analyzing public preferences and increasing acceptability for the renewable portfolio standard in korea abstract in order to respond to the challenge of climate change similar to other countries korea has announced various policies to vitalize the development and uptake of renewable energy the renewable portfolio standard rps is the most striking example of a policy in this area this study employs a conjoint survey and bayesian mixed logit model to analyze consumer preferences for specific attributes of the rps policy it analyzes households marginal willingness to pay mwtp for the rps with specific attributes and simulates the degree of household acceptability of the policy through a scenario analysis comparison between costs and benefits of implementing the policy is also attempted by analyzing the households mwtp with the actual transition expense of rps implementation incurred by electricity supply companies the simulation results provide implications for improving rps policy implementation households consider the creation of new jobs as the most important policy attribute followed by increase in electricity prices damage to forests reduction in co 2 emissions and length of power outages moreover the korean household is willing to accept an increase of up to 1 39 in its electricity prices relative to 2012 and the median mwtp of each household for rps implementation is krw 734 99 month usd 0 67 month

green taxes in a post paris world are millions of nays inevitable turning the paris agreement s greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments we address the question of the acceptability of cost effective climate policy in a real voting setting first we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes rejected in switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people energy taxes were aimed at completely replacing the current value added tax we examine the determinants of voting and find that distributional and competitiveness concerns reduced the acceptability of energy taxes along with the perception of ineffectiveness most people would have preferred tax revenues to be allocated for environmental purposes second at the same time of the ballot we tested the acceptability of alternative designs of a carbon tax with a choice experiment survey on a representative sample of the swiss population survey respondents are informed about environmental distributional and competitiveness effects of each carbon tax design these impacts are estimated with a computable general equilibrium model this original setting generates a series of novel results providing information on the expected environmental effectiveness of carbon taxes reduces the demand for environmental earmarking making distributional effects salient generates an important demand for progressive designs e g social cushioning or recycling via lump sum transfers the case of lump sum recycling is particularly striking it is sufficient to show its desirable distributional properties to make it one of the most preferred designs which corresponds to a completely novel result in the literature we show that providing detailed information on the functioning of environmental taxes may contribute to close both the gap between acceptability ex ante and ex post and the gap between economists prescriptions and the preferences of the general public

incorporating discontinuous preferences into the analysis of discrete choice experiments data from a discrete choice experiment on improvements of rural landscape attributes are used to investigate the implications of discontinuous preferences on willingness to pay estimates using a multinomial error component logit model we explore differences in scale and unexplained variance between respondents with discontinuous and continuous preferences and condition taste intensities on whether or not each attribute was considered by the respondent during the evaluation of alternatives results suggest that significant improvements in model performance can be achieved when discontinuous preferences are accommodated in the econometric specification and that the magnitude and robustness of the willingness to pay estimates are sensitive to discontinuous preferences

comparative social mobility revisited models of convergence and divergence in 16 countries this paper reanalyzes 3 stratum intergenerational mobility classifications assembled by hazelrigg and garnier for men in 16 countries in the 1960s and 1970s log linear and log multiplicative models are used to compare mobility regimes and to estimate effects of industrialization educational enrollment social democracy and income inequality on immobility and other parameters of the mobility process several models of mobility fit the data equally well so criteria of plausibility and parsimony are applied to choose one model of stratum specific immobility and another model of vertical mobility with uniform immobility we find substantial similarity in mobility and immobility across countries but the exogenous variables do explain systematic differences among countries cross national variations are complex because most of the exogenous variables have different effects on different parameters of the mobility regime relative to other factors industrialization and education have weaker effects on mobility regimes than has usually been supposed

attitudes towards carbon taxes across europe the role of perceived uncertainty and self interest abstract while using carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may well be effective this has recently proved too unpopular to put into practice in a number of countries yet at a time when governments across the world are preparing their nationally determined contributions to the paris agreement our knowledge of whether and why people oppose these taxes originates from a single or small number of cases drawing on the european social survey n 44 387 this article provides evidence on public attitudes towards increasing taxes on fossil fuels to reduce climate change from 23 countries most of which have never featured in the literature before the results point to a widespread aversion to carbon taxes on the one hand this worsens with the perceived costs of taxes such as the case among consumers who depend highly on energy on the other it improves with political trust and external political efficacy factors that help ease the uncertainty around policy proposals our estimations suggest that the effect of changes in these factors alone would be large enough to reverse the public resistance to carbon taxes in some countries these results are robust to a number of alternative specifications and various checks

markets and income inequality in rural china political advantage in an expanding economy when market reform generates rapid growth in an agrarian subsistence economy changes in inequality may be due to economic growth and structural change rather than to the intrinsic features of markets the case of post mao china is examined using nationally representative survey data gathered in 1996 to address unresolved questions about findings from 1980s surveys well into reform s second decade political officeholding has a large net impact on household income comparable to that of operating a private enterprise contrary to findings based on earlier surveys and expectations about the impact of growth cadre household advantages are stable across levels and forms of economic expansion returns to entrepreneurship however decline sharply with the spread of wage employment future declines in relative returns to political position are therefore unlikely to occur due to the further spread of private household entrepreneurship and theories of change based on this mechanism appear untenable

the emergence of a market society changing mechanisms of stratification in china this article examines the effect of institutional change the shift from redistribution to markets in altering the mechanisms of stratification new institutionalists maintain that interests are emb

using choice experiments to value the environment this paper we outline the choice experiment approach to environmental valuation this approach has its roots in lancaster s characteristics theory of value in random utility theory and in experimental design we show how marginal values for the attributes of environmental assets such as forests and rivers can be estimated from pair wise choices as well as the value of the environmental asset as a whole these choice pairs are designed so as to allow efficient statistical estimation of the underlying utility function and to minimise required sample size choice experiments have important advantages over other environmental valuation methods such as contingent valuation and travel cost type models although many design issues remain unresolved applications to environmental issues have so far been relatively limited we illustrate the use of choice experiments with reference to a recent uk study on public preferences for alternative forest landscapes this study allows us to perform a convergent validity test on the choice experiment estimates of willingness to pay

what determines urban households willingness to pay for co2 emission reductions in turkey a contingent valuation survey abstract this paper explores turkish urban households willingness to pay wtp for co2 emission reductions expected to result from improvements in power production a face to face questionnaire with a contingent valuation cv module prepared using the double bounded dichotomous choice elicitation framework was administered to 2422 respondents representative of urban turkey a developing country with low but rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions the determinants of wtp were identified by considering not only the impact of standard socio economic factors but also the effects of environmental knowledge attitudes and behaviour the relevance of the identity of the collection agent national versus international institutions in terms of trust people have towards them and the degree of perceived participation of others in the realization of the project our study confirms the existing literature in demonstrating that wtp figures reported by young and educated people that are active on environmental issues and who also possess material security and environmental knowledge are more likely to be high however their willingness to make contributions is hampered significantly by their belief that their fellow citizens will not contribute and the general lack of trust in institutions overall this study may be taken as a call to eliminate governance related uncertainties in climate change deals

the first shall be last entrepreneurship and communist cadres in the transition from socialism this article reviews the sociological literature on the transition from socialism to capitalism it distinguishes between the erosion and transition phases and between traditional and corporate segments in the emerging private sector panel survey data from hungary show that during the transition ex communist cadres maintain their advantageous position and do especially well in the more dynamic corporate segment they are successful because human capital is important in both capitalism and socialism and because the cadres are able to convert past political power to economic advantage contrary to the findings of studies based only on agriculture the transition increases income inequalities

does the market pay off earnings returns to education in urban china previous work on the market transition in reform era china has missed the direct link between individuals labour market history and individuals labour market outcome a typology of workers is developed based on individuals labour market histories and a model of selective mobility of workers from the state sector to the market sector is offered as an explanation for higher earnings returns to education in the market sector analysis of data from an urban survey in china reveals that commonly observed higher earnings returns to education in the market sector are limited only to recent market entrants and that early market entrants resemble state workers in both their level of earnings and returns to education these results challenge the prevailing wisdom that education is necessarily more highly rewarded in the market sector thus it is concluded that higher returns to education in the market sector should not be construed as being caused by marketization per se and instead that the sorting process of workers in labour markets helps explain the sectoral differentials

what factors drive inequalities in carbon tax incidence decomposing socioeconomic inequalities in carbon tax incidence in ireland abstract carbon taxes increase the cost of necessary household energy expenditures in many developed countries carbon taxes are regressive as they comprise a greater proportion of a poorer household s income certain socioeconomic groups are more negatively affected by these impacts than others while inequality of incidence by income group has received great attention in the literature a gap exists to quantify the inequality associated with socioeconomic characteristics this information is policy relevant as it may inform the most effective means to offset negative welfare impacts through changes to taxes and or social transfers this paper provides this contribution first the inequality of carbon tax incidence across the income spectrum is quantified using the concentration index methodology a subsequent multivariate decomposition quantifies the contribution each socioeconomic factor makes towards this inequality of incidence this is carried out for electricity motor fuel and all other home fuels to elicit variation of socioeconomic incidence by source while income contributes a great deal towards inequality of incidence for other home fuels other socioeconomic characteristics are the primary determinants of electricity and motor fuel related carbon tax incidence the relative importance of each characteristic in determining regressive impacts is quantified and this varies by carbon tax source

a choice experiment on fuel taxation and earmarking in norway abstract pigouvian taxes are efficient but unpopular among voters and hence often politically infeasible earmarking of revenues has been widely reported to increase public support for taxes but earmarking is generally not the most efficient use of the revenues this trade off between efficiency and political feasibility is the motivation for our primary research objective to quantify the effect of earmarking on support for fuel tax rises our secondary research objective is to investigate why earmarking increases support using data from a representative sample of the norwegian voter population n 1147 we estimate models of voter preferences for fuel taxes using logistic regression models our results show that in the absence of earmarking the majority of voters would like to reduce fuel taxes but earmarking the revenues for environmental measures has a substantial effect on voter support for fuel tax increases garnering a majority for increases of up to 15 above present levels further analysis indicates that a prime reason why earmarking for environmental measures is popular is that it increases the perceived environmental effectiveness of the tax and hence its legitimacy as an environmental rather than a fiscal policy instrument

using discrete choice models with experimental design data to forecast consumer demand for a unique cultural event an approach is developed to forecast participation in unique events with long gestation periods experimental observations of choice are derived for conjoint measurement type multiattribute alternatives that describe possible event configurations the choice data are analyzed by means of discrete choice econometric models a multinomial logit choice model is applied to forecast the choice of attendance at various types of international expositions the empirical work was part of the planning efforts undertaken to investigate the potential demand for an international exposition to be held in eastern australia in conjunction with the australian 1988 bicentennial celebrations

regional variation in earnings inequality in reform era urban china this article studies the regional variation in earnings inequality in contemporary urban china focusing on the relationship between the pace of economic reforms and earning determination through

public acceptance for environmental taxes self interest environmental and distributional concerns abstract while strongly recommended by economists it has often been politically difficult to impose taxes on externalities there is a substantial literature on public attitudes towards environmental taxes there has however been few comprehensive attempts to understand attitudes towards environmental taxes the main research question in this paper is which factors influence support for fuel taxation we propose a model of attitudes towards fuel taxation and test this model as well as more specific hypotheses using data from a representative survey of the adult norwegian population our results suggest that support for fuel taxation is best predicted by beliefs about environmental consequences followed by beliefs about consequences to others beliefs about consequences to self self interest is the factor that explains the least variation in support for fuel taxation the academically interesting result that support cannot be well explained without capturing a broad range of motivational factors is also highly policy relevant it implies that there is no magic formula for increasing public support for environmental taxes there are however some issues which can be addressed trust in how well the government spends the revenue and the perception that taxation does very little to change behaviour and thus to reduce environmental problems

what do we know about carbon taxes an inquiry into their impacts on competitiveness and distribution of income abstract the kyoto protocol to the united nations framework convention on climate change unfccc has set legally binding emissions targets for a basket of six greenhouse gases and timetables for industrialised countries it has also incorporated three international flexibility mechanisms however the articles defining the flexibility mechanisms carry wording that their use must be supplemental to domestic actions this has led to the open debates on interpretations of these supplementarity provisions such debates ended at the resumed sixth conference of the parties cop to the unfccc held in bonn july 2001 and at the subsequent cop 7 in marrakesh november 2001 the final wording in the bonn agreement reaffirmed in the marrakesh accords at least indicates that domestic policies will have an important role to play in meeting annex b countries emissions commitments carbon taxes have long been advocated because of their cost effectiveness in achieving a given emissions reduction in this paper the main economic impacts of carbon taxes are assessed based on a review of empirical studies on existing carbon energy taxes it is concluded that competitive losses and distributive impacts are generally not significant and definitely less than often perceived however given the ultimate objective of the framework convention future carbon taxes could have higher rates than those already imposed and thus the resulting economic impacts could be more acute in this context it has been shown that how to use the generated fiscal revenues will be of fundamental importance in determining the final economic impacts of carbon taxes finally we briefly discuss carbon taxes in combination with other domestic and international instruments

is fairness blind the effect of framing on preferences for effort sharing rules this paper uses a choice experiment to study citizens preferences for effort sharing rules for reducing carbon dioxide emissions for a given global cost and level of emission reduction we study the willingness to pay for various rules that imply different distributions of the cost between eu the us china and africa the focus of this paper is on the use of two different treatments one where the respondents were informed about the country or country group names and one where the names were replaced with anonymous labels a d this allows us to test whether people s preferences for effort sharing rules depend on the framing of the problem we find that the ranking of the rules and the strength of the preferences are not significantly different between the two treatments and hence we find no evidence of ingroup bias in preferences for effort sharing rules c 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved less

on the self interested use of equity in international climate negotiations abstract we discuss self interested uses of equity arguments in international climate negotiations using unique data from a world wide survey of agents involved in international climate policy we show that the perceived support of different equity rules by regions may be explained by the ranking of their economic costs despite being self interested equity arguments may be perceived as being used for different reasons for example out of fairness considerations or in order to facilitate negotiations consistent with experimental and behavioral studies on fairness perceptions we find that individuals are more likely to state reasons with positive attributes if they evaluate their own region or regions that support the individual s personally preferred equity rule negotiators perceive the use of equity by regions as less influenced by pressure from interest groups

tracking global carbon revenues a survey of carbon taxes versus cap and trade in the real world abstract we investigate the current use of public revenues which are generated through both carbon taxes and cap and trade systems more than 28 3 billion in government carbon revenues are currently collected each year in 40 countries and another 16 states or provinces around the world of those revenues 27 7 8 billion are used to subsidize green spending in energy efficiency or renewable energy 26 7 4 billion go toward state general funds and 36 10 1 billion are returned to corporate or individual taxpayers through paired tax cuts or direct rebates cap and trade systems 6 57 billion in total public revenue earmark a larger share of revenues for green spending 70 while carbon tax systems 21 7 billion more commonly refund revenues or otherwise direct them towards government general funds 72 of revenues drawing from an empirical dataset we also identify various trends in systems use of carbon revenues in terms of the total revenues collected annually per capita in each jurisdiction and offer commensurate qualitative observations on carbon policy design choices

what is fair an experimental guide to climate negotiations abstract international commitments to reduce emissions must be negotiated between countries in a manner considered to be fair or equitable while the burden sharing principles commonly advocated in climate negotiations reflect different views of what constitutes a fair way to distribute the abatement burden their use can also be strategically motivated to legitimise a specific bargaining position in this context using a threshold public good game with a climate change framing real monetary incentives and drawing on a sample of individuals from the united states the european union china india and south africa this multi country study examines the degree to which the use of burden sharing principles reflects material self interest in an initial treatment participants who represent the country of which they are a national choose between various burden sharing principles in a subsequent treatment drawing from rawls veil of ignorance participants are unaware of which country they represent and are randomly allocated to a country after making their decision a comparison of participants choices across these two treatments indicates that the use of the historical and future polluter pays rules by american and chinese participants is consistent with material self interest or in other words self interested use of burden sharing principles

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

social inequalities in reforming state socialism between redistribution and markets in china this article extends market transition theory to an analysis of inequality under the conditions of partial reform in china logit regression analysis indicates cadres officials have no greater odds than other households of being among the privileged or avoiding poverty entrepreneurs andformer team cadres however are advantaged despite the rise of a hybrid elite of entrepreneurs who are currently cadres that capitalizes on redistributive power to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace increases in income inequality are modest when market reform stimulates improved economic performance the poor appear to benefit and experience comparable improvements in household income as a result there is only a slight increase in inequality at least in the early stages of market reform the empirical analysis is based on survey data collected in rural china in 1985

do hypothetical and actual marginal willingness to pay differ in choice experiments application to the valuation of the environment abstract in this paper we test the validity of choice experiments with donations for environmental projects in particular we test whether or not there are differences in preferences between a hypothetical and an actual choice experiment our experiments indicate no differences in addition internal tests of validity indicate transitive and stable preferences in both experiments although there are some indications of possible learning effects during the experiment

political orientation environmental values and climate change beliefs and attitudes an empirical cross country analysis abstract based on unique data from representative computer based surveys among more than 3400 citizens this paper empirically examines the determinants of several climate change beliefs and attitudes in three countries which are key players in international climate policy namely the usa germany as the largest country in the european union and china our econometric analysis implies that political orientation in the usa is by far more relevant for general climate change beliefs and beliefs in anthropogenic climate change than in germany and china furthermore us and german citizens with a conservative but not green identification significantly less often support publicly financed climate policy while us and german respondents with a social green identification and chinese respondents belonging to the communist party have a significantly higher willingness to pay a price premium for climate friendly products however our econometric analysis overall reveals that environmental values which are measured by a new ecological paradigm nep scale are the major factors for climate change beliefs and attitudes in all three countries and thus play an even more dominant role than political orientation in addition environmental values weaken the differences in several climate change beliefs and attitudes between a right wing and a left wing identification these interaction effects between political orientation and the nep scale are especially strong in the usa only relevant for the support of publicly financed climate policy in germany and negligible in china our estimation results suggest alternative strategies such as specific communication campaigns in order to reduce the climate change skepticism in conservative and right wing circles in the usa and to increase the support of climate policies among such population groups

a future for carbon taxes abstract carbon taxes have been frequently advocated as a cost effective instrument for reducing emissions however in the practice of environmental policies only six countries have implemented taxes based on the carbon content of the energy products in this paper we evaluate carbon taxes with regard to their competitiveness distributional and environmental impacts the evidence shows that carbon taxes may be an interesting policy option and that their main negative impacts may be compensated through the design of the tax and the use of the generated fiscal revenues

prices versus quantities with incomplete enforcement abstract i study whether incomplete enforcement of a regulation has any impact on the choice between price e g taxes and quantity e g tradeable quotas instruments results indicate that a second best design accounting for incomplete enforcement can be implemented equally well with either instrument as long as the benefit and cost curves are known with certainty if these curves are uncertain to the regulator however the quantity instrument performs relatively better than the price instrument the reason is that the effective amount of control under the quantity instrument is no longer fixed which makes this instrument come closer to a non linear instrument

on self interested preferences for burden sharing rules an econometric analysis for the costs of energy policy measures abstract this paper examines the acceptance of burden sharing rules that refer to the costs of the german energy transition which is one of the most challenging and disputed national climate and energy policy measures based on data from a comprehensive survey of more than 2200 citizens the empirical analysis reveals that the polluter pays rule has by far the highest support compared with the ability to pay rule and especially compared with the equal pay rule which is widely refused in the sample since the distribution of the costs of the german energy transition is largely in line with a polluter pays rule its strong support seems to contribute to the high acceptance of the energy transition at all the main result of our econometric analysis with multivariate binary and ordered probit models is that not only some attitudinal factors like environmental values and political identification but especially economic self interest is relevant since equivalent energy expenditures have a significantly negative effect on the support of the polluter pays rule and especially equivalent income has a significantly negative effect on the preference for the ability to pay rule these results suggest that the use of distributional arguments for the criticism of energy policy measures is not necessarily value driven on the basis of real perceptions of distributive justice but can also be strategically motivated to prevent and combat economically unfavorable measures together with the strong general support of the polluter pays rule these results suggest that a sharp reorientation of the german energy transition due to distributional arguments is not very useful

poverty and distributional effects of carbon pricing in low and middle income countries a global comparative analysis abstract even though concerns about adverse distributional implications for the poor are one of the most important political challenges for carbon pricing the existing literature reveals ambiguous results for this reason we assess the expected incidence of moderate carbon price increases for different income groups in 87 mostly low and middle income countries building on a consistent dataset and method we find that for countries with per capita incomes of below usd 15 000 per year at ppp adjusted 2011 usd carbon pricing has on average progressive distributional effects we also develop a novel decomposition technique to show that distributional outcomes are primarily determined by differences among income groups in consumption patterns of energy rather than of food goods or services we argue that an inverse u shape relationship between energy expenditure shares and income explains why carbon pricing tends to be regressive in countries with relatively higher income since these countries are likely to have more financial resources and institutional capacities to deal with distributional issues our findings suggest that mitigating climate change raising domestic revenue and reducing economic inequality are not mutually exclusive even in low and middle income countries

modeling preference heterogeneity in stated choice data an analysis for public goods generated by agriculture stated choice models based on the random utility framework are becoming increasingly popular in the applied economics literature the need to account for respondents preference heterogeneity in such models has motivated researchers in agricultural environmental health and transport economics to apply random parameter logit and latent class models in most of the published literature these models incorporate heterogeneity in preferences through the systematic component of utility an alternative approach is to investigate heterogeneity through the random component of utility and covariance heterogeneity models are one means of doing this in this article we compare these alternative ways of incorporating preference heterogeneity in stated choice models and evaluate the sensitivity of estimated welfare measures to which approach is selected we find that a latent class approach fits our data best but all the models perform well in terms of out of sample predictions finally we discuss what criteria a researcher can use to decide which approach is most appropriate for a given data set

analysis on china s eco innovations regulation context intertemporal change and regional differences abstract eco innovation is recognized as a determinant of success or failure of environmental protection efforts in the long run this paper attempts to examine china s eco innovation gains in response to the energy saving and emissions reduction eser policy enforced during 2006 2010 we first construct an integrated analysis framework to evaluate the changes of energy and environmental performance used as the proxy of eco innovation and then the intertemporal change of china s eco innovation gains as well as the regional differences is investigated the results indicate that china had accelerated its process of eco innovations during 2006 2010 when a series of eser policies were enforced the developments and wide adoptions of advanced energy saving and environmentally friendly technologies serve as the primary driving forces while upgrading management skills and organizational designs contribute relatively little furthermore the realizing paths of cross region eco innovations in china are obviously discrepant

unequal but fluid social mobility in chile in comparative perspective a major finding in comparative mobility research is the high similarity across countries and the lack of association between mobility and other national attributes with one exception higher inequality seems to be associated with lower mobility evidence for the mobility inequality link is however inconclusive largely because most mobility studies have been conducted in advanced countries with relatively similar levels of inequality this article introduces chile to the comparative project as the 10th most unequal country in the world chile is an adjudicative case if high inequality results in lower mobility chile should be significantly more rigid than its industrialized peers this hypothesis is disproved by the analysis despite vast economic inequality chile is as fluid if not more so than the much more equal industrialized nations furthermore there is no evidence of a decline in mobility as the result of the increase in inequality during the market oriented transformation of the country

what is a fair co2 tax increase on fair emission reductions in the transport sector we examine how individual preferences for fair reductions of carbon dioxide co2 emissions affect the support for increases in the co2 tax on gasoline and diesel we assume that people not only care about their own material welfare but also have preferences for fairness in policy design and we explore the implications using original data from a mail questionnaire sent to a representative sample of the swedish population the main result is that fairness in policy design does matter those respondents who adhere to a fairness principle tend to be relatively more positive to increases in the co2 tax one possible explanation for this result is that there is a relatively high degree of reciprocity regarding the origin of emissions and the fairness regarding who should bear the burden of co2 reductions via a split sample analysis we also find that the relative importance of fairness principles is dependent upon whether one uses a car often or not this sheds light on the potential goal conflict between the importance of fairness principles and self interest in the form of a need for private car transportation

carbon control policies competitiveness and border tax adjustments abstract several propositions have recently been made to use border tax adjustments btas to address the loss of competitiveness induced by unilateral stringent domestic pollution control policies this paper explores in a general equilibrium framework the sectoral and welfare implications of a unilateral domestic ghg control policy combined with a bta scheme using the canadian economy as an illustration we assess the extent to which btas achieve their objectives and analyze the impacts of different methods of recycling the bta proceeds to support domestic industries our simulation results suggest that imposing btas on the imports of non fossil and energy intensive products reduces or removes completely the negative competitiveness impacts that domestic industries suffer from the use of the proceeds of the btas to support domestic energy intensive industries improves their competitiveness and more importantly in some cases overprotects them as it allows them to even increase their output in comparison to the benchmark without emissions control our results also shed light on the existence of heterogeneity in the composition of energy intensive industries as far as the recycling method of the bta proceeds is concerned energy intensive industries that are more oriented toward the domestic market are better off with the recycling of the bta proceeds towards gross output than towards exports alone finally abstracting from the environmental benefits of reduced emissions we find that a bta entails a higher welfare cost to households

implementing china s national energy conservation policies at state owned electric power generation plants abstract china s 11th five year guideline identified energy conservation as one of the country s fundamental policies and established a mandatory target 20 reduction in national average energy intensity by 2010 despite the various policies laws and administrative reforms to support energy conservation china fell behind schedule for meeting its conservation targets in 2006 and 2007 using a combination of available literature and an interview based case study this paper examines the implementation of energy conservation and investigates impediments to achieving china s conservation goal in the electric power generation sector three key impediments are detailed 1 municipal governments incentives to overlook conservation related central directives primarily because of budget pressures linked to financial decentralization 2 procedural obstacles in the form of time required to obtain project approvals for high efficiency power generation units and 3 financial obstacles making it difficult for power generation enterprises to raise capital for energy conservation projects an interview based case study of a state owned coal fired electric power generation company demonstrates the influence of the aforementioned obstacles while procedural obstacles are notable they can be managed however electricity pricing reforms and or stronger subsidy programs will be needed to address the financial obstacles facing chinese power generation companies

motor fuel prices in turkey the world s most expensive motor fuel gasoline diesel and lpg is sold most likely in the republic of turkey this paper investigates the key issues related to the motor fuel prices in turkey first of all the paper analyses the main reason behind high prices namely motor fuel taxes in turkey then it estimates the elasticity of motor fuel demand in turkey using an econometric analysis the findings indicate that motor fuel demand in turkey is quite inelastic and therefore not responsive to price increases caused by an increase in either pre tax prices or taxes therefore fuel market in turkey is open to opportunistic behaviour by firms through excessive profits and the government through excessive taxes besides the paper focuses on the impact of high motor fuel prices on road transport associated activities including the pattern of passenger transportation motorization rate fuel use total kilometers travelled and co2 emissions from road transportation the impact of motor fuel prices on income distribution in turkey and turkish public opinion about high motor fuel prices are also among the subjects investigated in the course of the study

intergenerational occupational mobility in great britain and the united states since 1850 abstract the us tolerates more inequality than europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than europe s though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century we extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10 000 nationally representative british and us fathers and sons the us was more mobile than britain through 1900 so in the experience of those who created the us welfare state in the 1930s the us had indeed been exceptional the us mobility lead over britain was erased by the 1950s as us mobility fell from its nineteenth century levels jel j62 n31 n32 n33 n34

intergenerational aspects of ecotax reforms an application to germany in a model of overlapping generations and majority voting we analyze an ecotax reform consisting of the tax rate and the budgetary rule revenue can be recycled through a lump sum transfer or a reduction in pension contributions our theoretical results as well as the calibration of our model to the german economy show that the median voter s preferred tax rate may exceed the efficient rate this holds whenever income of the decisive voter is sufficiently high compared to the average income as rich individuals benefit more from a reduction in pension contributions than they are harmed by an increase in ecotaxes the calibration confirms that the median voter prefers the earmarking of tax revenue for reductions in pension contributions to the alternative lump sum transfer this is quite an accurate prediction of the situation in germany aging of society as expected for germany lowers the ecotax in the political equilibrium below its optimal level

social and political responses to ecological tax reform in europe an introduction to the special issue this paper introduces the special issue on the policies for ecological tax reform assessment of social responses petras project about responses to ecological tax reform etr in europe although etr is widely accepted to be a policy with desirable effects its implementation has been limited by problems of political acceptability the project aimed to address the question of how to make such a policy more acceptable it is the first study to examine in depth the thinking of members of the general public about the etr policies and is also the first international comparative study of the thinking of ordinary business people about etr policies the petras project methodology was based around the use of interviews and focus groups to inform the assessment of social responses to etr policies and the development of improved designs for them a number of issues emerged relating to awareness trust understanding of the purpose visibility incentives regressivity levels of taxation terminology communication about etr and the use of alternative instruments together with these similarities a pattern of differences between the countries can also be seen the final section of this paper introduces the national studies described in the following papers

the relevance of attitudinal factors for the acceptance of energy policy measures a micro econometric analysis abstract this paper empirically examines the individual support of the german energy transition in total and especially of six single energy policy measures which are components of the energy transition our micro econometric analysis with binary and ordered probit models on the basis of data from a broad survey of citizens reveals the important role of several attitudinal factors with respect to our indicators for perceived personal costs of the energy transition the estimation results point to a weak evidence for economic self interest due to some negative correlations between expected energy price increases due to the energy transition and the support of single energy policy measures interestingly however the concern that the energy transition alone causes strong energy price increases is not shared by the majority of the respondents the estimation results also suggest that the support of several energy policy measures is strongly correlated with environmental values however the most important attitudinal factor is obviously political identification the econometric analysis suggests that an overall left green policy identification is positively correlated with the support of the energy transition in total and an identification with ecological policy is positively correlated with the acceptance of several single energy policy measures the econometric analysis especially supports the more sophisticated categorization of political orientation since for example a liberal conservative policy orientation is not significantly correlated with the support of the energy transition in total

a conjoint analysis of corporate preferences for the sectoral crediting mechanism a case study of shanxi province in china it is crucial to understand corporate preferences in designing and planning new market based instruments using the method of conjoint analysis this paper evaluates corporate preferences for policy alternatives of the sectoral crediting mechanism aiming at supporting its discussions and development data were collected from 94 companies in all 11 prefecture level cities of shanxi province china the results confirm that companies are most concerned about three policy attributes domestic policy instruments the relationship with the clean developing mechanism and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities from the viewpoint of the chinese businesses surveyed the ideal policy alternative has a domestic policy instrument in which installations with voluntary targets receive tradable units while co existing with the clean developing mechanism and providing opportunities to get financial and technical assistance from developed countries meanwhile the coverage of the sectoral crediting mechanism could be expanded to small companies that are the most inefficient and thus have the lowest abatement costs in some sectors the results of this study are important in light of ongoing discussions and developments of the sectoral crediting mechanism in china

does ecological economics have a future contradiction and reinvention in the age of climate change abstract this paper addresses the role of neoclassical methodologies in ecological economics and the contradictions these methodologies pose to the field s critical founding principles we first consider robert costanza s treatment of nicholas stern s global deal and then survey climate change related articles published in this journal over the past five years this survey reveals how mainstream neoclassical methodologies dominate discourse and do so by marginalizing more critical political economy analyses this situation imperils the field s founding vision of a no growth steady state it also fails to address the related growth dynamics of capitalism without such a critical treatment the field s formal embrace of methodological pluralism actually entails an ideological empiricism that renders ecological economics theoretically incoherent this situation undermines the field s historical promise as an alternative economic paradigm ecological economics now faces a problematic future its survival in a form faithful to its founding vision will require an explicit choice to address its internal contradictions and reinvent itself in ways relevant to our contemporary context without such a choice ecological economics will likely succumb to an implicit acceptance of the hegemony of mainstream economic methodologies and their pro growth imperatives

a theory of market transition from redistribution to markets in state socialism state socialist redistributive economies are characterized by the allocation and distribution of goods through central planning this paper develops a theory of market transition which argues that in reforming socialist economies the transition from redistributive to market coordination shifts sources of power and privilege to favor direct producers relative to redistributors the shit improves incentives for direct producers stimulates the growth of private markets and provides to entrepreneurs an alternative path for socioeconomic mobility a set of hypotheses test the market transition theory with householdand village level data

time inconsistency in environmental policy tax earmarking as a commitment solution tax earmarking imposes a constraint on government policymaking and may be desirable if i t solves a time inconsistency problem in tax policy in a two period economy in which the policy decisions regarding taxes public goods provision and pollution abatement are taken by a majority elected individual we show how the time inc onsistency problem in environmental policy arises we demonstrate that the commitment equilibrium under no earmarking rules cannot be as fully implemented as a no commitment equilibrium under earmarking rules however th e earmarking rules do act as a partial commitment mechanism

intergenerational occupational mobility in great britain and the united states since 1850 comment using historical census and survey data long and ferrie forthcoming found a significant decline in social mobility in the united states from 1880 to 1973 we present two critiques of the long ferrie study first the data quality of the long ferrie study is more limiting than the authors acknowledge second and more critically they applied a method ill suited for measuring social mobility of farmers in a comparative study between 1880 and 1973 a period in which the proportion of farmers dramatically declined in the u s we show that long and ferrie s main conclusion is all driven by this misleading result for farmers

alleviating the constant stochastic variance assumption in decision research theory measurement and experimental test analysts often rely on methods that presume constant stochastic variance even though its degree can differ markedly across experimental and field settings this reliance can lead to misestimation of effect sizes or unjustified theoretical or behavioral inferences classic utility based discrete choice theory makes sharp testable predictions about how observed choice patterns should change when stochastic variance differs across items brands or conditions we derive and examine the implications of assuming constant stochastic variance for choices made under different conditions or at different times in particular whether substantive effects can arise purely as artifacts these implications are tested via an experiment designed to isolate the effects of stochastic variation in choice behavior results strongly suggest that the stochastic component should be carefully modeled to differ across both available brands and temporal conditions and that its variance may be relatively greater for choices made for the future the experimental design controls for several alternative mechanisms e g flexibility seeking and a series of related models suggest that several econometrically detectable explanations like correlated error state dependence and variety seeking add no explanatory power a series of simulations argues for appropriate flexibility in discrete choice specification when attempting to detect temporal stochastic inflation effects

history and social responses to environmental tax reform in the united kingdom abstract this paper gives a short history of fuel taxation and the climate change levy in the uk the research described was based around the use of interviews and focus groups to inform the assessment of social responses to etr policies and the development of improved designs for them interviews were conducted with selected policy makers and companies focus groups were conducted with quota samples of the general public the research shows that the problem that etr faces in terms of public acceptance is not so much outright hostility to environmental taxation as conceptual problems with the design similar conceptual problems were also found in the interviews with business people these can be summarised as lack of trust about use of the revenues difficulty in understanding the purpose of a tax shift and a desire for incentives for good behaviour as well as perceived penalties for bad behaviour

the behavioural economics of climate change this paper attempts to bring some central insights from behavioural economics into the economics of climate change in particular it discusses i implications of prospect theory the equity premium puzzle and time inconsistent preferences in the choice of discount rate used in climate change cost assessments and ii the implications of various kinds of social preferences for the outcome of climate negotiations several reasons are presented for why it appears advisable to choose a substantially lower social discount rate than the average return on investments it also seems likely that taking social preferences into account increases the possibilities of obtaining international agreements compared to the standard model however there are also effects going in the opposite direction and the importance of sanctions is emphasized

the german energy transition as a regime shift abstract in this paper i use the resilience framework to interpret the project of transforming the german energy system into a renewable energy sources res based system the so called energiewende as a regime shift this regime shift comprises several transformations which are currently altering the technological political and economic system structure to build my argument i first sketch how technological political and economic developments reduced the resilience of the conventional fossil nuclear energy regime and created a new res regime second i depict recent changes in german public discourse and energy policy as the shift to the res regime third i highlight the challenges involved with increasing the resilience of the res regime in particular sufficient resilience of the electricity transmission grid appears to be crucial for facilitating the transformation of the whole energy system

the continuing search for a popular tax for the next few years perhaps for a longer time federal tax policy will be inseparably intertwined with deficit reduction policy as a result tax decisions will be more closely related to spending decisions and attention will shift to new kinds of taxes for decades federal tax policy debates have been quite separate from debates over what these taxes are supposed to finance federal tax controversy has focused heavily on the major general revenue sources the individual and corporate income taxes economists have analyzed the effects of these levies on economic behavior and on the distribution of income and this analysis has played a considerable role in policy formulation the substantial reduction in marginal tax rates as well as base broadening indexing and changes in the treatment of depreciation and consumer interest were greatly influenced by the views of economists the frequency of recent changes in the income tax rules capped by the surprisingly comprehensive tax reform legislation of 1986 have left both politicians and tax reformers with little appetite for further tinkering with the income taxes moreover the continuing large deficits in the federal budget only partially offset by growing surpluses in the social security trust fund have forced policymakers to focus on a new aspect of an old problem how to get citizens to want less from their federal government or be willing to pay more for it

pollution tax heuristics an empirical study of willingness to pay higher gasoline taxes economists widely agree that in concept pollution taxes are the most cost effective means of reducing pollution with the advent of monitoring and enforcement technologies the case for pollution taxation is generally getting stronger on the merits despite widespread agreement among economists however pollution taxes remain unpopular especially in north america some oppose pollution taxes because of a suspicion that government would misspend the tax proceeds while others oppose pollution taxes because they would impose economic hardships upon certain individuals groups or industries and there is no pollution tax more pathologically hated as the gasoline tax this is unfortunate from an economic perspective as a gasoline tax is easy to implement and is a reasonable pigouvian tax scaling proportionately with the harms of consumption surprisingly there is a dearth of theory explaining this cleave between economists and virtually everybody else drawing on behavioralist literatures this paper introduces several theories as to why people and governments so vehemently oppose pollution taxes using the example of gasoline taxes we provide some empirical evidence for these theories we also show that revenue recycling the use of tax proceeds to reduce other taxes is an effective means of reducing opposition to gasoline taxes

the rise and fall of french ecological tax reform social acceptability versus political feasibility in the energy tax implementation process the french government has a 10 year history of negotiations with industry resulting in voluntary agreements on energy consumption when implemented these voluntary agreements produced very few results in terms of global reduction of greenhouse emissions politiques et management public 11 4 1993 47 hence the idea of an energy tax became increasingly attractive for many french decision makers ecological environmental tax reform etr should have been one of the major political decisions and successes of the past leftwing coalition government instead it became one of its major failures as the constitutional court decided to terminate the energy tax project in december 2000 through insights gleaned from focus groups and interviews with business people and decision makers an attempt is made to understand the failure of the energy tax project firstly decision makers lacked crucial information about public and business opinions and secondly there were conflicts between the relevant administrations the fuel revolts of 2000 ended any hope of resolving the conflicts and implementing etr which was ultimately found unconstitutional this paper examines the political controversies raised by the etr project and the reasons for its eventual collapse in the hope of contributing new understanding to the body of knowledge on the political difficulties of introducing environmental policy instruments

using a choice experiment to account for preference heterogeneity in wetland attributes the case of cheimaditida wetland in greece abstract this paper aims to assist policy makers in formulating efficient and sustainable wetland management policies in accordance with the ramsar convention and the european union water framework directive 2000 60 ec by providing results of a valuation study on the cheimaditida wetland in greece a choice experiment is employed to estimate the values of changes in several ecological social and economic functions that cheimaditida wetland provides to the greek public in addition to the conditional logit model a random parameter logit model a random parameter logit model with interactions and a latent class model are estimated to account for heterogeneity in the preferences of the public for the various functions of the wetland the results reveal that there is considerable preference heterogeneity across the public and on average they derive positive and significant values from sustainable management of this wetland the estimated economic benefits of sustainable wetland management are weighed against the costs of alternative wetland management scenarios results of this cost benefit analysis can aid in the design of socially optimal policies for sustainable management of the cheimaditida wetland with possible implications for other similar wetlands in greece and the rest of europe

can carbon taxes be progressive abstract most studies have assessed the distributional impact of carbon taxes through their effects on commodity prices alone while ignoring their impact on individual welfare brought about by changes in factor prices yet the remunerations of capital and labor are not affected by these taxes similarly and their shares in earned incomes are not uniform across households this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the incidence of carbon taxes on inequality by considering simultaneously the commodity and the income channels we propose a decomposition of the change in individual welfare metrics then we develop a general equilibrium model to assess the impact of carbon taxes on factor and commodity prices and subsequently their distributional impact on households using the lorenz and concentration curves and the gini index our results suggest that changes in factor prices and changes in commodity prices especially those of energy commodities have opposing effects on inequality carbon taxes tend to reduce inequality through the changes in factor prices and tend to increase inequality through the changes in commodity prices hence we find a non monotonic u shaped relationship between carbon taxes and inequality our results suggest that the traditional approach of assessing the impact of carbon taxes on inequality through changes in commodity prices alone may be misleading the findings cast light on the desirability of using both channels in the assessment of carbon taxes on inequality

the equity efficiency trade off in environmental policy evidence from stated preferences the design of environmental policy raises several equity issues in particular the distribution of benefits and costs at the same time it has often been argued that there is a trade off in environmental policy between equity and efficiency which brings these issues firmly to the attention of environmental economics in this paper we use a simple choice experiment to elicit individual preferences over equity efficiency trade offs in the context of two environmental problems local air pollution and global climate change we find that equity matters to people as much as efficiency does in the design and delivery of environmental policy

china s experiment on the differential electricity pricing policy and the struggle for energy conservation abstract differential electricity pricing was promulgated by china s central government to guide the development of high energy consuming industries which are significant for energy conservation this paper examines the twists and turns of the policy implementation at the provincial level and seeks to elucidate the difficulties in its implementation local governments concerned that following the central directives would hurt local interests have tried to deviate from the central orders while the central revises the policy from time to time to ensure local compliance three difficulties are analyzed 1 the current relations between the central and local energy regulatory institutions make these local institutions difficult to perform their duties and affect incentives for local governments to respond to central directives 2 financial reform puts a great burden on local governments to raise revenues to cover expenditures making local governments focus mainly on economic development rather than serving merely as political agents of the central government 3 the aggressive attitude of local governments in pursuing gdp growth is not necessarily driven by the central government but by pressure from competition among localities and the need to win local support solving these difficulties is important for making national energy conservation polices effective and efficient

how wrong can you be implications of incorrect utility function specification for welfare measurement in choice experiments despite the vital role of the utility function in welfare measurement the implications of working with incorrect utility specifications have been largely neglected in the choice experiments literature this paper addresses the importance of specification with a special emphasis on the effects of mistaken assumptions about the marginal utility of income monte carlo experiments were conducted using different functional forms of utility to generate simulated choices multi nomial logit and mixed logit models were then estimated on these choices under correct and incorrect assumptions about the true underlying utility function estimated willingness to pay measures from these choice modeling results are then compared with the equivalent measures directly calculated from the true utility specifications results show that for the parameter values and functional forms considered a continuous quadratic or a discrete linear attribute specification is a good option regardless of the true effects the attribute has on utility we also find that mistaken assumptions about preferences over costs magnify attribute mis specification effects

design and analysis of simulated consumer choice or allocation experiments an approach based on aggregate data the authors integrate concepts in conjoint analysis and discrete choice theory in econometrics to develop a new approach to the design and analysis of controlled consumer choice or resource allocat

preferences for energy efficiency vs renewables how much does a ton of co2 emissions cost concerns about climate change are growing and so is the demand for information about the costs and benefits of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions this paper seeks to estimate the benefits of climate change mitigation as measured by the public s willingness to pay for such policies we investigate the preferences of italian and czech households towards climate change mitigation policy options directly related to residential energy use we use discrete choice experiments which are administered in a standardized fashion to representative samples in the two countries through computer assisted web interviews our preferred estimates of the willingness to pay per ton of co2 emissions avoided is 133 for the italians and 94 euro for the czech respondents at 2014 purchasing power parity we find evidence of considerable heterogeneity in wtp driven by income the two samples differ in their within sample income elasticities of wtp but comparison across the two countries suggests an income elasticity of wtp of one or even greater than one for certain mixed logit specifications

intergenerational class mobility in postwar japan this article uses mobility data from japan to 1 test the feather man jones hauser hypothesis that industrial societies share similar rats of intergenerational mobility and to 2 shed light on the debate about japanese exceptionalism japanese relative mibility rates show no systematically greater deviation from the postulated common pattern than do those of nine european nations regarding absolute mobility rates however an argument can be made for the distinctiveness of mobility patterns and processes of class formation and reproduction in japan

economic transformation and income inequality in urban china evidence from panel data using panel data of 4 730 urban residents drawn from 20 cities in china this article examines changes in income determinants between the prereform and reform eras to guide this empirical study a conceptual model is developed that emphasizes the coevolution of politics and markets to synthesize theoretical ideas in the recent debate on the transformation of state socialist societies the findings show significant changes in returns to education and in the rise of private hybrid firms in the reform era there is also strong evidence of institutional persistence in returns to positional power and in the organizational hierarchy these findings reveal multifaceted processes of transformation that call for more sophisticated theoretical models and in depth institutional analyses

tightening up declining class mobility during russia s market transition this study analyzes intergenerational occupational mobility in late soviet and post soviet russia using data from six surveys belying claims that class differences did not matter in the soviet union the authors find that social origin did affect occupational opportunity during russia s soviet period but the transition from state socialism to a market economy tightened the link between origins and destinations men and women were equally constrained by their social origin even though they faced significantly different opportunity structures in both periods as the economic transformation took hold fewer russians experienced upward mobility and more were downwardly mobile political and economic transition not the demographic replacement of retiring cohorts by younger ones strengthened the association between origins and destinations career mobility during the 1990s took the form of a regression toward origins as workers who had the most upward mobility during the soviet era lost the most in the tr

market transition industrialization and social mobility trends in postrevolution china1 this study examines trends in intergenerational class mobility in china by analyzing six comparable nationally representative surveys between 1996 and 2012 defying a simplistic unidirectional ac

market transition and the persistence of power the changing stratification system in urban china research on transitional socialist societies has explored trends in income inequality and issues concerning who gains and who loses during market reforms we find that income inequality in a major chinese city declined only slightly during the first decade of reform policies it then increased dramatically in the subsequent five years strategic position in the state bureaucracy continues to be an important determinant of income although connections to the market system are becoming alternate sources of advantage we interpret these findings in light of the historical and institutional context of urban china

paying for mitigation a multiple country study a contingent valuation study conducted in china sweden and the united states was used to investigate citizens willingness to pay wtp for reducing co2 emissions we find that a majority of the respondents in all three countries believe that the mean global temperature has increased over the last 100 years and that humans are responsible for the increase the share of americans that believes these statements is smaller and a relatively larger share of americans also believes that nothing can be done to stop climate change sweden has the highest wtp while china has the lowest jel q51 q54

public acceptability of personal carbon trading and carbon tax abstract climate change is one of the greatest challenges confronting the international community requiring action to achieve deep cuts in carbon emissions the implementation of potentially uncomfortable but necessary policy measures is though critically dependent upon public acceptability this paper reports a novel application of stated preference techniques to explore the influence of key design attributes on the acceptability of a personal carbon trading scheme in isolation and when compared to a carbon tax illustrative forecasts from the models developed indicate the importance of design attributes especially the basis of the initial permit allocation for personal carbon trading and the use to which revenues are put for carbon tax results indicate that the best scheme designs could be acceptable to a majority of respondents

valuing wetland attributes an application of choice experiments abstract the interest for wetlands is increasing not only because of the possibility of a cost efficient uptake of nutrients but also because wetlands can be designed to provide other services what values that are supplied depend largely on the design there are numerous different design options and different actors may promote different alternatives whether we want to design a wetland for nutrient retention alone or one that also serves other interests policy makers need information about the value of different options conducting a choice experiment we are able to identify attributes that increase and decrease citizens perceived value of wetlands using a random parameter model we find that biodiversity and walking facilities are the two greatest contributors to welfare while a fenced waterline and introduction of crayfish decrease welfare

public preferences for carbon tax attributes the impacts of climate change are already visible throughout the world recognizing the threats posed by climate change the durban platform the 17th session of the conference of parties cop 17 underscores that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation and ambitious action by all countries a crucial starting point for the design of effective and publicly acceptable policies is to explore public preferences for climate policy instruments using a choice experiment this study investigates public preferences for carbon tax attributes in a developing country context the results account for heterogeneity in preferences and show that turkish people prefer a carbon tax with a progressive cost distribution rather than one with a regressive cost distribution the private cost has a negative effect on the probability of choosing the tax earmarking carbon tax revenues increases the public acceptability of the tax moreover there is a preference for a carbon tax that promotes public awareness of climate change

a critical review of china s rapidly developing renewable energy and energy efficiency policies renewable energy and energy efficiency reee policies have far reaching implications for energy security climate change economic competitiveness pollution and human livelihood for these reasons reee has become a national priority for the chinese government particularly since 2005 this paper aims to critically review china s reee policies in six sectors electricity industry transportation buildings and local government in addition to examining the progress china has made in the development and implementation of reee policies this review also identifies limitations and room for improvement finally five policy recommendations are presented

does improved environmental quality prevent a growing economy abstract a major concern for sustainable development is how countries can lower pollution while avoiding adverse output and energy shocks since economic activities change with time we develop a dynamic applied equilibrium model to study the dynamics of co2 emissions and evaluate how the pursuit of environmental policy objectives can influence output and productivity in a surrogate country in transition under an optimal environmental policy which ensures mitigation between 38 and 50 we show that productivity projected towards the year 2075 increases slightly from between 3 8 and 6 2 to between 5 7 and 7 6 respectively the required carbon tax begins from 5 29 ton in 2020 and grows on average by 3 5 reaching up to 35 83 per ton carbon towards the year 2075 even though these tax rates ensure huge benefits for mitigation they represent marginal productivity growth and substantial output and consumption costs in other words improved environmental quality presents opportunities for multifactor productivity mfp but this productivity improvement is too marginal to offset the compliance costs of the carbon tax thereby causing output to decline hence to ensure maximum economic dividend from carbon pricing especially in transitional economies measures are required to improve the innovation benefits of carbon taxes towards levels that offset the compliance costs of environmental regulations otherwise caution should be taken by developing countries in their environmental policy designs especially when boosting consumption and economic growth is a major priority

the demand for earmarking results from a focus group study abstract environmental taxes might be efficient but plans to impose new taxes are often met with fierce public resistance in order to design environmental taxes that are both efficient and acceptable to the public so that they can be politically feasible it is important to understand public attitudes towards environmental taxes we conduct a focus group study in norway to extend the current knowledge on this issue we find less general resistance to taxation as a policy instrument and seemingly more trust in government than what has been reported in similar studies from other countries the participants are however very skeptical and do not see the point of using the revenues from an environmental tax to reduce other taxes such as the payroll tax instead they express a very strong preference for earmarking the revenues for environmental purposes they also call for more information about environmental taxes in particular on how the revenues are spent providing more information including what the revenues are spent on irrespective of whether they are earmarked or not would seem to provide a relatively cheap and possibly effective way to increase the public acceptability of new or increased environmental taxes

do you not like pigou or do you not understand him tax aversion and revenue recycling in the lab tax aversion reduces the likelihood that price rationing can be a politically viable tool for environmental protection we examine the case of the classic pigouvian tax to control a negative externality and consider how recycling the revenues labeling of the tax and information about its purpose affects the support for taxation we test the support for taxation within a single price market experiment in which purchases by some buyers impose external costs on others observing behavior consistent with tax aversion we also find that recycling the revenues to more narrowly targeted groups seems to increase support for taxation in the absence of narrow revenue recycling labeling a pigouvian instrument as a tax may significantly lower the likelihood of voter support

recreation demand models with taste differences over people we estimate random parameter logit models of anglers choice of fishing site the models generalize logit by allowing coefficients to vary randomly over anglers rather than being fixed the models do not exhibit the restrictive independence from irrelevant alternatives property of logit and can represent any substitution pattern estimation explicitly accounts for the fact that the variation in coefficients over anglers induces correlation in unobserved utility over trips by the same angler willingness to pay for improved fish stock and the value to anglers of specific sites are calculated from the models and compared with the estimates obtained from a standard logit model

structural change and post socialist stratification labor market transitions in contemporary russia in russia market transition has led to sweeping structural changes a long recession growth of the private sector expansion of certain branches of the economy and contraction of others a decrease in average firm size and regional differentiation in economic performance these structural changes had important consequences for stratification through their effects on individual labor market outcomes analyses of nine types of individual labor market transitions in russia using 1991 1997 work history data show that structural location has strong effects human capital and membership in the communist party of the soviet union also influence labor market prospects but not in ways consistent with general theories about how market transition affects stratification processes structural change plays a key role in determining the impact of market reforms on stratification but market transition produces variable patterns of structural change in different countries and in different regions within a single country the structural perspective demonstrates why market transition has variable consequences for stratification different prior conditions and reform policies produce different patterns of structural change

how much have electricity shortages hampered china s gdp growth abstract based on an econometric analysis of the annual growth data for china s gdp and electricity generation from 1953 to 2010 we find that electricity generation growth granger causes gdp growth but not vice versa we also find that the gdp elasticity of electricity generation is about 0 6 implying that a 1 increase in china s electricity generation growth would increase gdp growth by 0 6 while deng s reform raised china s gdp growth rate by about 5 per year it did not alter the gdp elasticity of electricity generation hence an obvious strategy to promote china s economic growth would be accelerating electricity generation expansion rapidly adding thermal generation units however could have large scale adverse environmental impacts we therefore support china s 2011 five year plan which calls for expanding investments in renewable energy conservation and energy efficiency as well as improving china s integrated electricity planning and cost based pricing decisions

political uncertainty and the earmarking of environmental taxes abstract far from being used to secure a double dividend by reducing distorting taxes revenues from environmental taxes seem quite often to be earmarked to particular spending programs in the us for example a range of such taxes feed into environmental trust funds such earmarking runs counter to standard notions of good practice in taxing and spending this paper develops and explores an explanation of such apparent inefficiencies in terms of political uncertainty roughly a green incumbent may chose to earmark revenues if the efficiency loss from doing so is outweighed by the value of constraining subsequent and potentially non green policy makers from wasting the funds raised it emerges for example that those most likely to earmark are green politicians who are politically weak and that earmarking then enables such a policy maker to set the corrective tax higher than they otherwise would but nevertheless lower than the pigovian tax

citizens preferences on nuclear and renewable energy sources evidence from turkey abstract based on data from a face to face survey of 2422 residents from urban turkey this paper presents an analysis of citizens preferences in turkey on nuclear and renewable energy sources findings indicate that opposition to nuclear power was strong and only a small number of respondents endorsed it by listing it in their top two choices conversely almost two thirds of the sample endorsed investment in renewable energy sources such as wind and solar and only a small minority was opposed to it econometric analyses revealed that knowledge of the climate change problem was a common factor that explained endorsement of both nuclear and renewables yet high levels of concern for the environment and a negative perception regarding its future differentiated the endorsers of renewables from those of nuclear energy endorsers of nuclear energy were found to be males who were knowledgeable about climate change and engaged in environmental issues but less concerned about the environment and optimistic about its future nuclear opponents on the other hand were found to be concerned about the environment pessimistic about its future and not fully relying on technology