the carbon footprint of uk households 1990 2004 a socio economically disaggregated quasi multi regional input output model this paper presents a socio economically disaggregated framework for attributing co2 emissions to people s high level functional needs based around a quasi multi regional input output qmrio model the study in theory takes into account all co2 emissions that arise from energy used in production of goods and services to satisfy uk household demand whether the emissions occur in the uk or abroad results show that co2 emissions attributable to households were 15 above 1990 levels in 2004 and that although absolute decoupling occurred between household expenditure and co2 during the uk s switch from coal to gas in the early 1990s since then only slight relative decoupling is evident the proportion of co2 that arises outside uk borders in support of uk consumption is rising and reducing these emissions is particularly problematic in a global trading system investigation into the carbon footprint of different segments of the uk population shows wide variation the segment with the highest carbon footprint emits 64 more co2 than the segment with the lowest results show that recreation and leisure are responsible for over one quarter of co2 emissions in a typical uk household in 2004 we conclude that expanding lifestyle aspirations are significant factors in driving household co2 emissions but the study also emphasizes that attention must be paid to the infrastructures and institutions that result in considerable amounts of co2 being locked up in basic household activities through which people meet their everyday needs for subsistence protection and communication with family and friends the findings highlight the sheer scale of the challenge facing uk policy makers and suggest that policies should be targeted towards segments of society responsible for the highest carbon footprints

alternative approaches to money and growth this paper reexamines the issue of money and growth in an economy with both endogenous labor supply and endogenous capital stock using three recently developed approaches the money in the utility function approach the cash in advance approach and the transactions costs approach by establishing a qualitative equivalence between alternative setups the authors find economically justifiable conditions such that all comparative statics results derived from the aforementioned approaches are identical copyright 1992 by ohio state university press

relating the environmental impact of consumption to household expenditures an input output analysis in this paper we evaluate the relationships between household expenditures and the environmental impact categories climate change acidification eutrophication and smog formation by combining household expenditures with environmentally extended input output analysis expenditure elasticities are examined with regression analysis and are compared and interpreted on the basis of insight at the product level with data from the netherlands in the year 2000 we find that environmental impact increases with increasing household expenditures although the degree to which the environmental impact increases differs per impact category climate change and eutrophication increase less than proportionally with increasing expenditures acidification increases nearly proportionally with increasing expenditures whereas smog formation increases more than proportionally it appears that the mix of necessities and luxuries to which an environmental impact is related is essential in explaining the relationship

prices and quantities unsustainable consumption and the global economy abstract the ecological unsustainability of current consumption patterns is now well documented one aspect of this problem which has not been sufficiently addressed is the growth of excess consumption driven by falling goods prices the index of department store prices have fallen substantially since the early 1990s in large part because global capital mobility and excess global labor supply has allowed firms to depress wages and avoid paying environmental costs consumers have responded by purchasing increasing numbers of these artificially cheap goods the example of apparel is discussed in some detail and data from other goods categories are presented these trends suggest that achieving sustainable consumption in the us is not only a technical issue but will also involve fundamental changes in the global political economy to eliminate the artificially low prices of imported goods

in search of a natural systems sustainability index abstract this research note proposes an index of sustainability to be attached to any natural system evaluated according to several indicators of sustainability the proposed index is is very operational and most of the indices proposed in the literature can be considered to be particular cases of is moreover the is propounded can be used to reach balances or compromises between an engineering solution of maximum aggregate sustainability and an ecological solution of most balanced sustainability of the system

inflation and growth impatience and a qualitative equivalence this paper studies the role of an endogenous time preference on the relationship between inflation and growth in the long run in both the money in utility function miuf and transactions costs tc models we establish a qualitative equivalence between the two models in a setup without a labor leisure tradeoff when the time preference is decreasing or increasing in consumption and real balances both the miuf and tc models are qualitatively equivalent in terms of predicting a negative or positive relationship between inflation and growth in a steady state both a decreasing and an increasing time preference in consumption are consistent with the arguments found within the literature while a decreasing time preference in real balances corroborates with empirical evidence there is no evidence in support of an increasing time preference in real balances

effect of distance of transportation on willingness to pay for food abstract consumers interest in locally produced foods is increasing hence there is a need to decipher and quantify consumers desire for local foods and understand the underlying causes of this demand more specifically we examine in this paper the issue of distance of transportation and its impact on consumer preferences we investigate how consumers willingness to pay wtp for food varies with the distance the food traveled results from non hypothetical second price auctions indicate that average wtp is falling in distance traveled indicating a preference for local production results also indicate that the marginal value of a mile traveled depends on the type of food studied apples vs wine socio demographic characteristics perceptions of freshness taste and food safety as well as support of local economy impact wtp for local foods

is money net wealth this paper develops a simple monetary model a hybrid of the sidrauski and overlapping generation frameworks in which new dynasties of infinitely lived agents continuously enter the economy it is shown that the long run nonsuperneutrality of money in life cycle models is a modality of the violation of the ricardian debt neutrality proposition the very same intergenerational redistribution effects which on the fiscal side are the source of debt nonneutrality are at work on the monetary side to create monetary wealth effects and make money nonsuperneutral in the long run copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

farm costs and food miles an assessment of the full cost of the uk weekly food basket changes in both farm production and food transport have resulted in the imposition of new levels of environmental costs this study analyses the full costs of foods in the average weekly uk food basket by calculating the costs arising at diverent stages from farms to consumers plates of the 12 commodities assessed livestock produce contributes the most costs per kg the external cost of uk agriculture up to the farm gate is estimated to be 1 51 bn yr i1 it is calculated that a switch to organic production could lead to avoided costs of 1 13 bn yr i1 agricultural and food produce accounts for 28 of goods transported on uk roads currently imposing estimated external costs of 2 35 bn yr i1 the contribution made by sea and air transport is currently trivial owing to low volumes however road transport to carry food from the shop to home is estimated to impose a further 1 28 bn yr i1 to total external costs subsidies not targeted at environmental improvements cost consumers 2 88 bn yr i1 thus the real cost of the per capita uk food basket 24 79 is calculated to be 2 91 more per person wk i1 11 8 if externalities and subsidies are included with farm externalities 81 p domestic road transport 76 p government subsidies 93 p and shopping transport 41 p contributing the most we assess a variety of scenarios for adoption of organic farming localised food systems and sustainable transport to indicate the substantial potential to reduce environmental costs in the uk food system 2005 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

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

on the rate of time preference under recursive preferences abstract the boehm bawerkian and the fisherian approaches lead to identical measurements on both the strong and the weak rates of time preference since they are generally path dependent when goods are multiple conditions assuring their path independence are identified

embodied pollution in trade estimating the environmental load displacement of industrialised countries abstract the present paper sets out to aid in the development of environmental load displacement indicators developing the notion of the environmental memory of physical flows we estimated embodied pollution in trade of 18 industrialized countries with a the rest of the world and b developing countries from 1976 to 1994 we found that in the last years of analysis total imports of japan usa and western europe have entailed in general larger air pollutant emissions than local exports the balance of embodied emissions in trade beet seems to follow an inverted u shape across time in japan and western europe and an n shape in the us in the period of analysis japanese and european environmental terms of trade with developing countries improved from the japanese and european point of view whereas american environmental terms of trade with developing countries deteriorated over time although there is no statistical trend between income and embodied emissions in imports in a cross section analysis there does seem to be a positive relationship between both variables at a national level the results suggest that despite many shortcomings this type of assessment may shed useful insights on the international aspects of sustainable development

country of origin and choice of food imports an in depth study of european distribution channel gatekeepers country of origin preferences of distribution channel gatekeepers when sourcing food imports were investigated using in depth interviews in five european markets channel member perceptions of product country image related more to specific issues of confidence and trust in integrity of production certification and regulatory systems than to country image stereotypes this study integrates these trust determining factors with price perceived value constructs in order to build a comprehensive model applicable to food channel gatekeepers

willing consumers or locked in policies for a sustainable consumption postmodern explanations of consumer behaviour stress social and psychological factors to the neglect of explanations based on structural issues such as the working life conditions which favour a work and spend lifestyle the conditions of urban living or the effects of pervasive marketing this paper argues that consumers may not be so keen and willing but are rather locked in by circumstances some of these circumstances are deliberately created by other interests and a policy to limit consumption must look for adequate means over a large and varied field in the end shorter working hours may be an important key to a more sustainable future 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

the design of an environmental index of sustainable food consumption a pilot study using supermarket data monitoring of the environmental impacts of consumption is necessary for the evaluation of current performance and to support the understanding of how initiatives for change can be implemented we discuss design issues and methodology for an environmentally sensitive shopper ess index to measure the environmental sustainability of food consumption at the household level the ess index is based on revealed consumer preferences and uses scanner data provided by the largest uk food retailer as a pilot illustration of the methodology we use the index to identify environmentally critical periods during the calendar year

a simple dynamic general equilibrium model abstract we analyse a single sector economy with h 1 infinitely lived agents that operate in a continuous time framework utility functions are recursive but not additive both efficient and perfect foresight competitive equilibrium allocations are considered the existence and stability of such allocations are investigated locally i e in a neighbourhood of steady state allocations the model is shown to be useful for explaining the distribution of wealth and consumption across agents and for analysing the way in which wealth redistribution can affect the dynamics of aggregate economic variables

the global stability of efficient intertemporal allocations this paper describes a continuous time model of an economy with finitely many infinitely lived consumers and a finite number of capital goods two objectives are achieved first recursive nonadditive utility functionals are formulated and analyzed second these preference functionals are applied to analyze the nature of efficient allocations in a dynamic economy two classes of global turnpike propositions are proven which provide the basis for a model of the long run distribution of wealth these propositions also provide new perspective regarding existing stability literature based on additive utilities copyright 1987 by the econometric society

the rate of time preference and dynamic economic analysis strong restrictions on the structure of preferences are a central feature in the received theory of intertemporal allocation in fact most of the modern literature concerned with capital theoretic problems represents preferences by a functional in which an additive utility function is discounted by a constant rate of time preference this specification is attractive because it is analytically tractable in dynamic models and it clearly delineates how tastes and opportunities interact to determine an economy s household s paths of consumption and capital formation however its rigid structure constancy of time preference severely limits the conclusions and explanatory power of the corresponding models this paper considers a class of utility functionals in continuous time which have the appealing feature that the rate of time preference depends systematically on an index of aggregate future consumption the more flexible structure embodied in these functionals leads to important generalizations and

the complete complementarity of consumption and real balances and the strong superneutrality of money abstract in the representative agent model with money in the utility function if consumption and real balances are perfect complements steady state capital intensity and real balance holdings are both invariant to monetary growth regardless of the nature of time preferences

dynamic behavior of capital accumulation in a cash in advance model abstract this paper analyzes the dynamic behavior of capital accumulation in stockman s cash in advance model if the cash in advance constraint applies only to consumption then money is superneutral along the transition path as well as in the long run alternatively if the cash in advance constraint applies to gross investment as well as consumption then a permanent increase in the rate of monetary growth reduces the steady state capital stock the effect on the speed of adjustment depends on the sign of a certain simple function of the parameters of preferences and technology

missing carbon reductions exploring rebound and backfire effects in uk households households are expected to play a pivotal role in reducing the uk s greenhouse gas ghg emissions and the uk government is encouraging specific household actions to help meet its targets however due to the rebound effect only a portion of the ghg emission reductions estimated by simple engineering calculations are generally achieved in practice for example replacing short car journeys by walking or cycling reduces consumption of motor fuels but this frees up money that may be spent on for example purchasing extra clothes or flying on vacation alternatively the money may be put into savings since all of these options lead to ghg emissions total ghg savings may be less than anticipated indeed in some instances emissions may increase a phenomenon known as backfire we estimate that the rebound effect for a combination of three abatement actions by uk households is approximately 34 targeting re spending on goods and services with a low ghg intensity reduces this to a minimum of around 12 while re spending on goods and services with a high ghg intensity leads to backfire our study highlights the importance of shifting consumption to lower ghg intensive categories and investing in low carbon investments

food and life cycle energy inputs consequences of diet and ways to increase efficiency food consumption is one of the most polluting everyday activities when impacts during product life cycles are considered greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector are substantial and need to be lowered to stabilise climate change here we present an inventory of life cycle energy inputs for 150 food items available in sweden and discuss how energy efficient meals and diets can be composed energy inputs in food life cycles vary from 2 to 220 mj per kg due to a multitude of factors related to animal or vegetable origin degree of processing choice of processing and preparation technology and transportation distance daily total life cycle energy inputs for diets with a similar dietary energy consumed by one person can vary by a factor of four from 13 to 51 mj current swedish food consumption patterns result in life cycle energy inputs ranging from 6900 to 21 000 mj per person and year choice of ingredients and gender differences in food consumption patterns explain the differences up to a third of the total energy inputs is related to snacks sweets and drinks items with little nutritional value it is possible to compose a diet compatible with goals for energy efficiency and equal global partition of energy resources however such a diet is far from the swedish average and not in line with current trends

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

anticipated inflation and the capital stock in a cash in advance economy abstract an economy is constructed in which the steady state capital stock is inversely related to the rate of inflation as a result that is directly opposite the usual conclusion

the fundamental principle of intertemporal optimization consumer behavior under recursive preferences abstract this paper shows that a simple principle expressible by a single equation runs through intertemporal consumer behavior the effect of any given variations of consumption on the utility must be balanced against the effect of such variations on subsequent stocks of assets the former is measured by the directional marginal utility and the latter by the directional marginal value of assets the implicit utility price of assets necessary to convert the latter into utility units is then determined in reference to the maximized value of the utility functional it is this equation that is implied by pontryagin s maximum principle

tracing distant environmental impacts of agricultural products from a consumer perspective globally trade flows of agricultural products are increasing while value is typically added along the whole production chain certain environmental impacts such as land and water use biomass appropriation and soil degradation are intrinsically linked to where the primary products originate from when taking a consumer oriented approach on environmental problems bilateral trade statistics can help in providing a clearer picture about the location of impacts caused by consumption elsewhere however in today s increasingly globalized world consumer goods are often imported from countries other than where the primary product originated from for instance soybeans are transported from brazil to the netherlands where they are processed into soy oil which is shipped to austria where it is consumed utilizing bilateral trade matrices and matrix algebra we present a method that allows to clearly link consumption patterns to the origin of primary products in this the method can help to provide information about consumption related distant environmental impacts we employ the case of land and water use linked to austria s soy product consumption to demonstrate the approach s relevance finally we outline some possible applications of this method to show its potential in enhancing understanding for informed consumer based environmental decision making

the consumer price index conceptual issues and practical suggestions a national academy of sciences panel recently made a number of recommendations to the bls for improving the consumer price index while also suggesting some cautions to be observed when considering the adoption of new concepts and techniques this paper discusses the panel s analyses in four areas should a cost of living index be the measurement objective of the cpi should the index attempt to capture the effect on living costs from changes in environmental conditions how can hedonic techniques be best applied for measuring quality changes should the bls attempt to measure the consumer surpluses accompanying the introduction of new goods

international commodity agreements design and performance abstract this article traces the design and performance of the five currently or recently active international commodity agreements icas in cocoa coffee natural rubber sugar and tin following detailed discussion of each of these the author makes three observations that icas can only be successful provided that they command a consensus in their industries that existing agreements are not robust enough with regard to exchange rates and that existing agreements are poorly drafted the author argues that the collapse of the tin agreement in october 1985 may have marked the end of the postwar chapter in the commodity intervention story he finds it improbable that new icas will emerge and suggests instead that more of the existing agreements will lapse

food miles do uk consumers actually care abstract the food miles concept originating in the uk and given much prominence in the news media has been used to imply that importing food from distant countries is inherently more wasteful than growing and consuming local produce what impact is this potential non tariff barrier having on consumer buying behaviour in uk supermarkets revealed preference surveys in four supermarkets show only 5 6 of 251 consumers nominated country of origin as one of the reasons for choosing a fresh food item they had just purchased furthermore only 3 6 indicated that they had consciously chosen british products for the reason that such produce was less harmful for the environment in contrast stated preference surveys in the street found that 21 5 indicated that food miles or the long distance it travels would stop them buying new zealand products what people say may differ substantially from what they actually do in regard to food miles

integration of environmental externalities in international commodity agreements abstract much ecological damage in third world countries is associated with commodity production for the world market competition in commodity markets prevents commodity exporting countries from making the costs of environmental preservation and reconstruction a recurrent element in pricing this article argues that an international commodity agreement ica can be the institutional locus where environmental externalities associated with commodity production can be integrated into a price system such extended or transformed icas are here labeled new international commodity agreements nicas they include a price markup for environmental preservation and reconstruction in commodity producing developing countries this price markup can be levied in the form of an export tax or in the form of a surcharge on import tariffs the conclusion of nicas maybe facilitated by the common fund for commodities which has recently come into operation