assessing economic value added by university based new venture outreach programs abstract a new venture development office was set up in a university to solicit screen and allocate community ventures into upper level undergraduate and graduate project courses innovative ventures in the early stages of development were allocated according to 1 the project requirements of different courses and 2 the assessed needs of the ventures themselves during 1984 89 different projects with a weighted average of 125 manhours per project were run through the new venture office students who conducted the projects included law students industrial design students and a few undergraduate commerce students although the majority of the work was done by second year mba students most of the mba students were parttime students holding middle management positions and having five or more years of relevant business experience projects were run through twelve different courses and a seed capital conference the program was conceptualized and coordinated by a number of professors teaching within an entrepreneurship concentration in an mba program early in 1985 a telephone survey of 50 of the 63 entrepreneurs who had projects in the program was completed these people were asked to systematically and realistically assess the resulting net benefits to their ventures along a number of different prespecified dimensions the total value added was computed to be 1 75 million cdn which stands in contrast to the direct out of pocket cost of the program which was only 75 000 cdn the individual dimensions of value added that were measured included time gained or saved in advancing their new venture knowledge understanding gained of new venture development information added of use in pursuing their new venture contacts made in support of their new venture strategic changes made and overall value of the experience additionally respondents were asked to report whether or not they had secured new capital injections increased or decreased employee levels or made structural advances in their ventures rather than assume that the program was the primary instigator of all such changes the respondents were asked to assess the relative impact of the program along appropriate dimensions the program was perceived to have had a significant influence on most of the dimensions measured a summary of the major results includes average value added of time saved or gained 6 097 50 average valeu added of new knowledge about venture development 9 389 47 average value added of new information added 6 293 48 average value added of new contracts made 7 238 89 average value added of strategy changes 16 937 50 average value added of overall involvement in the program 37 269 00 net employment generated 20 4 fte and new capital raised 5 1 million certain shortcomings of the research are discussed including the validity and reliability of the value added measures research is continuing to validate the findings and refine the program

recent developments in consumer credit risk assessment consumer credit risk assessment involves the use of risk assessment tools to manage a borrower s account from the time of pre screening a potential application through to the management of the account during its life and possible write off the riskiness of lending to a credit applicant is usually estimated using a logistic regression model though researchers have considered many other types of classifier and whilst preliminary evidence suggest support vector machines seem to be the most accurate data quality issues may prevent these laboratory based results from being achieved in practice the training of a classifier on a sample of accepted applicants rather than on a sample representative of the applicant population seems not to result in bias though it does result in difficulties in setting the cut off profit scoring is a promising line of research and the basel 2 accord has had profound implications for the way in which credit applicants are assessed and bank policies adopted

the influence of competitive positioning and rivalry on emerging market risk assessment rating agencies play a pivotal role in international credit transactions their sovereign risk assessments are largely thought to reflect objective evaluations of the creditworthiness of potential borrowers we test this assumption by examining the role that competitive positioning and dynamics play in the risk assessments these agencies provide our analyses of agency risk assessments for emerging market sovereign borrowers indicate that they are significantly related to agency positioning as an incumbent or insurgent new entrant to agency specialization in sovereigns from particular geographic regions and in some instances to the level of agency rivalry in a specific sovereign market our findings suggest both significant general and contingent links between foreign investment risk assessment and competitive positioning and rivalry among agencies

barriers to energy efficiency a comparison across the german commercial and services sector abstract based on a large sample for the german commercial and services sector this paper econometrically assesses the relevance of various types of barriers to energy efficiency at the sectoral level and across fifteen sub sectors the results at the level of entire sectors suggest that the lack of information about energy consumption patterns and about energy efficiency measures lack of staff time priority setting within organizations and in particular the investor user dilemma are all relevant barriers allowing for sector specific differences in the relevance of these individual barriers yields a more heterogeneous picture the numbers and types of relevant barriers vary across sub sectors and the majority of sub sectors are subject to relatively few barriers the statistically most significant barriers are found for the sub sector of public administrations these findings are robust independent of whether the definition of an organization s energy efficiency performance includes only measures that have actually been realized or also those that are being planned for planned projects however organizations appear to underestimate internal priority setting as a barrier to energy efficiency

enterprise level amount of energy saved targets in china weaknesses and a way forward abstract recognizing the industrial sector s high energy use and vast potential for energy saving many national governments have established voluntary or negotiated agreements that set quantitative energy saving targets for individual industrial enterprises the most commonly used energy saving targets worldwide are volume and energy intensity targets since 2006 the chinese government has set mandatory enterprise level energy saving targets in terms of the amount of energy saved this represents a unique category that differs from both volume and energy intensity targets based on first hand data collected at ten case enterprises this paper represents one of the first attempts to verify the reliability of the amount of energy saved data reported by the chinese government and to rigorously and systematically investigate the inherent weaknesses of the amount of energy saved targets through a comparison with the mainstream categories of energy saving targets the ten case enterprises reported four different types of amount of energy saved while all of the case enterprises claimed full achievement of their amount of energy saved targets four enterprises exaggerated their performance by violating the national standard for calculating the amount of energy saved of enterprises the paper thus hypothesizes that the national top 1000 enterprise program s alleged achievement of performance 65 higher relative to its amount of energy saved target is likely an overestimation although amount of energy saved targets constitute an innovative energy saving indicator they do not represent a step forward from conventional volume and intensity targets because of the following four weaknesses 1 amount of energy saved targets provide limited potential for comparison given the different types of amount of energy saved and the different calculation methods 2 they generate uncertain environmental outcomes as it is possible to meet a portion of an amount of energy saved target through production volume expansion 3 they are difficult to enforce due to the complexity of data verification on the part of local government agencies and 4 they are poorly correlated with the national target for reducing energy intensity amount of energy saved targets should therefore be replaced with double control targets that impose both volume and intensity targets on industrial enterprises

beyond case studies barriers to energy efficiency in commerce and the services sector to assess the empirical relevance of various barriers to the diffusion of energy efficient measures we conduct econometric analyses for 19 sub sectors in the german commercial and services sectors results from estimating a separate logit model for each sub sector suggest that the most important barriers are the investor user dilemma and the lack of information about energy consumption patterns typically multiple types of barriers are found to be statistically significant but they vary considerably across sub sectors finally we discuss policy implications for the most relevant barriers

factors impacting investments in energy efficiency and clean technologies empirical evidence from slovenian manufacturing firms abstract promoting energy efficiency is one of the top priorities of the eu energy strategy manufacturing is identified there as one of the sectors holding the potential for substantial energy efficiency improvements this paper therefore examines factors impacting firms decisions to invest in energy efficiency and clean technologies drawing on the energy efficiency gap literature the impact of three groups of factors is analysed namely economic firm specific characteristics and market drivers organisational and regulatory employing probit and bivariate probit models on a panel data set for 848 slovenian manufacturing firms over 7 years 2005 2011 the paper finds that decisions to invest in energy efficiency and in clean technologies are impacted by similar yet not identical factors the following factors significantly increase the likelihood of both energy efficiency and clean technology investments share of energy costs market share and export orientation importantly other types of investments except for investments in the expansion of existing capacities do not crowd out energy efficiency or clean technology investments on the other hand foreign ownership and managers expectations of future demand only impact energy efficiency investments while clean technology investments are influenced by managers expectations of the future business condition of the firm further the economic and financial crisis reduces the likelihood of clean technology investments but not energy efficiency investments this is explained by the fact that investments in energy efficiency represent a cost effective solution for the firm the same argumentation can be used to explain why high energy costs also play an important role for investments in clean technology in addition the likelihood to invest is found to be importantly influenced by industry specific characteristics which captures the effect of industry differences in environmental regulation and other conditions the paper adds to the existing literature in three important ways it employs data on actual rather than intended investments it examines investment decisions over a number of years thereby allowing for an analysis of the impact of the recession on firms decisions and it examines relationships among different types of investments accounting for a potential crowding out effect based on the paper s findings it can be concluded that the energy efficiency gap is less likely to exist in large and well performing firms implying that policy measures should primarily target less energy intensive small and medium sized enterprises

incentives for investment in energy efficiency an econometric evaluation and policy implications technical studies suggest that there exist many opportunities to improve energy efficiency and that a substantial proportion is profitable by current business standards this study deals with the question why so many of these profitable opportunities are not used reasons for not implementing profitable opportunities are idetified and their effect is estimated on the basis ofa survey among dutch firms designed specifically for this study the reasons that prevail indicate what policy measures may accompany energy taxes in the pursuit of energy efficiency improvement in addition energy efficiency elasticities are estimated as well as the factors that determine the elasticities these too indicate opportunities for government policy if it wants to improve the effectiveness of energy taxes

industrial structure energy saving regulations and energy intensity evidence from chinese cities abstract exploring the drivers of declining energy intensity is necessary in order to accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy in china to date studies have typically adopted case analysis to link enterprise features and energy saving performance the impact of internal industrial configuration in terms of size and ownership structure on aggregate energy intensity remains to be examined to fill this research gap this paper tests the impact of the internal structure of industries on city level energy intensity by employing a unique panel dataset of 283 cities for the period 2005 to 2010 the driscoll kraay method and instrumental variable are used to treat residual cross sectional dependence and endogeneity respectively results suggest that small scale enterprises exerts a negative effect on energy intensity a 1 increase in the output value proportion of small sized firms will lead to a decrease in total energy intensity of 0 067 in contrast the same change by medium enterprises will raise energy intensity by 0 031 a negative and or non significant coefficient suggests that for most energy intensive large and state owned enterprises china s 2006 top down energy saving regulation has been quite effective in targeting key energy intensive enterprises in china the findings reveal that state owned enterprises soes can act as promoters of rather than barriers to low carbon policy implementation in china given that the effectiveness of energy saving regulation will be undermined as a result of diluted regulatory strength in each enterprise market oriented energy price reform is proposed as a fundamental driver for guaranteeing a continual decline in energy intensity

quantitative methods in credit management a survey many static and dynamic models have been used to assist decision making in the area of consumer and commercial credit the decisions of interest include whether to extend credit how much credit to extend when collections on delinquent accounts should be initiated and what action should be taken we survey the use of discriminant analysis decision trees and expert systems for static decisions and dynamic programming linear programming and markov chains for dynamic decision models since these models do not operate in a vacuum we discuss some important aspects of credit management in practice e g legal considerations sources of data and statistical validation of the methodology we provide our perspective on the state of the art in theory and in practice

barriers to industrial energy efficiency investments in greece abstract this paper sets out to investigate the main determinants of industrial decision making process with respect to energy efficiency investments based on a survey among greek industries in the empirical analysis probit models are employed the results support that an energy saving campaign should regard industries as subgroups with different needs and different managerial aspects the importance of qualified employees is also established from this survey an energy conservation framework would be more effective if the diffusion of information with regard to industrial energy saving investments is based on investment in human capital

energy and climate policy in china s twelfth five year plan a paradigm shift the twelfth five year plan fyp endorsed by the people s national congress in march 2011 plays a crucial role in shaping china s development trajectory over the next decades and especially for the fulfillment of the 40 45 carbon intensity reduction target by 2020 the plan will condition both the medium and long term perspectives of economic restructuring rebalance between the inclusive economic growth and environmental objectives which are compounded by multiple constraints faced by china such as aging population natural resources depletion energy supply security and environmental deterioration this article investigates the major energy and climate targets and actions specified in the 12th fyp to gain insights into the nature and magnitude of challenges and difficulties with regard to the medium and long run economic and environmental policies it points out that china should articulate sectoral policies with the global climate mitigation targets to avoid long term carbon lock in based on an in depth analysis of the objectives in the plan it is argued that the implementation should include mainstreaming developments of appropriate instruments to support cost effective energy efficiency improvements and carbon intensity reduction in the next five years

entrepreneurship education in the nineties abstract bringing entrepreneurship education into the community support infrastructure poses one of the more important economic development issue for the 1990s aspart of the new strategy for job creation entrepreneurship education holds promise as an integral component in a community s venture support system along with incubators innovation centers technology transfer offices science parks and venture capital operations since new venture success is foremost a function of entrepreneurial knowledge and know how entrepreneurship education may be the most promising of these economic development mechanisms unfortunately it may be the most difficult to implement generally the extent and nature of education required by modern aspiring entrepreneurs is not well understood many would see entrepreneurship education as strictly an add on to current education in management or engineering such is the option of minimal use the real promise or entrepreneurship education will be realized when it is strategically organized for economic development and job creation this article traces the recent history of entrepreneurship education before proceeding to deal with a number of questions facing those who would use entrepreneurship education as part of a modern economic development strategy 1 1 why is entrepreneurship education important 2 2 how should it be distinguished from related programs 3 3 how will success be measured 4 4 who will be the students 5 5 how will the subject be taught 6 6 what will be the curriculum 7 7 who will be the teachers

the efficiency paradox bureaucratic and organizational barriers to profitable energy saving investments abstract the paradox of why profitable energy saving investments are not undertaken continues to provoke debate the underlying phenomenon might be called the efficiency paradox because it represents a case in which business firms which are often presumed or taken axiomatically to be economically efficient make decisions that do not maximize profits new data from one of the us environmental protection agency s voluntary pollution prevention programs enables this paradox to be explored statistically the data show that both the level and variation in returns to lighting upgrade investments cannot be explained by standard economic models substantial gains in energy efficiency can be achieved without sacrificing profitability both economic and organizational factors account for some of the variation in observed returns to these investments but the results suggest a need for improved and more comprehensive theories of the investment behavior of firms and other organizations

energy performance contract models for the diffusion of green manufacturing technologies in china a stakeholder analysis from smes perspective abstract small and medium sized enterprises smes are significant to china s emission reduction programme this research aims to improve our understanding of the challenge of diffusing green manufacturing technologies among smes in china specifically this study examines the chinese government s effort to facilitate reduction of energy consumption among smes through energy performance contracts epcs to incentivize domestic manufacturers to adopt energy efficient measures eems in order to reduce demand for energy and corresponding drop in emissions the data is gathered from relevant epc stakeholders in the national motor upgrading demonstration project and its implementation in dongguan city which is based on 30 in depth interviews and 6 focus group discussions using stakeholder analysis this study finds that guaranteed energy savings model is the favorite model in implementation given the gained benefits outweigh committed resources and the control capability overrides possible risks among the two core stakeholders the outcomes of this study may allow the government to have a clear understanding of stakeholder perception of the different epc models used in china so the design and deployment of these mechanisms can be improved

energy conservation through energy service companies empirical analysis from china abstract china s energy service companies escos have developed only modestly despite favorable political and market conditions we argue that with sophisticated market institutions still evolving in china trust based relations between escos and energy customers are essential for successful implementation of energy efficiency projects chinese escos who are predominantly small and private enterprises perform poorly in terms of trust building because they are disembedded from local business social and political networks we conclude that in the current institutional setting the esco model based on market relations has serious limitations and is unlikely to lead to large scale implementation of energy efficiency projects in china

new venture development the costs and benefits of public sector assistance abstract in recent years there has been an extraordinary level of entrepreneurial activity occurring in the united states venture start ups new incorporations even bankruptcies are reaching record numbers concurrent with the increase in entrepreneurial activity has been an effort within the reagan administration to privatize public sector programs designed to aid new and small ongoing business ventures the premise behind this movement is that private sector initiatives can better and more efficiently serve the needs of entrepreneurs and small business managers and can also offer new business opportunities for some entrepreneurs at the same time however privatization could reduce the assistance programs currently targeting fledgling ventures many of which are unable to afford a private consultant the purpose of this article is to examine the economic impact of one public sector assistance program the small business development center sbdc in terms of its contributions to new venture initiation in georgia and south carolina the focus on the sbdc program is appropriate since over 50 of the counseling activities of most of the centers is devoted to pre venture clients i e individuals or groups considering starting a business this study is important and timely not only in respect to assessing the effectiveness of public sector assistance programs for pre ventures but also for assessing whether it is worthwhile from an economic perspective to offer assistance to such individuals in the first place although it is difficult to be precise in attributing cause to effects in dynamic business ventures our study indicates that the small business development center s client sample experienced a greater than expected number of business starts and a higher than expected rate of survival the results suggest that the net taxable sales generated by these new ventures in 1984 was approximately 20 million in georgia and 10 million in south carolina results also suggest that almost 500 new jobs were created in georgia and 600 new jobs were created in south carolina between 1981 and 1984 as a result of successful business starts among sbdc pre venture clients while such figures are impressive the bottom line of this study is that the new tax revenues generated by client firms exceeded the cost of delivering the services specifically our conservative estimates suggest a 3 80 to 1 00 and 1 50 to 1 00 benefit to cost ratio for the center s pre venture consulting services in georgia and south carolina respectively furthermore the value attached to the assistance received by the entrepreneurs themselves closely paralleled our estimates lending additional validity to our conclusions resource constrained entrepreneurs can obtain effective business assistance from the sbdc free of charge and the benefits to society accruing from this service far outweigh the cost of providing them

china s industrial energy consumption trends and impacts of the top 1000 enterprises energy saving program and the ten key energy saving projects abstract this study analyzes china s industrial energy consumption trends from 1996 to 2010 with a focus on the impact of the top 1000 enterprises energy saving program and the ten key energy saving projects from 1996 to 2010 china s industrial energy consumption increased by 134 even as the industrial economic energy intensity decreased by 46 decomposition analysis shows that the production effect was the dominant cause of the rapid growth in industrial energy consumption while the efficiency effect was the major factor slowing the growth of industrial energy consumption the structural effect had a relatively small and fluctuating influence analysis shows the strong association of industrial energy consumption with the growth of china s economy and changing energy policies an assessment of the top 1000 enterprises energy saving program and the ten key energy saving projects indicates that the economic energy intensity of major energy intensive industrial sub sectors as well as the physical energy intensity of major energy intensive industrial products decreased significantly during china s 11th five year plan fyp period 2006 2010 this study also shows the importance and challenge of realizing structural change toward less energy intensive activities in china during the 12th fyp period 2011 2015

a new look at debt rescheduling indicators and models this paper presents logit and discriminant models of debt rescheduling the models incorporated new short term debt data and variables representing economic shocks the 30 country database covered the period from 1975 to 1982 and contained the largest number of debt rescheduling observations of any previous database because of the new indicators and more recent data the models captured the effects of the changes that have occurred in the world economy since the oil price shocks and the period of rapid debt accumulation by the developing countries compared to the earlier research models the models have proven to be efficient in forecasting debt reschedulings

sovereign debt ratings a judgmental model based on the analytic hierarchy process the major rating agencies assign quality rating to international security offerings these ratings serve as indicators of perceived sovereign risk associated with such offerings a review of the ratings process followed by the major rating agencies in particular the standard poor s corporation reveals that ratings are assigned with considerable reliance on informal judgment informal judgmental systems however can induce serious inconsistencies in the relative importance assigned to criteria used in assigning rating and lead to biased ratings

a survey study of energy saving activities of industrial companies in the republic of korea abstract this study measures industrial energy saving activities esas in the republic of korea and identifies their determinant factors by a questionnaire survey to the energy intensive companies more than 90 of the samples have practiced the institutional and managerial esas requiring relatively lower costs and efforts although the companies have felt strong pressures from the governmental regulations and recognized the importance of industrial associations the externally coercive normative and mimetic factors still indicate no significant influence on their esas at present as internal factors the willingness for energy saving support from top management and internal training specific for energy saving determine a company s practice level of esas economic incentives like financial subsidies are useful for encouraging the company s involvement in esas korean government shall also provide more technical support to the companies particularly the small and medium sized ones for enhancing their capacities in promptly reacting to the newly initiated mandatory regulations on industrial energy efficiency

credit risk assessment using a multicriteria hierarchical discrimination approach a comparative analysis corporate credit risk assessment decisions involve two major issues the determination of the probability of default and the estimation of potential future benefits and losses for credit granting the former issue is addressed by classifying the firms seeking credit into homogeneous groups representing different levels of credit risk classification discrimination procedures commonly employed for such purposes include statistical and econometric techniques this paper explores the performance of the m h dis method multi group hierarchical discrimination an alternative approach that originates from multicriteria decision aid mcda the method is used to develop a credit risk assessment model using a large sample of firms derived from the loan portfolio of a leading greek commercial bank a total of 1411 firms are considered in both training and holdout samples using financial information through the period 1994 1997 a comparison with discriminant analysis da logit analysis la and probit analysis pa is also conducted to investigate the relative performance of the m h dis method as opposed to traditional tools used for credit risk assessment 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

barriers to increasing energy efficiency evidence from small and medium sized enterprises in china abstract this paper analyzes financial informational and organizational barriers to energy efficiency investments for small and medium sized enterprises smes in china its findings are based on a survey of 480 smes in zhejiang province and complemented by semi structured interviews with enterprises contained in the survey sample responses reveal that only a minority of smes in china actively perform energy saving activities at a significant level the survey data suggest further that informational barriers are the core bottleneck inhibiting energy efficiency improvements in china s sme sector financial and organizational barriers also influence a company s energy saving activities with interview based evidence stronger than statistical evidence the interviews point out three additional barriers to energy saving activities the role of family ownership structures lax enforcement of government regulations and the absence of government support as well as a lack of skilled labor more than 40 of enterprises in the sample declared themselves unaware of energy saving equipment or practices in their respective business area indicating that there are high transaction costs for smes to gather assess and apply information about energy saving potentials and relevant technologies one policy implication of the study is that the chinese government could play a more active role in fostering the dissemination of energy efficiency related information in the sme sector

credit granting a comparative analysis of classification procedures financial classification issues and particularly the financial distress problem continue to be subject to vigorous investigation the corporate credit granting process has not received as much attention in the literature this paper examines the relative effectiveness of parametric nonparametric and judgemental classification procedures on a sample of corporate credit data the judgemental model is based on the analytic hierarchy process evidence indicates that nonparametric recursive partitioning methods provide greater information than simultaneous partitioning procedures the judgemental model is found to perform as well as statistical models a complementary relationship is proposed between the statistical and the judgemental models as an effective paradigm for granting credit the credit granting process involves a tradeoff between the perceived default risk of the credit applicant and potential returns from granting requested credit the main objective in credit granting is to determine the optimal amount of credit to grant the amount of credit requested along with other financial and nonfinancial factors influences the assessment of default risk while default risk assessment can be appropriately modeled using classificatory models integration of such risk assessment with potential returns can be accomplished using a dynamic expected value framework academic research on credit granting can be grouped into two basic categories 2 i attempts to apply classification procedures to customer attribute data and develop classification models to assign group membership in the future and ii attempts to explicitly recognize the need to integrate such risk assessment with potential return as well as allow for differing degrees of credit investigation depending on the costs of such investigation to our knowledge this study represents the first attempt at examining the relative performance of classification procedures for corporate credit granting relative performance is measured in terms of how well the models replicate expert judgement we examine four statistical models multiple discriminant analysis mda logistic regression northeastern university and university of cincinnati respectively we are grateful to robert eisenbeis and sangit chatterjee for their insightful comments on an earlier draft we also thank an anonymous fortune 500 corporation as well as the credit research foundation for their support the usual disclaimer applies 1 this paper is primarily concerned with the credit granting decision in an industrial nonfinancial setting a more detailed version of this paper is available from the authors further for a review of the various motives for corporations to extend credit refer emery 10 2 we do not make any attempts to present a comprehensive review of the literature interested readers are referred to an excellent review by altman et al 1

energy efficiency analysis of g7 and brics considering total factor structure abstract energy is the driving force of world economy with the increase in the world s population and consumption additional efforts must be made to guarantee energy availability for all economies and consequently to avoid a number of serious problems related to its scarcity therefore measures to ensure energy efficiency are now a priority for any nation willing to develop its economy given the fast economic development seen in the brics group which has played an important role in the global economy the objective of this study is to measure and analyze energy efficiency in the countries that comprise the brics group brazil russia india china and south africa and the g7 group canada france germany italy japan united kingdom and united states considering the total factor structure for this data envelopment analysis was used with slacks based measure model and the window analysis and the total factor energy efficiency index was calculated from the slacks provided by this tool for the countries analyzed the model used as inputs gross fixed capital formation and workforce and energy consumption additionally two outputs were used carbon dioxide emissions undesirable output and gross domestic product desired output moreover the factors that lead to better energy efficiency measures were sought using an econometric model the results indicate that the brics and g7 are statistically different groups and therefore justify being analyzed separately energy efficiency in brics ranged from 23 54 to 99 95 with brazil as the country which had the highest total factor energy efficiency index in the analysis performed for the g7 group every country had a total factor energy efficiency index above 95 the tobit model was used and the results show that patents are significant for energy efficiency in the brics countries while in the g7 countries the gross domestic product per capita measured by purchasing power parity life expectancy and years of schooling are significant these findings indicate that in the brics countries the results of energy efficiency measures are more related to investments in low energy consumption technologies while in the g7 countries the energy efficiency tends to be better when countries have better social conditions which in addition to high life expectancy ensures a fair income distribution the results of this study are important in terms of being useful for public policies related to energy efficiency especially 1 to contribute to the discussions related to evaluating the countries energy use helping to identify those with the best practices with regard to environmental and economic aspects in each group and 2 to guide policy decisions regarding government incentives to promote the development of efficient countries in terms of economic growth with minimal use of resources capital labor energy without harming the environment

optimizing the production scheduling of a single machine to minimize total energy consumption costs abstract the rising cost of energy is one of the important factors associated with increased production costs at manufacturing facilities which encourages decision makers to tackle this problem in different manners one important step in this trend is to reduce the energy consumption costs of production systems considering variable energy prices during one day this paper proposes a mathematical model to minimize energy consumption costs for single machine production scheduling during production processes by making decisions at machine level to determine the launch times for job processing idle time when the machine must be shut down turning on time and turning off time this model enables the operations manager to implement the least expensive production scheduling during a production shift to obtain near optimal solutions genetic algorithm technology has been utilized furthermore to determine whether the heuristic solution provides the minimum cost and the best possible schedule for minimizing energy costs an analytical solution has also been run to generate the optimal solution next a comparison between the analytical solution and heuristic solutions is presented for larger problems the heuristic solution is preferable the results indicate that significant reductions in energy costs can be achieved by avoiding high energy price periods this minimization process also has a positive environmental effect by reducing energy consumption during peak periods which increases the possibility of reducing co 2 emissions from power generator sites

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