managing without growth abstract there are three main arguments why developed countries should consider managing without growth 1 continued economic growth worldwide is not an option owing to environmental and resource constraints and so developed countries should leave room for growth in developing countries where the benefits of growth are evident 2 in developed countries growth has become uneconomic in the sense that it detracts more from well being than it adds and 3 economic growth in developed countries is neither necessary nor sufficient for meeting specific policy objectives such as full employment no poverty and protection of the environment this paper explores various growth scenarios for canada over the medium range to 2020 using lowgrow a dynamic simulation model after describing lowgrow a scenario is presented that shows conditions under which the rate of unemployment in canada could be reduced to historically low levels poverty eliminated and greenhouse gas emissions reduced to comply with canada s commitment under the kyoto protocol without relying on economic growth this is not to say that zero growth should itself become a policy objective rather that the dependence on and defence of economic growth should not be an obstacle to fulfilling more specific welfare enhancing objectives of full employment eliminating poverty and protecting the environment the paper concludes with some policy implications for managing without growth followed by an annex which provides a technical description of lowgrow

crisis or opportunity economic degrowth for social equity and ecological sustainability introduction to this special issue abstract this article reviews the burgeoning emerging literature on sustainable degrowth this is defined as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level in the short and long term the paradigmatic propositions of degrowth are that economic growth is not sustainable and that human progress without economic growth is possible degrowth proponents come from diverse origins some are critics of market globalization new technologies or the imposition of western models of development in the rest of the world all criticize gdp accounting though they propose often different social and ecological indicators degrowth theorists and practitioners support an extension of human relations instead of market relations demand a deepening of democracy defend ecosystems and propose a more equal distribution of wealth we distinguish between depression i e unplanned degrowth within a growth regime and sustainable degrowth a voluntary smooth and equitable transition to a regime of lower production and consumption the question we ask is how positive would degrowth be if instead of being imposed by an economic crisis it would actually be a democratic collective decision a project with the ambition of getting closer to ecological sustainability and socio environmental justice worldwide most articles in this issue were originally presented at the april 2008 conference in paris on economic degrowth for ecological sustainability and social equity this conference brought the word degrowth and the concepts around it into an international academic setting articles of this special issue are summarized in this introductory article hueting d alessandro and colleagues van den bergh kerschner spangenberg and alcott discuss whether current growth patterns are un sustainable and offer different perspectives on what degrowth might mean and whether and under what conditions it might be desirable matthey and hamilton focus on social dynamics and the obstacles and opportunities for voluntary social action towards degrowth lietaert and cattaneo with gavalda offer a down to earth empirical discussion of two practical living experiments cohousing and squats highlighting the obstacles for scaling up such alternatives finally van griethuysen explains why growth is an imperative in modern market economies raising also the question whether degrowth is possible without radical institutional changes

material flows vs natural capital what makes an economy sustainable abstract in the discourse about sustainable development constant natural capital is frequently referred to as a criterion for ecological sustainability but what is natural capital the concept will be analyzed by presenting arguments in favour of using the term and different versions of sustainability strong and weak subsequently a critique of the natural capital concept is brought forward from an ecological as well as from an economic perspective following this critique the use of material inputs and the material input per unit of service mips as a measure for the environmental impact potential is suggested dematerialisation is understood to be an alternative management rule for sustainability in conclusion a change of perspective is proposed due to the conceptual and measurement problems associated with the constant natural capital criterion which refers to a stock it seems more reasonable from a scientific as well as from a practical perspective to add flows i e material inputs to a decision criterion for whether a development is sustainable or not

a multi objective multi period stochastic programming model for public debt management while raising debt on behalf of the government public debt managers need to consider several possibly conflicting objectives and have to find an appropriate combination for government debt taking into account the uncertainty with regard to the future state of the economy in this paper we explicitly consider the underlying uncertainties with a complex multi period stochastic programming model that captures the trade offs between the objectives the model is designed to aid the decision makers in formulating the debt issuance strategy we apply an interactive procedure that guides the issuer to identify good strategies and demonstrate this approach for the public debt management problem of turkey

scenario modelling for selective hedging strategies abstract we study currency risk management in the context of scenario analysis we develop scenario based optimization models that jointly determine the portfolio composition and the hedging strategy within each currency thus the model prescribes optimal selective hedging policies we then study empirically the performance of the models the new elements of our empirical analysis are various horizons one month and one semester various currency bases explicit incorporation of realistic transaction costs the results show that selective hedging strategies dominate the alternatives under some conditions and that transaction costs are very important in determining the profitability of various currency risk management strategies for both stocks and bonds at the one month horizon

trade ecologically unequal exchange and colonial legacy the case of france and its former colonies 1962 2015 abstract the role of trade in global environmental change is receiving increasing attention and there is a lively debate about ecologically unequal exchange eue little is known however about the role of colonial legacy for the evolution of physical trade patterns this study provides empirical evidence on the basis of a systematic evaluation of global trade data we quantify in physical and monetary terms the development of trade relations between france its former colonies and the rest the world from the immediate post colonial period until 2015 we use a set of physical trade indicators including physical trade balance and terms of trade to analyse differences in trade patterns and eue the results indicate that colonial ties were very strong in the 1960s but thereafter quickly diminished we find strong evidence for eue between france and its former colonies in the post colonial period and that the colonial factor explains eue between centre and peripheries better than income differences until the 1970s in recent decades colonial legacy increasingly vanished our findings corroborate that socio political factors and in particular colonial legacy play an important role for eue relations and that they deserve more attention in quantitative empirical research on trade

technological change and the rebound effect in the stirpat model a critical view abstract technological change is key to understand the explanatory variables behind environmental impacts in the context of the stirpat stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology model an adequate representation and analysis of the significance of the technology variable t in the stirpat model becomes crucial even more if one aims to better understand underlying processes such as the environmental rebound effect e re a critical review of the application of the stirpat model has been conducted to understand the diversity and value of the variables scopes assumptions statistical approaches and the environmental impacts commonly studied the findings highlight that despite the multiple applications and the high potential of the stirpat model inconclusive results and or knowledge gaps remain notably 1 a geographical imbalance in the scope of studies 2 the almost exclusive focus on carbon emissions 3 a lack of agreement on the choice of data additional explanatory variables and regression models 4 a lack of consensus on how to approximate t and 5 a lack of explicit analyses of the e re our findings are useful to both policymakers and academics for method design further research and policy evaluation

identifying barriers toward a post growth economy a political economy view abstract in this paper we take a political economy perspective on barriers that inhibit a transition beyond the growth paradigm that is we frame transition barriers as looming conflicts of interest specifically we investigate potential transition barriers within three case studies first unemployment represents the most commonly cited reason why economic growth is considered indispensable second alternative indicators to gross domestic product gdp have not succeeded in replacing gdp as a standard metric of economic welfare third pension schemes rely on economic growth to offset demographic change in each of these three examples we identify actor interest constellations that foster the status quo of a growth economy we conclude that compensating some of those actors who would presumably be worse off in a post growth economy may be necessary though not sufficient for a transition

a dynamic stochastic programming model for international portfolio management we develop a multi stage stochastic programming model for international portfolio management in a dynamic setting we model uncertainty in asset prices and exchange rates in terms of scenario trees that reflect the empirical distributions implied by market data the model takes a holistic view of the problem it considers portfolio rebalancing decisions over multiple periods in accordance with the contingencies of the scenario tree the solution jointly determines capital allocations to international markets the selection of assets within each market and appropriate currency hedging levels we investigate the performance of alternative hedging strategies through extensive numerical tests with real market data we show that appropriate selection of currency forward contracts materially reduces risk in international portfolios we further find that multi stage models consistently outperform single stage models our results demonstrate that the stochastic programming framework provides a flexible and effective decision support tool for international portfolio management

saving puzzles and saving policies in the united states in the past two decades the widely reported personal saving rate in the united states has dropped from double digits to below zero first we attempt to account for the decline in the national income and product accounts nipa saving rate the macroeconomic literature suggests that 40 50 per cent of the drop since 1988 can be attributed to households spending stock market capital gains another 30 per cent is accounting transfers from personal saving into government and corporate saving because of the way pensions and capital gains taxes are treated in the nipa second while nipa saving measures are well suited to measuring the supply of new funds for investment and capital accumulation it is not clear that they should be the target of government saving policies finally we emphasize that the nipa saving rate is not useful in judging whether households are preparing for retirement or other contingencies many households have accumulated significant wealth primarily through retirement saving vehicles and capital gains even as the saving rate slid there remains a segment of the population who save little and whose behaviour appears untouched either by the stock market boom or the slide in personal saving we explore reasons and policy options for their puzzling low saving rate copyright 2001 oxford university press

the employment effects of sustainable development policies abstract this paper argues that it is time for ecological economists to bring the employment impacts of sustainable development policies to the forefront of the research agenda important conservation efforts continue to founder because of their perceived employment effects the paper examines the evidence on the employment impacts of sustainable development policies and argues that maintaining or even increasing employment depends critically on appropriate policy design and attention to the political economy of implementation of policies the paper concludes that a better understanding of these issues fair labour market and structural adjustment programs and especially forward planning to anticipate problem areas must replace the piecemeal knee jerk reactions to environmental issues such as were evident in australia during the last federal election

trade competition and domestic pollution a panel study 1980 2003 this research note examines whether trade competition abets regula tory races in the environmental area to analyze trade competition we develop a new measure structural equivalence which assesses competitive threats that a country faces from other countries whose firms export the same products to the same destination countries employing this new measure we analyze air pollution intensity sulfur diox ide or so2 and water pollution intensity biochemical oxygen demand or bod for a panel of 140 countries for the time period 1980 2003 we find that trade competi tion is a significant predictor of water pollution intensity among structurally equiva lent countries we then test separately whether trade competition abets upward and downward regulatory races we find that in the case of water pollution countries respond symmetrically to downward and upward races that is they follow their struc turally equivalent competitor countries both when they ratchet down their regula tions and when they ratchet up regulations in the case of air pollution however countries are responsive to downward policy changes only in competitor countries

scale prices and biophysical assessments abstract in a recent forum on biophysical assessments a number of ecological economists expressed serious reservations about the use of prices to assess the appropriate scale of macroeconomic systems while such reservations are warranted the preference for biophysical assessments over prices indicates that many ecological economists are focussing on one notion of scale and neglecting another altogether there are two notions of scale that are critical to achieving sustainable development sd one is the maximum sustainable macroeconomic scale the other is the optimal macroeconomic scale the maximum sustainable scale is the largest macroeconomic scale that can be sustained by a throughput of matter energy that is within the ecosphere s regenerative and waste assimilative capacities the optimal scale is a preferable macroeconomic scale and is one that is not only sustainable but one that maximises the net benefits of economic activity biophysical assessments are needed to determine the maximum sustainable scale because ecological sustainability is a biophysical problem not an economic problem thus it is through biophysical assessments that the necessary restrictions on the incoming resource flow can be calculated and imposed however since the achievement of an optimal macroeconomic scale is an economic problem albeit a constrained economic problem relative prices are required to efficiently allocate the sustainable resource flow so the macroeconomy can adjust to the optimum failure to recognise the two notions of scale and the most appropriate means of their assessment is likely to thwart rather than advance the movement toward sd

indirect carbon emissions in household consumption evidence from the urban and rural area in china abstract resident energy consumption can be divided into direct and indirect parts and the indirect part is often considered to be much more important than direct part by some scholars in this paper on the basis of consumer lifestyle approach cla and the estimation of net primary productivity npp energy ecological footprint eef of indirect energy consumption is calculated using statistical data of chinese urban and rural areas from 1999 to 2010 and then improved stirpat stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology model is used to empirically study the influences of urbanization level economic level engel coefficient energy intensity and industry structure on indirect energy consumption given the consideration of potential multicollinearity the model is estimated using partial least square pls regression the results indicate that for urban residents the eef of indirect energy use is on the rise it is positively influenced by urbanization level per capita income and the ratio of tertiary industry but negatively influenced by engel coefficient and energy intensity for rural residents the eef is declining it is positively influenced by engel coefficient energy intensity and tertiary industry proportion while negatively influenced by urbanization level and per capita income combining these empirical findings and china s specific circumstances some policy recommendations are made

environmental kuznets curves real progress or passing the buck abstract recent research has examined the hypothesis of an environmental kuznets curve ekc the notion that environmental impact increases in the early stages of development followed by declines in the later stages these studies have focused on the relationship between per capita income and a variety of environmental indicators results imply that ekcs may exist for a number of cases however the measures of environmental impact used generally focus on production processes and reflect environmental impacts that are local in nature and for which abatement is relatively inexpensive in terms of monetary costs and or lifestyle changes significantly more consumption based measures such co2 emissions and municipal waste for which impacts are relatively easy to externalize or costly to control show no tendency to decline with increasing per capita income by considering consumption and trade patterns the author re examines the concept of the ekc and proposes the use of alternative consumption based measures of environmental impact the author speculates that what appear to be improvements in environmental quality may in reality be indicators of increased ability of consumers in wealthy nations to distance themselves from the environmental degradation associated with their consumption

household saving micro theories and micro facts in this survey we review the recent theoretical and empirical literature on household saving and consumption the discussion is structured around a list of motives for saving and how well the standard theory captures these motives we show that almost all of the motives for saving that have been suggested in the informal saving literature can be captured in the standard optimizing model particular attention is given to recent work on the precautionary motive and its implications for saving and consumption behavior we also discuss the behavioral or psychological approach that eschews the use of standard optimization techniques and focuses instead on direct consideration on saving we provide a section on facts who save and how much we then discuss informally the recent decline in the u s saving rate and whether the theory is of much use in understanding this and other changes in aggregate saving rates over time we do not find any convincing explanation for the change in saving rates we also discuss some analyses of saving behavior over the life cycle addressing such questions as whether households save enough for retirement and whether the consumption patterns of older households can be rationalized within a simple life cycle model we also review a great number of studies of the consumption euler equations based on our analysis of the studies cited we conclude that there is still mixed evidence that consumption is excessively sensitive to income we also examine in depth the recent empirical literature on the precautionary motive we conclude that although some households do seem to have a significant precautionary motive at some points in their life cycle this motive is not so strong empirically as some investigators suggest

spatial polarization of the ecological footprint distribution abstract the international allocation of natural resources is determined not by any ethical or ecological criteria but by the dominance of market mechanisms from a core periphery perspective this allocation may even be driven by historically determined structural patterns with a core group of countries whose consumption appropriates most available natural resources and another group having low natural resource consumption which plays a peripheral role this article consists of an empirical distributional analysis of natural resource consumption as measured by ecological footprints whose purpose is to assess how strongly countries cluster together based on their ecological footprints this is the extent to which the distribution of consumption responds to polarization as opposed to mere inequality to assess this we estimate and decompose different polarization indices for a balanced sample of 119 countries over the period 1961 to 2007 our results point towards a polarized distribution which is consistent with a core periphery framework

false prophet or genuine savior assessing the effects of economic openness on sustainable development 1980 99 while many herald globalization the increasing interconnectedness of national economies to be associated with rising standards of living across the globe others fear its effects on sustainability antiglobalization forces and environ mentalists view these developments as a threat to the welfare of future generations because of profligate and excessive current consumption this study is the first to estimate the effects of dependence on trade foreign direct investment fdi and an index of economic freedom on the world bank s measure of sustainability the gen uine savings rate which measures the rate at which investment in the total stock of manufactured human and natural capital exceeds its depreciation contrary to pessi mists fears our indicators of economic openness show positive effects on sustain ability results that are robust to sample size testing procedure and several alternative specifications the results support those who suggest that distorted economies tend to be both inefficient and damaging to future generations if increasing trade fdi and economic freedom are hallmarks of globalization then worries about its effects on future well being are misplaced

analysis of energy embodied in the international trade of uk interest in the role embodied energy plays in international trade and its subsequent impact on energy security has grown as a developed nation the uk s economic structure has changed from that of a primary producer to that of a primary consumer although the uk s energy consumption appears to have peaked it imports a lot of energy embodied in international trade alongside the more obvious direct energy imports the uk has seen increasing dependency on imported fossil energy since the uk became a net energy importer in 2005 in this paper an energy input output model is established to calculate not only the amount of fossil energy embodied in uk s imports and exports but also the sector and country distributions of those embodied fossil energy the research results suggest the following uk s embodied fossil energy imports have exceeded embodied fossil energy exports every year since 1997 uk embodied energy imports through the so called made in china phenomena are the largest accounting for 43 of total net fossil energy imports if net embodied fossil energy imports are considered the gap between energy consumption and production in uk is much larger than commonly perceived with subsequent implications to the uk s energy security

an empirical assessment of u s state level immigration and environmental emissions abstract this paper uses u s state level data for co no 2 so 2 and pm 10 emissions and a stirpat inspired model to provide empirical evidence discrediting at least in part the restrictionist perspective on the immigration environment relationship the paper finds that u s states with a larger share of foreign born residents are associated with lower no 2 and so 2 emissions while these results do not necessarily imply that immigrants mitigate environmental emissions they emphasize the importance of addressing the relationship between immigration and the environment based on an objective assessment of facts hence it is this paper s contention that it is empirically unjustifiable to call for restrictions on immigration on environmental grounds

south korean green growth and the jevons paradox an assessment with democratic and degrowth policy recommendations the policy instruments at the core of the notion of green growth are central to south korea s national strategy for green growth nsgg 1 green stimulus packages 2 price based or market corrective policies and 3 green research and development to bring about a technological shift that increases resource efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources this assessment of the nsgg explores the potentials and limitations of 3 in light of the jevons paradox the commonly found association between improved efficiency and increased resource use greenhouse gas ghg emissions and total energy use have increased since the implementation of the nsgg despite overall improvements in energy efficiency we argue that the jevons paradox is a fundamental limitation of the nsgg and suggest policy alternatives to the nsgg 1 increased public participation in environmental decision making and 2 economic degrowth

channels of interstate risk sharing united states 1963 1990 we develop a framework for quantifying the amount of risk sharing among states in the united states and construct data that allow us to decompose the cross sectional variance in gross state product into several components which we refer to as levels of smoothing we find that 39 percent of shocks to gross state product are smoothed by capital markets 13 percent are smoothed by the federal government and 23 percent are smoothed by credit markets the remaining 25 percent are not smoothed we also decompose the federal government smoothing into subcategories taxes transfers and grants to states

the economics of climate change impacts a la stern novel and nuanced or rhetorically restricted abstract the stern report conducts an estimation of greenhouse gas control costs weighed against the benefits of avoiding damages at the global scale as i show stern and colleagues are aware of the limits to cba although they chose to ignore the considerable literature on the subject the many contributions by ecological economists and especially work specific to the enhanced greenhouse effect various problems are raised or mentioned in the report including strong uncertainty incommensurability plural values non utilitarian ethics rights distributional inequity poverty and treatment of future generations how then can this report acknowledging so many of those aspects of climate change that render cba an unsuitable tool for generating policy recommendations go ahead to conduct a global cba and make policy recommendations i explain how issues are suppressed and sidelined in a careful and methodical manner with the pretence they have been addressed by state of the art solutions meanwhile the authors maintain allegiance to an economic orthodoxy which perpetuates the dominant political myth that traditional economic growth can be both sustained and answer all our problems besides perpetuating myths this diverts attention away from alternative approaches away from ethical debates over harming the innocent the poor and future generations and away from the fundamental changes needed to tackle the very real and serious problems current economic systems pose for environmental systems

explaining the decline of the u s saving rate the role of health expenditure between 1980 and 2007 the u s personal saving rate declined from 11 percent to 3 percent in this paper we provide evidence that most of the decline can be explained by rising health expenditures we rst employ reduced form methods and exogenous variation in medical expenses generated by fda drug approvals to document that a 1 percentage point increase in health expenditure generated a decline in the saving rate that is between 0 73 and 0 89 percentage points using this result we calculate that the rise in health expenditure explains about 90 percent of the drop in the saving rate we then develop and estimate a model of consumption saving and health decisions to evaluate which mechanisms are behind the decline using the estimated model we document that the rise in medical expenses and drop in the saving rate are driven mainly by progress in health technology during the years 1995 2010 by the reduction in co payment rates in the period 1986 1994 and by improvements in income processes for the years 1980 1985

modes of extraction unequal exchange and the progressive underdevelopment of an extreme periphery the brazilian amazon 1600 1980 the demographic ecological and infrastructural effects of extractive economies differ significantly from those of productive economies analysis of underdevelopment in extractive export economies requires time lagged models of the cumulative effects of the sequence of local modes of extraction organized in response to world system demands such a model organized aroud the predominance of specific commodities at different times is derived from a critical synthesis of various theories of development and underdevelopment the propositions in this model are examined through a case study of the sequence of extractive export economies in the amazon basin from the time of colonial conquest to the present

an analysis of the implications of china s urbanization policy for economic growth and energy consumption abstract china intends to rely on urbanization policies to increase its economic growth even against the backdrop of new constraints on energy consumption this paper investigates the impact of urbanization on economic growth and energy consumption using data from china s 266 prefecture level cities over the 2000 2010 period and examines the heterogeneity of this impact across income and urbanization groups the main results of our empirical estimation indicate that 1 the effect of urbanization on economic growth is positive and significant for the entire sample although it is positive and significant only for high and middle income groups and not the low income group 2 the impact of urbanization on energy consumption is positive and significant for all groups when the sample is divided into three urbanization groups based on the northam curve indicating that urbanization will lead to large increases in energy consumption in summary our empirical results show that urbanization targets will be difficult to achieve in terms of increasing gdp per capita under energy consumption constraints

is complete hedging optimal for international bond portfolios over the 1980s however non u s investors could have lowered their international portfolios risks by taking on some currency exposure for these investors the benefits of diversification across currencies more than offset the cost of the currencies volatilities evidently the free lunch argument misses something and investors should be concerned that the missing link might change across countries or over time

local economic development agglomeration economies and the big push 100 years of evidence from the tennessee valley authority we study the long run eects of one of the most ambitious place based economic development policies in u s history the tennessee valley authority using a rich panel dataset of counties we conduct an evaluation of the dynamic eects of the tva on local economies in the seventy years following the program s inception we nd that the tva led to short run gains in agricultural employment that were eventually reversed while impacts on manufacturing employment continued to intensify well after the program s subsidies had lapsed a pattern consistent with the presence of strong agglomeration economies in the manufacturing sector economists have long cautioned that the local gains created by place based policies may be oset by losses elsewhere yielding ambiguous eects on the u s as a whole building on the framework in glaeser and gottlieb 2008 we develop a novel approach to assessing the aggregate consequences of shifting the spatial distribution of manufacturing employment our ndings suggest the aggregate productivity gains associated with relocating manufacturing activity to the tva region were probably minimal

income and health spending evidence from oil price shocks health expenditures as a share of gdp in the united states have more than tripled over the past half century a common conjecture is that this is a consequence of rising income we investigate this hypothesis by instrumenting for local area income with time series variation in oil prices interacted with local oil reserves this strategy enables us to capture both partial equilibrium and local general equilibrium effects of income on health expenditures our central income elasticity estimate is 0 7 with 1 1 as the upper end of the 95 confidence interval which suggests that rising income is unlikely to be a major driver of the rising health expenditure share of gdp 2013 the president and fellows of harvard college and the massachusetts institute of technology

non renewable and renewable energy consumption and co2 emissions in oecd countries a comparative analysis abstract this paper attempts to explore the determinants of co 2 emissions using the stirpat model and data from 1980 to 2011 for oecd countries the empirical results show that non renewable energy consumption increases co 2 emissions whereas renewable energy consumption decreases co 2 emissions further the results support the existence of an environmental kuznets curve between urbanisation and co 2 emissions implying that at higher levels of urbanisation the environmental impact decreases therefore the overall evidence suggests that policy makers should focus on urban planning as well as clean energy development to make substantial contributions to both reducing non renewable energy use and mitigating climate change

working time reduction policy in a sustainable economy criteria and options for its design abstract reducing per capita consumption particularly amongst high income groups is often deemed necessary to reduce the environmental impacts of the global economy far from implying a necessary reduction in wellbeing some research suggests this could actually improve it as reduced expenditure means a reduced need for income and hence paid work then there is the possibility for average working hours to fall providing increased leisure time in which to pursue happiness through less consumption intensive but more time consuming ways to date however there has been little critical discussion of the details of what policy might need to cover to allow and encourage substantial working time reduction in a way that successfully reconciles these environmental and wellbeing goals this article addresses this gap in the literature it begins by reviewing the conditions under which working time reduction could bring environmental and wellbeing benefits it then presents examples of innovative voluntary working time policies from the netherlands and belgium drawing these elements together the article presents a new green life course approach for working time policy design it argues that as a complement to more conventional working time policies this could be a valuable tool to combine environmental and wellbeing goals

medical care costs how much welfare loss hardly a week goes by without a front page newspaper article on rising health care costs and the uninsured in this article i focus mainly on costs arguing that the issue has been somewhat misconceived while the level of medical care spending in the u s is a cause for concern the welfare losses associated with rises in that level of spending may not be as large as the public rhetoric can make them seem in fact cost containment may not be as urgent as is widely supposed and some proposed cost containment policies may result in welfare losses for the insured and even increase the number of uninsured

cvar models with selective hedging for international asset allocation abstract we develop an integrated simulation and optimization framework for multicurrency asset allocation problems the simulation applies principal component analysis to generate scenarios depicting the discrete joint distributions of uncertain asset returns and exchange rates we then develop and implement models that optimize the conditional value at risk cvar metric the scenario based optimization models encompass alternative hedging strategies including selective hedging that incorporates currency hedging decisions within the portfolio selection problem thus the selective hedging model determines jointly the portfolio composition and the level of currency hedging for each market via forward exchanges we examine empirically the benefits of international diversification and the impact of hedging policies on risk return profiles of portfolios we assess the effectiveness of the scenario generation procedure and the stability of the model s results by means of out of sample simulations we also compare the performance of the cvar model against that of a model that employs the mean absolute deviation mad risk measure we investigate empirically the ex post performance of the models on international portfolios of stock and bond indices using historical market data selective hedging proves to be the superior hedging strategy that improves the risk return profile of portfolios regardless of the risk measurement metric although in static tests the mad and cvar models often select portfolios that trace practically indistinguishable ex ante risk return efficient frontiers in successive applications over several consecutive time periods the cvar model attains superior ex post results in terms of both higher returns and lower volatility

allocating ecological footprints to final consumption categories with input output analysis we present and discuss a method that allows the disaggregation of national ecological footprints by economic sector detailed final demand category sub national area or socio economic group this is done by combining existing national footprint accounts with input output analysis calculations in the empirical part are carried out by using supply and use tables for the united kingdom covering the reporting period 2000 ecological footprints are allocated to detailed household consumption activities following the coicop classification system and to a detailed breakdown of capital investment the method presented enables the calculation of comparable ecological footprints on all sub national levels and for different socio economic groups the novelty of the approach lies in the use of input output analysis to re allocate existing footprint accounts in the detail of disaggregation by consumption category and in the expanded use of household expenditure data this extends the potential for applications of the ecological footprint concept and helps to inform scenarios policies and strategies on sustainable consumption the method described in this paper can be applied to every country for which a national footprint account exists and where appropriate economic and environmental accounts are available the approach helps to save time in data collection and improves the consistency between ecological footprint estimates for a particular human society from different researchers for these reasons the suggested methodology includes crucial steps on the way towards a standardisation of ecological footprint accounts

are americans saving optimally for retirement we solve each household s optimal saving decisions using a life cycle model that incorporates uncertain lifetimes uninsurable earnings and medical expenses progressive taxation government transfers and pension and social security benefits with optimal decision rules we compare household by household wealth predictions from the life cycle model using a nationally representative sample we find making use of household specific earnings histories that the model accounts for more than 80 percent of the 1992 cross sectional variation in wealth fewer than 20 percent of households have less wealth than their optimal targets and the wealth deficit of those who are undersaving is generally small

footprints on the earth the environmental consequences of modernity growing evidence demonstrating clear threats to the sustainability of the ecosystems supporting human societies has given rise to a variety of sociological theories of human environment interactions these environmental impact theories fall into three general perspectives human ecology modernization and political economy these theories however have not been empirically tested in a common analytic framework here a framework that relies on ecological principles is adopted and modified using a revised stochastic formulation of that framework and the most comprehensive measure of environmental impact to date the ecological footprint the factors driving the environmental impacts of societies are assessed the overall findings support the claims of human ecologists partially support the claims of political economists and contradict the claims of modernization theorists basic material conditions such as population economic production urbanization and geographical factors all affect the environment and explain the vast majority of cross national variation in environmental impact factors derived from neo liberal modernization theory such as political freedom civil liberties and state environmentalism have no effect on impacts taken together these findings suggest societies cannot be sanguine about achieving sustainability via a continuation of current trends in economic growth and institutional change authors

capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development an indicator of weak sustainability the measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction in this paper we present one form that a weak sustainability indicator can take derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non decreasing although subject to qualification at this stage some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries

exchange rate uncertainty forward contracts and international portfolio selection in this paper ex ante efficient portfolio selection strategies are developed to realize potential gains from international diversification under flexible exchange rates it is shown that exchange rate uncertainty is a largely nondiversiflable factor adversely affecting the performance of international portfolios therefore it is essential to effectively control exchange rate volatility for that purpose two methods of exchange risk reduction are simultaneously employed multicurrency diversification and hedging via forward exchange contracts the empirical findings show that international portfolio selection strategies designed to control both estimation and exchange risks almost consistently outperform the u s domestic portfolio in out of sample periods since grubel 11 applied modern portfolio theory mpt to international investment various authors such as levy and sarnat 17 solnik 20 and lessard 16 have examined the gains from international diversification of investment portfolios for the purpose of establishing the gains from international diversification these studies constructed international portfolios using historical risk and return data from a period of fixed or relatively stable exchange rates and showed that internationally diversified portfolios dominated purely domestic portfolios in terms of mean variance efficiency from the standpoint of today s investors however the previous studies fail to offer operational guidance for international diversification for two important reasons first it is now questionable whether the past findings are still relevant under the current flexible exchange rate regime second by being ex post in nature the past studies ignored the issue of estimation risk or parameter uncertainty and therefore may have overstated the realizable portion of the potential gains from international diversification fluctuating exchange rates are likely to mitigate the potential gains from international diversification by making investment in foreign securities more risky as will be shown later a fluctuating exchange rate contributes to the risk of foreign investment not only through its own variance but also through its positive covariances with the local stock market returns during our sample period of 1980 through 1985 for example exchange rate volatility is found to account for about fifty percent of the volatility of dollar returns from investment in the stock markets of such major countries as germany japan and the u k furthermore the exchange rate changes vis a vis the u s dollar are found to be

are the economy and the environment decoupling a comparative international study 1960 20051 ecological modernization theory posits that even though economic development harms the environment the magnitude of the harmful link decreases over the course of development in contrast the treadmill of production theory argues that the strong relationship between environmental harms and economic development will remain constant or possibly increase through time to evaluate these competing propositions interactions between economic development and time are used in cross national panel analyses of three measures of carbon dioxide emissions the results vary across the three outcomes as well as between developed and less developed countries providing mixed support for both theoretical perspectives the authors conclude by discussing how both theories could benefit from engaging contemporary research concerning changes within the transnational organization of production and the structure of international trade and how these global shifts influence environment economic development relationships

does urbanization increase pollutant emission and energy intensity evidence from some asian developing economies abstractthis paper aims to investigate the effects of urbanization on pollutant emissions and energy intensity in selected asian developing countries after controlling for the effects of disaggrega

trickle down consumption abstract we document that nonrich households consume a larger share of their current income when exposed to higher top income and consumption levels permanent income wealth effects and upward local price pressures cannot provide the sole explanation for this finding instead we show that the budget shares that nonrich households allocate to more visible goods and services rise with top income levels consistent with status maintaining explanations for our primary finding nonrich households might have saved up to 3 more annually by the mid 2000s had incomes at the top grown at the same rate as median income since the early 1980s

3 d sustainability an approach for priority setting in situation of conflicting interests towards a sustainable development abstract this paper aims to provide a new approach to objectively assess hierarchies and priority setting in the relationship between environmental social and economic sustainability within sustainable development after a literature review several widely used conceptual figures diagrams describing this relationship were assessed using swot analyses in order to identify the major weaknesses in these pictorial descriptions based on the findings a new concept called 3 d sustainability has been developed and is presented visually as well as is described in the text this concept introduces and ranks criteria for the assessment of hierarchies within and conflicts of interests between social environmental and economic sustainability the three dimensions of sustainability these criteria are applied to several existing hierarchies and solutions to conflicts of interests based on the swot analyses the main shortcomings of the widely used conceptual figures were identified as 1 misinterpretation of embeddings 2 misjudgement of equity between the three dimensions of sustainability 3 a lack of expression of limitations and 4 lack of adequate decision support these shortcomings are overcome theoretically and in practice by 3 d sustainability a slightly more complex but conceptually richer figure than the widely used conceptual figures assessed in particular the shift of the burden of proof within the three sustainability dimensions is argued as a main solution the application of the criteria of 3 d sustainability to several real examples indicates its usefulness in decision support while justifying more sustainable hierarchies and solutions in the settlement of conflicts of interests within the three sustainability dimensions

does urbanization lead to less energy use and lower co2 emissions a cross country analysis despite the relationship between urbanization energy use and co2 emissions has been extensively studied in recent years little attention has been paid to differences in development stages or income levels most previous studies have implicitly assumed that the impact of urbanization is homogenous for all countries this assumption can be questionable as there are many characteristic differences among countries of different levels of affluence this paper investigates empirically the effects of urbanization on energy use and co2 emissions with consideration of the different development stages using the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat model and a balanced panel dataset of 99 countries over the period 1975 2005 the findings suggest that the impact of urbanization on energy use and emissions varies across the stages of development surprisingly urbanization decreases energy use in the low income group while it increases energy use in the middle and high income groups the impact of urbanization on emissions is positive for all the income groups but it is more pronounced in the middle income group than in the other income groups these novel findings not only help advance the existing literature but also can be of special interest to policy makers and urban planners

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

how organizational and global factors condition the effects of energy efficiency on co2 emission rebounds among the world s power plants the united nations intergovernmental panel on climate change ipcc the international energy agency iea and several nations suggest that energy efficiency is an effective strategy for reducing energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions skeptics contend that because efficiency lowers the price of energy and energy services it may actually increase demand for them causing total emissions to rise while both sides of this debate have researched the magnitude of these so called rebound effects among end use consumers researchers have paid less attention to the conditions under which direct rebounds cause co2 emissions to rise among industrial producers in particular researchers have yet to explore how organizational and global factors might condition the effects of efficiency on emissions among power plants the world s most concentrated sources of anthropogenic greenhouse gases here we use a unique dataset containing nearly every fossil fuel power plant in the world to determine whether the impact of efficiency on emissions varies by plants age size and location in global economic and normative systems findings reveal that each of these factors has a significant interaction with efficiency and thus shapes environmentally destructive rebound effects

currency hedging for international portfolios this paper examines the benefits from currency hedging both for speculative and risk minimization motives in international bond and equity portfolios the riskreturn performances of globally diversified portfolios are compared with and without forward contracts over the period 1974 to 1990 inclusion of forward contracts results in statistically significant improvements in the performance of unconditional portfolios containing bonds conditional strategies are also implemented both in sample and out of sample and are shown to both significantly improve the risk return tradeoff of global portfolios and to outperform unconditional hedging strategies whether international portfolios should be hedged against currency risks is the subject of an active debate the theoretical side of the debate has been closely associated with two strands in the academic literature international asset pricing and optimal hedging in the futures markets in the international asset pricing model iapm of solnik 1974 optimal portfolios contain positions in forward contracts or equivalently foreign currency denominated bills these positions which can differ from the positions in foreign stocks have since been termed hedges black 1990 shows that under additional assumptions the hedge ratios should be identical for all investors regardless of their nationality universality and that investors should never fully hedge their foreign currency exposures similarly theoretical models from the futures literature produce demands for hedging instruments that contain both speculative and hedging components the empirical issue unanswered so far is whether adding forward contracts to international portfolios significantly improves the risk return profile of global investments empirical research has barely begun to respond to the challenges of theoretical models there exists little empirical evidence on either the relevance of black s universal hedge ratios or the optimality of hedge ratios less than one instead researchers have concentrated on the benefits of fully hedging exchange risk for example eun and resnick 1988 indicate that stock portfolios perform better when fully hedged but offer no statistical tests

medicaid insurance in old age the old age provisions of the medicaid program were designed to insure retirees against medical expenses we estimate a structural model of savings and medical spending and use it to compute the distribution of lifetime medicaid transfers and medicaid valuations across currently single retirees compensating variation calculations indicate that current retirees value medicaid insurance at more than its actuarial cost but that most would value an expansion of the current medicaid program at less than its cost these findings suggest that for current single retirees the medicaid program may be of the approximately right size

influential factors of carbon emissions intensity in oecd countries evidence from symbolic regression abstract carbon emissions intensity is used as a yardstick to evaluate the relative extent of carbon emissions of a country to reduce carbon emissions intensity it is crucial to find out the dominant factors that enhance it and take actions to manage them this study is an attempt to employ symbolic regression method to explore the most influential factors of carbon emissions intensity in 34 oecd member countries using data from 1995 to 2014 rooted in genetic programming symbolic regression method can explore the inherent functional structures amidst the variables and could discover the influential factors robotically the results confirm that the influential factors of carbon emissions intensity vary from country to country gdp is found as the most frequent and important factor of carbon emissions intensity in 17 countries each of industrialization and technological innovation is the prominent factor in every 4 countries and each of urbanization total population and foreign direct investment plays a pro active role in 3 individual nations based on the empirical results some policy implications are also conferred

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

does decreasing working time reduce environmental pressures new evidence based on dynamic panel approach abstract there is a growing interest in the correlation between working time and environmental pressures but prior empirical studies were mostly focused on static methods within limited country groups to fill the gap this study aims to stimulate the discussion by distinguishing between different time periods for developed and developing country groups respectively in particular we contribute to a further understanding of the environmental effects of working time reduction policies by comparing the differences under the dynamic framework of system generalized method of moments we applied this dynamic panel regression approach for 55 countries worldwide over the period 1980 2010 and employing carbon emissions per capita as the environmental indicator in general results confirmed the significant relationship between hours of work and environmental impacts in developed economies although this is not the case for the developing counterparts interestingly the significant correlations for the developed country group turned from positive during the first sub period 1980 2000 to negative during the second sub period 2001 2010 connecting these results with previous literature we proposed the reasons of rebound energy use derived from certain leisure activities which were more energy intensive if excessive non working time provided

graduate education in ecological economics abstract interest in graduate education in ecological economics is increasing however no formal plan of study for a phd in ecological economics has been disseminated the lack of a formal plan is problematic as the field of ecological economics matures interest grows and new programs are being developed this paper attempts to fill a void by creating a program of study addressing the proficiencies a graduate student in ecological economics should have upon completion of his her phd based on the us educational system the plan of study presented in this paper has been developed to make the graduate of an ecological economics program as competitive on the labor market as students awarded traditional economics degrees the plan i describe is created to meet the requirements necessary for a phd in ecological economics further fields of specialization are suggested to complement the core of an ecological economics program to enhance the education process and to give the student with an ecological economics degree a higher level of marketability

the united states bilateral debt for nature swaps and forest loss a cross national analysis we engage with the theoretical and empirical literature on the effectiveness of debt for nature swaps in promoting environmental protection we present cross national evidence that us bilateral deb

the economic effects of climate change greenhouse gas emissions are fundamental both to the world s energy system and to its food production the production of co2 the predominant gas implicated in climate change is intrinsic to fossil fuel combustion specifically thermal energy is generated by breaking the chemical bonds in the carbohydrates oil coal and natural gas and oxidizing the components to co2 and h2o one cannot have cheap energy without carbon dioxide emissions similarly methane ch4 emissions an important greenhouse gas in its own right are necessary to prevent the build up of hydrogen in anaerobic digestion and decomposition one cannot have beef mutton dairy or rice without methane emissions climate change is the mother of all externalities larger more complex and more uncertain than any other environmental problem the sources of greenhouse gas emissions are more diffuse than any other environmental problem every company every farm every household emits some greenhouse gases the effects are similarly pervasive weather affects agriculture energy use health and many aspects of nature which in turn affects everything and everyone the causes and consequences of climate change are very diverse and those in low income countries who contribute least to climate change are most vulnerable to its effects climate change is also a long term problem some greenhouse gases have an atmospheric life time measured in tens of thousands of years the quantities of emissions involved are enormous in 2000 carbon dioxide emissions alone and excluding land use change were 24 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide tco2

the value of life and the rise in health spending over the past half century americans spent a rising share of total economic resources on health and enjoyed substantially longer lives as a result debate on health policy often focuses on limiting the growth of health spending we investigate an issue central to this debate is the growth of health spending a rational response to changing economic conditions notably the growth of income per person we develop a model based on standard economic assumptions and argue that this is indeed the case standard preferences of the kind used widely in economics to study consumption asset pricing and labor supply imply that health spending is a superior good with an income elasticity well above one as people get richer and consumption rises the marginal utility of consumption falls rapidly spending on health to extend life allows individuals to purchase additional periods of utility the marginal utility of life extension does not decline as a result the optimal composition of total spending shifts toward health and the health share grows along with income in projections based on the quantitative analysis of our model the optimal health share of spending seems likely to exceed 30 percent by the middle of the century

international portfolio management with affine policies abstract while dynamic decision making has traditionally been represented as scenario trees these may become severely intractable and difficult to compute with an increasing number of time periods we present an alternative tractable approach to multiperiod international portfolio optimization based on an affine dependence between the decision variables and the past returns because local asset and currency returns are modeled separately the original model is non linear and non convex with the aid of robust optimization techniques however we develop a tractable semidefinite programming formulation of our model where the uncertain returns are contained in an ellipsoidal uncertainty set we add to our formulation the minimization of the worst case value at risk and show the close relationship with robust optimization numerical results demonstrate the potential gains from considering a dynamic multiperiod setting relative to a single stage approach

an equilibrium framework for the analysis of a degrowth society with asymmetric agents sharing and basic income abstract this paper presents a novel equilibrium framework allowing for asymmetries in the initial wealth allocations labour supplies as well as in the preferences of optimizing agents the framework is applied to study a degrowth society where a subset of agents voluntarily limit their material consumption thereby complying with voluntary simplicity vs at micro level the utility maximization problems of asymmetric agents are formulated and solved for optimal labour supplies new macro level equilibrium solutions accounting for wealth inequality are presented based on different labour supply models the equilibrium welfare is measured using a bernoully nash aggregate an increase in the share of the vs type agents implies a degrowth transition to a lower level of average consumption analysis of the equilibrium framework shows that degrowth whereby average market based consumption falls improves the equilibrium welfare assuming the vs type agents have sufficient resources enabling a reduction in labour supplies sharing collaborative consumption and basic income support welfare increasing degrowth any growing economy can eventually reach the size at which degrowth would improve the welfare simulations suggest that degrowth can also yield a pareto improvement in welfare

state level renewable electricity policies and reductions in carbon emissions abstract a wide range of renewable electricity policies has been adopted at the state level in the united states but to date there has been no large scale empirical assessment of the effect of these policies on carbon emissions such an assessment is important because scholars have pointed out that increases in renewable electricity will not necessarily lead to declines in carbon emissions we examine the effects of a range of policies across 39 states we find significant and robust decreases in carbon emissions associated with the introduction of public benefit funds a form of carbon tax adopted by 19 states to date our aim in this paper is not to provide a final judgment on these policies many of which may not have been in place long enough to show strong effects but to shift the attention of the research community away from proximate measures such as increases in clean electricity generation and onto measurement of lower carbon emissions

sustainable growth criteria minimum benchmarks and scenarios for employment and the environment abstract the relationship of economic growth and environmental impact has spurred fierce debates between growth optimists referring to the phenomenon of the environmental kuznets curve and pessimists referring to the limits to growth however no operational set of simple criteria has been developed so far to assess the sustainability of a given growth pattern this is all the more true for measures combining environmental and social criteria the paper undertakes to sketch out such criteria and to assess them by applying them to transdiciplinary sustainability scenarios and model simulations with panta rhei one of the most complex models of the german economy theoretical considerations as well as the empirical work with the model demonstrate that there are indeed trade offs between economic growth and environmental impacts and a positive correlation of growth and employment nonetheless it is still possible to develop carefully orchestrated strategies that combine economic competitiveness low unemployment rates and an easing of the pressure on the environment social and technical innovation reduced working time a modernised social security system green taxes and salary increases proportional to labour productivity growth are essential parts of any such strategy the triple effectiveness of such strategies regarding environmental social and economic sustainability is demonstrated by the model runs

growth degrowth and climate change a scenario analysis article i nfo article history the paper proceeds with a discussion of the interplay of scale and intensity in determining greenhouse gas emissions this is followed by the presentation of several macroeconomic scenarios using lowgrow a simulation model of the canadian economy the scenarios considered are business as usual which is a projection into the future of past trends selective growth in which differential growth rates are applied to parts of the economy according to their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and degrowth where the average gdp capita of canadians is reduced towards a level more consistent with a world economy the size of which respects global environmental limits the paper ends with a comparison of the scenarios 2011 published by elsevier b v

more leisure or higher pay a mixed methods study on reducing working time in austria working time reduction has become a central topic in the debate on social ecological transformation as it has the potential to mitigate unemployment improve well being and reduce environmental pressures this article analyses which groups of employees want to reduce their working time and for which reasons a novel working time policy in austria the leisure option provides a unique possibility to examine this question this policy enables employees to choose between a wage increase and more leisure time we use a mixed methods approach to analyse employees preferences and the decision to reduce working time with two empirical parts run in parallel a binary logit regression based on austrian microcensus 2012 data investigates factors associated with a preference for reduced working time qualitative interviews are conducted among employees at a firm in the electronics industry that offers the leisure option our results suggest that working time preferences are to a large extent shaped by social norms such as the full time working norm and gender roles we also find that the desire to work less is strongly moulded by personal values placed either on leisure and family time or on financial security

universal hedging optimizing currency risk and reward in international equity portfolios investors can increase their returns by holding foreign stocks in addition to domestic ones they can also gain by taking the appropriate amount of exchange risk but what amount is appropriate assume that investors see the world in light of their own consumption goods and count both risk and expected return when figuring their optimum hedges assume that they share common views on stocks and currencies and that markets are liquid and there are no barriers to international investing in this perfect world it is possible to derive a formula for the optimal hedge ratio this formula requires three basic inputs the average across countries of the expected returns on the world market portfolio the average across countries of the volatility of the world market portfolio and the average across all pairs of countries of exchange rate volatility these values can be estimated from historical data the formula in turn gives the circumstances for three rules 1 hedge foreign equity 2 hedge less than 100

the economic and financial dimensions of degrowth abstract we respond to the call for future research on degrowth and specifically analyze the implications of economic degrowth on the monetary and financial system we argue that any early indications of degrowth would cause the stock market to crash which would trigger further deleveraging contagion and a deflation as a result the economy would implode which would eventually allow for a new rapid growth cycle given the likely extraordinary fiscal and monetary policy response during the implosion thus in our view degrowth as an explicit strategy option is economically unsustainable and unfeasible as a limitation our analysis centers on the examples of unplanned crisis leading to an economic implosion which imperfectly represent the idea of planned voluntary degrowth

the growth discourse growth policy and sustainable development two thought experiments abstract this paper addresses three aspects of growth the discourse the policy and the impacts the growth discourse claims that the central factor for social economic political and environmental progress is economic growth it is assumed to create wealth and provide the necessary means for social and environmental purposes on the basis of the growth discourse different growth policies can be derived based on different economic and political ideologies in order to reveal the implications of de facto degrowth two thought experiments are conducted for physical and economic end to growth strategies the latter is capable of meeting environmental objectives but implies significant social tensions and hardships and calls for transition strategies consisting of carefully designed steps

what are political leaders environmental intentions the impact of social identification processes and macro economic conditions abstract evidence of continued environmental degradation has led to a questioning of the traditional vision of unlimited economic growth in favour of sustainable development although several explicit environmental strategies were designed at the supranational level the pursuit of environmental sustainability remains an aim driven by political concerns at the country level this study aims to investigate the role of both internal cognitive and motivational factors and external social forces and macro economic conditions contexts in influencing the propensity of political leaders regarding environmental matters the findings indicate that cognitive and motivational factors tend to shape the environmental intentions of political leaders whereas the external context does not have a significant impact our results suggest that the political leaders propensity for addressing environmental matters is largely affected by the desire of leaders to establish or confirm an individual status through political processes or to conform to group norms however younger political leaders demonstrate a higher environmental propensity than do older leaders

decoupling analysis of world economic growth and co2 emissions a study comparing developed and developing countries abstract this study discusses decoupling trends in world economic growth and co2 emissions based on decoupling theories the decoupling trends of economic growth and co2 emissions in typical developed and developing countries in 1965 2015 are compared by using an oecd decoupling factor model and tapio elastic analysis tea method and the igtx decoupling model on this basis this study evaluates correlations of these three decoupling models by employing the spearman s rank correlation coefficient the research indicates that owing to the igtx decoupling model being easily affected by other non environmental factors the shorter the research period of interest the more easily the decoupling indices distort while the accuracy of the tea method is not limited by the length of the research period of interest with respect to the overall decoupling trend the research shows that 1 strong decoupling is found in developed countries and slightly increases in the stabilisation thereof the decoupling state in the united kingdom and germany is more stable than that of the united states and france 2 developing countries demonstrate weak decoupling that fluctuates significantly and lacks regularity the stabilisation and optimisation of china in decoupling process are better than those of brazil and india finally according to research conclusions relevant policies and suggestions are proposed in view of energy savings and emissions reduction in developing countries

effects of higher order moments on the newsvendor problem abstract in this paper we propose a stochastic programming model for the well known single period newsvendor problem by adopting the conditional value at risk cvar as the risk metric in the objective function the demand uncertainty is modeled in terms of discrete scenarios that reflect the empirical distributions implied by market demand data our numerical results demonstrate that the higher order moments skewness and kurtosis of demand have obvious effects on the newsvendor problem and the stochastic programming framework provides a flexible and effective decision support tool for the newsvendor problem

on modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change with climate change as prototype example this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low probability high impact catastrophes even when updated by bayesian learning uncertain structural parameters induce a critical tail fattening of posterior predictive distributions such fattened tails have strong im plications for situations like climate change where a catastrophe is theoretically possible because prior knowledge cannot place sufficiently narrow bounds on overall damages this paper shows that the economic consequences of fat tailed structural uncertainty along with unsureness about high temperature damages can readily outweigh the effects of discounting in climate change policy analysis

on valuing and hedging european options when volatility is estimated directly abstract we quantify the effects on contingent claim valuation of using an estimator for the unknown volatility of a geometric brownian motion gbm process the theme of the paper is to show what difficulties can arise when failing to account for estimation risk our narrative uses a direct estimator of volatility based on the sample standard deviation of increments of the underlying brownian motion after replacing the direct estimator into the gbm we derive the resulting distribution function of the approximated gbm for any time point this allows us to present post estimation distributions and valuation formulae for an assortment of european contingent claims that are in accord with many of the basic properties of the underlying risk neutral process and yet better reflect the additional uncertainties and risks that exist in the black scholes merton paradigm

integrated dynamic models for hedging international portfolio risks abstract we develop scenario based stochastic programming models for hedging the risks of international portfolios using options the models provide increasing level of integration in managing market and foreign exchange fx risks we start with a single stage model with currency options for selective hedging of fx risks while market risk is addressed through diversification we add stock options to hedge market risks and add quantos and currency options to develop an integrated model using an innovative method to price quantos on the scenario tree underpinning the stochastic program the models are extended to multi stage settings backtesting on market data over a 14 year period that includes the global financial crisis of 2008 we demonstrate the effectiveness of taking increasingly integrated views of risk management simultaneous hedging of market and fx risks using stock and currency options has the best ex post performance the differences are economically significant and statistical significance is established through rigorous hypothesis testing the models are particularly effective during the crisis test results show that two stage models outperform their single stage counterparts regardless of the hedging strategy

comment on generating scenario trees for multistage decision problems in models of decision making under uncertainty one typically has to approximate the uncertainties by a limited number of discrete outcomes ha yland and wallace 2001 formulate a nonlinear programming problem to generate sucha limited number of discrete outcomes while satisfying specified statistical properties they have developed and employed this method for a stochastic multistage asset allocation problem when the method is applied to such financial optimization problems under uncertainty we argue here that it does not suffice to match statistical properties to obtain realistic outcomes the limited description of the uncertainty in such models should also exclude arbitrage opportunities and thereby be consistent with financial asset pricing theory we illustrate that the method proposed by ha yland and wallace can result in arbitrage opportunities in the scenario tree if only statistical properties are imposed we show how one can check ex post for the presence of arbitrage opportunities in a scenario tree by checking for the existence of solutions to sets of linear equations arbitrage opportunities can also be precluded ex ante in the scenario tree by adding constraints to the nonlinear programming problem of ha yland and wallace

selecting a portfolio with skewness recent evidence from us european and latin american equity markets abstract polynomial goal programming in which investor preferences for skewness can be incorporated is utilized to determine the optimal portfolio from latin american us and european capital markets the empirical findings suggest that the incorporation of skewness into an investor s portfolio decision causes a major change in the resultant optimal portfolio the empirical evidence indicates that investors do trade expected return of the portfolio for skewness