a note on global welfare in pharmaceutical patenting this paper revisits the question of whether global welfare is higher under a uniform world wide system of pharmaceutical product patents or with international rules allowing low income nations to free ride on the discoveries of firms in rich nations key variables include the extent to which free riding reduces the discovery of new drugs the rent potential of rich as compared to poor nations the ratio of the marginal utility of income in poor as compared to rich nations and the competitive environment within which r d decisions are made global welfare is found to be higher with free riding across plausible discovery impairment and income utility combinations especially when rent seeking behaviour leads to an expansion of r d outlays exhausting appropriable rents

regulatory policy and the location of bio pharmaceutical foreign direct investment in europe this paper examines the relationship between cross country differences in drug price regulation and the location of biopharmaceutical foreign direct investment fdi in europe simple theory predicts that price regulation in one country might affect total investment but not the location of that investment if sales are global nevertheless some manufacturers threaten that the introduction of price regulation in a country will motivate them to move their investments to other countries are such threats cheap talk or is there evidence that firms avoid price controlling countries when making fdi location choices we use data on 527 investments initiated in 27 european countries between 2002 and 2009 and find that investors are less likely to choose countries with price controls after controlling for other determinants of investment we also observe a relative decline in investment in countries that increased the stringency of regulatory regimes during our sample period the effect is restricted to non manufacturing investments and is most robust for those related to administrative functions

the relative importance of actual and potential competition empirical evidence from the pharmaceuticals market the relative importance of actual and potential competition empirical evidence from the pharmaceuticals market

bureaucracy infrastructure and economic growth evidence from u s cities during the progressive era recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish i hypothesize that establishment of such a bureaucracy will lengthen the period that public decision makers are willing to wait to realize the benefits of expenditures leading to allocation of a greater proportion of government resources to long gestation period projects such as infrastructure this hypothesis can be tested using data generated by a natural experiment in the early part of this century when a wave of municipal reform transformed the governments of many u s cities controlling for city and time effects adoption of civil service is found to increase the share of total municipal expenditure allocated to road and sewer investment other estimates imply that this increased share raises the growth rate of city manufacturing employment by one half percent per year this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

bureaucrats or politicians part ii multiple policy tasks abstract policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats this paper investigates first the normative criteria with which to allocate policy tasks to elected policymakers politicians or non elected bureaucrats politicians are preferable if there is uncertainty about social preferences and flexibility is valuable or if policy complementarities and compensation of losers is important bureaucrats are preferable if time inconsistency and short termism is an issue or if vested interests have large stakes in the policy outcome we then compare this normative benchmark with the case in which politicians choose when to delegate and show that the two generally differ

a new tailored scheme for the support of renewable energies in developing countries abstract historically the promotion of renewable energy technologies in isolated areas has involved international donors or governments subsidising the initial capital investment this paper proposes an alternative support mechanism for remote villages based on the generation of renewable electricity this communication presents an evaluation of the renewable energy premium tariff rpt scheme a locally adapted variation of the feed in tariff tailored for decentralised grids of developing countries the rpt scheme stimulates the deployment of renewable energy technologies by paying for renewable electricity generated a good quality performance is secured since the support is given based on the electricity produced by renewables not for the initial capital investment the mechanism has been designed to provide a cost effective scheme for the introduction of renewable energy technologies to remote villages to provide sustainable and affordable electricity to local users to make renewable energy projects attractive to policy makers and concurrently decrease financial risk to attract private sector investment

energy consumption real income and temporal causality results from a multi country study based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques abstract unlike previous studies on the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth this paper illustrates how the finding of cointegration i e long term equilibrium relationship between these variables may be used in testing granger causality based on the most recent johansen s multivariate cointegration tests preceded by various unit root or non stationarity tests we test for cointegration between total energy consumption and real income of six asian economies india pakistan malaysia singapore indonesia and the philippines non rejection of cointegration between variables rules out granger non causality and imples at least one way of granger causality either unidirectional or bidirectionial secondly by using a dynamic vector error correction model we then analyse the direction of granger causation and hence the within sample granger exogeneity or endogeneity of each of the variables thirdly the relative strength of the causality is gauged through the dynamic variance decomposition technique by decomposing the total impact of an unanticipated shock to each of the variables beyond the sample period into proportions attributable to shocks in the other variables including its own in the bivariate system results based on these tools of methodology indicate that while all pair wise relationships shared common univariate integrational properties only relationships for three countries india pakistan and indonesia were cointegrated for these countries temporal causality results were mixed with unidirectional causality from energy to income for india exactly the reverse for indonesia and mutual causality for pakistan the vdcs were not inconsistent with these results and provided us with an additional insight as to the relatively more dominant direction of causation in pakistan simple bivariate vector autoregressive models for the three non cointegrated systems did not indicate any direction of causality significantly in either direction

endogenous federal grants and crowd out of state government spending theory and evidence from the federal highway aid program contrary to simple theoretical predictions existing evidence suggests that federal grants do not crowd out state government spending a legislative bargaining model with endogenous grants documents a positive correlation between grant receipts and preferences for public goods this correlation has likely biased existing work against measuring crowd out to correct for such endogeneity the model motivates instruments based on the political power of state congressional delegations exploiting this exogenous variation in grants the instrumental variables estimator reports crowd out that is statistically and economically significant this endogeneity may explain the flypaper effect a nonequivalence between grant receipts and private income jel d70 h40 h77

do fiscal rules dampen the political business cycle this paper develops and tests the theory that fiscal rules limit politicians ability to manipulate the budget for electoral gain using panel data from the american states i find evidence suggesting that stringent balanced budget rules dampen the political business cycle that is while spending rises before and falls after elections in states that can carry deficits into the next fiscal year this pattern does not exist in states with strict no carry rules neither binding gubernatorial term limits nor the partisan composition of government appear to significantly affect the magnitude of the political business cycle

tying in two sided markets with multi homing this paper analyzes the effects of tying on market competition and social welfare in two sided markets when economic agents can engage in multi homing by participating in multiple platforms to reap maximal network benefits the model shows that tying induces more consumers to multi home and makes platform specific exclusive content available to more consumers which is beneficial to content providers as a result tying can be welfare enhancing if multi homing is allowed even in cases where its welfare impacts are negative in the absence of multi homing the analysis thus can have important implications for recent antitrust cases in industries where multi homing is prevalent

energy consumption and gdp causality relationship in g 7 countries and emerging markets abstract the causality relationship between energy consumption and income is a well studied topic in energy economics this paper studies the time series properties of energy consumption and gdp and reexamines the causality relationship between the two series in the top 10 emerging markets excluding china due to lack of data and g 7 countries we discover bi directional causality in argentina causality running from gdp to energy consumption in italy and korea and from energy consumption to gdp in turkey france germany and japan hence energy conservation may harm economic growth in the last four countries

voters as fiscal conservatives voters penalize federal and state spending growth this is the central result of my analysis of voting behavior in presidential senatorial and gubernatorial elections from 1950 1988 the composition of federal spending growth seems irrelevant the vote loss to the president s party from an extra dollar of defense or nondefense spending is the same however in gubernatorial elections expansion of state welfare spending exacts a disproportionate political price deficit financing of federal or state spending does not appear to matter politically i conclude by discussing the obvious question of why government budgets have grown in the face of this voter hostility

energy and national income in korea further evidence on the role of omitted variables abstract results of this paper indicate that the real oil price is a major determinant of real national income and energy consumption the combined effects of real money and real government expenditure on real income and energy consumption are also substantial a lack of causality or the causality between energy and real income in prior studies is due to the omitted variables results also confirm that the two oil price shocks combined adversely affected real national income

an investigation of co integration and causality between energy consumption and economic activity in taiwan applying hsiao a version of the granger causality method this paper examines the causality between energy and gnp and energy and employment by applying recently developed techniques of co integration and hsiao s version of the granger causality to taiwanese data for the 1955 1993 period the phillips perron tests reveal that the series with the exception of gnp are not stationary and therefore differencing is performed to secure stationarity the study finds causality running from gdp to energy consumption without feedback in taiwan it is also found that causality runs from gdp to energy but not vice versa

measuring the effect of subsidized training programs on movements in and out of employment despite over two decades of u s experience in operating large scale subsidized training programs for low income and unemployed workers the effects of these programs are still highly controversial the controversy arises from the difficulty of specifying the model of participant outcomes in the absence of training that is necessary in any nonexperimental program evaluation in this paper we suggest that some of these difficulties may be overcome by focusing on a very simple measure of outcomes namely the probability of employment we present a variety of estimates of the effect of training on the probability of employment for the 1976 cohort of adult male participants in the comprehensive employment and training act ceta program our methods range from a simple comparison of pre and post training employment probabilities between trainees and nonparticipants to a fully specified first order markov model of employment probabilities with individual heterogeneity there is consistent evidence across methods that ceta participation increased the probability of employment in the three years after training by from 2 to 5 percentage points classroom training programs appear to have had significantly larger effects than on the job programs although the estimated effects of both kinds of programs are positive we also find that movements in and out of employment for trainees and nonparticipants are reasonably well described by a first order process conditional on individual heterogeneity in the context of this model ceta participation appears to have increased both the probability of moving into employment and the probability of continuing employment

electoral business cycles in oecd countries studies of oecd countries have generally failed to detect real economic expansions in the pre election period casting doubt on the existence of opportunistic political business cycles we develop a theory that predicts a substantial portion of the economy experiences a real decline in the pre election period specifically the political uncertainty created by elections induces private actors to postpone investments with high costs of reversal the resulting declines referred to as reverse electoral business cycles are larger the more competitive the electoral race and the greater the polarization between major parties we test these predictions using quarterly data on private fixed investment in ten oecd countries between 1975 and 2006 the results suggest that reverse electoral business cycles exist and as expected depend on electoral competitiveness and partisan polarization moreover simply by removing private fixed investment from gross domestic product gdp we uncover robust evidence of opportunistic cycles

causality relationship between electricity consumption and gdp in bangladesh in this paper we examine the causal relationship between the per capita electricity consumption and the per capita gdp for bangladesh using cointegration and vector error correction model our results show that there is unidirectional causality from per capita gdp to per capita electricity consumption however the per capita electricity consumption does not cause per capita gdp in case of bangladesh the finding has significant implications from the point of view of energy conservation emission reduction and economic development

price regulation and parallel imports of pharmaceuticals abstract this paper studies the effects of price regulation and parallel imports in the on patent pharmaceutical market in a theory model where the producer price is subject to bargaining between the brand name producer and a distributor we show that the effects of stricter price regulation crucially depend on whether the producer faces competition from parallel imports while parallel imports improve the bargaining position of the distributor price regulation counteracts this effect and may even be profitable for the producer we test the implications of our model on a unique dataset with information on sales and prices at both producer and retail level for 165 substances over 4 years 2004 2007 we show that stricter price regulation reduces competition from parallel imports and has no strictly negative effect on producer profits in the presence absence of parallel imports our results suggest that price regulation might improve static efficiency without being harmful for dynamic efficiency in the presence of parallel imports

does electoral accountability affect economic policy choices evidence from gubernatorial term limits this paper analyzes the behavior of u s governors from 1950 to 1986 to investigate a reputation building model of political behavior we argue that differences in the behavior of governors who face a binding term limit and those who are able to run again provides a source of variation in discount rates that can be used to test a political agency model we find evidence that taxes spending and other policy instruments respond to a binding term limit if a democrat is in office the result is a fiscal cycle in term limit states which lowers state income when the term limit binds

margins and market shares pharmacy incentives for generic substitution we study the impact of product margins on pharmacies incentive to promote generics instead of brand names first we construct a theoretical model where pharmacies can persuade patients with a brand name prescription to purchase a generic version instead we show that pharmacies substitution incentives are determined by relative margins and relative patient copayments second we exploit a unique product level panel data set which contains information on sales and prices at both producer and retail level in the empirical analysis we nd a strong relationship between the margins of brand names and generics and their market shares in terms of policy implications our results suggest that pharmacy incentives are crucial for promoting generic sales

pricing of drugs with heterogeneous health insurance coverage in this paper we examine the role of insurance coverage in explaining the generic competition paradox in a two stage game involving a single producer of brand name drugs and n quantity competing producers of generic drugs independently of brand loyalty which some studies rely upon to explain the paradox we show that heterogeneity in insurance coverage may result in higher prices of brand name drugs following generic entry with market segmentation based on insurance coverage present in both the pre and post entry stages the paradox can arise when the two types of drugs are highly substitutable and the market is quite profitable but does not have to arise when the two types of drugs are highly differentiated however with market segmentation occurring only after generic entry the paradox can arise when the two types of drugs are weakly substitutable provided however that the industry is not very profitable in both cases that is when market segmentation is present in the pre entry stage and when it is not the paradox becomes more likely to arise as the market expands and or insurance companies decrease deductibles applied on the purchase of generic drugs

does tax competition really promote growth abstract this paper considers the relationship between tax competition and growth in an endogenous growth model where there are stochastic shocks to productivity and capital taxes fund a public good which may be for final consumption or an infrastructure input absent stochastic shocks decentralized tax setting two or more jurisdictions maximizes the rate of growth as the constant returns to scale present with endogenous growth implies extreme tax competition stochastic shocks imply that households face a portfolio choice problem which dampens down tax competition and may raise taxes above the centralized level growth can be lower with decentralization our results also predict a negative relationship between output volatility and growth with decentralization

advertising and competition in the ethical pharmaceutical industry the case of antihypertensive drugs abstract this paper uses data on the majority of name brand antihypertensive drugs marketed in the united states during 1988 93 to test the hypothesis that advertising decreases the price elasticity of demand in the pharmaceutical industry this is the first study to directly estimate the effects of drug product promotion on the price elasticity of demand in this industry we find strong evidence of an advertising effect in particular detailing efforts the salient means for product promotion in this industry systematically lower price sensitivity given the inverse relationship between elasticity of demand and price it is likely that consumers pay higher prices as a result of the advertising that occurs in this industry our findings are thus consistent with hurwitz and caves who find evidence that advertising inhibits entry into this market but in contrast to earlier research that found no anticompetitive effect

characteristics of demand for pharmaceutical products an examination of four cephalosporins we model demand for four cephalosporins and compute own and cross price elasticities between branded and generic versions of the four drugs we model demand as a multistage budgeting problem and we argue that such a model is appropriate to the multistage nature of the purchase of pharmaceutical products in particular the prescribing and dispensing stages we find quite high elasticities between generic substitutes and also significant elasticities between some therapeutic substitutes

bureaucratic structure and bureaucratic performance in less developed countries abstract we argue that several easily identifiable structural features constitute the key ingredients of effective state bureaucracies and should help to predict ratings of bureaucratic performance competitive salaries internal promotion and career stability and meritocratic recruitment we collect a new dataset on these features for bureaucracies of 35 less developed countries controlling for country income level of education and ethnolinguistic diversity we find that our measure of meritocratic recruitment is a statistically significant determinant of ratings supplied by two of three country risk agencies the importance of competitive salaries and internal promotion and career stability could not be clearly established

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

the generics paradox revisited empirical evidence from regulated markets earlier studies have pointed at the presence of a generics paradox in the us prescription drug market this article tests whether the generics paradox also holds in the presence of pricing and reimbursement regulation in six european prescription drug markets using proprietary pricing and market share data the results of panel data analysis suggest that the generics paradox also holds in these markets neither generic entry nor generic market penetration affect prices of originator drugs downwards and prices of originator drugs actually increase post generic entry

reference pricing with elastic demand for pharmaceuticals in this paper we re examine the properties of two commonly adopted government reimbursement schemes for pharmaceuticals reference pricing and fixed percentage reimbursement we depart from the previous literature by assuming that the individual demand is price sensitive and depends on the copayment rate i e the part paid by each consumer we obtain two novel results under reference pricing first as the copayment rate increases so do pharmaceutical prices second this increase in pharmaceutical prices reduces social welfare whilst reference pricing does emerge as a preferable reimbursement scheme demand elasticities and the copayment rate interact in complex ways this leads unexpectedly to the possibility that a higher copayment rate lower reimbursement rate results in higher government expenditure

patents and the global diffusion of new drugs analysis of the timing of launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries during 1983 2002 shows that patent and price regulation regimes strongly affect how quickly new drugs become commercially available in different countries price regulation delays launch while longer and more extensive patent rights accelerate it health policy institutions and economic and demographic factors that make markets more profitable also speed up diffusion the estimated effects are generally robust to controlling for endogeneity of policy regimes with country fixed effects and instrumental variables the results highlight the important role of policy choices in driving the diffusion of new innovations

the relationship between energy and gnp further results this paper reexamines the casuality between gnp and energy consumption by using updated us data for the period 1947 1979 as a secondary contribution we investigate the causal relationship between energy consumption and employment applying sims technique we find no causal relationship between gnp and energy consumption we find further that there is a slight unidirectional flow running from employment to energy consumption economic interpretations of the empirical results are also presented

a note on the causal relationship between energy and gdp in taiwan abstract this paper re examines the causality between energy consumption and gdp by using updated taiwan data for the period 1954 1997 as a secondary contribution we investigate the causal relationship between gdp and the aggregate as well as several disaggregate categories of energy consumption including coal oil natural gas and electricity applying granger s technique we find bidirectional causality between total energy consumption and gdp we find further that different directions of cause exist between gdp and various kinds of energy consumption

reducing subsidies on household fuels in india how will it affect the poor kerosene and lpg are widely used in households in india for lighting and cooking these fuels have historically been subsidized as part of the restructuring of the energy sector the government is committed to limiting these subsidies this paper examines the impact of reducing energy subsidies on the welfare of the poor the paper uses data from nationally representative surveys of over 100 000 households the paper concludes that the case for reducing lpg subsidies is strong although the kerosene subsidy is an inefficient means of subsidizing fuel use by the poor reduction in it will need to be supported by other policies that would limit the adverse impacts

regulation and pricing of pharmaceuticals reference pricing or price cap regulation we study the relationship between regulatory regimes and pharmaceutical firms pricing strategies using a unique policy experiment from norway which in 2003 introduced a reference price rp system called index pricing for a sub sample of off patent pharmaceuticals replacing the existing price cap pc regulation we estimate the effect of the reform using a product level panel dataset covering the drugs exposed to rp and a large number of drugs still under pc regulation in the time before and after the policy change our results show that rp significantly reduced both brand name and generic prices within the reference group with the effect being stronger for brand names we also identify a negative cross price effect on therapeutic substitutes not included in the rp system in terms of policy implications the results suggest that rp is more effective than pc regulation in lowering drug prices while the cross price effect raises a concern about patent protection

civil service reform abstract civil service rules governing the selection and motivation of bureaucrats are among the defining institutions of modern democracies although this is an active area of reform in the us and elsewhere economic analyses of the issue are virtually nonexistent this paper provides a welfare evaluation of civil service reform it describes the effect of reform on the interaction of politicians voters and bureaucrats and shows that society often faces trade offs between improving the bureaucracy and improving the performance of politicians my results characterize the conditions under which merit based recruitment and civil service protections such as tenure can improve welfare

pricing patent loss and the market for pharmaceuticals dustry the drug price competition and patent term restoration act of 1984 very clearly reflects the determination of policy makers to simultaneously address issues of price control and technical progress the 1984 act increased returns to innovation by extending the period of patent protection to take into account the time between receipt of a patent and food and drug administration fda approval of a drug for sale in the market the 1984 act also reduced the testing requirements for approval of new generic brands of existing chemical entities thus reducing entry barriers in markets where patents have expired the expected outcome from eased entry conditions for generic substitutes was substantially enhanced price competition and lower prices for brand name drugs in fact prices for brand name drugs have tended to increase following entry by generics wagner and duffy 28 examined price changes for top selling generics and name brands they show substantial price increases in brand name prices accompanying large reductions in generic prices as entry of generics occurs grabowski and vernon 9 examined data on 18 major orally administered rug products subject to generic competition between 1983 and 1987 and found that the name brand price increased by an average of 7 one year subsequent to generic entry and 11 two years following generic entry

health insurance and diversity of treatment we determine the optimal health policy mix when the average utility of patients increases with the supply of drugs available in a therapeutic class health risk coverage relies on two instruments copayment and reference pricing both of which affect the risk associated with health expenses and diversity of treatment for a fixed supply of drugs the reference pricing policy aims at minimizing expenses in which case the equilibrium price of drugs is independent of the copayment rate however with an endogenous supply of drugs diversity of treatment may susbtitute for insurance so that the reference pricing may depart from maximal cost containment in order to promote entry we next analyze the determinants of the optimal policy while an increase in risk aversion or in the side effect loss increases diversity and decreases the copayment rate an increase in entry cost decreases both diversity and the copayment rate

sustainability assessment of renewable energy projects for off grid rural electrification the pangan an island case in the philippines abstract renewable energy systems ress have been promoted for rural electrification as an answer to the growing energy needs of communities while simultaneously satisfying environmental and resource scarcity problems these off grid systems however have several challenges in the perspective of sustainability due to the technically and financially weak recipients and users of the projects there is still however less detailed understanding how the technical and economic aspects of the projects can properly match the social aspects to promote sustainability this paper aimed to further understand the challenges and social impacts of rural electrification projects using res through a case study of a centralized off grid solar plant in the philippines the study used multiple correspondence analysis mca to identify essential user attributes which explain the users electricity consumption behaviors the community cooperative had difficulties maintaining the facility in the long term due to financial and capacity related challenges a holistic approach dealing with the technical economic and social aspects in developing res projects promote sustainability

the optimal income taxation of couples this paper analyzes the general nonlinear optimal income tax for couples a multidimensional screening problem each couple consists of a primary earner who always participates in the labor market but makes an hours of work choice and a secondary earner who chooses whether or not to work if second earner participation is a signal of the couple being better worse off we prove that optimal tax schemes display a positive tax subsidy on secondary earnings and that the tax subsidy on secondary earnings decreases with primary earnings and converges to zero asymptotically we present calibrated microsimulations for the united kingdom showing that decreasing tax rates on secondary earnings is quantitatively significant and consistent with actual income tax and transfer programs

reference pricing competition and pharmaceutical expenditures theory and evidence from a natural experiment abstract we study the impact of regulation on competition between brand names and generics and pharmaceutical expenditures using a unique policy experiment in norway where reference pricing rp replaced price cap regulation in 2003 for a sub sample of off patent products first we construct a vertical differentiation model to analyze the impact of regulation on prices and market shares of brand names and generics then we exploit a detailed panel data set at product level covering several off patent molecules before and after the policy reform off patent drugs not subject to rp serve as our control group we find that rp significantly reduces both brand name and generic prices and results in significantly lower brand name market shares finally we show that rp has a strong negative effect on average molecule prices suggesting significant cost savings and that patients copayments decrease despite the extra surcharges under rp

energy consumption and gdp in tunisia cointegration and causality analysis abstract in this paper the johansen cointegration technique is used to examine the causal relationship between per capita energy consumption pcec and per capita gross domestic product pcgdp for tunisia during the 1971 2004 period in order to test for granger causality in the presence of cointegration among the variables a vector error correction model vecm is used instead of a vector autoregressive var model our estimation results indicate that the pcgdp and pcec for tunisia are related by one cointegrating vector and that there is a long run bi directional causal relationship between the two series and a short run unidirectional causality from energy to gross domestic product gdp the source of causation in the long run is found to be the error correction terms in both directions hence an important policy implication resulting from this analysis is that energy can be considered as a limiting factor to gdp growth in tunisia conclusions for tunisia may also be relevant for a number of countries that have to go through a similar development path of increasing pressure on already scarce energy resources

identifying industry margins with price constraints structural estimation on pharmaceuticals we develop a structural model to investigate the effects of pharmaceutical price regulation on demand and on manufacturers price setting behavior in france we estimate price cost margins in a regulated market with price constraints and infer whether these constraints are binding exploiting cost restrictions across drugs which come from observing the same drugs in potentially price constrained markets france and in markets where prices are unregulated us and germany our counterfactual simulations suggest that price constraints generated modest savings for anti ulcer drugs in 2003 2013 2 percent of total expenses relative to a free pricing scenario and shifted consumption from generic to branded drugs

renewable energies and the poor niche or nexus renewable energies are considered as an essential element of any strategy for sustainable energy development the poor in the developing world without access to modern energies are regarded as a major market for renewable energies this short paper attempts to analyse whether such a niche is backed by any economic logic and whether renewable energy and the poor nexus could be a strategy for success the paper suggests that contrary to the common belief the economic logic behind the niche is unsound and that the nexus is not a recipe for success

energy consumption and economic growth evidence from cameroon abstract the aim of this paper is to study the nature of the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in cameroon through a three step approach i study the stationarity of the chronic ii test of causality between variables and iii estimate the appropriate model the study concludes in a non stationarity of the series using the data in first difference the granger causality test yields a strong evidence for unidirectional causality running from oil to gdp cointegration tests also show that these two series are co integrated and the error correction model ecm reveals that every percentage increase in oil products consumption increases economic growth by around 1 1 this result confirms the intuition that an economic policy aimed at improving energy supply will necessarily have a positive impact on economic growth on the other side a lack of energy is a major bottleneck for further economic development in cameroon

bureaucrats or politicians part i a single policy task this paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat the bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort or if there is great uncertainty about whether the policymaker has the required abilities the optimal allocation of redistributive tasks is ambiguous and depends on how the bureaucrat can be instructed but irrespective of the normative conclusion the politician prefers not to delegate redistributive policies

transparency political polarization and political budget cycles in oecd countries we investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance while some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies in contrast we show conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a feature of many advanced industrialized economies using a sample of 19 oecd countries in the 1990s we identify a persistent pattern of electoral cycles in low er transparency countries while no such cycles can be observed in high er transparency countries furthermore we find in accordance with recent theory that electoral cycles are larger in politically more polarized countries

financing off grid sustainable energy access for the poor this paper examines the role of public instruments in promoting private finance to achieve off grid sustainable energy access renewable energy technologies are increasingly becoming the cheapest solutions for off grid energy access the dramatic uptake of mobile phones in developing countries shows how quickly decentralized services can develop on a commercial basis under the right conditions and raises the prospect that private finance could also drive decentralized energy access for the poor indeed there are already a number of instances of clean energy solutions such as solar portable lights household biogas units or solar home systems that have managed to scale up through leveraging private finance however the experience gained from first generation market development projects show that in almost all cases significant public resources have been necessary to increase the affordability of clean energy technologies provide access to financing for the poor and remove non economic barriers such public interventions may be funded by international public finance domestic budgets and carbon finance despite mounting fiscal constraints facing governments worldwide the emergence of new sources of climate finance and the political momentum in support of energy subsidy reforms as well as new programming modalities offer opportunities to leverage additional resources to achieve universal energy access by 2030

financing energy access and off grid electrification a review of status options and challenges abstract this paper provides a review of funding needs and financing mechanisms for energy access in general and off grid electrification in particular to find whether the funding for these activities has been adequate whether sufficient funding is likely to be available to meet the needs of universal energy access whether innovative approaches can be used in funding it finds that in all successful cases the state has played an important role in funding infrastructure investments but many developing countries have neglected the energy access issue for a long time international donor agencies have provided selective and limited support while the innovative mechanisms are also unfriendly towards small scale projects weak governance limited organisational capacity and unfavourable policy environment militate against large scale mobilisation of financial resources in the poorest countries of the world where energy access is a chronic problem the challenge of mobilising finance and ensuring its appropriate delivery and use remains a major issue and would require a co ordinated effort of all relevant stakeholders

a qualitative factor analysis of renewable energy and sustainable energy for all se4all in the asia pacific this study assesses the factors responsible for the success and failure of renewable energy access programs in bangladesh china laos mongolia nepal sri lanka india indonesia malaysia and papua new guinea based on 441 research interviews over the course of four years site visits to 90 renewable energy facilities and focus groups with almost 800 community members in 10 countries this study develops a series of overarching qualitative factors that correlate with programs that met their targets sometimes ahead of schedule and produced measurable benefits exceeding costs the inverse of these factors is associated with programs that did not meet their targets were behind schedule and or produced measurable costs exceeding benefits it concludes by offering 10 lessons for energy analysts and development practitioners concerning appropriate technology income generation financing political leadership capacity building programmatic flexibility marketing and awareness stakeholder engagement community ownership and technical standardization

structural breaks energy consumption and economic growth revisited evidence from taiwan abstract this paper studies the stability between energy consumption and gdp for taiwan during 1954 2003 we use aggregate as well as various disaggregate data of energy consumption including coal oil gas and electricity to employ the unit root tests and the cointegration tests allowing for structural breaks our main findings are first though gas consumption seems to have structural breaks in the 1960s after considering the structural breaks the series is a stationary variable when taiwan adopted its expansionary export trade policy second we find that different directions of causality exist between gdp and various kinds of energy consumption the empirical result shows unanimously in the long run that energy acts as an engine of economic growth and that energy conservation may harm economic growth third the cointegration between energy consumption and gdp is unstable and some economic events may affect the stability overall we do find the structural breakpoints and they look to match clearly with the corresponding critical economic incidents

regulation of pharmaceutical prices evidence from a reference price reform in denmark reference price systems for prescription drugs constitute widely adopted cost containment tools under these regimes patients co pay a fraction of the difference between a drug s pharmacy retail price and a reference price that is set by the government reference prices are either externally based on drug prices in other countries or internally based on domestic drug prices determined we study the effects of a change from external to internal reference pricing in denmark in 2005 we find that the reform led to substantial reductions in retail prices reference prices and patient co payments as well as to sizable decreases in overall producer revenues and health care expenditures the reform induced consumers to substitute away from branded drugs for which we estimate strong preferences the increase in consumer welfare due to the reform therefore depends on whether or not we take perceived quality differences into account in its calculation

political budget cycles and the civil service evidence from highway spending in us states abstract we study political budget cycles in infrastructure spending that are conditional on bureaucratic organization bureaucrats can facilitate or hinder politicians ability to engage in voter friendly spending around elections to test this idea we use civil service reforms undertaken by us states in the second half of the 20th century to study political budget cycles in highway spending under civil service and patronage we find that under patronage highway spending is 12 higher in election years and 9 higher in the year before an election by contrast under civil service highway spending is essentially smooth over the electoral cycle these findings provide a novel way through which civil service rules can stabilize government activity

a theory of jurisdictional assignments in bureaucracies 1 what determines the allocation of tasks among government agencies this paper develops a formal model of task allocation that argues that jurisdictions are strategically designed to achieve legislative goals in the model agencies choose unobservable policies and political outcomes are a noisy indicator of these choices the legislature therefore faces a compliance issue when the agencies policy preferences are different from its own the legislature exerts control by defining agency jurisdictions setting ex ante budgets and choosing ex post contractual inducements the principal result is that tasks will be consolidated under a single roof when that agency prefers lower levels of policy than the legislature in other cases separating tasks prevents resources from being allocated in a manner undesirable for the legislature

electoral manipulation via voter friendly spending theory and evidence abstract we present a model of the political budget cycle in which incumbents try to influence voters by changing the composition of government spending rather than overall spending or revenues rational voters may support an incumbent who targets them with spending before the election even though such spending may be due to opportunistic manipulation because it may also reflect sincere preference of the incumbent for types of spending voters favor classifying expenditures into those which are likely targeted to voters and those that are not we provide evidence supporting our model in data on local public finances for all colombian municipalities our findings indicate both a pre electoral increase in targeted expenditures combined with a contraction of other types of expenditure and a voter response to targeting

political cycles in a developing economy effect of elections in indian states the author studies the effect of state legislative assembly elections on the policies of state governments in 14 major states of india from 1960 to 1996 she identifies the effect of the timing of elections using an instrument for the electoral cycle that distinguishes between constitutionally scheduled elections and midterm polls she contrasts two levers of policy manipulation fiscal policy and public service delivery to distinguish between alternative models of political cycles the predictions of three models are tested 1 populist cycles to woo uninformed and myopic voters 2 signaling models with asymmetric information 3 a moral hazard model with high discounting by political agents the empirical results for fiscal policy show that election years have a negative effect on some commodity taxes a positive effect on investment spending but no effect on deficits primarily because consumption spending is reduced with regard to public service delivery elections have a positive and large effect on road construction by state public works departments strikingly the fiscal effects are much smaller than the effect on roads the author argues that the pattern of evidence is inconsistent with the predictions of models of voter myopia and asymmetric information she explores an alternative moral hazard model in which the cycle is generated by high political discounting and career concerns persuade politicians to exert greater effort in election years on the management of public works

alternative framework for renewable energy planning in the philippines abstract like many countries striving to be responsible consumers of energy and conscious of the need to mitigate the impact of climate change the philippines has in both policy and practice shown a bias towards renewable energy re sources the country s proportion of re production in primary energy and distribution in electricity is significantly higher than those of many asian and european countries however the philippine national re program has adopted a strategy of aggressively amassing re capacity to the extent of tripling the capacity over the period 2011 to 2030 the preoccupation with more megawatts rather than the value of re beyond clean energy has erected a bias against off grid re applications off grid re applications can displace more expensive diesel generation and can enhance the livelihood opportunities for communities the insistence on focusing on megawatts is threatening to bloat the current feed in tariff structure by causing large grid connected applications to be seriously oversubscribed this paper reviews the current re status in the philippines and presents a simple alternative planning paradigm in which the ability of re technology to affect the livelihood of the residents and the effectiveness of its energy delivery are used to distinguish the utility of different re technologies in off grid and grid connected areas the authors also describe an actual kw scale off grid application that addresses both energy and economic poverty

opportunistic political cycles test in a young democracy setting this paper tests the theory of opportunistic cycles in a decade old democracy russia finds strong evidence of cycles and provides an explanation for why previous literature often found weaker evidence using regional monthly panel data we find that 1 the budget cycle is sizable and short lived public spending shifts toward direct monetary transfers to voters 2 the magnitude of the cycle decreases with democracy government transparency media freedom voter awareness and over time and 3 preelectoral manipulation increases incumbents chances for reelection the short length of the cycle explains underestimation of its size by previous literature because of low frequency data used in previous studies

the political economy of fiscal deficits a survey this paper surveys recent literature both theoretical and empirical regarding political explanations for fiscal deficits political economy suggests conflicts of interest may lie behind the emergence of deficits 1 opportunistic politicians generate deficits to win elections even in conflict with general welfare 2 conflicts of interests between politicians partisan preferences create incentives for at least some incumbents to run deficits and 3 conflicts of interest between different social groups or regions generate tensions in the allocation of government resources leading to overspending this paper reviews these different strands of the literature it also covers contributions that highlight the crucial role of budget institutions in determining the extent to which the political motivations to generate deficits are indeed translated into poor fiscal outcomes promising avenues for future research are highlighted

energy use and output growth in canada a multivariate cointegration analysis using a neo classical one sector aggregate production technology where capital labor and energy are treated as separate inputs this paper develops a vector error correction vec model to test for the existence and direction of causality between output growth and energy use in canada using the johansen cointegration technique the empirical findings indicate that the long run movements of output labor capital and energy use in canada are related by two cointegrating vectors then using a vec specification the short run dynamics of the variables indicate that granger causality is running in both directions between output growth and energy use hence an important policy implication of the analysis is that energy can be considered as a limiting factor to output growth in canada