the stochastic convergence of co2 emissions a long memory approach in response to equity concerns surrounding the spatial distribution of co2 emissions and assumptions of co2 convergence within some climate models this paper examines the convergence of co2 emissions within the oecd over the period 1870 2004 more specifically using the local whittle estimator and its variants we examine whether relative per capita co2 emissions are fractionally integrated that is they are long memory processes which although highly persistant may revert to the mean trend in the long run our results suggest that co2 emissions within 13 out of 18 oecd countries are indeed fractionally integrated implying that they converge over time albeit slowly interestingly though the countries whose emissions are not found to be fractionally integrated are some of the highest polluters within the oecd at least in per capita terms our results have implications both for future studies of co2 convergence and for climate policy

stochastic convergence in per capita fossil fuel consumption in u s states abstract this study examines the stochastic convergence of per capita fossil fuel consumption across u s states including the district of columbia utilizing lm and rals lm unit root tests with allowance for endogenously determined structural breaks our results indicate that with the exception of nevada the evidence from two break and one break lm and rals lm unit root tests rejects the null hypothesis of a unit root in the relative per capita fossil fuel consumption in the u s this finding indicates the presence of stochastic convergence in relative per capita fossil fuel consumption in the u s states

co2 emissions and income dynamics what does the global evidence tell us this paper analyzes the co evolution of two major determinants of social welfare namely income and carbon emissions in particular by using a distribution dynamics approach based on markov chains we investigate the shape and behavior of the joint distribution of per capita income and carbon dioxide emissions we arrive at several interesting conclusions especially in the context of international negotiations on climate change first evidence does not support theoretical models predicting the existence of a poverty environment trap specifically in the long run two main groups of countries will emerge poor versus polluting countries second the typical development path leads initially to high emission levels and subsequently to high income third the convergence process towards the stationary distribution is very slow finally for carbon emissions whenever it is observed the environmental kuznets curve seems to be only a transitory phenomenon

conditional convergence in australia s energy consumption at the sector level abstract we examine the convergence of energy consumption per capita at the sector level in australia over the period 1973 74 to 2013 14 to do so we employ recently developed lm and rals lm unit root tests that accommodate up to two endogenously determined structural breaks we find support for energy consumption per capita convergence for six of seven sectors in australia

convergence in per capita carbon dioxide emissions among g7 countries a tar panel unit root approach the subject of this paper is the examination the convergence of per capita carbon dioxide emissions of the g7 countries during the 1960 2005 period in a nonlinear panel analysis framework in this approach first the linearity of the series was tested and when the linearity was rejected the threshold autoregressive tar panel unit root test which splits the data into two regimes was employed to examine the stationarity properties of the series because the null of linearity was rejected in the first step we tested the stationarity of the series using the tar panel unit root test in the tar panel unit root test we found that the united kingdom was the transition country whose per capita carbon dioxide co2 emissions determined the switch from one regime to the other the results showed that convergence existed in the first regime and divergence in the second when we tested whether absolute or conditional convergence existed we found that the per capita co2 emissions were conditionally converging in the first regime

rights and the private pareto principle this paper begins with a review of gibbard s paradox for rights and gibbard s proposal for avoiding the paradox this is followed by a theorem that identifies the pairs where rights are directly relevant at some profile when gibbard s proposal is adopted as the next step the paper reviews sen s paradox and the private pareto principle which has recently been proposed by hammond as a replacement for the traditional pareto principle with the argument that this will make rights and paretian comparisons compatible the remainder of the paper is devoted to an analysis of the nature of the social pairwise comparisons that the private pareto principle recommends for the pairs of alternatives where rights are directly relevant at some profile this analysis reveals that on these pairs the private pareto principle makes two important concessions to rights

energy consumption and co2 emissions convergence in european union member countries a tonneau des danaides abstract as the consumption of energy is responsible for approximately 80 of ghg in eu iea 2008 the impact of energy activity on the environment has received increasing attention over the last decades from scholars researchers politicians and society as a whole within eu member countries it is commonly accepted that the design of energy and mitigation policies either at national or at european level require a detailed and integrated investigation of convergence divergence pattern among the participating countries in this paper we examine the distribution dynamics of energy consumption and co2 emissions their intensities as well as the carbonization index in 23 european countries over a forty one year period in particular from 1970 to 2010 for this purpose we used quah s methodology which is based on the dynamics of cross section distributions the main conclusion is that for all the examined variables the hypothesis of convergence patterns for the eu sample is not valid moreover regarding each examined variable different groups of polarization established important differences occur across eu countries according to the climate type with respect to the examined variables our analysis provides strong evidence supporting the fact that national and european energy and mitigation policies should be implemented according to the non convergence paradigm the body of evidence provided by our analysis is of great importance to energy policy makers and for issues related to climate change

preference belief and welfare policy choices depend on general values such as equality freedom justice and welfare when economists evaluate policies they focus on their welfare consequences and they take welfare to be the satisfaction of preferences yet most would allow exceptions when preferences are based on obviously false beliefs few for example would claim that drinking a fatal poison in the mistaken belief that it was water improves a person s welfare to deny that drinking poison is welfare enhancing is only good sense but it creates serious philosophical tensions for the preference satisfaction view for one cannot define welfare as the satisfaction of preferences and then admit that satisfying preferences sometimes makes people worse off such clear cases are artificial but the dependence of preferences on unreliable beliefs is a pervasive feature of social life which makes a preference based standard of welfare generally problematic although many kinds of beliefs influence preferences we shall focus on judgments concerning the probabilities of risky and uncertain outcomes 1

sustainable development and a dwindling carbon space curbing global warming by setting long term maxima for temperature rise or concentrations of greenhouse gases defines spaces within which further emissions of these gases are to remain referred to here as carbon spaces this paper addresses questions related to how to share between countries the carbon space and or efforts to stay within it in the perspective of sustainable development different allocation mechanisms are reviewed responding to criteria such as responsibility for climate change capability to engage in abating it and potential or future contribution the carbon space remaining at any time will depend on effective mitigation up till that time and will condense if more stringent maxima are to be set per capita this space becomes smaller with rising population sharing the carbon space in a fair way requires convergence of currently widely unequal per capita emissions if the world is to stay within the carbon space consistent with 2 warming then developed economies the wealthiest sources of greenhouse gases should quickly and deeply engage in mitigation also substantial mitigation is to take place in developing countries and that this will require substantial support to developing countries financially technologically changing development paths can make a major contribution to climate change mitigation this requires changes in investment production and consumption patterns green new deals as proposed in the context of a widened response to the current economic crisis could become a first phase of a fundamental transition towards a decarbonised global economy worldwide concerns to do with equity as well as sustainability must be incorporated and integrated into coherent transitory strategies

stochastic divergence or convergence of per capita carbon dioxide emissions re examining the evidence this paper revisits the time series literature on the convergence of per capita carbon dioxide co2 emissions and examines the robustness of previous results using a sample of oecd countries for the period 1950 2002 we employ a battery of stationarity and unit root tests including those that allow for cross sectional dependencies within the panel we also correct for inaccuracies in previous studies that could result in a trend stationary series being labelled as converging even if it were actually diverging from the international average the body of evidence provided by our analysis suggests that per capita co2 emissions have not converged among oecd countries during the period under consideration this finding is of importance to both climate change policy makers and to those who construct climate change models

convergence in per capita energy use among oecd countries abstract unlike previous studies which mainly focus on the integration properties of energy consumption and production this study examines the convergence of per capita energy use among 25 oecd countries over the period 1960 to 2010 in particular newly developed lm and rals lm unit root tests with allowance for two endogenously determined structural breaks are employed the results indicate significant support for per capita energy use convergence among oecd countries

persistence mean reversion and non linearities in emissions evidence from the brics and g7 countries the ministerio de economia y competitividad eco2014 55236 juncal cunado gratefully acknowledges financial support from the ministerio de economia y competitividad eco2014 55496

self supporting preferences and individual rights the possibility of paretian libertarianism one of the paradoxes in social choice theory that has caused considerable concern among theoretical economists is that of the impossibility of the paretian liberal which was discovered by sen 1970a 1970b chapter 6 it has been found disturbing that even a minimal amount of efficiency in social choice as expressed by the pareto principle should not be compatible with a minimum of individual freedom as expressed in a rather weak libertarian requirement which is imposed on the collective choice procedure therefore it is not surprising that a large number of solutions to the liberal paradox have been proposed the directions of these solutions diverging rather widely for a very lucid discussion covering the whole spectrum see sen 1976 it is the purpose of this paper to review very briefly the present state of the discussion section i and to propose a new solution to the paradox that essentially focuses on the notion of an individual right and the appropriate amount of protection it should obtain in social decisions section ii therefore our solution to the liberal paradox may in some sense be viewed as a byproduct of properties one would like a theory of rights to exhibit the solution is captured in our theorem 1 for its derivation we use a basic lemma which establishes the consistency of the rights all proofs are given in an appendix

environmental valuation under sustainable development environmentalism has evolved since the 1960 s from a concern with the preservation of wilderness in the american experience to a concern over pollution of human habitat throughout the industrialized world northern anxiety spread to the loss of tropical rainforests and biodiversity in the south where environmentalism evolved further in an encounter with indigenous interpretations conditions and priorities by the late 1980 s climate change emerged as a central issue in a now global discourse on the relationship between environment and development the principle of sustainable development that current needs are to be met as fully as possible while ensuring that the life opportunities of future generations are undiminished relative to present is now widely accepted this paper illustrates that incorporating environmental values per se in decision making will not bring about sustainability unless each generation is committed to transferring to the next sufficient natural resources and capital assets to make development sustainable 11 refs 3 figs

the overvaluation of purchasing power parity abstract recent panel studies of purchasing power parity have reported strong evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates however these studies fail to control for cross sectional dependence in the data this failure has dramatic consequences raising the significance level of tests with a nominal size of 5 percent to as much as 50 percent it is shown in this paper that controlling for cross sectional dependence no evidence against the random walk null can be found in panels of up to 64 real exchange rates this finding cannot be attributed to low power as there is ample power in panels of this size to reject the unit root null

testing for convergence in carbon dioxide emissions using a bayesian robust structural model we address international convergence in carbon dioxide emissions per capita and per value added derived from emission inventories based on production and consumption patterns we propose a bayesian structural model that accounts for heteroscedasticity and endogeneity between emissions and economic growth and tests for the existence of group specific convergence via shrinkage priors we find evidence for country specific conditional convergence in all emission inventories implying a half life of 2 7 3 1 years for production based emissions and 3 6 4 7 years for consumption based emissions when testing for global convergence without allowing for individual specific convergence paths the half life of hbox co 2 per capita increases to 15 26 years whereas emission intensities show a half life of 44 45 years our results highlight the current incompatibility between emission targets and economic growth and the need for faster diffusion of green technologies moreover there is no evidence for specific convergence dynamics in the european union the oecd or the countries that are subject to binding emission constraints specified in the kyoto protocol the institutional frameworks implemented in industrialized countries did not induce faster convergence among developed economies

segmented trends and non stationary time series since the influential work of charles r nelson and charles plosser 1982 many empirical studies have concluded that macroeconomic time series are difference stationary this paper proposes the segmented trend model as an alternative in which the series is the sum of a nonstationary trend and a stationary cycle and where the trend shows infrequent shifts the paper proposes tests between the difference stationary and segmented trends models and applies these to the data of nelson and plosser in general the results indicate that prices are difference stationary but quantities follow segmented trend processes copyright 1989 by royal economic society

convergence of per capita co2 emissions across the globe insights via wavelet analysis abstract this paper examines the convergence of per capita carbon dioxide co2 emissions for 162 countries across the globe covering all income groups high income oecd high income non oecd middle income and low income countries as categorized by the world bank the incidence of stochastic convergence is analysed by making use of recently developed wavelet based unit root tests the existing studies on this subject make use of conventional unit root tests using time series and or panel data a serious drawback of these tests is that they analyse the stochastic behaviour of any series in time domain only whereas the stochastic process may behave differently across different frequencies as well thus wavelet methods are an obvious solution as they consider frequency dimension as well in addition to time dimension when analyzing the stochastic behaviour of any data series and hence these methods encompass the conventional unit root testing methodologies by providing a clear and complete picture of the stochastic process our empirical findings based on latest available time series annual data from 1960 to 2010 lend support in favor of convergence among 38 countries including 18 high income oecd countries 2 high income non oecd countries 13 middle income countries and 5 low income countries while for the rest of 124 countries the co2 emission series is found to be non stationary suggesting the divergence in these countries these findings are in contrast with the most of the existing studies which may be due to the use of wavelet based unit root tests that are of course better alternatives some policy implications evolve from the empirical findings

accounting rates of return reply willem buijink and marc jegers have pointed out that the conditional internal rate of return estimates contained in my 1985 paper are dependent on estimates of the useful life of the firms depreciable assets and that my estimates of such useful lives are contaminated by depreciation method differences across the firms i think their point is correct and the intent of this reply is to use their formulas to obtain corrected useful life and conditional internal rate of return estimates and to report the impact of these corrections on the relationship between profitability and firm size for the sample of firms that was the focus of my 1985 paper

examining the link between carbon dioxide emissions and the share of industry in gdp modeling and testing for the g 7 countries abstract in this paper the relationship between per capita co 2 emissions and the share of industrial value added in gross domestic product gdp for the g 7 countries is discussed using a novel approach it is assumed that per capita co 2 emissions are correspondent to the share of industrial value added in gdp a model is developed using hidden markov process to search this initial assumption in the model the data for industrial share in gdp are assigned to be the observations while the data for per capita co 2 emissions represent the hidden process which may be then predicted using the ratio of industrial value added to gdp the data set covers the period from 1970 to 2008 and the model is tested for the g 7 countries the study findings show that except in the case of canada the hidden markov model performs reasonably well in tracking per capita co 2 emissions the study results provide also a basis for a number of policy implications

per capita carbon dioxide emissions convergence or divergence understanding and considering the distribution of per capita carbon dioxide co2 emissions is important in designing international climate change proposals and incentives for participation i evaluate historic international emissions distributions and forecast future distributions to assess whether per capita emissions have been converging or will converge i find evidence of convergence among 23 member countries of the organisation for economic co operation and development oecd whereas emissions appear to be diverging for an 88 country global sample over 1960 2000 forecasts based on a markov chain transition matrix provide little evidence of future emissions convergence and indicate that emissions may diverge in the near term i also review the shortcomings of environmental kuznets curve regressions and structural models in characterizing future emissions distributions

convergence of per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the eu legend or reality abstract designing appropriate environmental and energy policies in order to meet the kyoto protocol s carbon dioxide co 2 reduction targets in the european union eu requires a detailed examination and thorough understanding of co 2 emission trends across the eu member states this paper investigates whether co 2 emissions have converged across 22 european countries over the 1971 to 2006 period the bayesian shrinkage estimation method is employed to do this work and the results reveal the following first the hypothesis of absolute convergence in per capita co 2 emissions is supported and a slight upward convergence is observed second the fact that countries differ considerably in both their speed of convergence and volatility in emissions makes it possible to identify different groups of countries third the results with respect to convergence do not vary much once the share of industry in gdp is accounted for in a conditional convergence analysis however a decreasing share of industry in gdp seems to contribute to a decline in per capita emissions these findings may carry important implications for both national and eu environmental policies

are political freedoms converging this article tests for convergence o f freedom using freedom house s 2002 indices of political rights and civil liberties in 136 countries from 1972 to 2001 time series tests using structural breaks are employed to test for stochastic and beta convergence cross section tests are performed to examine the impact of legal systems education natural resources economic freedom and other variables we find that political freedoms are converging for one half of the countries additionally we find that the level of freedom is significantly related to the legal system education economic freedom and natural resources

is there convergence in per capita renewable energy consumption across u s states evidence from lm and rals lm unit root tests with breaks abstract given the federal and state policy initiatives to curb fossil fuel consumption and expand the use of renewable energy sources in the u s this study investigates the convergence properties of per capita renewable energy consumption across u s states including the district of columbia in addition to cross sectional tests of and convergence our study employs lm and rals lm unit root tests with endogenously determined structural breaks to test for stochastic convergence traditional cross sectional tests indicate that both and convergence of per capita renewable energy consumption exists across u s states moreover our results also provides clear support for stochastic convergence of per capita renewable energy consumption for a majority of u s states including the district of columbia once allowance is made for structural breaks

stochastic convergence in per capita co2 emissions evidence from emerging economies 1921 2014 abstract we employ the recently developed lm and rals lm unit root tests that allow for endogenously determined structural breaks to study stochastic convergence in relative per capita co2 emissions over the period 1921 to 2014 for a balanced panel of emerging market economies the results provide mixed evidence of the presence of stochastic convergence in particular stochastic convergence is achieved for eleven out of the seventeen countries under investigation this implies that the energy regulatory framework in these countries needs to be revaluated in order to reduce the carbon footprint to further comprehend the factors behind the observed disparities in emission stability we analyse the determinants of the identified groups an examination of the determinants of the observed behaviour in relative per capita co2 emissions reveal that income population financial development and trade are significant drivers with trade predominantly playing a larger role in emission growth also weak evidence is found in terms of a catching up effect in the growth of relative per capita co2 emissions

club convergence of sectoral co2 emissions in the european union abstract an understanding of the evolution of sectoral co2 emissions for all eu countries in recent decades would clearly be useful for political authorities when designing future environmental policies this paper investigates the process of convergence in sectoral per capita co2 emissions with a focus on the energy sector the concept of club convergence is used to analyse emissions in 28 eu countries from 1971 to 2012 with special attention paid to the energy subsectors power generation and heating manufactures and construction transportation and other minor fuel combustion we find that core european countries france the netherlands germany and the uk are included in the best performing clubs no matter the sector or subsector whereas among central and eastern european countries a few diverge from the average towards higher emissions relative convergence among a large number of eu members would therefore support the relevance of both the eu abatement policy and international agreements in this process

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

choices without prices without apologies valuing is usually regarded as a process of compressing information about attributes into a single metric armed with this reduced form of compact information the consumer can consider a particular object with a particular price attached or implied and make an informed decision but the process of valuing is less straightforward than we ordinarily suppose when environmental goods and services become the object of information compaction it is possible that important information is lost we comment on the choice problem germane to environmental goods and services and challenge the presumption that environmental choices made without explicit pricing are inferior to those in which hypothetical valuation studies are undertaken

eco efficiency and convergence in oecd countries this paper assesses the convergence in eco efficiency of a group of 22 oecd countries over the period 1980 2008 in doing so three air pollutants representing the impact on the environment of economic activities are considered namely carbon dioxide text co 2 nitrogen oxides text no mathrm x and sulphur oxides text so mathrm x furthermore eco efficiency scores at both country and air pollutant specific level are computed using data envelopment analysis techniques then convergence is evaluated using the recent approach by phillips and sul econometrica 75 1771 1855 2007 which tests for the existence of convergence groups first we find that eco efficiency has improved over the period with the exception of text no mathrm x emissions second switzerland is the most eco efficient country followed by some scandinavian economies such as sweden iceland norway and denmark in contrast southern european countries such as portugal spain and greece in addition to hungary turkey canada and the united states are among the worst performers finally we find that both the most eco efficient countries and the worst tend to form clubs of convergence

will history repeat itself economic convergence and convergence in energy use patterns in this paper a difference in differences estimator on panel data for 30 developing and 21 industrialized countries is employed over the period 1971 2005 to examine how patterns of energy use characterized by the consumption of primary energy carriers sectoral energy use and carbon emissions are changing in the process of economic development for the average developing country in our sample the results indicate that economic catch up has been accompanied by above average growth of the use of most primary energy carriers the consumption of final energy in most sectors and total co2 emissions for industrialized countries we find that economic growth is partially decoupled from energy consumption and that above average rates of economic growth were accompanied by larger improvements in energy efficiency these results emphasize the need to identify the relevant engines of economic growth their implications for energy use and possibilities to achieve low carbon growth centered on productivity and efficiency improvements rather than on capital accumulation

towards an ecological economics of sustainability abstract persistent disagreement both as to the interpretation to be given to sustainability and as to the relation between ecological and economic sustainability has hindered the development of an ecological economics of sustainable resource use this paper identifies the main concepts of sustainability deriving from the two disciplines in order to explore the difference implied by an ecological approach to the problem it is argued that present economic and ecological approaches are largely disjoint and that they address basically different phenomena by combining the efficiency requirements of what is usually thought of as economic sustainability with the stability requirements of an ecological approach it is shown that an intertemporally efficient allocation of resources that satisfies the conditions for constant levels of consumption is not necessary to assure ecological sustainability ecological sustainability requires that the allocation of economic resources should not result in the instability of the economy environment system as a whole

convergence in energy consumption per capita among asean countries abstract we test for convergence in energy consumption per capita among asean countries over the period 1971 to 2011 using the panel kpss stationarity test and panel lagrange multiplier lm unit root test the results for the panel stationarity and unit root tests with structural breaks find support for energy convergence in asean

divergence in state level per capita carbon dioxide emissions this paper addresses the question of whether income convergence is sufficient for per capita carbon dioxide co2 emissions convergence by focusing on a set of advanced economies the u s states i undertake a variety of cross sectional and stochastic convergence tests with two novel measures of 1960 to 1999 state level co2 emissions per capita production pre electricity trade co2 and consumption post electricity trade co2 and with income per capita although incomes continue to converge i find stark divergence in production co2 per capita and no evidence of convergence for consumption co2 per capita forecasts of future distributions show little convergence in emissions

ownership versus competition efficiency in public enterprise certainly the introduction of product market competition into potentially competitive or at least contestable markets can improve performance to take just one example morrison and whinston 1986 1986 estimate that even in the imperfectly contestable u s airline industry the annual u s welfare gains from deregulation have been around 6 billion

entitlements missing markets and environmental uncertainty reply abstract at one level dore and ward seem intent on immunizing received doctrine they say that i did not prove that rights violated nozick s principles of justice and that i did not prove that missing markets were the problem more telling they allege i did not prove that my story was better than the particular story favored by dore and ward that is they argue that there is an alternative approach based on the theory of public economics which is indeed operational 3 they then use the bulk of their comment to explain and defend this alternative model they hope to convince the reader that the model of public economics survives intact in the face of my alternative model to the extent that their model allows one to define the problem away it is not difficult to see why they find it so compelling more seriously dore and ward fail to make a coherent argument about the concept of rights and duties and the logic of a particular rights structure that happens to prevail they seem concerned that my article was tampering with some sacred social construct the status quo rights structure and that my article threatened the received wisdom of both public economics and paretian walrasian bliss indeed theirs seems to be a genuine fear that if economists release their grip on the certitude of received orthodoxy the floodgates will be open to all manner of bumbling regulators seeking to shift rights and wealth positions across generations my article is apparently threatening because it seems to suggest that the received wisdom may at times be misleading

panel stationarity tests for purchasing power parity with cross sectional dependence we investigate the purchasing power parity ppp hypothesis for a group of 17 countries using a new panel based test of stationarity that allows for arbitrary cross sectional dependence we treat the short run time series dynamics nonparametrically and thus avoid the need to fit separate and potentially misspecified models for the individual series the statistic is simple to compute and uses standard normal critical values even in the presence of a wide range of different deterministic components we also evaluate the behavior of the test using a factor model to approximate cross sectional dependence and find that it generally improves finite sample performance taken together these features provide a widely applicable solution to the problem of testing for stationarity versus unit roots in macro panel data the test finds significant evidence against the ppp null hypothesis being true even when allowance is made for structural breaks

are co2 emission levels converging among industrial countries time paths of carbon dioxide emissions intwenty one industrial countries are examinedfrom 1960 1997 to test for stochastic andconditional convergence both panel unit roottests and cross section regressions areperformed overall we find significantevidence that co2 emissions haveconverged

rational performance and gibbard s pareto consistent libertarian claim abstract the purpose of this paper is to introduce a new condition called the rational performance and hereby point out that the gibbard s pareto consistent libertarian claim has a certain defect from this point of view

convergence of carbon dioxide performance across swedish industrial sectors an environmental index approach the overall objective of the paper is to analyze convergence of co2 emission intensity across manufacturing sectors in sweden our approach differs from previous work on carbon convergence in that

convergence of per capita sulphur dioxide emissions across us states this study examines the stochastic conditional convergence of sulphur dioxide so2 emissions using the residual augmented least squares lagrange multiplier rals lm unit root test with structural breaks this procedure allows the data to account for trend breaks and nonnormal errors that have been ignored or deemphasized in previous studies the study finds that per capita sulphur dioxide emissions exhibits stochastic conditional convergence across us states

the paretian liberal paradox and ecological economics abstract two of the most basic considerations in collective choice are the pareto principle and some minimal protection of individual rights in his impossibility theorem sen 1970 shows that there is a potential inconsistency between preference sovereignty as expressed by the pareto condition and the protection of minimal rights a liberal or liberty condition the paretian liberal paradox plp and the extensive debate surrounding it prompts serious reconsideration of the traditional welfare economics approach the critique of welfarism made by the plp is of central importance for environmental issues given pervasive externalities missing markets uncertainty and potential irreversibilities making collective choice decisions on these issues may require using explicit non utility information and restricting individual preference sovereignty we explore the implications of the plp for long term environmental policy and the transdisciplinary field of ecological economics as a simple pedagogical device relying on sparse principles the plp stimulates an increased awareness of the potential conflict between preferences and rights recognition of the plp focuses attention on what counts as admissible information in collective choice rules for example consideration of the plp illuminates differences in the informational requirements of alternative sustainability concepts

intergenerational resource rights efficiency and social optimality the discipline of economics is generally defined as the science of the allocation of scarce resources between competing social objectives given an initial distribution of resources between economic agents how would they behave so as to improve their welfare according to the pareto criterion the agents would exchange commodities until the opportunities for fruitful exchange were fully exhausted and no agent could be made better off without rendering at least one other agent worse off pareto efficiency is a powerful concept in microeconomic analysis provided that the initial distribution of property rights is equitable allocative efficiency gives rise to the best of all possible worlds acknowledging that the assumptions of perfect competition are often violated firms are monopolistic information is incomplete and externalities exist economists have argued for the modification of institutions so that economic reality will conform more closely to the assumptions of the model that yields such gratifying results but microeconomic theory has always maintained that allocative efficiency is in itself insufficient to maximize social welfare bator 1957 a social welfare function is required to discriminate a social optimum among the array of efficient allocations that correspond to alternative assignments of property rights though economists have posited alternative functional forms for the sake of pursuing conceptual arguments welfare functions have remained elusive constructs for well known theoretical and practical reasons consequently a sharp line of demarcation has been drawn between questions of efficiency the province of economics and equity the principal focus of ethical and political discourse in resource economics however the line demarcating efficiency and equity is often crossed the term optimal depletion appears regularly where only efficient depletion is meant while political debates about resource exploitation over time are laden with questions of the proper distribution of our natural patrimony between generations resource economists have predominantly espoused particular use rules that guarantee efficiency but overlook potential improvements in social welfare achievable through the reassignment of property rights across generations we document the evolution and current status of the misuse of the term optimal depletion in section ii we develop a simple two generation three period general equilibrium model in section iii to illustrate how alternative distributions of resource rights between generations relate to alternative pareto efficient solutions in section iv we demonstrate how different social welfare functions affect the optimal solution and associated assignment of resource rights between generations

convergence of greenhouse gas emissions among g7 countries the convergence of air pollutants is a major concern for policymakers since all the countries pursue the goal of allocating the emissions equally internationally in the future hence the examination of the existence of convergence is important for the climate change protection of the earth in this article greenhouse gas ghg emissions convergence among the g7 countries for the period between 1990 and 2011 is examined using the pairwise testing technique proposed by that aims to analyse probabilistic convergence across a large number of cross sectional units next we proceed with multivariate tests for stability and the existence of unit roots finally the analysis is complemented by the use of the panel stationarity test accounting for structural changes as proposed by carrion i silvestre et al 2005 test overall the results do not confirm the hypothesis of convergence for the countries in question although more recently the countries have shown a small decline in their ghg emissions

global convergence in per capita co2 emissions national social science foundation of china 12zd059 ministry of education 10gbj013 new huadu business school research fund

intergenerational equity and environmental decisions a model using rawls veil of ignorance abstract four general strategies for resource use exploitationism conservationism naturalist preservationism and extensionist preservationism are sketched and a two step model for deciding resource policy issues is proposed the model based on a modification of rawls hypothetical rational decision model posits a self interested chooser who decides the rules constituting a fair society in the first stage the chooser places pre emptive constraints on each generation s use of resources these constraints embodying leopold s conception of whole ecosystem health limit the options available to individuals of any generation in the pursuit of economic welfare in the second stage each generation may choose a strategy of resource use from those possibilities fulfilling the first stage constraints it is argued that a exploitationism is not in general an acceptable strategy because it violates constraints that would be imposed on all generations by a chooser who is ignorant regarding the generation he will inhabit b extensionist preservation which recognizes values inherent in wild species and natural ecosystems provides no operationalizable guide for environmental policy c conservationism fails to protect the biotic heritage of future generations because applications of the sustainable yield criterion can cause simplification and eventual breakdowns of natural ecosystems and therefore d a broadly naturalist preservationist strategy which imposes constraints on the pervasive exploitation of ecological systems and thereby protects biological diversity in the long run would be chosen by the rational chooser who is ignorant of the generation he will inhabit