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

how to improve the performance of carbon tax in china abstract the chinese government committed to controlling carbon dioxide co 2 emissions and promoting development of non fossil fuels thus it becomes a top priority for the government to develop effective climate policies against such background this paper develops a new multi country computable general equilibrium cge model with detailed energy disaggregation this study evaluates the impact of single policy instrument carbon tax and combined policy mixes in order to investigate driving factors affecting the policy performance the main findings are as follows firstly the driving factors can be classified into two types the first type of factors affects cost effectiveness significantly while the second type generates considerable effect on emission performance secondly cross border externalities function as important barriers to the co 2 emission reduction since they imply extra competitiveness loss and result in considerable carbon leakage finally this paper considers two integrated policy mixes wherein carbon tax revenue is recycled to reduce capital tax or support clean energy subsidy these policy mixes can improve both cost effectiveness and emission performance and thus perform better than carbon tax alone in this way carbon tax revenue can be used to improve the performance looking ahead complicated policy mixes are preferred to improve the performance of china s carbon tax

determinants of energy productivity in 39 countries an empirical investigation abstract this paper uses three types of analysis to investigate the drivers of energy productivity changes occurring in 39 countries during 1995 2009 we find that increases in sectoral energy productivity were the primary driver behind economy wide energy productivity improvements structural economic shifts away from industry and towards service oriented sectors played a lesser role in aggregate energy productivity improvements nations with similar demographic and economic characteristics showed similar levels of energy productivity and rates of improvement most notably former communist countries and nations undergoing economic liberalization exhibited the highest rate of improvement although they are still less energy productive than developed nations moreover the econometric analysis reinforces the long standing hypothesis that higher levels of income per capita and higher energy prices are associated with greater energy productivity while a greater share of output from industry is associated with lower energy productivity levels in particular higher energy prices and income levels are associated with improvements in sectoral energy productivity

the choice between market failures and corruption because government intervention transfers resources from one party to another it creates room for corruption as corruption often undermines the purpose of the intervention governments will try to prevent it they may create rents for bureaucrats induce a misallocation of resources and increase the size of the bureaucracy since preventing all corruption is excessively costly second best intervention may involve a certain fraction of bureaucrats accepting bribes when corruption is harder to prevent there may be both more bureaucrats and higher public sector wages also the optimal degree of government intervention may be nonmonotonic in the level of income

effects of local and civil environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in china a spatial durbin econometric analysis this paper employs metafrontier malmquist luenberger index and a spatial durbin model to investigate the influence of both local and civil environmental regulation and its spatial spillover effect on green total factor productivity in 273 cities of china in 2003 2013 according to city political attribute and regional differences this article divides the sample city into six categories the results show that effect of local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity is significantly positive in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone but negative effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone moreover the race to the top results in significantly positive spatial spillover effects from local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone while the race to the bottom causes significantly negative spatial spillover effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone as for civil environmental regulation it has positive direct and indirect effects in promoting green total factor productivity we further find that environmental regulation inhibits the original technological innovation of enterprises which suggests that government should reduce market intervention improve enterprise flexibility of market change and promote enterprises to carry out the original technological innovation thus the government and citizen should make targeted pollution reduction policies for the green total factor productivity increase

measuring the energy security implications of fossil fuel resource concentration abstract economic assessments of the welfare effects of energy insecurity are typically uncertain and fail to provide clear guidance to policy makers as a result governments have had little analytical support to complement expert judgment in the assessment of energy security this is likely to be inadequate when considering multiple policy goals and in particular the intersections between energy security and climate change mitigation policies this paper presents an alternative approach which focuses on gauging the causes of energy insecurity as a way to assist policy making the paper focuses on the energy security implications of fossil fuel resource concentration and distinguishes between the price and physical availability components of energy insecurity it defines two separate indexes the energy security price index espi based on the measure of market concentration in competitive fossil fuel markets and the energy security physical availability index espai based on the measure of supply flexibility in regulated markets the paper illustrates the application of espi and espai with two case studies france and the united kingdom looking at the evolution of both indexes to 2030

a real options valuation of chinese wind energy technologies for power generation do benefits from the feed in tariffs outweigh costs abstract in order to assess the viability of wind energy projects in china this paper takes a real options approach by accounting for flexibility over deployment of the technology in response to a stochastic non renewable energy cost the difference between the latter and the r d enhanced cost of renewable energy operation may be thought of as a benefit from using wind on the other hand the chinese government provides feed in tariffs to encourage further adoption of wind which should be included as a cost this work thus shows that there is substantial options value to china s wind energy program which is bolstered if the cost of carbon dioxide emissions is internalized moreover by varying the rate of feed in tariffs the model may be used to show plausible ranges for the feed in tariffs which could be a useful policy insight furthermore the study hypothesizes that with the likelihood of renewable energy to replace non renewable energy wind power in china can potentially reduce co2 emissions by approximately 6 4 by 2020 comparing to the 2005 level and highlights the significant role of wind power in china s emission targets and energy security this is a relevant paper especially given the importance of a sustainable energy transition for china more generally using the real options approach from a policy perspective could provide insights about the viability of renewable energy programs and robustness of feed in tariffs rates

economic growth and interfactor interfuel substitution in korea this paper investigates the impact of increases in oil consumption and changes in wage rates on the interfactor interfuel substitution in korea a two stage translog cost function is estimated to incorporate the feedback effect between the interfactor and interfuel substitution empirical results show that the substitutability complementarity relationships among factors and fuels exhibit substantially different patterns before and after 1989

determinants of energy demand in the french service sector a decomposition analysis abstract this paper analyzes the changes in the energy consumption of the service sector in france over the period 1995 2006 using the logarithmic mean divisia index i lmdi i decomposition method the analysis is carried out at various disaggregation levels to highlight the specifics of each sub sector and end use according to their respective determinants the results show that in this period the economic growth of the service sector was the main factor that led to the increase in total energy consumption structure productivity substitution and intensity effects restricted this growth but with limited effect by analyzing each end use this paper enables a more precise understanding of the impact of these factors the activity effect was the main determinant of the increase in energy consumption for all end uses except for air conditioning for which the equipment rate effect was the main factor structural changes in the service sector primarily impacted energy consumption for space heating and cooking improvements in productivity limited the growth of energy consumption for all end uses except for cooking finally energy efficiency improvements mainly affected space heating energy use

renewable energy policy evaluation using real option model the case of taiwan abstract this study presents a policy benefit evaluation model that integrates cost efficiency curve information on renewable power generation technologies into real options analysis roa methods the proposed model evaluates quantitatively the policy value provided by developing renewable energy re in the face of uncertain fossil fuel prices and re policy related factors the economic intuition underlying the policy making process is elucidated while empirical analysis illustrates the option value embedded in the current development policy in taiwan for wind power in addition to revealing the benefits that re development provides when considering real options analytical results indicate that roa is a highly effective means of quantifying how policy planning uncertainty including managerial flexibility influences re development in addition to assessing the policy value of current re development policy this study also compares policy values in terms of internalized external costs and varying feed in tariff fit simulation results demonstrate that the re development policy with internalized co2 emission costs is appropriate policy planning from sustainability point of view furthermore relationship between varying fit and policy values can be shown quantitatively and appropriate fit level could be determined accordingly

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

development of the electricity environmental policy cge model gtap e powers a case of the carbon tax in south africa abstract a new carbon price mechanism with full emission coverage is developed within the framework of a global computable general equilibrium model gtap e powers to enhance the capacity and accuracy for climate change and energy policy assessment the model developed is then used to examine the potential impacts of the carbon tax in south africa results show that incorporation of non co2 emissions in the model significantly alters the results of which the economy of south africa experiences higher costs compared to the case that only has co2 emissions when more sectors are included in the policy it also puts higher costs on the economy as higher levels of emissions are subject to the carbon tax results also show that south africa only experiences small tradeoffs from introducing the carbon tax in all scenarios that is with a tax rate of 9 15 the country is able to reduce its emission levels by 12 25 15 6 at the costs of real gdp reduction by 1 17 1 59 fossil based industrial sectors are particularly worst off while clean and renewable energy sectors strongly expand their production the results indicate that south africa is likely to move to a low carbon and sustainable economy with such a policy

a theory of collective reputations with applications to the persistence of corruption and to firm quality the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by his past behaviour and because his track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper thus studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality 1 collective reputations collective reputations play an important role in economics and the social sciences countries ethnic racial or religious groups are known to be hard working honest corrupt hospitable or belligerent some firms enjoy substantial rents from their reputations for producing high quality products some departments are reported to treat their faculty or students fairly the paper is a first attempt at modelling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations a member s current incentives are affected by her past behaviour and because her track record is observed only with noise by the group s past behaviour as well the paper studies the joint dynamics of individual and collective reputations in a model in which current generations are progressively replaced by new ones and derives the existence of stereotypes from history dependence rather than from a multiplicity of equilibria or from the existence of a common trait as is usually done in the literature see section 2 for a detailed comparison with the literature it shows that new members of an organization may suffer from an original sin of their elders long after the latter are gone and it derives necessary and sufficient conditions under which group reputations can be rebuilt last the paper applies the theory to analyse when a large firm can maintain a reputation for quality let us spell out the building blocks of our theory in more detail a a group s reputation is only as good as that of its members each member is characterized by individual traits such as talent diligence or honesty past individual behaviour conveys information about these traits and generates individual reputations

estimates of energy subsidies in china and impact of energy subsidy reform abstract for a transitional economy such as china some energy subsidies are reasonable and sometimes even necessary for achieving social goals however with rising energy prices and environmental concerns we see conflicts emerging between energy subsidies energy demand supply fundamentals and climate change considerations energy subsidies have important implications for sustainable development through their effects on energy use efficiency and the choice of fuel source this paper applies the price gap approach to estimate china s energy subsidies results indicate that china s energy subsidies amounted to cny 356 73 billion in 2007 equivalent to 1 43 of gdp subsidies for oil products consumption are the largest followed by subsidies for the electricity and coal sectors furthermore a cge model is used to analyze the economic impacts of energy subsidy reforms our findings show that removing energy subsidies will result in a significant fall in energy demand and emissions but will have negative impacts on macroeconomic variables we conclude that offsetting policies could be adopted such that certain shares of these subsidies are reallocated to support other sustainable development measures which could lead to reducing energy intensity and favoring the environment

achieving co2 reductions in colombia effects of carbon taxes and abatement targets in this paper we investigate co2 emission scenarios for colombia and the effects of implementing carbon taxes and abatement targets on the energy system by comparing baseline and policy scenario results from two integrated assessment partial equilibrium models tiam ecn and gcam and two general equilibrium models phoenix and meg4c we provide an indication of future developments and dynamics in the colombian energy system currently the carbon intensity of the energy system in colombia is low compared to other countries in latin america however this trend may change given the projected rapid growth of the economy and the potential increase in the use of carbon based technologies climate policy in colombia is under development and has yet to consider economic instruments such as taxes and abatement targets this paper shows how taxes or abatement targets can achieve significant co2 reductions in colombia though abatement may be achieved through different pathways taxes and targets promote the entry of cleaner energy sources into the market and reduce final energy demand through energy efficiency improvements and other demand side responses the electric power sector plays an important role in achieving co2 emission reductions in colombia through the increase of hydropower the introduction of wind technologies and the deployment of biomass coal and natural gas with co2 capture and storage ccs uncertainty over the prevailing mitigation pathway reinforces the importance of climate policy to guide sectors toward low carbon technologies this paper also assesses the economy wide implications of mitigation policies such as potential losses in gdp and consumption an assessment of the legal institutional social and environmental barriers to economy wide mitigation policies is critical yet beyond the scope of this paper

what drives the change in china s energy intensity combining decomposition analysis and econometric analysis at the provincial level abstract we employ decomposition analysis and econometric analysis to investigate the driving forces behind china s changing energy intensity using a provincial level panel data set for the period from 1995 to 2009 the decomposition analysis indicates that a all of the provinces except for a few experienced efficiency improvement while around three fourths of the provinces economics became more energy intensive or remained unchanged b consequently the efficiency improvement accounts for more than 90 of china s energy intensity change as opposed to the economic structural change the econometric analysis shows that the rising income plays a significant role in the reduction of energy intensity while the effect of energy price is relatively limited the result may reflect the urgency of deregulating the price and establishing a market oriented pricing system in china s energy sector the implementation of the energy intensity reduction policies in the eleventh five year plan fyp has helped reverse the increasing trend of energy intensity since 2002 although the chinese government intended to change the industry led economic growth pattern it seems that most of the policy effects flow through the efficiency improvement as opposed to the economic structure adjustment more fundamental changes to the economic structure are needed to achieve more sustainable progress in energy intensity reduction

household welfare and co2 emission impacts of energy and carbon taxes in mexico abstract we analyse the effects of environmental taxes on welfare and carbon emissions at the household level for the case of mexico the integrated welfare environmental analysis which is based on a censored energy consumer demand system extends previous work in two ways first the estimation of a full matrix of substitution elasticities allows us to test the necessity of incorporating second order effects into the welfare analysis second the substitution elasticities derived from the demand system are used to estimate the shortrun co2 emission reduction potential we find that first order approximations of welfare effects provide reasonable estimates particularly for carbon taxes analog to evidence in other low and middle income countries the taxation of all energy items is found to be regressive with the exception of motor fuels the analysis of the emission implications of different tax scenarios indicates that short run emission reductions at the household level can be substantial though the effects depend on how revenue is recycled this effectiveness combined with moderate and manageable adverse distributional impacts renders the carbon tax a preferred mitigation instrument considering the large effect of food price increases on poverty and the limited additional emission saving potential the inclusion of ch4 and n2o in a carbon tax regime is not advisable

mapping the evolution of energy growth nexus synergies and trade offs the study explores the intellectual structure development and evolution of energy crisis and economic growth research through bibliometric analysis of research articles on energy growth nexus from 2000 to 2017 by using citespace where gephi is used to analyse the authors collaboration the analysis incorporates 27 152 references cited by 344 authors in 1165 articles and from 330 journals the results of study quantitatively present the most cited articles authors countries institutions and intellectual structure with data visualization in the knowledge domain of energy growth nexus the study categorizes the major research areas in energy growth nexus research as carbon dioxide emission electricity consumption heterogeneous panel real income renewable energy and financial development the study discusses emerging trends which provide the future research fronts and intellectual development within the framework of energy growth nexus

the effect of carbon tax on per capita co2 emissions new huadu business school 09zd050 national social science foundation of china 09zd050 08ajy022 research foundation of ministry of education of china 10jzd0018 fundamental research funds for the central universities 2010221051

china s energy economy technical change factor demand and interfactor interfuel substitution with its rapid economic growth china s primary energy consumption has exceeded domestic energy production since 1994 leading to a substantial expansion in energy imports particularly of oil china s energy demand has an increasingly significant impact on global energy markets in this paper allen partial elasticities of factor and energy substitution and price elasticities of energy demand are calculated for china using a two stage translog cost function approach the results suggest that energy is substitutable with both capital and labor coal is significantly substitutable with electricity and complementary with diesel while gasoline and electricity are substitutable with diesel china s energy intensity is increasing during the study period 1995 2004 and the major driver appears to be due to the increased use of energyintensive technology

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

do carbon taxes work analysis of government policies and enterprise strategies in equilibrium abstract to achieve the goal of carbon emission reduction a number of countries have implemented carbon tax policies and carbon pricing has become an important tool this paper discusses the interactions between a government and an enterprise for implementing carbon taxes over time or by level of tax considering greenhouse gas emission we examine the impacts of various carbon tax policies on enterprises investments in new technology their reductions in production quantity and governments tax remittances a case study of the strategic responses of three firms in taiwan s electronics cement and steel industries to two carbon emission policies promulgated by government shows that appropriate levels of tax can induce an enterprise to alter its production processes to achieve emission reduction as part of a long term business strategy

corruption top down or bottom up this article studies the impact of corruption on an economy with a hierarchical government in particular we study whether centralizing corruption within the higher level of government increases or decreases the total amount of corruption we show that when the after tax relative profitability of the formal sector as compared to that of the informal sector is high enough adding a layer of government increases the total amount of corruption by contrast for high enough public wages and or an efficient monitoring technology of the bureaucratic system centralization of corruption at the top of the government hierarchy redistributes bribe income from the lower level to the upper level in the process total corruption is reduced and the formal sector of the economy expands

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

age analysis of the impact of a carbon energy tax on the irish economy a computable general equilibrium model with specific detail in taxation and energy use is developed in this paper to quantify the impact of the implementation of energy taxation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in ireland benchmark data combining physical energy and emissions data and economic data in the form of a social accounting matrix sam had to be compiled from various data sources because energy and pollution accounts from the seea are not available for ireland we find that the reduction target for energy related co2 emissions in ireland of 25 8 compared to 1998 levels can be achieved with a carbon energy tax of 10 15 euros per tonne of co2 though fuel switching is important in meeting the target this result is more sensitive to the possibilities for producers to substitute away from energy use welfare would fall but only by small percentages production and consumption patterns would change more significantly with a shift in demand from fuels with a high emission factor to energy sources with a lower carbon intensity and from energy to other commodities this paper confirms that a carbon energy tax leads to greater emission reductions than an equivalent uniform energy tax the latter has a stronger negative impact on the less polluting energy sectors whereas the carbon tax greatly stimulates the use of renewable energy and reduces the use of peat and coal the new sam the model and the application to energy taxes contribute to a better informed debate on environmental policy in ireland

marital investments time consistency and emotions abstract a benchmark model of a married couple s educational investment yields an inefficient outcome due to the possibility of opportunistic divorce motivated by findings in social psychology i use psychological game theory to incorporate belief dependent guilt feelings multiple equilibria become possible some marriages have inefficient under investment some have efficient outcomes and preclude divorce if guilt is sufficiently important a life long efficient marriage is implied because a spouse may signal a trust so strong as to force the partner to hold beliefs that make divorce unattractive

corruption as a self fulfilling prophecy evidence from a survey experiment in costa rica an influential body of scholarship argues that corruption behaves as a selffulfilling prophecy the idea of this work is that levels of corruption emerge endogenously as a result of a society wide coordination game in which ther individual returns to corrupt behavior are a function of how disposed towards corruption the other members of society are perceived as being an empirical implication of this logic is that if one were to exogenously perturb beliefs about societal levels of corruption upward willingness to engage in corruption should increase as a consequence the current paper evaluates this claim by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large scale household survey conducted in the gran area metropolitana gam of costa rica from october 2013 to april 2014 n 4200 changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of costa ricans who have experienced or directly observed an act of corruption from 2006 to 2011 the paper finds that on average assignment to this display relative to the control condition increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to pay a bribe to a police officer by approximately 0 04 to 0 08 thereby providing supporting evidence for the self fulfilling prophecy hypothesis

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

energy intensity a decomposition and counterfactual exercise for latin american countries abstract this paper investigates trends in energy intensity over the last 40 years based on a sample of 75 countries it applies the fisher ideal index to decompose the energy intensity into the relative contributions of energy efficiency and economic structure then the determinants of these energy indexes are examined through panel data regression techniques special attention is lent to latin american countries lac by comparing its performance to that of a similar set of countries chosen through the synthetic control method when analyzed by income level energy intensity has decreased in a range between 40 and 54 in low and medium income countries respectively efficiency improvements drive these changes while the structural effect does not represent a clear source of change the regression analysis shows that per capita income petroleum prices fuel energy mix and gdp growth are main determinants of energy intensity and efficiency while there are no clear correlations with the activity component in the case of lac the energy intensity decreased around 20 which could be interpreted as an under performance however the counterfactual exercise suggests that lac has closed the gap with respect to its synthetic control

how to boost energy productivity in china s industrial sector an integrated decomposition framework based on multi dimensional factors abstract the industrial sector is a pillar for china s economy improving the energy productivity is of great significance to mitigate the discrepancy between energy use and energy supply as well as the economic development and environmental friendliness this paper extended the previous decomposition method by introducing six new components energy output oriented regional efficiency energy output oriented scale economy energy output oriented pure technical efficiency these new factors can uncover the impacts of regional balance development scale economy optimization and resource allocation efficiency change on energy productivity the main research results indicate that during the 2000 2016 period 1 industrial energy productivity yield progressively increased and the discrepancies of energy productivity in different regions were obvious eastern region represented the best energy productivity performance followed by the central and western regions 2 technological progress in both energy saving and production were two principal contributors to energy productivity growth overall the pure technical efficiency also promoted energy productivity suggesting that resource allocation efficiencies were performed well in both the energy market and the output market 3 by contrast both the energy and output oriented scale economy effect failed to promote energy productivity growth besides the energy oriented and output oriented regional efficiency had opposite impacts on energy productivity the former one had the inhibiting effects while the last one had the promoting effects finally several relevant suggestions for policymakers were provided

exploring impact of carbon tax on china s co2 reductions and provincial disparities abstract with fast development it is not easy for china to achieve carbon reduction targets only by traditional command and control measures e g the measures for energy efficiency carbon tax is advocated as one effective complementary measure and has high possibility to be implemented for china s future low carbon development under such a circumstance this paper aims at forecasting the possible impact of carbon tax on both carbon reduction and economic loss of 30 chinese provinces a 30 chinese province cge computational general equilibrium model has been developed to conduct the provincial evaluation and seven scenarios including business as usual bau scenario and six carbon tax scenarios with carbon price from 20 usd ton to 120 usd ton up to 2030 are set the results show that china s industrial co2 will be reduced from 12 2 billion tons under bau scenario to 10 4 billion tons 9 3 billion tons 8 5 billion tons 7 9 billion tons 7 4 billion tons and 7 0 billion tons under scenarios of tax20 tax40 tax60 tax80 tax100 and tax120 in 2030 respectively electricity metal and chemicals sectors have high reduction potentials and are priority sectors for carbon tax policy provincial disparity analysis demonstrates that coal production consumption and total energy consumption are key factors to affect carbon tax effect on co2 reduction and inner mongolia shandong shanxi and hebei have the largest industrial co2 reduction potentials after levying carbon tax however the implementation of carbon tax will impede economic development for all provinces therefore the concept of carbon tax efficiency is further proposed in order to evaluate the effectiveness of carbon tax by considering both co2 reduction and gdp loss policy suggestions indicate that provinces of shanxi inner mongolia hebei and anhui should be set priority when implementing carbon tax policy in china and carbon price should be no more than 50 usd ton

energy intensity developments in 40 major economies structural change or technology improvement this study analyzes energy intensity trends and drivers in 40 major economies using the wiod database a novel harmonized and consistent dataset of input output table time series accompanied by environmental satellite data we use logarithmic mean divisia index decomposition to 1 study trends in global energy intensity between 1995 and 2007 2 attribute efficiency changes to either changes in technology or changes in the structure of the economy and 3 highlight sectoral and regional differences we first show that heterogeneity within each sector across countries is high these general trends within the sectors are dominated by large economies first and foremost the united states in most cases heterogeneity is lower within each country across the different sectors regarding changes of energy intensity at the country level improvements between 1995 and 2007 are largely attributable to technological change while structural change is less important in most countries notable exceptions are japan the united states australia taiwan mexico and brazil where a change in the industry mix was the main driver behind the observed energy intensity reduction

on controlling crime with corrupt officials abstract this paper attempts to synthesize the recently developed strategic approach towards modeling corruption and the classical views the following propositions are sought to be proved a if reward schemes are introduced the classical and the strategic approaches yield similar results so far as controlling crime is concerned b with probability of detection being dependent on the effort of a corrupt official crime cannot be controlled and c in the context of an infinitely repeated game of crime the corrupt law enforcing agent might choose less bribes and lower effort level than the myopic optimal and hence would strategically pamper crime

dynamic environmental performance analysis a malmquist index approach abstract this article presents a general framework for dynamic environmental performance analysis by generalizing the approach proposed by kuosmanen and kortelainen kuosmanen t kortelainen m 2005 measuring eco efficiency of production with data envelopment analysis journal of industrial ecology 9 4 59 72 from a static to a dynamic setting for this purpose we construct an environmental performance index epi by applying frontier efficiency techniques and a malmquist index approach compared to other dynamic environmental productivity and efficiency analysis approaches based on these methods our approach builds on the standard definition of eco efficiency as it is presented in the ecological economics literature recognizing the importance to analyze the sources of environmental performance changes we show how changes in overall environmental performance can be decomposed into changes in relative eco efficiency and shifts in environmental technology respectively we apply the presented technique at the macro level to dynamic environmental performance analysis of 20 member states of the european union in 1990 2003 according to the results environmental technical change mostly explains the improvement in overall environmental performance while relative eco efficiency change has been minor for most countries during the sample period

government expenditure corruption and total factor productivity abstract this paper classifies government expenditures into three types and constructs a theoretical framework to explore the influences of government expenditures and corruption on total factor productivity it then establishes a dynamic spatial autoregressive model and a panel threshold model to test the theoretical hypotheses based on provincial panel data from 2007 to 2014 the results illustrate that u shape curve relationships exist between government expenditures of administrative service investment development safeguard governance and total factor productivity and that the relationship between the government expenditure structure and total factor productivity follows an inverted u shape curve in addition the findings suggest that increased corruption levels can directly reduce regional total factor productivity and that the effects of the proportions of administrative service expenditures investment development expenditures and safeguard governance expenditures on total factor productivity have a single corruption threshold increasing the proportions of government expenditures could improve the total factor productivity up until the threshold value

a sequential malmquist luenberger productivity index environmentally sensitive productivity growth considering the progressive nature of technology this study proposes an index for measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth which appropriately considers the nature of technical change the rationale of this methodology is to exclud

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

the effects of economic and policy incentives on carbon mitigation technologies the ability to estimate the likely effects of potential climate change policies on energy use and greenhouse gas ghg emissions requires an improved understanding of the relationship between different policy alternatives and energy saving and ghg reducing changes in technology a particularly important and understudied aspect of this set of issues is the conceptual and empirical modeling of how the various stages of technological change are interrelated how they unfold over time in response to market forces and the differential impact of various policies for example r d subsidies environmental taxes information programs we summarize several contributions to this literature and suggest promising areas for continued research on empirical analysis and modeling of induced technological change

a general equilibrium model of statistical discrimination we study a general equilibrium model with endogenous human capital formation in which ex ante identical groups may be treated asymmetrically in equilibrium the interaction between an informational externality and general equilibrium effects creates incentives for groups to specialize discrimination may arise even if the corresponding model with a single group has a unique equilibrium the dominant group gains from discrimination rationalizing why a majority may be reluctant to eliminate discrimination the model is also consistent with reverse discrimination as a remedy against discrimination since it may be necessary to decrease the welfare of the dominant group to achieve parity

oil price fluctuation volatility spillover and the ghanaian equity market implication for portfolio management and hedging effectiveness abstract this study attempts to contribute to the literature on stock markets and energy prices by examining the dynamic volatility and volatility transmission between oil and ghanaian stock market returns in a multivariate setting using the recently developed var garch var agarch and dcc garch frameworks in turn the models results are used to compute and analyze the optimal weights and hedge ratios for oil stock portfolio holdings for comparison purposes and to put the paper more in the perspective of west africa the nigerian stock market is also included in the analysis our findings point to the existence of significant volatility spillover and interdependence between oil and the two stock market returns while spillover effects are stronger for nigeria the transmission of volatility is much more apparent from oil to stock than from stock to oil in the case of ghana also the study demonstrates evidence of short term predictability in oil and stock price changes through time and reveals that conditional volatility changes more rapidly as result of substantial effects of past volatility rather than past news shocks for all market returns moreover we show that there is a slightly more effective hedge in the two stock markets under the dcc garch framework our preferred model compared to the other two models although hedging effectiveness is much greater for ghana on the whole our findings for optimal hedge ratios are consistent with other studies and particularly the view that oil assets should be an integral part of a diversified portfolio of stocks and suggest that a better understanding of volatility links is crucial for portfolio management in the presence of oil price risk finally the existence of multivariate asymmetric effects and dynamic conditional correlations as revealed by the var agarch and dcc garch models make it clear that the assumptions of symmetric effects and constant conditional correlations are not supported empirically

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

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

distributional effects of a carbon tax on chinese households a case of shanghai abstract as an effective policy instrument to reduce co 2 emissions the effects of a carbon tax on distribution have been the critical factor in determining whether a carbon tax will be acceptable in china taking shanghai as an example which is the economic center and front runner of china this paper estimates the distributional effect of a carbon tax on households in various income groups by using the input output model and the suits index the results indicate that the comprehensive distributional effect of the carbon tax is regressive the expenditure of the low income group caused by the carbon tax accounts for 0 853 of the total expenditure while that of the high income group 0 712 the direct distributional effect presents a weak progressivity while the indirect one is significantly regressive and the latter is much larger than the former moreover the suits index of the carbon tax is 0 078 implying that the carbon tax burden on the low income group is the highest and thus that a carbon tax can intensify income inequality therefore when introducing a carbon tax some rational associated redistribution or compensation measures such as purposive transfer payments should be implemented to restrict or even eliminate the regressivity of the carbon tax

public beliefs and corruption in a repeated psychological game abstract this paper investigates the role of guilt aversion for corruption in public administration corruption is modeled as the outcome of a game played between a bureaucrat a lobby and the public there is a moral cost of corruption for the bureaucrat who is averse to letting the public down we study how the behavior of the lobby and the bureaucrat depend on perceived public beliefs when these are constant and when they are allowed to vary over time with time varying beliefs corruption is more likely when the horizon of the game is relatively long and when public beliefs are initially low and are updated fast

factor substitution and energy productivity fluctuation in china a parametric decomposition analysis abstract technical research on energy productivity can support government officials as they evaluate practical energy policies for the future this study proposed a parametric method to decompose china s energy productivity rate of change into six factors based on a theoretical stochastic frontier analysis the method was applied to conduct an empirical study using inter provincial panel data in china from 1995 to 2012 the results highlighted three key points first the general rate of change in energy productivity was mainly influenced by a steady positive rate of change in technical progress combined with a steady negative rate of change in technical efficiency the core factors causing fluctuations in energy productivity included a positive rate of change in the substitution of capital and energy and a negative rate of change in the substitution of labor and energy second from a geographic perspective provinces with a high rate of change in technical progress experienced a weaker deterioration in technical efficiency however the rate of change in technical efficiency tends to decline as the rate of change in technical progress increases third there is a similar changing trend between the substitution of capital and energy and the substitution of labor and energy

delving into liberia s energy economy technical change inter factor and inter fuel substitution abstract the industrial energy mix of liberia is dominated by petroleum products this has generated serious environmental problems contributing immensely to co 2 emissions and other pollutants in the country this study has attempted to investigate the potential for inter factor and inter fuel substitution between capital labor petroleum and electricity in liberia by employing a translog production and cost function approach ridge regression procedure has been adopted to estimate the parameters of the function due to multicollinearity in the data estimation results show that all inputs are substitutes these suggest that price based policies coupled with capital subsidy programs can be adopted to redirect technology use towards cleaner energy sources like electricity hence retaining the ability to fuel the economy while also mitigating greenhouse gas ghg emissions substitution between energy and labor and energy and capital implies that removal of price ceilings on energy in liberia would tend to reduce energy use and increase capital and labor intensiveness notwithstanding the study seems to show no evidence of convergence in relative technological progress of the four inputs implying that petroleum will continue to play a dominant role in the energy consumption mix of liberian industry while labor investment will continue to outweigh capital inputs finally the findings of this study provide general insights and underscore the importance of policies that focus on installed capacity of renewable electricity energy intensity targets as well as merger of enterprises

renewable energy technologies as beacon of cleaner production a real options valuation analysis for liberia abstract the importance of energy consumption for growth and development calls for improved decision support for a sustainable energy transition given africa s dependence on fossil fuels the economic and environmental savings from research development and deployment of renewable energy technologies may be substantial although the benefits of renewable energy technologies research development funding may appear to be low assuming immediate deployment the uncertainty in the non renewable energy price and the flexibility over timing makes research development program more appealing this study develops different scenarios in order to quantify benefits provided by research development funding for renewable power generation in liberia by using real options pricing approach to estimate the value of renewable energy technologies while taking into account the uncertainty of fossil fuel prices and learning by doing in renewable energy technologies the optimal solution shows that renewable energy technologies are economically attractive especially when external costs are internalized however annual research development funding is low and should be raised significantly in order to guarantee the highest possible investment incentives with minimal expenditures the study also hypothesizes that with the likelihood of renewable energy to replace non renewable energy renewable power use in liberia can potentially reduce carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 13 9 by 2015 compared to the 2008 levels the key insight provided by the real options analysis in this study is that while renewable energy may have inherent limitations such as seasonality of supply low energy content and capacity factor issues they still hold a significant amount of value which can only be detected when externalities are internalized thus underscoring the need for external costs related policies

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

environmentally sensitive productivity analysis of the canadian pulp and paper industry 1959 1994 an input distance function approach abstract this study employs a parametric input distance function that incorporates both desirable and undesirable outputs to provide a more complete representation of the production technology from which environmentally sensitive productivity and efficiency measures can be generated this framework also generates pollution abatement cost estimates that are useful for policy making an input based malmquist index of productivity growth that appropriately credits the producer not only for increases in marketable or desirable outputs but also for the production of improved environmental quality through pollution abatement activities is derived from the input distance function the method was applied to time series data from the canadian pulp and paper industry our shadow price estimates indicate that the marginal cost to producers of pollution control has been rising the main conclusion of this study is that productivity improvement from the social viewpoint has been stronger than conventional measures would suggest

guilt in games a clear conscience is a good pillow why does this old proverb contain an insight the emotion of guilt holds a key psychologists report that the prototypical cause of guilt would be the infliction of harm loss or distress on a relationship partner roy baumeister arlene m stillwell and todd f heatherton 1994 245 june price tangney 1995 moreover guilt is unpleasant and may affect behavior to render the associated pangs counterfactual baumeister stillwell and heatherton state if people feel guilt for hurting their partners and for failing to live up to their expectations they will alter their behavior to avoid guilt in ways that seem likely to maintain and strengthen the relationship avoided guilt is the down of the sound sleeper s bolster how can guilt be modeled how are human interaction and economic outcomes influenced we offer a formal approach for providing answers start with an extensive game form which associates a monetary outcome with each end node say that player i lets player j down if as a result of i s choice of strategy j gets a lower monetary payoff than j expected to get before play started player i s guilt may depend on how much he lets j down player i s guilt may also depend on how much j believes i believes he lets j down we develop techniques to analyze equilibria when players are motivated in part by a desire to avoid guilt the intellectual home for our exercise is what has been called psychological game theory this framework originally developed by john geanakoplos david pearce and ennio stacchetti 1989 and recently extended by battigalli and dufwenberg 2005 henceforth b d allows players utilities to depend on beliefs about choices states of nature

output elasticities and inter factor substitution empirical evidence from the transportation sector of shanghai abstract as a major consumer of fossil fuels the transportation sector in shanghai presents a wide range of problems including air pollution noise and traffic congestion this study aims to explore the energy substitution effect based on a trans log production function to evaluate the contribution of each input factor to sectoral output and reveal the substitution possibilities between capital labor and energy to deal with a multicollinearity problem we adopt ridge regression to obtain the coefficient of each variable under the appropriate penalty value the bootstrap method is used for making statistical inferences and the 95 confidence interval is obtained with 1000 bootstrap samples the empirical results demonstrate the following 1 the output elasticities of capital 0 13 0 15 labor 0 24 0 25 and energy 0 43 0 48 are positive and show an increasing trend over the study period 2 the substitution elasticity between labor and energy is the highest among the input factors around 1 0095 with a slight decreasing trend 3 the substitution elasticity between energy and capital ranges from 1 0018 to 1 0021 and the substitution elasticity between capital and labor is infinitely close to 1

does factor market distortion inhibit the green total factor productivity in china abstract this article measures green total factor productivity gtfp to discuss whether factor market distortions inhibit the green development of china s economy meanwhile export and foreign direct investment fdi are taken into account based on a threshold model considering export and fdi are closely related to factor market distortion environment and the economy the result shows that the factor market distortion has negative influences on china s gtfp growth export and fdi s spillover effect significantly moreover factor market distortion was found to be the threshold of export and fdi s spillover effect leading to inferior export and fdi which further inhibit gtfp growth this article provides a supplement to the issue from the perspective of environment based on the widely confirmed proposition that factor market distortion inhibits tfp growth according to the results we suggest that the chinese government should reduce the control of factor market as much as possible leaving the factor resources allocation to the market this will not only promote an innovation driven development but also an energy saving and environment friendly economy in china the article provides a new perspective on the influence mechanism of export and fdi on gtfp growth by discussing the impact path of factor distortion and expands the empirical framework of the research direction as well

factor and fuel substitution in china s iron steel industry evidence and policy implications climate change which is induced from energy consumption and co2 emissions has got people s attention hence many strategies and ways are being adopted to mitigate co2 emissions energy substitution is crucial to the promotion of energy conservation and co2 emissions reduction the purpose of this paper is to estimate both inter factor and inter fuel substitution in china s iron steel industry during the period 1985 2011 empirical results show several conclusions for china s iron steel industry 1 own price elasticity of energy is negative so increase in energy price will reduce energy input 2 energy and capital and energy and labor are substitutes and the substitution in energy capital is relatively stronger 3 though coal oil and electricity are also substitutes the substitution effect is not so obvious because of pricing distortions in china the driving forces of energy efficiency change are further discussed and the results show that technology progress is the key factor determining energy intensity therefore market oriented reforms in terms of energy prices improvement in energy substitution including inter factor and inter fuel substation and promotion of energy saving technologies are important means for ensuring future energy conservation and co2 emissions reduction practices in china s iron steel sector

opportunities and challenges for renewable energy policy in china renewable energy is the inevitable choice for sustainable economic growth for the harmonious coexistence of human and environment as well as for the sustainable development government support is the key and initial power for developing renewable energy in this article an overall review has been conducted on renewable energy development policy including laws and regulations economic encouragement technical research and development industrialized support and government model projects etc in china on this basis a systematic analysis has been conducted on the disadvantages of renewable energy development policy on the point of long term effective system for renewable energy development a series of policy advice has been offered such as strengthening the policy coordination enhancing regional policy innovation echoing with clean development mechanism implementing process management constructing market investment and financing system it is expected that the above advices could be helpful to ever improvement of renewable energy development policy c 2007 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

impact of a carbon tax on the chilean economy a computable general equilibrium analysis abstract in 2009 the government of chile announced their official commitment to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions by 20 below a business as usual projection by 2020 due to the fact that an effective way to reduce emissions is to implement a national carbon tax the goal of this article is to quantify the value of a carbon tax that will allow the achievement of the emission reduction target and to assess its impact on the economy the approach used in this work is to compare the economy before and after the implementation of the carbon tax by creating a static computable general equilibrium model of the chilean economy the model developed here disaggregates the economy in 23 industries and 23 commodities and it uses four consumer agents households government investment and the rest of the world by setting specific production and consumptions functions the model can assess the variation in commodity prices industrial production and agent consumption allowing a cross sectoral analysis of the impact of the carbon tax the benchmark of the economy upon which the analysis is based came from a social accounting matrix specially constructed for this model based on the year 2010 the carbon tax was modeled as an ad valorem tax under two scenarios tax on emissions from fossil fuels burned only by producers and tax on emissions from fossil fuels burned by producers and households the abatement cost curve has shown that it is more cost effective to tax only producers rather than to tax both producers and households this is due to the fact that when compared to the emission level observed in 2010 a 20 emission reduction will cause a loss in gdp of 2 and 2 3 respectively under the two scenarios the tax value that could lead to that emission reduction is around 26 us dollars per ton of co2 equivalent the most affected productive sectors are oil refinery transport and electricity having a contraction between 7 and 9 analyzing the electricity sector by energy source the production of electricity from fossil fuels will decrease by 11 but electricity from renewables will increase by 43 electricity producers will pass the cost of the carbon tax to the consumer by increasing the price of electricity by 8 the findings of this paper will allow policy makers to take better and more informed decisions by providing a cross sectoral analysis of the impact on the economy of reducing emissions by 20 by implementing a national carbon tax