bargaining over governments in a stochastic environment in this paper i structurally estimate a stochastic bargaining model of government formation in a multiparty parliamentary democracy and i conduct policy experiments to evaluate the effects of changes in the bargaining procedure i show that the model fits well data on the duration of negotiations and government durations in postwar italy also i show that changes in the proposer selection process would not affect either the duration of negotiations or government durations whereas the imposition of a strict deadline would in general reduce the incentives to delay agreement as well as government durations

green spillovers of outward foreign direct investment on home countries evidence from china s province level data abstract in recent years there has been substantial outward foreign direct investment ofdi from china to other countries meanwhile china has taken green development as one of its core future strategies questions arise as to whether the ofdi of china brings green spillovers towards home and should the government encourage ofdi to further promote the domestic green economy to answer these questions this study examines empirically the reverse spillovers of china s ofdi on its domestic green development based on a panel dataset involving 30 provinces provincial green total factor productivity gtfp is calculated and its relationship with ofdi is discussed for the period of 2006 2015 then the main results demonstrate whether china s ofdi has green spillovers on the domestic economy and to what extent they depend on provincial heterogeneity in terms of absorptive capability and environmental regulation stringency at the national level it is only either when employees in every province have more than 12 years of schooling on average or the environmental legal construction index reaches approximately 611 that china s ofdi can generate significant spillovers towards its green economic growth such that a rise of 1 unit of ofdi is associated with 2 4 and 3 2 increases in gtfp respectively moreover green benefits from ofdi cannot be found in the home country unless the stock of ofdi reaches a certain level i e beyond approximately 3361 chinese yuan rmb per capita at the 2005 constant price at the provincial level the influence of ofdi on the green economy in the eastern provinces is greater than that in other provinces additionally this study finds that the relationships between ofdi absorptive capability environmental regulation stringency and green economic growth are robust to multiple econometric methods and alternative proxies for threshold variables overall it is indicated that china s ofdi does bring green spillovers to china but the current effects show large heterogeneities across provinces and are still very limited due to the lack of necessary supporting conditions even with the dramatically rising scale ofdi in most of chinese provinces has only small effects on local transition to the green economy calling for the formulation of proper policies to encourage ofdi and enhance its green spillover effect

environmental regulation industrial innovation and green development of chinese manufacturing based on an extended cdm model abstract as for the academics and policymakers more attention has been given to the issue on how to drive green development of the manufacturing through regulations and innovations we construct the extended crepon duguet mairesse cdm model and employ the panel data of chinese manufacturing industries during 2003 2014 to examine the effects of environmental regulation on industrial innovation and green development the findings reveal that 1 in the long term environmental regulation has crowded out r d investment 2 environmental regulation has inhibited patent outputs so that the weak version of porter hypothesis is not underpinned 3 in the short term environmental regulation has promoted the improvements of labor productivity energy efficiency and environmental efficiency in the manufacturing industry excluding green total factor productivity gtfp whereas in the long term environmental regulation only has increased energy efficiency while it has obstructed labor productivity which provides no support for the strong version of porter hypothesis 4 different innovation outputs have distinct influences on labor productivity energy efficiency environmental efficiency and gtfp finally this paper provides pertinent policy implications

do renewable energy technology innovations promote china s green productivity growth fresh evidence from partially linear functional coefficient models abstract renewable energy technology innovation can benefit the environment by promoting green productivity as proposed by existing theoretical studies however recent uneven developments of both environmental performance and renewable energy technology among regions in china remind us to revisit the above theoretical link in this paper we relax the hypothesized homogeneity and linearity in traditional empirical models to investigate the effects of renewable energy technology innovation on china s green productivity the results of the partially linear functional coefficient models show that the effect of renewable energy technological innovation on green productivity is significant only when the relative income level of a province passes a critical turning point beyond the turning point such an effect increases with the growth of relative income levels finally we provide provincial specific policy implications based on the estimated nonparametric relationship between renewable energy technology innovation and green productivity

the low carbon technology characteristics of china s ferrous metal industry abstract the ferrous metal industry is the largest energy consuming industrial sector in china this paper examines the low carbon production characteristics of this industry during the period 1980 2013 we employ the duality theory of the weighted russell directional distance function to propose a general procedure for modeling production characteristics with carbon emissions being considered the undesirable output using the weighted russell directional distance function model we measure the carbon adjusted technical efficiency and environmental regulatory costs for this industry to investigate policy effects we test the porter hypothesis using the granger causality between regulatory cost and technical efficiency by using the dual model of weighted russell directional distance function we estimate the carbon shadow pricing and inter factor substitution possibilities results show that the carbon adjusted technical efficiency and environmental regulation costs of the chinese ferrous metal industry have significantly increased in recent decades however the latter does not significantly cause the improvement of former the indirect morishima elasticities of substitution reflect that the increase of fixed assets will effectively improve the carbon emissions performance of the chinese ferrous metal industry finally some policy implications are suggested

reassessment of the tiebout model abstract the tiebout model has been the reference point for the classical approach to fiscal federalism its emphasis on mobility benefit taxation and the advantages of fiscal competition have informed fiscal federalism since the seminal contributions of musgrave and oates this paper reviews the influence that the tiebout model has had on fiscal federalism and argues that while its insights remain relevant for local government it is far from compelling as a positive description of or a normative prescription for fiscal federalism at the state level some aspects of alternative approaches are presented which lead to different perspectives than tiebout inspired ones

centralized versus decentralized provision of local public goods a political economy approach abstract this paper takes a fresh look at the trade off between centralized and decentralized provision of local public goods it argues that the sharing of the costs of local public spending in a centralized system will create a conflict of interest between citizens in different jurisdictions when spending decisions are made by a legislature of locally elected representatives this conflict of interest will play out in the legislature depending on precisely how the legislature behaves the result may be excessive public spending or allocations of public goods characterized by uncertainty and misallocation across districts the extent of the conflict of interest between districts is affected by spillovers and differences in tastes for public spending thus the relative performance of centralized and decentralized systems depends upon spillovers and differences in tastes for public spending but for different reasons than suggested in the existing literature

quantifying the risk to crude oil imports in china an improved portfolio approach abstract china s rapid economic development caused a sharp increase in crude oil demand in 2011 china imported 254 million tons of crude oil in total with its dependence on imported oil reaching 56 5 this paper carries out a quantitative study on the risk of china s crude oil imports by establishing an assessment model which has two primary characteristics first the model not only uses portfolio theory to assess the risk to china s crude oil imports taking into consideration the effect of the diversified sources of imports but also introduces a correlation coefficient which considers the risks associated with importing oil from oversea sources second the correlation between import prices and global oil prices is analyzed with respect to each exporting country the ease of doing business index grading system is introduced in order to represent the risk weight for each exporting country because of these improvements the model provides operable methods for studying how global oil prices import volumes the diversification index and the political and economic situation of the exporting countries affects china s crude oil import risks as well as offers a method for implementing optimal crude oil import strategies it is concluded that china s crude oil import risks associated with the middle east are not as precarious as researchers traditionally reported among countries in the middle east there exist obvious disparities and differences affecting the kinds and types of risks involved therefore these risks should be treated piecemeal when performing an overall assessment of crude oil import risks in china it should also be noted that with respect to the middle east there is still room for china to optimize the mix of source countries in order to reduce risks china should raise the volume of imports coming from low risk countries as well as add new low risk exporting countries to its importing portfolio

energy efficiency and sustainable growth in industrial sectors in european union countries a nonlinear ardl approach abstract it can be said that economic growth providing it ensures a clean and safe environment is one of the main objectives of many countries with this in mind an important question needs to be asked what is the relationship between energy efficiency and economic growth this can only be answered through an empirical analysis by carrying out such an analysis using the energy efficiency of the industrial sector for 11 european union countries for a time span from 1997 to 2015 it should be possible to understand if the energy efficiency measures and investments being made are driving economies towards greater energy efficiency and sustainable growth this paper uses a nonlinear ardl model which allows short and long run relationships to be analysed for the ascending and descending movements of variables the results indicate that investment is increasing energy efficiency while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions economic growth is driving economies to greater energy efficiency the same result is found in the industrial energy price index to verify robustness the environmental kuznets curve was estimated using gross domestic product per capita and as an alternative the industrial production index to ensure increased energy efficiency along with sustainable growth policymakers must adapt their policies and devise new ones to both incentivise investment and control energy pricing alternative ways of electricity generation such as renewable sources could allow the economy to grow in a more sustainable way such mechanisms would let policymakers develop policies for greener and more sustainable growth while at the same time encouraging the efficient use of energy

efficiency analysis of chinese industry a directional distance function approach two efficiency measures of chinese industry were estimated at the provincial level from 1994 to 2002 using a directional output distance function one is a traditional efficiency measure that considers only desirable output while the other considers both desirable and undesirable outputs simultaneously a comparison of the two measures revealed that efficiency levels are biased only if desirable output is considered five coastal provinces municipalities that have attracted a large amount of foreign direct investment are found to be the most efficient when only desirable output is considered and also when both desirable and undesirable outputs are considered however omitting undesirable output tends to lead to an overestimate of industrial efficiency levels in shandong sichuan and hebei provinces we also found that a province s industrial structure has significant effects on its efficiency levels

quantifying china s oil import risks and the impact on the national economy abstract with an increase in china s oil imports china s oil supply will also continue to be effected by the socio economic stability of oil exporting countries and the safety of oil transport routes this paper introduces a systematic and quantitative method to evaluate the influence of china s oil import risks oir on the national economy and industrial sectors from a perspective of apply chain process for this analysis china s oir is quantified by integrating oil exporting country risk and the risks from oil transportation routes country risk is defined as the oil exporting country s political risk caused by political changes or internal conflicts transport risk is defined as the risk of shipping routes affected by pirate attacks and geopolitics second the relationship between china s oir and oil import costs is analyzed using a multiple linear approach third an input output analysis method is used to research the effect of the cost of china s oil imports on the cost of investment within china s domestic sectors this research finds that the corresponding impact on gdp is 3494 5 million dollars given an increasing by 10 of china s oir and the impact on domestic sectors differs from sector to sector finally this paper puts forth recommendations to improve long term oil supply security in china

endogenous federal grants and crowd out of state government spending theory and evidence from the federal highway aid program contrary to simple theoretical predictions existing evidence suggests that federal grants do not crowd out state government spending a legislative bargaining model with endogenous grants documents a positive correlation between grant receipts and preferences for public goods this correlation has likely biased existing work against measuring crowd out to correct for such endogeneity the model motivates instruments based on the political power of state congressional delegations exploiting this exogenous variation in grants the instrumental variables estimator reports crowd out that is statistically and economically significant this endogeneity may explain the flypaper effect a nonequivalence between grant receipts and private income jel d70 h40 h77

predictability and power in legislative bargaining the rules and procedures of legislatures often provide legislators with information bearing on the identities of upcoming proposers for a broad class of legislative bargaining games we establish that markovian equilibria necessarily deliver all economic surplus to the first proposer whenever the information structure permits the legislators to rule out some minimum number of proposers one round in advance this result holds regardless of the recognition process and even if players vary in patience and risk aversion it raises the possibility that procedures adopted in the interest of transparency may contribute to the imbalance of political power

total factor spillovers similarities and competitions in the petroleum industry this chapter investigates multi dimensional spillovers similarities and competitions in the petroleum industry spatial techniques are applied first in production function in order to observe the cross sectional dependence in each of the four dimensions product technology segment and region wide these four single dimensional spatial models are then aggregated by a model averaging method that assigns weights to different models based on their ability to explain data taking all dependences into consideration this chapter estimates the total factor spillovers similarities and competitions in the spirit of total factor productivity negative spillover effects are observed in all the four dimensions moreover segment wide competition has negative effect on productivity some policy implications concerning human capital globalization and development strategies are also discussed

a carrot and stick approach to agenda setting this paper models a legislature in which the same agenda setter serves for two periods showing how he can exploit a legislature completely in the first period by promising future benefits to legislators who support him in equilibrium a large majority of legislators vote for the first period proposal because they thereby maintain the chance of belonging to the minimum winning coalition in the future legislators may therefore approve policies by large majorities or even unanimously that benefit few or even none of them the results are robust but institutional arrangements such as entitlements can reduce the agenda setter s power by reducing his discretion to reward and punish legislators and rules such as sequential voting can increase a legislator s ability to resist exploitation

bargaining in legislatures bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures in our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting the model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard institution free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium

exploring the green total factor productivity of china s metallurgical industry under carbon tax a perspective on factor substitution abstract the characteristics of high emissions and high energy consumption in metallurgical industry have brought great challenges to the green and low carbon transition in china as a low carbon economic instrument carbon tax is generally considered to be an effective way to reduce co2 emissions through raising energy cost but whether it will promote the green total factor productivity gtfp of china s metallurgical industry is still unanswered under this background this paper uses provincial panel data over years 2000 2015 to investigate the impact of carbon taxation on gtfp of metallurgical industry from the perspective of inter fuel and inter factor substitution the lock in mechanism is also incorporated in the three stage estimation model to better reflect the asymmetric price response of factors and fuels the results reveal that the slow marketization process of energy price and the rigid demand for energy in china s metallurgical industry hinder the substitution effect of energy the implementation of carbon tax has limited effect on energy saving and co2 reduction in the metallurgical industry of china and levying a carbon tax has a negative effect on gtfp during the research period therefore the government should not achieve co2 reduction targets at the expense of green economic growth gtfp is suggested to be considered in future assessment criteria in the process of transforming to low carbon economy

industrial eco efficiency in china a provincial quantification using three stage data envelopment analysis abstract the coordinated development of industrialization and the ecological environment is vital to achieve ecological civilization in china integratively considering the economy energy and resources and environment this study aims to measure the industrial eco efficiency of 30 provinces autonomous regions and municipalities in china between 2005 and 2013 a three stage data envelopment analysis dea modeling approach is adopted to eliminate interference of the external environment and statistical noise with industrial eco efficiency measurement the results show that regional industrial eco efficiency in china is affected by the factors of the environmental regulation technological innovation level of economic development and industrial structure after eliminating the impacts of external environment and statistical noise china s national average industrial eco efficiency declines by 30 between 2005 and 2013 the industrial eco efficiency of the 30 provinces increases but at different rates of growth the variation of overall regional industrial eco efficiency is primarily caused by scale efficiency furthermore all the 30 provinces are classified into four groups to interpret the causes of variation and differences of regional industrial eco efficiency in general the management and technology level and the economy of scale of industries should be improved simultaneously even though specific opportunities for industrial eco efficiency improvement vary across provinces in china

comparing tax expenditures and direct subsidies the role of legislative committee structure abstract this paper analyzes the impact of legislative committee structure on policy outcomes comparing a tax committee enacting tax expenditures and a decentralized system of specialized committees undertaking direct spending an endogenous commodity taxation framework is combined with models of legislative bargaining and committee voting the main conclusion is that the tax committee structure gives rise to lower subsidy levels under a wide range of circumstances however it is only under a more restrictive set of assumptions that social welfare is higher in the tax committee regime this theoretical analysis is illustrated by two examples of institutional change in congress

budget institutions and fiscal policy in the u s states this paper summarizes state balanced budget requirements and the available empirical evidence on the effect of these rules on state fiscal policies existing state rules differ from many current proposals at the federal level they are typically restricted to part of the state budget they frequently permit short term borrowing and they lack formal enforcement mechanisms the paper also surveys previous research on how anti deficit provisions affect state fiscal policy the available evidence indicates that stringent anti deficit provisions lead to more rapid adjustment of state taxes and expenditures when fiscal deficits emerge this suggests that changing the federal budget process has the potential to affect federal fiscal policy this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

quantifying the supplier portfolio diversity of embodied energy strategic implications for strengthening energy resilience this paper investigates energy resilience of countries by quantifying the supplier diversification of both direct and embodied energy import in particular we quantify two approaches to diversify a country s supplier portfolio by lowering the dependency on each supplier portfolio diversification and by having embodied energy suppliers that are different from its direct energy suppliers portfolio differentiation we examine possibilities for strategic utilization of embodied energy trade to compensate for low diversity of direct energy trade for three types of fossil resources coal oil and gas we find that the diversity of embodied energy import is much greater than that of direct energy import of the three energy resources coal enables countries to adopt portfolio diversification and portfolio differentiation more than gas and oil our results suggest embodied energy can be considered as a transfer of energy resources across national borders that can directly benefit from the diversity of the world energy production by skipping the limited diversity of the world energy export

carbon emission performance evaluation and allocation in chinese cities abstract this paper presents a dea approach with multiple abatement factors to evaluate co2 emission performance and allocate co2 emission quotas in chinese cities we first consider the difference of marginal abatement costs among cities and construct the non radial directional distance function with multiple abatement factors the total factor co2 emission performance index and its dynamic change index are then proposed to measure co2 emission performance considering equity and efficiency we develop a composite index by the hybrid method to allocate emissions quota which considers co2 emissions as well as co2 emission performance then we conduct an empirical study using inputs and outputs dataset of 71 chinese cities in 2005 2012 chinese cities have poor energy efficiency and still have high co2 emissions the eastern region outperforms the central region and the western region performs worst whereas the dynamic co2 emission performance of the central region has the largest increase the change of co2 emission performance is driven mainly by technological advances as for the co2 emission allocation the composite index method encourages cities to reduce emissions and enhance emission performance through carbon trading market it also motivates cities with high historical emissions to reduce their emissions by improving technology when they have poor co2 emission performance

evaluating china s natural gas supply security based on ecological network analysis abstract growing role of natural gas as an effective policy choice has kindled the discussions surrounding the security of its supplies in the policy circles of the chinese government this study tries to evaluate china s natural gas supply security and employs a system oriented modelling approach namely ecological network analysis ena to integrate all the critical compartments of china s natural gas supply system several ena indicators are constructed which disclose that domestic natural gas production contributes significantly to china s natural gas supply system in comparison with all the external natural gas suppliers in addition the variations in a system stability indicator suggest that diversification of external natural gas suppliers has a positive influence on china s natural gas supply security furthermore the results revealed that china s natural gas supply security policy is orchestrated on following features 1 to increase the investment in the upstream natural gas production sector to boost its domestic production in order to reduce its import requirements and 2 to diversify the external natural gas supplies by sources and routes to reduce the level of the economic and supply disruption related risks

a structural model of government formation in this paper we estimate a bargaining model of government formation in parliamentary democracies we use the estimated structural model to conduct constitutional experiments aimed at evaluating the impact of institutional features of the political environment on the duration of the government formation process the type of coalitions that form and their relative stability

comparison of china s oil import risk results based on portfolio theory and a diversification index approach in recent years the international oil price has fluctuated violently bringing about huge risk for the international oil trade in fact the risk of crude oil and petroleum product imports is different because of the different import origins and prices which import risk is lower for china from the perspective of oil supply security how should china portfolio crude oil and petroleum product imports to minimize its oil import risk using portfolio theory and a diversification index approach this paper compares and analyzes the supply price and transport risks of crude oil and petroleum product imports our results show that the following 1 specific risk diversification risk and marine transport risk of china s petroleum product imports are lower than that of crude oil imports 2 the average rate of return of china s petroleum product imports is higher than that of crude oil imports moreover the average import price variance of petroleum product imports is lower than that of crude oil imports thus the systematic risk price risk of petroleum products is lower too therefore from the perspective of oil supply security china should increase petroleum product imports to decrease its oil import risk

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

characterization of the von neumann morgenstern stable set in a non cooperative model of dynamic policy making with a persistent agenda setter abstract we generalize the dynamic bargaining game of diermeier and fong 2011 to arbitrary quota rules to provide a non cooperative characterization of the von neumann morgenstern stable set assuming that players are sufficiently patient and have strict preferences a pure strategy stationary equilibrium exists and in any such equilibrium a policy is a steady state if and only if it is in the stable set the result provides a non cooperative foundation of stable sets in settings with dynamic policy making and a persistent agenda setter

the rebound effect for heavy industry empirical evidence from china abstract energy efficiency improvement will reduce the effective price of energy services and hence at least partially mitigate original expected energy conservation therefore the magnitude of rebound effect is important for the design and timing of an effective energy conservation policy under the framework of translog cost share equations we estimates the direct rebound effect for heavy industry in china for the first time by conducting an empirical research on the relationship between the direct rebound effect and the ease with which energy services can substitute for other inputs additionally asymmetric price responses are specified in the model for the rebound effect estimation empirical results in our paper indicate that the rebound effect for heavy industry in china is about 74 3 this reveals that energy efficiency improvement can save energy to a certain degree since the rebound effect is less than 100 back fire but most of the expected reduction in heavy industry energy consumption is mitigated these findings prove that energy pricing reforms and energy taxes should be further implemented to achieve effective energy conservation in china s 12th five years plan

does financial agglomeration promote the increase of energy efficiency in china abstract whether financial agglomeration is conducive to the improvement of energy efficiency is of great significance for china to better follow the path of energy conservation and emission reduction and green sustainable development based on the balanced panel data of 285 cities in china from 2005 to 2017 this paper analyzes the impact of financial agglomeration on energy efficiency theoretical analysis shows that financial agglomeration can influence energy efficiency through scale economy effect innovation driving effect information spillover effect and structural adjustment effect dynamic spatial econometric results show that from a national perspective financial agglomeration has a positive impact on energy efficiency however from the perspective of different regions and different city sizes it is found that financial agglomeration can have different effects on energy efficiency financial agglomeration has a significant positive impact on energy efficiency in eastern and central regions megacities and big cities financial agglomeration has a significant negative impact on energy efficiency in western china and has no significant effect on energy efficiency in medium sized and small cities finally based on the conclusions of the study specific proposals for financial agglomeration to improve energy efficiency are proposed

sources of production inefficiency and productivity growth in china a global data envelopment analysis abstract the current mode of production in china is extensive and inefficient and has caused great stress on both resources and the environment this paper focuses on analyzing the sources of production inefficiency and productivity growth in china here a developed slacks based measure is utilized to decompose production inefficiency into three components input inefficiency economic output inefficiency and environmental inefficiency furthermore by applying a method based on global data envelopment analysis we take a further step to analyze the key factors responsible for the change of environmental productivity during 2003 2011 from the point of view of technical progress productive scale and management level the results show that redundancy in energy and labor inputs and excessive emission of sulfur dioxide chemical oxygen demand and ammonia nitrogen are the main sources of production inefficiency in china during the sample period the efficiency in all inputs and environmental emissions has improved except for capital input efficiency which had a decreasing trend further analysis shows that the overall environmental productivity in china has begun to follow an ascending path technical progress is the most powerful contributor to china s productivity growth while the decreases in scale and management efficiency are the two main obstacles preventing productivity improvement

does china factor matter an econometric analysis of international crude oil prices abstract whether china s crude oil imports are the culprit of oil price volatility these years has not been quantitatively confirmed therefore this paper empirically investigates the role of china s crude oil net imports in brent price changes from october 2005 to november 2013 based on an econometric analysis the results indicate that during the sample period china s crude oil imports do not significantly affect brent price changes no matter in the long run or short run therefore the blame for china s crude oil imports to cause the dramatic fluctuations of international oil price has no solid evidence also there exists significant uni directional causality running from the brent price to china s crude oil imports at the 5 level besides the response of the brent price to china s crude oil imports is found positive but slight and the brent price responds more significantly to us dollar exchange rate and oecd commercial inventory than to china s crude oil imports in the short run finally the contribution of china s crude oil imports to brent price movement is about 10 which is less than that of us dollar exchange rate but larger than that of indian crude oil imports or oecd commercial inventory

environmentally sensitive productivity growth a global analysis using malmquist luenberger index abstract we examine conventional and environmentally sensitive total factor productivity tfp in 41 developed and developing countries over the period of 1971 to 1992 due to the non availability of reliable input and co 2 emissions price data the study uses directional distance function to derive malmquist luenberger ml productivity index the index allows us to decompose the tfp into measures of technical and efficiency changes dea is used to compute the directional distance functions we find that tfp index value is not different when we account for the co 2 emissions relative to the situation when they are freely disposable but for the components of tfp change technical and efficiency changes the null hypothesis of whether the indexes are the same under two different scenarios cannot be accepted issues of catch up and convergence or in some cases possible divergence in productivity are examined within a global framework the paper also studies the impact of openness on conventional and environmentally sensitive measures of productivity

plant level productivity efficiency and environmental performance of the container glass industry this paper presents a methodology and empirical results based on themalmquist productivity index we measure productivity while treatingpollution as an undesirable output our estimates show that technicalchange has contributed to productivity and environmental performancegrowth in the container glass industry an energy and pollution intensivesector changes in inter plant efficiency over time have made thisproductivity growth more rapid than otherwise would have occurred withthe underlying technical change the efficiency estimates show that thereare both opportunities to improve productivity and reduce pollution in thisindustry as well as productivity losses associated with the emissionscontrol the shadow prices for nox the undesirable output we analyze is quite high compared to other regulated sectors

uniqueness of stationary equilibrium payoffs in coalitional bargaining we study a model of sequential bargaining in which in each period before an agreement is reached the proposer s identity is randomly determined the proposer suggests a division of a pie of size one each other agent either approves or rejects the proposal and the proposal is implemented if the set of approving agents is a winning coalition for the proposer the theory of the fixed point index is used to show that stationary equilibrium expected payoffs of this coalitional bargaining game are unique this generalizes eraslan 34 insofar as a there are no restrictions on the structure of sets of winning coalitions b different proposers may have different sets of winning coalitions c there may be a positive probability that no proposer is selected

the role of environmental factors in growth accounting this paper explores a relatively new methodology the directional distance function method to analyse productivity growth the method allows us to explicitly evaluate the role that undesirable outputs of the economy such as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have on the frontier production process which we specify as a piecewise linear and convex boundary function we decompose productivity growth into efficiency change catching up and technology change innovation we test the statistical significance of the estimates using recently developed bootstrap methods we also explore implications for growth of total factor productivity in the oecd and asian economies copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

why should majority voting be unfair the common use of majority rule in group decision making is puzzling in theory it inequitably favors the proposer and paradoxically it disadvantages voters further if they are inequity averse in practice however outcomes are equitable the present paper analyzes data from a novel experimental design to identify the underlying social preferences our experiment compares one shot and indefinite horizon versions of random proposer majority bargaining the baron ferejohn game which allow us to disentangle behaviors compatible with altruism inequity aversion and reference dependent altruism most subjects are classified as reference dependent altruists around 10 are inequity averse subjects are egoistic when their payoff is below their reference point they become efficiency concerned when satisfied and the reference point is either the ex ante expectation or the opponent s payoff finally we successfully test rda out of sample on a number of distribution and bargaining games from three seminal social preference experiments

bargaining over environmental budgets a political economy model with application to french water policy in decentralized water management with earmarked budgets financed by user taxes and distributed back in the form of subsidies net gains are often heterogeneous across user categories this paper explores the role of negotiation over budget allocation and coalition formation in water boards to provide an explanation for such user specific gaps between tax payments and subsidies we propose a bargaining model to represent the sequential nature of the negotiation process in water districts in which stakeholder representatives may bargain upon a fraction of the budget only the structural model of budget shares estimated from the data on french water agencies performs well as compared with reduced form estimation empirical results confirm the two stage bargaining process and provide evidence for systematic net gains from the system for agricultural water users

environmental regulation and green productivity growth empirical evidence on the porter hypothesis from oecd industrial sectors abstract green growth has become an important development strategy for oecd countries and governments have correspondingly implemented various environmental regulation policies whereas few studies have discussed the impacts of environmental regulation on green productivity growth in oecd countries based on a panel data of oecd countries industrial sectors this study analyzes the stringency of environmental regulation policies and measures green productivity growth using an extended sbm ddf approach the dynamic panel regression investigates the impacts and mechanism of environmental policy stringency on green productivity growth in oecd countries industrial sectors the main results are i porter hypothesis is validated that the environmental policy has a positive impact on green productivity growth within a certain level of stringency lower than 3 08 ii the impact turns to be adverse when the environmental regulation policy is stringent over a certain level as the compliance cost effect is higher than innovation offset effect the findings provide new empirical evidence for the strong version of the porter hypothesis and some implications for oecd countries to further promote green growth

the economics of split ticket voting in representative democracies in u s elections voters often vote for candidates from different parties for president and congress voters also express dissatisfaction with the performance of congress as a whole and satisfaction with their own representative the authors develop a model of split ticket voting in which government spending is financed by uniform taxes the benefits from this spending are concentrated while the model generates split ticket voting overall spending is too high only if the president s powers are limited overall spending is too high in a parliamentary system the authors model can be used as the basis of an argument for term limits copyright 1997 by american economic association

pollution abatement activities and traditional productivity abstract this study models the joint production of good and bad output production and calculates traditional productivity when bad output production is regulated and when it is unregulated we apply this model to data for u s coal fired electric power plants for 1985 1995 and compare rates of productivity and technical change to gain an understanding of the association between pollution abatement activities and traditional rates of productivity and technical change while traditional productivity and technical change associated with abatement activities decline we conclude they are not statistically significant

environmental regulation and environmental productivity the case of china abstract constrained by the dual mission of supporting industrial growth and reducing emissions china s traditional emission reduction oriented environmental policies unavoidably face a dilemma this study adopts the gml index to calculate china s industrial productivity by considering environmental factors in addition based on the assumption of industry heterogeneity the author examines the non linear relationship between china s environmental regulation and environmental productivity and calculated the optimal regulation environment for industries according to this study when impact of undesirable outputs pollutant emissions is considered environmental regulation and environmental productivity are positively correlated which to some degree validates the porter hypothesis at present environmental regulation has significant positive effects on clean production industries but shows a lag effect on pollution intensive industries the degree of environmental regulation and environmental productivity show an inverted u shaped relation and display three thresholds it should be noted however that the relationship between regulation and productivity may vary across industries these findings have clear policy implications rather than continually increasing the level of environmental regulation the government should establish standards for individual industries that emphasize flexibility

the president and the distribution of federal spending scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of congress paying particular attention to committees and majority parties this article highlights the president who has extensive opportunities both ex ante and ex post to influence the distribution of federal outlays we analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24 year period the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled using district and county fixed effects estimation strategies we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays we find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president s party represent them

economic policy and special interest politics a great deal of research has been done on the boundary between economics and political science in the last five to ten years this research in political economics spans many subfields such as macroeconomics trade public finance regulation rational choice politics and game theory a common denominator has been to study structural models of the political process agents behave rationally within well specified economic and political institutions where the policymaking process is formulated as an extensive form game methodologically much progress has been made relative to traditional approaches which were often based on inconsistent or irrational political and economic behaviour relying on non derived influence functions political support functions or vote functions yet the modem work has largely developed separately in each subfield without much contact with other subfields and each of the resulting literatures tends to focus on a distinct but partial aspect of the political process in this lecture i shall argue that even though the progress to date has been substantial we can gain a better understanding of policymaking in democracies by combining the insights from different strands of thinking on some economic policy issues the conflicting views both among citizens and politicians basically reduce to a single left to right dimension examples may include the politics of inflation vs unemployment capital taxation or the size of government we can think about policy issues within this domain of general interest politics as being resolved via traditional downsian electoral competition at least to a first approximation but the economic policy process also allows narrow interest groups ample opportunities to concentrate benefits to their own group at the expense of the population as a whole the resulting policy conflict is generically multi dimensional resolving it by voting alone would thus result in condorcet cycles we therefore need to go beyond the simplest electoral models to understand policy determination within this domain of special interest politics this lecture deals with special interest politics to make my point about fruitful analytical arbitrage i will stick to the same underlying policy example throughout this will be a simple model of a society where the government uses

on the convergence to the nash bargaining solution for action dependent bargaining protocols we consider a non cooperative multilateral bargaining game and study an action dependent bargaining protocol that is the probability with which a player becomes the proposer in a round of bargaining depends on the identity of the player who previously rejected an important example is the frequently studied rejector becomes proposer protocol we focus on subgame perfect equilibria in stationary strategies which are shown to exist and to be efficient equilibrium proposals do not depend on the probability to propose conditional on the rejection by another player we consider the limit as the bargaining friction vanishes in case no player has a positive probability to propose conditional on his rejection each player receives his utopia payoff conditional on being recognized otherwise equilibrium proposals of all players converge to a weighted nash bargaining solution where the weights are determined by the probability to propose conditional on one s own rejection

comparative politics and public finance we propose a model with micropolitical foundations to contrast different political regimes compared to a parliamentary regime the institutions of a presidential congressional regime produce fewer incentives for legislative cohesion but more separation of powers these differences are reflected in the size and composition of government spending a parliamentary regime has redistribution toward a majority less underprovision of public goods and more rents to politicians a presidential congressional regime has redistribution toward powerful minorities more underprovision of public goods but less rents to politicians the size of government is smaller under a presidential regime this last prediction is consistent with cross country data

a deterministic parametric metafrontier luenberger indicator for measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth a korean fossil fuel power case abstract this paper contributes to the current literature by proposing an alternative parametric metafrontier productivity approach called the deterministic parametric metafrontier luenberger productivity indicator dpmlpi for measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth incorporating technological heterogeneities the luenberger productivity indicator is constructed based on a quadratic output directional distance function with undesirable outputs and then combined with the deterministic metafrontier to develop dpmlpi the dpmlpi can be decomposed into efficiency change technological change and productivity growth gap the productivity growth gap can be further divided into efficiency change gap and technological change gap the parametric linear programming technique is used to estimate parameters and construct the metafrontier an empirical study for the korean fossil fuel power industry at the plant level is conducted for the 2003 2011 period the results show a 0 15 increase in environmentally sensitive productivity growth which is mainly driven by environmental technological change the oil fired power plants show higher levels than the coal fired ones of environmentally sensitive productivity growth and technological change performance some related policy implications are also proposed for the korean fossil fuel power sector

promoting green productivity growth for china s industrial exports evidence from a hybrid input output model abstract stimulated by low labor cost and loose environmental regulations china s industrial exports have benefited significantly since joining the world trade organization wto however the extensive growth model in the past several decades has led to environmental degradation china is now shifting her development pattern to a more sustainable model using a hybrid input output model this paper found that total energy coefficients fell sharply between 1997 and 2002 and 2007 and 2012 the total energy consumption and co2 emission embodied in china s industrial exports grew by more than 100 from 2002 to 2007 with little variation from 2007 to 2012 subsequently malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi is employed to assess the green productivity growth in the sector the decomposition of the mlpi is further conducted this suggests that efficiency changes from 2002 to 2007 and 2007 to 2012 are lower than 1 indicating that technical change is the main contributor to mlpi finally policy implications are provided with emphasis on dissemination of new conservation technologies

an empirical analysis of the risk of crude oil imports in china using improved portfolio approach abstract this paper quantifies the diversification index of china s crude oil imports during the period 1996 2004 and explores the relationship between the monthly prices and brent crude oil cash prices accordingly we calculate the systematic and specific risks using portfolio theory of china s crude oil import over the period 1996 2004 because china s crude oil import increased rapidly since 1996 we improve upon the traditional portfolio theory and develop a risk index model of portfolio theory for crude oil imports in order to explore objectively the changes in china s crude oil import risks the results show that china s crude oil import risk is affected extensively by the fluctuation of international oil prices so the traditional portfolio theory is insufficient to measure china s crude oil import risk the improved portfolio theory risks index model reflects the effect of international oil prices diversification imports and geopolitics factors etc on crude oil import risk and changes in crude oil import risk therefore the risk index model of portfolio theory provides greater theoretical and methodological robustness as an indicator of china s crude oil import security than that offered from the application of traditional measures of dependence

different types of environmental regulations and heterogeneous influence on green productivity evidence from china this paper attempts to examine if the strong version of porter hypothesis is supported in china by investigating how different regulatory instruments and the relative stringency impact green productivity we use a slacks based measure sbm and luenberger productivity index accounting for undesirable outputs to evaluate the industrial green productivity growth rates of china s 30 provinces the estimates imply an unsustainable development model in china with significant regional differences by employing a panel threshold model and a province level panel dataset during 2000 2012 empirical results show that both command and control and market based regulation have a non linear relationship with and can be positively related to green productivity but with different constrains on regulation stringency there are double thresholds with the command and control and exists an optimal range of stringency for productivity improvement while a single threshold has been found with the market based regulation and its current stringency is reasonable for most of provinces moreover based on china s reality the productivity effect driven by market based regulation is much stronger than that of the command and control the mechanism of informal regulation is much more complicated consequently we find evidence to support the strong porter hypothesis that reasonable stringency of environmental regulations may enhance rather than lower industrial competitiveness

legislative representation bargaining power and the distribution of federal funds evidence from the us congress this article investigates the relationship between representation in legislatures and the geographic distribution of federal funds in a legislative bargaining model we demonstrate that funds are concentrated in high representation areas and two channels underlie this result the proposal power channel reflects the role of representation in committee assignments and the vote cost channel reflects the role of representation in coalition formation in our empirical analysis we find that small states relative to large states receive more funding in the us senate relative to the house we also find empirical support for the two channels underlying this relationship throughout the history of federations and international organisations a key consti tutional design question involves how jurisdictions of different sizes are represented in legislative bodies and how their votes will ultimately be weighted large jurisdictions typically argue for delegation sizes or voting weights that are roughly proportional to population whereas small jurisdictions typically argue for an equal number of delegates or votes for each jurisdiction this conflict over representation is presumably driven at least in part by a belief that increased representation strengthens bargaining power in the battle over the geographic distribution of funds authorised by these legislative bodies in this article i analyse the relationship between legislative representation bar gaining power and the geographic distribution of federal funds from both a theoretical and empirical perspective in addition to investigating the existence of a relationship between representation and federal funds i also explore the underlying mechanisms that is i ask which political institutions such as agenda control provided to commit tees and the formation of coalitions under majority rule shape the bargaining power of jurisdictions in central legislatures and thus facilitate the relationship between repre sentation and the distribution of federal spending to provide a framework for analysing these issues i begin by developing a simple theoretical model of a central legislature that determines the crossjurisdiction distri bution of local public goods which are financed by a national tax base both delegation sizes and population are variable allowing me to consider a variety of institutional arrangements for jurisdictional representation legislators represent local interests and given the common pool problem associated with concentrated benefits and dis persed tax costs attempt to increase ownjurisdiction spending but to restrain spending elsewhere the model follows a recent literature on legislative bargaining in which a proposer must secure a majority of votes in order to pass legislation and due to the

balancing energy security priorities portfolio optimization approach to oil imports the notion of energy security in most interpretations includes the physical supply and price affordability components making financial risks a crucial part of energy security strategies mainstrea

a comprehensive review of data envelopment analysis dea approach in energy efficiency the main aim of this review article is to review of dea models in regarding to energy efficiency this paper reviewed and summarized the different models of dea that have been applied around the world to development of energy efficiency problems consequently a review of 144 published scholarly papers appearing in 45 high ranking journals between 2006 and 2015 have been obtained to achieve a comprehensive review of dea application in energy efficiency accordingly the selected articles have been categorized based on year of publication author s nationalities scope of study time duration application area study purpose results and outcomes results of this review paper indicated that dea showed great promise to be a good evaluative tool for future analysis on energy efficiency issues where the production function between the inputs and outputs was virtually absent or extremely difficult to acquire

majority rule bargaining and the under provision of public investment goods abstract despite evidence that modern democracies systematically shortchange public investment goods relatively little theoretical work exists to explain this phenomenon we build on baron and ferejohn s american political science review 83 4 1989 1181 1206 bargaining model to describe public investments in a setting of budgetary politics specifically we show that underinvestment inherently arises from distributive politics within a majoritarian institution the inability of current majorities to contract with future ones drives a wedge between spending on consumption today and investing for future consumption extensions to the model demonstrate that earmarking future returns to specific players and or detaching consumption from investment decisions yields more efficient levels of public investment

green total factor productivity and its decomposition of chinese manufacturing based on the mml index 2003 2015 abstract manufacturing industry is an important part of economic development recognizing the sustainable development of regional manufacturing has an important guiding role in the formulation of environmental policies based on the meta frontier malmquist luenberger mml productivity index this paper uses chinese provincial panel data 2003 2015 to measure the green total factor productivity tfp of china s manufacturing it is decomposed into the following efficiency change ec change of the best practice gap ratio bpc and change of technical gap ratio tgc we compared the regional differences in green tfp growth in manufacturing in all provinces analyzed regional and time differences in green tfp and the decomposition of manufacturing between regions and identified innovative regions the results show that 1 the average annual growth rate of green tfp in chinese manufacturing is 0 85 with technological progress playing a key role 2 there are differences in the causes of the increase in green tfp in all regions the eastern region and the western region are driven by technological progress while the central region depends on technology catch up effects 3 guangdong and qinghai are two different types of global innovation regions with guangdong driven by technological innovation and qinghai driven by strict environmental protection systems

malmquist index measurement for sustainability enhancement in chinese municipalities and provinces abstract this study discusses a use of dea environmental assessment in a time horizon we use a radial approach to examine a dynamic change of index measures related to china s regional development and industrial pollution prevention in applying the proposed assessment to a time series data we need to examine components that produce a shift of an efficiency frontier in a time horizon a unique feature of the proposed assessment is that it incorporates a framework of malmquist index to examine the frontier shift among multiple periods here the frontier shift indicates a progress potential on technology development and or managerial improvement among observed periods thus it is not an efficiency measure rather the measurement eliminates inefficiency by shifting an organization to an efficiency frontier in this study the index is conceptually separated into 6 subcomponents which are further disaggregated into 12 different elements 6 subcomponents 2 disposability concepts under natural and managerial disposability concepts the proposed index measurement needs to consider a possible occurrence of a frontier crossover among different periods because technology diffusion on production activities usually has a time lag until it becomes really effective methodologically this study conveys the message that dea is an approximation method so being not perfect therefore it is necessary for us to use several different approaches e g potential improvement by measuring a frontier shift and efficiency analysis to obtain reliable empirical evidence as an application this study examines the level of sustainability related to 30 municipalities and provinces in china from 2003 to 2014 the following six policy implications are obtained in this study first all municipalities and provinces have made a considerable progress on their economies and pollution prevention efforts second the effect of the frontier crossover is limited in china because they attain a high level of their potentials on economic development and pollution prevention of course this effort is within the chinese boundary not international because this study does not compare them with other industrial nations third china needs to allocate its resources to western provinces at a level that it has used for coastal developments fourth the government should reinforce efforts on environmental protection in central and southern regions fifth the government has focused on the sustainability development in urban municipalities and provinces and then has gradually shifted the policy influence toward rural areas finally different empirical results are confirmed by the potential analysis which consists of the malmquist index measurement and the efficiency analysis both approaches need to be examined for future planning on chinese regional development

evaluating the dynamic performance of energy portfolios empirical evidence from the dea directional distance function abstract in recent years the complex global energy commodity market has led to increased uncertainty for energy investment returns and tremendous challenges for investors to design appropriate energy portfolios therefore we employ four popular portfolio methods to determine energy portfolios based on daily fossil fuel futures prices during 2006 2015 moreover we use the dea window analysis method and dea directional distance function to comprehensively evaluate the dynamic performance of these energy portfolios based on the efficiency perspective the empirical results indicate that first to increase investment returns the mean variance method that exclusively emphasizes the maximization of returns shows the best performance however in order to decrease the volatility and risk of investment returns the mean variance method that aims to resist risk more than make profits and the bootstrap historical simulation value at risk var method have the best performance second when the global financial crisis broke out in the second half of 2008 and energy markets experienced a sharp downturn in the second half of 2014 the dea efficiency of energy portfolios appeared relatively lower than those of their neighboring periods regardless of which portfolio method is employed finally the average dea efficiencies of energy portfolios are all higher than those of single energy investment throughout the sample period except when the equally weighted method and the information entropy comprehensive index method are used meanwhile the mean variance method that prefers profit making to risk resisting possesses the highest average dea efficiency among various methods concerned

electoral and financial effects of changes in committee power the gramm rudman hollings budget reform the tax reform act of 1986 and the money committees in the house most rational choice theories of legislatures locate the source of committee power in the restrictive procedural rules that enforce committee jurisdictions however there is no empirical support for this claim further there is little evidence for the natural implication that membership on more powerful committees confers electoral benefits i address these puzzles by exploiting the occurrence of major budget and tax reforms in the mid eighties these reforms provide a natural experiment for measuring the electoral and financial consequences of changes in committee power i show that the procedural rule changes instituted by the gramm rudman hollings budget reform caused an increase in campaign contributions to members of the budget committee and led to a reduction in the vote share of members of the appropriations committee this heretofore unrecognized effect of the gramm rudman hollings budget reform on the welfare of members of the house rivals that of a more widely recognized policy shock th

proposal power and majority rule in multilateral bargaining with costly recognition this paper studies a sequential bargaining model in which agents expend efforts to be the proposer in equilibrium agents effort choices are influenced by the prize and cost effects the endogenous prize is 9

votes or money theory and evidence from the us congress abstract this paper investigates the relationship between the size of interest groups in terms of voter representation and the interest group s campaign contributions to politicians we uncover a robust hump shaped relationship between the voting share of an interest group and its contributions to a legislator this pattern is rationalized in a simultaneous bilateral bargaining model where the larger size of an interest group affects the amount of surplus to be split with the politician thereby increasing contributions but is also correlated with the strength of direct voter support the group can offer instead of monetary funds thereby decreasing contributions the model yields simple structural equations that we estimate at the district level employing data on individual and pac donations and local employment by sector this procedure yields estimates of electoral uncertainty and politicians effectiveness as perceived by the interest groups our approach also implicitly delivers a novel method for estimating the impact of campaign spending on election outcomes we find that an additional vote costs a politician on average 145

metafroniter energy efficiency with co2 emissions and its convergence analysis for china this paper measures the energy efficiency performance with carbon dioxide co2 emissions in 30 provinces in china during the period of 1997 2011 using a meta frontier framework with the improved directional distance function ddf we construct a new environmental production possibility set by combining the super efficiency and sequential data envelopment analysis dea models to avoid discriminating power problem and technical regress when evaluating efficiency by ddf then it is used in a meta frontier framework to reflect the technology heterogeneities across east central and west china the results indicate that eastern china achieved the highest progress inefficiency relative to the metafrontier followed by western and the central china by focusing on technology gaps we offer some suggestions for the different groups based on group frontier and meta frontier analyses the inefficiency can be attributed to managerial failure for eastern and western china and technological differences for central china the convergence analysis shows that energy and co2 emission governance will produce negative effects on economic growth and it is suitable and acceptable to introduce rigorous environmental measures in eastern china

energy risk management and value at risk modeling abstract the value of energy trades can change over time with market conditions and underlying price variables the rise of competition and deregulation in energy markets has led to relatively free energy markets that are characterized by high price shifts within oil markets the volatile oil price environment after opec agreements in the 1970s requires a risk quantification value at risk has become an essential tool for this end when quantifying market risk there are various methods for calculating value at risk the methods we introduced in this paper are historical simulation arma forecasting and variance covariance based on garch modeling approaches the results show that among various approaches the hsaf methodology presents more efficient results so that if the level of confidence is 99 the value at risk calculated through hsaf methodology is greater than actual price changes in almost 97 6 percent of the forecasting period

china s sovereign wealth fund investments in overseas energy the energy security perspective abstract sovereign wealth funds swfs are state owned investment funds that invest in real and financial assets since the global financial crisis in 2008 swfs investments have resulted in national security concerns of host countries because swfs continue to expand rapidly and have become increasingly active in real time strategic transactions given this background china which has the biggest swf in the world is facing severe challenges of energy resources shortages while its plan is to accomplish social and economic development goals energy security is a key driving force of the energy investment policy of china s swfs this makes the swf investments more complicated and more politically sensitive the combination of sovereign rights and the strategic importance of energy also makes geopolitics more complicated and brings more uncertainty to swf investments this article explores the relationship between energy security and energy investments of china s swfs it is recognised that the energy investment of swfs must follow a sustainable path to coordinate energy security economic growth return on investment and national security concerns government policymakers are urged to balance the financial and political returns on swfs against potential negative effects the conclusion presents insights for policymakers energy scholars and swf researchers

energy consumption co2 emissions and economic growth an ethical dilemma in this study we examine the dynamic interrelationship in the output energy environment nexus by applying panel vector autoregression pvar and impulse response function analyses to data on energy consumption and its subcomponents carbon dioxide emissions and real gdp in 106 countries classified by different income groups over the period 1971 2011 our results reveal that the effects of the various types of energy consumption on economic growth and emissions are heterogeneous on the various groups of countries moreover causality between total economic growth and energy consumption is bidirectional thus making a case for the feedback hypothesis however we cannot report any statistically significant evidence that renewable energy consumption in particular is conducive to economic growth a fact that weakens the argument that renewable energy consumption is able to promote growth in a more efficient and environmentally sustainable way finally in analysing the case for an inverted u shaped ekc we find that the continued process of growth aggravates the greenhouse gas emissions phenomenon in this regard we cannot provide any evidence that developed countries may actually grow out of environmental pollution in the light of these findings the efficacy of recent government policies in various countries to promote renewable energy consumption as a means for sustainable growth is questioned put differently there seems to be an ethical dilemma between high economic growth rates and unsustainable environment and low or zero economic growth and environmental sustainability

income inequality and carbon dioxide emissions the case of chinese urban households abstract this paper draws on chinese survey data to investigate variations in carbon dioxide emissions across households with different income levels rich households generate more emissions per capita than poor households via both their direct energy consumption and their higher expenditure on goods and services that use energy as an intermediate input an econometric analysis confirms a positive relationship between emissions and income and establishes a slightly increasing marginal propensity to emit mpe over the relevant income range the redistribution of income from rich to poor households is therefore shown to reduce aggregate household emissions suggesting that the twin pursuits of reducing inequality and emissions can be achieved in tandem

environmental efficiency and abatement cost of china s industrial sectors based on a three stage data envelopment analysis abstract china has gained the reputation of global factory due to its phenomenal industrial growth over the past decades at the same time its industrial energy consumption has resulted in serious environmental problems accordingly there is an urgent and critical need to reduce industrial carbon emissions at a minimum cost without hampering the country s economic development the dual targets for carbon emission intensity and amount from the 12th five year 2011 2015 plan make it necessary to investigate the environmental efficiency and reduction costs of different sectors this study employs a three stage data envelopment analysis model based on a directional distance function approach with radial and non radial slacks of desirable and undesirable outputs considered to measure the environmental efficiency and marginal co2 emission abatement costs of china s 37 two digit industries during 2005 2014 based on the environmental efficiency and abatement cost of the industrial sectors we reached the following conclusions first the adjusted estimates differ significantly from the results that do not consider the influence of environmental factors and it is essential to consider the heterogeneity of industries in proposing emission reduction strategies in addition the stimuli for the smelting and pressing of metal industries result in cost reduction and the supervision on the top nine emitters and the equipment manufacturing industries should be strengthened finally the industrial sectors with large abatement potential are classified into short term and long term key target industries according to the emission abatement cost analyses

productivity growth and environmental regulations accounting for undesirable outputs analysis of china s thirty provincial regions using the malmquist luenberger index this paper employs the malmquist luenberger ml productivity index to evaluate china s growth in total factor productivity tfp incorporating undesirable outputs during the period from 1989 to 2008 the ml productivity index and its components technical and efficiency changes are derived from the directional distance function which gives credit for an increase in good outputs and for reductions in undesirable outputs the average annual ml productivity growth accounting for undesirable outputs is 2 46 whereas the value of the traditional malmquist productivity index is 4 84 showing that the true tfp growth in china is overestimated if undesirable outputs are ignored we explore the strictness in enforcing environmental regulations and its impact on improvements in ml productivity the results show that the enforcement of environmental regulations in china is in general far below the levels achieved in the best performing regions and that the more stringent enforcement of environmental regulations would help to improve ml productivity growth in china

diversification of oil import sources and energy security a key strategy or an elusive objective this paper explores the relationship between the diversification of sources of imported oil and energy security of oil importing countries it examines the importance of diversification policy for oil importers explains why oil importers implement oil diversification policy and contextualizes the oil import diversification strategy in the overall energy security policy of oil importers the paper analyzes the factors and the contexts that affect the level of importance assigned to oil import diversification policy in oil importing countries and the limitations that may affect the successful implication of oil import diversification policy the examples are drawn from the world s top three oil importers the united states japan and china the policymakers in these and other oil importing countries place much importance on energy security the diversification of oil import sources is used as one of the strategies to enhance energy security in oil importing countries this paper is important for policymakers in oil importing countries as it provides them with a qualitative conceptual framework with which to evaluate the need to diversify their countries sources of imported oil and with which to identify the likely limitations to the successful implementation of oil import diversification policy

green productivity growth in china s industrial economy abstract this paper uses a directional distance function ddf and the malmquist luenberger productivity index to estimate the changing patterns of green total factor productivity gtfp growth of 38 chinese industrial sectors during the period 1980 2010 unlike the measures of traditional total factor productivity tfp growth the ddf incorporates carbon dioxide emissions as an undesirable output directly into the production technology which credit sectors for simultaneously reducing their emissions and increasing their output our estimates of aggregate and sector level gtfp growth reveal that chinese industry is not yet on the path towards sustainable low carbon growth a dynamic panel data analysis of the determinants of gtfp across sectors is used to identify factors that might rectify this situation including state owned enterprise soe reform the growth of small private enterprises continued openness to foreign investment and higher spending on r d particularly in emission intensive sectors

monetary policy by committee consensus chairman dominance or simple majority this paper studies the theoretical and empirical implications of monetary policy making by committee under four different voting protocols the protocols are a consensus model where a supermajority is required for a policy change an agenda setting model where the chairman controls the agenda a dictator model where the chairman has absolute power over the committee and a simple majority model where policy is determined by the median member these protocols give preeminence to different aspects of the actual decision making process and capture the observed heterogeneity in formal procedures across central banks the models are estimated by maximum likelihood using interest rate decisions by the committees of five central banks namely the bank of canada the bank of england the european central bank the swedish riksbank and the u s federal reserve for all central banks results indicate that the consensus model fits actual policy decisions better than the alternative models this suggests that despite institutional differences committees share unwritten rules and informal procedures that deliver observationally equivalent policy decisions

infrastructure investment and travel time abstract we examine additional travel time that arises as reconstruction of non functioning bridges gets delayed our simulations show that the extent to which a budget increase reduces such additional travel time is rather modest we show that a substantial portion of the unsolved travel time results from budgetary allocations

estimating the value of proposal power this paper investigates the role of proposal power in the allocation of transportation projects across u s congressional districts in 1991 and 1998 the evidence supports the key qualitative prediction of legislative bargaining models members with proposal power those sitting on the transportation authorization committee secure more project spending for their districts than do other representatives support for the quantitative restrictions on the value of proposal power is more mixed i then empirically address several alternative models of legislative behavior including partisan models informational roles for committees models with appropriations committees and theories of committees as preference outliers

distributive politics and the costs of centralization this paper studies the choice between centralization and decentralization of fiscal policy in a political economy setting with centralization regional delegates vote over agendas comprising sets of region specific projects the outcome is inefficient because the choice of projects is insufficiently sensitive to within region benefits the number of projects funded may be non monotonic in the strength of project externalities the efficiency gains from decentralization and the performance of constitutional rules such as majority voting which may be used to choose between decentralization and centralization are then discussed in this framework weaker externalities and more heterogeneity between regions need not increase the efficiency gain from decentralization

social sustainability measured by intermediate approach for dea environmental assessment chinese regional planning for economic development and pollution prevention abstract this study examines the level of simultaneous achievement on economic prosperity and environmental protection so measuring the level of sustainability by a newly proposed intermediate approach conventionally dea data envelopment analysis for performance evaluation was used to assess various economic activities of organizations that utilized inputs e g the number of employees to yield desirable outputs e g the number of products the methodology was usually classified into radial or non radial category in an effort of extending it to environmental assessment dea needs to incorporate undesirable outputs e g the amount of co 2 into the computational framework this type of assessment is referred to as dea environmental assessment the proposed intermediate approach develops a new type of dea environmental assessment by combining the analytical features of radial approach with those of non radial approach the new approach measures the level of unified inefficiency on each production factor and determines the level of total unified inefficiency from the average of the sum of these inefficiency scores a rank sum test and a mean test are additionally incorporated into the proposed intermediate approach such a combination enhances the statistical capability as an application this study examines the level of sustainability related to 30 provinces in china from 2003 to 2014 the application finds four policy implications first it is important for china to allocate its resources to western provinces at a level that it has used for coastal developments second the government continues to reinforce the policy making effort on environmental protection by paying attention to central and southern regions the chinese industries need to transfer toward green energy the transfer should be efficiently executed for their future developments third the government has focused on the sustainability development in urban provinces and then has gradually shifted the policy influence toward rural areas finally the policy implementation needs a time lag until it becomes effective the time lag on economic policy is longer than that of environmental policy the economic policy has historically produced a regional imbalance often leading to educational and income imbalances among chinese provinces

energy industry investment influences total factor productivity of energy exploitation a biased technical change analysis abstract technical progress plays a critical role in sustaining a clean world through energy efficiency improvement the optimal energy industry investment not only reduces the cost for energy industry but also avoids environmental degradation via over investment this study addresses both technical progress and energy industry investment we present a novel measuring framework for the malmquist total factor productivity index mi of energy exploitation and accordingly analyze the mi of china s 30 provinces between 2006 and 2016 based on the efficiency measurement results we further examine the nonlinear impact of energy industry investment on the mi under different types of biased technical change the results show that the growth rate of mi is 1 92 the growth rates of mi s two decomposition indices technical efficiency and technical change are 0 63 and 1 59 respectively indicating that the mi rise is primarily ascribed to technical change the mean values of the output biased technological change the input biased technological change and the magnitude of technological change are 1 0443 1 0066 and 0 9723 respectively indicating that of the three output biased technological change is the most significant contributor to technical change the variation of these technical changes in different provinces provides information that could help in designing an effective energy policy to increase efficiency for a specific province according to the threshold estimates of energy industry investment on the mi the effect is significant within the range greater than the first threshold value we find that the mi increases by 0 0001 when energy industry investment increases by 100 000 000 yuan

the impact of federal spending on house election outcomes while it is widely believed by academics politicians and the popular press that incumbent members of congress are rewarded by the electorate for bringing federal dollars to their district the empirical evidence supporting that claim is extremely weak one explanation for the failure to uncover the expected relationship between federal spending and election outcomes is that incumbents who expect to have difficulty being reelected are likely to exert greater effort in obtaining federal outlays since it is generally impossible to adequately measure this effort the estimated impact of spending is biased downward because of an omitted variable bias we address this estimation problem using instrumental variables for each house district we use spending outside the district but inside the state containing the district as an instrument for spending in the district federal spending is affected by a large number of actors e g governors senators mayors and other house members in the state delegation

seniority in legislatures we construct a stochastic game model of a legislature with an endogenously determined seniority system we model the behavior of the legislators as well as their constituents in an infinitely repeated divide the dollar game each legislative session must make a decision on redistributional issues modeled as a divide the dollar game however each session begins with a vote in which the legislators decide by majority rule whether or not to impose on themselves a seniority system legislative decisions on the redistributional issues are made by the baron ferejohn rule an agenda setter is selected by a random recognition rule which in our model is a function of the seniority system selected the agenda setter makes a proposal on redistributional issues and the legislature then votes whether to accept or reject the agenda setters proposal if the legislature rejects the proposal another agenda setter is randomly selected and the process is repeated if the legislature accepts the proposal the legislative session ends and the voters in each legislative district vote whether to retain their legislator or throw it out of office the voters verdict determines the seniority structure of the next period legislature we find a stationary equilibrium to the game having the property that the legislature imposes on itself a non trivial seniority system and that legislators are always reelected