natural gas consumption and gdp in bangladesh abstract reserves of natural gas in bangladesh are very large and total demand has increased secularly in recent years this paper examines the causal relationship between the consumption of natural gas and gdp in bangladesh over the period 1980 to 2010 we find that there is a positive unidirectional causality running from gdp to natural gas consumption movements in gdp affect the consumption of natural gas but not vice versa while our results rest on several statistical assumptions they support the pursuit of policies that are in line with energy conservation implementing these policies will be of particular significance in light of the fact that bangladesh s current reserves of natural gas will not meet its current level of consumption demand beyond the next two decades

soil fertility management and socio economic factors in crop livestock systems in burkina faso a case study of composting technology abstract the relation between technology adoption and farmers socio economic characteristics has increasingly been given attention in developing countries however most of the studies conducted by economists dealt with the adoption of external technologies here we test the determinants of compost adoption an alternative indigenous technology for soil fertility management the results of analysis of data from burkina faso using logit model strongly support the hypothesis that farmers socio economic characteristics and their agro ecological location significantly affect their adoption decisions there are two main conclusions of this study first the agro ecological location of farmers influence their decision to widely adopt compost technology second among farmers characteristics affecting compost adoption three groups can be distinguished the most important socio economic characteristics are farmers age their comparative perception on the yield effect of compost with regards to other fertilizers and their annual agricultural income a second group of characteristics include the institutional factors which are represented by the farmers participation in extension workshops a third group of factors comprises the farmer s labor force participating rate the number of ruminants owned and farmers gender

the electricity consumption versus economic growth of the polish economy abstract the aim of this contribution is an investigation of causal interdependences between electricity consumption and gdp in poland our research was conducted for total electricity consumption as well as for the industrial consumption of electricity in order to reflect the causality between gdp and electricity consumption properly we performed our investigations in a three dimensional framework with employment chosen as an additional variable we used reliable quarterly data from the period q1 2000 q4 2009 in order to check the stability of the causalities the investigations were performed on two samples a full sample and a pre crisis i e q1 2000 q3 2008 subsample we applied both traditional methods and some recently developed econometric tools we found feedback between total electricity consumption and gdp as well as between total electricity consumption and employment we also found unidirectional causality running from industrial electricity consumption to employment and no direct causal links between industrial electricity consumption and gdp in addition all these findings were in general not seriously affected by the financial and economic crises of 2008 a significant exception is the causal effect of industrial electricity consumption on employment which was more pronounced after the crisis of 2008

the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth abstract this paper employs the geweke decomposition test on pooled data of 109 developing and industrial countries from 1960 to 1994 to examine the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth the paper finds that 1 financial development generally leads to economic growth 2 the granger causality from financial development to economic growth and the granger causality from economic growth to financial development coexist 3 financial deepening contributes more to the causal relationships in the developing countries than in the industrial countries 4 the longer the sampling interval the larger the effect of financial development on economic growth 5 financial deepening propels economic growth through both a more rapid capital accumulation and productivity growth with the latter channel being the strongest

agricultural technology adoption and poverty reduction a propensity score matching analysis for rural bangladesh this study aims at shedding some light on the potential impact of agricultural technology adoption on poverty alleviation strategies it does so through an empirical investigation of the relationship between technological change of the green revolution type and wellbeing of smallholder farm households in two rural bangladeshi regions as technology adoption is not randomly assigned but there is self selection into treatment the paper tackles a methodological issue in assessing the causal effect of technology on farm household wellbeing through the non parametric p score matching analysis it pursues a targeted evaluation of whether adopting a modern seed technology causes resource poor farmers to improve their income and decrease the propensity to fall below the poverty line it finds a robust and positive effect of agricultural technology adoption on farm household wellbeing suggesting that there is a large scope for enhancing the role of agricultural technology in directly contributing to poverty alleviation 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

foreign direct investment and decoupling between energy and gross domestic product in developing countries on a sample of 20 developing countries we noticed a clear decline in the energy intensity as foreign direct investment increases the reason for that probably is the use of modern technologies that came with foreign direct investment i e a leapfrogging over the old fashioned traditional technologies in use in these countries

legal environment finance channels and investment the east african example abstract how do legal environments and finance affect investments by firms in the east african community property rights external and internal finance channels key conduits of the transmission mechanism from legal environment to investment individually and interactively affect firms decision to invest firms that perceive secure property rights are more likely to invest in fixed capital the interactions suggest governments in this community would do well to pursue investment growth policies that slant heavily towards financial markets deepening while not ignoring enhancement of legal infrastructures overall property rights external finance internal finance firm size and an export orientation are important determinants of the investment decision

examining carbon emissions economic growth nexus for india a multivariate cointegration approach abstract the study probes cointegration and causality between carbon emissions and economic growth for india using ardl bounds testing approach complemented by johansen juselius maximum likelihood procedure in a multivariate framework by incorporating energy supply investment and employment for time span 1971 2006 the study fails to establish long run equilibrium relationship and long term causality between carbon emissions and economic growth however there exists a bi directional short run causality between the two hence in the short run any effort to reduce carbon emissions could lead to a fall in the national income this study also establishes unidirectional short run causality running from economic growth to energy supply and energy supply to carbon emissions the absence of causality running from energy supply to economic growth implies that in india energy conservation and energy efficiency measures can be implemented to minimize the wastage of energy across value chain such measures would narrow energy demand supply gap absence of long run causality between carbon emissions and economic growth implies that in the long run focus should be given on harnessing energy from clean sources to curb carbon emissions which would not affect the country s economic growth

agriculture based energy for rural household income and well being east african experience abstract this paper discusses biogas production in east africa and the implications to household income and sustainable development a household model that links livestock biogas and crop production is analyzed a base model was compared with three scenarios with an increase in crop yield from the use of bioslurry the results demonstrated that investing in biogas plants only for energy replacement would not give farmers positive benefits at the current interest rates the combined effects of lower interest and increases in yield could encourage farmers investments in biogas plants that could lead to increases in household income and food security and reduction in deforestation in the region

dairy farming and biogas use in rungwe district south west tanzania a study of opportunities and constraints this study examined the opportunities and constraints of biogas use in rungwe district south west tanzania two hundred households with and without biogas facilities were selected randomly from four villages structured semi structured and open ended discussion was used to gather information findings show a number of opportunities for biogas technology adoption including large numbers of indoor fed cattle and inadequate firewood in the district which has increased its cost of such commodity households generally spend an average of tshs 20 656 50 per month or tshs 247 876 8 per annum for energy the demand for biogas 90 among respondents is high and the energy policy as well as donor community favour the promotion of energy efficient technologies such as biogas constraints encountered in establishing biogas plants were found to include unaffordability 75 and water scarcity also there is inadequate expertise where some of the biogas plants have been poorly constructed leading to ineffective performance there is also a small proportion of the respondents who admitted that they had heard nothing about biogas technology it is being suggested that credit should be available as well as developing affordable biodigestors communal biogas should be encouraged to reduce the cost per unit and the government should undertake the improvement of water services

the implementation of decentralised biogas plants in assam ne india the impact and effectiveness of the national biogas and manure management programme abstract the indian government s national biogas and manure management programme nbmmp seeks to deliver renewable energy services to households across the country by facilitating the deployment of family sized 3 anaerobic biogas digesters nbmmp policy is implemented at three levels from government and state nodal agency via private contractors to households creating multiple institutional arrangements we analysed the scheme in assam north east india focusing on how policy was implemented across two districts and interviewing stakeholders in rural households state and non state institutions the top down supply side approach to policy enables government to set targets and require individual states to deploy the scheme which benefits households who can afford to participate nbmmp delivered improved energy service outcomes to a majority of households although the level of knowledge and understanding of the technology amongst users was limited training and education of householders and particularly women is needed in relation to the maintenance of digesters feedstock suitability and the environmental and potential livelihood benefits of digestate a revised bottom up approach to policy which highlights the contextual and demand side issues around adopting the technology may deliver monetary benefits from market competition and enable development of community focused microfinance schemes to improve the affordability of biogas systems

renewable energy adoption in an ageing population heterogeneity in preferences for micro generation technology adoption abstract many countries are endeavouring to supply more of their energy from renewable resources such countries are also experiencing an aging population with a greater proportion of people aged 65 years this demographic shift may reduce the uptake of renewable energy if older person households are less inclined to accept change and adopt new technologies this paper assesses whether such households have different behavioural responses to energy efficiency compared to the rest of society and investigates whether micro generation renewable energy technologies are less likely to be adopted by these households it uses conditional logit and mixed logit models to investigate the impact of age of household on primary heating adoption and also to assess the impact of older households on the installation of discretionary micro generation technologies solar thermal solar voltaic and wind power to supplement existing heating and lighting systems results indicate that primary heating choice is not affected but that older person households are less inclined to adopt micro generation technologies

who adopts lpg as the main cooking fuel and why empirical evidence on ghana based on national survey the aim of this paper is to identify the factors that influence the probability of adopting lpg as the main cooking fuel in ghana using household level data gleaned from last two nationwide household surveys glss 5 glss 6 using a flexible semi parametric specification the following were uncovered first we find socioeconomic and demographic factors such as income education access to urban infrastructure and location of household as key drivers of households choice of lpg as main cooking energy source again the influences of these factors are stable across time and with a strong price effect the evidence shows that urban households with better socioeconomic and demographic factors are likely to adopt lpg as the main cooking fuel relative to households in rural areas and also urban households with poor socioeconomic and demographic factors finally we observe that the imposition of fully parametric structure functional form prior to estimation on factors such as age of household head income and household size as done in the literature is inappropriate at least in the case of ghana and tend to bias the marginal effects there is strong evidence of variations in the response rate of lpg adoption over the domains of income household size and the age of the household head the results suggest a policy dichotomy between rural and urban dwellers for it to be effective

biogas energy use in nigeria current status future prospects and policy implications abstract industrial revolution brought coal a fossil fuel to the forefront of the global energy scene this was later overtaken by another fossil fuel crude oil and natural gas is trying fast to take over the dominant role in the world energy supply mix the increasing world wide awareness and concern about the environmental impacts of fossil fuels coupled with the oil price shocks of the early 1970s and late 1980s and likely future price hikes have lent enormous weight to a switch to renewable energy sources this paper therefore looks at biogas renewable energy use in nigeria a country which is fossil fuels rich and an oil exporting nation in order to contain the uncertainty usually associated with structural transformation of the economy typical of a developing country like nigeria a three scenario analysis has been adopted to examine the future prospects of biogas in the country while a generated energy from biogas would range between 5 0 171 0 1012 j in the period 2000 2030 under a moderate ambitious biogas technology programme some constraints may hinder this realization these include economic technical and socio cultural constraints recommendations to overcome these constraints and make biogas technology penetrate even more than already projected into the rural communities and poor urban households have been suggested part of the envisaged benefits of biogas use to the national economy includes the avoidable co2 emissions if biogas displaces kerosene at least between 357 60 952 tons of co2 per annum would be avoided

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

the electricity consumption and gdp nexus for the fiji islands fiji is a small open island economy dependent on energy for its growth and development hence the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is crucial for fiji s development in this paper we investigate the nexus between electricity consumption and economic growth for fiji within a multivariate framework through including the labour force variable we use the bounds testing approach to cointegration and find that electricity consumption gdp and labour force are only cointegrated when gdp is the endogenous variable we use the granger causality f test and find that in the long run causality runs from electricity consumption and labour force to gdp implying that fiji is an energy dependent country and thus energy conservation policies will have an adverse effect on fiji s economic growth

farmers perceptions and adoption of new agricultural technology evidence from analysis in burkina faso and guinea west africa economists investigating consumer demand have accumulated considerable evidence showing that consumers generally have subjective preferences for characteristics of products and that their demand for products is significantly affected by their perceptions of the product s attributes however the role of farmers preferences in adoption decisions have received very limited attention in adoption studies conducted by economists this paper tests the hypothesis that farmers perceptions of technology characteristics significantly affect their adoption decisions the analysis conducted with tobit models of modern sorghum and rice varietal technologies in burkina faso and guinea respectively strongly supports this hypothesis our results provide a strong case for future adoption studies to expand the range of variables used away from the broad socio economic demographic and institutional factors to include farmers subjective perceptions of the characteristics of new agricultural technologies

modeling multiple adoption decisions in a joint framework a multinomial probit mnp model is applied to the modeling of adoption decisions by farmers facing multiple technologies which can be adopted in various combinations this model allows for full investigation of the interactions between decisions to adopt or not adopt several technologies estimation is carried out in a bayesian framework employing gibbs sampling to circumvent past difficulties encountered in maximum likelihood estimation of the mnp model the model is estimated for a sample of u s apple growers with four possible sustainable production technology bundles the results show that adoption decisions are most significantly influenced by off farm labor supply