a resilience perspective of the seea abstract while the seea is an important advance in national accounting it remains deficient in a number of ways in regard to natural resources the dynamic and interactive nature of ecosystems means that any linear compartmentalised system of accounting will miss significant changes that influence human wellbeing in particular losses in resilience of critical capital stocks through changes in underlying ecosystem variables that do not contribute directly to valued flows and are therefore not included in the accounts means that the accounts will not recognise that such stocks are becoming riskier likely to collapse and are therefore over valued we present a stock based approach to measuring sustainable development the inclusive wealth approach of arrow kj dasgupta p and maler k g 2003 evaluating projects and assessing sustainable development in imperfect economies environmental and resource economics 26 647 685 at a regional scale using an example from south east australia which includes an assessment of the resilience of critical capital stocks

the accounting push and the policy pull balancing environment and economic decisions abstract the use of information in environmental and economic policy has been a theme for over 100 years but standards for integrating environmental and economic information were not adopted until 2012 through the system of environmental economic accounting seea for 20 years the technical push to develop accounts proceeded largely independently of the pull from the intended or likely end users of accounts consequently governments have little knowledge of the accounting or how it might be used we examine why public policy imperatives have not yet pulled environmental accounting into the mainstream and explain how accounting can help reshape government decision making as part of this a model showing the place of accounts in the information system and the policy cycle is presented along with a research agenda and principles for the decision centred design of accounts we conclude that a phased implementation of the accounts as well as additional research into their applications will be needed to build practical understanding and political acceptance of the accounts

ecosystem service valuation for national accounting a reply to obst hein and edens 2016 while recent experimental frameworks for national ecosystem service accounting have shown substantial progress in our view some crucial methodological issues remain that deserve further consideration before setting final standards in response to the landmark work of obst et al environ resour econ 64 1 23 2016 doi 10 1007 s10640 015 9921 1 we provide arguments with regard to the suitability of particular valuation approaches generally we agree that respective valuation methods need to produce values that are consistent with national accounting standards such as representing exchange values however we disagree with their conclusions regarding specific valuation techniques firstly the circumstance that methods used for estimating shadow prices can also be used to derive consumer surplus does not justify the general exclusion of all shadow pricing methods for valuation of ecosystem services for national accounts especially for public ecosystem services secondly that preference based methods can also be used to assess welfare changes does not imply that cost based methods are generally better suited for ecosystem accounting to the contrary we see an essential need for preference information in accounting contexts thirdly that accounting standards use a written down replacement cost approach does not mean ecosystem accounting requires to employ a replacement cost approach to the contrary we argue that assessing ecosystem degradation through restoration costs would be in line with writing down depreciation but we also point to its limits

opec and the international oil market can a cartel fuel the engine of economic development abstract the opec cartel was formed to promote two economic goals one microeconomic low oil market volatility the other macroeconomic promotes economic development of its members these goals create a tension since the cartel s single tool is output quotas using this dual micro macro perspective we analyze oil exporting countries behavior we find that the effects of the cartel s choices will be reflected in oil market stability long term macroeconomic development and international oil market structure if an oil producing country cares about both oil industry profits and macroeconomic stability the goal of output stability may be inconsistent with cartel membership

rethinking ecosystem services to better address and navigate cultural values ecosystem service approaches have become a prominent basis for planning and management cultural services and non use values are included in all major typologies and present some of the most compelling reasons for conserving ecosystems though many barriers exist to their explicit characterization the values that conform least well to economic assumptions variously lumped together with as cultural services have proven elusive in part because valuation is complicated by the properties of intangibility and incommensurability which has in turn led to their exclusion from economic valuation we argue that the effectiveness of the ecosystem services framework in decision making is thwarted by i conflation of services values and benefits and ii failure to appropriately treat diverse kinds of values we address this challenge by 1 distinguishing eight dimensions of values which have implications for appropriate valuation and decision making 2 demonstrating the interconnected nature of benefits and services and so the ubiquity of intangible values 3 discussing the implications of these propositions for ecosystem services research and 4 outlining briefly a research agenda to enable decision making that is ecologically appropriate and socially just because many ecosystem services co produce cultural benefits full characterization of services must address non material values through methods from diverse social sciences

trade surpluses and life cycle saving behaviour abstract the national income account identity and the life cycle theory of consumption together imply that the current account should be a function of the age structure a country with a high proportion of young and retired should have current account deficits using a panel of 84 countries we find empirical support for this hypothesis

money and economic activity inventories and business cycles abstract incomplete information is a necessary condition for any real effects produced by monetary impulses an alternative to the local global inference problem is explored in this paper agents are confronted with permanent and transitory shocks even with full knowledge about the stochastic structure their best perception at any particular time will usually be erroneous prices for each period are set at the beginning of the period on the basis of market conditions the realization of the shock process thus creates a short run disequilibrium absorbed by inventory adjustments this adjustment translates perceived transitory monetary shocks into serially correlated output movements the analysis proceeds within the context of rational expectations it offers a generalization of equilibrium analysis in two respects prices are always in equilibrium relative to perceived conditions but they do not reflect all ongoing shocks quantity adjustments reflect the perceived transitory shocks the framework used involves moreover a stock flow interaction operated by inventory adjustments the stock flow interaction imposes at any time a future expected adjustment path for price level and quantities to the system s unique stock equilibrium a major implication of the analysis resolves a puzzle experienced in a recent paper by robert hall it reconciles intertemporal substitution with lagged effects of monetary impulses it also reconciles small and inconclusive cyclic movements in real wages with the occurrence of production function and large variations in unemployment lastly the nature of the inference problem determined by the pattern of incomplete information produces serially correlated movements conditioned on large permanent shocks

corporate social responsibility in the international banking industry this article aims at providing a framework to assess corporate social responsibility with international banks currently it is mainly rating institutions like eiris and kld that provide information about firms social conduct and performance however this is costly information and it is not clear how the rating institutions arrive at their conclusion we develop a framework to assess the social responsibility of internationally operating banks we apply this framework to more than 30 institutions and find significant differences among individual banks countries and regions furthermore it appears that social responsibility of these banks has significantly improved between 2000 and 2005

the perception of man and the conception of society two approaches to understanding society the social sciences offer two distinct approaches to understanding society one originated with the scottish moral philosophers and shaped the discipline of economics the other emerged from the french enlightenment and influenced the study of sociology the two approaches are based on radically different perceptions of man and man s relation to society this paper explores these alternative hypotheses and examines some major implications it concludes that the hypothesis reaching back to the scottish philosophers provides the basis for a unified approach in the social sciences

how does energy consumption affect china s urbanization new evidence from dynamic threshold panel models abstract energy consumption may play different roles at different stages of urbanization and economic growth given china s rapid economic development and urbanization process this study tries to explore the possible nonlinear relationship between energy consumption and urbanization in china against the background of promoting new type urbanization the level of china s urbanization is evaluated comprehensively using the entropy method a newly developed dynamic threshold panel model is employed to examine the nexus of energy consumption and comprehensive urbanization with full consideration of heterogeneous characteristics the panel data vector autoregression or pvar model is also used to estimate the direct effects of various energy consumption patterns on the urbanization the empirical results indicate that the nexus of energy consumption and urbanization is indeed nonlinear and that energy consumption is conducive to promote china s urbanization at the current stage of development however the positive effect decreases when there is an increase in energy consumption intensity and energy consumption scale whereas the effect increases with the promotion of energy consumption structure

reviving growth in the arab world abstract why has growth in the arab world been so disappointing stagnating since 1985 the little growth that does exist is volatile and unstable and the region has lagged behind both the gains of other developing countries and the region s own pre 1985 performance this article attempts to encourage the revitalization of growth in the arab world by addressing the following two questions why has growth been so low specifically in comparison to the high performers of east asia and why has it been so erratic and unstable i estimate two growth models of the determinants of long term growth and the persistence of growth using global panel data drawn from more than 70 countries i conclude by describing two strategies and one development constraint important in explaining the growth process specific to the arab world

natural resource abundance and human capital accumulation summary this paper studies the link between resource abundance and human capital accumulation it reviews the commonly used indicators of resource abundance and human capital accumulation the case for a form of resource curse in human capital accumulation is not robust to reasonable changes in these indicators in fact subsoil wealth and resource rents per capita are shown to be significantly correlated with improved indicators of human capital accumulation if mineral wealth is what authors have in mind when they refer to natural resource abundance then they should choose indicators that measure this concept as accurately as possible

natural capital accounts and public policy decisions findings from a survey abstract there have been many initiatives and policy commitments in natural capital accounting in the recent years based on a survey for statistical offices ministries and independent experts worldwide we provide some preliminary evidence that there is very little use of natural capital accounts for public policy decisions and more so in developing countries the most relevant obstacles are the lack of political support by key people and institutional leadership unable to promote policy use by other ministries concerning developing countries the factor which is considered as the most relevant in preventing the use of natural capital accounts for policy making is the stage of development of the country in addition respondents from statistical institutes and developing countries are firstly concerned about institutional obstacles and secondly about data availability and cooperation respondents from ministries and independent experts are particularly concerned about design obstacles not many accounts may be available to be used in the policy making process due to data gaps design challenges and the required investment the problem being more acute in developing countries a key result of the survey is the need to evaluate the added value of natural capital accounts with respect to statistics

the quality of political institutions and the curse of natural resources we propose a theoretical model to explain empirical regularities related to the curse of natural resources which emphasises the behaviour and incentives of politicians we extend the standard voting model to give voters political control beyond the elections this gives rise to a new restriction that policies should not give rise to a revolution our model clarifies when resource discoveries might lead to revolutions namely in countries with weak institutions it also suggests that for bad political institutions human capital depends negatively on natural resources while for high institutional quality the dependence is reversed this finding is corroborated in cross section regressions

scarcity growth and r d abstract the limits to economic growth due to resource scarcity can be alleviated only by the development of backstop substitutes this paper combines resource based economic growth with r d to reduce the cost of backstop technologies characterizing the entire dynamics of optimal growth and r d processes we find that an economy s growth prospects depend on its type as determined by its production technology and learning ability and by its knowledge capital endowment a wide variety of growth patterns emerges ranging from cases in which an economy that without r d eventually stagnates converges to a steady state is diverted by r d onto a path of sustained growth to cases in which r d is not warranted resource scarcity is shown to encourage r d due to the increased reliance on the backstop technology

corruption and development a review of issues in this paper we start with a discussion of some of the different denotations of the problem of corruption we then consider the ways in which the damaging consequences of corruption operate in a developing economy while not ignoring its possible redeeming features in some cases we pursue the question of why corruption is perceptibly so different in different societies and also persistent finally we examine the feasible policy issues that arise in this context

do we need ecosystem accounts the internationally adopted system of environmental economic accounting measures the interaction between the economy and the natural environment its central framework accounts for the depletion of natural resources but omits environmental degradation notably from pollution a recent companion volume on experimental ecosystem accounting addresses ecosystem degradation but excludes the depletion of natural assets its physical accounts notably on land cover and use could support the management and conservation of ecosystems policies of sustainable economic performance and growth require however integrative information on both depletion and degradation at national and sectoral levels integrated environmental and economic accounts can provide this information without the detour of ecosystem accounting

nonmarket benefits of nature what should be counted in green gdp abstract green gross domestic product green gdp is meant to account for nature s value on an equal footing with the market economy several problems bedevil green gdp however one is that nature does not come prepackaged in units like cars houses and bread even worse green gdp requires measurement of the benefits arising from public goods provided by nature for which there are no market indicators of value so what should green gdp count that is the subject of this paper ecological and economic theories are used to describe what should be counted and what should not if green gdp is to account for the nonmarket benefits of nature

natural resources education and economic development economic growth since 1965 has varied inversely with the share of natural capital in national wealth across countries four main channels of transmission from abundant natural resources to stunted economic development are discussed a the dutch disease b rent seeking c overconfidence and d neglect of education public expenditure on education relative to national income expected years of schooling for girls and gross secondary school enrolment are all shown to be inversely related to the share of natural capital in national wealth across countries natural capital appears to crowd out human capital thereby slowing down the pace of economic development

the varieties of resource experience natural resource export structures and the political economy of economic growth many oil mineral and plantation crop based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s this article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources those extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base such as oil and minerals and plantation crops are predisposed to heightened economic and social divisions and weakened institutional capacity this in turn impedes their ability to respond effectively to shocks which previous studies have shown to be essential for sustaining rising levels of prosperity analysis of data on classifications of export structure controlling for a wide array of other potential determinants of governance shows that point source and coffee and cocoa exporting countries do relatively poorly across an array of governance indicators these governance effects are not associated simply with being a natural resource exporter countries with natural resource exports that are diffuse relying primarily on livestock and agricultural produce from small family farms do not show the same strong effects and have had more robust growth recoveries

money and output viewed through a rolling window abstract we examine the extent to which fluctuations in the money stock anticipate or granger cause fluctuations in real output using a variety of rolling window and increasing window estimation techniques various models are considered using simple sum as well as divisia measures of m 1 and m 2 income prices and both the t bill rate and the commercial paper rate findings indicate that the relation between income money prices and interest rates is stable as long as sufficient data are used and that there is cointegration among the variables considered although cointegration spaces become very difficult to estimate precisely when smaller windows of data are used further both m 1 and m 2 are shown to be important predictors of income for the entire period from 1960 2 1996 3 based on modified versions of what we term the most damaging specifications from friedman and kuttner 1993 and thoma 1994 our new evidence is based in part on a rather novel model selection approach to examining the relationship between money and income 1998 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

oil revenue shocks and government spending behavior in iran abstract oil revenues play an important role in the political economy of iran on average 60 of the iranian government revenues and 90 of export revenues originate from oil and gas resources current international sanctions on iran have mainly targeted the oil production capacity of iran and its exports to the global markets in this study we analyze the dynamic effects of oil shocks on different categories of the iranian government expenditures from 1959 to 2007 using impulse response functions irf and variance decomposition analysis vdc techniques the main results show that iran s military and security expenditures significantly respond to a shock in oil revenues or oil prices while social spending components do not show significant reactions to such shocks

dutch disease and the mitigation effect of migration evidence from canadian provinces this article evaluates whether immigration can mitigate the dutch disease effects associated with booms in natural resource sectors we derive predicted changes in the size of the non tradable sector from a small general equilibrium model a la obstfeld rogoff using data for canadian provinces we find evidence that aggregate immigration mitigates the increase in the size of the non tradable sector in booming regions the mitigation effect is due mostly to interprovincial migration and temporary foreign workers there is no evidence of such an effect for permanent international immigration interprovincial migration also results in a spreading effect of dutch disease from booming to non booming provinces

the curse and blessing of fixed specific factors in small open economies abstract this paper investigates how a country s specific factor endowment affects its long run economic performance we build an open economy version of the two sector neoclassical growth model in which we introduce fixed industry specific inputs in both activities we show that differences in input shares between sectors can contribute to explain why nations that seem to have similar factor endowments can show very different income levels in particular under productivity adjusted factor price equalization larger amounts of factors specific to the industry with a lower larger labor share lead the economy to enjoy larger smaller long run income levels the model can also account for overtaking episodes between countries along their development paths

the real time predictive content of money for output abstract data on monetary aggregates are subject to periodic redefinitions presumably in part to improve their link to measures of output money data are also revised on a regular basis taking these data imperfections into account we reassess the evidence on the marginal predictive content of m1 and m2 for real and nominal output in particular first by using the latest version of the data that is available and then using sequences of historical time series that would have been available to forecasters in real time we are able to provide a comprehensive assessment of whether money is useful for predicting output we conclude that the generally significant marginal predictive content of m1 or m2 for output that is found using a recently revised data set is not duplicated in a real time setting although m2 is shown to remain useful when 1 year ahead forecasts are constructed using fitted vector autoregressive models

effects of foreign currency component in monetary aggregates on money neutrality abstract we test the money neutrality from a new angle the in sample investigation provides evidence that m1 and m2 with or without foreign currency component affect nominal gdp the out of sample approach shows money tends to affect nominal more than real gdp

political foundations of the resource curse in this paper we argue that the political incentives that resource endowments generate are the key to understanding whether or not they are a curse we show 1 politicians tend to over extract natural resources relative to the efficient extraction path because they discount the future too much and 2 resource booms improve the efficiency of the extraction path however 3 resource booms by raising the value of being in power and by providing politicians with more resources which they can use to influence the outcome of elections increase resource misallocation in the rest of the economy 4 the overall impact of resource booms on the economy depends critically on institutions since these determine the extent to which political incentives map into policy outcomes countries with institutions that promote accountability and state competence will tend to benefit from resource booms since these institutions ameliorate the perverse political incentives that such booms create countries without such institutions however may suffer from a resource curse

measuring the importance of oil related revenues in total fiscal income for mexico revenues from oil exports are an important part of government budgets in mexico a time series analysis is conducted using monthly data from 1990 to 2005 examining three different specifications to determine how international oil price fluctuations and government income generated from oil exports influence fiscal policy in mexico the behavior of government spending and taxation is consistent with the spend tax hypothesis the results show that there is an inverse relationship between oil related revenues and tax revenue from non oil sources fiscal policy reform is urgently needed in order to improve tax collection as oil reserves in mexico become more and more depleted

the demand for commercial bank loans and the lending rate abstract this paper presents a two equation structural model of short term loans and the lending rate estimated with quarterly data for the netherlands the emphasis is on the fact that the lending rate is observed as a zone rather than as a unique and directly measurable market price an important empirical result is that the interest rate elasticity of loan demand is significant this conclusive finding confirms the intuitive feeling with regard to the importance of the rate of interest for credit prevailing in the banking community but is seldom found in empirical econometrics

more evidence on the money output relationship i introduction the empirical relationship between money and real output continues to produce conflicting evidence stock and watson 1989 using monthly u s data for the period 1960 85 report that while actual money growth m1 does not granger cause the growth of industrial production its detrended component does krol and ohanian 1990 internationalize stock and watson s study and find that both actual and detrended ml growth granger cause output growth in the u k but that neither series affects output growth in japan canada and germany friedman and kuttner 1992a 1992b 1993 question the role of money in explaining output behavior they report 1993 that even though the stock watson specification is used simply updating the sample through 1990 yields the result that detrended m1 growth no longer explains output growth friedman and kuttner also argue that the commercial paper rate or the spread between the three month treasury bill and the commercial paper rate provides a better gauge for output s reaction to monetary policy changes replacing the treasury bill rate used by stock and watson with the commercial paper rate or the spread friedman and kuttner find that m1 growth has no marginal explanatory power over output a feature of recent investigations of the money output link is the general use of a var specification based on the presumption that the series are difference stationary e g feldstein and stock 1994 several recent studies however have questioned this presumption due to the low power of unit root tests dejong et al 1992 dejong 1992 dejong and whiteman 1991a 1991b and rudebusch 1993 these studies suggest that it is difficult to distinguish between difference stationary as the null and trend stationary as the alternative hypothesis given the uncertainty about the existence of a unit root in economic time series we re examine the money output relation by specifically considering the affect of assuming that the series are trend stationary or difference stationary such an investigation is important to determine if permanent temporary changes in money and other series create permanent temporary shifts in real output for example if real output and money contain a unit root i e they are best represented by the difference stationary model permanent money shocks may produce permanent shifts in output put another way permanent money shocks may have a long run impact because they affect the stochastic trend component of output and thus change the output level for all future horizons on the other hand if output and other series are represented by a trend stationary model fluctuations around a trend level of these series are stationary mean reverting under this model a transitory money shock may only have a short run impact on output as it quickly returns to its trend level to analyze the sensitivity of results to different stationarity assumptions used we estimate two var systems one system uses the log levels of the variables along with a deterministic time trend the other uses the log difference of the series and excludes the trend term the first system represents the trend stationary specification and the second one represents the difference stationary specification there is some evidence that the money output link may be sensitive to the presence of a deterministic trend term e g eichenbaum and singleton 1986 stock and watson 1989 even so our study provides a direct comparison based on identical data sets of the effects that the two different stationarity specifications have on the money output results while testing the robustness of the money output connection is our main focus we also provide some different perspectives on the debate one is to use both long and short term data sets most studies limit the analysis to quarterly data from the post 1960 era we study the link between money interest rates and output using annual data over the extended period 1915 1993

karl brunner s monetary economics an appreciation karl brunner s contribution to the development of monetary economics during the last thirty years was of the first order of importance i am confident that this will be the verdict of future historians of the period s economic thought they will base it not just on his enviable record of solo publication and citation but on his quite extraordinary contnbutions as a collaborator often but by no means always as a coauthor an organizer of conferences and above all as an editor 1 it is quite impossible to conceive of how the discipline might have evolved without the two journals that karl founded the journal of money credit and banking and the journal of monetary economics or of what course policy debates might have taken not only in the united states but also in western europe without the carnegie rochester konstanz and interlaken meetings not to mention the shadow open market committee as well as numerous ad hoc conferences in which he was involved and anyone who contributed to his journals or participated

natural resources and the tradeoff between authoritarianism and development abstract why do african and middle eastern countries seem cursed by an abundance of natural resources yet usa australia and norway seem blessed a growing literature has argued that the benevolence or malignance of natural resources depends upon the quality of institutions this paper offers a new explanation based on associational freedom and its interaction with the political system the model predicts that natural resources have an adverse impact on economic performance and transition to democracy in authoritarian regimes but not in democracies it also predicts that repression of associational freedom will be increasing in natural resources in authoritarian regimes i test the model s predictions using fixed effects regressions on an international panel from 1975 to 2000 and find support

natural resources democracy and corruption we study how natural resources can feed corruption and how this effect depends on the quality of the democratic institutions our game theoretic model predicts that resource rents lead to an increase in corruption if the quality of the democratic institutions is relatively poor but not otherwise we use panel data covering the period 1980 to 2004 and 124 countries to test this theoretical prediction our estimates confirm that the relationship between resource rents and corruption depends on the quality of the democratic institutions our main results hold when we control for the effects of income time varying common shocks regional fixed effects and various additional covariates they are also robust across different samples and to the use of various alternative measures of natural resources democracy and corruption

federal tax policies congressional voting and natural resources can abundance of natural resources affect legislators voting behavior over federal tax policies we construct a political economy model of a federalized economy with district heterogeneity in natural resource abundance the model shows that representatives of natural resource rich districts are more less willing to vote in favor of federal tax increases decreases this occurs because resource rich districts are less responsive to federal tax changes due to the immobile nature of their natural resources we test the model s predictions using data on roll call votes in the u s house of representatives over the major federal tax bills initiated during the period of 1945 2003 in conjunction with the presence of active giant oil fields in u s congressional districts our identification strategy rests on plausibly exogenous giant oil field discoveries and exploitation and narrative based aggregate federal tax shocks that are exogenous to individual congressional districts and legislators we find that i resource rich congressional districts are less responsive to changes in federal taxes ii representatives of resource rich congressional districts are more less supportive of federal tax increases decreases controlling for legislator congressional district and state indicators our results indicate that resource richness is approximately half as dominant as the main determinant namely party afiliation in driving legislators voting behavior over federal tax policies