the diffusion of health technologies cultural and biological divergence abstract this paper proposes the hypothesis that genetic distance to the health frontier influences population health outcomes evidence from a world sample suggests that genetic distance interpreted as long term cultural and biological divergence is an important factor in understanding health inequalities across countries specifically the paper documents a remarkably robust negative link between genetic distance to the united states and population health as measured by life expectancy at birth and the adult survival rate even after accounting for an extensive set of possible confounders such as gdp per capita and various climatic factors consistent with the interpretation that genetic distance is related to population health indirectly through human barriers to the diffusion of modern health technologies the evidence indicates that the gene gradient emerges at the onset of the international epidemiological transition

are labour productivity and residential living standards drivers of the energy consumption changes abstract the aim of this paper is to analyse the effects that explain the final energy consumption changes in spain in the period 2000 2013 using the lmdi i method distinguishing between the final energy consumption by the productive sectors and households residential and private transport the consumption changes in the productive sectors and households have been decomposed into five effects these are the intensity the inverse of labour productivity the structural the standard of living and the activity effects the energy intensity effect has been defined from a physical perspective in order to eliminate the possible effects brought about by causes unconnected with the energy process the evolution of the market the variation of productivity etc that usually affect the energy intensity indicator when measured from a macroeconomic perspective the results show that the activity the living standard of private transport and sectoral intensity effect are those that contribute most to the increase of energy consumption in this period whereas the inverse of labour productivity the structural and the intensity effects in private transport contribute to reducing the final energy consumption the results obtained for the sectoral intensity except for non private transport and the residential intensity effects lead us to recommend that it is necessary to focus on a more effective and intensive policy in the matter of energy efficiency in spain than that developed in the period of analysis

a decomposition analysis of the trend in uk income inequality post war britain has experienced a number of dramatic demographic and social changes that have undoubtedly influenced the distribution of income there has been a rise in the number of pensioners whose incomes are relatively low a considerable increase in the number of young and old households living on their own and a remarkable expansion in the proportion of working wives the potential importance of these structural changes suggests that their impact on the income distribution needs to be examined systematically before any attempt can be made to interpret the observed trend in overall income inequality adequately the method usually adopted for this purpose attempts to create a comparable time series of distributions based on the structural characteristics pertaining in one particular year for example if we wished to investigate the effect of shifts in the age structure of the population this approach would disaggregate the distribution in one year tl and estimate what the distribution would have been like if the age structure had been the same as that observed in some other year to on the assumption that other distributional characteristics such as ageincome differentials and inequality within age groups remain invariant to this demographic change the comparison between the actual distribution at t1 and the constructed distribution at t1 with to s age structure is taken to indicate the impact of changes in the age structure over the period concerned this comparison can be presented in terms of quantile shares summary measures of inequality or the entire lorenz curves this approach known as shift share analysis or standardising the inequality series see semple i975 love and wolfson i976 dinwiddy and reed i977 royal commission i977 rowley and henderson i978 macleod and horner i980 is perfectly adequate for simple and straightforward structural changes when several changes are occurring simultaneously however it becomes difficult to identify the contribution of the individual factors and to assess their relative importance to the overall trend in inequality furthermore the combined impact of several structural influences will not in general sum up to the inequality change requiring explanation the purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative method of analysing

spatial and economic patterns in life expectancy among us states this study investigates the determinants of gender specific life expectancy across us states over the period 1995 2007 we employ a production function specification where life expectancy depends o

intragenerational income mobility in latin america economic mobility has not been widely studied in developing countries until very recently owing to the lack of suitable data studying mobility requires longitudinal data tracking economic units that is individuals households or firms over time collecting this type of data is expensive and historically few latin american countries carried it out now however such data sets are available for a number of latin american and caribbean countries table a 1 in the appendix provides a list of available panel data sets that can be used for income mobility studies for these countries in this paper we discuss how the knowledge gleaned from mobility studies differs from comparable cross sectional analysis the structure of the paper is as follows the next section discusses what mobility is how it can be measured and how it differs from inequality the subsequent section reviews previous mobility studies in latin american countries the paper then summarizes the contributions of our own recent work and the final section discusses what lies ahead in mobility research for latin american economies

has the world moved forward a robust multidimensional evaluation this paper presents a multidimensional normative framework to evaluate whether the world moved forward between 1980 and 2008 we focus on the robustness of the results when attributing different weights to the different dimensions population weighted international welfare has not worsened over this period however the trend in the underlying inequality is ambiguous once sufficient weight is given to longevity and or income c 2010 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the extensive margin and monetary policy abstract the creation of new firms referred to as the extensive margin is a significant but overlooked dimension of monetary policy a monetary var documents that monetary policy has significant effects on firm creation an analytically tractable model combining sticky prices and firm entry shows that entry alters the transmission of monetary policy innovations acting much like a type of investment in more standard models monetary policy rules that offset the uncertainty of productivity shocks can raise the mean level of entry and thereby welfare suggesting a new motivation for stabilization policy

failure to launch the role of land inequality in transition delays recent work in the growth literature has provided various explanations for transition delays and the great divergence this paper provides empirical support for one theory of transition delays initial land inequality our analysis is designed to elucidate the channels via which land inequality can affect long run economic performance using a new historical data set for land inequality frankema 2009 we employ duration analysis to investigate whether higher levels of land inequality lead to longer delays in the extension of primary schooling we then investigate whether such delays affect long run economic performance via their effect on contemporaneous schooling our findings suggest that land inequality is a key determinant of delays in schooling and that such delays have a significant negative impact on long run output

globalization and its challenges rudi was born and grew up in krefeld germany he was an undergraduate at the university of geneva and completed his ph d at the university of chicago in 1971 which is where we met he was a student of robert mundell and both the subject matter the development of the mundell fleming model and the elegance and insights of his early work reflected mundell s influence he taught at the university of rochester and at the university of chicago before accepting an offer from mit in 1975

analysis of energy end use efficiency policy in spain abstract the implementation of saving measures and energy efficiency entails the need to evaluate achievements in terms of energy saving and spending this paper aims at analysing the effectiveness and economic efficiency of energy saving measures implemented in the energy savings and efficiency action plan 2008 2012 eap4 in spain for 2010 the lack of assessment related to energy savings achieved and public spending allocated by the eap4 justifies the need of this analysis the results show that the transport and building sectors seem to be the most important from the energy efficiency perspective although they did not reach the direct energy savings that were expected there is scope for reduction with the appropriate energy measures for the effectiveness indicator the best performance are achieved by public service agricultural and fisheries and building sectors while in terms of energy efficiency per monetary unit the best results are achieved by transport industry and agriculture sectors authors conclude that it is necessary that central regional and local administrations will get involved in order to get better estimates of the energy savings achieved and thus to affect the design of future energy efficiency measures at the lowest possible cost to the citizens

firm entry markups and the monetary transmission mechanism abstract two business cycle models with endogenous firm and product entry are estimated by matching impulse responses to a monetary policy shock the competition effect implies that entry lowers desired markups and dampens inflation under translog preferences where the substitutability between goods depends on their number we find evidence of such an effect that model generates more countercyclical markups than dixit and stiglitz 1977 monopolistic competition model where price stickiness is the only source of markup fluctuations in contrast a model with strategic interactions between oligopolistic firms cannot generate an empirically relevant competition effect and is statistically equivalent to the dixit stiglitz model

workers of the world unite franchise extensions and the threat of revolution in europe 1820 1938 abstract we test the hypothesis that the extension of the voting franchise in europe was related to the threat of revolution we contend that international diffusion of regime contention and information about revolutionary events happening in neighboring countries generate the necessary variation in the perceived threat of revolution using two samples of european countries covering the period from 1820 to 1938 we find robust evidence which is consistent with the threat of revolution hypothesis we also find some evidence that war triggered suffrage reform

explaining import quality the role of the income distribution abstract we examine a generalized version of flam and helpman flam h helpman e 1987 vertical product differentiation and north south trade american economic review 77 810 822 in which consumption prices for quality differentiated goods are rising in household income we provide propositions for aggregating this relationship across heterogenous households to map cross country differences in income distributions to cross country differences in import price distributions the theoretical predictions are examined and confirmed using disaggregated data on prices of traded goods and micro data on household income from the luxemburg income study country pairs with more similar income distributions have more similar import price distributions whether similarity is measured by 1st 4th moment statistics population and consumption shares within world income and product price quantiles or income and price dis similarity indices

comparison of energy intensities in european union countries results of a structural decomposition analysis abstract this work proposes an input output structural decomposition analysis model to identify the sources of the differences in the energetic intensities of the european union countries given an economic structure a determined composition of the final demand and determined direct energy intensities by countries the work studies to what extent these factors explain the difference in aggregate energy intensities that are observed for different european union countries on the basis of this information indicators are constructed by sectors and countries that allow us to identify the role that each sector or country plays as an energy consumer the results show that the aggregate total energy differences in europe are strongly influenced by the direct energy intensity effect and by the demand effect without the different economic structures of the countries being an important factor in the explanation of these differences the metallurgical and manufacturing products sectors are identified as the most intensive in the aggregate energy intensity

technology trade and growth a unified framework abstract our recent work examines the links among innovation technology trade and growth one strand focuses on research activity technology diffusion and growth the other examines technology and trade in this paper we exploit the common treatment of technology in these two strands to provide a parsimonious model of innovation growth and trade we examine the effect of lower geographic barriers to trade on research and the effects of scale and research productivity on relative incomes

economic growth and the evolution of water consumption in spain a structural decomposition analysis abstract the aim of this paper is to examine how technology processes of input substitution and changes in final demand all of which underlie economic growth influence water consumption this analysis is undertaken for spain during a significant socio economic period from 1980 the beginning of the democratic era to 2007 the onset of the current economic crisis to this end we construct water consumption series linked to a time series of input output tables generated for the spanish economy and we develop a structural decomposition analysis to study mainly changes in water consumption embodied in final demand we find that the growth in spanish demand all other things being constant would have implied an increase in water consumption almost three times the growth actually observed however this demand effect is largely offset by technology and intensity effects mainly due to changes in agricultural crops given the importance of the demand growth the final demand effect is also analyzed in detail broken down by categories as well as level and composition household demand and the increase of exports appear as key explicative factors

the implications of increasing globalization and regionalism for the economic growth of small island states abstract this paper provides an overview of the implications of globalization and increasing regionalism for small island states in the context of the critical determinants of their economic growth a brief outline of the globalization process is provided followed by a discussion of regionalism and the trend in subnational regional autonomy this is followed by an overview of the empirical literature on the critical factors determining the growth of small states next is an analysis of the implications for small island states of increasing globalization and regionalism in the context of the critical growth factors identified in the preceding section the paper concludes by proposing an agenda for further research into the implications for small island states of the impact of globalization on specific growth factors

tax competition and the distribution of income in this paper we provide a two country two class model of asymmetric capital tax competition we show formally that poor people living in small countries can benefit from capital tax competition and therefore they are in favor of it in order to benefit from capital inflow from larger countries poor people in smaller countries accept less within country income redistribution as a consequence between country income inequality is increased by tax competition

lights camera income illuminating the national accounts household surveys debate gdp per capita and household survey means present conflicting pictures of the rate of economic development in emerging countries one of the areas in which the national accounts household surveys debate is key is the measurement of developing world poverty we propose a data driven method to assess the relative quality of gdp per capita and survey means by comparing them to the evolution of satellite recorded nighttime lights our main assumption which is robust to a variety of specification checks is that the measurement error in nighttime lights is unrelated to the measurement errors in either national accounts or survey means we obtain estimates of weights on national accounts and survey means in an optimal proxy for true income these weights are very large for national accounts and very modest for survey means we conclusively reject the null hypothesis that the optimal weight on surveys is greater than the optimal weight on national accounts and we generally fail to reject the null hypothesis that the optimal weight on surveys is zero additionally we provide evidence that national accounts are good indicators of desirable outcomes for the poor such as longer life expectancy better education and access to safe water and we show that surveys appear to perform worse in developing countries that are richer and that are growing faster therefore we interpret our results as providing support for estimates of world poverty that are based on national accounts jel code i32

true world income distribution 1988 and 1993 first calculation based on household surveys alone the paper derives world income or expenditure distribution of individuals for two years 1988 and 1993 it is the first paper to calculate world distribution for individuals based entirely on household survey data from 91 countries and adjusted for differences in purchasing power parity between the countries measured by the gini index inequality increased from an already very high 63 in 1988 to 66 in 1993 the increase was driven more by rising differences in mean incomes between the countries than by rising inequalities within countries the most important contributors were rising urban rural differences in china and slow growth of rural incomes in south asia compared to several large developed market economies

globalization and global inequality assessing the impact of the rise of china and india 1980 20051 this article uses updated purchasing power parity measurements of countries income and a new strategy for approximating global inequality to examine how global income inequality as a combination of increasing average within country inequality and decreasing between country inequality changed in the period 1980 2005 in view of the overwhelming influence of china and india on trends in global inequality change the authors base their strategy on estimating the change in world average within country inequality from change in within country inequality of these two countries the authors find that global inequality decreased continuously throughout the period they also project that global inequality will likely rise again in the next 25 years unless the stellar economic performance of china and india spreads widely to other developing countries

is energy efficiency a driver or an inhibitor of energy consumption changes in spain two decomposition approaches abstract the 2000 2008 expansion period of the economy was accompanied by an important increase of energy consumption the desire of decoupling has led us to analyse the driving forces behind the energy consumption changes during this expansion period through a structural decomposition analysis sda based on the spanish input output tables previous decomposition has been supplemented by a logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi analysis of the energy consumption changes during a longer period 2000 2013 the results show that the energy intensity was the main inhibitor effect of the energy consumption changes of sectors of production not only during the recession but also during the expansion period secondly the energy intensity was a driver of the energy consumption change of households during the expansion period however during the recession period the energy intensity of private transport contributed to reducing energy consumption having an inhibitor effect therefore if the activity effect is still the most important driver the energy intensity effect has become the main inhibitor of energy consumption changes the energy policy recommendation is to focus on household energy consumption in the future if the spanish government aims to attain the eu energy efficiency objectives

what drive the changes in china s energy consumption and intensity during 12th five year plan period abstract during the 12th five year plan period 2011 2015 the chinese government has released a series of energy conservation plans to launch and deepen the transition in the energy use particularly the dual control of the energy consumption and energy intensity was firstly emphasized this paper intends to explore the targeted and effective energy policy implications through investigating the drivers of changes in energy consumption intensity of china during the 12th five year plan period under the input output framework the embodied energy consumptions intensities by final demand category were estimated at aggregate sector level and the total energy consumption intensity was decomposed using the additive multiplicative structural decomposition analysis among the final demand categories china s energy consumption intensity was mainly contributed by the investment followed by the household consumption according to the sda results china s total energy consumption increased by 28 8 of which the energy intensity effect and the investment effect were the most retardant and accelerator respectively at the same time china s total aggregate energy intensity decreased by 16 0 of which the energy intensity effect and the household consumption effect were the most retardant and accelerator respectively in detail the key sectors with respect to the critical effects were picked out above all policy implications are discussed for achieving the energy goals during the 13th five year plan period and launching the energy revolution during the 14th five year plan period

how to measure the economic impact of vector borne diseases at country level vector borne diseases vbds are widespread in less developed countries and reemerging in developed ones available economic studies agree that vbds have significant effects on countries economic outcomes and affirm that a systematic evaluation of such effects is crucial for the efficient allocation of resources to health related priorities this paper provides a comparative assessment of available methodologies for measuring the economic impact of vbds at national level we review both macroeconometric and micro based approaches and examine advantages and disadvantages of current methods we conclude by suggesting possible areas for future research

structural decomposition analysis of physical flows in the economy many environmental problems can be attributedto the extraction and emissions of physicalsubstances increasing our understanding of theeconomic and technological driving forcesbehind these physical flows can contribute tosolving the environmental problems related tothem the input output framework is a usefulsetting in which to integrate detailedinformation about economic structure andphysical flows in this article a specificmethod in input output analysis is reviewed namely structural decomposition analysis sda it is based on comparative static analysis which decomposes historical changes of a policyvariable into determinant effects sda has beenapplied for example to analyze the demand andtechnological driving forces of energy use co2 emissions and various other pollutantsand resources this article examines thetheoretical aspects of structuraldecomposition in particular those concerningphysical flows and environmental issues furthermore the article includes an extensivesurvey of empirical studies

a literature survey on energy growth nexus abstract this paper provides a survey of the recent progress in the literature of energy consumption economic growth and electricity consumption economic growth causality nexus the survey highlights that most empirical studies focus on either testing the role of energy electricity in stimulating economic growth or examining the direction of causality between these two variables although the positive role of energy on growth has become a stylized fact there are some methodological reservations about the results from these empirical studies a general observation from these studies is that the literature produced conflicting results and there is no consensus neither on the existence nor on the direction of causality between energy consumption electricity consumption and economic growth as a policy implication to avoid from conflicting and unreliable results the authors may use the autoregressive distributed lags bounds test two regime threshold co integration models panel data approach and multivariate models including new variables such as real gross fixed capital formation labor force carbon dioxide emissions population exchange rates interest rates etc thus the authors should focus more on the new approaches and perspectives rather than by employing usual methods based on a set of common variables for different countries and different intervals of time

price indexes inequality and the measurement of world poverty i discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity ppp price indexes from the international comparison project global inequality increased with the latest revision of the icp and this reduced the global poverty line relative to the us dollar the recent large increase of nearly half a billion poor people came from an inappropriate updating of the global poverty line not from the icp revisions even so ppp comparisons between widely different countries rest on weak theoretical and empirical foundations i argue for wider use of self reports from international monitoring surveys and for a global poverty line that is truly denominated in us dollars

the computation of world income distribution there is a growing perception of the international economy as an interdependent system the un general assembly s 1974 75 declaration on principles and programs for a change in the international economic order assumes that the welfare of peasants workers businessmen civil servants and political elites in less developed countries ldcs are linked to decisions made by economic policymakers in the industrialized nations many people in ldcs especially elites compare their material levels of living with those of rich countries accordingly there is merit to examining global income distribution because scholars do not have a good technique for aggregating country income distributions into a world income distribution they rarely analyze this distribution this article presents a method of calculating global distribution given a set of national distributions as a sidelight to their work on purchasing power parity kravis heston and summers calculate world 145 nonsocialist countries income distribution but by nations not by households or individuals they assume that each individual receives his gnp per capita table 1

trade openness and child health a heterogeneous panel cointegration analysis in this paper we examine the impact of trade openness on child health based on a cross country panel data set covering 66 countries for the period 1960 2013 to account for the time series proper

which parts of globalization matter for catch up growth in his ely lecture stanley fischer 2003 split globalization into noneconomic and economic interactions that extend across borders economic globalization the ongoing process of greater economic interdependence among nations is reflected in the increasing amount of cross border trade in goods and services the increasing volume of financial flows and the increasing flows of labor charles jones and i have recently argued that we can take the analysis one step deeper jones and romer 2010 globalization is driven by the gains from reuse of ideas flows of ideas are the part of globalization that matters for poverty reduction and catch up growth yet most economists still shy from talking about them because they have trouble finding the right words

global inequality of opportunity how much of our income is determined by where we live suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics over which they have almost no control country of residence and income distribution within that country assume further that there is no migration the authors show that more than one half of variability in income of world population classified according to their household per capita in one percent income groups by country is accounted for by these two characteristics the role of effort or luck cannot play a large role in explaining global distribution of income

comparing structural decomposition analysis and index to analyze and understand historical changes in economic environmental employment or other socio economic indicators it is useful to assess the driving forces or determinants that underlie these changes two techniques for decomposing indicator changes at the sector level are structural decomposition analysis sda and index decomposition analysis ida for example sda and ida have been used to analyze changes in indicators such as energy use co2 emissions labor demand and value added the changes in these variables are decomposed into determinants such as technological demand and structural effects sda uses information from input output tables while ida uses aggregate data at the sector level the two methods have developed quite independently which has resulted in each method being characterized by specific unique techniques and approaches this paper has three aims first the similarities and differences between the two approaches are summarized second the possibility of transferring specific techniques and indices is explored finally a numerical example is used to illustrate differences between the two approaches

the developing world is poorer than we thought but no less successful in the fight against poverty a new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world we find that 25 of the population lived in poverty in 2005 as judged by what poverty typically means in the world s poorest countries this is higher than past estimates substantial overall progress is still indicated the corresponding poverty rate was 52 in 1981 but progress was very uneven across regions the trends over time and regional profile are robust to various changes in methodology though precise counts are more sensitive

monetary shocks exchange rates and the extensive margin of exports abstract this paper develops a two country dynamic general equilibrium model to assess the relationship between the real exchange rate and the extensive margin of exports exchange rate pass through to consumer prices governs the relative strength of a demand channel onto the exporting decision of a firm with incomplete pass through a favorable movement in the real exchange rate generates increased export participation and an expansion in the extensive margin of exports this result is consistent with firm level studies and contributes to an ongoing empirical debate as to the importance of changes in export participation over the business cycle

what do normative indices of multidimensional inequality really measure we argue that normative indices of multidimensional inequality do not only measure a distribution s extent of inequity i e the gaps between the better off and the worse off but also its extent of inefficiency i e the non realized mutually beneficial exchanges of goods we provide a decomposition that allows quantifying these two parts of inequality exact formulas of the inequity and inefficiency components are provided for a generic class of social welfare functions the inequity component turns out to be a two stage measure which applies a unidimensional inequality measure to the vector of well being levels we critically discuss two prominent transfer principles viz uniform majorization and correlation increasing majorization in the light of the decomposition a decomposition of inequality in human development illustrates the analysis

driving forces for aggregate energy consumption a cross country approach abstract although a cornerstone for development past and current energy use has often posed a major challenge for policymakers with respect to planning and management within this context in this paper an updated multi sectorial cross country assessment of energy consumption trends was undertaken aiming at identifying the main drivers of changes in aggregate energy consumption these drivers have been interpreted in the light of the policy measures that have been implemented over the years by different countries to achieve a sustainable development of the energy sector the cross country assessment encompasses a set of developed united kingdom portugal and spain and emerging brazil china and india countries resorting to the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi decomposition method changes in the aggregate energy consumption were decomposed into three main explanatory effects activity structure and intensity the major findings achieved reflect the relevance of intensity and activity effects in detriment of the structural effect the assessment of energy consumption trends using the lmdi decomposition method provides critical information regarding which is the dominant factor that should be focused in policy design

global inequality in well being dimensions abstract this paper contributes to the literature on global inequality in multidimensional well being by examining inter country disparities in the longevity knowledge and standard of material living components of the well known and widely used human development index for the years 1992 2004 it differs from previous studies by examining global inequality in each of the components of this index alongside that of the index as a whole thus side stepping ambiguities over weighting that are inherent to multidimensional well being indices the gini coefficient both population and non population weighted is used to measure the extent of inequality results indicate that the different components often provide very different information to the index as a whole especially with respect to changes in global inequality over time most component variables show declines in global inequality whereas the longevity component exhibits increased inequality since 1992

economic and social convergence in colombia royuela v and garcia g a economic and social convergence in colombia regional studies gross domestic product gdp has usually been used as a proxy for human well being nevertheless other social aspects should also be considered such as life expectancy infant mortality educational enrolment and crime issues this paper investigates economic and social convergence between regions in colombia in the period 1975 2005 the main results confirm that there is convergence in colombia in key social variables although not in the classic economic variable gdp per capita it is also found that spatial autocorrelation reinforces convergence processes through deepening market and social factors while isolation condemns regions to non convergence

occupational choice and development abstract the rise in world trade since 1970 has been accompanied by a rise in the geographic span of control of management and hence also a rise in the effective international mobility of labor services we study the effect of such a globalization of the world s labor markets the world s welfare gains depend positively on the skill heterogeneity of the world s labor force we find that when people can choose between wage work and managerial work the worldwide labor market raises output by more in the rich and the poor countries and by less in the middle income countries this is because the middle income countries experience the smallest change in the factor price ratio and where the option to choose between wage work and managerial work has the least value in the integrated economy our theory also establishes that after economic integration the high skill countries see a disproportionate increase in managerial occupations using aggregate data on gdp openness and occupations from 115 countries we find evidence for these patterns of occupational choice

on the evolution of the world income distribution the post world war ii period has seen substantial changes in the distribution of gdp per worker around the world in the upper half of the distribution a number of countries have exhibited large increases in income relative to the richest countries in the bottom half several countries have seen incomes fall relative to the richest countries the net result of these changes is a movement in the shape of the world income distribution from something that looks like a normal distribution in 1960 to a bi modal twin peaks distribution in 1988 projecting these changes into the future suggests a number of interesting ndings first it seems likely that the united states will lose its position as the country with the highest level of gdp per worker second growth miracles have been more common in recent decades than growth disasters if these dynamics continue the future income distribution will involve far more rich countries and far fewer poor countries than currently observed

halving global poverty the goal of central importance to this paper is to cut in half the proportion of people living below 1 a day from around 30 percent of the developing world s population in 1990 to 15 percent by 2015 based on population projections in 1990 this would correspond to around one billion people exiting poverty this paper begins by discussing poverty trends on a global scale where the poor are located in the world and how their numbers have been changing over time it then discusses the relationship of economic growth and income distribution to poverty reduction finally it suggests an evidence based agenda for poverty reduction in the developing world full text available at official url

international redistribution of income summary how do international policies on aid trade and factor movements affect the international distribution of income we calculate the impact by world decile of the actual level of aid flows and the effect on income of merchandise trade restrictions by high income countries we find that aid s distributional impact is equality enhancing extremely small in terms of changes in inequality measures but of some importance for the lowest decile of the distribution we also find that some of this impact is counteracted by lost potential income in the lower deciles from merchandise trade barriers imposed by high income countries

long term determinants of the demographic transition 1870 2000 abstract this paper analyzes the long term economic determinants of the demographic transition using a large panel of countries since 1870 a simple theoretical framework accounts for the possibly nonmonotonic variations of fertility in the course of economic development as predicted by unified growth theory i find that primary schooling rather than income or health related variables is the most robust determinant of the fertility transition as regards the health transition both education and income are significant determinants of mortality rates but education alone accounts for the bulk of their time variation over the twentieth century thus education can be viewed as the main long term determinant of the demographic transition

channels and policy debate in the globalization inequality poverty nexus the process of globalization has led to a much greater integration of the world economy the flows of trade capital labour technology and information across national borders have accelerated since the 1980s and created an environment conducive to faster economic growth and transmission of knowledge it is evident that the forces of globalization provide a strong potential for a major reduction in poverty in the developing world however for a number of reasons brought out in this chapter the positive impact of globalization on poverty alleviation worldwide has not been as substantial as one might have expected in this chapter we explore structural factors and policies within the world economy and national economies that impede the full transmission of the benefits of the various channels of globalization to poverty reduction

the adjustment of global external balances does partial exchange rate pass through to trade prices matter abstract this paper assesses whether partial exchange rate pass through to trade prices has important implications for the prospective adjustment of global external imbalances to address this question we develop and estimate an open economy dsge model in which pass through is incomplete due to the presence of local currency pricing distribution services and a variable demand elasticity that leads to fluctuations in optimal markups we find that the overall magnitude of trade adjustment is similar in a low and high pass through environment with more adjustment in a low pass through world occurring through movements in the terms of trade rather than real trade flows and through a larger response of the exchange rate

a delayed revolution environment and agrarian change in india slow growth of agricultural income has contributed to poor economic growth and poverty in india in modern times the condition was weakened by green revolutions in the last third of the twentieth century conventional accounts attribute the stagnation to institutions created during colonial rule in india this article suggests instead that it derived from an environmental constraint the green revolutions succeeded partly because state aid enabled peasants to overcome the constraint in some regions

inequality among world citizens 1820 1992 this paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries the estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to world war ii and after that seems to have stabilized or to have grown more slowly in the early 19th century most inequality was due to differences within countries later it was due to differences between countries inequality in longevity also increased during the 19th century but then was reversed in the second half of the 20th century perhaps mitigating the failure of income inequality to improve in the last decades jel d31 f0 n0 o0

input output analysis of alternative policies implemented on the energy activities an application for catalonia abstract the aim of this paper is to analyze the economic impact of alternative policies implemented on the energy activities of the catalan production system specifically we analyze the effects of a tax on intermediate energy uses a reduction in intermediate energy demand and a tax on intermediate uses combined with a reduction in intermediate energy demand the methodology involves two versions of the input output price model a competitive price formulation and a mark up price formulation the input output price framework will make it possible to evaluate how the alternative measures modify production prices consumption prices private real income and intermediate energy uses the empirical application is for the catalan economy and uses economic data for the year 2001 the combination of a tax on energy uses and an improvement in the energy efficiency of the production system is a measure that accomplishes both economic and environmental goals since it has no effects on prices it has a positive effect on private real income and finally energy consumption is considerably reduced

globalization poverty and inequality what is the relationship what can be done forbes online of 27 february 20031 offers some information about the world s ten richest people much of the information would cause little surprise the list shows that big money comes from software innovation retailing scale economies the business of oil investment luck and inheritance what is however really striking more so as one ponders the matter is just how rich these ten people are 2 together they had in 2002 a net worth of us 217 billion ranging from bill gates in the lead with us 40 7 billion to john walton son of sam walton founder of wal mart at the rear with us 16 5 billion

the long run determinants of inequality what can we learn from top income data this paper studies determinants of income inequality using a newly assembled panel of 16 countries over the entire twentieth century we focus on three groups of income earners the rich p99 100

the quantity and quality of life and the evolution of world inequality gdp per capita is usually used to proxy for the quality of life of individuals living in different countries welfare is also affected by quantity of life however as represented by longevity this paper incorporates longevity into an overall assessment of the evolution of cross country inequality and shows that it is quantitatively important the absence of reduction in cross country inequality up to the 1990s documented in previous work is in stark contrast to the reduction in inequality after incorporating gains in longevity throughout the post world war ii period health contributed to reduce significantly welfare inequality across countries this paper derives valuation formulas for infra marginal changes in longevity and computes a full growth rate that incorporates the gains in health experienced by 96 countries for the period between 1960 and 2000 incorporating longevity gains changes traditional results countries starting with lower income tended to grow faster than countries starting with higher income we estimate an average yearly growth in full income of 4 1 percent for the poorest 50 percent of countries in 1960 of which 1 7 percentage points are due to health as opposed to a growth of 2 6 percent for the richest 50 percent of countries of which only 0 4 percentage points are due to health additionally we decompose changes in life expectancy into changes attributable to 13 broad groups of causes of death and three age groups we show that mortality from infectious respiratory and digestive diseases congenital perinatal and ill defined conditions mostly concentrated before age 20 and between ages 20 and 50 is responsible for most of the reduction in life expectancy inequality at the same time the recent effect of aids together with reductions in mortality after age 50 due to nervous system senses organs heart and circulatory diseases contributed to increase health inequality across countries

changes in the world distribution of income between 1950 and 1977 trends in the world distribution of income are much discussed and philosophised about the issue of increasing economic inequality among nonsocialist countries in the post war period is central to the debate about the international economic order in i969 the pearson commission report was already pointing to the widening gap between the developed and developing countries as a central issue of our time and was proposing the reduction of that gap as the main objective of international co operation according to that report gnp per capita had increased between i960 and i967 at annual rates of 2 5 and 3 6 in developing and developed countries respectively morawetz i978 found that the gap between the two sets of countries rose from i 2 6 fold in i950 to i3 2 fold in i975 other authors see a more complicated picture atkinson i975 for instance has argued that although the share of poor countries in world income probably declined between i950 and i970 that of the countries at the middle of the world distribution probably increased 2 what may be a mere assessment of relative growth performances among nonsocialist countries becomes a basic theoretical element in the radical stream of economic literature for authors like amin i974 emmanuel i972 and frank i978 the capitalist mode of development necessarily leads to the rich countries of the centre becoming richer and poor countries of the periphery becoming poorer in a degree depending on their involvement in international trade for them a widening gap between developed and developing countries is simply the statistical confirmation of an unavoidable consequence of the national and international capitalist system in the latter perspective the issue at stake is of such importance that the contrast between the abundance of theoretical literature and the lack of empirical work is striking the few existing studies of changes in world distribution provide an inadequate picture intra country income distributions are not taken into account observation periods do not exceed i5 years 8 for andic and peacock i96i and for beckerman and bacon i970 i5 for kirman and tomasini i969 socialist as well as some non socialist countries are excluded and national incomes are converted to u s dollars at official exchange rates 3 finally none of these studies covers the i970s although several shocks which might have affected world distribution occurred during that decade for the non socialist countries to which they refer the andic peacock and beckerman bacon studies found the gini coefficient almost constant over

mortality reductions educational attainment and fertility choice this paper develops a model where reductions in mortality are the main force behind economic development the model generates a pattern of changes similar to the demographic transition where gains in life expectancy at birth are followed by reductions in fertility and increases in the rate of human capital accumulation the onset of the transition is characterized by a critical level of life expectancy at birth which marks the movement of the economy from a malthusian equilibrium to an equilibrium with investments in human capital and the possibility of long run growth

economic growth population theory and physiology the bearing of long term processes on the this lecture sketches a theory of the secular decline in morbidity and mortality that takes account of changes induced in physiological functioning since 1700 the synergism between technological and physiological improvements has produced a form of human evolution biological though not genetic rapid culturally transmitted and not necessarily stable which is still ongoing in both oecd and developing countries thermodynamic and physiological aspects of economic growth are defined and their impact on growth rates is assessed implications of this theory for population forecasting measurement of national income demand for leisure pension policies and demand for health care are considered excerpt

international medical technology diffusion abstract does medical technology generated in frontier countries have a significant impact on health outcomes in the rest of the world this paper considers a framework where non frontier countries may benefit from medical innovation that is embodied in medical imports or diffuses in the form of ideas using a novel dataset from a cross section of 63 technology importing countries we show that medical technology diffusion is an important contributor to improved health status as measured by life expectancy and mortality rates

declining exchange rate pass through to u s import prices the potential role of global factors this paper documents a robust and sustained decline in exchange rate pass through to u s import prices from well above 0 5 during the 1970s and 1980s to around 0 2 over the last decade we attribute this decline to the rising prominence of competition from china a shift in import pricing behavior since the asian financial crisis and the reduced share of material intensive goods in u s imports we also find evidence that foreign exporters are increasingly setting their prices with an eye on u s prices these results in turn suggest a new and more general hypothesis linking the decline in pass through to the evolving nature of competition in global markets and structural changes in international production patterns

explaining international comovements of output and asset returns the role of money and nominal rigidities abstract output and asset returns are highly positively correlated across the u s and the remaining major industrialized countries standard business cycle models that assume flexible prices and wages in the real business cycle rbc tradition have great difficulties explaining this fact this paper presents a dynamic optimizing stochastic general equilibrium model of a two country world with sticky nominal prices and wages the structure here generates cross country correlations of output and returns that are markedly higher and hence closer to the data than the cross country correlations that obtain when flexible prices and wages are assumed

energy consumption and economic growth nexus in portugal italy greece spain and turkey an ardl bounds test approach 1965 2009 abstract the paper examines the nexus between primary energy consumption and growth in portugal italy greece spain and turkey pigst with annual time series data from 1965 to 2009 pigst are southern european economies which have experienced several episodes that make them of particular interest to the study of periods of economic expansion and stagnation an ardl bounds test approach is a suitable technique to examine energy growth nexus within the context of countries with both sporadic shocks outliers and permanent shocks structural breaks empirical results suggest bidirectional causality between energy and growth in both the long run and short run supporting the feedback hypothesis the results reveal themselves to be robust to panel framework an energy conservation policy will reduce gdp growth while a saving phenomenon is observed since one additional unit of product requires less than one unit of energy

multilevel lmdi decomposition of changes in aggregate energy consumption a cross country analysis in the eu 27 abstract this paper aims at analysing the factors behind the change in aggregate energy consumption in the eu 27 also identifying differences between member states the logarithmic mean divisia index method lmdi is applied to multiplicatively decompose at the country level the variation in aggregate energy consumption in the eu 27 member states for the 2001 2008 period we also analyse the sensitivity of the results when several aggregation levels are considered with energy intensity used as the criterion to aggregate countries this allows us to check robustness of results also enabling an improved understanding of both inter and intra unit effects results indicate that improvements in energy efficiency in the eu 27 were not enough to overcome the pressure of european economic activity on aggregate energy consumption mediterranean countries and especially former communist states increased their energy consumptions most of them favoured by structural change the analysis also reveals that the impact of intra group movements on aggregate energy consumption is partially offset when moving from higher to lower aggregation levels

income inequality and technology diffusion evidence from developing countries we study the effect of within country income inequality on the diffusion of mobile phones using data on market penetration in a sample of developing countries from 1985 to 1998 mobile phones are an example of international technology originating in industrialized countries and diffusing worldwide we find that income inequality as measured by the income share of the highest earning deciles has a positive effect on the early diffusion of mobile phones and that the estimated effect becomes greater when a measure of agricultural endowments is used as an instrument the instrumental variable results are robust to weak instruments our findings suggest that the diffusion of new technologies originating from industrialized countries may generate yet another channel that links inequality and development

health and the evolution of welfare across brazilian municipalities abstract this paper describes the pattern of reductions in mortality across brazilian municipalities between 1970 and 2000 and analyzes its causes and consequences it shows that as in the international context the relationship between income and life expectancy has shifted consistently in the recent past but reductions in mortality within brazil have been more homogeneously distributed than across countries we use a compensating differentials approach to estimate the value of the observed reductions in mortality the results suggest that gains in life expectancy had a welfare value equivalent to 39 of the growth in income per capita being therefore responsible for 28 of the overall improvement in welfare we then use a dynamic panel to conduct a preliminary assessment of the potential determinants of these gains we show that improvements in education access to water and sanitation seem to be important determinants of the dimension of changes in life expectancy not correlated with income

good for living on the relationship between globalization and life expectancy this paper analyzes the relationship between three dimensions economic social and political of globalization and life expectancy using a panel of 92 countries covering the 1970 2005 period using different estimation techniques and sample groupings we find that economic globalization has a robust positive effect on life expectancy even when controlling for income nutritional intake literacy number of physicians and several other factors the result also holds when the sample is restricted to low income countries only in contrast political and social globalization have no such robust effects

business cycles with staggered prices and international trade in intermediate inputs abstract international trade in intermediate inputs and increasingly in goods produced at multiple stages of processing has been widely studied in the real trade literature we assess the role of this feature of modern world trade in accounting for some stylized facts about international business cycles our model with staggered prices and trade in intermediates across four stages of processing does well in explaining the observed international correlations in aggregate quantities and it performs much better than a single stage model with no trade in intermediates the model in itself does not provide a full account of the cyclical behavior of the real exchange rate but compared to the single stage model it moves in the right direction

is global social welfare increasing a critical level enquiry abstract we assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite or because of the substantial increase in global population we use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical level generalized utilitarianism clgu clgu posits that social welfare increases with population size if and only if the new lives come with a level of living standards higher than that of a critical level despite its attractiveness clgu poses a number of practical difficulties that may explain why the literature has left it largely unexplored we address these difficulties by developing new procedures for making partial clgu orderings the headline result is that we can robustly conclude that world welfare has increased between 1990 and 2005 if we judge that lives with per capita yearly consumption of more than 1 248 necessarily increase social welfare the same conclusion applies to sub saharan africa if and only if we are willing to make that same judgment for lives with any level of per capita yearly consumption above 147 otherwise some of the admissible clgu functions will judge the last two decades increase in global population size to have lowered global social welfare

pharmaceuticals and the developing world pharmaceuticals have greatly improved health in developing countries but many people in developing countries do not obtain even inexpensive pharmaceuticals and little pharmaceutical r d is oriented toward products needed by developing countries such as a malaria vaccine access to existing products could be improved by facilitating differential pricing for example by subsidizing donation programs and reforming health care delivery r d incentives could be improved if rich countries or international organization committed to purchase needed products when they are developed and make them available to the poor

application of the structural decomposition analysis to assess the indirect energy consumption and air emission changes related to italian households consumption abstract the design of sustainable production and consumption strategies and the assessment of implemented actions require to identify the driving forces that influence the trend of energy consumption and environmental impacts for this purpose the structural decomposition analysis sda was developed as a suitable methodology to analyse the driving forces of the changes in economic energy and environmental indicators the paper presents one of the first italian studies that apply an energy and environmental extended input output model opportunely shaped to the examined context combined with sda in detail it aims at 1 investigating the energy use and the air emissions arisen from the productive sectors to meet the household final demand in the period 1999 2006 2 identifying the sources of variations in energy and environmental indicators and 3 identifying which economic sectors are the most relevant sources of variation and must to be taken into account in the definition of sustainable production and consumption strategies as sources of changes the authors investigate energy and emission intensity effects leontief effect and final demand effect outcomes point out that the increase of the final consumptions often nullifies the energy and environmental benefits due to the improvement of the eco efficiency and to the introduction of innovative technologies of production the sector level analysis shows that tertiary and electricity gas and vapour result the highest italian consuming sectors of energy thus they should be focused for energy saving strategies agriculture hunting and sylviculture and road transports that are primarily sectors affecting air emissions should be taken into account for the reduction of environmental impacts results highlight that the current dichotomy of final demand growth and improvement of eco efficiency represents a key problem that needs to be addressed therefore the presented study can aid to define suitable oriented strategies for the energy and environmental impact reduction

measuring poverty in a growing world or measuring growth in a poor world the extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years although there are better data than ever before controversies are not resolved a major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys which is used to measure poverty grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts in the world as a whole and in large countries particularly india china and the united states in consequence measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries one plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys but growth in the national accounts is also upward biased and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys so it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption without any increase in measured inequality current statistical procedures in poor

the long run relationship between trade and population health evidence from five decades in recent years the increase in international trade has sparked a debate about the impact of international trade on population health to date however there has been very little econometric research on the relationship between these two variables this paper examines the long run relationship between trade openness and population health for a sample of 74 countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010 using panel time series techniques it is shown that international trade in general has a robust positive long run effect on health as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality this effect tends to be greater in countries with lower development levels higher taxes on income profits and capital gains and less restrictive business and labour market regulations

the effect of a common currency on the volatility of the extensive margin of trade abstract this paper studies the effects of the european monetary unification on the volatility of the extensive margin of trade first we highlight empirical novel facts about the effects of monetary unification we build country level measures of the extensive margin of intra emu exports and describe how their volatilities evolved over time we show that the adoption of a common currency has been associated with an increase of the volatility of the extensive margin of exports for most countries and a decrease in the volatility of the extensive margin of exports for germany second we address this question theoretically and build a two country version of the model of ghironi and melitz 2005 with endogenous entry heterogenous firms endogenous tradability endogenous labor supply and sticky prices we compare the volatility of the extensive margin of trade under fixed exchange rates and in a monetary union monetary unification does imply an increase in the volatility of the extensive margin of trade for pre emu followers such as france or the netherlands and a decrease in the volatility of the extensive margin of trade for the leader germany this pattern is qualitatively consistent with the data but arises only if monetary policy responds moderately to output

international mortality modelling an economic perspective abstract a recent literature has developed on modelling mortality in multiple populations together the purpose of this paper is to suggest a reason why mortality in different populations may be related based on an economic literature on technology and knowledge diffusion

economic development and the escape from high mortality summary this paper studies the characteristic features of the escape from high mortality as recorded from the historical experience of northwestern europe and from the current experience of less developed countries the paper documents stylized facts of mortality change and measures the contribution of economic development represented by income per capita to the mortality decline during the second half of the 20th century the paper argues that improvements in economic conditions since the 18th century are an important factor behind the decline in death rates in developed countries and in the subsequent reduction of death rates in less developed countries we show that economic development lowers mortality through differential effects in infectious disease mortality and that quantitatively income growth is able to account for between one third and one half of the recent mortality decline

input output analysis of co2 emissions embodied in trade competitive versus non competitive imports energy related co2 emissions embodied in international trade have been widely studied by researchers using the environmental input output framework in the literature two different approaches to deal with emissions embodied in a country s imports can be found one of the approaches is based on the assumption of competitive imports while the other is based on the assumption of non competitive imports we show that the implications of the results obtained using different imports assumptions are not the same the approach using the competitive imports assumption gives estimates larger than those obtained using the non competitive import assumption the differences between the two embodiment estimates come from the transition of embodied emissions in china s imports for intermediate consumption to those in china s exports this explains why relatively high estimates of co2 emissions embodied in china s exports are reported in several recent studies appearing in energy policy

the driving forces of china s energy use from 1992 to 2010 an empirical study of input output and structural decomposition analysis abstract the energy consumption in china has accelerated since the early 2000s and china became the largest energy consumer in the world by 2010 to examine the driving forces of china s energy use this paper conducts a structural decomposition analysis based on hybrid input output tables in addition we describe the framework of china s energy system by using two energy flow charts the results show that china s current energy use is investment led demand between 1992 and 2007 the three main final demand categories gross fixed capital formation household consumption and exports contributed approximately one third each to the changes of total energy use in china between 2007 and 2010 however three quarters of energy consumption changes came from investment activity only technological improvement saved approximately five percent of the total energy use annually during the periods of 1992 1997 1997 2002 and 2007 2010 in the period of 2002 2007 however its contribution dropped to only three percent p a due to the rise of the indirect energy requirement coefficient in the construction sector these results suggest that adjusting the final demand structure and improving energy efficiency further will meet china s energy challenges in the future

recent trends in income inequality in latin america this paper documents patterns and recent developments on income inequality in latin america la new comparative international evidence confirms that la is a region of high inequality although maybe not the highest in the world income inequality has fallen in the 2000s suggesting a turning point from the substantial increases of the 1980s and 1990s the fall in inequality is significant and widespread but it does not seem to be based on strong fundamentals

the comparison of multi dimensioned distributions of economic status the literature on inequality measurement has been largely concerned with single dimensioned indicators this paper explores some of the issues which arise when there are several dimensions to inequality and these are not readily reduced to a single index concentrating particularly on the two dimensioned case we make use of results on multi variate stochastic dominance in portfolio theory extending these and applying them to the measurement of inequality the use of the dominance conditions is illustrated by an application to the international distribution of income and life expectancy

revisiting drivers of energy intensity in china during 1997 2007 a structural decomposition analysis the decline of china s energy intensity slowed since 2000 during 2002 2005 it actually increased reversing the long term trend therefore it is important to identify drivers of the fluctuation of energy intensity we use input output structural decomposition analysis to investigate the contributions of changes in energy mix sectoral energy efficiency production structure final demand structure and final demand category composition to china s energy intensity fluctuation during 1997 2007 we include household energy consumption in the study by closing the input output model with respect to households results show that sectoral energy efficiency improvements contribute the most to the energy intensity decline during 1997 2007 the increase in china s energy intensity during 2002 2007 is instead explained by changes in final demand composition and production structure changes in final demand composition are mainly due to increasing share of exports while changes in production structure mainly arise from the shift of chinese economy to more energy intensive industries changes in energy mix and final demand structure contribute little to china s energy intensity fluctuation from the consumption perspective growing exports of energy intensive products and increasing infrastructure demands explain the majority of energy intensity increase during 2002 2007

world welfare is rising estimation using nonparametric bounds on welfare measures abstract i take a new approach to measuring world inequality and welfare over time by constructing robust bounds for these series instead of imposing parametric assumptions to compute point estimates i derive sharp bounds on the atkinson inequality index that are valid for any underlying distribution of income conditional on given fractile shares and gini coefficients while the bounds are too wide to reject the hypothesis that world inequality may have risen i show that world welfare rose unambiguously between 1970 and 2006 this conclusion is valid for alternative methods of dealing with countries and years with missing surveys alternative survey harmonization procedures alternative gdp series or if the inequality surveys used systematically underreport the income of the very rich or suffer from nonresponse bias

the brain drain and the world distribution of income abstract skilled emigration or brain drain from developing to developed countries is becoming the dominant pattern of international migration today such migration is likely to affect the world distribution of income both directly through the mobility of people and indirectly as the prospect of migration affects the rate of return to education in both the sending and receiving economies this migration pattern will therefore affect human capital accumulation and fertility decisions in both the sending and receiving economies this paper analyzes these effects in a dynamic two country model of the world economy where agents in both countries make optimal fertility and human capital decisions the implications of the analysis for the world distribution of income are derived in the light of recent empirical findings of the brain drain literature the analysis shows that the current trend towards predominantly skilled emigration from poor to rich countries may in the long run increase inequality in the world distribution of income as relatively poor countries grow large in terms of population in the short run however it is possible for world inequality to fall due to rises in gdp per capita in large developing economies with sufficiently low skilled emigration rates

lmdi decomposition approach a guide for implementation since it was first used by researchers to analyze industrial electricity consumption in the early 1980s index decomposition analysis ida has been widely adopted in energy and emission studies lately its use as the analytical component of accounting frameworks for tracking economy wide energy efficiency trends has attracted considerable attention and interest among policy makers the last comprehensive literature review of ida was reported in 2000 which is some years back after giving an update and presenting the key trends in the last 15 years this study focuses on the implementation issues of the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi decomposition methods in view of their dominance in ida in recent years eight lmdi models are presented and their origin decomposition formulae and strengths and weaknesses are summarized guidelines on the choice among these models are provided to assist users in implementation