sustainable island businesses a case study of norfolk island abstract conventional measures aimed at tackling the energy and waste issues of island communities focus on technological solutions such as the introduction of renewable energy sources there exists a history of technology implementations on small islands that have failed because of a lack of continuing skills and financial resources needed for ongoing operation and maintenance despite these experiences what has received little attention so far are measures aimed at achieving island friendly solutions by reducing their material metabolism for example by recycling and re use the two case studies presented in this work show that conservation efficiency and reductions of the overall material metabolism of economic activity can be as effective as purely technologically driven changes both case studies demonstrate exceptional sustainability performance in terms of material flow and greenhouse gas emissions the income growth scenarios show that from a sustainability point of view increasing tourist yield rather than tourist numbers is preferable for coping with price hikes and a finite resource base and is also more likely to keep within bounds the strain on the island s people and infrastructure

will china s trade restructuring reduce co2 emissions embodied in international exports china s co2 emissions exports embodied in international trade has recently attracted more attention and raises questions on the liability and responsibility for environmental costs associated with chinese produced goods given that embodied emissions exports and imports are normal phenomena during international trade the key question focuses on china s reduction of embodied emissions exports via trade restructuring a trade restructuring optimization model combined with input output analysis and multi objective programming was established in this study in order to analyze the maximum volume of embodied emissions reduction within bearable cost constraints the results suggest that the trade off cost for china to reduce embodied emissions exports is very high additionally the net exports of china s embodied co2 emissions under a reasonable scenario can only be reduced by 3 26 previous policy suggestions on import export structure adjustments have limited effects on the reduction of china s embodied emission exports and unemployment is an important constraint on embodied co2 emissions export reduction even so china can still take advantage of various positive factors that have emerged in recent years to improve the industrial and energy consumption structures given that the increasing trend of china s embodied co2 emission exports has already changed gradually

an experimental study of truth telling in a sender receiver game a recent experimental study of cai and wang 2005 on strategic information transmission reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis to evidence that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in terms of a tension between normative social behavior and incentives for lying we show in a simple sender receiver game that subjects incurring in costs to punish liars tell the truth more often than predicted by the logit agent quantal response equilibria whereas subjects that do not punish liars after receiving a deceptive message play on the aggregate equilibrium strategies thus we can partition the subject pool into two groups one group of subjects with preferences for truth telling and one taking into account only material incentives

a first empirical comparison of energy footprints embodied in trade mrio versus plum abstract the ecological footprint as an indicator that accounts for human demand on global bioproductivity sets out to quantify the impacts associated with consumption in a given country including the impacts associated with trade the national footprint accounts nfa by global footprint network gfn calculate trade embodied footprints by multiplying yield and embodied energy factors with mass volumes of traded goods in a product land use matrix plum this article compares energy footprints embodied in trade from and to the united kingdom in 2002 as calculated by the nfa plum with the results from a recently developed multi region input output model mrio for the uk although totals for imports and exports are comparable breaking down the results by economic sectors reveals large differences and hardly any correlation between the two methods the omission of trade in services especially transport services and upstream impacts of energy goods fossil fuels and the use of inappropriate embodied energy factors in the nfa plum method are identified as the main reasons for these differences in the light of the results it seems that a comprehensive footprint account of trade can better be achieved with an input output based approach i conclude that mrio models once fully developed will be particularly suitable in the future to estimate the ecological footprints of imports and exports of nations with the possibility to track their origin via inter industry linkages international supply chains and multi national trade flows

linkages and vertical integration in the chinese economy the original concept of vertical integration can be applied only to the analysis of the relationship between final demand and gross output but is unsuitable for most of supply oriented studies where what matters are the interindustry relations for example vertical integration of an industrial district with the rest of the economy cannot be measured with the traditional technique and should be accounted for by a different measure that considers the direct and indirect demand derived from the whole gross output of the district in such a way it is possible to measure the expansionary potential that any industry has on any other one constructing an index of vertical integration these concepts are then applied to the input output table of a developing country like china and they provide some understanding of the routes development strategies have to follow copyright 1991 by mit press

conceptualising environmental responsibility abstract downstream responsibility is rarely addressed in the academic literature and in corporate sustainability reporting we conceptualise downstream responsibility for the example of carbon emissions by establishing a terminology as well as a framework for quantifying downstream carbon footprints by extracting emissions intensive sales chains for a number of australian industry sectors and comparing these to emissions intensive supply chains we demonstrated the ability of input output analysis to quantify emissions responsibility in both directions we extend the definition of downstream responsibility beyond the product use and disposal phases to include what we call enabled emissions this term implies that whatever is sold downstream enables our customers to operate and emit irrespective of whether it is our product that is combusted or that directly combusts fuels or not our structural path analyses and threshold capture relationships reveal stark differences between industries with regard to the data collection efforts necessary to achieve a reasonably complete footprint assessment industries appear to have their own specific carbon footprint profiles and one cannot design generic relevance tests that tell which data to collect moreover we conclude that current completeness standards in carbon reporting cannot be satisfied using relevance thresholds input output analysis and structural path analysis are excellent tools that can help companies undertake screening exercises which in turn help prioritising and streamlining the collection of data needed to establish a corporate downstream carbon footprint compared to conventional manual approaches hybrid life cycle assessments assisted by input output analysis and structural path analysis achieve more complete results with substantially less staff money and time

the impact of domestic trade on china s regional energy uses a multi regional input output modeling to systematically reveal how domestic trade impacts on china s regional energy uses an interprovincial input output modeling is carried out to address demand derived energy requirements for the regional economies in 2007 based on the recently available data both the energy uses embodied in final demand and interregional trade are investigated from the regional and sectoral insights significant net transfers of embodied energy flows are identified from the central and western areas to the eastern area via interregional trade shanxi is the largest energy producer and interregional embodied energy deficit receiver in contrast to guangdong as the largest energy user and surplus receiver by considering the impacts of interregional trade the energy uses of most eastern regions increase remarkably for instance shanghai hainan zhejiang beijing jiangsu and guangdong have their embodied energy requirements 87 49 19 97 13 64 12 60 6 46 and 6 38 times of their direct energy inputs respectively in contrast the embodied energy uses of some central and western regions such as inner mongolia shanxi xinjiang shaanxi and guizhou decrease largely the results help understand the hidden network linkages of interregional embodied energy flows and provide critical insight to amend china s current end reduction oriented energy policies by addressing the problem of regional responsibility transfer

shared producer and consumer responsibility theory and practice abstract over the past decade an increasing number of authors have been examining the nexus of producer versus consumer responsibility often dealing with the question of how to assign responsibility for internationally traded greenhouse gas emissions recently a similar problem has appeared in drafting the standards for the ecological footprint while the method traditionally assumes a full life cycle perspective with full consumer responsibility a large number of producers businesses and industry sectors have started to calculate their own footprints see www isa org usyd edu au adding any producer s footprint to other producers footprints or to population footprints which all already cover the full upstream supply chain of their operating inputs leads to double counting the sum of footprints of producers and consumers is larger than the total national footprint the committee in charge of the footprint standardisation process was hence faced with the decades old non additivity problem posing the following dilemma for the accounting of footprints or any other production factor if one disallows double counting but wishes to be able to account for producers and consumers then one cannot impose the requirement of full life cycle coverage the supply chains of actors have to be curtailed somehow in order to avoid double counting this work demonstrates and discusses a non arbitrary method of consistently delineating these supply chains into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive portions of responsibility to be shared by all actors in an economy

determinants of emissions growth in oecd countries abstract this paper analyses the sources of growth in energy related greenhouse gas emissions for oecd countries over the period 1982 1997 it employs a decomposition formula that separates out the effects of changes in population economic growth energy intensity of output in aggregate and by sector primary energy use in final energy consumption the share of fossil fuels and the carbon intensity of fossil fuel combustion it is shown that in general growth in emissions depends on how effectively energy use can be changed to offset the effects of economic growth across the oecd as a whole growth in emissions has been mainly due to economic growth both gdp per capita and population growth as well as an increase in primary energy required for final energy consumption offset by falling energy intensities and a declining share of fossil fuels overall the large fall in the energy intensity of oecd economies over 1982 1997 has been driven primarily by falling energy intensities in the services and industry sectors of the usa and the services sector of the european union but these have been offset somewhat by rising energy intensity of services in japan the influence of falling energy intensities and the declining share of fossil fuels weakened in the five year period 1992 1997 resulting in faster emissions growth there were sharp difference between countries with population growth and worsening fuel mix playing a much stronger role in the usa compared to the eu and japan but with the us making much larger reductions in energy use per unit of gdp the analysis suggests that opportunities to reduce emissions are more limited in germany the uk and japan with more opportunities in the usa canada the netherlands and australia

from production based to consumption based national emission inventories abstract under the united national framework convention of climate change unfccc countries are required to submit national emission inventories nei to benchmark reductions in greenhouse gas ghg emissions depending on the definition and system boundary of the nei the mitigation options and priorities may vary the territorial system boundary used by the unfccc has been critiqued for not including international transportation and potentially causing carbon leakage to address these issues past literature has argued in favour of using consumption based nei in climate policy this article discusses several issues in moving from the standard production based nei to consumption based nei first two distinct accounting approaches for constructing consumption based nei are presented the approaches differ in the allocation of intermediate consumption of imported products second a consistent method of weighting production based and consumption based nei is discussed this is an extension of the previous literature on shared responsibility to nei third due to increased uncertainty and a wide system boundary it may be difficult to implement consumption based nei directly into climate policy several alternative options for incorporating consumption based inventories into climate policy are discussed

embodied carbon in china s foreign trade an online sci e and ssci based literature review abstract this paper systematically presents a survey of the empirical literature studying the embodied co2 emissions in china s foreign trade ecct based on the bibliometric method and the online version of science citation index expanded sci e and social sciences citation index ssci this study summarizes the latest publications regarding ecct in peer reviewed journals in terms of quantities most productive countries institutions authors citations and disciplines by using synthetic analysis of keyword frequency this study reveals the most popular methodologies applied in measuring ecct discusses the variation of numerical results in the literature and reasons and countermeasures for the results uncertainties continuous investigation of the literature releases the methodology employed for measuring ecct becoming more reasonable and the results more critical however the numerical results of ecct are of great discrepancies within given year by different considerations on methodology specification accounting principles and data sources and processing for instance the estimates of co2 embodied in china s exports changed from 478 mt to over 3000 mt and those of in china s imports ranged from 140 mt to over 1700 mt in 2007 therefore overcoming data inherent limitations and reducing discrepancies among available databases should be urgently considered the results imply that the prospective research tendencies on ecct are to 1 improve china s regional input output data and energy intensity data to more precise estimates under global perspective 2 estimate china s carbon emission at firm level by different firm ownerships in production and consumption worldwide 3 assess china s carbon emission from processing or non processing trade by compiling more detailed multi regional input output table 4 evaluate city level carbon mitigation capacity in china under global mrio model 5 explore new carbon management experience in china s carbon trading market and new trade expansion policy of one belt and one road in her new growth era

supply side structural effect on carbon emissions in china abstract this paper carries out a structural decomposition analysis sda of production related carbon emissions in china from 1992 to 2005 by adopting the ghosh input output model it finds that the supply side structure measured by sectoral shares in value added increased production related carbon emissions in 1992 2002 mainly due to the rapid growth of manufacturing sectors but reduced them in 2002 2005 thanks to the decreased shares of carbon intensive sectors whatever the supply side structure forward carbon multipliers of each sector or changes in supply side sectoral shares and related emissions effects calculated by adopting the ghosh input output model were different from their demand side counterparts estimated by adopting the leontief input output model the results suggest optimizing the supply side structure and lowering the forward carbon multipliers to control carbon emissions in the future

rational expectations in elections some experimental results based on a multidimensional model while our experimental results do not show convincingly the superiority of our model over alternative hypotheses these results do not reject the rational expectations approach to handling incomplete information in elections this is not to say of course that our model provides the most appropriate treatment of incomplete information since it relies primarily on one source of information polls certainly other data exist such as the historical record of the parties primary election outcomes and the coalitions observed at nominating conventions which voters might use for information on their choices what we hope our analysis has begun however is a more rigorous study of how citizens can interpret such data and the role played by the various media in supplying these data

carbon dioxide emissions allocation a review carbon dioxide co2 emissions allocation plays a fundamental role in determining reduction responsibility at economy level or emission permits at firm level past decades have seen the development and applications of various methods for co2 emissions allocation this paper provides a literature review of co2 emissions allocation with emphasis on the evolution of allocation methods used it begins with a summary of the most popular allocation principles and criteria that lay a foundation for the development of allocation methods we then classify the existing allocation methods into four groups namely indicator optimization game theoretic and hybrid approaches the main features and findings of past studies are identified and summarized while the fairness principle prevails in earlier studies the efficiency principle has been found to receive increasing attention recently we also present a comparison of the empirical results based on ten popular indicator methods to show how indicator choice affects the allocation results issues related to selecting appropriate methods in co2 emissions allocation are finally discussed further research may be carried out to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency so that the allocation results become more widely acceptable and economically feasible

carbon emission flow in the power industry and provincial co2 emissions evidence from cross provincial secondary energy trading in china abstract the accurate calculation of co2 emissions in every province in china is the basis for developing regional energy policies there is a huge fossil fuel reserve and production capacity in western china whereas their underdeveloped social and economic status means that there is lower demand the more developed eastern coastal regions of china show dynamic economic momentum and hence higher energy demand based on the carbon emission flows in network theory this paper proposes an approach to recalculate provincial co2 emissions from the perspective of secondary energy consumption this approach attributes co2 emissions to final energy consumers after considering cross provincial secondary energy trading especially cross provincial electric power trading in the regional power grid given the uneven distribution of energy resources and the imbalance of energy consumption among regions cross provincial secondary energy trading in china is significant especially in the power industry by adopting the approach proposed in this paper the provincial carbon intensity and the corresponding energy policy can be modified to make energy end users pay rather than the primary producer

a review of recent multi region input output models used for consumption based emission and resource accounting abstract the interest in consumption based emission and resource accounting has grown significantly many studies juxtapose consumer emissions carbon footprint and producer territorial emissions of greenhouse gases in order to demonstrate the effects of trade on the national emission budget to this end a respectable number of studies have been undertaken worldwide in order to estimate emissions embedded in international trade of numerous countries and world regions input output approaches and increasingly multi region input output mrio models are commonly chosen as they provide an appropriate methodological framework for complete carbon footprint estimates at the national and supra national level with increasing processing capabilities of computers and a wider availability of economic accounts environmental accounts and trade data such models are now being implemented on a wide scale after a brief overview of salient single region input output studies i provide an in depth review of the most recent multi region input output models used for the purpose of consumption based environmental accounting the main methodological features and important results are described for around twenty studies covering the years 2007 to 2009 this is followed by a detailed review of studies dealing with uncertainty in mrio analysis an area which has not received a lot of attention so far i conclude that further research is mainly needed in two areas a improvements in data availability and quality and b improvements in the accuracy of mrio modelling

constructing long term 1948 2011 consumption based emissions inventories accompanying the boom in the global economy co2 emissions have soared over the past several decades with the developing world exhibiting higher emission growth rates than the developed world emissions transfers between regions which represent a significant fraction of total emissions are assumed to be a primary factor contributing to this difference it is important to understand these transfer figures and the resulting consumption based emissions in order to evaluate the emissions drivers and establish climate policies existing studies however have merely estimated figures over a 20 years span post 1990 using a traditional input output analysis ioa framework to broaden the data coverage to pre 1990 of these transfer figures and to further analyze their impacts on total emissions in the long term a new model called the long term consumption based accounting model lcba which is directly based on statistics is developed to span the period from 1948 to 2011 the results are consistent with the magnitudes and trends of existing studies over the validation post 1990 period we use monte carlo methods to calculate upper and lower bounds on the lcba for each country and year and find that 3 existing time series are almost fully included within these boundaries from 1990 furthermore the lcba model is succinct enough to be easily expanded for future ghg estimations or to analyze other ecological footprints related to the flow of materials it can be assumed that the soaring emissions transfers will seriously jeopardize the current climate policies such as kyoto protocol the durban platform for enhanced action adp under which all parties are legally bound will require a consumption based accounting method together with the territorial one in order to achieve an equitable agreement however more researches are still needed to facilitate the use of these figures to better support decision making

input output analysis of carbon emissions embodied in china japan trade abstractenergy related co2 emissions embodied in international trade have been widely studied by researchers all over the world by using the bilateral trade input output btio approach this study investigates the co2 emissions embodied in china japan trade during 1995 2009 and attempts to identify the driving forces for the change in co2 emissions embodied in china s exports to japan during that period by using structural decomposition analysis sda result shows that co2 emissions embodied in china s exports increased by about 100 from 1995 to 2009 whereas those embodied in china s imports increased by about 500 during the same period result of this research also reveals that the scale effect had a large influence on the increase in co2 emissions embodied in china japan trade the technical effect greatly decreased co2 emissions embodied in china s exports to japan but obviously increased those embodied in imports the influence of the structural effect was relatively small and insignificant in

china s provincial co2 emissions embodied in international and interprovincial trade trades create a mechanism of embodied co2 emissions transfer among regions causing distortion on the total emissions as the world s second largest economy china has a large scale of trade which results in the serious problem of embodied co2 emissions transfer this paper analyzes the characteristics of china s co2 emissions embodied in international and interprovincial trade from the provincial perspective the multi regional input output model is used to clarify provincial co2 emissions from geographical and sectoral dimensions including 30 provinces and 28 sectors two calculating principles production accounting principle and consumption accounting principle munksgaard and pedersen 2001 are applied the results show that for international trade the eastern area accounts for a large proportion in china s embodied co2 emissions the sectors as net exporters and importers of embodied co2 emissions belong to labor intensive and energy intensive industries respectively for interprovincial trade the net transfer of embodied co2 emissions is from the eastern area to the central area and energy intensive industries are the main contributors with the largest amount of direct co2 emissions the eastern area plays an important role in co2 emissions reduction the central and western areas need supportive policies to avoid the transfer of industries with high emissions

business incentives for sustainability a property rights approach abstract public and private demands for sustainable development put pressure on firms to develop strategies that include environmental concerns environmental effects from products often appear as externalities outside the legal boundary of the producing company these companies often possess the best competence to optimise the total life cycle environmental performance of its products they are however neither obliged nor stimulated enough by policy incentives to do so from a sustainable development perspective the policy instruments used today are mostly of a control and demand type i e they do not create sufficient incentives to go further than hedging over set requirements environmental concerns and tightened environmental policy parameters have mostly been associated with the notion of additional costs and thus a restriction on economic performance however since the mid 1990s several papers have called for corporate win win situations as well as instruments giving up stream incentives for change but not enough abatement of environmental impacts has emerged in reality perhaps this is due to the lack of proper connection between economic theory on the one hand and incentive advocating articles and instruments on the other we propose a concept for trading of product life cycle plc emission rights based on property rights and transaction cost theories considering the problem with asymmetric information over the value chain the initial financial impacts from such plc instruments are shown to be significant for the system provider since emissions and resource use become production costs this provides economic incentives to take an increased responsibility for information flow as well as initiatives for product innovations

the paradox of voter participation a laboratory study it is widely believed that rational choice theory is grossly inconsistent with empirical observations about voter turnout we report the results of an experiment designed to test the voter turnout predictions of the rational choice palfrey rosenthal model of participation with asymmetric information we find that the three main comparative statics predictions are observed in the data the size effect whereby turnout goes down in larger electorates the competition effect whereby turnout is higher in elections that are expected to be close and the underdog effect whereby voters supporting the less popular alternative have higher turnout rates we also compare the quantitative magnitudes of turnout to the predictions of nash equilibrium we find that there is undervoting for small electorates and overvoting for large electorates relative to nash equilibrium these deviations from nash equilibrium are consistent with the logit version of quantal response equilibrium which provides a good fit to the data and can also account for significant voter turnout in very large elections

austria s co2 responsibility and the carbon content of its international trade abstract seeking to limit global warming to 2 c puts narrow restrictions on the remaining carbon budget while the prevalent accounting framework for carbon emissions is production based production based principle pbp we here quantify the co2 emissions on the basis of the consumption based principle cbp for austria at a methodological level a multi regional input output model with full linkages is used to account for austria s co2 responsibility on a global scale estimates are carried out for the years 1997 and 2004 results show that during 1997 co2 responsibility based on cbp were 36 larger than those based on pbp this relation has increased through time the cbp indicator of 2004 was 44 larger than the pbp in terms of carbon emission location for each euro spent on austrian final demand in 2004 it is estimated that two thirds of the co2 emissions occur outside austrian borders regarding the origin of the emissions embodied in imports it is estimated that about one fourth originated in non annex i countries in 1997 this proportion increased to one third by 2004 due to this divergence between cbp and pbp indicators there is a need to re think current accounting bases in order to properly assign co2 responsibilities

tracing co2 emissions in global value chains abstract this paper integrates two lines of research into a unified conceptual framework trade in value added and embodied emissions in trade this allows both value added and emissions to be systematically traced at the country sector and bilateral levels through various routes in global value chains by combining value added and emissions accounting in a consistent way the potential environmental cost along global value chains can be estimated from different perspectives like production consumption and trade using this unified accounting framework we trace value added and co 2 emissions in global production and trade networks among 41 economies in 35 sectors from 1995 to 2009 based on the world input output database and show how they improve our understanding of the impacts of cross border production sharing on the environment

the development of commercial local area resource and emissions modelling navigating towards new perspectives and applications meeting near future uk greenhouse gas ghg emissions targets will require all parts of the uk economy to contribute and in particular significant changes in business practices are required at the local level from review it was found that there is a lack of detailed business accounting and reporting of ghg emissions at the local level especially concerning supply chain impacts and small and medium sized enterprises this paper presents a framework model to generate detailed benchmark estimates of ghgs both on site and supply chain related for individual businesses and all businesses of a sector within an area the model makes use of available economic and environmental data and with similar datasets existing in other parts of the world such models may be used elsewhere the framework model is applied to an empirical case study estimates from such a framework can be used in a step by step approach to move businesses and local areas towards improved accounting reporting and sustainability including procurement the model makes use of two different accounting perspectives the production perspective on site ghgs and the provision perspective supply chain ghgs attributable to purchased inputs of a business or sectors production the new provision perspective and its consequences are explored and explained

towards a better understanding of renewable energy yieldcos abstract for renewable energy yieldcos to disburse high and growing present day dividends at the cost of delayed debt service and avoided capital expenditure is clearly unsustainable expecting to issue new stock at ever higher prices to pay incumbent investors ever higher dividends represents the foundations of a pyramidal scheme which is most likely to unravel sooner rather than later in the medium term yieldcos may be expected to offer positive and reasonably stable annualized returns certainly not entirely risk free as frequently perceived though displaying characteristics of a bond rather than those of an equity share this paper also demonstrates the application of the real option valuation framework to prioritize investments into yieldcos with stocks classified in order of the returns they offer and conditioned by the volatility of such returns

the responsibility for carbon emissions and carbon efficiency at the sectoral level evidence from china this work reviews benefit based principles to measuring responsibility for carbon emissions at the sectoral level using environmental input output analysis several new emissions multipliers are proposed to measure sectoral carbon efficiency these principles are used in an empirical analysis of carbon emissions in china and differences between the principles are compared the results indicate that all principles considered can prevent double counting of emissions but that different principles may lead to significantly different attributions of responsibility for carbon emissions and to different multiplier values for particular sectors electricity and heat supply is found to be the sector with the highest emissions responsibility under all but the consumer responsibility principle as well as the highest carbon multiplier under all principles however this sector s responsibility under producer responsibility principles is greater than that under other principles basic metals and transportation and post and telecommunication are among the top five sectors with the greatest responsibilities under all but the consumer responsibility principle whereas construction has the highest consumer responsibility among all sectors the pros and cons and policy implications of each principle are also discussed

trade off analysis between embodied energy exports and employment creation in china moving towards sustainable consumption in china must factor in the drivers of production china s domestic energy demand is affected not only by domestic demand but also by foreign trade the accounting of energy embodied in china s international trade has attracted much attention in recent years in fact embodied energy imports exports are a part of the normal pattern of economic phenomena occurring through international trade with exports of embodied energy contributing significantly to china s economic development this research suggest that china s net embodied energy exports remained relatively stable before 2002 and then increased dramatically from 73 mtoe in 2002 to 502 mtoe by 2007 with an average annual growth rate of 47 2 over that period the total employment creation reliant on these exports is 191 3 million people including direct employment of 44 1 million people and indirect employment of 147 2 million people in 2007 and the total employment creation increased quickly between 2002 and 2007 with an average annual growth rate of 9 1 the share of employment created by exports in china s total employment increased from 16 5 in 1997 to 18 6 in 2002 and a more dramatic increase can be observed in 2007 of 28 1 the exports oriented sectors in china are energy intensive from the perspective of embodied energy consumption and the energy intensive exports are located in nearly the same sectors as the labor intensive exports china will find it difficult to sustain the trade off in costs due to unemployment if it wishes to reduce embodied energy exports china needs to exercise patience and long term reform to change the current development model because of its large economy and population base

let the experts decide asymmetric information abstention and coordination in standing committees abstract we examine abstention when voters in standing committees are asymmetrically informed and there are multiple pure strategy equilibria swing voter s curse svc equilibria where voters with low quality information abstain and equilibria when all participants vote their information when the asymmetry in information quality is large we find that voting groups largely coordinate on the svc equilibrium which is also pareto optimal however we find that when the asymmetry in information quality is not large and the pareto optimal equilibrium is for all to participate significant numbers of voters with low quality information abstain furthermore we find that information asymmetry induces voters with low quality information to coordinate on a non equilibrium outcome this suggests that coordination on letting the experts decide is a likely voting norm that sometimes validates svc equilibrium predictions but other times does not

identifying critical supply chain paths that drive changes in co2 emissions abstract to address the problem of global warming it is important to identify the supply chain paths that drive changes in life cycle co2 emissions and provide both policy makers and decision makers with the information on the critical paths in order to efficiently reduce the co2 emissions in this article i extract and analyze the factors and key supply chains involved in changes in co2 emissions associated with japan s overall demand from 1990 to 2000 using the structural path decomposition spd method applied to the 1990 1995 2000 linked japanese environmental input output tables at the four digit commodity classification level the results reveal that the volume of co2 emissions increased as a result of changes in the input structure of the electricity of the services sector such as electricity amusement and recreation facilities household demand electricity retail trade household demand and electricity public administration local local government demand indicating increasing dependence of services on energy input i also find that the final demand shift changed co2 emissions for example the rise in demand for integrated circuits in exports has contributed to increasing co2 emissions generated from electricity the fall in demand for frozen fish and shellfish in household demand has contributed to decreasing co2 emissions from marine fisheries

consumption and environment some conceptual issues abstract consumption ranks with population and technology as a major driver of environmental change and yet researchers and policymakers have paid it scant attention when the topic is addressed its conceptual foundations are either taken as self evident or are conflated with production overall economic activity materialism maldistribution population or technology the risk is to adopt the latest buzzword in the environmental debate stretch the concept to encompass all conceivable concerns and forfeit any advantage for analysis or for behavior change that may accrue to a new perspective on environmental problems consumption must be distinguished conceptually from other approaches to environmental problems one approach is to work within the consumption production dichotomy examining not just purchasing but product use and non purchase decisions a second approach one that challenges the prevailing dichotomy and its propensity to relegate consumption to a black box is to treat all resource use as consuming that is using up and ask what risks are entailed consumption can then be seen as material provisioning where risks increase with increasing distance from the resource as background misconsumption or overconsumption depending on the social concern raised or as a chain of decisions that compel the behaviors of restraint and resistance among producers pursuing the consumption and environment topic engenders resistance among a wide range of actors for reasons that are personal analytic and policy related nevertheless the topic appears to have the potential of helping analysts and others transcend conventional approaches to excess throughput

elections with limited information a fulfilled expectations model using contemporaneous poll and endorsement data as information sources a one dimensional model of two candidate elections under asymmetric information is theoretically developed and experimentally tested candidates do not know voter utility functions and most voters are uninformed about candidate policy positions a fulfilled expectations equilibrium is defined using poll and endorsement data as information sources it is proved that with any positive fraction of informed voters any equilibrium extracts all available information all participants voters and candidates alike act as if they were fully informed for fixed candidate strategies a dynamic is given for convergence to voter equilibrium and this process is shown to imply a bandwagon effect

attributional or consequential life cycle assessment a matter of social responsibility abstract results of life cycle assessment lca are critically dependent on the system boundaries notably the choice of attributional or consequential modelling published lca studies rarely specify and justify their modelling choices since lca studies are typically performed within the context of social responsibility and product life cycle management this article investigates the relationship between social responsibility paradigms and the system modelling choices in lca we identify three different social responsibility paradigms value chain responsibility supply chain responsibility and consequential responsibility we point out that while there is no generally right or wrong choice of system model each responsibility paradigm implies a specific matching system model we then argue that all responsibility paradigms ultimately imply a consequential perspective namely that of responding to the concerns of the system stakeholders although value or supply chains are systems defined without concern for consequences and thus may include activities that the decision maker cannot influence the chosen system is still analysed and assessed by accounting for its social consequences and it is for these consequences that social responsibility is then taken we argue that it is inconsistent to exclude consequences of own actions i e the consequential system while including consequences from actions of others in value chain or supply chain we thus conclude that a consistent socially responsible decision maker must always take responsibility for the activities in the consequential product life cycle and may additionally take responsibility for the consequences of other activities in the value chain or supply chain we end the article with recommendations on reporting on lca system models that are more specific than those of the current lca standards

the carbon footprint of greek households 1995 2012 abstract the goal of this paper is twofold i to investigate the carbon footprint of greek households throughout the period 1995 2012 in order to identify the main socio economic factors that affect ghg emissions and ii to evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented policies to tackle climate change in this a consumption based emissions inventory approach is applied the analysis is based on an environmentally extended input output model including direct co2 emissions from households indirect co2 emissions from electricity consumption and indirect co2 emissions from energy used in the production of goods and services purchased by households domestic or imported statistical analysis and appropriate regression models were developed in order to identify the main factors influencing the carbon footprint of greek households the results indicate that the observed trends during the period 1995 2008 can be attributed to the effect of high economic growth this trend is partially counterbalanced by favorable weather conditions and the implementation of greenhouse mitigation policies and measures mainly in the supply side since 2008 the shrinking household income is the dominant driver in addition the effectiveness of energy conservation policies and measures in place is rather low while the effect of imports is limited

conditional cooperation and voluntary contributions to public goods we compare a partners condition where the same small group of subjects plays a repeated publi c good game to a strangers condition where subjects play this game in changing group formations subjects in the partners conditi on contribute from t he first period on significantly more to the publi c good than subjects in the strangers conditi on in the strangers conditi on contributions show a continual decay whil e in the partners conditi on contributions fluctuate on a high level until t hey decrease in the final periods we interpret subjects behavior in terms of conditional cooperation which is characterized by both future oriented and reactive behavior

consumer and producer environmental responsibility comparing two approaches abstract two different indicators of environmental responsibility were independently proposed by rodrigues et al rodrigues j domingos t giljum s schneider f 2006 designing an indicator of environmental responsibility ecological economics 59 3 256 266 and lenzen et al lenzen m murray j sack f wiedmann t 2007 shared producer and consumer responsibility theory and practice ecological economics 61 27 42 these indicators are both supposed to reflect the indirect effects of consumer and producer behavior in the generation of environmental pressure in this paper we compare their mathematical properties and interpretation we conclude that they have different implications for environmental policy

economic drivers of greenhouse gas emissions in china abstract for china greenhouse gas emissions increased by 0 075 gigatons gt in the period of 1995 2000 and increased by 4 23 gt from 2000 to 2009 then reached the amount of 8 61 gt in 2009 different from the traditional analysis focused on accounting sectors greenhouse gas emissions under the production based responsibility this paper investigates sectoral ghg emissions in china in the period of 1995 2009 from the perspective of consumption based and income based responsibility we found that different metrics yield very different ghg emission responsibilities the sector of electricity gas and water supply has the highest ghg emissions responsibility based on the production and income metrics while the sector of construction is the largest emitter under the consumption metric in the light of the key driver analysis of ghg emissions from 1995 to 2009 based on the consumption metric the change in the final demand volume is the largest driver of increase in china s consumption based ghg emissions 17 18 gt the changes in the production structure and the final demand structure are other contributors 0 53 gt 1 46 gt the improvement to the intensity of ghg emissions is the main force for ghg emissions mitigation 14 86 gt according to the income metric the contributions of input volume changes input structure changes and ghg intensity changes are similar to the effects of consumption based responsibility 19 11 gt 1 13 gt 14 95 gt the difference is that the change in the production structure is another force that offset ghg increase 0 98 gt results in this paper can give some recommendation on mitigating ghg emissions in china for policy makers from production side demand side and supply side

performance evaluation and a flow allocation decision model for a sustainable supply chain of an apparel industry abstract there is a growing concern that business enterprises and their supply chains focus primarily on economic activities and ignore their impact on the environment and society this paper aims to help decision makers managers and practitioners to achieve economic growth societal development and environmental protection by developing sustainable supply chain performance measures and proposes a partner selection and flow allocation decision making model survey data from 278 business organizations from the indian apparel industry supply chain network were used and an integrated method of structural equation modeling fuzzy analytical hierarchy process and fuzzy multi objective linear programming was applied to the proposed model the results of the structural equation modeling analysis indicate that the survey respondents considered sustainable production performance to be of prime importance which thus indicates its significance in developing a sustainable supply chain for the apparel industry to illustrate the use of the proposed model for partner selection and flow allocation decision making real time data from an apparel manufacturer are presented optimal results were obtained for two strategies sustainability and cost saving to show a cost benefit trade off when developing a sustainable supply chain using comparative performance a decision maker can choose an appropriate strategy based on cost benefit analysis of the presented trade offs

environmentally sustainable household consumption from aggregate environmental pressures to priority fields of action unsustainable consumption patterns of the north or rather of the global affluent consumers class have been identified by agenda 21 as one of the key driving forces behind the unsustainable development however neither accounting based on the system of national accounts sna nor household economics provide the proper instruments to assess the environmental impact of household decision making eco efficiency assessments as familiar in the business sector provide no appropriate tool for households as an alternative an environmental space based assessment scheme is suggested covering the major pressures on the environment caused by household decisions the methodology is used twice once to analyse the environmental relevance of the main activity clusters of household consumption and once to identify the dominant acts of consumption within each cluster the latter provide the basis for deriving environmental performance indicators a rough analysis of household influence potentials permits to identify housing eating and mobility as the three priority fields for action for minimising the environmental impact of households extending the influence analysis actor matrixes are derived allocating influence and thus responsibility for environmental pressures to different groups of economic agents

the evolution of household induced value chains and their environmental implications abstract the growing fragmentation of production processes and expansion of international trade in the last decades have increased the scope and complexity of value added chains worldwide causing a rearrangement of sectoral linkages intra and inter regionally in terms of economic spillovers this implies that a dollar entering a particular economy nowadays follows a different path than a decade before permeating in longer interregional feedback loops and creating additional multiplier effects outside its region of origin however it also implies that the environmental burden that such this dollar generates has changed in scale and spatial distribution in this paper we explore the evolution of these paths over the period 1997 2008 and highlight the main drivers of observed structural changes that contribute to the surge or decline of the spatial distribution of economic spillovers and greenhouse gases emissions we specifically study the effects of an increase in income in the united states the country with the largest trade volume in the world we introduce an extended version of the temporal leontief inverse tli framework that allows tracing the evolutionary path of the american households multiplier in a quasi dynamic fashion isolating the contribution of expenditure patterns income trade and foreign structural change to the temporal evolution we find similar growing multiplier effects inside and outside the us due to services and manufacturing respectively but a declining local environmental burden due to changes in interindustry relations inside the us with declining manufacturing and a reduced emission intensity we also highlight the fragmentation process with declining foreign intraregional spillovers and increasing trade spillovers

delving into the carbon footprints of singapore comparing direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions of a small and open economic system abstract small and open economic systems like cities face specific challenges for greenhouse gas accounting they typically import most of their energy requirements as secondary energy products based on conversion processes which caused emissions elsewhere emission estimates therefore already require attention not only to direct on site activities moreover for a comprehensive approach it is suggested to include upstream and downstream processes of connected socioeconomic systems and the indirect life cycle related emissions of imported and exported goods singapore is used in this longitudinal study as an example of an urban scale economy accounts for direct emissions are compared with trade corrected estimates of indirect emissions results indicate that direct emissions account for only about 20 of the overall upstream emissions necessary to sustain the input side of the economic production process domestic emissions plus indirect emissions embodied in imported goods if indirect emissions embodied in exports are considered and subtracted from the previous figure the trade corrected accounts for direct and indirect emissions still exceed direct emission accounts although by less than 40 given the increasing trends in world trade and urbanisation indirect pressures of urban systems should be included in discussions of effective and fair adaptation and mitigation strategies

the swing voter s curse in the laboratory this paper reports the first laboratory study of the swing voter s curse and provides insights on the larger theoretical and empirical literature on pivotal voter models our experiment controls for different information levels of voters as well as the size of the electorate the distribution of preferences and other theoretically relevant parameters the design varies the share of partisan voters and the prior belief about a payoff relevant state of the world our results support the equilibrium predictions of the feddersen pesendorfer model and clearly reject the notion that voters in the laboratory use naive decision theoretic strategies the voters act as if they are aware of the swing voter s curse and adjust their behavior to compensate while the compensation is not complete and there is some heterogeneity in individual behavior we find that aggregate outcomes such as efficiency turnout and margin of victory closely track the theoretical predictions

on sustainability interpretations of the ecological footprint abstract this paper focuses on using the ecological footprint concept for sustainability assessment the ecological footprint is a popular indicator of human use of environmental resources and is commonly presented at the country level by comparing the consumption footprint with territorial biocapacity with a negative balance implying unsustainability this constrains a country s consumption by its biocapacity but allows its stock of resources to be depleted if they are not associated with domestic consumption this paper argues that this approach is legitimate but should not automatically constitute a default framework for interpretation two perspectives on entitlements to environmental resources are analyzed and based on them a novel approach to sustainability assessment is proposed the paper further discusses the links between national sustainability and the related issues of self sufficiency consumption and responsibility

a bibliometric account of the evolution of ee in the last two decades is ecological economics becoming a post normal science abstract in ecological economics the debate on formalism and formalization has been addressed in the context of a lively discussion on ecological economics as a post normal versus normal science using ecological economics ee as a seed journal and applying bibliometric techniques to all 2533 the articles published in ee from january 1989 to december 2009 we analyze the evolution of the field of ecological economics aiming to shed light on this debate we observe the predominance and increased relevance of certain research topics methodological issues policies governance and institutions and valuation moreover collective action technical change and the environment and values stand as emergent themes of research finally we note that ecological economics experienced an empirical turn reflected in a shift away from exclusively formalized papers towards exclusively empirical and to a larger extent formal and empirical ones the combination of the prominent and emergent topics and the empirical turn mirrors the increasing awareness among researchers in the field of the need to address a key specificity of ecological economics the interdependence of the economic biophysical and social spheres on this basis we argue that at least through the lens of ee ecological economics has evolved towards a post normal science

international trade and shared environmental responsibility by sector an application to the spanish economy abstract the aim of this paper is to define a shared responsibility criterion for analysing the impact of international trade on co 2 emissions applied to sectors with the approach proposed it is possible for sectors in a country to account for only a part of the emissions associated with exported and imported goods the agents considered as responsible for pollution are sectors two fold as producers and suppliers of intermediate inputs and final demand accounting for direct emissions linked to production and as consumers of intermediate inputs required for production accounting for direct and indirect emissions linked to consumption of inputs and the countries and foreign sectors that trade with these industries the responsibility of emissions is shared by all the participants along the global product chain depending on the value added of each step the criterion is applied to the spanish economy for the period 2000 to 2005 and proves useful for determining what economic policies may be suitable for mitigating anthropogenic impact on the environment and for including all the agents of the supply chain in the development of sustainable supply chain management

co2 emissions from the transport of china s exported goods emissions of greenhouse gases in many european countries are declining and the european union eu believes it is on track in achieving emission reductions as agreed upon in the kyoto agreement and the eu s more ambitious post kyoto climate policy however a number of recent publications indicate that emission reductions may also have been achieved because production has been shifted to other countries and in particular china if a consumption perspective is applied emissions in industrialized countries are substantially higher and may not have declined at all significantly emissions from transports are omitted in consumption based calculations as all trade involves transport mostly by cargo ship but also by air transports add considerably to overall emissions growth incurred in production shifts consequently this article studies the role of transports in creating emissions of co2 based on the example of exports from china results are discussed with regard to their implications for global emission reductions and post kyoto negotiations

advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty we study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters preferences to uninformed political candidates we conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are initially unknown and change over time in the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections in the advocacy treatments voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences we find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group in fact we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups which convey new information and uninformative advocacy groups which do not overall advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter however advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation

recalculating co2 emissions from the perspective of value added trade an input output analysis of china s trade data abstract using traditional trade statistics to calculate co 2 emissions embodied in international trade results in significant miscalculations and a deeper divide between countries the aim of this research is to provide a reasonable estimate of carbon emissions to help policymakers in each country address their actual share of responsibility this study employs the world input output database and the gross export decomposition methodology to recount the co 2 emissions embodied in china s international trade from the perspective of value added trade the result shows that reliance on traditional statistics caused a significant overestimation of china s imports and exports us 398 77 billion and us 504 46 billion for china s imports and exports respectively our findings suggest that 177 24 million tons of carbon emissions embodied in imports and 907 636 million tons of carbon emission embodied in exports were over calculated the result obtained with traditional calculation methods has artificially increased the responsibility share of china in the global emissions reduction we also compare the co 2 emission coefficients of china with those of other countries our findings suggest that the high emission coefficients of most chinese industrial sectors determine the carbon emissions embodied in china s exports to be higher than in its imports

moral bias in large elections theory and experimental evidence in this article we provide evidence that voters in large elections tend to vote against their material self interest and to vote for a morally or ethically appealing alternative it may seem puzzling that voters might behave differently in small elections than they do in large ones however we show that such behavior is a logical consequence of voters having a conflict between obtaining a better material outcome and choosing a moral action we develop a simple model of this conflict and show that decreasing the probability that a single vote is decisive i e pivot probability reduces the importance of outcomes relative to actions in voter decision making because pivot probability is generally small in large elections alternatives that are understood by voters to be morally superior are more likely to win in large elections than in small ones thus compared to the preferences of voters election results will be biased in favor of moral alternatives 1 the model produces a set of predictions that we test in a laboratory experiment to clarify ideas consider a situation in which two outcomes are possible a and b assume that b gives

a three perspective view of greenhouse gas emission responsibilities in new zealand abstract while responsibility for the environmental impacts of production has been commonly assigned to producers production is driven by consumer demand and it is valid to question whether impacts should instead be assigned to consumers however in each of these approaches producers and consumers either bear the full burden of responsibility or none at all an example of this is the kyoto protocol where all greenhouse gas emissions are assigned to the producer and no consideration is given to where goods are finally consumed rather than taking the conventional producer or consumer responsibility approach a third perspective is possible in which responsibility is shared we use input output analysis to apply all three of these responsibility perspectives to new zealand s domestic greenhouse gas emissions our main findings from the shared responsibility approach are that new zealand producers are responsible for 44 of domestic emissions new zealand consumers take 28 and 27 are exported a shared responsibility approach appears to distribute the burden of responsibility and associated liability between parties more fairly and is likely to be more widely acceptable than pure producer or consumer perspectives

provincial responsibility for carbon emissions in china under different principles abstract by applying a multi regional input output model the study compares the provincial responsibility for carbon emissions and provincial carbon multipliers in china under seven responsibility allocating principles including three basic principles the production income and consumption principles and four shared responsibility principles the income weighted consumption weighted comprehensive and weighted comprehensive principles empirical results indicate that carbon multipliers of provinces under these principles are significantly different from one another the carbon multipliers of provinces with higher ratios of carbon intensive sectors in their outputs are also larger at the same time the carbon multipliers of the same sector in the provinces are significantly different from one another changing the principle causes significant changes in the responsibility for carbon emissions of some provinces but only slight changes in the responsibilities of some other provinces however the responsibilities of provinces with large economic sizes output are always the largest whereas provinces with the smallest economic sizes are always the smallest regardless of the principles further this study proposes a series of regional policies for carbon mitigation according to provincial carbon multipliers and responsibility allocation features under the different principles

retrospective voting an experimental study this essay reports on some experiments designed to study two candidate electoral competition when voters are retrospective voters the experiments consist of a sequence of elections in which subjects play the part of both voters and candidates in each election the incumbent adopts a policy position in a one dimensional policy space and voters are paid on the basis of single peaked utility function over that space for the position adopted by the incumbent neither voters nor candidates are informed of the voter utility functions and the only information received by the voter is the payoff he has received from the present and previous incumbent administrations despite the severely limited information of candidates and voters we find that generally candidates converge toward the median voter ideal point

bringing economic opportunity into line with environmental influence a discussion on the coase theorem and the porter and van der linde hypothesis environmental concerns and tightened environmental policy parameters have been associated with the notion of additional costs of compliance rather than with innovation and sustainability the contrary has also been suggested claiming that strict environmental legislation merely serves as a catalyst for firms to retain obvious economic and environmental mutual gains so called win wins laying around waiting to be collected such implications can be seen from the porter and van der linde writings heavily criticised by palmer et al as being built on faulty examples this paper supports that conclusion and uses property rights and transactions costs theories to find private incentives to explore the win wins for those actors who have the largest potentials to diminish the pressure on our environment by applying the coase theorem emphasising transaction costs and property rights this paper argues that strong public support is needed to create private incentives for exploring economic and environmental win win innovations the public support suggested is to a extend producer responsibilities where the same costs which may be neglected by the end consumers will if transferred to the design owner be viewed as a production cost and to b enforce environmental public procurement both may be combined with a support to c actors such as non governmental organisations and consumer agencies positioning themselves as information bridges by informing the consumers the negative effects of asymmetric information among actors can thereby be diminished as well as the low interest to primarily care for the environment among common consumers

voting when money and morals conflict an experimental test of expressive voting abstract moral considerations may matter much in voting because the costs of expressing support for a morally worthy cause may be low in a referendum these costs depend on whether a voter expects to affect the outcome of the referendum to test the low cost theory of expressive voting we experimentally investigate a proposal to tax everyone and to donate tax revenues the analysis of expectations and voting decisions shows that the low cost theory fails to explain voting decisions instead we find that voters tend to approve of the proposal if they expect others to approve too

spatial elections with endorsements and uninformed voters some laboratory experiments this paper presents a laboratory experiment designed to examine voting behavior within a spatial election framework when subjects are only endowed with endorsement information in the experiment subjects are assigned ideal points on a single issue dimension with the aid of an endorsement their task is to vote for the candidate whose position is closer to them the results show that under these conditions subjects are in fact playing a lottery where the odds of being correct is a function of spatial location the study points out that researchers should be aware of an information bias in models that use this particular information source

measuring emissions avoided by international trade accounting for price differences abstract net emissions avoided by trade nea are the difference between the pollution that would have been produced in a country if it had not exported any products and all the imports required to satisfy its domestic demand had been produced internally and its actual emissions the domestic technology assumption dta applied to an input output model is the appropriate method to estimate the nea the usual implementation of the dta involves that the country analyzed should produce a quantity of products equivalent to the monetary value of the imports required to satisfy its final demand i e monetary dta however due to price differences the same physical quantity of goods in different countries could have a different monetary value and the estimation of the nea would be biased we show that a physical dta focused on the pollution to produce domestically the imports measured in physical units would be a better approach we have applied both methodologies to analyze greenhouse gas emissions in spain 1995 2007 both methodologies show that spain is avoiding emissions through trade however the nea increases up to three times when applying the physical dta showing that results from the monetary dta are biased by price differences