assessing the role of domestic value chains in china s co 2 emission intensity a multi region structural decomposition analysis china has been facing severe pressure in co2 emissions mitigation with production fragmentation among provinces inside china domestic value chains dvcs have become increasingly important to both economic growth and co2 emissions of the country thus greening domestic value chains is crucial for china to achieve its climate goal a fundamental question behind this issue is to assess the role of dvcs in china s emission intensity and quantify the underlying drivers to this end a multi region structural decomposition analysis mr sda model is proposed in this study a change in national emission intensity is explained by two divisions of effects i e local effects and dvc effects from a forward linkage perspective this study further disentangles the dvc production links and captures its impact on emission intensity applying the proposed mr sda model to study china s co2 emission intensity change in 2002 2012 shows that the dvcs hindered further emission intensity reduction of china during this period the main determinant was the deteriorated dvc forward linkages in the central and western regions of china more detailed results and discussions are presented

the effect of industry delocalization on global energy use a global sectoral perspective abstract sectoral production technologies differ largely across countries so do sectoral energy intensities hence shifts in production locations within global sectors possibly caused by environmental regulations are likely to have an impact on aggregated energy usage and emissions applying a logarithmic mean divisia index decomposition we decompose changes of sectoral energy use from 2001 2011 into three effects sectoral value added energy efficiency and delocalization which in this paper is conceived as a structural effect within sectors between regions our results show that although economic activity and technological progress dominate global energy use developments for most sectors a delocalization towards less efficient production places is ongoing it contributes to annual increases in energy use in the range of 1 6 especially manufacturing sectors which are among the most energy consuming sectors reveal significant increases in energy usage due to delocalization since 2004 this development is accompanied by declining energy intensity improvement rates indicating that delocalization induces second order effects

agricultural productivity and structural transformation evidence from brazil we study the eects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transfor mation to guide empirical work we present a simple model where the eect of agricultural productivity on industrial development depends on the factor bias of technical change we test the predictions of the model by studying the introduction of genetically engineered soybean seeds in brazil which had heterogeneous eects on agricultural productivity across areas with dierent soil and weather characteristics we nd that technical change in soy production was strongly labor saving and lead to industrial growth as predicted by the model

additive efficiency decomposition in two stage dea kao and hwang 2008 kao c hwang s n 2008 efficiency decomposition in two stage data envelopment analysis an application to non life insurance companies in taiwan european journal of operational research 185 1 418 429 develop a data envelopment analysis dea approach for measuring efficiency of decision processes which can be divided into two stages the first stage uses inputs to generate outputs which become the inputs to the second stage the first stage outputs are referred to as intermediate measures the second stage then uses these intermediate measures to produce outputs kao and huang represent the efficiency of the overall process as the product of the efficiencies of the two stages a major limitation of this model is its applicability to only constant returns to scale crs situations the current paper develops an additive efficiency decomposition approach wherein the overall efficiency is expressed as a weighted sum of the efficiencies of the individual stages this approach can be applied under both crs and variable returns to scale vrs assumptions the case of taiwanese non life insurance companies is revisited using this newly developed approach

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

price discrimination by u s and german exporters the insensitivity of the u s trade balance to the sharp depreciation of the dollar in the past three years has revived interest in the relationship between exchange rates and the trade balance a central issue in most analyses of the relation between the current account and the exchange rate concerns the price adjustment process the simple integrated competitive market model predicts that local currency prices should change in proportion to the nominal exchange rate for a country too small to influence world prices the relationship between local currency import prices and exchange rates has been referred to as the pass through relationship in the empirical literature in international economics if the proportional relationship between import prices and exchange rates holds pass through is said to be complete accounts of recent u s experience cite the failure of dollar prices of imported goods to rise in proportion to exchange rates i e incomplete pass through as an important factor in explaining the persistence of the trade deficit unfortunately observations on pass through alone provide limited insight into the behavior of markets since incomplete pass through is consistent with at least two fundamentally different paradigms one is the standard competitive model of trade in which the law of one price holds but exchange rate fluctuations are associated with large changes in import demand due to other factors for example if dollar appreciation is correlated with increases in world demand and industry marginal cost is increasing then pass through will be less than complete the other is an imperfectly competitive model in which exporters are capable of price discriminating across destination markets a phenomenon paul krugman 1987 has labeled pricing to market in this model incomplete pass through is typically associated with fluctuations in the markup of price over marginal cost on exports 2 these fluctuations in markups are believed to be countryspecific they do not reflect the behavior of prices to other export destinations both models are plausible explanations of recent u s experience unfortunately it is impossible to distinguish between these competing models using only information on import prices and exchange rates for a single country in order to distinguish between the competing models an empirical analysis of goods prices and exchange rates must be capable of measuring either marginal cost or the markup over marginal cost either of these tasks poses formidable empirical problems much of the empirical literature in industrial organization has been concerned with precisely these issues since markups are an important measure of the competitiveness of industries

decomposition weights and overall efficiency in two stage additive network dea abstract data envelopment analysis dea is a technique for performance evaluation of peer decision making units dmus the network dea models study the internal structures of dmus using two stage network structures as an example the current paper examines additive efficiency decomposition where the overall efficiency is defined as a weighted average of stage efficiencies and the weights are used to reflect relative importance of individual stages we show that weights may not affect the calculation of stage efficiency scores and that variation in the overall efficiency resulting from using different weights can be associated with constant stage efficiencies we demonstrate the need to isolate the impact of weights on the overall efficiency we propose to use a new overall efficiency index to address some pitfalls in weighted additive efficiency decomposition our findings are illustrated using two empirical data sets representing two types of two stage network structures

operational research in education operational research or techniques have been applied from the early stages of the discipline to a wide variety of issues in education at the government level these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions how to measure it and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings local governments as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation may also need to make decisions regarding for example the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones as well as the day to day logistics of getting pupils to schools issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses this survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government managers and consumers of education and the or techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

did the tax revolt reduce school performance abstract this paper uses detailed school level data from 49 states to analyze the effects of tax revolt era property tax limitations on school services i find that limitations are associated with larger student teacher ratios and lower cost of living adjusted starting teacher salaries all else equal these results are robust to modelling the results as endogenous and using a variety of measures for whether the limitation binds at particular schools however i find no such evidence that schools subject to limitations have reduced their administrative costs furthermore i find that limitations are associated with lower student performance on mathematics science social studies and reading examinations all else equal

currency unions and international integration this paper characterizes the integration patterns of international currency unions such as the cfa franc zone we empirically explore different features of currency unions and compare them to countries with sovereign monies by examining the criteria for mundellos concept of an optimum currency area we find that members of currency unions are more integrated than countries with their own currencies for instance we find that currency union members have more trade and less volatile real exchange rates than countries with their own monies business cycles are more highly synchronized across currency union countries than across countries with sovereign monies

nonparametric estimation of education productivity incorporating nondiscretionary inputs with an application to dutch schools in this paper we develop a malmquist productivity index for public sector production characterized by the influence of environmental variables we extend johnson and ruggiero 2011 to the more general case of variable returns to scale to further decompose the malmquist productivity index into technical efficiency scale and environmental change we apply our model to analyze productivity of dutch schools using 2002 2007 data the results indicate that the environment influences the productivity index as well as the technical efficiency scale and environmental change components we see that schools with a moderate classification of environment have the highest productivity numbers in line with expectations schools with the worst environment also perform worse and would perform better with an improved environment

network dea pitfalls divisional efficiency and frontier projection under general network structures abstract data envelopment analysis dea is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units dmus recently network dea models been developed to examine the efficiency of dmus with internal structures the internal network structures range from a simple two stage process to a complex system where multiple divisions are linked together with intermediate measures in general there are two types of network dea models one is developed under the standard multiplier dea models based upon the dea ratio efficiency and the other under the envelopment dea models based upon production possibility sets while the multiplier and envelopment dea models are dual models and equivalent under the standard dea such is not necessarily true for the two types of network dea models pitfalls in network dea are discussed with respect to the determination of divisional efficiency frontier type and projections we point out that the envelopment based network dea model should be used for determining the frontier projection for inefficient dmus while the multiplier based network dea model should be used for determining the divisional efficiency finally we demonstrate that under general network structures the multiplier and envelopment network dea models are two different approaches the divisional efficiency obtained from the multiplier network dea model can be infeasible in the envelopment network dea model this indicates that these two types of network dea models use different concepts of efficiency we further demonstrate that the envelopment model s divisional efficiency may actually be the overall efficiency

testing the market integration process in the european car sector evidence from pricing to market behaviour in this study we investigate the process of the european car market integration by analysing the evolution of cross country differences in the degree of pricing to market behaviour of united kingdom exporters we estimate these country differences by exploiting statistical information for pre tax retail prices and for export unit values conclusions from both independent data sets are in general quite consistent results support the claim that in the period before the block exemption regulation 1400 2002 came fully into force international price discrimination was an important source of car price dispersion within the euro area for a more recent period we found that estimated deviations in pricing to market behaviour across destinations have become lower this convergence suggests that car market integration was progressively improved at the end of the last decade

estimating technical and allocative efficiency in the public sector a nonparametric analysis of dutch schools abstract public sector output provision is influenced not only by discretionary inputs but also by exogenous environmental factors in this paper we extended the literature by developing a conditional dea estimator of allocative efficiency that allows a decomposition of overall cost efficiency into allocative and technical components while simultaneously controlling for the environment we apply the model to analyze technical and allocative efficiency of dutch secondary schools the results reveal that allocative efficiency represents a significant 37 percent of overall cost efficiency on average although technical inefficiency is still the dominant part furthermore the results show that the impact of environment largely differs between schools and that having a more unfavorable environment is very expensive to schools these results highlight the importance of including environmental variables in both technical and allocative efficiency analysis

reaping the carbon rent abatement and overallocation profits in the european cement industry insights from an lmdi decomposition analysis we analyse variations of carbon emissions in the european cement industry from 1990 to 2012 at the european level eu 27 and at the national level for six major producers germany france spain the united kingdom italy and poland we apply a log mean divisia index lmdi method cross referencing data from three databases the getting the numbers right gnr database developed by the cement sustainability initiative the european union transaction log eutl and the eurostat international trade database our decomposition method allows seven channels of emission change to be distinguished activity clinker trade clinker share alternative fuels thermal and electrical energy efficiency and electricity decarbonisation we find that apart from a slow trend of emission reductions coming from technological improvements first from a decrease in the clinker share then from an increase in alternative fuels most of the emission change can be attributed to the activity effect using counterfactual scenarios we estimate that the introduction of the eu ets brought small but positive technological abatement 2 2 1 3 between 2005 and 2012 moreover we find that the european cement industry has gained 3 5 billion euros of overallocation profits mostly due to the slowdown of production

the value added of sectoral disaggregation implications on competitive consequences of climate change policies global impact assessment of unilateral climate policies is commonly based on multi sector multi region computable general equilibrium cge models that are calibrated to consistent accounts of production consumption and bilateral trade flows however global economic databases such as gtap treat energy intensive and trade exposed industries rather in aggregate thereby missing potentially important details on the heterogeneity of these sectors in this paper we elaborate on the availability of data resources and methodological issues in disaggregating energy intensive and tradeexposed sectors that receive larger attention in the public policy debate on unilateral emission regulation non ferrous metals iron and steel and non metallic minerals our sensitivity analysis revolves around three types of unobserved heterogeneity at the sub sectoral level trade elasticities energy consumption and technology specifications drawing on the example of border tax adjustments we find that for all given technology specifications and variation in energy shares the biggest differences emerge from variations in armington elasticities even moderate changes in armington elasticities can alter the magnitude and the sign of the effects at the sectoral level the implications of sub sectoral disaggregation are not as pronounced for macroeconomic indicators and leakage as for sectoral indicators

cross border integration in the european electricity market evidence from the pricing behavior of norwegian and swiss exporters abstract this paper examines the electricity market integration process in two european areas based on the pricing behavior of norwegian and swiss exporters the aim is to gain evidence for the period after the adoption of the second legislative package 2003 the pricing behavior of norwegian exporters indicates that the wholesale markets for denmark and sweden are highly integrated moreover results are fully compatible with the existence of a very competitive marketplace for electricity this clearly contrasts with the evidence provided by swiss exporters in this last case analysis revealed differences in pricing to market behavior between italy france and germany which indicates that exporters take advantage of international market segmentation and divergences between market structures this outcome provides a reasonable explanation as to why price differences between countries cannot be fully attributed to transmission costs as has been claimed in previous research we also found cross country convergence in levels of markups and in pricing to market behavior of the swiss exporters for the first part of the period that was analyzed the evidence is fully consistent with an initial impulse toward market integration originated by reforms implemented at the beginning of the last decade

the triptych approach revisited a staged sectoral approach for climate mitigation abstract the triptych approach is a method for allocating future greenhouse gas ghg emission reductions among countries under a post 2012 international climate mitigation regime based on technological criteria at the sector level and accounting for structural differences the emission allowances are decomposed according to sectors thereby enabling the link to real world emission reduction strategies to be more concrete the new triptych approach presented here is a refinement of an earlier version in terms of an increased transparency and allowing a delayed participation for developing countries initial participation of developing countries with incentives but no penalties through no lose targets or sustainable development policies and measures for this article we calculated the emission reductions for countries for two technology oriented scenarios which stabilize ghg concentrations at 450 and 550 ppm co 2 eq respectively the reductions are ambitious but nonetheless compatible with existing technical reduction potentials as growth is allowed but efficiency has to be improved

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

an evaluation of the efficiency of quebec s school boards using the data envelopment analysis method in this paper the efficiency of quebec s school boards during a period of severe cutbacks in their finance is examined using data envelopment analysis the average efficiency is found to be relatively high in spite of this potential savings could be achieved if school boards were fully efficient results were found to depend heavily on school boards socio economic conditions thus they were subjected to tobit analysis and the boards corrected efficiencies recalculated it is concluded that inefficiencies cost 800 million dollars of which 200 million dollars come from unfavourable socio economic conditions

how global climate policy could affect competitiveness a global uniform carbon price would be economically efficient and at the same time avoid carbon leakage still it will affect the competitiveness of specific industries economic activity and employment across countries this paper assesses short term economic shocks following the introduction of a global carbon price that would be in line with the paris agreement based on the world input output database wiod we trace the carbon content of final output through global supply chains this allows us to estimate how prices of the final output would react to the introduction of a global carbon price we find that impacts on industrial competitiveness are highly heterogeneous across regions and economic sectors the competitive position of brazil japan the usa and advanced economies of the eu is likely to improve whereas industries and labor markets in newly industrializing asian economies as well as eastern europe are likely to experience substantial adverse impacts

examining the link between teacher wages and student outcomes the importance of alternative labor market opportunities and non pecuniary variation researchers using cross sectional data have failed to produce systematic evidence that teacher salaries affect student outcomes these studies generally do not account for non pecuniary job attribu

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

testing for homotheticity of educational production models since the 1960s the performance of public schools has typically been investigated in the context of educational production functions e g hanushek 1986 studies generally relate educational outcomes such as standardized test scores or graduation rates to quantities and qualities of inputs such as the number and quality of teachers school spending on facilities and family peer group characteristics these educational production functions have been estimated by regression methods e g hanushek 1986 sanders 1993 summers and wolfe 1977 and by nonparametric methods e g fare grosskopf and weber 1989 the studies offer interesting insights on such issues as the effect of class size and teacher quality on student performance and the relative efficiency of schools however little attention has been given to the characteristics of the educational production technology despite the fact that some important policy questions cannot be addressed without knowledge of these characteristics one such characteristic is input homotheticity for multiple educational outcomes outputs and inputs input homotheticity means loosely speaking that each isoquant is a radial expansion or contraction of the isoquant corresponding to unit outcomes outputs see primont and primont 1994 for a formal definition to illustrate suppose that schools must be downsized perhaps as a result of declining enrollments how should downsizing be implemented if the educational production technology is input homothetic then it is economically optimal to reduce input expenditures proportionally but otherwise it is not primont and primont 1994 provide a new test for input homotheticity in this paper we use data on outputs and inputs for eleven missouri school districts to illustrate how to irnplement such a test

influencing factors on hydrogen energy r d projects an ex post performance evaluation abstract to enhance its energy security korea made a significant r d investment in developing hydrogen energy technology over a period of 10 years the hydrogen energy r d center was established in 2003 with a 100 billion korean won krw government investment that would fund the initiative through 2012 this paper is a meaningful attempt to evaluate the ex post performance of completed hydrogen energy r d projects using data envelopment analysis dea through empirical analysis we focus mainly on measuring ex post performance and uncovering the influencing factors on that performance the results of our empirical analysis reveal several interesting findings first overall the ex post performance of completed projects is relatively low however there are major performance gaps among projects second r d type technology type and private sector investment are factors influencing project performance more specifically projects identified as basic research storage technology or without private sector investment had the highest performance with an acceptable level of statistical significance third dea can provide unique information such as results of returns to scale and slack analysis which cannot be gleaned from parametric methods as time went on the decreasing returns to scale drs ratio increased and the increasing returns to scale irs ratio decreased this means that the r d budget was used less and less effectively as time passed moreover among the three year project period the second year s r d budget was used most efficiently in each r d project this study can provide meaningful information to policy makers to enhance the performance of future r d projects and to promote hydrogen r d projects as well as advance the hydrogen economy

expenditures and student achievement in illinois abstract this study examines educational outcomes in illinois for the 1989 1990 school year several measures of educational attainment are analyzed including act scores high school graduation rates and the percentage in a high school planning to attend college the most important results are that an increase in average teacher s salary increases act scores and the percentage college bound and an increase in the pupil teacher ratio reduces the graduation rate and the percentage college bound

productivity and intermediate products a frontier approach abstract in recent years it has become popular to measure productivity using non parametric approaches however this has been done while ignoring intermediate products here we develop a non parametric productivity measure that explicitly incorporates such products

combining the assumptions of variable and constant returns to scale in the efficiency evaluation of secondary schools our paper reports on the use of data envelopment analysis dea for the assessment of performance of secondary schools in malaysia during the implementation of the policy of teaching and learning mathematics and science subjects in the english language ppsmi the novelty of our application is that it makes use of the hybrid returns to scale hrs dea model this combines the assumption of constant returns to scale with respect to quantity inputs and outputs teaching provision and students and variable returns to scale vrs with respect to quality factors attainment levels on entry and exit and socio economic status of student families we argue that the hrs model is a better informed model than the conventional vrs model in the described application because the hrs technology is larger than the vrs technology the new model provides a tangibly better discrimination on efficiency than could be obtained by the vrs model to assess the productivity change of secondary schools over the years surrounding the introduction of the ppsmi policy we adapt the malmquist productivity index and its decomposition to the case of hrs model

an empirical examination of the pollution haven hypothesis for india towards a green leontief paradox using input output analysis we examine whether india can be regarded as a pollution haven we calculate the extra co2 so2 and nox emissions induced by 1 billion rupees of additional exports this is compared with the reduction of indian pollution caused by an import increase of equal size in contrast to what the pollution haven hypothesis states for developing countries we find that india considerably gains from extra trade comparing 1996 1997 with 1991 1992 the gains have only increased indicating that india has moved further away from being a pollution haven the outcome is robust to changes in the underlying assumptions

the technical efficiency of schools in chile this paper assesses the technical efficiency of schools in chile which is defined as the capacity of schools to generate the maximum output academic achievement given the quantity of inputs they use two alternative methodological approaches for measuring efficiency are used i estimation of a stochastic production frontier and ii data envelopment analysis dea which allows identification of the efficient production frontier of the schools analysed nonparametrically each of these techniques has advantages and limitations which are discussed in the paper they lead however to the same conclusions when a sample of 2000 schools is analysed the results obtained provide interesting points for educational policy discussion in chile

the evolution of price dispersion in the european car market car prices in europe are characterized by large and persistent differences across countries the purpose of this paper is to document and explain this price dispersion using a panel data set extending from 1980 to 1993 we first demonstrate two main facts concerning car prices in europe i the existence of significant differences in quality adjusted prices across countries with italy and the u k systematically representing the most expensive markets 2 substantial year to year volatility that is to a large extent accounted for by exchange rate fluctuations and the incomplete response of local currency prices to these fluctuations these facts are analysed within the framework of a multiproduct oligopoly model with product differentiation the model identifies three potential sources for the international price differences price elasticities generating differences in markups costs and import quota constraints local currency price stability can be attributed either to the presence of a local component in marginal costs or to markup adjustment that is correlated with exchange rate volatility the latter requires that the perceived elasticity of demand is increasing in price we find that the primary reason for the higher prices in italy is the existence of a strong bias for domestic brancs that generates high markups for the domestic firm fiat in the u k higher prices are mainly attributed to better equipped cars and or differences in the dealer discount practices the import quota constraints are found to have a significant impact on japanese car prices in italy france and the u k with respect to local currency price stability a large percentage of the documented price inertia can be attributed to local costs and a smaller fraction to markup adjustment that is indicative of price discrimination based on these results we conjecture that the emu will substantially reduce the year to year volatility observed in the car price data but without further measures to increase european integration it will not completely eliminate existing cross country price differences

assessing school efficiency in portugal using fdh and bootstrapping this study explores a new data set that contains information both on inputs and outputs for a sample of portuguese secondary schools an fdh reference technology is used to determine radial technical efficiency scores and slacks although it is known that there is no reason to assume convexity in the study of education efficiency frontiers this is the first study ever to use fdh at the school level effectively relaxing the convexity assumption a two stage approach is used whereby the significant environmental variables that explain fdh efficiency scores and slacks are identified for the purpose of statistical inference the first application of the bootstrapping algorithms suggested by simar and wilson 2003 is conducted the study concludes that the unemployment rate access to health care services adult education and living infrastructures are determinants of school efficiency the differences between the coast and the interior of portugal seem to be more relevant as far as school efficiency is

between a rock and a hard place a trade theory analysis of leakage under production and consumption based policies without a comprehensive global climate agreement carbon leakage remains a contentious issue consumption based pricing of emissions which could in practice be implemented with a full border tax adjustment bta has been forwarded as an option to increase the effectiveness of unilateral climate policy this paper questions the economic rationale behind this approach using a theoretical 2 times 2 trade model in which leakage occurs through terms of trade effects we show analytically first that consumption based pricing of emissions does not necessarily result in less leakage than production based policies second the sign of the optimal unilateral carbon tariff depends on the carbon intensity differential between the foreign country s exporting and non exporting sectors and not on the differential between home s and foreign s exporting sectors as implied by the full bta approach third based on empirical data for the year 2004 our model implies that full bta applied by the european union on e g imports from and exports to china would by shifting china s production from the export sector with a relatively low carbon intensity towards the more carbon intensive non export sector actually increase leakage

deriving the dea frontier for two stage processes data envelopment analysis dea is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units dmus recently dea has been extended to examine the efficiency of two stage processes where all the outputs from the first stage are intermediate measures that make up the inputs to the second stage the resulting two stage dea model provides not only an overall efficiency score for the entire process but as well yields an efficiency score for each of the individual stages due to the existence of intermediate measures the usual procedure of adjusting the inputs or outputs by the efficiency scores as in the standard dea approach does not necessarily yield a frontier projection the current paper develops an approach for determining the frontier points for inefficient dmus within the framework of two stage dea

global patterns of materials use a socioeconomic and geophysical analysis abstract human use of materials is a major driver of global environmental change the links between materials use and economic development are central to the challenge of decoupling of materials use and economic growth dematerialization this article presents a new global material flow dataset compiled for the year 2000 covering 175 countries including both extraction and trade flows and comprising four major material categories biomass construction minerals fossil energy carriers and ores industrial minerals first we quantify the variability and distributional inequality gini coefficients in international material consumption we then measure the influence of the drivers population gdp land area and climate this analysis yields international income elasticities of material use finally we examine the coupling between material flows and between income and material productivity measured in economic production per tonne material consumed material productivity is strongly coupled to income and may thus not be suitable as an international indicator of environmental progress a finding which we relate to the economic inelasticity of material consumption the results demonstrate striking differences between the material groups biomass is the most equitably distributed resource economically the most inelastic and is not correlated to any of the mineral materials the three mineral material groups are closely coupled to each other and economic activity indicating that the challenge of dematerializing industrial economies may require fundamental structural transformation our analysis provides a first systematic investigation of international differences in material use and their drivers and thus serves as the basis for more detailed future work

cross country price dispersion in the euro era a case study of the european car market impact of the euro this paper investigates the effects of the european monetary union on cross country price differences in the european car market the analysis utilizes disaggregate bi annual data on the prices of almost all car models sold in the 15 countries of the european union over 1993 2003 the data refer to identical models with identical specifications and options to identify the euro s effect we exploit the fact that out of the 15 countries in our sample 12 joined euroland at the beginning of 1999 and officially adopted the euro as their national currency at the beginning of 2002 while 3 countries remained outside the monetary union we investigate whether there is a systematic difference in the evolution of cross country price dispersion between euroland members and non members after 1999 our analysis distinguishes between phase i monetary union with national currencies preserved 1999 2001 and phase ii official adoption of the euro as a national currency in 2002 we examine the evolution of both the absolute price differentials across countries and the speed with which deviations from the long term cross country differentials are eliminated we find that in the pre euro era countries that later joined euroland exhibited lower price differentials relative to the base country of the netherlands by approximately 6 the monetary union further reduced these differentials by a small but significant percentage about 1 5 between 1999 and 2001 this reduction happened while the price differentials in non euroland countries increased the price differentials in euroland countries further decreased following the official euro adoption in 2002 however we cannot attribute this decline to the euro as we witness an even faster decrease of price differentials in non euroland countries over the 2002 2003 period despite these reductions cross country price differences remain large even among members regarding the speed of convergence we find that even before 1999 the half life of price shocks was shorter in euroland countries compared to non euroland countries 0 65 versus 1 year however we do not find any evidence that the emu further affected the speed of convergence in a significant manner overall our results suggest a big role for exchange rate stability in reducing international price dispersion and a smaller role for a common currency the surprisingly high remaining international price differentials after the euro suggest the need for additional measures towards integration e g liberalization of the distribution system reduction of high registration taxes in particular countries pinelopi koujianou goldberg and frank verboven

goods prices and exchange rates what have we learned import prices typically change by a smaller proportion than the exchange rate between the exporting and importing country recent research indicates that common currency relative prices for similar goods exported to different markets are highly correlated with exchange rates between those markets this evidence suggests that incomplete pass through is a consequence of third degree price discrimination while distance matters for market segmentation borders have independent effects the source of the border effect has not been clearly identified furthermore there is little evidence yet to suggest substantial market power is implied by the observed price discrimination

cost and learning efficiency drivers in australian schools a two stage network dea approach this article explore performance issues in australian public schools using a two stage dea network model which accounts simultaneously for both cost and learning efficiency levels in the cost efficiency stage different types of expenses and investments are employed to support a given number of students teachers and administrative staff in the learning efficiency stage these groups of individuals help to produce important outputs related to performance in student tests and school rankings results indicate that australian public schools are heterogeneous policy implications are also discussed

pricing to market behaviour in european car markets abstract this paper investigates ptm behaviour in european car markets for a period of great interest 1993 98 taking into account the role of invoicing currency the results indicate that local currency price stability is a strong and pervasive phenomenon across products independently of the invoicing currency the paper offers robustness checks tests and arguments that justify the interpretation of this finding at least in part as evidence of ptm it implies the existence of market segmentation and price discrimination despite the completion of the single market programme on 1 january 1993

liberalizing a distribution system the european car market we quantify the competitive effects of liberalizing the selective and exclusive distribution system in the european car market based on a model of oligopoly pricing with differentiated products we consider two possible competitive effects from liberalization i the creation of international intrabrand competition cross border trade which will result in a reduction of international price discrimination and ii a possible cumulative effect arising from a strengthening of national intrabrand competition which would result in reduced double marginalization we find that the reduction in international price discrimination mainly redistributes consumer gains across countries it has a positive but modest effect on total welfare if liberalization also has the cumulative effect of reducing double marginalization the welfare effects are much higher finally we find that the effects of liberalization on the manufacturers profits are either small or positive this finding implies that international price discrimination and softening competition through a double marginalization mechanism should not be interpreted as main profit motives for the previous distribution system but only as unintended side effects hence the industry rationale for maintaining the previous distribution system should be sought in other areas jel f15 l42

lmdi decomposition approach a guide for implementation since it was first used by researchers to analyze industrial electricity consumption in the early 1980s index decomposition analysis ida has been widely adopted in energy and emission studies lately its use as the analytical component of accounting frameworks for tracking economy wide energy efficiency trends has attracted considerable attention and interest among policy makers the last comprehensive literature review of ida was reported in 2000 which is some years back after giving an update and presenting the key trends in the last 15 years this study focuses on the implementation issues of the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi decomposition methods in view of their dominance in ida in recent years eight lmdi models are presented and their origin decomposition formulae and strengths and weaknesses are summarized guidelines on the choice among these models are provided to assist users in implementation

development and application of the hicks moorsteen productivity index for the total factor productivity assessment of wastewater treatment plants abstract the assessment of the productivity change in wastewater treatment plants is essential to improve performance and reduce operational costs several indices are available to compute unit productivity however some assessments are more reliable than others in the absence of price data the malmquist productivity index is the most commonly applied but it does not maintain total factor productivity properties under variable returns to scale technology hence malmquist productivity index is not a suitable index to compute total factor productivity change in wastewater treatment plants the present study served to overcome such limitations by calculating for the first time total factor productivity changes in a sample of 204 spanish wastewater treatment plants using the hicks moorsteen productivity index it is a multiplicatively complete index which can be decomposed as several sub indices representing technical and efficiency changes therefore this study also investigated the drivers of total factor productivity change in wastewater treatment plants results showed a 5 4 total factor productivity decline per year from 2003 to 2008 in the plants analysed the primary driver in the reduction was efficiency change alternatively technical change improved during the five years of study the results of this study provide support for policymakers and managers in decision making processes and contribute to the improvement of technical and economic wastewater treatment plants performance in addition it is evidenced that wastewater treatment plants current dependence on external energy sources should be reduced to improve productivity and reduce costs to citizens who pay for wastewater treatment services

determinants of global natural gas consumption and import export flows abstract based on the data of the bp statistical review of world energy this paper constructs the consumption and import export of natural gas identities it discusses the drivers of changes in global natural gas consumption and trade flows from 2008 to 2015 using the extended logarithmic mean divisia index the results show that differences in the natural gas supply and demand across countries or regions as well as the distribution of energy between the domestic and international markets can be better explained when natural gas trade movements are considered by comparing the supply and consumption increment of natural gas this study finds that only the energy intensity economic growth and demographic effects are consistent with each other the changes in the impact of other effects mainly depend on storage variations and statistical errors in addition the primary drivers of the incremental changes in natural gas consumption vary in different countries they include production scale import scale export scale consumption structure proportion energy intensity economic growth and population and balance effects finally the consumption competitiveness of the liquefied natural gas significantly improved over the examined period

composition of energy outflows embodied in the gross exports of the construction sector abstract energy sustainability has great importance in the development of the economy and society since energy is a necessary driving force for economic growth the construction sector accounts for a greater percentage of global energy consumption than most other sectors the structure of exports in the current trade pattern has affected the transmission of sectoral embodied energy through changes in regional economies this paper uncovers the composition of productions for gross exports and examines embodied energy from the viewpoint of value added through a case study in the construction sector multi regional input output tables have been used to process the data relevant to economic trade and energy input while the production of gross exports in 40 countries has been decomposed into the exports of value added trade and the exports of vertical specialisation trade based on data from world input output tables the decomposition and reorganisation clearly show the pathways and composition in the trade activities of gross exports the embodied energy of value added exports accounted for 60 90 of gross exports in the construction sectors of 37 countries the framework for sharing production in the construction sector still dominated the connections among many countries especially the trade relationships between large economies in the process of vertical specialisation trade the foreign value added of the construction sector was still limited by significant events such as the global financial crisis the construction sectors were ranked between 5 and 11 in all 35 domestic sectors in 34 countries as measured by the total export of embodied energy so the creation of high value added is enhanced by improvement in energy efficiency in the construction sector however the reduction of energy consumption in the construction sector may indirectly increase energy consumption in its upstream sectors because of the connection between exports and related production the balance between energy consumption and creation of value added in exports is an important consideration for government supervision and sectoral development local construction markets need to strengthen their ability in the supply of intermediate goods which benefits value added exports and domestic demand moreover developing national and international supply chains can positively offset the impact of the imbalanced distribution of globalised production

catholic schools dropout rates and educational attainment this paper examines the effect of catholic schooling on high school dropout rates and educational attainment particular attention is given to the effect of selection into the catholic school sector after adjusting for self selection we find that sophomores in the catholic schools are still substantially more likely to graduate with their class it is also shown that seniors in the catholic schools are not more likely to acquire more schooling than other seniors if selection is taken into account

measuring the efficiency of china s regional innovation systems application of network data envelopment analysis dea chen k and guan j measuring the efficiency of china s regional innovation systems application of network data envelopment analysis dea regional studies this study applies a relational network data analysis envelopment to the systematic evaluation of the innovation efficiency of china s regional innovation systems by decomposing the innovation process into the two connecting sub processes technological development and subsequent technological commercialization the results show that only one fifth of china s regional innovation systems are operating on the empirical best practice frontier during the whole process from technological development to commercialization furthermore it is found that substantial inconsistencies exist between technological development capacity and commercialization capacity in most regional innovation systems and that downstream commercialization capacity plays a more important role in the innovation performance of regional innovation systems chen k et guan j evaluer

international comparisons of pricing to market behavior this paper measures the degree of price discrimination across export destinations that is associated with exchange rate changes using u s u k german and japanese industry level data given the industries sampled more price discrimination across destinations is observed in the u k german and japanese data for industries that match across source countries however behavior is very similar across source countries furthermore destination specific price adjustment on exports to the united states from germany and japan is similar to price adjustment observed on shipments to other destinations most variation in the data appears to be related to industry copyright 1993 by american economic association