energy consumption and economic growth in south africa reexamined a nonparametric testing apporach this paper is an effort to investigate claims concerning granger causality relationship from energy consumption to economic growth in south africa we adopt a nonparametric bootstrap method to reassess evidence supporting granger causality and unravel findings of long run unidirectional causality running from energy consumption to economic growth this implies that energy conservation policies will negatively impact economic growth in south africa in addition the results of this study have implications on co2 emissions in south africa given that coal accounts for about 72 of energy this suggests that energy use would have a long run effect of raising the country s co2 emission levels hence there might be a need to develop a more balanced energy structure which will include higher share of renewable energy a further monte carlo experiment performed reveals that asymptotic granger causality test suffers size distortion problem for south african data these findings provide support for use of a bootstrap methodology and also imply that the results presented in this study are likely to be more reliable

the impacts of transport energy consumption foreign direct investment and income on co2 emissions in asean 5 economies abstract in this study we incorporate new variables and assess the impact of transportation sector s energy consumption and foreign direct investment on co2 emissions for asean 5 economies using the cointegration and granger causality methods this study also attempts to validate the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis our results reveal that the co2 emissions and their determinants are co integrated only in indonesia malaysia and thailand the long run elasticity estimation suggests that income and transport energy consumption significantly influence co2 emissions whereas fdi is not significant economic growth plays a greater role in contributing to co2 emission in asean 5 nonetheless we find that the inverted u shape ekc hypothesis is not applicable to the asean 5 economies especially in indonesia malaysia and thailand in the long run the bi directional causality between economic growth and co2 emissions is detected in indonesia and thailand while we find unidirectional causality running from gdp to co2 emissions in malaysia we also observe bi directional causality between transport energy consumption fdi and co2 emissions in thailand and malaysia as an immediate policy option controlling energy consumption in transportation sector may result in a significant reduction in co2 emissions however this may slow the process of economic growth in malaysia and indonesia alternatively we suggest policymakers to place more emphasis on energy efficient transportation system and policies to minimise fossil fuel consumption thus the quality of environment can be improved with less deleterious impact on economic growth

strategic competition in sequential election contests this paper studies a sequential election contest such as theamerican presidential primary in which several electionsoccur one at a time until a single winner emerges theconventional wisdom is such a system benefits a candidatefavored in the initial elections because of momentum thispaper uncovers a potentially opposing force if participationis costly and candidates exit when they have unfavorablefuture prospects a candidate with friendly elections at theend of the contest will typically benefit from the resultinggame theoretic competition tension between this strategic effect and momentum helpsexplain several empirical regularities of presidentialprimaries

momentum and social learning in presidential primaries this paper investigates social learning in sequential voting systems in the econometric model candidates experience momentum effects when their performance in early states exceeds expectations the empirical application uses daily polling data from the 2004 presidential primary we find that kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from dean owing to these momentum effects early voters had up to five times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates and this helps to explain the distribution of advertising expenditures finally we use the estimated model to conduct two counterfactual experiments

what determines eu decision making needs power or both this paper examines the determinants of power in the council of the european union it argues that quantitative power indices stemming from voting theory provide a good description of the actual distribution of power among eu members of course we cannot directly verify the accuracy of such indices since it is impossible to measure power directly instead we evaluate whether these power measures explain a quantifiable manifestation of the exercise of power namely members shares of eu budget allocation as an alternative explanation of the eu budget we also consider a needs view of the budget where members allocations are determined by principles of solidarity our empirical analysis is based on 1976 2001 data on the patterns of the eu budget shares and on measures of each member state s needs and political power our results indicate that at least 60 of the budget expenditures can be attributed to selfish power politics and the remaining 40 to the declared benevolent eu budget policies however when we apply specific voting power measures that allow correlated preferences and cooperative voting patterns between the member states our estimates indicate that the power politics view can explain as much as 90 of the budget shares we conclude that power politics can explain a major part of the council decisions and that correlated preferences and voting cooperation between eu countries potentially play significant roles in eu decision making heikki kauppi and mika widgren

long term changes in co2 emissions in austria and czechoslovakia identifying the drivers of environmental pressures this study presents fossil fuel related co2 emissions in austria and czechoslovakia current czech republic and slovakia for 1830 2000 the drivers of co2 emissions are discussed by investigating the variables of the standard kaya identity for 1920 2000 and conducting a comparative index decomposition analysis proxy data on industrial production and household consumption are analysed to understand the role of the economic structure co2 emissions increased in both countries in the long run czechoslovakia was a stronger emitter of co2 throughout the time period but per capita emissions significantly differed only after world war i when czechoslovakia and austria became independent the difference in co2 emissions increased until the mid 1980s the period of communism in czechoslovakia explained by the energy intensity and the composition effects and higher industrial production in czechoslovakia counterbalancing factors were the income effect and household consumption after the velvet revolution in 1990 czechoslovak co2 emissions decreased and the energy composition effect and industrial production lost importance despite their different political and economic development austria and czechoslovakia reached similar levels of per capita co2 emissions in the late 20th century neither austrian eco efficiency nor czechoslovak restructuring have been effective in reducing co2 emissions to a sustainable level

rational herding in financial economics abstract this paper briefly describes recent papers on the economics of rational herding in financial markets some models can predict perfect herding in which rational agents all act alike without any countervailing force such herding typically arises either from direct payoff externalities negative externalities in bank runs positive externalities in the generation of trading liquidity or in information acquisition principal agent problems based on managerial desire to protect or signal reputation or informational learning cascades the paper also provides a few pointers to related literature and suggests issues to be addressed in future research

convergence in carbon dioxide emissions among industrialised countries revisited this paper examines the existence of stochastic and deterministic convergence of carbon dioxide co2 emissions in 23 countries over the period 1960 2002 for that purpose we conduct unit root testing by employing the recently developed panel stationarity test of carrion i silvestre et al carrion i silvestre j l del barrio castro t lopez bazo e 2005 breaking the panels an application to the gdp per capita econometrics journal 8 159 175 which assumes a highly flexible trend function by incorporating an unknown number of structural breaks we accommodate general forms of cross sectional dependence as well as control for finite sample bias through bootstrap methods overall our analysis provides strong evidence supporting both stochastic and deterministic convergence in co2 emissions thus confirming strazicich and list strazicich m c list j a 2003 are co2 emission levels converging among industrial countries environmental and resource economics 24 263 271 and westerlund and basher westerlund j basher s a 2007 testing for convergence in carbon dioxide emissions using a century of panel data environmental and resource economics forthcoming findings of convergence

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

impact of industrialisation on co2 emissions in nigeria abstract developing countries including nigeria aim to achieve industrialisation and sustainable development however there are few empirical studies that examined the impact of industrialisation led economic transformation on carbon emissions in developing countries this is the focus of this study the paper investigates the impact of industrial value added on co2 emissions in nigeria using the kaya identity framework and augmented dickey fuller adf johansen s cointegration technique and vector error correction model vecm the data spans from 1980 to 2011 the result of the adf test indicates that continual long term policies that exert permanent shocks on the variables are required to achieve economic development industrialisation and co2 reduction the result of the analysis shows that industrial value added has an inverse and significant relationship with co2 emissions which suggests that there is no evidence that industrialisation increases carbon emissions in nigeria gdp per capita and population has positive and significant impacts on co2 emission energy intensity and carbon intensity has positive but very weak significant impact at 10 level on co2 emission the paper recommends that policy makers in nigeria should pursue pragmatic industrialisation policies coupled with modest decarbonisation and energy efficiency measures in order to ensure long term industrial economic and sustainable development

are fluctuations in electricity consumption per capita transitory evidence from developed and developing economies abstract this paper investigates the unit root properties of electricity consumption per capita of 67 developed and developing countries for the period 1971 2010 to examine the stationary properties of electricity consumption per capita we have adopted lee and strazicich 2003 2004 test of unit root that allows us to test for at most two endogenous breaks and uses the lagrange multiplier lm test statistics results show that 65 country series reject the unit root null hypothesis except for 2 country series thus our empirical findings provide significant evidence that electricity consumption per capita is stationary in almost all countries considered the stationarity of electricity consumption per capita indicates that it should be possible for the series to forecast future movements in the energy consumption based on the past behaviors of the series

the new econometrics of structural change dating breaks in u s labor productivity we have seen the emergence of three major innovations in the econometrics of structural change in the past fifteen years 1 tests for a structural break of unknown timing 2 estimation of the timing of a structural break and 3 tests to distinguish unit roots from broken time trends these three innovations have dramatically altered the face of applied time series econometrics in this paper we review these three innovations and illustrate their application through an empirical assessment of u s labor productivity in the manufacturing durables sector

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

will policies to promote renewable electricity generation be effective evidence from panel stationarity and unit root tests for 115 countries abstract this study examines whether policies to promote renewable electricity generation are likely to be effective by applying panel unit root and stationarity tests to time series data on renewable electricity generation for 115 countries over the period 1980 2008 we find that for the panel as a whole and almost three quarters of the individual countries renewable electricity generation is characterized by a unit root this result implies that policies to promote renewable electricity generation such as renewable portfolio standards which result in annual increases in renewable energy and as such which represent permanent positive shocks to the long run growth path of renewable electricity generation will be more effective in increasing renewable electricity generation than policies with a pre specified time horizon

carbon dioxide income and energy evidence from a non linear model abstract this study applies the panel smooth transition regression pstr model to explore the impacts of real income energy and investment on the co 2 income nexus for 99 countries covering the period from 1971 to 2010 we find that in the full sample as real income rises co 2 emissions rapidly increase first and then their increasing rate starts to slow down while the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis for co 2 emissions is supported from the composite results of three income groups our results show that decreasing energy usage improving energy efficiency and enhancing clean energy usage could effectively ease the impacts of real income on co 2 emissions moreover countries with different energy trade conditions and income levels have different co 2 income correlations indicating that one size does not fit all

decomposition of ireland s carbon emissions from 1990 to 2010 an extended kaya identity in recent decades ireland has been an important example of a development pathway where rapid economic growth was accompanied by rising energy demand and increasing carbon emissions understanding the driving forces of carbon emissions is necessary for policy formulation and decomposition analysis is widely used for this purpose this study uses an extended kaya identity as the scheme and applies the log mean divisia index lmdi i as the decomposition technique change in carbon emissions is decomposed from 1990 to 2010 and includes a measure of the effect of renewable energy penetration results illustrate that scale effects of affluence and population growth act to increase emissions and are countered primarily by energy intensity and fossil fuel substitution renewable energy penetration has a minor effect but has been increasing in recent years policy will need to significantly reduce intensity and increase renewables if applicable targets are to be reached this requires not only a comprehensive suite of policies and measures but emphasis on the development path and non technical change for optimal outcomes

sequential voting with abstention abstract dekel and piccione 2000 sequential voting procedures in symmetric binary elections j polit economy 108 34 55 have proven that information cascades do not necessarily affect the properties of information aggregation in sequential elections under standard conditions any symmetric equilibrium of a simultaneous voting mechanism is also an equilibrium of the correspondent sequential mechanism we show that when voters can abstain these results are sensitive to the introduction of an arbitrarily small cost of voting the set of equilibria in the two mechanisms are generally disjoint and the informative properties of the equilibrium sets can be ranked if an appropriate q rule is chosen when the cost of voting is small the unique symmetric equilibrium of the simultaneous voting mechanism dominates all equilibria of the sequential mechanism

analyzing cost of grid connection of renewable energy development in china abstract renewable energy is believed to be the central issue in sustainable development literatures on renewables costs are rather sparse especially on costs of integration and system balancing the objective of this paper is to fill the research gap by providing an assessment for the cost of china s grid connected renewable energy development and analyze its sharing between different stakeholders due to china s pricing mechanism of renewable energy and their cost decreasing potential the pricing model of feed in tariff and dynamic technological learning processes are employed in the estimation of purchasing cost the positive bias is overcome by considering china s energy saving dispatching policy the results suggest that purchasing cost would be 32 57 40 80 billion yuan over 2012 2020 and peak in 2017 grid integration costs which further involve costs of grid infrastructure and system balancing are also investigated we find that grid infrastructure will cost 27 88 billion yuan by 2015 and soar to 45 32 billion by 2020 while system balancing will cost 31 49 billion yuan in 2015 and 63 97 billion yuan in 2020 among which a substantial part over 60 comes from electricity loss in energy transfer the different parts of these costs are underwritten by disparate participants due to china s renewable energy policies and its institutional arrangement purchasing cost is shared by power consumers through res the cost of grid infrastructure is mainly covered by grid enterprises and there is no mechanism to specify how to share the cost electricity loss during system balancing which might become a major obstacle for system balancing

bandwagons and momentum in sequential voting in this paper i show that an equilibrium exists to the sequential voting game in which a bandwagon begins with probability 1 these bandwagons are driven by a combination of beliefs and the desire of voters to vote for the winning candidate significantly in this equilibrium the pivot probability for each voter is non zero even in an infinite population consequently the bandwagons do not always start after one or at most two favourable decisions as do economic cascades and varying levels of informative voting are observed consistent with observations from sequential voting in u s presidential primaries further voters are exposed to counterintuitive incentives referred to as buyers remorse that have been attributed to real primary voters i also derive equilibrium behaviour in this environment when voting is simultaneous and compare the quality of information aggregation within each mechanism i relate the conclusions to u s presidential primaries and find they are consistent with a common conclusion about the front loading of the primary process that in tight elections with no front runner simultaneous voting is preferred whereas in lopsided elections sequential voting is preferred the superior performance of sequential voting in lopsided races is precisely because bandwagons occur copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

are co2 emission levels converging among industrial countries time paths of carbon dioxide emissions intwenty one industrial countries are examinedfrom 1960 1997 to test for stochastic andconditional convergence both panel unit roottests and cross section regressions areperformed overall we find significantevidence that co2 emissions haveconverged

the taylor rule and interest rates in the emu area abstract we demonstrate that average interest rates in the emu countries in 1990 98 with the exception of the period of exchange market turmoil in 1992 93 moved very closely with average output gaps and inflation as suggested by the taylor rule

monnet s error in entering a currency union without any political union european countries have taken a gamble will the needs of the currency unions force a political integration as anticipated by monnet or will the tensions create a backlash as suggested by kaldor friedman and many others we try to answer this question by analyzing the cross sectional and time series variation in pro european sentiments in the eu 15 countries the 1992 maastricht treaty seems to have reduced the pro europe sentiment as does the 2010 eurozone crisis yet in spite of the worst recession in recent history the europeans still support the common currency europe seems trapped there is no desire to go backward no interest in going forward but it is economically unsustainable to stay still

is the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis a sound basis for environmental policy in africa achieving economic development and environmental sustainability simultaneously is one of the most important development challenges for africa today the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability is founded on the environmental kuznets curve ekc this paper examines the validity of the hypothesis and the driving factors of carbon dioxide co2 emission in five african countries using the stirpat empirical model panel cointegration and fully modified ordinary least squares unlike previous studies economic development is disaggregated into agriculture and industrial economic development the results show that there is no evidence of the validity of the hypothesis in africa regardless of whether economic development is driven by agriculture or industrialisation energy structure and energy intensity are the two major driving forces of co2 emissions in africa population growth and urbanisation have negative relationship with co2 emissions from our results the ekc is not a sound basis for environmental policy in africa rather environmental policy in africa specifically for co2 emissions mitigation should focus on encouraging energy efficiency enhancing the use of clean energy incorporating the impact of population growth and harnessing the positive impacts of urbanisation

reduction potential of co2 emissions in china s transport industry newhuadu business school research fund china sustainable energy program g 1311 19436 ministry of education 10 jbg 013 national social science foundation of china 71203186

global crises and populism the role of eurozone institutions populist parties are likely to gain consensus when mainstream parties and status quo institutions fail to manage the shocks faced by their economies institutional constraints which limit the possible actions in the face of shocks result in poorer performance and frustration among voters who turn to populist movements we rely on this logic to explain the different support of populist parties among european countries in response to the globalization shock and to the 2008 2011 financial and sovereign debt crisis we predict a greater success of populist parties in response to these shocks in euro zone countries and our empirical analysis confirms this prediction this is consistent with voters frustration for the greater inability of the euro zone governments to react to difficult to manage globalization shocks and financial crises our evidence has implications for the speed of construction of political unions a slow staged process of political unification can expose the eu to a risk of political backlash if hard to manage shocks hit the economies during the integration process

mad about austerity the effect of fiscal consolidation on public opinion we explore the impact of fiscal austerity on three different dimensions of public opinion in 26 european union countries consumer confidence attitude toward national authorities and european institutions on annual data between 1997 and 2017 our main finding is that the independent effect of a tighter fiscal stance on public opinion is not large and when present seems to closely follow the impact of fiscal austerity on economic activity our results therefore are inconsistent with the view that fiscal austerity necessarily implies a negative effect on public opinion and a decline in popularity of national and european institutions

ambiguous policy announcements we study the effects of an announcement of a future shift in monetary policy when agents face knightian uncertainty about the commitment capacity of the monetary authority households are ambiguity averse and are differentially exposed to inflation due to differences in wealth in response to the announcement of a future loosening in monetary policy only wealthy households creditors will act as if the announcement will be fully implemented due to the potential loss of wealth from the prospective policy easing and when creditors believe the announcement more than debtors their expected wealth losses are larger than the wealth gains that debtors expect hence the economy responds as if aggregate net wealth falls which attenuates the effects of the announcement we study the quantitative properties of the model in a liquidity trap after allowing for a realistic characterization of households wealth portfolio