war peace and the size of countries this paper studies the relationship between international con ict and the size distribution of countries in a model in which both peaceful bargaining and non peaceful confrontations are possible we show how the size distribution of countries depends on the likelihood bene ts and costs of con ict and war we also study the role of international law and show how better de ned international property rights may lead to country breakup and more numerous local con icts

turning lights into flights estimating direct and indirect rebound effects for uk households energy efficiency improvements by households lead to rebound effects that offset the potential energy and emissions savings direct rebound effects result from increased demand for cheaper energy services while indirect rebound effects result from increased demand for other goods and services that also require energy to provide research to date has focused upon the former but both are important for climate change this study estimates the combined direct and indirect rebound effects from seven measures that improve the energy efficiency of uk dwellings the methodology is based upon estimates of the income elasticity and greenhouse gas ghg intensity of 16 categories of household goods and services and allows for the embodied emissions of the energy efficiency measures themselves as well as the capital cost of the measures rebound effects are measured in ghg terms and relate to the adoption of these measures by an average uk household the study finds that the rebound effects from these measures are typically in the range 5 15 and arise mostly from indirect effects this is largely because expenditure on gas and electricity is more ghg intensive than expenditure on other goods and services however the anticipated shift towards a low carbon electricity system in the uk may lead to much larger rebound effects

the inverted pyramid a neo ricardian view on the economy environment relationship abstract in ecological economics natural resources which may contribute only a small amount to gdp are viewed as fundamental to the functioning of the economy they are sometimes pictured as sitting at the base of an inverted pyramid with the rest of the economy balanced on top of them in this paper we show that when prices are set by markup a standard heterodox assumption then the inverted pyramid picture of the economy emerges naturally in a neo ricardian model we demonstrate the use of the model with brief applications to biophysical economics the paper is one of a growing number that use heterodox macroeconomics to address questions in ecological economics

explaining cross country differences in participation rates and aggregate fluctuations abstract the empirical evidence shows that there exists a negative relationship between the ratio of employment to population and the standard deviation of log of gdp in this paper we build a real business cycle model with an underground economy sector in order to quantitatively address this issue the existence of an alternative to registered market activities for providing tradeable goods and services implies that population will be switching sectors in response to aggregate productivity shocks amplifying the response of registered output the level of participation in registered market activities will then be negatively related to fluctuations this feature does not arise in a standard one sector model

relating the environmental impact of consumption to household expenditures an input output analysis in this paper we evaluate the relationships between household expenditures and the environmental impact categories climate change acidification eutrophication and smog formation by combining household expenditures with environmentally extended input output analysis expenditure elasticities are examined with regression analysis and are compared and interpreted on the basis of insight at the product level with data from the netherlands in the year 2000 we find that environmental impact increases with increasing household expenditures although the degree to which the environmental impact increases differs per impact category climate change and eutrophication increase less than proportionally with increasing expenditures acidification increases nearly proportionally with increasing expenditures whereas smog formation increases more than proportionally it appears that the mix of necessities and luxuries to which an environmental impact is related is essential in explaining the relationship

spatial sustainability trade and indicators an evaluation of the ecological footprint the search for frameworks and indicators of sustainable development has taken a prominent place in this journal however some specific aspects have received little or no attention notably the spatial dimension and the role of international trade in indicator development moreover many sustainable development indicators comprise implicit valuations weighting schemes and policy objectives which are insufficiently recognised as such this contribution tries to highlight these issues by means of a review of a recently proposed indicator for ecological economic analysis namely the ecological footprint that has been developed by wackernagel and rees its concept and calculation procedure are criticised on a number of points and it is concluded that the ecological footprint is not the comprehensive and transparent planning tool as is often assumed in explaining our position we will argue that spatial sustainability and regional sustainable development have not been precisely discussed so far neither in the literature on trade and environment nor in that on sustainable development we will defend the view that trade can contribute positively and negatively to environmental unsustainability consequently indicators and models are needed that allow for analysing interactions and trade offs between such opposite effects 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

extreme weather and civil war does drought fuel conflict in somalia through livestock price shocks climate change leads to more frequent and more intense droughts in somalia in a global context weather shocks have been found to perpetuate poverty and fuel civil conflict by relating regional and temporal variations in violent conflict outbreaks and drought incidence and severity we show that this causality is also valid for somalia at the local level we find that livestock price shocks drive drought induced conflicts through reducing the opportunity costs of conflict participation our estimation results indicate that a temperature rise of around 3 2 degree celcius corresponding to the median ipcc scenario for eastern africa by the end of the century would lower cattle prices by about 4 percent and in turn increase the number of violent conflict by about 58 percent hence climate change will further aggravate somalia s security challenges and calls for decisive action to strengthen both drought and conflict resilience especially in pastoralist and agropastoralist livelihoods

an equilibrium model of the business cycle with household production and fiscal policy the authors estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model of the u s economy that includes an explicit household production sector and stochastic fiscal variables they use their estimates to investigate two issues first the authors analyze how well the model accounts for aggregate fluctuations they find that household production has a significant impact and reject a nested specification in which changes in the home production technology do not matter for market variables second the authors study the effects of some simple fiscal policy experiments and show that the model generates different predictions for the effects of tax changes than similar models without home production copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a first empirical comparison of energy footprints embodied in trade mrio versus plum abstract the ecological footprint as an indicator that accounts for human demand on global bioproductivity sets out to quantify the impacts associated with consumption in a given country including the impacts associated with trade the national footprint accounts nfa by global footprint network gfn calculate trade embodied footprints by multiplying yield and embodied energy factors with mass volumes of traded goods in a product land use matrix plum this article compares energy footprints embodied in trade from and to the united kingdom in 2002 as calculated by the nfa plum with the results from a recently developed multi region input output model mrio for the uk although totals for imports and exports are comparable breaking down the results by economic sectors reveals large differences and hardly any correlation between the two methods the omission of trade in services especially transport services and upstream impacts of energy goods fossil fuels and the use of inappropriate embodied energy factors in the nfa plum method are identified as the main reasons for these differences in the light of the results it seems that a comprehensive footprint account of trade can better be achieved with an input output based approach i conclude that mrio models once fully developed will be particularly suitable in the future to estimate the ecological footprints of imports and exports of nations with the possibility to track their origin via inter industry linkages international supply chains and multi national trade flows

fostering change to sustainable consumption and production an evidence based view this note from the field is an edited version of a policy brief summarizing the key findings from the first half of the sustainable consumption research exchange network score for the policy programs in the field of sustainable consumption and production scp we recommend a framework for action to change to scp that mentions the key domains to include food mobility and energy use housing the last two clearly related to urban development it should use a systemic perspective on the scp challenge and differentiate between developed fast developing and base of the pyramid economies score focuses mainly on developed economies and here we propose to differentiate between 1 measures that fit with mainstream beliefs and paradigms here governments could make operational agreements on implementation of instruments like green public procurement stimulating ecodesign etc 2 problems where a rough agreement on goals exists but where change is radical or means are uncertain and hence planning difficult here governments could foster visioning experimentation and support e g international collaboration in leapfrogging programs 3 problems that outright clash with the mainstream beliefs and paradigms here governments could foster informed deliberation on the more fundamental issues related to markets governance and growth 2007 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

what makes growth sustained abstract we identify structural breaks in economic growth in 140 countries and use these to define growth spells periods of high growth preceded by an upbreak and ending either with a downbreak or with the end of the sample growth spells tend to be shorter in african and latin american countries than elsewhere we find evidence that growth duration is positively related to the degree of equality of the income distribution democratic institutions export orientation with higher propensities to export manufactures greater openness to fdi and avoidance of exchange rate overvaluation favorable for duration and macroeconomic stability

responsibility and trade emission balances an evaluation of approaches this paper compares two concepts to evaluate the international responsibility of a country with respect to its emissions using a multi regional input output model we show that the trade emission balance and the responsibility emission balance yield the same result in practical work however a lack of data availability implies that the same technology assumption has been commonly adopted in that case also a third alternative exists which simply evaluates the emissions embodied in the trade balance of the country this third alternative yields the same results as the other two approaches at the aggregate level at the level of individual products however the results are clearly different and it turns out that the third alternative answers a different question that is it is appropriate for measuring the emission content of the products that cross the border in our empirical application we consider spain in 1995 and 2000 distinguishing nine different gases co 2 ch 4 n 2 o sf 6 hfcs pfcs so 2 nox and nh 3 c 2010 elsevier b v all rights reserved

does informality facilitate inflation stability abstract informality is a structural trait in emerging economies affecting the behavior of labor markets financial access and economy wide productivity this paper develops a simple general equilibrium closed economy model with nominal rigidities labor and financial frictions to analyze the transmission of shocks and of monetary policy in the model the informal sector provides a flexible margin of adjustment to the labor market at the cost of a lower productivity in addition only formal sector firms have access to financing which is instrumental in their production process in a quantitative version of the model calibrated to mexican data we find that informality i dampens the impact of demand and financial shocks as well as of technology shocks specific to the formal sector on wages and inflation but ii heightens the inflationary impact of aggregate technology shocks the presence of an informal sector also increases the sacrifice ratio of monetary policy actions from a central bank perspective the results imply that informality mitigates inflation volatility for most type of shocks but makes monetary policy less effective

the economics of poverty traps and persistent poverty an asset based approach abstract longitudinal data on household living standards open the way to a deeper analysis of the nature and extent of poverty while a number of studies have exploited this type of data to distinguish transitory from more chronic forms of income or expenditure poverty this paper develops an asset based approach to poverty analysis that makes it possible to distinguish deep rooted persistent structural poverty from poverty that passes naturally with time due to systemic growth processes drawing on the economic theory of poverty traps and bifurcated accumulation strategies this paper briefly discusses some feasible estimation strategies for empirically identifying poverty traps and long term persistent structural poverty as well as relevant extensions of the popular foster greer thorbecke class of poverty measures the paper closes with reflections on how asset based poverty can be used to underwrite the design of persistent poverty reduction strategies

does trade liberalization lead to environmental burden shifting in the global economy abstract does trade liberalization lead to the outsourcing of pollution from industrialized countries to developing countries according to the pollution haven hypothesis international trade is a key channel through which richer countries can geographically dissociate consumption from production of goods we examine whether and how trade liberalization via preferential trade agreements ptas facilitates the shifting of consumption based environmental burdens from developed countries via imports to poorer countries via exports based on panel data analysis of 183 countries from 1987 to 2013 we find partial evidence for trade induced environmental burden shifting while we observe an increase in footprint exports from low income countries when these countries liberalize trade this is not matched by an increase in footprint imports of high income countries our results also show that environmental clauses in ptas and participation in international environmental agreements do not influence the relationship between trade liberalization and ecological footprint movements however domestic institutions have a significant effect on the trade induced distribution of environmental burdens these findings suggest that ptas as a policy tool for trade liberalization are per se unlikely to induce exploitation of low income countries natural capital by wealthier nations however they suggest that political incentives inherent to democratic institutions encourage environmental burden shifting

weak instruments diagnosis and cures in empirical econometrics what is the weak instruments wi problem and what causes it universal agreement does not exist on these questions we define weak instruments by two features i two stage least squares 2sls analysis is badly biased toward the ordinary least squares ols estimate and alternative unbiased estimators such as limited information maximum likelihood liml may not solve the problem and ii the standard first order asymptotic distribution does not give an accurate framework for inference thus a researcher may estimate bad results and not be aware of the outcome the cause of wi is often stated to be a low r or f statistic of the reduced form equation in the most commonly occurring situation of one right handside endogenous variable we find the situation is more complex with an additional factor the correlation between the stochastic disturbances of the structural equation and the reduced form that needs to be taken into account we discuss in this paper a specification test hahn and hausman 2002a for wi a caution against using no moments estimators such as liml in the wi situation and suggestions for different estimators an approach to inference of frank kleibergen 2002 for wi we end with a caution of how small biases can become large biases in the wi situation we begin with the limited information structural model under the assumptions of hausman 1983

the role of consumption patterns demand and technological factors on the recent evolution of co2 emissions in a group of advanced economies changes in production structures and modifications of patterns of consumption are key factors in the fight against environmental harm initiatives such as agenda 21 promoted by the un highlight the need to evaluate the relationships among factors of production and consumption innovation and demographics and the environment in the attainment of sustainable development in this context our work studies in depth those factors underlying the economic activity of households in a representative group of european union countries and the us within the framework of an input output model a structural decomposition analysis is considered in order to identify the weight that growth in demand changes in patterns of consumption changes in the distribution of income the substitution of inputs and changes in energy intensity have all had on the evolution of co2 emissions the work specifically seeks to identify common patterns and differential behaviors among productive sectors in the european social environment the results show that growth in demand and therefore in production largely absorbs the limited effect of technological and efficiency improvements and the incipient changes observed in consumption patterns

a household s burden the embodied resource use of household equipment in germany the paper describes patterns of resource use related to german households equipment using cluster analysis and material flow accounting data on socio demographic characteristics and expenditures on fuel electricity and household equipment allow for a differentiation of seven different household types the corresponding resource use expressed in material footprint per person and year is calculated based on cradle to gate material flows of average household goods and the related household energy use our results show that patterns of resource use are mainly driven by the use of fuel and electricity and the ownership of cars the quantified material footprints correlate to social status and are also linked to city size age and household size affluent established and or younger families living in rural areas typically show the highest amounts of durables and expenditures on non durables thus exhibiting the highest use of natural resources

war and institutions new evidence from sierra leone scholars of economic development have argued that war can have adverse impacts on later economic performance war destroys physical capital and infrastructure and disrupts human capital accumulation and it may also damage institutions by creating political instability destroying the social fabric and endangering civil liberties world bank 2003 understanding war s impact on development is particularly important for sub saharan africa where two thirds of all nations suffered from armed conflict during the 1980s and 1990s the proliferation of armed conflict in the world s poorest region begs the question of what role conflict may be playing in africa s disappointing economic performance yet the net long run effects of war are ambiguous from the point of view of economic theory to the extent that war impacts are limited to the destruction of capital the neoclassical model predicts rapid economic growth postwar converging back to steady state growth several recent papers that study war impacts including in japan donald r davis and david e weinstein 2002 and vietnam miguel and gerard roland 2005 find few persistent local impacts of u s bombing with heavily bombed areas experiencing rapid recovery to prewar population and economic trends this is consistent with the neoclassical model if war s main consequence is to destroy capital war could also affect long run growth either positively or negatively by modifying the scale parameter in the neoclassical growth model for example while the world bank 2003 argues that war has adverse institutional consequences charles h tilly shows how war promoted state formation and nation building in europe historically ultimately strengthening institutions tilly 1975 we study the aftermath of the recent civil conflict in sierra leone one notable aspect of this project is the extensive household data for sierra leone on conflict experiences and on local institutions our results are complementary to the other recent studies mentioned above none of which examines institutional impacts

a dimensionally consistent aggregation framework for biophysical metrics abstract we develop a formal representation of the economy ecosystem interaction problem by distinguishing between stock flow and fund flux spaces georgescu roegen 1971 we then define dimensionless quantities in both the cardinal stock flow space and the ordinal fund flux space this leads to analytic definitions of natural capital and natural income in the fund flux space we show that a stock fund representation of the economy ecosystem interaction problem helps investigate aggregation properties of biophysical metrics in particular we show how a metric that is dimensionally consistent in the stock flow space can have dimensional problems in the fund flux space ecological footprint is used as an illustrative example finally we argue that dimensionally consistent metrics are keys to further the development of biophysical assessments as a tool for practical environmental policy

international commodity prices growth and the outbreak of civil war in sub saharan africa to learn more about the effect of economic conditions on civil war we examine whether sub saharan civil wars are more likely to start following downturns in the international price of countries main export commodities the data show a robust effect of commodity price downturns on the outbreak of civil wars we also find that sub saharan countries are more likely to see civil wars following economic downturns in their main oecd export destinations

standard ecological footprint method for small highly specialized economies abstract the negative impact of human endeavour on the biosphere has becoming increasingly clear in recent decades this has spurred a surge in the creation of sustainability indicators one of the most used sustainability indicators of recent years is the ecological footprint ef the ef uses trade flows to estimate environmental impacts of consumption the purpose of this study was to test ef s ability to deal with a small but highly specialized economy for this we used iceland as a case study but the icelandic economy is dominated by strong specialization with fisheries dwarfing all other sectors global footprint network s standard methodology was utilized with only the addition of local data being used where these data proved more robust than international databases the results from the two editions of the gfn calculation models 2008 and 2014 yielded a footprint of 56 59 and 25 26 gha per capita respectively for iceland three main reasons were identified for the drop in the footprint between the two editions all within the fishing grounds footprint a much improved coverage of extraction rates changes in fish species trophic levels and changes to aggregate errors for traded cod and halibut a correction of co2 intensities for exports also had a big impact but resulted in a rise in the ef for the latter edition the study highlighted the rapid development of the methodology as a major strength while the method s main weakness was revealed as the uncertainties associated with the marine footprint local consumption figures from the icelandic directorate of health indicated that a further drop in the marine footprint is in store with increased accuracy of the method mainly to do with accurate allocation between export and consumption footprints although the indicator s accuracy has been much improved in recent years additional improvements are thus still needed the extremes of the icelandic economy highlight errors to the extent that the huge footprint the calculations yielded make the country an outlier in a global context the indicator seems in this respect not accurate enough yet to be able to deal with such a degree of specialization especially where the main sectors are very large in relation to the population at least not when the sector in question is the marine sector the upside of this is that highly specialized economies may in this way be very useful for identifying and correcting inaccuracies within the methodology for their sector of specialization

measuring poverty in a growing world or measuring growth in a poor world the extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years although there are better data than ever before controversies are not resolved a major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys which is used to measure poverty grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts in the world as a whole and in large countries particularly india china and the united states in consequence measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries one plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys but growth in the national accounts is also upward biased and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys so it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption without any increase in measured inequality current statistical procedures in poor

additional precision provided by region specific data the identification of fuel use and pollution generation coefficients in the jersey economy turner k 2006 additional precision provided by region specific data the identification of fuel use and pollution generation coefficients in the jersey economy regional studies 40 347 364 a debate is currently ongoing in the uk regarding the need to collect and report data at the regional level one specific area of this debate is the extent to which region specific economic and environmental data are required to carry out analyses of devolved sustainability policy issues this paper uses the jersey economy as a case study to assess the added precision from using good quality region specific data compared with adjusted national uk data it is found that due to differences in polluting technology between jersey and the uk estimates based on national emissions intensities produce results that are misleading in terms of both absolute pollution levels and the relative contribution of different activities to total emissions in the economy while jersey may be regarded as atypical in many ways relative

impact of household consumption on co2 emissions danish household consumption increased by 58 over the period 1966 1992 while co2 emissions only increased by 7 using decomposition analysis we investigated the global co2 impact of danish household consumption from 1966 to 1992 our conclusion is that overall growth in private consumption but not changes in the composition of consumption is the key to understanding the increase in co2 emissions however the effect of growth in private consumption has been partly offset by substantial energy conservation in the energy supply and manufacturing sectors

a note on the calculus for physical input output analysis and its application to land appropriation of international trade activities abstract in a recent paper in this journal embodied land appropriation in international trade activities was analysed using a physical input output table piot ecological economics 44 2003 137 the authors stated that there are significant differences between the physical and the monetary input output tables in their results which the authors argued to be due to the fact that the results from the monetary table are determined mainly by the monetary structure of final demand while the structure of a physical table more closely resembles the physical realities of an economy in the present paper it is argued that the methodological foundation that the authors based their analysis on is misleading and does not satisfy the overall material balance requirement it is shown that the differences in the results between the monetary and physical tables presented by the authors have nothing to do with the resemblance to the physical realities i also tried to further clarify a number of critical issues in applying physical input output tables related to double counting treatment of wastes and the effect of closing the system toward direct material inputs a number of consistent but different approaches to cope with these issues are presented including their proofs the embodied land appropriation of international trade activities is calculated and compared by applying those approaches there are many advantages of using physical input output tables however their superiority should not be exaggerated nor be regarded as absolute depending on how it is constructed and used it is also possible that the results from a physical input output table do not tell us more than that indeed some commodities are cheaper or more costly per unit of their mass

macroeconomic adjustment and the poor analytical issues and cross country evidence the author studies the links between macroeconomic adjustment and poverty first he summarizes some of the recent evidence on poverty in the developing world second he reviews the various channels through which macroeconomic policies affect the poor third the author emphasizes the role of the labor market he develops an analytical framework that captures some of the main features of the urban labor market in developing countries and studies the effects of fiscal adjustment on wages employment and poverty fourth he presents cross country regressions linking various macroeconomic and structural variables to poverty the author finds that output growth and real exchange rate depreciations tend to lower poverty while illiteracy income inequality and macroeconomic volatility tend to increase poverty in addition the impact of growth on poverty appears to be asymmetric and to result from a significant relationship between episodes of increasing poverty and negative growth rates

decomposition of tourism greenhouse gas emissions revealing the dynamics between tourism economic growth technological efficiency and carbon emissions abstract this study proposes an analytical framework for decomposing the national tourism carbon footprint and carbon efficiency to identify the dynamics between economic growth technological efficiency and environmental externality using the environmentally extended input output model and decomposition methods tourism carbon changes are decomposed into the economic factors of total consumption and purchasing patterns and the production factors of industry input structure and technological improvement this macro level approach provides a basis for 1 assessing whether total tourism emissions increase in direct proportion to tourism consumption over time 2 tracing the underlying determinants and their effects on tourism emissions expansion and eco efficiency performance and 3 comparing the carbon performance of the tourism industry against the national average based on the example of taiwan the results demonstrate that we are a long way from the goal of using the technological efficiencies of production to offset tourism based carbon emissions

indivisible labor lotteries and equilibrium abstract this paper considers an economy where labor is indivisible and agents are identical although the discontinuity in labor supply at the individual level disappears as a result of aggregation it is shown that indivisible labor has strong consequences for the aggregate bahavior of the economy it is also shown that optimal allocations involve lotteries over employment and consumption

international trade and the sustainability footprint a practical criterion for its assessment a simple and minimal criterion for sustainability is that the value of natural capital plus manufactured capital be not decreasing on the basis of any individual country or region the above simple comparison may be misleading as it does not take account of the production of goods for consumption in other countries regions via international trade in other terms the full environmental footprint of a country may not be properly assessed a method of calculating a weak sustainability criterion has been established for both a closed economy approach and an open economy approach there are significant differences between the open and closed economies measures for several regions particularly the middle east overall global sustainability on this criterion has been positive and increasing using a difference equation approach a further analysis has been made of the average proportional rate of change of global sustainability between 1980 and 1990 and its various regional and structural components have been determined these indicate that most of global sustainability growth can be attributed to western europe other asia and japan particularly through high savings ratios the usa on the other hand has made a very small net contribution to the growth in global sustainability

using composition of land multiplier to estimate ecological footprints associated with production activity abstract ecological footprint ef a measure of sustainability represents the areas of land and water required to produce the goods and services for satisfying the consumption of a defined human population or economy and to provide environmental assimilation capacity for keeping its environmental quality at a given level production land footprint a main component of the ef represents the lands used by production sectors for producing the goods and services for the final consumption of a given human population there have been at least two alternatives in estimating the production land footprint one is based on the estimates of apparent consumption of each type of resource along the line of the methodology proposed by wackernagel and rees wackernagel m rees w e 1996 and its later refinement the other suggested by bicknell et al 1998 is based on the monetary values of products that are delivered to domestic final demand the information recorded in an input output table the former faces the challenge of distinguishing the commodities used as intermediate input from those as final consumption although its recent development has tried to calculate the raw materials used directly in traded manufactured products wackernagel m lewan l hansson c b 1999a it is not an easy job because the indirect input requirements are also involved using input output analysis which has been widely used to consider the direct and indirect input requirements of supporting final demand may alleviate this difficulty bicknell et al 1998 adopted input output analysis to estimate the footprint of new zealand in their calculation they used land multipliers to obtain the production land areas required to produce the outputs for domestic final consumption directly and indirectly and presented the estimates under three land categories agricultural land forest land and degraded land however this presentation causes errors in the concept and calculation this is because that the area requirement of sector j s production land is obtained by multiplying sector j s land multiplier with its output for domestic final consumption the result would contain not only sector j s own production land but also those of other sectors whose outputs sector j uses as inputs thus the ensuing estimates on sectoral production lands cannot be presented by land category using the hypothetical data in the article of bicknell et al 1998 this paper explains the reasons for using the composition of land multipliers instead of land multipliers in estimating the production land footprint so that the calculated areas can be expressed by land category the revised calculation is then applied to taiwan for estimating her two footprint components production land and energy land in 1991

new methodology for the ecological footprint with an application to the new zealand economy abstract sustainable development has become a primary objective for many countries throughout the world since the late 1980s a major difficulty associated with sustainable development objectives however is the absence of reliable indicators to measure progress towards the goal of sustainability the ecological footprint provides an estimate of the land area necessary to sustain current levels of resource consumption for a given population on an aggregate basis the ecological footprint may be compared with the amount of ecologically productive land available to give an indication of whether consumption patterns are likely to be sustainable this paper proposes the use of a modified form of input output analysis to calculate the ecological footprint the input output approach provides a consistent means of calculating an ecological footprint using data collected as part of the system of national accounts in most developed countries in addition it makes explicit the link between the level of economic activity in a country and its corresponding impact on the environment an application of this methodology to new zealand indicates that it takes 3 49 has of ecologically productive land per year to sustain the average new zealander s current level of consumption

exogenous shocks and growth crises in low income countries a vulnerability index summary this paper develops a new index which provides early warning signals of a growth crisis in the event of large external shocks in low income countries lics multivariate regression analysis and a univariate signaling approach are used to map information from a parsimonious set of underlying policy structural and institutional indicators into a composite vulnerability index both the in sample and out of sample predictive power of the index are high in particular it explains well the growth crises observed in lics during the global financial crisis

applying physical input output analysis to estimate land appropriation ecological footprints of international trade activities in the last few years some studies have been presented which link land use accounting and input output analysis based on monetary input output tables miots for the calculation of direct and indirect land appropriation of production and consumption activities the compilation of the first comprehensive physical input output tables piots for some western european countries in the 1990s opened new possibilities for linking physical accounting and input output analysis using a physical multiplier for this kind of calculation is more appropriate as the most land intensive sectors are also the sectors with the highest amounts of material flows physical input output analysis illustrates land appropriation in relation to material flows of each of the sectors which is more appropriate from the point of view of environmental pressures than land appropriation in relation to monetary flows of a miot physical input output analysis has so far not been applied for any land related studies based on a physical input output model of the eu 15 physical input output analysis is applied in this paper in order to calculate direct and indirect land requirements for the production of exports from eu 15 to the rest of the world

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

low carbon product selection with carbon tax and competition effects of the power structure abstract this paper considers product selection strategies of two competitive firms in the presence of carbon tax optimal strategies are developed for product selection of the firm with two game structures namely the nash game and the stackelberg game by which the paper conducts an analytical examination of the effect of power structure on the product selection strategy of the firm over various levels of carbon tax rate the critical managerial findings derived with the studies are as follows i two competitive firms will always adopt the same product strategy with the nash pricing game regardless of the carbon tax rate which is in contrast to that they will adopt a differentiated product strategy over the low carbon tax rates with the stackelberg pricing game ii two competitive firms will both select the common or low carbon product with randomness over the middle carbon tax rates with the nash product selection game which is contrast to that the randomness in their product selections is removed with the stackelberg product selection game which leads to an existence of the pure strategy stackelberg equilibrium for their product selection strategies over the middle carbon tax rates the inherent mechanisms leading to these essential differences are also discussed in the paper

development circumstances of four recycling industries used motor oil acidic sludge plastic wastes and blown bitumen in the world abstract the conspicuous global challenges that we are departing towards them today comprise to be addressed in the multifaceted frameworks of economy society environment and technology in recent years the consensus of demanding for sustainable development and its implementation has been unanimously posed along with this affirm high added value knowledge based competitive sustainable manufacturing and business excellence have been widely scrutinized as a prominent enabler and handler especially in recycling industries sector current review survey encompasses the development circumstances of four major recycling industries in iran and over the world thus evaluation of the individual techniques exploited in the four recycling industries indicated that employed processes had the lowest economic outlay and the highest revenue in comparison to other technologies additives can be utilized as raw materials for production of economically valuable bituminous products the recycling and converting processes are not only cost effective but they also descent the environmental risk to a large level using new techniques to zero economic indices business excellence score and the quality of the obtained products represented that these processes support sustainable development of industries

the rising resilience of emerging market and developing economies summary economic performance in many emerging market and developing economies emdes improved substantially over the past 20 years in the past decade emdes spent more time in expansion and had smaller downturns than advanced economies for the first time we document the history of emdes resilience over the past 60 years and investigate what factors have been associated with it we find that their improved performance since the 2000s is accounted for by both good policies and a lower incidence of external and domestic shocks better policies account for about three fifths of their improved resilience while less frequent shocks account for the remainder

growth and violence argument for a per capita measure of civil war the economics literature typically uses counts of casualties as a measure of conflict intensity despite the fact that the units of observation vary considerably in population size when analysing the impact of conflict on economic growth the use of counts relies on the assumption that a given number of casualties affects large and small populations in the same way using within and between country evidence this paper demonstrates that this standard assumption can be rejected a per capita model of conflict intensity that captures local effects of violence provides a more consistent empirical framework for both between country and within country studies

commodity prices and bank lending we analyze the transmission of changes in commodity prices to bank lending in a large sample of developing countries a bank level analysis shows that a fall in commodity net export prices is associated with a reduction of bank lending particularly for commodity exporters and during episodes of terms of trade decline we complement this analysis with loan level data from a credit register which allows us to identify the effect of a commodity price shock on the supply of credit controlling for unobserved factors that could drive borrowers credit demand results show that banks with relatively lower deposits and poor asset quality transmit the changes in commodity prices to lending more aggressively jel f30 f34 g21 q02

economic energy and greenhouse emissions impacts of some consumer choice technology and government outlay options abstract the impacts of selected spending options in the australian economy are determined in terms of energy consumption greenhouse gas emissions and a range of economic parameters six case studies of one current practice and one alternative environmentally motivated spending option are carried out describing consumer choices technologies and government outlays the assessment method is based on input output theory and as such enables both the direct and indirect effects of spending to be quantified in general the results indicate that pro environmental objectives such as reductions in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are compatible with broad socio economic benefits such as increases in employment and income and reductions in imports

sharing resources the global distribution of the ecological footprint abstract this paper examines how the human demand on bioproductive lands as measured by the ecological footprint is distributed across the globe using methods commonly used to measure the distribution of income measuring the distribution of natural resource use will be necessary to achieve an economy that is sustainable just and efficient currently different nations place different demands on the environment i e the ecological footprint is not evenly distributed across the globe calculation of the gini coefficient for total ecological footprint and its components explains the sources of inequality in overall resource use calculation of the atkinson index shows how inequality in the ecological footprint is related to the inequality of income and environmental intensity

a new database on the structure and development of the financial sector this article introduces a new database of indicators of financial structure and financial development across countries and over time the database is unique in that it combines a wide variety of indicators that measure the size activity and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets it improves on previous efforts by presenting data on the public share of commercial banks introducing indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial institutions and constructing measures of the size of bond and primary equity markets this article introduces a new database the first to provide comprehensive measures of the development structure and performance of the financial sector this database is the first to define and construct indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial intermediaries such as insurance companies pension funds and non deposit money banks it is also the first to include indicators of the size of primary equity markets and primary and secondary bond markets in constructing the database authors carefully deflate measures and match stock and flow variables

the incentives of private companies to invest in protected area certificates how coalitions can improve ecosystem sustainability abstract since the early 80 s the global demand on nature has exceeded the earth s capacity to reduce the overuse of the very resources on which human life depends protected areas have been developed worldwide typically national states ngos and charities have funded protected areas with limited investment from private companies this paper analyzes one option to increase private investment an international market for protected area certificates following a cost benefit analysis a three stage coalition game is developed the corporate dependency on ecosystems is modeled through the ecological footprint by implementing instruments such as side payments membership restriction and non compliance penalties the model shows that corporate environmental agreements reduce the individual cost of ecological protection and enhance social welfare the findings are supported by a sensitivity analysis conducted for the german tourism sector in zanzibar

rent seeking incentives in share contests abstract this article investigates share contests in our framework we allow contestants to have more general preferences than have been used in the literature previous approaches have the unfortunate characteristic that contestants marginal rates of substitution between the rent share allocated by the contest and their effort is constant regardless of the size of the rent share this results in a conventional wisdom larger rents command more effort by providing a more general framework we show the reverse may also be true and we derive the conditions under which this is the case our approach then allows us to rationalize within a standard contest framework observations that rents might be more hotly contested when they become scarcer as has evidently been the case with the recent global contraction of public funds available for public policy

a consumption based approach to carbon emission accounting sectoral differences and environmental benefits in recent years there has been growing concern about the emission trade balances of countries this is due to the fact that countries with an open economy are active players in international trade trade is not only a major factor in forging a country s economic structure but contributes to the movement of embodied emissions beyond country borders this issue is especially relevant from the carbon accounting policy and domestic production perspective as it is known that the production based principle is employed in the kyoto agreement the research described herein was designed to reveal the interdependence of countries on international trade and the corresponding embodied emissions both on national and on sectoral level and to illustrate the significance of the consumption based emission accounting it is presented here to what extent a consumption based accounting would change the present system based on production based accounting and allocation the relationship of co2 emission embodied in exports and embodied in imports is analysed here international trade can blur the responsibility for the ecological effects of production and consumption and it can lengthen the link between consumption and its consequences input output models are used in the methodology as they provide an appropriate framework for climate change accounting the analysis comprises an international comparative study of four european countries germany the united kingdom the netherlands and hungary with extended trading activities and carbon emissions moving from a production based approach in climate policy to a consumption based principle and allocation approach would help to increase the efficiency of emission reductions and would force countries to rethink their trading activities in order to decrease the environmental load of production activities the results of this study show that it is important to distinguish between the two emission accounting approaches both on the global and the local level

demographic transition in resource rich countries a blessing or a curse summary this study argues that resource wealth is a key factor for understanding income effects of demographic transition we develop a simple model highlighting how the income effect of increased labor supply may depend on resource rents and provide empirical evidence that support the theoretical predictions using panel data covering the period from 1982 to 2006 for more than 120 countries we find a negative interaction effect between resource wealth and demographic transition on national income moreover the negative interaction effect does not depend on institutional quality and is found also across different samples

conflict defense spending and the number of nations abstract this paper provides a formal model of endogenous border formation and choice of defense spending in a world with international conflict we examine both the case of democratic governments and of dictatorships the model is consistent with three observations first breakup of countries should follow a reduction in the likelihood of international conflicts second the number of regional conflicts between smaller countries may increase as a result of the breakup of larger countries third the size of the peace dividend the reduction in defense spending in a more peaceful world is limited by the process of country breakup

from ecological footprint to ecological rent an economic indicator for resource constraints abstract this paper takes as a starting point a combination of an input output model with a national ecological footprint account for germany in the spirit of wiedmann et al wiedmann t minx j barrett j wackernagel m 2006 allocating ecological footprints to final consumption categories with input output analysis ecological economics 56 28 48 footprint as well as biocapacity is dealt with at the industry level gross output of each industry and final demand for each industry can then be split up into a share that is reconcilable with biocapacity and another share that corresponds to the ecological deficit the ecological footprint concept is extended in this study by introducing the additional biocapacity necessary for sustaining the given level of economic activity it is assumed that each industry had to rent the corresponding areas and to apply a given technology in order to make this additional land biophysically productive that results in an additional technology for each industry leading to an increase in costs and prices the new price level is directly linked to the share of output that corresponds to biocapacity overshooting which is defined by the ecological deficit economic indicators can be derived by measuring the income difference brought about by the price increase this difference corresponds to a ricardian rent which is due to resource constraints on output growth

informality labor regulation and the business cycle abstract we ask how labor regulation and informality affect macroeconomic volatility and the propagation of shocks in emerging economies for this we propose a small open economy business cycle model with frictional labor markets endogenous labor participation and an informal sector our own calculations from the enoe national household survey reveal that these three margins are important to account for the labor market dynamics in mexico the model is calibrated to the mexican economy in particular to business cycle moments for employment and informality we show that interest rate shocks which affect specifically job creation in the formal sector are key to obtain a countercyclical informality rate in our model the presence of an informal sector might help to mitigate the impact of a stringent labor regulation on employment and consumption fluctuations in that sense it adds flexibility to the economy in its adjustment to shocks but at the cost of a lower productivity and an excess tfp and output volatility reducing the burden of labor regulation to the formal sector might achieve the goal of reducing output volatility while improving at the same time the efficiency in the allocation of resources

sustainability of nations by indices comparative study between environmental sustainability index ecological footprint and the emergy performance indices abstract the present work makes a comparison between the two most used environmental sustainability indices of nations ecological footprint and environmental sustainability index with two emergy ratios renewability and emergy sustainability index all of them are gaining space within the scientific community and government officials despite the efforts for obtaining an index that adequately represents the sustainability of a region according to the result of this research nowadays there is not yet a completely satisfactory index we consider that all of them need to be improved but the results point out the possibility of obtaining one better index of sustainability through the junction of ecological footprint with renewability emergy index

institutional causes macroeconomic symptoms volatility crises and growth countries that have pursued distortionary macroeconomic policies including high inflation large budget deficits and misaligned exchange rates appear to have suffered more macroeconomic volatility and also grown more slowly during the postwar period does this reflect the causal effect of these macroeconomic policies on economic outcomes one reason to suspect that the answer may be no is that countries pursuing poor macroeconomic policies also have weak institutions including political institutions that do not constrain politicians and political elites ineffective enforcement of property rights for investors widespread corruption and a high degree of political instability this paper documents that countries that inherited more extractive institutions from their colonial past were more likely to experience high volatility and economic crises during the postwar period more specifically societies where european colonists faced high mortality rates more than 100 years ago are much more volatile and prone to crises based on our previous work we interpret this relationship as due to the causal effect of institutions on economic outcomes europeans did not settle and were more likely to set up extractive institutions in areas where they faced high mortality once we control for the effect of institutions macroeconomic policies appear to have only a minor impact on volatility and crises this suggests that distortionary macroeconomic policies are more likely to be symptoms of underlying institutional problems rather than the main causes of economic

does food security matter for transition in arab countries abstract expectations are high that transition in tunisia egypt libya and yemen will bring about more freedom justice and economic opportunities however experiences from other world regions show that countries in transition are at high risk of entering conflicts which often come at large economic social and political costs in order to identify options on how conflict may be prevented in arab transition countries this paper assesses the key global drivers of conflicts based on a dataset from 1960 to 2010 and improved cross country regression techniques results show that unlike in other studies where per capita incomes inequality and poor governance among other factors emerge as the major determinants of conflict food security at macro and household levels emerges as the main cause of conflicts in the arab world the high exposure of arab countries to global food price variations proves to be an important source of vulnerability for a peaceful arab transition if history is also a guide to the future improving food security is not only important for improving the lives of rural and urban people it is also likely to be the key for a peaceful transition the paper concludes with a set of policy options on how to improve food security at macro and household levels including safeguard mechanisms against excessive price volatility export led and pro poor growth the creation expansion of social safety nets and targeted nutrition programs

carbon water and land use accounting consumption vs production perspectives abstract the traditional approach of accounting of environmental pressure in the kyoto protocols follows the production based accounting which attributes all environmental pressures generated from production activities within a country boundary to that country total environmental pressure however the major flaws of this approach is that it does not take into account the environmental pressures embodied in imports and so build stimulus for shifting of environmental pressures abroad an alternative approach to include environmental pressures associated with imports to the country and subtract export related environmental pressures is the consumption based approach or footprint approach this approach has been widely considered as an alternative way to more adequately allot responsibilities between the emitters and final consumers this study compares and discusses the concepts of both approaches showing the results of an empirical analysis and going into the application of the two different perspectives in worldwide environmental policies this paper presents the results of an analysis of the carbon water and land footprints of the worldwide from 1995 to 2009 and compares the outcomes for the two approaches for four world regions i e eu oecd bric and row the analysis is based on a multi region input output mrio model to assess these environmental pressures the proposed model uses the world input output database wiod covering 35 sectors and 41 countries the results show that during the entire study period the carbon emissions land use and water use for the eu and oecd regions are higher in the consumer approach than in the producer approach the results further indicate that for the bric and rest of the world row regions the carbon emission land and water use are higher in the producer approach than in the consumer approach

can cultural norms reduce conflicts confucianism and peasant rebellions in qing china abstract can culture mitigate conflicts triggered by economic shocks in light of the extraordinary emphasis that confucianism places on subordination and pacifism we examine its role in possibly attenuating peasant rebellion within the historical context of china circa 1651 1910 our analysis finds that while crop failure triggers peasant rebellion its effect is significantly smaller in counties characterized by stronger confucian norms as proxied by confucian temples and chaste women this result remains robust after controlling for a long list of covariates and instrumenting confucian norms using ancient confucian sages 500 b c a d 550 to address concerns of measurement error and reverse causality

the violent legacy of conflict evidence on asylum seekers crime and public policy in switzerland we study empirically how past exposure to conflict in origin countries makes migrants more violence prone in their host country focusing on asylum seekers in switzerland we exploit a novel and unique dataset on all crimes reported in switzerland by the nationalities of perpetrators and of victims over 2009 2016 our baseline result is that cohorts exposed to civil conflict mass killing during childhood are 35 percent more prone to violent crime than the average cohort this effect is particularly strong for early childhood exposure and is mostly confined to co nationals consistent with inter group hostility persisting over time we exploit cross region heterogeneity in public policies within switzerland to document which integration policies are best able to mitigate the detrimental effect of past conflict exposure on violent criminality we find that offering labor market access to asylum seekers eliminates two thirds of the effect

examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 1 a technical note on combining input output and ecological footprint analysis in recent years there have been a number of attempts to develop a more comprehensive approach to the issue of measuring resource use and or pollution generation embodied in trade flows including contributions that combine input output techniques and ecological footprint analysis in this two part paper we describe how to enumerate the resource and or pollution content of inter regional and inter national trade flows part 1 and we present a literature review of recent methodological and empirical developments part 2 it is straightforward in principle to extend the basic input output approach to capture international trade flows however in practice problems of data availability and compatibility and of computability of extended input output matrices mean that simplifying assumptions are generally applied but with the implications of these assumptions often not made fully explicit what appears to be absent from previous applications is an account of the analytical method by which ecological footprints should ideally be estimated in an international input output accounting analysis this allows an explicit analysis of the problems that prevent the application of the full method and identification of the most appropriate short cut methods in a transparent way the objective of this paper is to provide such an account

procedures and criteria to develop and evaluate household sustainable consumption indicators abstract communication about very complex problems like household sustainable consumption in simple terms is still a major challenge despite the diversity of tools to measure household consumption clearer indicators are needed to more effectively communicate with the general public the main objective of this research was to develop an approach to define the main procedures and criteria to built household sustainable consumption assessment tools based on indicator sets a review of available household sustainable consumption assessment metrics and related initiatives was conducted this included a comparative analysis of the different approaches the review revealed that the majority of these initiatives are focused upon specific domains e g energy or waste but none used an integrated approach in the sustainable consumption domains furthermore it was found that few methods used indicators to measure and assess household sustainable consumption principal components and a checklist of key good practice factors that a household sustainable consumption indicator system should include were developed due to the need to communicate effectively to engage stakeholders and to address the complexity involved in the measurement and assessment of household sustainable consumption the proposed integrated approach was designed to evaluate household sustainable consumption

a three perspective view of greenhouse gas emission responsibilities in new zealand abstract while responsibility for the environmental impacts of production has been commonly assigned to producers production is driven by consumer demand and it is valid to question whether impacts should instead be assigned to consumers however in each of these approaches producers and consumers either bear the full burden of responsibility or none at all an example of this is the kyoto protocol where all greenhouse gas emissions are assigned to the producer and no consideration is given to where goods are finally consumed rather than taking the conventional producer or consumer responsibility approach a third perspective is possible in which responsibility is shared we use input output analysis to apply all three of these responsibility perspectives to new zealand s domestic greenhouse gas emissions our main findings from the shared responsibility approach are that new zealand producers are responsible for 44 of domestic emissions new zealand consumers take 28 and 27 are exported a shared responsibility approach appears to distribute the burden of responsibility and associated liability between parties more fairly and is likely to be more widely acceptable than pure producer or consumer perspectives

measuring progress towards carbon reduction in the uk the uk climate change bill proposes to establish legally binding targets for a 60 reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 this paper discusses the challenges posed by measuring progress towards this target it takes as a premise that the conventional productionbased accounting framework enshrined in the unfccc emissions accounting guidelines is inappropriate for this task because it fails to account for the carbon traded across the uk national boundary accordingly it sets out a consumption based accounting framework using a two region environmental input output eio model which could in principle measure progress in reducing the emissions attributable to final consumers in the uk it illustrates the use of this framework to measure the reduction in carbon dioxide achieved by the uk between 1990 the kyoto base year and the year 2004 and compares this against the production perspective the results indicate that any progress towards the uk s carbon reduction targets visible under a production perspective disappears completely when viewed from a consumption perspective but the robustness of this conclusion depends critically on the accuracy of underlying economic and environmental data sets as well as specific assumptions concerning imports by analysing the consistency of uk input output data we conclude that eio is still some way from being able to answer the critical question of the carbon trade balance for the uk in these circumstances measuring real progress towards carbon reduction in the uk remains elusive

a brief review of some problems in using national accounts data in level of output comparisons and growth studies abstract after an initial burst of enthusiasm for establishing their national accounts 30 or 40 years ago some countries have made continuous improvements while others have done little to maintain even their initial system presently most developing countries make their basic estimate of gdp from the production side and most do not have adequate surveys to permit a consistency check of their production and expenditure side estimates the base surveys for expenditures and production are typically over ten years old and the lags in basic surveys for constructing constant price estimates are frequently longer a number of countries estimate their growth from a weighted average of volume indexes and make no attempt at direct deflation many of those that do deflate their current expenditure estimates do so at a very aggregate level users of national accounts should be aware of the varying quality of the estimates across countries and hopefully continual questioning of the numbers will help to encourage improvement

sustainability assessment of u s final consumption and investments triple bottom line input output analysis the u s final demand categories such as household consumption private fixed investments government purchases and investments and export of goods and services have a wide range of environmental economic and social impacts analysis of these impacts termed as the triple bottom line tbl stimulated a tremendous interest by policy makers over the last decade therefore current research aims to analyze the tbl of u s final demands from a systems perspective to accomplish this goal the supply and use tables published by the u s bureau of economic analysis are merged with a range of environmental economic and social metrics the results show that household consumption has the largest indirect tbl sustainability impacts compared to other final demand categories with shares that range between 43 and 88 industrial sectors including manufacturing utilities agriculture construction transportation and mining are generally found to be responsible for the highest impacts for most of the environmental impact categories service sectors generally have the highest impacts on the economic and social indicators of sustainability analysis results also indicate that while meeting the household demand agriculture utilities and manufacturing sectors have relatively more environmental impacts than their contributions to gross domestic product gdp whereas service sectors contribute to gdp with a higher share than their environmental burdens furthermore it is envisioned that significant reductions in environmental footprints of u s households can be achieved if environmental policies that aim to reduce the household consumption are also supported with sustainable growth through greener and resource efficient economy

applying input output analysis to scenario analysis of ecological footprints abstract application of input output analysis to ecological footprints efs is shifting from an ex post static calculation toward an ex ante scenario analysis for enhancing the policy relevance of ef analysis this change in application prompts two issues requiring careful examination 1 what is measured by leontief inverses or extended environmental leontief inverses and 2 whether a sector s land multiplier or compositions of land multiplier can appropriately reflect the effect of delivering one unit of the sector s output to final demand on the required area s of production lands used by the sector itself and by other producing sectors whose products are contributed directly and indirectly to its production the underlying message of these two questions is whether the assumed linear marginal relationship between a sector s output and its intermediate inputs input output coefficients a critical assumption made by w leontief to transform a transactions table from an accounting framework into the input output model can be extended to assume that the marginal relationship between a sector s output and the area of production land it uses for generating output is fixed land output marginal coefficient equal to average coefficient by reviewing the literature on input output analysis and its application to environmental issues and by theoretically and empirically examining the relation between sector output and land appropriation this study advises against the use of land multipliers or their compositions in the ef scenario analysis to apply the input output model to ef scenario analysis for enhancing policy relevance with due attention to the relationship between sector output and land appropriation this study suggests a two stage ef calculation procedure in the first stage the input output application estimates only the required raw materials or generated pollutants for meeting a given consumption pattern which is the objective of environmental input output analysis in the second stage the estimated amount of raw materials or pollutants is converted into land water area and a choice of conversion methods is suggested according to the research questions and the availability of conversion methods and required data

exchange market mayhem the antecedents and aftermath of speculative attacks exchange market mayhem the antecedents and aftermath of speculative attacks this paper evaluates the causes and consequences of episodes of turbulence in foreign exchange markets using data from 1959 through 1993 for twenty oecd countries we consider the antecedents and aftermath of devaluations and revaluations flotations fixings and speculative attacks which may not be successful we find that realignments of fixed exchange rates are alike devaluations are preceded by political instability budget and current account deficits and fast growth of money and prices revaluations are mirror images of devaluations speculative attacks resemble devaluations but money growth and inflation are more endemic and there is no last minute attempt to tighten monetary policy in contrast few consistent correlations link regime transitions like flotations or fixings to macroeconomic or political variables transitions between exchange rate regimes are largely idiosyncratic and are neither consistently provoked ex ante by systematic imbalances nor typically justified ex post by subsequent changes in policy we conclude that there are no clear early warning signals of many speculative attacks and no easy solutions for policy makers barry eichengreen andrew k rose and charles wyplosz

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

taking the u out of kuznets a comprehensive analysis of the ekc and environmental degradation unlike most environmental kuznets curve ekc studies which focus on narrow measures of pollution as proxies for environmental quality we test the validity of the ekc using the ecological footprint ef a more comprehensive measure of environmental degradation we find no empirical evidence of an ekc relationship between the ef and economic development and only limited support for such a relationship among the components of the ef in addition we discover that energy is largely responsible for the lack of an ekc relationship and that energy consumption levels would have to be cut by over 50 in order for a statistically significant ekc relationship to emerge from the data overall these results suggest that growth alone will not lead to sustainable development

on the number and size of nations this paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes and in different economic environments with more or less economic integration we focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations our model implies that i democratization leads to secessions ii in equilibrium one generally observes an inefficiently large number of countries iii the equilibrium number of countries is increasing in the amount of economic integration

population size and civil conflict risk is there a causal link does an expansion of the population size expose nation states to a higher risk of suffering from civil conflict obtaining empirical evidence for a causal relationship is difficult due to reverse effects and omitted variable bias this article addresses causality issues by using randomly occurring drought as an instrumental variable to generate exogenous variation in population size for a panel of 37 sub saharan countries over the period 1981 2004 instrumental variable estimates yield that a 5 increase in population size raises the risk of civil conflict by around six percentage points

climate shocks state capacity and peasant uprisings in north china during 25 1911 ce china provides an interesting case study of civil conflict because of her long history and rich records using a unique dynastic panel dataset for north china during 25 1911 ce this study finds that severe famines and dynastic age were positively correlated with peasant uprisings whereas government disaster relief as a proxy for state capacity played a significant mitigating role negative climate shocks e g severe drought locust plagues affected peasant uprisings primarily through the channel of severe famines the effects of population density temperature and other climate shocks e g flood levee breaches snow disasters and frost were either not robust or insignificant

trading spaces calculating embodied ecological footprints in international trade using a product land use matrix plum abstract nations import and export biophysical resources with many ecosystems worldwide under mounting stress countries may be increasingly interested in knowing the extent and origin of their ecological imports and dependencies in this paper the ecological footprint is used as a tool to measure the biophysical as opposed to financial value of international trade flows this paper attempts to answer the following question how large of an ecological footprint does a given country exert inside the borders of each of its trading partners records in the un comtrade bilateral trade database are multiplied by a matrix of per product footprint yield coefficients to translate from values in dollars and tonnes to units of hectares the results show that the largest interregional flows are from latin to north america and from north america to asia pacific grouping countries by gdp high and middle income countries appear in footprint terms to trade predominantly with other high and middle income countries and much less with low income countries

identifying common features among household consumption patterns optimized to minimize specific environmental burdens abstract this study seeks to find common features in a set of simulated japanese household consumption patterns each of which was optimized to reduce a particular type of environmental burden to this end an input output system comprising some 500 commodity and fixed capital formation sectors was formulated that relates japanese household consumption of these commodities to the generation of 13 types of environmental burden clustered in 6 key problem areas based on this system a linear programming model was developed and was used to compute a set of 13 household consumption patterns optimized for minimizing each of the environmental burdens in turn each of these singly optimized patterns was then characterized as to how it impacts on the magnitude of the other 12 environmental burdens by examining the commonalties and differences among these optimal patterns we then classified consumer commodities into 3 types providing a simple indicator with which to steer towards consumption patterns with less environmental impact than today s

integrating the valuation of ecosystem services into the input output economics of an alpine region traditional economic accounting mostly ignores the benefits provided by nature and thus falls short in giving incentives for improving the way the economy uses natural resources in this study we develop a general framework for integrating the value of ecosystem services into an input output table in particular we integrate regionally valued ecosystem services on the supply side of an input output table to quantify what natural resources offer to economic development using several different indicators we show the benefits of the ecosystem services under the status quo and a scenario for regional development our results suggest that economic activities should be encouraged to use the ecosystem services more intensively while landscape development should aim at providing the required services we conclude that such an approach can provide a platform for decision makers to learn quantitatively about the dependency of the regional economy on natural services

the economic impact of short term imf engagement in low income countries summary this study estimates the economic impact of imf supported programs addressing policy and exogenous shocks in low income countries lics using the propensity score matching approach focusing on a more homogenous group of financing events greatly improves the specification and predictive power of the selection model as compared to earlier studies which is the key requirement to control for selection bias this paper looks into a wide range of potential economic and political determinants of participation lower reserve coverage deterioration in the current account balance a weaker real gdp growth increased macroeconomic instability evident in higher fiscal deficits inflation and exchange market pressures and lagged elections would increase the probability of participation i e propensity scores moreover global conditions including changes in real oil and non oil commodity prices and world trade are also significant therefore adverse global shocks could create cycles in demand for imf financing the short term imf engagement is positively associated with a wide range of macroeconomic outcomes notably the impact on the short term growth is the greatest and becomes significant only for lics facing substantial macroeconomic imbalances or large exogenous shocks when matching accounts for propensity scores and institutional quality program countries in this group have changes in growth 1 5 and 3 5 percentage points higher than the control group

the modern history of exchange rate arrangements a reinterpretation we develop a novel system of reclassifying historical exchange rate regimes one key difference between our study and previous classifications is that we employ monthly data on market determined parallel exchange rates going back to 1946 for 153 countries our approach differs from the imf official classification which we show to be only a little better than random it also differs radically from all previous attempts at historical reclassification our classification points to a rethinking of economic performance under alternative exchange rate regimes indeed the breakup of bretton woods had less impact on exchange rate regimes than is popularly believed

effects of transitory shocks to aggregate output on consumption in poor countries this paper provides instrumental variables estimates of the response of aggregate private consumption to transitory output shocks in poor countries to identify exogenous unanticipated idiosyncratic and transitory variations in national output we use year to year variations in rainfall as an instrumental variable in a panel of 39 sub saharan african countries during the period 1980 2009 our estimates yield a marginal propensity to consume out of transitory output of around 0 2 to explain this result we show using instrumental variables techniques that there is a significant negative effect of transitory output shocks on net current transfers and a significant positive and quantitatively large effect on the trade balance an important implication is that frictions to private financial flows do not necessarily imply large effects of transitory shocks to aggregate output on private consumption in poor countries

economic structure and strategies for greenhouse gas mitigation abstract greenhouse gas ghg emission mitigation policy impacts the economic system directly in the short term by altering relative prices and indirectly in the long term by shifting the structure of the economy there may also be adjustments to economic structure independent of policy intervention due to changes in population consumption patterns and global markets the overall effectiveness of specific mitigation policy will partly depend on these indirect and exogenous changes to economic structure this study develops a new measure linking economic development with its environmental effects the technical cost of ghg mitigation under economic growth in an economy is calculated by combining traditional input output io analysis and a linear programming based sensitivity analysis the approach is applied to northern ireland ni producing an isoemission matrix that maps emission neutral expansion paths for the economy the measurement provides an indicator of the demand for technical improvement to achieve ghg mitigation at a national or regional level the flexibility and transparency of the approach make it useful for evaluating potential ghg mitigation strategies