stock market linkages evidence from latin america abstract this study investigates the dynamic interdependence of the major stock markets in latin america using data from 1995 to 2000 we examine the stock market indexes of argentina brazil chile colombia mexico and venezuela the index level series are non stationary and so we employ cointegration analysis and error correction vector autoregressions var techniques to model the interdependencies we find that there is one cointegrating vector which appears to explain the dependencies in prices the results are robust to sensitivity tests based on translating indexes to us dollars i e a common currency for all the markets and to partitioning the sample into periods before and after the asian and russian financial crises of 1997 and 1998 respectively our results suggest that the potential for diversifying risk by investing in different latin american markets is limited

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

inequality of opportunity in energy consumption in china abstract this paper proposes an empirical implementation of the concept of inequality of opportunity in energy consumption expenditure and applies this to data from chinese general social survey cgss we examine the role played by circumstances beyond the control of individuals for instance gender hukou status family background and region of birth in generating inequality in energy consumption expenditure in china this study shows that the relative share of inequality of opportunity ior in energy consumption expenditure in china is 10 02 for the entire sample ior turns out to be larger for the older cohort peaking at 14 40 for the 1955 64 cohort a shapley value decomposition presents that hukou status and region of birth are the two largest contributors to inequality of opportunity across birth cohorts a heterogeneity analysis further shows that more disadvantaged groups for instance female individuals born in the west of rural china with worse family backgrounds are facing more unequal opportunities in energy consumption in china these results suggest that energy policies focused on zero discrimination in opportunities should be encouraged

joint confidence intervals for income shares and lorenz curves in a recent paper beach and davidson 1983 extended the principles of statistical inference to lorenz curves and income shares by establishing the asymptotic distribution and covariance structure of a vector of lorenz curve ordinates corresponding to a set of quantile abscissae one can thus use the lorenz curve and income shares no longer just as descriptive devices for summarizing distribution information but now also as analytical tools for comparing alternative distributions and carrying out conventional statistical inference on them it would clearly be desirable however to extend and complement this work by providing a method for computing a set of joint confidence intervals about these income shares and for illustrating graphically a joint confidence band about a set of estimated lorenz curve ordinates the present paper provides a new and simple technique for doing this when analyzing differences between sets of income shares or lorenz curves one typically wants to elicit more detailed information than is provided by a standard joint chi square test on the overall set of shares that is when the hypothesis of two sets of shares being the same is rejected we generally want to know further which particular differences in shares are different from zero and of these nonzero differences which are positive and which negative savin 1980 a natural way of providing such information is through multiple comparison procedures developed in this paper in a recent work richmond 1982 has developed a general method of finding multiple comparison intervals that is particularly suited to the present problem and in this situation appears to dominate other conventional alternatives in contrast for example to scheff s s projection method richmond s approach focuses on a set of primary points of interest income shares among a more general set of points including the lorenz curve ordinates and optimizes the joint confidence interval lengths on this primary set of points since estimated lorenz curve ordinates are built up from underlying income shares these shares perhaps further supplemented are natural choices for the primary set the method however also provides a joint confidence band that geometrically bounds the set of lorenz curve ordinates and interpolated segments between them the present

reforming residential electricity tariff in china block tariffs pricing approach the chinese households that make up approximately a quarter of world households are facing a residential power tariff reform in which a rising block tariff structure will be implemented and this tariff mechanism is widely used around the world the basic principle of the structure is to assign a higher price for higher income consumers with low price elasticity of power demand to capture the non linear effects of price and income on elasticities we set up a translog demand model the empirical findings indicate that the higher income consumers are less sensitive than those with lower income to price changes we further put forward three proposals of chinese residential electricity tariffs compared to a flat tariff the reasonable block tariff structure generates more efficient allocation of cross subsidies better incentives for raising the efficiency of electricity usage and reducing emissions from power generation which also supports the living standards of low income households

technical performance and firm size analysis of patents and publications of u s firms this study focuses on the scientific output of firms of different sizes in different industries in the u s both patents and papers and publications are used as measures of technical output data from two samples of firms one consisting of 225 large firms annual sales at least 250 million and minimum annual r d budget of 1 million and the other consisting of 248 small and medium sized firms annual sales between 10 to 200 million and annual r d budget at least 10 thousand have been presented here the study shows that determinants of r d expenditure are different in firms of different sizes for the large firms r d expenditure depends on net income as well as its size measured in terms of annual sales for small size firms r d expenditure is closely related with sales rather than the net income for large firms r d expenditure is related to both sales and income the latter being more important than the former the two output measures patents and papers are correlated but the correlation is not a very strong one for small firms patent and papers are correlated significantly with both r d expenditure as well as annual sales the firm s growth is not linked with patents on the contrary there is a negative relationship between patent and r d growth and patent and income growth in the case of small firms papers are not linked with growth variables for small firms finally this study confirms the hypothesis that small firms are more productive in innovation than the large firms small firms are more efficient than their larger competitors in terms of patents and papers per million dollars of r d expenditure

stochastic dominance and mean variance measures of profit and loss for business planning and investment in this paper we first extend the stochastic dominance sd theory by introducing the first three orders of both ascending sd asd and descending sd dsd to decisions in business planning and investment to risk averse and risk loving decision makers so that they can compare both return and loss we provide investors with more tools for empirical analysis with which they can identify the first order asd and dsd prospects and discern arbitrage opportunities that could increase his her utility as well as wealth and set up a zero dollar portfolio to make huge profit our tools also enable investors and business planners to identify the third order asd and dsd prospects and make better choices to complement the stochastic dominance approach we also introduce an improved mean variance criterion to decisions in business planning or investment on both return and loss for risk averse and riskloving investors we then illustrate the superiority of the present approaches with well known examples in the literature and discuss the relationship between the improved stochastic dominance and mean variance criteria

inequality in male and female earnings the role of hours and wages the authors decompose annual earnings into hours of work and hourly earnings and analyze male female differences in earnings inequality using canadian data their results indicate that the larger female inequality in earnings is due to a greater inequality in the distribution of hours of work the distributions of wages for men and women are either statistically indistinguishable or more equal for women the authors compare two data points 1988 and 1981 and find the same structure in the gender comparisons also changes between 1988 and 1981 in earnings inequality are generated from movements in the hours distributions copyright 1996 by mit press

unemployment institutions and reform complementarities re assessing the aggregate evidence for oecd countries there is no or limited consensus on the quantitative impact of institutions on unemployment which has led some to question the case for structural reforms recent studies suggest also that institutions interact with each other and cannot be analysed in isolation in this paper we estimate a standard reduced form model to explore the institutional determinants of unemployment and assess its robustness using a large battery of robustness checks we show that although the impact of each individual policy varies across countries due to policy interactions the simple linear model can be used to draw inferences for countries with an average mix of institutions the model is then extended to encompass systemic interactions in which individual policies interact with the overall institutional framework we find relatively robust evidence of broad reform complementarities

the management of multinational r d a neglected topic in international business research despite the growing involvement of multinational firms in foreign based r d during the past fifteen years little research has been done on why and how firms internationalize their r d and what effects it might have on firm competitiveness the present paper calls attention to this neglect and seeks to advance the management of multinational r d as an area of study for international business scholars to this end the paper first examines the key contributing factors to increased foreign r d investments among multinationals it then reviews the research literature to find out what we presently know about the management of multinational r d finally a research agenda is proposed to provide a foundation and stimulus for future investigations seven research directions are recommended with an emphasis on interdisciplinary inquiry and a focus on issues that have both theoretical and practical significance

energy embodied in the international trade of china an energy input output analysis abstract growing international trade has not only positively affected the people s republic of china s china s economic development but also expanded the exportation of energy embodied in goods during their production this energy flow out will pose risks to china s rational utilization of natural resources as well as environmental protection in this paper we evaluate the energy embodied in goods produced in china during 1992 2005 and use input output structural decomposition analysis to identify five key factors causing the changes of energy embodied in exports direct primary energy efficiency primary energy consumption structure structure of intermediate inputs structure of exports and scale of exports for the three sub periods of 1992 1997 1997 2002 and 2002 2005 results show that china is a net exporter of energy and the energy embodied in exports tends to increase over time the expanding total volume of exports and increasing exports of energy intensive goods tend to enlarge the energy embodied in exports within all three sub periods but these driving forces were offset by a considerable improvement of energy efficiency and changes in primary energy consumption structure from 1992 to 2002 and the effects of structure of intermediate input only in the sub period from 1992 to 1997 from 2002 to 2005 the sharp augmentation of energy embodied in exports was driven by all the five factors our research has practical implications for the chinese economy results of this study suggest that the energy embodied in trade should receive special attentions in energy policies design to limit the energy resource out flow and pollution generation

testing for poverty dominance an application to canada the paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices this helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across distributions the tests which can take into account the complex sampling procedures that are typically used by statistical agencies to generate household level surveys are implemented using the canadian survey of labour and income dynamics slid for 1996 1999 and 2002 although the yearly cumulative distribution functions cross at the lower tails of the distributions the more recent years tend to dominate earlier years for a relatively wide range of poverty lines failing to take into account slid s sampling variability as is sometimes done can inflate significantly one s confidence in ranking poverty taking into account slid s complex sampling design as has not been done before can also decrease substantially the range of poverty lines over which a poverty ranking can be inferred

international stock market efficiency a non bayesian time varying model approach this article develops a non bayesian methodology to analyse the time varying structure of international linkages and market efficiency in g7 countries we consider a non bayesian time varying vector autoregressive tv var model and apply it to estimate the joint degree of market efficiency in the sense of fama 1970 1991 our empirical results provide a new perspective that the international linkages and market efficiency change over time and that their behaviours correspond well to historical events of the international financial system

common stochastic trends in international stock markets abstract this paper presents evidence concerning the number of common stochastic trends in the equity markets of the u s japan england germany and canada monthly and quarterly data from january 1974 through august 1990 on morgan stanley s capital international indices are used to compute johansen 1990 tests for common trends the results indicate the presence of a single common trend driving these countries stock markets estimates of the factor loadings suggest that this trend is most important in the japanese market and least important in the canadian market to interpret this evidence the paper demonstrates that under weak conditions the unit root and cointegration structure of stock prices should mirror the unit root and cointegration structure of their dividend payments the paper tests this prediction by constructing national dividend series from capital international s dividend yield data as well as by using gnp data as with stock prices the evidence points to a single common trend although the stochastic properties and relative importance of this trend differs somewhat from the trend in stock prices

foreign exchange market efficiency and cointegration in this note we examine an implication of the cointegration literature for the efficiency of foreign exchange markets in particular if foreign exchange markets are efficient then two spot exchange rates cannot be cointegrated this proposition is tested for 10 dollar bilateral exchange rates over the period january 1973 december 1985

cointegration and market efficiency abstract recently many economists have asserted that asset prices determined in efficient asset markets cannot be cointegrated we show that there is no general equivalence between the existence of arbitrage opportunities and cointegration or for that matter a lack of cointegration whether asset prices are cointegrated is a function of the relevant model we first show a convenient way to calculate the cointegrating vector based on necessary and sufficient conditions for cointegration we then examine particular cases including exchange rates interest rates and spot and forward exchange rates and asset prices with incoem flows reinvested and not reinvested jel f31

consistent testing for stochastic dominance under general sampling schemes we propose a procedure for estimating the critical values of the extended kolmogorov smirnov tests of stochastic dominance of arbitrary order in the general k prospect case we allow for the observations to be serially dependent and for the first time we can accommodate general dependence amongst the prospects which are to be ranked also the prospects may be the residuals from certain conditional models opening the way for conditional ranking we also propose a test of prospect stochastic dominance our method is based on subsampling and we show that the resulting tests are consistent and powerful against some n 1 2 local alternatives we also propose some heuristic methods for selecting subsample size and demonstrate in simulations that they perform reasonably we describe an alternative method for obtaining critical values based on recentring the test statistic and using full sample bootstrap methods we compare the two methods in theory and in practice

structural path analysis of india s carbon emissions using input output and social accounting matrix frameworks abstract while input output io tables have been widely employed to study energy and environmental issues social accounting matrix sam which further considers the interactions of the production system primary factors households and social institutions in the economy is rarely seen in this field this paper thus compares the transmission dynamics under an io framework and a sam framework with the help of structural path analysis spa technique which decomposes the io and sam analysis results by extracting the interconnections in the economic system a case study is performed to investigate india s carbon emissions based on its latest publicly available io and sam tables as the fourth largest emitter in the world india s large population base fast population growth and huge unmet demand imply a surge of carbon emissions following future economic development there have been a few studies on india s energy and emission issues using io tables but more research from different perspectives is still needed to better support policy making this is the first study on india s carbon emissions under a sam framework and using spa techniques and also the first study that extends the use of spa by transmission path to the energy and environmental literature

demand contributors and driving factors of singapore s aggregate carbon intensities abstract singapore is an island city state it lacks conventional energy resources and is alternative energy disadvantaged yet its aggregate carbon intensity given by the ratio of carbon emissions to gdp dropped by 30 from 2005 to 2014 currently it has a relatively low carbon intensity using i o analysis we study singapore s aggregate carbon intensity and the factors contributing to its changes at different levels i e final demand sector and transmission levels it is found that domestic exports accounted for nearly two thirds of singapore s aggregate carbon intensity followed by private consumption and investment at the sectoral level the top three contributors were the petroleum petrochemical and land transport sectors improvements in emission intensity and final demand structure were major factors contributing to reductions in carbon intensity our study contributes to the literature in two aspects methodologically it deals with embodied emission intensity and analyzes its changes from the demand perspective this differs from most studies in the literature from the production perspective empirically the findings and policy implications are unique as they are applicable to a major city with urbanization taking place in many developing countries cites role in emissions and environmental sustainability are growing in importance but not many in depth analyses similar to our study have been reported

market reaction to quarterly earnings announcements a stochastic dominance based test of market efficiency the use of the capm in empirical research is subject to some criticism in light of this criticism the stochastic dominance criteria are offered as an alternative research method for the examination of market efficiency the underlying assumptions of the two frameworks are discussed and the stochastic dominance technique is demonstrated via the examination of market reaction to quarterly earnings announcements during the 24 quarters commencing with october 1962 the findings are compared to those of watts watts r the time series behavior of quarterly earnings unpublished paper university of newcastle newcastle n s w 1975 quoted in watts 1978 who utilized the same data base in contrast to watts conclusion our analysis suggests that the market was efficient during the entire period examined and that no significant differences in market behavior between the first and the second 12 month periods was evident the discord may be attributed to the relative effectiveness of the two analytical tool

comparing structural decomposition analysis and index to analyze and understand historical changes in economic environmental employment or other socio economic indicators it is useful to assess the driving forces or determinants that underlie these changes two techniques for decomposing indicator changes at the sector level are structural decomposition analysis sda and index decomposition analysis ida for example sda and ida have been used to analyze changes in indicators such as energy use co2 emissions labor demand and value added the changes in these variables are decomposed into determinants such as technological demand and structural effects sda uses information from input output tables while ida uses aggregate data at the sector level the two methods have developed quite independently which has resulted in each method being characterized by specific unique techniques and approaches this paper has three aims first the similarities and differences between the two approaches are summarized second the possibility of transferring specific techniques and indices is explored finally a numerical example is used to illustrate differences between the two approaches

which is a better investment choice in the hong kong residential property market a big or small property the relationship between property size and property investment yield is an interesting issue in the real estate market previous studies usually use the mean variance criterion to compare the return risk profiles of the yields of different property sizes in the united states however this criterion has a few shortcomings this article provides the first attempt to use a stochastic dominance approach to analyse this issue we adopt two powerful stochastic dominance tests to compare the yields of five property size classes in the hong kong residential property market in our study we analyse two possible investment outcomes 1 investors could not rent out their properties and thus they would gain lose from the appreciation depreciation of residential property prices 2 investors could also gain from rental incomes our empirical results provide strong evidence to show that the yields of smaller property classes stochastically dominate the yields of bigger property classes suggesting that buying smal

technological gap scale economy and china s industrial energy demand abstract the industrial sector in china is energy intensive and accounts for more than 60 of the nation s total energy consumption demand narrating the story behind the growth of china s industrial energy consumption could help us understand the past and prepare for the future this paper aims to investigate the factors affecting china s industrial energy consumption in the 21st century by using an extended production theoretical decomposition approach pda with considering the technological gap and scale of the economy effects the new proposed decomposition framework includes four new factors namely the energy technological gap the output technological gap energy scale efficiency and output scale efficiency the results show that in the 21st century the energy consumption of china s industry increased by more than one billion tons of standard coal the expansion of the industrial economy is a dominant driver of china s industrial energy consumption while potential energy intensity energy technology and output technology are the three largest energy saving factors in addition to the conventional factors the newly proposed factors also have important effects on china s industrial energy consumption specifically output scale efficiency is an energy saving factor while the energy technological gap output technological gap and energy scale efficiency are drivers of energy consumption this suggests that china s industry is at the stage of returns to scale that is beneficial to output performance but harmful to energy performance meanwhile the widening of the industrial technological gaps has negative impacts on china s industrial energy conservation the proposed decomposition approach can provide information that cannot be obtained from traditional approaches and it can also be applied to many other cases for investigating feasible paths of energy saving and emissions reduction

monetary policy natural resources and federal redistribution can monetary policy shocks induce redistribution across natural resource rich and poor states within a federation we conjecture that resource rich states are capital intensive hence their investment is more responsive to changes in monetary policy consequently contractionary monetary policy shocks e g increases in the interest rate may induce redistribution from resource poor states to resource rich ones via an equalizing federal transfer scheme because investment is reduced more strongly in the latter we test these hypotheses using a panel of u s states covering several decades and find that 1 resource rich states are significantly and persistently more capital intensive 2 contractionary monetary policy shocks induce a relative drop increase in investment federal transfers in resource rich states over the course of four years 3 these patterns are driven by resource induced differences in the capital share in the economy we estimate that a one standard deviation contractionary monetary shock induces within the first year federal redistribution of approximately 2 5 billion from the resource poor to the resource rich states representing about 11 of the total average annual federal transfers received by the latter states

testing for weak form efficiency of crude palm oil spot and future markets new evidence from a garch unit root test with multiple structural breaks there is a sizeable literature that tests for weak form efficiency in commodity and energy spot and future prices while many studies now allow for multiple structural breaks to address the criticism that conventional unit root tests have low power to reject the unit root null in the presence of structural change the extant literature overlooks the fact that conventional unit root tests are biased in the presence of conditional heteroscedasticity we apply a recently developed generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity garch unit root test with multiple structural breaks to crude palm oil spot and future prices and find much more evidence against weak form efficiency than that found using tests that fail to allow for conditional heteroscedasticity our results point to the importance of allowing for heteroscedasticity when testing for efficiency in commodity and energy spot and future prices

a two tiered attribution structural decomposition analysis to reveal drivers at both sub regional and sectoral levels a case study of energy consumption in the jing jin ji region abstract structural decomposition analysis sda is a very commonly used method for exploring the driving forces of environmental pressure ep enhanced with attribution analysis sda can further decompose the driving forces of ep into economic sectors or sub regions and provide more detailed evidence based policymaking however current studies of sda with attribution analysis have not been sufficiently developed and are only one tiered i e they decompose the driving forces of ep into either a sub regional or an economic sectoral level in this study we introduce a method of sda with a two tiered attribution analysis which is capable of 1 exploring the driving force of environmental pressure at a multi regional level and 2 further decomposing the driving forces of ep into both sub regions and economic sectors based on this method we explore the driving forces for the change of energy consumption in the jing jin ji region during the period of 2007 2012 results of this case study indicate that technological change final demand structure and final demand composition respectively contributed 129 12 and 3 while affluence production structure total population and population structure respectively contributed 129 77 38 and 2 to energy consumption change in the region in terms of sub regional and economic sectoral level contributions hebei province and the chemical and smelting and rolling of metals industries were the most prominent contributors through this case study we situate the strengths and limitations of the two tiered attribution sda method and propose key policy suggestions and future research directions

energy use embodied in china s construction industry a multi regional input output analysis abstract the rapid urbanization process was bound to produce considerable energy demand in china which increased the pressure on sustainable development this study employed a multi regional input output model to investigate energy use embodied in the consumption and interregional trade of china s construction industry results show that as a typical demand driven sector the construction industry consumed 793 74 million tons of coal equivalent in 2007 which is equal to 29 6 of china s total national energy consumption regions have been divided according to different driving forces for energy increment shanxi liaoning heilongjiang henan and sichuan were identified to be driven by their extensive construction activities and inefficient construction process interregional imports of the construction industry represented a resource dependent geographical distribution energy flows are from resource abundant areas in the central part to resource deficient areas in the eastern coast by contrast energy exports represented a regional discrete distribution which mainly transferred energy in the form of labor mobility and service supply this study provided insight into the current energy consumption status of provincial construction industry from both regional and sectoral perspectives which can be a basis for energy policy making and implementation

have air pollutant emissions converged among u s regions evidence from unit root tests previous studies of income distribution have found evidence indicating that incomes across u s regions have converged supporting the prediction of the neoclassical growth model a potential shortcoming in these studies is that only one measure of well being is considered a measure of wealth linked to incomes or production this paper examines whether income convergence was accompanied by air pollutant emission convergence results from unit root tests provide some evidence that indicators of environmental quality have converged across u s regions during the 1929 1994 period

consistent testing for stochastic dominance a subsampling approach we study a very general setting and propose a procedure for estimating the critical values of the extended kolmogorov smirnov tests of first and second order stochastic dominance due to mcfadden 1989 in the general k prospect case we allow for the observations to be generally serially dependent and for the first time we can accommodate general dependence amongst the prospects which are to be ranked also the prospects may be the residuals from certain conditional models opening the way for conditional ranking we also propose a test of prospect stochastic dominance our method is based on subsampling and we show that the resulting data tests are consistent

international transmission of stock market movements this paper investigates the international transmission mechanism of stock market movements by estimating a nine market vector autoregression var system using simulated responses of the estimated var system we i locate all the main channels of interactions among national stock markets and ii trace out the dynamic responses of one market to innovations in another generally speaking a substantial amount of multi lateral interaction is detected among national stock markets innovations in the u s are rapidly transmitted to other markets in a clearly recognizable fashion whereas no single foreign market can significantly explain the u s market movements also the dynamic response pattern is found to be generally consistent with the notion of informationally efficient international stock markets

a stochastic dominance analysis of yen carry trades abstract yen carry trades have made headline news for over a decade we examine the profitability of such trades for the period 2001 2009 yen carry trades generated high mean returns and sharpe ratios prior to the recent financial crisis they continued to outperform major stock markets for the full sample period given the non normality of carry trade returns we apply non parametric tests based on stochastic dominance sd to evaluate whether the high returns of yen carry trades are compatible with risk as reflected in returns on us and global stock market indices we apply a general test for sd developed recently by linton maasoumi and whang 2005 to six currencies as well as portfolios of these currencies for a large class of risk averse investors profits from yen carry trades cannot be attributed to risks

input output analysis of co2 emissions embodied in trade competitive versus non competitive imports energy related co2 emissions embodied in international trade have been widely studied by researchers using the environmental input output framework in the literature two different approaches to deal with emissions embodied in a country s imports can be found one of the approaches is based on the assumption of competitive imports while the other is based on the assumption of non competitive imports we show that the implications of the results obtained using different imports assumptions are not the same the approach using the competitive imports assumption gives estimates larger than those obtained using the non competitive import assumption the differences between the two embodiment estimates come from the transition of embodied emissions in china s imports for intermediate consumption to those in china s exports this explains why relatively high estimates of co2 emissions embodied in china s exports are reported in several recent studies appearing in energy policy

regional convergence and national inequality this paper explores the implications of regional income convergence for measures of inequality at the national level in general such convergence occurs as poorer regions overtake more developed ones it is difficult to imagine any realistic scenario in which rising incomes in poorer regions would not have the effect of reducing absolute poverty at the same time it seems reasonable to assume that national inequality would fall as the mean incomes in the various regions converge given these general presumptions the recent economic history of regional convergence between the southern united states and the rest of the nation is quite puzzling over the last twenty five years mean family income in the southern united states has gone from about 80 of the national mean to about 93 at the same time inequality in the south and that in the non south have been changing only slightly when measured by gini coefficients under these circumstances with no serious deterioration in intraregional measures of inequality we would expect to observe a substantial reduction in national inequality as these two broad regions converge in mean incomes nevertheless there has been no significant decline in the national gini coefficient this apparent paradox is in contrast to an earlier period in u s history in which regional convergence occurred while national inequality was falling smolensky 1961 1963 the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the relationship between regional convergence and overall inequality is far from obvious in particular we shot that the convergence of mean incomes among regions ceteris paribus is not a sufficient condition for a reduction in common measures of ov erall inequality such as the gini coefficient the ceteris paribas conditions here are that the distribution of population across regions and the relative distribution of income within each region are held constant the proof of this assertion is made in section ii in section iii we demonstrate the relevance of this analysis to the u s case we show that the simple mean convergence of family incomes between the southern united states and the rest of the nation over the last twenty five years should not have been expected to have a direct effect on national inequality the naive link between regional income convergence and national income distribution does not hold up in this important case hence the arguments of section ii are more than analytical curiosa in a situation where the direct effects of income convergence are insufficient to reduce overall inequality there is the possibility that the broader process of regional convergence achieves this result more indirectly regional convergence may involve economic changes that work on intra regional income distributions or the distribution of population across regions in ways favorable to greater national equality in section iv we speculate on such indirect effects from a theoretical point of view we conclude that the direction and extent of such interactions are not obvious

accounting for south non south real wage differentials and for changes in those differentials over time a unified accounting framework for analyzing differences in real wages between the south and non south in 1979 and for changes in south non south wage ratios between 1973 and 1979 is outlined cross section analysis of real wage differentials allows two sources of regional wage variation 1 worker and job characteristics and 2 returns to those characteristics our results suggest that differences in the latter may be as important in accounting for regional wage differentials as the former an interactive specification permits decomposition of changes in regional wage ratios into direct effects of changes in characteristics and indirect effects of region year and region year variations in returns more than half the predicted changes in south non south wage ratios can be accounted for by changing relative returns to characteristics between the south and non south

the relationship between arbitrage and first order stochastic dominance this paper joins together two fields of research in financial economics the first field studies stochastic dominance while the second field studies arbitrage pricing the two fields are linked together through the derivation and the proof of a characterization theorem the characterization theorem gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of arbitrage opportunities in terms of the existence of two assets one of which first order stochastically dominates the other and the price of a particular contingent claim examples are provided to demonstrate the theorem s content this paper joins together two fields of research in financial economics the first field studies portfolio choice from the perspective of stochastic dominance see hadar and russell 5 6 hanoch and levy 7 levy and kroll 13 the second field studies arbitrage pricing its characterization and implications see ross 15 kreps 12 harrison and kreps 8 harrison and pliska 9 in these fields it is well known that the existence of arbitrage opportunities implies first order stochastic dominance and that the converse does not hold this paper provides a set of conditions under which the converse is true given complete markets the existence of an arbitrage opportunity is characterized in terms of the existence of two traded assets one of which stochastically dominates the other along with one additional condition the additional condition is roughly that state contingent prices must be zero over the states where the first asset dominates the second the theorem has a qualification however it is applicable only in markets which are complete not in the arrow debreu sense but in a weaker sense in the sense that all contingent claims on the primary assets must trade in many applications especially with respect to continuous trading models this condition is usually satisfied see duffie 2 and harrison and pliska 9 in the case of stochastically dominated assets this paper shows that the relationship of the assets to the state contingent prices is important in identifying arbitrage opportunities in this sense this paper is related to a recent paper of jagannathan 10 jagannathan studies the relationship of second order stochastic dominance not first order to call option valuation this characterization theorem relating arbitrage opportunities to stochastic dominance should provide a valuable tool in the area of stochastic dominance this theorem specifies conditions under which two assets can be compared using first order stochastic dominance on an individual basis for inclusion in the

efficiency tests in the french derivatives market abstract the french derivatives market the marche a terme international de france matif or the french international futures and options exchange is one of the major derivatives markets in the world the efficiency of four financial contracts traded on the matif cac40 index futures ecu bond futures national bond futures and pibor 3 month futures are examined in this paper test results from serial correlations unit root tests and variance ratio tests provide overwhelming evidence that the random walk hypothesis cannot be rejected for these contracts

could the global financial crisis improve the performance of the g7 stocks markets abstractfinancial crises are normally associated with negative effects on financial markets in this article we investigate whether the most recent global financial crisis gfc had any positive impact on the g7 canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states indices to conduct the analysis we employ the mean variance mv analysis capm statistics hurst exponent runs test multiple variation ratio test and stochastic dominance sd tests our mv and capm results conclude that most of the g7 stock indices are significantly less volatile the results from hurst exponent run tests and multiple variation ratio confirm that efficiency improved in the post gfc period finally our sd results conclude that there is no arbitrage opportunity and the markets are efficient due to the gfc and in general investors prefer investing in the indices after the gfc overall we conclude that the gfc led to markets that are more efficient and mature confirming that crises can also

input output analysis of co2 emissions embodied in trade the effects of sector aggregation abstract energy related co2 emissions embodied in international trade have been widely studied by researchers using the environmental input output analysis framework it is well known that both sector aggregation and spatial aggregation affect the results obtained in such studies with regard to the latter past studies are often conducted at the national level irrespective of country or economy size for a large economy with the needed data studies may be conducted at different levels of spatial aggregation we examine this problem analytically by extending the work of su et al su b huang h c ang b w zhou p 2010 input output analysis of co2 emissions embodied in trade the effects of sector aggregation energy economics 32 1 166 175 on sector aggregation we present a numerical example using the data of china and by dividing the country into eight regions it is found that the results are highly dependent on spatial aggregation our study shows that for a large country like china it is meaningful to look into the effect of spatial aggregation

structural path and decomposition analysis of aggregate embodied energy intensities in china 2012 2017 abstract the dependence of the economic development of a region on its energy consumption is a major challenge for developing countries the aggregate embodied energy intensity aei based on an input output framework reflects the interaction between regional economy and energy consumption driven by final demand studying the change in aei from the perspective of sector production and final demand can effectively control the source and trend of energy intensity change in order to control the growth of energy intensity however there is a relative lack of studies determining the causes of aei changes from the perspective of sectors and final demands this study attempted to identify the influencing factors of aei changes and establish an aei based environmental policy in china a multiplicative structural decomposition analysis and a structural path analysis were used to study the aei under conditions of different final demands sectors and transmission layers along with the factors influencing aei changes in china from 2012 to 2017 our results indicate that the final demand category of gross fixed capital formation made the largest contribution to aei changes in 2012 and 2017 and the multiplicative intensity factor significantly inhibited the decrease in aei among the sectors studied only a few were found to significantly affect the change in aei with s11 processing of petroleum coking and nuclear fuel s12 chemical industry and s14 smelting and rolling of metals being the key sectors that input high energy consumption products to other sectors

macroeconomic shocks and stock market returns the case of korea abstractthis study examines the effects of macroeconomic shocks on key macro variables including stock market returns in korea using the structural vector autoregression svar model we suggest a three variable svar model incorporating inflation output growth and stock returns we adopt a nonzero z ratio restriction for the long run identifying assumption to allow for economically meaningful relationships among variables while our results support the negative positive relation of demand supply shocks to stock returns we also find that demand shocks influence stock market variance more significantly than supply shocks do the sub period analysis finds that global market fluctuations during the global financial crisis have relatively little effect on korean stock market performance we also examine a generalized five variable model that includes the foreign exchange rate and interest rate confirming the results from the three variable case

structural path analysis and multiplier decomposition within a social accounting matrix framework the main purpose of this paper is to apply structural path analysis to a social accounting matrix sam framework because the sam is a comprehensive essentially general equilibrium data system the whole network through which influence is transmitted can be identified and specified through structural path analysis the latter provides an alternative and much more detailed way to decompose multipliers as compared with the traditional treatment of stone 1978 and pyatt and round 1979 this paper consists of five sections the first one reviews the sam framework as a basis for multiplier analysis and multiplier decomposition in particular the additive decomposition in terms of transfer open loop and closed loop effects is succinctly presented section ii applies this conventional decomposition to a sam of south korea to illustrate with eleven specific cases the effects of an exogenous injection on the endogenous accounts of the sam i e the incomes of the factors household groups and production activities section iii is devoted to the presentation of the elements of structural analysis and more particularly the transmission of economic influence within a structure finally section iv applies structural path analysis to the south korean sam and compares and contrasts the multiplier decomposition which it yields with the alternative decomposition discussed in section ii the comparison is the more significant in that the two decomposition methods are applied to the same eleven selected cases spanning a variety of sectors i e poles of origin for the injection and sectors poles of destination the empirical analysis in section iv suggests that structural path analysis applied to a sam is a potentially operationally useful technique within which a whole series of policy issues can be addressed the final section is devoted to a brief summary and conclusions

trickling down the rising tide new estimates of the link between poverty and the macroeconomy this paper uses pooled time series regressions of regional data to reexamine the link between poverty and the macroeconomy the use of disaggregated data provides additional degrees of freedom and permits the inclusion of controls for demographic changes and increased income inequality the results indicate a stronger relationship between poverty rates and the macroeconomy in the 1980s than that found in prior research and confirm that the dramatic reduction in unemployment during the late 1990s was instrumental in reducing poverty rates the estimated results for the 1990s imply a 0 4 0 9 increase in the poverty rate for each 1 increase in the unemployment rate

common stochastic trends in european stock markets the objective of the paper is to investigate whether price indices of different european stock markets display a common long run trending behaviour using cointegration analysis we provide empirical evidence of common stochastic trends among five important european stock markets over the period 1975 1991

innis lecture inference on income distributions this paper attempts to provide a synthetic view of varied techniques available for performing inference on income distributions two main approaches can be distinguished one in which the object of interest is some index of income inequality or poverty the other based on notions of stochastic dominance from the statistical point of view many techniques are common to both approaches although of course some are specific to one of them i assume throughout that inference about population quantities is to be based on a sample or samples and formally all randomness is due to that of the sampling process inference can be either asymptotic or bootstrap based in principle the bootstrap is an ideal tool since in this paper i ignore issues of complex sampling schemes and suppose that observations are iid however both bootstrap inference and to a considerably greater extent asymptotic inference can fall foul of difficulties associated with the heavy right hand tails observed with many income distributions i mention some recent attempts to circumvent these difficulties ce memoire tente de fournir une vue synthetique des diverses techniques disponibles pour faire des inferences a partir des repartitions de revenus on peut distinguer deux approches principales l une dans laquelle l objet vise est un indice d inegalite de revenus ou de pauvrete l autre est construite sur des notions de dominance stochastique d un point de vue statistique plusieurs techniques sont utilisees par les deux approches mais certaines techniques sont specifiques a l une ou a l autre approche l auteur postule que l inference a propos de quantites demographiques est fondee sur un echantillon ou des echantillons et que formellement tout le caractere aleatoire est attribuable au processus d echantillonnage l inference est soit asymptotique soit derivee par des technique de bootstrap en principe la seconde facon de proceder est un outil ideal puisque dans ce memoire l auteur ignore les problemes de procedures d echantillonnage complexes et presume que les observations sont idd cependant la seconde facon de proceder et encore plus la premiere peuvent rencontrer des difficultes associees au fait que l on observe des queues de distribution epaisses vers la droite dans plusieurs profils de repartition des revenus l auteur mentionne certains efforts recents pour contourner ces difficultes

statistical inference for the measurement of the incidence of taxes and transfers we establish the asymptotic sampling distribution of general functions of quantile based estimators computed from samples that are not necessarily independent the results provide the statistical framework within which to assess the progressivity of taxes and benefits their horizontal inequity and the change in the inequality of income which they cause by the same token these findings characterise the sampling distribution of a number of popular indices of progressivity horizontal inequity and redistribution they can also be used to assess welfare and inequality changes using panel data and to assess poverty when it depends on estimated population quantiles we illustrate these results using micro data on the incidence of taxes and benefits in canada

multiplicative structural decomposition analysis of aggregate embodied energy and emission intensities abstract aggregate intensity indicators such as the ratio of a country s energy and emissions to its gdp are often used by researchers and policymakers to study energy and environmental performance this paper analyzes the relationship between energy or emissions and value added or gdp from a different viewpoint namely from the demand rather than the production perspective using the input output i o framework the aggregate embodied intensity aei defined as the ratio of embodied energy or emissions to embodied value added can be defined at the aggregate final demand category and sectoral levels the total aggregate intensity can be presented as a weighted sum of the aeis at the final demand category or sectoral level changes of the aei at different levels can be decomposed to identify the driving forces using multiplicative sda a study using the latest 2007 and 2012 datasets of china indicates that a its aggregate intensity of co 2 emissions was mainly determined by the aei in investment and b the emission intensity effect generally contributed the most to the aei ratio changes at different levels the proposed framework can be applied to other aggregate intensity indicators and extended to multi country region analysis

what drive the changes in china s energy consumption and intensity during 12th five year plan period abstract during the 12th five year plan period 2011 2015 the chinese government has released a series of energy conservation plans to launch and deepen the transition in the energy use particularly the dual control of the energy consumption and energy intensity was firstly emphasized this paper intends to explore the targeted and effective energy policy implications through investigating the drivers of changes in energy consumption intensity of china during the 12th five year plan period under the input output framework the embodied energy consumptions intensities by final demand category were estimated at aggregate sector level and the total energy consumption intensity was decomposed using the additive multiplicative structural decomposition analysis among the final demand categories china s energy consumption intensity was mainly contributed by the investment followed by the household consumption according to the sda results china s total energy consumption increased by 28 8 of which the energy intensity effect and the investment effect were the most retardant and accelerator respectively at the same time china s total aggregate energy intensity decreased by 16 0 of which the energy intensity effect and the household consumption effect were the most retardant and accelerator respectively in detail the key sectors with respect to the critical effects were picked out above all policy implications are discussed for achieving the energy goals during the 13th five year plan period and launching the energy revolution during the 14th five year plan period

the measurement and trend of housing inequality in the united states 1978 85 inequality in housing services for renters owners and all households in the united states is estimated for 1978 and 1985 hedonic techniques are applied to data from the american housing survey to derive values for housing services that include publicly provided as well as subsidized housing we find significant disparities in housing but substantially less inequality than in incomes in 1978 the top decile garnered 19 2 of housing services while the bottom decile received only 5 1 the trend however is towards greater equality in housing with large and statistically significant shifts across all deciles by 1985 the share of the top decile dropped to 16 3 a percentage decrease in share of 15 3 while that of the bottom decile rose to 5 7 a percentage increase of 11 4

sources of inequality in the philippines insights from stochastic dominance tests for richness and poorness new stochastic dominance sd tests of richness and poorness are applied to income and expenditure distributions in the philippines to measure relative welfare levels and investigate sources of inequality from 2000 to 2012 we successfully demonstrate that welfare analyses based on ascending and descending sd principles offer a stronger characterisation of changing levels of welfare in a population than what could be obtained using standard sd approach alone empirically our results show that large improvements in relative welfare over time in the philippines favoured older and female headed households mainly in the urban areas further female headship and more years in education promoted higher welfare within and among the population groups on the other hand the growth of remittance incomes may have caused the greater imbalance in the distributions found in more recent years analysis by age groups meanwhile showed that over time there are increasing concentrations of poorer households among the youngest cohort 30 and under at the same time that there are also increasing concentrations of richer households among the over 60s the combined impact of these factors provides a viable explanation as to why the gap between the rich and the poor has remained high in the philippines for a very long time now

interdependencies among the nordic and u s stock markets using the concept of granger causality interdependencies among the stock market indices for four nordic countries and the u s are examined the vector autoregressive model results indicate that the u s market affected only the danish but not the norwegian finnish or swedish markets the swedish market was causally prior to both the norwegian and finnish markets the norwegian danish and finnish markets did not granger cause any other market the results indicate that the nordic stock markets are less than fully integrated

nutrition and nonparticipation in the us food stamp programme microdata from the national food consumption survey are used to test for differences in caloric and protein intake distributions we compare poor households that participate in the us food stamp programme to eligible households that do not participate tests for stochastic dominance provide unambiguous evidence that eligible nonparticipants suffer from relative undernutrition compared to participating households probit analysis is used to identify characteristics of participating and nonparticipating households

assessing european stock markets co integration abstract this paper examines long run comovements in the uk french and german stock markets using cointegration techniques after fixing the power of the cointegration test no evidence is found of an increasing number of cointegrating vectors an alternative approach to measure increasing integration based on the speed of adjustment coefficients is proposed

input output and structural decomposition analysis of singapore s carbon emissions singapore is an island city state it lacks conventional energy resources and is alternative energy disadvantaged in the past decade 2000 2010 its energy related carbon emissions increased from 37 8 to 44 4 million tonnes of co2 this paper analyses the city state s carbon emissions from the demand perspective using the input output i o method and investigate the drivers of emission changes using structural decomposition analysis sda it is the first comprehensive analysis of singapore s emissions using the i o framework the results obtained show that exports accounted for nearly two thirds of its total emissions and growth in its emissions in the last decade was largely export driven emissions increased as export oriented industries and export volume expanded fuel switching and energy efficiency however helped to lower growth in emissions besides exports household related emissions accounted for about a quarter of singapore s total emissions the emissions related to different household groups remained fairly stable as increases in embodied indirect emissions were offset by decreases in direct emissions the high income household group registered the largest increase in direct emissions while the middle income household group registered the largest increase in embodied emissions the policy implications of our findings are discussed

theories of risk testing investor behaviour on the taiwan stock and stock index futures markets investor behavior towards risk lies at the heart of economic decision making in general and modern investment theory and practice in particular this paper uses both the mean variance mv criterion and stochastic dominance sd procedures to analyze the preferences for four of the most widely studied investor types in the taiwan stock and stock index futures market we find that risk averters concave utility function prefer spot to futures whereas risk seekers convex utility function prefer futures to spot our findings also show that investors with s shaped utility functions prefer spot futures to futures spot when markets move upward downward finally our results imply that investors with reverse s shaped utility functions prefer futures spot to spot futures when markets move upward downward these results are robust with respect to sub periods spot returns including dividends and diversification although we do not check whether risk averters risk seekers and investors with s shaped and reverse sshaped utility functions actually exist in the market we do show that their existence is plausible the implications of our findings on market efficiency and the existence of arbitrage opportunities are also discussed in this study

convergence of the south and non south income distributions 1969 1979 income distribution and inequalities in the southern united states are analyzed and compared with data for the rest of the country the evidence presented in this paper reveals that in the 1970s the souths income distribution either converged or moved significantly closer to the income distribution of the rest of the country the degree of convergence depends on the definition of the recipient unit and to a degree on the particular cost of living index used to deflate southern and non southern incomes the convergence is attributed in part to the labor unionization in the northeast and the resulting relocation of companies to the south data are from the 1970 and 1980 censuses and concern total household income excerpt

market response to policy initiatives during the global financial crisis abstract this paper examines the impact of macroeconomic and financial sector policy announcements in the united states the united kingdom the euro area and japan on interbank credit and liquidity risk premia during the recent crisis overall policy interventions were associated with a reduction in interbank risk premia most significantly for recapitalization programs by contrast decisions to bail out individual banks in an ad hoc manner or let them fail were accompanied by a significant rise in interbank risk premia most policy announcements had international spillovers these results are broadly robust to using alternative measures of financial distress and varying the size of the event window

the spillovers of foreign direct investment and the convergence of energy intensity abstract the imbalance and insufficiency of china s regional economic development has led to huge differences in regional energy efficiency reducing the differences in regional energy efficiency has become an urgent energy issue in china the constant absorption of foreign direct investment fdi has brought advanced technologies to china which has an important impact on china s energy efficiency to explore whether fdi can reduce regional energy efficiency differences this paper investigates the existence of energy intensity convergence while incorporating foreign direct investment fdi since existing research on regional energy intensity convergence lacks of consideration of the data spatial dependence we focus on spatial econometric model to test energy intensity convergence we use panel data of 30 provinces in china over the period of 2005 2014 to test energy intensity convergence by convergence model the empirical results show that considering the spatial dependence of the data fdi can promote the formation of conditional energy intensity convergence further analysis found that the spillover effect of fdi plays an important role in this formation in addition the convergence speed accelerates after considering the spatial dependence finally the spillover effect of fdi which is global inhibits the declining speed of energy intensity during the research period the scale effect of fdi and energy rebound effect plays an important role in the effect of fdi on energy intensity these results show that guiding foreign investment more reasonably in each province in china can make contributions to the reduction of energy efficiency differences

cross national laws and differences in market response international differences in general and cultural differences in particular exert profound influence on what people buy in modeling market response highly visible international differences in purchase behavior seem to lead to an assumption by management scientists that there are large parallel international differences in market response to such things as price and advertising in an interpretive review of market response models we do find international differences in response parameters but we also find that parameter differences due to cross national factors tend to be smaller than differences related to technical characteristics of the model or to product market specifics we suggest two new intermediate categories of generalizability between the extremes of everything is the same and everything is different we also argue that one promising approach to international generalization is through appropriate statistical adjustment of parameters from existing models

gray water and environmental externalities international patterns of water pollution through a structural decomposition analysis abstract despite regulatory measures restricting industrial and agricultural operations from pouring pollutants into lakes streams and rivers around 1 1 trillion m3 of wastewater were still disposed in waterways around the world in 2009 and this amount continues to grow several studies have analyzed the determinants of gray water increase at local level but so far none has explored them in an international context to highlight the role of global value added chains and the dichotomy between developed and developing nations in order to provide insights on the dynamics of water pollution worldwide this paper analyzes the main drivers of gray water discharge during the 1995 2009 period and the effort on reducing gray water compared to other environmental externalities based on the world input output database a structural decomposition analysis sda of gray water generation shows that domestic demand for food is the main driver of gray water changes in all countries while relocation of industrial activities to developing nations has disproportionally transferred this burden from developed countries manufacturing industries we highlight that while national policies should target water pollution from the agri food sector within each country water discharges from manufacturing sectors in global value chains need to be regulated from an international perspective besides the empirical evidence on water pollution drivers currently lacking in the environmental literature this paper also introduces a novel hybrid multiplicative additive sda that overcomes the issue of distributing large interaction terms in standard additive models and allows simulating mitigation scenarios it portrays the heterogeneity among sectors of how environmental abatement policies affect water and air pollution

market efficiency of oil spot and futures a mean variance and stochastic dominance approach this paper examines the market efficiency of oil spot and futures prices by using both mean variance mv and stochastic dominance sd approaches based on the west texas intermediate crude oil data for the sample period 1989 2008 we find no evidence of any mv and sd relationships between oil spot and futures indices this infers that there is no arbitrage opportunity between these two markets spot and futures do not dominate one another investors are indifferent to investing spot or futures and the spot and futures oil markets are efficient and rational the empirical findings are robust to each sub period before and after the crises for different crises and also to portfolio diversification

equality of opportunity and luck definitions and testable conditions with an application to income in france abstract we offer a model of equality of opportunity that encompasses different conceptions expressed in the public and philosophical debates in addition to circumstances whose effect on outcome should be compensated and effort which represents a legitimate source of inequality we introduce a third factor luck that captures the random factors whose impact on outcome should be even handed for equality of opportunity to be satisfied then we analyze how the various definitions of equality of opportunity can be empirically identified given data limitations and provide testable conditions definitions and conditions resort to standard stochastic dominance tools lastly we develop an empirical analysis of equality of opportunity for income acquisition in france over the period 1979 2000 which reveals that the degree of inequality of opportunity tends to decrease and that the degree of risk of income distributions conditional on social origin appears very similar across all groups of social origins

energy intensity and embodied energy flow in australia an input output analysis abstract decoupling energy use from economic growth is critical for improving energy productivity and mitigating climate change input output databases have been increasingly utilised for consumption based energy accounting and for exploring both the direct and indirect influence of energy use this study performed an environmentally extended input output analysis of energy use in australia from 2006 to 2015 to investigate the total energy intensity of industry sectors and the embodied energy flow from sources of energy use to the final consumption of commodities between 2006 and 2015 the national direct energy intensity reduced by an average of 2 per annum nearly all industry sectoral groups reduced their total energy intensity because of direct energy intensity reduction from other or within industry sectoral groups the difference between the embodied energy use in the import and the export had widened making australia a greater net importer of embodied energy with significant outsourcing of direct energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions despite a slight reduction in per capita direct household energy use 3 the per capita indirect energy use embodied in household commodity consumption increased by 7 as indirect household energy use is more than three times direct household energy use improving end use energy efficiency should also consider the embodied energy in commodities structural decomposition analysis shows that for the studied period population growth and per capita demand for imported commodities are two major contributors for the increased total embodied energy in australia

comparative invention performance of major industrial countries patterns and explanations the paper presents an analysis of invention performance as measured by patenting activities of six countries france italy japan united kingdom ussr west germany relative to the united states for 41 sic industries over the past 20 years it turns out that non u s countries as a group have increased their relative invention performance in all fields of technology including high technology fields in a second step hypotheses which can be supposed to explain the relative decline of the united states patenting activities are discussed and tested there is strong evidence that catching up processes contributed most to the relative decrease of the united states there is only little evidence that government interventions regarding research and development activities have had counterproductive effects on invention performance