on the robustness of robustness checks of the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis since its first inception in the debate on the relationship between environment and growth in 1992 the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis ekc hereafter has been subject of continuous and intense scrutiny the most recent line of investigation criticizes the ekc hypothesis on more fundamental grounds in that it stresses the lack of sufficient statistical testing of the empirical relationship and questions the very existence of the notion of ekc attention is in particular drawn on the stationarity properties of the series involved per capita emissions or concentrations and per capita gdp and in case of presence of unit roots on the cointegration property that must be present for the ekc to be a well defined concept only at that point can the researcher ask whether the long run relationship exhibits an inverted u pattern on the basis of panel integration and cointegration tests for sulfur stern 2004 and perman and stern 1999 2003 have presented evidence and forcefully stated that the ekc hypothesis does not exist in this paper we ask whether similar strong conclusions can be arrived at when carrying out tests of system fractional integration and cointegration as an example we use the controversial case of carbon dioxide emissions the results show that more ekcs come back into life relative to traditional integration cointegration tests however we confirm that the ekc hypothesis remains a fragile concept

differentiating commitments world wide global differentiation of ghg emissions reductions based on the triptych approach a preliminary assessment in the context of global climate negotiations various approaches have been proposed to distribute commitments regarding greenhouse gas emissions mitigation over different countries one of them is the triptych approach which is a sector approach that accounts for differences in national circumstances such as population size and growth standard of living economic structure and fuel mix in power generation it was successfully applied in the negotiations on differentiation of commitments in the european union in 1997 in this study we aim to see what problems we encounter when applying the approach in a wider geographical context in order to reach this aim we establish a test differentiation of co2 emission reduction obligations for a selection of 48 countries the criteria we apply comprise technical emission reduction options only according to our triptych criteria including the choice for particular growth scenarios and a convergence of co2 emissions in the domestic sectors by the year 2030 the sum of co2 emissions in the 48 countries in 2015 is estimated to increase by 8 over 1990 levels with the criteria used the average reduction objective for the oecd will be somewhere between 10 and 20 for economies in transition to a market economy our calculations indicate on average a reduction between 30 and 50 for the developing countries we established increases varying roughly from 40 to 200 the choice for a particular growth scenario as well as the assumption for the period for the convergence of per capita emissions in the domestic sectors are crucial and may effect the outcome of the calculations to a large extent if these problems can be sufficiently solved the triptych approach can serve as a valuable tool to rank countries in a global differentiation scheme

uncertainty in the theory of renewable resource markets the natural growth rate of most renewable resource stocks is in part stochastic this paper examines the implications of such ecological uncertainty for competitive equilibrium in a market with property rights we show that stochastic fluctuations add a risk premium to the rate of return required to keep a unit of stock in situ and we examine the effects of fluctuations on resource rent examples are used to show that extraction can increase decrease or be left unchanged as the variance of the fluctuations increases depending on the extent of market self correction regulatory implications are also discussed renewable resource economics has traditionally been concerned with the study of dynamically optimal harvesting policies given a deterministic function for the natural growth of the resource stock issues have included the existence and characteristics of steady state equilibria for the optimally managed resource the need for and design of regulatory policies to prevent over exploitation and conditions under which as a social optimum or otherwise the resource will be exploited to extinction 1 much of this work has been based on the assumption of a fixed and exogenous price for the harvested resource typically resulting in bang bang solutions for the harvesting policy however some recent papers make price endogenous and thereby describe how the extraction rate and the rate of return and asset value of the resource behave in a competitive market with property rights 2

co2 emissions energy consumption and economic growth in bric countries abstract this paper examines dynamic causal relationships between pollutant emissions energy consumption and output for a panel of bric countries over the period 1971 2005 except for russia 1990 2005 in long run equilibrium energy consumption has a positive and statistically significant impact on emissions while real output exhibits the inverted u shape pattern associated with the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis with the threshold income of 5 393 in logarithms in the short term changes in emissions are driven mostly by the error correction term and short term energy consumption shocks as opposed to short term output shocks for each country short term deviations from the long term equilibrium take from 0 770 years russia to 5 848 years brazil to correct the panel causality results indicate there are energy consumption emissions bidirectional strong causality and energy consumption output bidirectional long run causality along with unidirectional both strong and short run causalities from emissions and energy consumption respectively to output overall in order to reduce emissions and not to adversely affect economic growth increasing both energy supply investment and energy efficiency and stepping up energy conservation policies to reduce unnecessary wastage of energy can be initiated for energy dependent bric countries

on conservation of renewable resources with stock dependent return and nonconcave production textabstractthis paper analyzes conservation and extinction of renewable resources when the production function is nonconcave and the return function depends on consumption and the resource stock the paper focuses on the efficiency of global conservation a safe standard of conservation and extinction which outcome obtains depends on the marginal rate of substitution between investment and the stock in addition to the discount factor and the marginal productivity of the resource conservation may be efficient even if the discounted intrinsic growth rate of the resource is less than 1 journal of economic literature classification numbers d90 q20

stochastic dynamic models with stock dependent rewards abstract we examine the behavior of optimal consumption and investment policies in aggregate stochastic growth models when utility depends on both consumption and the stock level such models arise in the study of renewable resources monetary growth and growth with public capital conditions are given which guarantee that optimal policies are monotonic the limiting behavior of the optimal consumption investment and output processes is characterized

interrelationships between income health and the environment extending the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis abstract this paper examines the link between the health indicators and the environmental variables for a cross section of countries widely dispersed on the economic development spectrum while environment and income are seen to have an inverted u shaped relationship environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis it is also well established that environment and health are positively related our study focuses on the implications of this for the relationship between health and income in the early phases of income growth the gains in health and the losses in environmental quality could cancel each other out and this challenges the idea that as incomes increase health would always improve to empirically analyse these issues we estimate a two stage least squares model that focuses on the impact of income and the environment on health status with environment being an endogenous variable our results show that the environmental stress variable has a significant negative effect on health status at the same time gross national product gnp levels are shown to vary positively with health status variables we find that the health gains obtained through improved incomes can be negated to a significant extent if the indirect effect of income acting via the environment is ignored research findings in this regard would be a useful policy instrument towards maximising both the environmental and health gains that come with economic growth and development

the politics of flatland a version of the median voter theorem holds for two dimensional spatial models in which voters regard the two dimensions as economic goods or goodlike activities and in which the set of feasible outcomes is constrained by budget or technology although mathematically trivial this fact has widespread analytical uses after arguing that our two dimensional model with its stability property fits a number of important and general policy areas we use our analysis to address some prominent theoretical issues

between estimates of the emissions income elasticity abstract recent papers by wagner and vollebergh et al point out some fundamental econometric problems with traditional methods of estimating the environmental kuznets curve ekc and propose alternative approaches that avoid these issues wagner notes that traditional methods do not take into account the presence of powers of unit root variables and cross sectional dependence in the data while vollebergh et al point out that the time effects are not uniquely identified in the ekc model the between estimator is a simple estimator that also addresses the concerns of these authors it makes no a priori assumption about the nature of the time effects and is likely to provide consistent estimates of long run relationships in real world data situations i apply several common panel data estimators including the between estimator to oecd and global carbon and sulfur emissions datasets the between estimates of the sulfur income elasticity are 0 732 in the oecd and 1 067 in the global data set and the estimated carbon income elasticity is 1 612 in the oecd and 1 509 globally

uncertainty and markets for renewable resources abstract the market allocation of renewable resources is examined when growth rates are affected by random disturbances given free access to a renewable resource environmental disturbances are shown to affect the biological survival of the resource the optimal solution is then examined and it is shown to be achieved by a competitive allocation when property rights are clearly defined given rational expectations or a complete set of contingent futures markets the stochastic dynamics are shown in each case to differ considerably from the deterministic model

economic development and co2 emissions a nonparametric panel approach we examine the empirical relation between co2 emissions per capita and gdp per capita during the period 1960 1996 using a panel of 100 countries relying on the nonparametric poolability test of baltagi et al baltagi b h hidalgo j li q 1996 a nonparametric test for poolability using panel data journal of econometrics 75 345 367 we find evidence of structural stability of the relationship we then specify a nonparametric panel data model with country specific effects estimation results show that this relationship is upward sloping nonparametric specification tests do not reject monotonicity but do reject the polynomial functional form which leads to the environmental kuznets curve in several studies

environment and development is there a kuznets curve for co2 emissions this article re examines the relationship between growth in per capita income and environmental degradation using econometric techniques appropriate for smooth transition regressions with panel data this is a more intuitive and flexible methodology than the polynomial models widely used in the literature and it can reconcile some of the mixed results found previously the methodology is applied to carbon dioxide emissions from nonoecd countries over the period 1971 to 1997 although there is no evidence of environmental kuznets curve we find two regimes namely a low income regime where emissions accelerate with economic growth and a middle to high income regime associated with a deceleration in environmental degradation

on a clear day you might see an environmental kuznets curve we shed some new light on the environmental kuznets curve ekc and show how it can be viewed as a particular form of equilibrium relationship where technology and preference parameters determine the shape of the curve in contrast to most of the literature on the ekc we estimate a theoretically consistent model on long run data swedish sulfur emission covering the period 1900 2002 furthermore we test and date structural change the model suggests four regimes 1900 1918 1919 1933 1934 1967 and 1968 2002 generating four rather different patterns for pollution over time the policy conclusions are consonant with pearce s general view about the ekc there is no theoretical presumption that it has an inverted u shape nor should any country try to grow out of the environmental problems without analyzing the benefits and costs of so doing

the supermajority core of the us senate and the failure to join the league of nations the failure of the united states to join the league of nations is often considered to be an outcome of isolationist influence the supermajority requirement of treaty ratification in the us senate also is blamed for allowing a minority of isolationists to block the will of the majority that supported the treaty to determine the cause of the failure i analyze the senate debate over the treaty using the concepts of the supermajority core and supermajority winset using all 157 votes on the treaty i estimate senatorial positions and the locations of both the status quo and the treaty on the same metric space from this analysis i find that isolationists were not influential enough to block the ratification instead president wilson s unwillingness to compromise is found to have played a critical role in the treaty s defeat the treaty s defeat thus was not an indication of the power of isolationism this study contributes to the growing body of literature that debunks claims about the dominance of isolationism in the interwar period at the same time the paper demonstrates how the core and winset concepts can be useful in answering substantive collective choice questions

dynamic programming models of fishing competition it is natural to consider the stock of any renewable resource as a capital stock and treat the exploitation of that resource in much the same way as one would treat accumulation of a capital stock this has been done to some extent by cohn clark and gordon monro and by ngo van long whose papers contain a discussion of this point of view however the analysis is much simpler than it appears in the literature especially since the interaction between markets and the natural biological dynamics has not been made clear three issues which have been raised only tangentially are important for the understanding of the economics of renewable resources the first arises from the fact that the fish population might not be able to sustain the market determined amount of fish and hence should be allocated optimally over time second there is the cost externality here costs are affected by the size of the stock of fish which again affects the optimal allocation over time the third issue is how central planning typically used in capital theory can be employed as a tool in analyzing a decentralized economy with perfect futures markets and property rights in this paper a simple framework using only elementary mathematical techniques will be provided in which many important results new to the literature as well as many familiar results can be derived one bonus of this approach is that much of the previous literature can be organized and rationalized the simplicity of the mathematics has the effect of revealing the underlying economic intuition of the subject throughout the paper as a matter of convenience the selfrenewing resource will be referred to as fish however it should be clear that the analysis is perfectly general in that it can be applied to any self renewing resource in fact by specializing the production function an elementary exposition of the theory of exhaustible resources is implicit there are two main sections to this work plus an appendix the first section analyzes the time path of prices output and resource stock under the assumption of free entry competition and the second section studies optimal planning or perfect competition in the first part of the discussion of each market structure extraction costs are assumed to be independent of the size of the fish stock in the second part of each section this assumption is relaxed finally the appendix contains several of the results used in the body of the paper the case of free entry competition can be treated in a very simple manner each period s output is determined by the intersection of the demand and marginal harvesting cost curves i e supply equals demand subtracting this output from the natural dynamics yields the dynamics of free entry competition using this technique it is easy to see the conditions under which free entry competition leads to the exhaustion of the stock of fish furthermore the free entry case serves as a benchmark by which to evaluate the effects of the institution of property rights on the exploitation of the resource the case of a centrally planned economy is studied next this case is shown to be identical to a competitive outcome in which property rights are clearly defined and prices and outputs are endogenously determined so as to be consistent with demand conditions one result coincidentally is that it is possible that the optimal solution might be obtained without property rights the tech the hebrew university university of virginia university of illinois and northwestern university respectively research support from the national science foundation under grants soc 77 27340 and soc 7905900 and the us israel bsf under grant 1828 79 is gratefully acknowledged

governing a groundwater commons a strategic and laboratory analysis of western water law we examine strategic behavior in groundwater depletion within the setting of state governance of groundwater resources in the american west solving a dynamic common pool resource model for its optimal solution and its subgame perfect equilibrium provides benchmarks for behavior observed in laboratory experiments three forms of legal rules common pool depletion with a rule of capture to establish ownership absolute ownership doctrine entry restrictions prior appropriation doctrine and stock quotas correlative rights doctrinekre examined in terms of their impact on individual strategic behavior in laboratory experiments

the effects of market structure on industry growth rivalrous non excludable capital abstract we analyze imperfect competition in dynamic environments where firms use rivalrous but non excludable industry specific capital that is provided exogenously capital depreciation depends on utilization so firms influence the evolution of the capital equipment through more or less intensive supply in the final goods market strategic incentives stem from i a dynamic externality arising due to the non excludability of the capital stock leading firms to compete for its use rivalry and ii a market externality leading to the classic cournot type supply competition comparing alternative market structures we isolate the effect of these externalities on strategies and industry growth

identifying reduced form relations with panel data the case of pollution and income abstract in this paper we propose a solution to the non robustness that plagues the estimation of inverted u shaped relationships using panel data such as the relation between pollution and income when dependent and independent variable like pollution and income are both time related separating the effect of the independent variable from time effects brings about a fundamental identification dilemma the imposition of restrictions on the controls might drive the shape of the relationship between the dependent pollution and independent income variables our solution consists of imposing the very weak constraint that arbitrary cross sectional units have the same relationship we apply our methodology to two widely studied cases namely so 2 and co 2 emissions interestingly our estimates are insensitive to the required subjective choices but also strongly differ from the literature so far we find consistent positive income effects for both cases and time effect estimates with a clear u shaped trend for so 2 emissions but only slightly so for co 2 emissions

the instability of the adjusted and unadjusted environmental kuznets curves abstract we test the stability of the unadjusted and adjusted environmental kuznets curves ekcs our results provide evidence in favour of a theoretically funded adjusted ekc hypothesis in which the impact of per capita gdp on co 2 emissions is evaluated conditionally to the effects of the industry mix and of the energy supply infrastructure in this specification the shape of the gdp co 2 relationship appears quite sensitive to changes in the estimation period in the final part of the paper signs and dynamics of fixed effects of individual countries in different specifications are interpreted as measures of virtuous or vicious of environmental behaviour

cooperative and non cooperative harvesting in a stochastic sequential fishery abstract we examine cooperative harvesting in a sequential fishery with stochastic shocks in recruitment two fleets harvest in a stochastic interception fishery we analyze cooperative management as a non cooperative game where deviations from cooperative harvesting are deterred by the threat of harvesting at non cooperative levels for a fixed number of periods whenever the initial stock falls below a trigger level we illustrate the sequential harvesting game with an application to the northern baltic salmon fishery cooperative harvesting yields participants substantial gains in terms of expected payoffs the greatest gains accrue to the fleet harvesting the spawning stock the actions of which are not observed by the competitor an explanation for the prevalence of fish wars is provided even if a cooperative agreement is reached shocks in recruitment trigger phases of non cooperative harvesting further the cooperative solution can only be maintained when stock uncertainty is not too prevalent

estimation of short run and long run elasticities of energy demand from panel data using shrinkage estimators this article discusses the problem of obtaining short run and long run elasticities of energy demand for each of 49 states in the united states using data for 21 years estimation using the time series data by each state gave several wrong signs for the coefficients estimation using pooled data was not valid because the hypothesis of homogeneity of the coefficients was rejected shrinkage estimators gave more reasonable results the article presents in a unified framework the classical empirical bayes and bayes approaches for deriving these estimators

majority rule outcomes and the structure of debate in one issue at a time decision making in many group decision making situations such as faculty hiring decisions outcomes are often arrived at by deciding one issue at a time e g first rank then subfield it is well known that procedures limiting votes to separate orthogonal dimensions always result in a unique outcome at the generalized median the median of each separate issue dimension often however there is conflict within groups over what ought to be the relevant orthogonal dimensions within which choices will be made we show that the way in which debate is structured i e the way in which the dimensions of choice are specified can have important consequences for what outcome gets chosen however we also show that the range of outcomes that could arise from alternative structurings of the decision process is bounded these bounds are expressed relative to the yolk a sphere located centrally in the pareto set whose existence was first noted by tullock 1967 262 and whose properties have recently been developed by mckelvey 1986 and feld et al 1987 we find that in m orthogonal dimensions the feasible outcomes must lie within mathtype mtef 2 1 feaafiart1ev1aaatcvaufebsjuyzl2yd9gzlbvynv2caerbulwbln hiov2dgi1btfmbaexatlxbi9gbaerbd9wdylwzybitldharqqtubsr 4rnchbgeagqivu0je9sqqrpepc0xbbl8f4rqqrffpeea0xe9lq jc9 vqaqpepm0xbba9pwe9q8fs0 yqaqpepae9pg0firpepekkfr0xfr x fr xb9adbaqaaegacigaaiaabeqaamaabaabaagcbawaaoaaaeaaca qgtbaaleqaaaaa 36f8 sqrt text m radii of the center of the yolk

strategic dynamic interaction abstract the motivation for this paper is fishing legislation that divides a fishery into regions each of which is exploited by a single firm as the regions have common borders an analysis based on models with one firm and one region would lead to erroneous results an alternative motivation is the problem of a fishery with several interacting species each exploited by a single firm in this paper we assume that fish move between regions therefore the stock in one region depends not only on previous stock and catch in the region but also on the stock and catch in neighboring regions in the multiple species interpretation these movements correspond to the interactions between species we use a multisectoral differential duopoly model in order to capture the strategic interactions of the firms over time the model is solved for an example in which varying levels of dependence between regions can be compared

covering dominance and institution free properties of social change this paper shows that different institutional structures for aggregation of preferences under majority rule may generate social choices that are quite similar so that the actual social choice may be rather insensitive to the choice of institutional rules specifically in a multidimensional setting where all voters have strictly quasi concave preferences it is shown that the uncovered set contains the outcomes that would arise from equilibrium behavior under three different institutional settings the three institutional settings are two candidate competition in a large electorate cooperative behavior in small committees and sophisticated voting behavior in a legislative environment where the agenda is determined endogenously because of its apparent institution free properties the uncovered set may provide a useful generalization of the core when a core does not exist a general existence theorem for the uncovered set is proven and for the downsian case bounds for the uncovered set are computed these bounds show that the uncovered set is centered around a generalized median set whose size is a measure of the degree of symmetry of the voter ideal points

a generalized harvest function for fishing allocating effort among common property cod stocks a generalized harvest function abstract simple harvest functions such as the schaefer or the biomass and effort cobb douglas function have been the foundation of most dynamic fishery models the intent of this article is to question these simple harvest functions by theoretically specifying and estimating a general harvest technology the harvest from a particular stock is assumed to be a function of 1 the amount of fishing effort applied 2 the stock s biomass 3 the size of the recruit class and 4 an index of other characteristics of the stock data are available for a number of common property cod stocks in the north atlantic the harvesting technology is estimated by developing a general stochastic variable cost function to explain how a country allocates its fishing effort among these common property stocks both the schaefer harvest function and the biomass and effort cobb douglas function are rejected on empirical grounds

convergence of per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the eu legend or reality abstract designing appropriate environmental and energy policies in order to meet the kyoto protocol s carbon dioxide co 2 reduction targets in the european union eu requires a detailed examination and thorough understanding of co 2 emission trends across the eu member states this paper investigates whether co 2 emissions have converged across 22 european countries over the 1971 to 2006 period the bayesian shrinkage estimation method is employed to do this work and the results reveal the following first the hypothesis of absolute convergence in per capita co 2 emissions is supported and a slight upward convergence is observed second the fact that countries differ considerably in both their speed of convergence and volatility in emissions makes it possible to identify different groups of countries third the results with respect to convergence do not vary much once the share of industry in gdp is accounted for in a conditional convergence analysis however a decreasing share of industry in gdp seems to contribute to a decline in per capita emissions these findings may carry important implications for both national and eu environmental policies

a test for parameter homogeneity in co2panel ekc estimations this paper casts doubt on empirical results based on panel estimations of an inverted u relationship between per capita gdp and pollution using a new dataset for oecd countries on carbon dioxide emissions for the period 1960 1997 we find that the crucial assumption of homogeneity across countries is problematic decisively rejected are model specifications that feature even weaker homogeneity assumptions than are commonly used furthermore our results challenge the existence of an overall environmental kuznets curve for carbon dioxide emissions

pluralism and social choice pluralist political theory identifies certain patterns of political preferences as promoting the stability of democratic political systems and others as threatening to such stability social choice theory likewise identifies certain patterns of political preferences as leading to stability in social choice under majority rule and related collective decision rules and other patterns as leading to unstable social choice but the preference patterns identified by pluralist theory as promoting stability are essentially those identified by social choice theory as entailing instability thus the notions of stability and the implicit normative criteria associated with the two theories are very close to being logically incompatible this incompatibility suggests that the social choice ideal of collective rationality may not be one that we should endorse indeed the generic instability of the pluralist political process and its consequent collective irrationality may contribute to the stability of pluralist political systems

condorcet winners and the paradox of voting probability calculations for weak preference orders choice literature given this problem social choice theorists have attempted to estimate the probability of condorcet winners given certain empirical or theoretical conditions we shall estimate the probabilities of condorcet winners and intransitive aggregate orders for various numbers of individuals with strong or weak preference orders across various numbers of alternatives we find using computer simulation a stark contrast between these estimates assuming strong individual preferences and the estimates allowing for individuals indifference between pairs of alternatives in contrast to earlier work which depends on the strong preference assumption we suggest that the problem is most acute for small committee decision making and least acute for mass elections with few alternatives

trade the pollution haven hypothesis and the environmental kuznets curve examining the linkages abstract this paper examines the extent to which the ekc inverted u relationship can be explained by trade and specifically the migration or displacement of dirty industries from the developed regions to the developing regions the pollution haven hypothesis phh using detailed data on north south trade flows for pollution intensive products the evidence for the phh is assessed emissions of 10 air and water pollutants are then estimated controlling for trade openness structural change and dirty north south trade flows evidence of pollution haven effects is found although such effects do not appear to be widespread and appear to be relatively small compared to the roles played other explanatory variables

the heterogeneity of carbon kuznets curves for advanced countries comparing homogeneous heterogeneous and shrinkage bayesian estimators we investigate carbon kuznets curves ckc relationships for advanced countries grouped in policy relevant groups north america and oceania south europe north europe by means of various homogeneous heterogeneous and shrinkage bayesian panel estimators we try to provide an answer to the question how sensitive are the ckc estimates to changes in the level of parameters heterogeneity we do find that in coherence with their policy and economic commitment to carbon reductions and environmental market based instruments implementation bell shapes are present only for northern eu which leads the group of advanced countries the other two lag behind we show for the first time that ckc shapes are present if we net out europe of the southern and less developed countries this is coherent with the kuznets paradigm the negative side of the tale is that they characterize a bunch of few countries other advanced countries lag behind and are far from reaching a ckc dynamics heterogeneous and bayesian

stability and centrality of legislative choice in the spatial context majority rule spatial voting games lacking a core still always present a near core outcome more commonly known as the copeland winner this is the alternative that defeats or ties the greatest number of alternatives in the space previous research has not tested the copeland winner as a solution concept for spatial voting games without a core lacking a way to calculate where the copeland winner was with an infinite number of alternatives we provide a straightforward algorithm to find the copeland winner and show that it corresponds well to experimental outcomes in an important set of experimental legislative voting games we also provide an intuitive motivation for why legislative outcomes in the spatial context may be expected to lie close to the copeland winner finally we show a connection between the copeland winner and the shapley value and provide a simple but powerful algorithm to calculate the copeland scores of all points in the space in terms of the modified power values of each of the voters and their locations in the space

economic models for the environmental kuznets curve a survey abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc refers to an inverted u shaped relationship between some pollutant level and per capita income i e the environmental quality deteriorates at early stages of economic growth and subsequently improves at a later stage since the early 1990s a considerable number of empirical studies have been conducted on the ekc and although there is no conclusive proof it has been recognized that the ekc emerges as an empirical regularity however some recent studies cast doubt on the concept and methodology of empirical results and evidence of the existence of the ekc has been questioned in fact how economic growth affects the environmental quality i e the shape of the ekc is still controversial in order to identify the actual relationship between the environmental quality and economic growth it is essential to develop economic models from various points of view this paper overviews the current stage of theoretical models that explain such relationship

carbon intensity and economic development 1962 1991 a brief exploration of the environmental kuznets curve the relationship between national carbon dioxide emissions intensity co2 emitted per unit of gross domestic product and level of economic development has changed from essentially linear in 1962 to strongly curvilinear in 1991 the inverted u curve reached statistical significance briefly in the early 1970s and increasingly since 1982 this is the result not of groups of countries passing through stages of development but of efficiency improvements in a small number of wealthy countries combined with worse performance in poor and middle income countries the curvilinear relation is deepening and is likely to persist due to constraints on poorer countries in the world economy

the costs of coalition coalition theories and italian governments governments in italy both change and remain the same from 1946 to 1992 the christian democratic party always held governing power but almost no cabinet stayed in office more than a few years and many governments collapsed after only a few months how can instability coexist with stability in this way how can governments break up at such low cost and with so little effect on alternation these questions are rooted in but not resolved by the available game theoretic literature on coalitional behavior my answer is that politicians purposive actions can reduce the costs of coalition i argue that the costs of making breaking and maintaining coalitions depend on political institutions and on the array of parties and voters in policy space institutional and spatial conditions structure politicians opportunities and attempts to lower costs under some conditions as i show coalitions are cheap and politicians can easily make coalitions even cheaper the inference is that this framework comprehends both italy s extremes and the degrees of stability found in other parliamentary democracies

estimating country specific environmental kuznets curves from panel data a bayesian shrinkage approach designing an efficient global climate policy turns out to be a difficult yet crucial task since there are noteworthy cross country differences in energy and carbon intensities in this article the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis is tested for carbon dioxide co2 emissions and as a modelling technique the iterative bayesian shrinkage procedure is employed to handle the cross country differences the results suggest that first the ekc hypothesis is rejected for 47 out of the 51 countries considered when the heterogeneity in countries energy efficiencies and cross country differences in the co2 emissions trajectories are accounted for second a classification of the results with respect to the development levels of the countries concerned reveals that the emergence of an overall inverted u shaped curve is due to the fact that in high income countries increase in gross domestic product gdp decreases emissions while in low income countries emissions and gdp are positively correlated

corruption and the environmental kuznets curve empirical evidence for sulfur abstract we investigate how corruption influences the income level at the turning point of the relationship between sulfur emissions and income using a wide cross national panel of countries at different levels of development and with different degrees of corruption our results support the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis for sulfur we find evidence that the higher the country s degree of corruption the higher the per capita income at the turning point suggesting different income pollution paths across countries due to corruption we build upon a new specification for the ekc developed by bradford et al 2005 that avoids using nonlinear transformations of potentially nonstationary regressors in panel estimation also we account for the indirect impact of corruption on emissions through its impact on per capita income our main findings remain unchanged when we investigate additional heterogeneity allowing for different income slopes across richer and poorer countries

information access income distribution and the environmental kuznets curve abstract recent empirical studies have tested the hypothesis of an environmental kuznets curve ekc focusing primarily on the relationship between per capita income and certain types of pollutant emissions given the stock nature of many pollution problems emissions only partially account for the environmental impacts moreover almost all of the studies have given consideration to little more than income levels as explanatory variables this paper empirically tests the hypothesis of the ekc existence for a stock sensitive indicator that is the percentage of protected area pa within national territory it does theorize that economic growth is a necessary condition in order to better address environmental issues but it also stresses that other variables income distribution education information accessibility may play a fundamental role in determining environmental quality contrary to other studies that mainly focus on the calculation of the income level corresponding to the transition point this paper is more concerned with the calculation of environmental quality corresponding to that transition point that is the minimum level of environmental quality that a country is willing to accept this paper highlights the idea that if the transition point is determined primarily by income level social policies determine the level of environmental quality corresponding to that point

towards a theory of bicameralism the neglected contributions of the calculus of consent in the calculus of consent 1962 235 buchanan and tullock assert 1 ceteris paribus while a coalition controlling less than a majority of voters may control in either chamber the greater the difference in the bases of representation in the two houses the less likely is any given coalition of voters to control a majority of the seats in both chambers 2 the potential of cross chamber logrolls on issues of unequal intensity increases the likelihood that a minority may effectively control policy making we link these ideas to social theory approaches to bicameralism and for the empirical study of legislatures

dirty industries patterns of change in industrial countries this article concerns itself with the environmental role of heavily polluting industries since 1970 analysing its development in 11 basic industries as well as electricity production and road transport in 32 industrial countries it argues for a green industrial policy demonstrating that other mitigations of environmental pressure in industrial countries end of pipe treatment relocation to the third world structural change in the industrial sector and even environmentally oriented modernization have so far been unable to solve the problems of dirty industries although some approaches have shown some promise

pools and streams a stochastic process model of applied research abstract applied research is often viewed as a process of testing ideas drawn from a pool of candidate innovations this model is formalized for the case in which the pool of ideas is continually replenished through basic research the intensity of applied research is determined by the equilibrium of an n person non cooperative game where players choose dynamic strategies for exploiting the pool the presence of a pool cannot be detected in a stationary state but when the number of applied researchers is finite transient responses to exogenous shifts in basic research policy may reveal the pool s existence

strategic resource extraction capital accumulation and overlapping generations abstract the standard resource extraction framework assumes infinitely lived agents and yields an overfishing result for some applications a finite time horizon may be more appropriate a direct extension of the levhari mirman model to overlapping generations yields an extreme overfishing result alternatively we assume young and old specialize and respectively fish and supply capital in this model under some circumstances there may well be under utilization of natural resources however for a given production technology if there are a sufficiently large number of agents overfishing always results

the core and the stability of group choice in spatial voting games the core of a voting game is the set of undominated outcomes that is those that once in place cannot be overturned for spatial voting games a core is structurally stable if it remains in existence even if there are small perturbations in the location of voter ideal points while for simple majority rule a core will exist in games with more than one dimension only under extremely restrictive symmetry conditions we show that for certain supramajorities a core must exist we also provide conditions under which it is possible to construct a structurally stable core if there are only a few dimensions our results demonstrate the stability properties of such frequently used rules as two thirds and three fourths we further explore the implications of our results for the nature of political stability by looking at outcomes in experimental spatial voting games and at belgian cabinet formation in the late 1970s

the strongly stable core in weighted voting games the problems associated with the concept of the core in spatial voting games such as non existence and instability are well documented the structurally stable core presented by schofield attempts to resolve these problems by looking at the subset of the core which is still nonempty after a small change in voter preferences although this concept combined with the adoption of supramajoritarian voting rules and weighted voting games may very well explain the observed stability in reality it may not be suitable for certain coalition situations this article proposes a new solution concept the strongly stable core the conditions for the existence and the potential location of the strongly stable core are then explored and compared with those of the structurally stable core

sharing clams tragedy of an incomplete commons abstract a dispersive phase is part of the reproductive cycle of most living organisms when economic agents are limited to harvesting a renewable resource from a fixed geographical area dispersion of the resource creates a tragedy of the commons a dynamic optimization problem is constructed where economic agents control fixed areas the growth of the resource occurring in each area disperses it is shown that the desired stock size for maximizing agents in their own area decreases inversely with the amount of leakage the degree to which the resource is common the socially optimal stock in each region is a function of the marginal profit for all areas that receive dispersing organisms and may be greater than the privately optimal stock for an area if that area captured all of its own resource growth this effect is enhanced if the dispersal rate is stock dependent possibly creating a double tragedy in a source and sink situation the socially optimal solution may involve eliminating all harvesting in the source region

logical deficiencies in spatial models a constructive critique a fundamental property of any good theoryis logical consistency however two commonassumptions in the rational choice approach topolitical analysis that induced preferences overpolicy are separable and that such preferences areindependent of changes in exogenous factors are notconsistent with the archetypal assumptions ofindividual utility maximization these particularpathologies of spatial models of politics have notbeen well recognized in the political scienceliterature

co2 emissions energy consumption and output in france abstract this paper examines the dynamic causal relationships between pollutant emissions energy consumption and output for france using cointegration and vector error correction modelling techniques we argue that these variables are strongly inter related and therefore their relationship must be examined using an integrated framework the results provide evidence for the existence of a fairly robust long run relationship between these variables for the period 1960 2000 the causality results support the argument that economic growth exerts a causal influence on growth of energy use and growth of pollution in the long run the results also point to a uni directional causality running from growth of energy use to output growth in the short run

is there a long term relationship between agricultural ghg emissions and productivity growth a dynamic panel data approach the paper adopts a single country regional panel dataset to analyse the long term relationship between agricultural greenhouse gases ghg emissions and productivity growth and consequently to assess emissions sustainability the hypothesis of emission sustainability is assessed by estimating alternative panel model specifications with conventional and gmm estimators applied to the highly heterogeneous italian regional agriculture whose methane and nitrous oxide emissions are properly reconstructed for the periods 1951 2008 and 1980 2008 the modelling approach and the empirical specification include the environmental kuznets curve ekc as one of the possible outcomes results suggest that when a significant relationship between agricultural ghg emissions and productivity growth occurs it is often monotonic and though sustainability is accepted for some ghg no univocal robust evidence of the ekc emerges across the different specifications estimators and periods policy implications of this empirical evidence are finally drawn

expectations and informal rules in coalition formation why do informal rules emerge alongside and at variance with the formal constitutional constraints that shape bargaining over coalition governments the presence of informal rules at odds with formal rules appears as an anomaly within both institution free and institution focused theories of coalitions the author argues that politicians create informal rules in order to alter formal institutions that do not function to their benefit the costs of a formal change in institutions offer incentives to politicians to invent informal rules as alternatives to such change and repeated interactions teach politicians what to expect and then invent the author s emphasis on the manipulability of rules echoes long standing themes in the study and practice of politics

a climate change policy induced shift from innovations in carbon energy production to carbon energy savings abstract we develop an endogenous growth model with capital labor and carbon energy as production factors and three technology variables that measure accumulated innovations for carbon energy production carbon energy savings and neutral growth all markets are complete and perfect except for research for which we assume that the marginal social benefits exceed the marginal private benefits by factor four the model constants are calibrated so that the model reproduces the relevant global trends over the 1970 2000 period the model contains a simple climate module and is used to assess the impact of induced technological change itc for a policy that aims at a maximum level of atmospheric co2 concentration 450 ppmv itc is shown to reduce the required carbon tax by more than a factor 2 and to reduce costs of such a policy by half when we do not constrain aggregate r d expenditures to benchmark levels costs are further reduced numerical simulations show that knowledge accumulation shifts from energy production to energy saving technology we discuss reasons for differences between our results and earlier results reported in the literature