co2 emissions and income dynamics what does the global evidence tell us this paper analyzes the co evolution of two major determinants of social welfare namely income and carbon emissions in particular by using a distribution dynamics approach based on markov chains we investigate the shape and behavior of the joint distribution of per capita income and carbon dioxide emissions we arrive at several interesting conclusions especially in the context of international negotiations on climate change first evidence does not support theoretical models predicting the existence of a poverty environment trap specifically in the long run two main groups of countries will emerge poor versus polluting countries second the typical development path leads initially to high emission levels and subsequently to high income third the convergence process towards the stationary distribution is very slow finally for carbon emissions whenever it is observed the environmental kuznets curve seems to be only a transitory phenomenon

market clearing with stochastic security part i formulation the first of this two paper series formulates a stochastic security constrained multi period electricity market clearing problem with unit commitment the stochastic security criterion accounts for a pre selected set of random generator and line outages with known historical failure rates and involuntary load shedding as optimization variables unlike the classical deterministic reserve constrained unit commitment here the reserve services are determined by economically penalizing the operation of the market by the expected load not served the proposed formulation is a stochastic programming problem that optimizes concurrently with the pre contingency social welfare the expected operating costs associated with the deployment of the reserves following the contingencies this stochastic programming formulation is solved in the second companion paper using mixed integer linear programming methods two cases are presented a small transmission constrained three bus network scheduled over a horizon of four hours and the ieee reliability test system scheduled over 24 h the impact on the resulting generation and reserve schedules of transmission constraints and generation ramp limits of demand side reserve of the value of load not served and of the constitution of the pre selected set of contingencies are assessed

the dilemmas of market socialism capital market reform in china part i bonds this two part article analyses the attempts to reform the socialist financial system in china by diversifying financial assets and introducing capital markets the approach used is that of political economy in the sense of elucidating the interplay between political and economic interests actors and issues in the reform process part i discusses the issue of bonds by governments and enterprises although the reform era has seen gradual progress towards something resembling a bond market in terms of a diversification of bond types and growing competition between bond issues there is no evidence that this has improved allocative efficiency in the economy rather bonds have functioned as one instrument in a complex struggle for resources between political institutional and economic actors in the context of a continuing shortage economy this competitive system falls far short of a true market rather it embodies powerful systemic factors reflecting the basic structural and institutional features o

energy consumption and co2 emissions convergence in european union member countries a tonneau des danaides abstract as the consumption of energy is responsible for approximately 80 of ghg in eu iea 2008 the impact of energy activity on the environment has received increasing attention over the last decades from scholars researchers politicians and society as a whole within eu member countries it is commonly accepted that the design of energy and mitigation policies either at national or at european level require a detailed and integrated investigation of convergence divergence pattern among the participating countries in this paper we examine the distribution dynamics of energy consumption and co2 emissions their intensities as well as the carbonization index in 23 european countries over a forty one year period in particular from 1970 to 2010 for this purpose we used quah s methodology which is based on the dynamics of cross section distributions the main conclusion is that for all the examined variables the hypothesis of convergence patterns for the eu sample is not valid moreover regarding each examined variable different groups of polarization established important differences occur across eu countries according to the climate type with respect to the examined variables our analysis provides strong evidence supporting the fact that national and european energy and mitigation policies should be implemented according to the non convergence paradigm the body of evidence provided by our analysis is of great importance to energy policy makers and for issues related to climate change

market clearing with stochastic security part ii case studies this paper analyzes the market clearing formulation with stochastic security developed in its companion paper through two case studies solved using mixed integer linear programming techniques the generation and reserve schedules as well as the nodal prices of energy and security are assessed under various conditions such as a line flow limits b when nonspinning reserve is excluded from the formulation c demand side valuation of energy not served d generator ramping limits and e the set of pre selected contingencies

appropriate technology in a solovian nonlinear growth model we propose a solovian growth model with a convex concave production function and international technological spillovers we test the empirical implications of the model analysing the effects of the productivity slowdown that followed the oil shocks of the 1970s we argue that this slowdown altering the world income distribution affected the pattern of international technological spillovers taking the poorest countries further away from the technological leaders and therefore unable to exploit their technologies the result is the emergence of a poverty trap for low income countries

network constrained economic dispatch using real coded genetic algorithm a genetic algorithm ga solution to the network constrained economic dispatch problem is presented a real coded ga has been implemented to minimize the dispatch cost while satisfying generating unit and branch power flow limits a binary coded ga was also developed to provide a means of comparison ga solutions do not impose any convexity restrictions on the dispatch problem the proposed method was applied on the electrical grid of crete island with satisfactory results various tests with both convex and nonconvex unit cost functions demonstrate that the proposed ga locates the optimum solution while it is more efficient than the binary coded ga

nonlinear economic growth some theory and cross country evidence abstract this paper aims to test the existence of different growth regimes that is of different relationships between growth rate and income level we propose a simple nonlinear growth model and test its empirical implications by estimating markov transition matrices and stochastic kernels we show that growth is indeed nonlinear a first phase of slow or zero growth is followed by a take off and finally by a phase of deceleration we discuss the relevance of these results with respect to the issue of convergence and reversibility of development in the light of models of structural change and technological diffusion

a continuous state space approach to convergence by parts abstract using a continuous state space approach this note extends feyrer s feyrer j 2003 convergence by parts manuscript dartmouth college available at http www dartmouth edu jfeyrer parts pdf study of the proximate determinants of the shape of the long run distribution of income per capita contrary to feyrer s finding of the primacy of total factor productivity tfp the results here imply that traps in both tfp growth and capital accumulation may matter

a security constrained bid clearing system for the new zealand wholesale electricity market this paper reports upon the mathematical models and implementation of the scheduling pricing and dispatch spd application for the new zealand electricity market nzem spd analyzes bids for energy offers reserve offers and energy demands and recognizes explicitly the effects on bid clearing due to transmission congestion network losses reserve requirements and ramp rate limits advanced lp solution methods are utilized to solve the large scale constrained optimization problem results on a 67 bus test system and the nzem are included

capital market information and industrial performance the role of west german banks in orthodox theory external capital markets play a dual role supplying various forms of investment finance and disciplining firms which are inefficient or fail to pursue profit goals an extensive literature speaks of the efficiency of external capital markets meaning that firms can make production investment decisions and investors can choose among the securities that represent ownership of firms activities under the assumption that security prices at any time fully reflect all available information fama i970 1 however this concept of efficiency is purely technical it depends critically on what information is available and we know there are problems of appropriability and failure in information markets deriving ultimately from certain peculiarities of information as a commodity arrow i962 thus another growing literature focusses on problems of achieving equilibrium in markets where agents are imperfectly or asymmetrically informed amongst other things this literature shows that informational failures of the kind in question can lead to capital rationing in loan and credit markets and the use of strict collateral requirements as screening devices jaffee and russell i976 stiglitz and weiss i98i cable and turner i983 these may then be expected to affect the efficiency of individual firms and the system as a whole capital shortage implies that some profitable investment opportunities are foregone and production choices may also be distorted by the need to satisfy additional financial constraints contrived to elicit signals of creditworthiness of the firms undertaking them similarly the disciplining role of external capital markets can be impaired by information impactedness williamson i975 and the costs of mobilising and giving effect to shareholders preferences thus in the principal agent framework developed by jensen and meckling i976 and fama i980 the degree of constraint on managerial pursuit of non profit goals as posited by managerial theorists depends on the transactions costs of stock owner intervention the result is an optimal degree of departure from cost minimising profit maximising behaviour determined by the level of transactions costs institutional factors which affect the way information is distributed amongst agents can therefore have an important bearing on allocative and technical efficiency and the west german system of industrial finance provides an in

income distribution dynamics among italian provinces the role of bank foundations this paper investigates the convergence process and the distribution dynamics of income among italian nuts 3 provinces between 2003 and 2011 findings show the existence of multiple steady state eq

optimal dispatch of a system based on offers and bids a mixed integer lp formulation the federal energy regulatory commission s ferc orders 888 and 889 will have far reaching consequences on the operation and dispatch of electric power systems a common element of the change is that of dispatching the system based on offers and bids to sell and buy unbundled commodities this paper formulates and solves the optimal dispatch problem as a mixed integer linear program such a formulation allows the acceptance of offers with minimum takes arising from generator characteristics

carbon emission reduction potentials under different polices in chinese cities a scenario based analysis abstract city is the core for carbon emission reduction this paper examines co 2 emission efficiency and productivity in 286 chinese cities under different production scenarios using a non radial directional distance function approach the examination is conducted via three scenarios namely co 2 emission reduction er emission reduction and energy conservation erec and emission reduction energy conservation and economic growth ereceg the results show substantial differences in total factor emission efficiency and productivity across the three scenarios we also found that total factor emission efficiency varies considerably across regional and different sized city groups however the distribution dynamics analysis provides strong evidence for the convergence of total factor emission efficiency across chinese cities in the long run efficiency change contributes of the majority of cross city variation in productivity growth for the sample period however low average total factor emission efficiency and large disparity in emission efficiency indicate great potential for future co 2 reduction regional development programs tend to drive economic activities into low co 2 emission performance regions our empirical findings provide valuable policy implications for achieving the joint targets of economic growth and co 2 emission reduction

reactive power as an ancillary service this paper addresses the problem of reactive power procurement by an independent system operator iso in deregulated electricity markets a reactive bid structure is proposed in the context of a reactive power market based on the reactive power price offers and technical constraints involved in reactive power planning a two tier approach is developed to determine the most beneficial reactive power contracts for the iso the reactive capability of a generator and therefore the opportunity costs in providing reactive power is also included in the model uncertainty in reactive demand and in reactive bids of participating parties is incorporated through monte carlo simulations and the expected reactive power procurement plan for the iso is hence determined the cigre 32 bus network approximately representing the swedish system is used for the studies

nonparametric analysis of regional income dynamics the case of greece abstract the analysis relies on estimating a stochastic kernel and the associated with it ergodic density it also derives nonparametric quantiles to better assess relative regional income mobility the long run density implied by the estimates suggests neither strong polarization nor convergence

human capital and convergence a production frontier approach using nonparametric production frontier methods we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to technological change shifts in the world production frontier technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and physical and human capital accumulation movements along the frontier we find that 1 technological change is decidedly nonneutral 2 productivity growth is driven primarily by physical and human capital accumulation 3 the increased international dispersion of productivity is explained primarily by physical capital accumulation and 4 international polarization the shift from a unimodal to a bimodal distribution is brought about primarily by efficiency changes technological catch up

urban rural gap and poverty traps in china a prefecture level analysis urban rural gap and regional inequality are long standing problems in china and result in considerable number of studies this article examines the dynamic behaviours of incomes for both urban and

stochastic multiobjective market clearing of joint energy and reserves auctions ensuring power system security in this paper a stochastic multiobjective framework is proposed for day ahead joint market clearing the proposed multiobjective framework can concurrently optimize competing objective functions including augmented generation offer cost and security indices overload index voltage drop index and voltage stability margin besides system uncertainties including generating units and branches contingencies and load uncertainty are explicitly considered in the stochastic market clearing scheme the solution methodology consists of two stages which firstly employs roulette wheel mechanism and monte carlo simulation mcs for random adaptive 24 h scenario generation wherein the stochastic multiobjective market clearing procedure is converted into its respective deterministic equivalents scenarios in the second stage for each deterministic scenario a multiobjective mathematical programming mmp formulation based on the epsiv constrained approach is implemented for provision of spinning reserve sr and nonspinning reserve nsr as well as energy the mmp formulation of the market clearing process is optimized while meeting ac power flow constraints and expected interruption cost eic the ieee 24 bus reliability test system rts 24 bus is used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method

a cross country evaluation of environmental performance is there a convergence divergence pattern in technology gaps abstract a balanced panel of 103 countries for the period 1995 2011 is introduced into a metafrontier framework to gain insight into the idiosyncratic performance of countries in two distinct groups developed annex i countries and developing non annex i countries we measure efficiency using a generalized directional distance function model suitable for dealing with anthropogenic emissions the measurement of efficiency and technology gaps takes into account the group specific heterogeneity moreover we examine the convergence divergence hypothesis for the technology gaps defined for each period our findings reveal significant patterns between the groups and among countries

risk constrained bidding strategy with stochastic unit commitment this paper develops optimal bidding strategies based on hourly unit commitment in a generation company genco that participates in energy and ancillary services markets the price based unit commitment problem with uncertain market prices is modeled as a stochastic mixed integer linear program the market price uncertainty is modeled using the scenario approach monte carlo simulation is applied to generate scenarios scenario reduction techniques are applied to reduce the size of the stochastic price based unit commitment problem and postprocessing is applied based on marginal cost of committed units to refine bidding curves the financial risk associated with market price uncertainty is modeled using expected downside risk which is incorporated explicitly as a constraint in the problem accordingly the proposed method provides a closed loop solution to devising specific strategies for risk based bidding in a genco illustrative examples show the impact of market price uncertainty on genco s hourly commitment schedule and discuss the way gencos could decrease financial risks by managing expected payoffs

growth and convergence of the oecd countries a multi sector production frontier approach abstract kumar and russell 2002 henderson and russell 2005 and badunenko henderson and russell 2013 have proposed a production frontier methodology to analyze the economic growth and the convergence of growth rates across countries they see two main advantages to this methodology 1 it reconstructs the world production frontier without relying on any particular typically unverifiable assumptions on any aspects of the growth process and 2 it allows to decompose labor productivity growth into several parts in this paper i extend the previous approach by considering a multi sector setting this setting allows to propose a more realistic and complete country level analysis while keeping the same advantages as with the previous methodology i also tackle the criticism of less reliable data at the sector level than at the country level by showing how the multi sector approach can easily be adapted i apply it to the oecd countries from 1995 to 2008 the results confirm the non neutrality of technological change i also find that capital accumulation plays the biggest role in the increase of output labor productivity while technological change and human capital accumulation also play an important role but it is twice as small as capital accumulation interestingly these results suggest the emergence of two groups eastern and central european countries and the eu15 and korea the two groups seem to diverge over time

a nonparametric analysis of income convergence across the us states abstract in this paper i apply the nonparametric methods proposed by quah to data on us state relative income levels in contrast to quah s results using cross country data i find no evidence of polarization in the cross state income distribution the long run density implied by the estimates is strongly unimodal this finding is consistent with the results of previous analyses of convergence in state income levels using other methods