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

sustainable consumption within a sustainable economy beyond green growth and green economies abstract in 1992 one unambiguous result of the unced conference was the need for changing consumption and production patterns with affluent countries taking the lead 20 years later at the 2012 uncsd little is left over and instead the green economy has been the theme pursued by the oecd the eu and other countries so the question needs to be answered if this is finally an attempt to put into practice what was promised 20 years ago or another diversion from what needs to be accomplished sustainable development is still a convincing concept if the original definition is taken avoiding the confusion caused by partisan interests reinterpreting the concept focussing on human needs fulfilment and respecting environmental limits it can still guide strong sustainable consumption green economy green growth on the other hand is a new terminology for what is known since 40 years as ecological modernisation it is indeed overdue but with its focus on efficiency and innovation it cannot guarantee to fulfil the brundtland sustainability criteria a factor analysis based on the i p a t formula demonstrates how optimistic the assumptions regarding future technologies must be to support the green growth concept consequently the authors pledge for a pragmatic risk avoiding approach by slimming the physical size of the economy this requires strong sustainable consumption including production as resource consumption which in turn requires a change of the societies institutional settings formal and informal mechanisms and orientations finally some elements of a strategy towards this end are pointed out with special emphasis on the role of non governmental organisations ngos through networking and advocacy they can both stimulate bottom up action and mobilise the pressure necessary for the institutional changes which are needed to mainstream strong sustainable consumption

multi criteria revision of the hungarian renewable energy utilization action plan review of the aspect of economy abstract in 2012 the hungarian government has decided to revise the country s national renewable action plan mostly due to the experienced changes of the economic environment and the continuously decreasing cost of renewable energy technologies present paper introduces the methodology and the most important results of this revision process carried out by the centre for energy research of the hungarian academy of sciences first the results of hungarian initiatives aiming the increase of the share of renewable were examined then by analysis of technological and economic trends of recent years new scenarios were set to reach the targets set by adopting the 2009 28 ec directive 1 a multiple criteria decision analysis mcda of all potential renewable technologies and their respective fuels served as a basis for the most competitive scenarios the authors focused on five aspects economy environment climate job creation and innovation due to coverage constraints present paper dominantly focuses on the review of the economical aspect but in addition to those mentioned further aspects may also be considered in the optimisation process the results of the revision highlight that by 2020 hungary will still mostly be using bioenergy in its renewable portfolio which also allows the country to exploit its significant potential

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

real exchange rate volatility and the price of nontradable goods in economies prone to sudden stops the dominant view in the empirical literature on exchange rates is that the high variability of real exchange rates is due to movements in exchange rate adjusted prices of tradable goods this paper shows that this dominant view does not hold in mexican data for the periods in which the country had managed exchange rate regimes variance analysis of a 30 year sample of monthly data shows that movements in the price of nontradables relative to tradables account for up to 70 percent of the variability of the real exchange rate during these periods the paper proposes a model in which this stylized fact and the sudden stops that accompanied the collapse of mexico s managed exchange rates could result from an endogenous amplification mechanism operating via nontradables prices in economies with dollarized liabilities and credit constraints the key feature of this mechanism is irving fisher s debt deflation process numerical evaluation suggests that the fisherian deflation effects on consumption the current account and relative prices dwarf those induced by the standard balance sheet effect typical of the sudden stops literature

energy investment economic growth and carbon emissions in china empirical analysis based on spatial durbin model abstract the international community has reached a consensus on preventing the global climate from deterioration by stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere energy industry is a key field for greenhouse gas emission and investment in the energy industry plays a crucial part in promoting the low carbon development of china s energy industry energy investment can effectively break the high carbon lock in effect of energy industry and achieve the low carbon development of energy industry by guiding regulating and gathering social funds into the field of cleaner production and the field of low carbon technology based on the unified framework of energy economy and environment this article takes 30 provinces in china as the research object and constructs a spatial econometric model to investigate the impact of energy investment and economic growth on carbon emission reduction the results indicate that both energy investment and economic growth are responsible for the increase of china s provincial co2 emissions but their driving mechanisms are significantly different furthermore the increase of carbon emissions in adjacent provinces will bring about the increase of local carbon emissions through spatial spillover effects based on these findings the corresponding countermeasures and policy suggestions are put forward

willingness to pay for land preservation across states and jurisdictional scale implications for benefit transfer in stated preference valuation of farmland preservation respondents are often told that preservation will occur within various jurisdictional scales that is community or state but are not told the specific location of parcels the resultant availability of welfare estimates for different scales and regions provides numerous avenues for benefit transfer this paper provides a systematic assessment of transfer error contrasting different methods for the transfer of farmland preservation values across states and jurisdictional scales results drawn from multistate choice experiments suggest that the choice of across scale versus across state transfer method can have significant implications for transfer validity

effects of renewable energy sector development on electricity consumption growth nexus in the european union abstract the aim of this study is to assess the effect of renewable energy sector development on the relationships between electricity consumption and economic growth in the european union countries in the period between 1995 and 2015 a panel vector autoregressive model is used for testing granger causality and estimating impulse response functions the results indicate that the relationships between economic growth and electricity consumption depend on the level of renewable energy sector development the greater the share of the renewable energy sector in the economy is the more noticeable the mutual dependence between the economic growth and renewable electricity consumption is in countries with relatively well developed renewable energy sectors renewable electricity consumption boosts the economy and vice versa in the remaining countries economic growth and electricity consumption are independent empirical findings suggest that policymakers should develop strategies to implement clean energy policy aimed at stimulating the development of the renewable energy sector to support economic growth

are green hopes too rosy employment and welfare impacts of renewable energy promotion in view of pressing unemployment problems policy makers across all parties jump on the prospects of renewable energy promotion as a job creation engine which can boost economic well being our analytical model shows that initial labor market rigidities in theory provide some scope for such a double dividend however the practical outcome of renewable energy promotion might be sobering our computable general equilibrium analysis of subsidized electricity production from renewable energy sources res e in germany suggests that the prospects for employment and welfare gains are quite limited and hinge crucially on the level of the subsidy rate and the financing mechanism if res e subsidies are financed by labor taxes welfare and employment effects are strictly negative for a broad range of subsidy rates the use of an electricity tax to fund res e subsidies generates minor benefits for small subsidy rates but these benefits quickly turn into significant losses as the subsidy rate exceeds some threshold value

the choice theory approach to market research this paper surveys economic choice theory stressing developments that permit use of data from psychometric and conjoint experiments to produce market demand forecasts alternatives to the widely used multinomial logit model are summarized and a new method for estimating multinomial probits is described an integration of choice models with attitudinal scaling and perceptual mapping within a latent variable system is described estimation of such systems under either random effects or fixed effects descriptions of heterogeneity across individuals is discussed issues in the use of choice models to describe responses from conjoint experiments are presented new regression diagnostic tests for the consistency of multinomial logit representations are discussed

how reliable are meta analyses for international benefit transfers meta analysis has increasingly been used to synthesise the environmental valuation literature but only a few test the use of these analyses for benefit transfer these are typically based on national studies only however meta analyses of valuation studies across countries are a potentially powerful tool for benefit transfer especially for environmental goods where the domestic literature is scarce we test the reliability of such international meta analytic transfers and find that even under conditions of homogeneity in valuation methods cultural and institutional conditions across countries and a meta analysis with large explanatory power the transfer errors could still be large further international meta analytic transfers do not on average perform better than simple value transfers averaging over domestic studies thus we question whether the use of meta analysis for practical benefit transfer achieves reliability gains justifying the increased effort however more meta analytic benefit transfer tests should be performed for other environmental goods and other countries before discarding international meta analysis as a tool for benefit transfer

testing choice experiment for benefit transfer with preference heterogeneity benefit transfer is a cost effective method for estimating the value of environmental goods that relies on information obtained in previous studies the multiattribute approach of choice experiments should provide advantages in terms of benefit transfer allowing differences in environmental improvements between sites as well as differences in socioeconomic and attitude characteristics between respondent populations this article investigates the capability of choice experiment method to be used in environmental benefit transfer when a random parameters approach is used to allow for preference heterogeneity we find that the inclusion of respondents taste heterogeneity reduces the magnitude of the transfer error

context sensitive benefit transfer using stated choice models specification and convergent validity for policy analysis benefit transfer has been an important practical policy tool appealing to government agencies especially when time or budget is constrained however the literature fails to support convergent validity of benefit transfer using the stated preference method this empirical study conducts four convergent validity assessments of benefit transfer using the choice modeling method and data from rhode island and massachusetts regarding coastal land management the comparisons evaluate how individual characteristics improve benefit transfer and yield insights relevant to research specifications to produce studies adaptable for transfer applications empirical tests show benefit transfer using choice modeling may be acceptable and even empirically valid depending on the policy objectives and the context

reducing barriers in future benefit transfers needed improvements in primary study design and reporting abstract original research provides many social benefits including additions to our stock of knowledge benefit transfer is a formal process whereby our stock of knowledge rather than original research is used to inform decisions any shortcoming in this stock directly affects our ability to conduct valid and reliable benefit transfers this paper discusses three general criteria that are necessary for valid benefit transfers and how original research designs and reporting of results unnecessarily constrain the potential of benefit transfers we make several suggestions regarding how original research through improved design and reporting might increase the validity and reliability of benefit transfers we also recommend that repositories for original research surveys and data be developed to insure long term availability of study information

transferring environmental value estimates issues and alternatives abstract environmental value transfer needs to be understood in the context of scientific information use in general this provides a different perspective upon the reasons why benefit transfer in particular appears so controversial and raises concerns over the limited types of validity testing being undertaken by those supporting such applications as ecosystem services valuation another key issue which we emphasise is the unintentional challenge to standard economic theory raised by the models used to conduct value transfers existing value transfer practice reveals the need for a more inclusive approach if environmental values are to be addressed we argue that there are robust alternative means for including multiple environmental values in decision processes these cannot be dismissed out of hand and analysts should be expanding their understanding of the available approaches which include attitude and norm measures multi criteria analysis and participatory deliberative institutions

the challenges of determining the employment effects of renewable energy abstract the benefits of promoting renewable energy are regularly claimed to be energy security climate change mitigation and job creation while the first two benefits are generally accepted the impact of renewable energy on employment is still disputed this paper presents a discussion of the various factors that influence the analysis of renewable energy and its impact on employment the advantages and disadvantages of input output methods and analysis methods are discussed as well as the issues surrounding the measurement of job creation a critical evaluation of the literature reveals factors that should be considered when completing a study about renewable energy and employment labour intensity of renewables cost increases and availability of investments counting job losses job quality and skills model assumptions and sources of information analytical studies using extensive surveys were found to be more appropriate for regional studies while input output methods were better suited to national and international studies

the social efficiency of instruments of promotion of renewable energies a transaction cost perspective this paper compares the social efficiency of the regulatory instruments used to promote renewable energy sources in electricity generation taking into consideration their role in promoting the preservation of collective goods they are based on a purchase obligation and act either by price feed in tariffs or by quantity bidding for new res e capacities res e quotas from the public economics perspective the two instruments are distinct in terms of cost efficacy and market incentives in a world of imperfect information exchangeable quotas of green certificates are preferred because this instrument allows better control over consumer costs and whilst retaining market incentives transaction cost economics tce contributes to the assessment of these instruments by introducing res e investment safeguard as a major determinant of social efficiency and the instruments conformity to its institutional environment as a determinant of its viability in light of this additional consideration the arrangements between res e producers and obligated buyers inherent in each instrument are in fact quite similar either long term contracting or vertical integration we compare and assess res e price and quantity instruments on several dimensions from both the public economics and tce perspectives control of the cost for consumers safeguards of res e investments adaptability of the instrument in order to preserve its stability in the long run market incentive intensity and conformity with the new market regime of electricity industry it shows neither instruments offer an optimal solution in each of these dimensions the government will thus select an instrument in accordance with the relative importance of its objectives c 2006 elsevier b v all rights reserved

choice modeling and tests of benefit transfer choice modelling cm is a stated preference technique that is increasingly being used to generate estimates of non market values in cm applications respondents to a survey are presented with several sets of options which contain common attributes but at varying levels and are asked to select their preferred alternative from each set the information provided by respondents choices is used to estimate marginal rates of substitution and hence estimates of value in this paper the results from three separate cm applications are presented estimates are made of the value of improving the quality of wetlands the first two applications focused on the gwydir wetlands in new south wales australia one survey was conducted in sydney a major urban centre and the second was conducted in moree a rural centre close to the gwydir wetlands the third survey which was also conducted in sydney focused on the macquarie marshes another wetland in new south wales an objective of the study was to test the suitability of using cm derived estimates for benefit transfer both across different populations and across different wetlands cm is potentially suited to benefit transfer because it is possible to allow for differences in environmental improvements between sites as well as differences in socio economic characteristics between respondent populations several tests aimed at determining the validity of transfers using cm across sites and populations are presented these include tests of the equality of models implicit prices and estimates of compensating surplus

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

evaluating the performance of benefit transfer an empirical inquiry abstract benefit transfers are used by public agencies needing information on costs and benefits of policy decisions although scientific debate regarding the validity of benefit transfer is ongoing this article develops a methodology to evaluate the performance of direct benefit transfer and benefit function transfer and applies the methodology to two pairs of similar non market amenities empirical results indicate that benefit function transfer is more robust than transfer of average site benefits our results suggest that the circumstances under which benefit function transfer provides valid policy relevant information may be limited and that errors from applying benefit transfer can be quite large even across seemingly similar amenities

the expansion of renewable energies and employment effects in germany the promotion of electricity produced from renewable energy is a high priority of the european union as well of its member states the german government wants to increase the share of renewable energies from about 5 to 12 by 2010 to attain this goal the german government has introduced compulsory compensation schemes for electricity produced from renewable energy fed into the public grid this paper examines the economic impact of this policy employing an econometric model particular emphasis was given to employment effects in general we distinguish two effects 1 an expansive effect resulting from additional investments and 2 a contractive effect resulting from an increase in the production cost of power the first effect will dominate during the first years and lead to an increase in employment of approximately 33 000 new jobs however the contractive effect will offset these gains and lead to a slightly negative employment balance by 2010

prospects for the use of choice modelling for benefit transfer abstract many of the earliest studies that sought to test the validity of benefit transfer which typically involved the use of contingent valuation or travel cost applications produced negative findings one of the recommendations from this early testing was to trial alternative methods to produce source studies for benefit transfer including multi attribute techniques subsequently there have been a number of studies conducted that have sought to test the validity of benefit transfer using choice modelling the purpose of this paper is to review these studies and to assess the current state of knowledge regarding the validity of using choice modelling for the purpose of benefit transfer we also describe and consider the merits of an alternative approach for extending the use of choice modelling in benefit transfer bayesian benefit transfer

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

choice experiments site similarity and benefits transfer choice experiments are designed to account for variations in environmental resources and site characteristics as well as potential implications of these variations for willingness to pay as a result choice experiment results may be well suited for benefits transfer it is unclear however whether the flexibility of choice experiments renders the similarity of study and transfer sites less critical for transfer validity drawing from identical choice experiments conducted in different rhode island communities this model assesses the extent to which error in function based benefits transfer is related to the similarity of communities across a variety of observable dimensions results suggest that site similarity at least across some dimensions influences the validity of choice experiment benefits transfers however the use of some measures of similarity as indicators of transfer error may provide misleading results

clean energy policies and green jobs an evaluation of green jobs in u s metropolitan areas state and local governments in the u s are actively promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency to seek economic development opportunities and create green jobs this study evaluates the employment effects of state and local clean energy and climate policies in u s metropolitan areas msas in 2006 the regression analysis shows that both state and local clean energy policies have positive and statistically significant impacts on green jobs at the metropolitan level the results from two stage probit least squares 2spls indicate that every additional state clean energy policy tool adopted is associated with 1 more green jobs in the msa on average msas with iclei membership maintain 9 3 more green jobs than msas without iclei membership ceteris paribus

exploring benefit transfer disamenities of waste transfer stations the benefit transfer method was developed as an alternative way to value externalities using values from studies of similar circumstances carried out at similar sites somewhere else given the challenges and high costs inherent in assessing the actual cost specifically in order to test the performance of the benefit transfer method employing hedonic price models this study focused on estimates of disamenities associated with waste transfer stations at four different cities in israel the sites were intentionally selected to represent a variety of circumstances we transferred the estimated benefit function from a study site to a policy site the goodness of fit was examined by comparing the calculated value with actual data from the policy site to test the sensitivity of the benefit transfer function to socioeconomic and housing characteristics it was repeatedly applied to different sets of observations the findings suggest that a relatively large number of alternative benefit functions are transferable statistical inequality outcome regarding the degree of similarity between samples does not unequivocally rule out the appropriateness of transferring environmental values across studies transfer errors varied between 21 and 29 and the absolute average error for all transfers was 15 4 errors were lower for transfer between relatively similar cities in terms of size and location and between sub samples that were similar in socioeconomic characteristics and housing type however when a site with very dissimilar data was involved the average absolute error rose to 19

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