tax policy asset prices and growth a general equilibrium analysis abstract this paper presents a computable general equilibrium tax policy model that combines a consideration of disaggregate industry effects with an integrated treatment of short and long run adjustments to policy initiatives the model s explicit consideration of forward looking investment decisions and adjustment dynamics permits assessments of short run effects of tax policy on asset values as well as long term impacts on capital accumulation simulations reveal that effects on asset values and investment depend critically on whether policies are oriented toward new or old capital investment tax credits yield significant increases in investment without conferring windfall gains to corporate shareholders corporate tax cuts with the same revenue cost on the other hand yield large windfalls to shareholders while providing only a modest investment stimulus incidence and growth effects differ considerably across sectors particularly between business and housing

environmental regulation and u s economic growth in this article we quantify the costs of pollution controls by reporting the results of simulations of the growth of the u s economy with and without regulation for this purpose we have constructed a detailed model of the economy that includes the determinants of long term growth we have also analyzed the interaction between industries in order to capture the full repercussions of environmental regulations however we have not attempted to assess the benefits resulting from a cleaner environment we find that pollution abatement has emerged as a major claimant on the resources of the u s economy the cost of emission controls is more than 10 of the total cost of government purchases of goods and services

the price of pollution a dual approach to valuing so2 allowances under the 1990 clean air act amendments a market based scheme to reduce u s sulfur dioxide emissions takes effect in 1995 indications are that participation in the market will be light and allowance prices will be lower than was once expected using an output distance function approach for wisconsin coal burning utility plants we estimate the shadow price of so2abatement which should approximate the allowance price the estimated average shadow price is above the prices at which the few observed allowance trades have occurred wisconsin s stringent state so2legislation may explain a portion of this divergence

input orientated data envelopment analysis framework for measuring and decomposing economic environmental and ecological efficiency an application to oecd agriculture this paper presents an input orientated data envelopment analysis dea framework which allows the measurement and decomposition of economic environmental and ecological efficiency levels in agricultural production across different countries economic environmental and ecological optimisations search for optimal input combinations that minimise total costs total amount of nutrients and total amount of cumulative exergy contained in inputs respectively the application of the framework to an agricultural dataset of 30 oecd countries revealed that i there was significant scope to make their agricultural production systems more environmentally and ecologically sustainable ii the improvement in the environmental and ecological sustainability could be achieved by being more technically efficient and even more significantly by changing the input combinations iii the rankings of sustainability varied significantly across oecd countries within frontier based environmental and ecological efficiency measures and between frontier based measures and indicators

a note on the malmquist productivity index in recent years the malmquist index has gained in popularity as a measure of productivity change we demonstrate that in the presence of non constant returns to scale the malmquist productivity index does not accurately measure productivity change the bias is systematic and depends on the magnitude of scale economies

farm growth and survival econometric evidence for individual farms in upper austria this article investigates survival and growth of more than 50 000 upper austrian farm households within a maximum likelihood sample selection framework the results suggest that age schooling and sex of the farm operator size of the farm family and off farm employment status as well as initial farm size significantly influence farm growth and survival the present study provides support for the notion of a disappearing middle in the size distribution the process of polarization is closely related to the off farm employment status of farms correcting for sample attrition bias is important when analyzing the performance of part time farms

transition economies performance and challenges i present data and assess the first twelve years of the transition from plan to market transformations have taken place but the income gap between the transition and advanced economies has widened transition countries further east have performed worse than those further west but policies matter all countries carried out quickly type i reforms such as macroeconomic stabilization price liberalization small scale privatization and breakup of state owned enterprises they differed in type ii reforms such as large scale privatization and development of banking and legal systems countries that developed a functioning legal framework and corporate governance have performed better than others

eco thermodynamics economics and the second law the laws of physics especially the first and second laws of thermodynamics have significant implications for economic theory the major implications of the first law conservation of mass energy are straightforward and have been discussed at length elsewhere in brief raw material inputs to economic processes are not consumed having been extracted from the environment in the first place they eventually return to the environment as wastes the economic implications of the second law entropy law are far more subtle there is considerable literature initiated by the work of georgescu roegen on the supposed constraints on economic growth imposed by the fact that economic processes utilize low entropy raw materials fossil fuels and high grade metal ores and discard high entropy wastes however as a practical matter the flux of available low entropy energy exergy from the sun is extremely large and certainly adequate to sustain economic activity in the solar system indefinitely even though fossil fuel and metal ore stocks may eventually be exhausted it is argued in this paper that the real economic significance of the second law lies in the fact that exergy is i not conserved and ii is a useful common measure of resource quality as well as quantity applicable to both materials and energy thus exergy can be used to measure and compare resource inputs and outputs including wastes and losses this is potentially important in itself moreover since exergy is not conserved it is truly consumed i e used up in economic processes hence exergy is no less a factor of production than labor or capital this fact has strong implications for economic growth theory especially with regard to assessing the role of technical progress

environmental efficiency and abatement efficiency measurements of china s thermal power industry a data envelopment analysis based materials balance approach abstract appropriate measurement of environmental and emission abatement efficiency is crucial for assisting policy making in line with constructing a more sustainable society the majority of traditional approaches for environmental efficiency measures take pollutant emissions as either undesirable outputs or environmentally determined inputs which suffer a limitation of not satisfying the physical laws that regulate the operation of economic and environmental process in this study we propose a dea based approach which is combined with the materials balance principle mbp that accounts for laws of thermodynamics to jointly evaluate environmental and abatement efficiency this approach is along the line of weak g disposability based modelling but is an extension to existing models that in our approach the identification of possible adjustments on polluting mass bound in inputs and outputs and potential adjustments on abatement of pollutants are all included the overall environmental efficiency measured by this approach is decomposed into the measures of technical efficiency polluting inputs allocative efficiency and polluting and non polluting inputs allocative efficiency with the emphasizing of incorporating pollutant abatement activities accordingly new measures of abatement efficiency are proposed which help to identify the pollutant abatement potential that can be achieved from end of pipe abatement technology promotion associated with polluting input quality promotion and input resources reallocation furthermore several global malmquist productivity indices for identifying the changes on environmental and abatement efficiency are proposed this approach is applied to china s thermal power industry and some empirical results verifying the necessity of introducing the mbp are obtained

impact of income on nutrient intakes implications for undernourishment and obesity the relationship between income and nutrient intake is explored nonparametric panel and quantile regressions are used engle curves for calories fat and protein are approximately linear in logs with carbohydrate intakes exhibiting diminishing elasticities as incomes increase elasticities range from 0 10 to 0 25 with fat having the highest elasticities countries in higher quantiles have lower elasticities than those in lower quantiles results predict significant cumulative increases in calorie consumption which are increasingly composed of fats though policies aimed at poverty alleviation and economic growth may assuage hunger and malnutrition they may also exacerbate problems associated with obesity

the impact of maize price shocks on household food security panel evidence from tanzania abstract using three waves 2008 09 2010 11 2012 13 of the tanzanian national panel survey this study investigates the impact of maize price shocks on household food security between 2008 09 and 2012 13 calorie intake stagnated for urban households yet sharply deteriorated for rural households the latter was driven by a significant decline in the consumption of the major staple maize which showed strongest price hikes among all major food items fixed effects regressions indicate a clear negative relationship between maize prices and average household energy intake almost all population groups were found to be negatively affected by maize price shocks with rural landless households being the most vulnerable group in particular a 50 percent rise in maize prices decreases caloric intake for rural urban households on average by 4 4 5 4 percent and for rural landless households by 12 6 percent results further indicate that subsistence agriculture can act as an effective strategy to insure against food price volatility

a derivation of the marginal abatement cost curve abstract the relationship between a firm s technology and its marginal abatement cost mac curve is explored even under the simplest specifications the mac curve will be kinked at some point except under a special assumption which in reality could easily be violated the nondifferentiability implies that the choice of instrument under uncertainty may depend on the targeted level of emissions reduction also stability conditions for dynamic tax mechanisms may be violated in the neighborhood of the kink point a policy implication is that in some cases output restrictions are as efficient as emissions restrictions in contrast to previous results

income elasticities for food calories and nutrients across africa a meta analysis abstract this paper aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between income and the demand for different types of food nutrients and calories in africa by conducting a meta analysis of income elasticity estimates we build a meta sample consisting of 1523 food income elasticities 369 nutrient income elasticities and 123 calorie income elasticities extracted from 66 primary studies covering 48 african countries the sample displays a large heterogeneity in income elasticity estimates which our meta analysis aims to explain by looking into attributes of the primary studies and characteristics of the countries considered there are significant differences in the size of the income elasticities across food and nutrient groups foods that make up basic diets tend to have lower income elasticities while elasticities are considerably higher for less basic and more aspirational foods the role of methodological attributes of the primary studies in explaining heterogeneity is found to be small overall our results confirm that although income growth in africa will increase food consumption and lead to more nutritionally diverse diets it is also associated with excessive intakes of fats and sugars raising concerns about over in addition to undernutrition this suggests that income based policies can still play a role in the fight against hunger but that targeted programs are needed to promote nutritionally valuable and healthy diets

environmental efficiency with multiple environmentally detrimental variables estimated with sfa and dea abstract the objective of this paper is to estimate comprehensive environmental efficiency measures for dutch dairy farms the environmental efficiency scores are based on the nitrogen surplus phosphate surplus and the total direct and indirect energy use of an unbalanced panel of dairy farms we define environmental efficiency as the ratio of minimum feasible to observed use of multiple environmentally detrimental inputs conditional on observed levels of output and the conventional inputs we compare two methods for the calculation of efficiency namely stochastic frontier analysis sfa and data envelopment analysis dea this paper reveals the strengths and weaknesses for estimating environmental efficiency of the methods applied both sfa and dea can estimate environmental efficiency scores the mean technical efficiency scores output oriented sfa 89 dea 78 and the mean comprehensive environmental efficiency scores sfa 80 dea 52 differ between the two methods sfa allows hypothesis testing and the monotonicity hypothesis is rejected for the specification including phosphate surplus dea can calculate environmental efficiency scores for all specifications because regularity is imposed in this method

mixed strategy nash equilibrium in data envelopment analysis abstract in a typical productivity analysis the efficiency measure assumes a perfectly competitive market with an endogenous price and depends on a fixed orientation with respect to a specific firm such as an input oriented measure when an imperfectly competitive market affects the endogenous price however firms may take a mixed strategy approach to address uncertain competition this study proposes a mixed strategy measure msm we construct a model embedded with a data envelopment analysis dea framework that identifies the mixed strategy nash equilibrium in the first stage and considers a probabilistic and multi oriented efficiency measure in the second stage based on the environmental regulation and a typical nash measure we create two indices environmental consistency and strategic consistency to support the business roadmap development we validate the proposed msm with an empirical study of china s electric power industry the results find that the proposed msm complements the nash measure and the msm model successfully supports our two managerial strategies invest in capacity expansion or develop emission abatement technology

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

comparing frontier methods for economic environmental trade off analysis abstract this paper uses a mechanistic frontier approach as a reference to evaluate the ability of conventional parametric sfa and non parametric dea frontier approaches for analyzing economic environmental trade offs conventional frontier approaches are environmentally adjusted through incorporating the materials balance principle the analysis is worked out for the flemish pig finishing case which is both representative and didactic results show that on average sfa and dea yield adequate economic environmental trade offs both methods are good estimators for technical efficiency cost allocative and environmental allocative efficiency scores are less robust due to the well known methodological advantages and disadvantages of sfa and dea for particular firms sfa dea and the mechanistic approach may yield different economic environmental trade offs one has therefore to be careful when using conventional frontier approaches for firm specific decision support the mechanistic approach allows for optimizing performances per average present finisher which is the production unit in pig finishing conventional frontier methods do not allow for this optimization since the number of average present finishers varies along the production functions since the mechanistic production function is based on underlying growth feed uptake and mortality functions additional firm specific indicators can also be calculated at each point of the production function

reducing child malnutrition how far does income growth take us how rapidly will child malnutrition respond to income growth this article explores that question using household survey data from 12 countries as well as data on malnutrition rates in a cross section of countries since the 1970s both forms of analysis yield similar results increases in income at the household and national levels imply similar rates of reduction in malnutrition using these estimates and better than historical income growth rates the article finds that the millennium development goal of halving the prevalence of underweight children by 2015 is unlikely to be met through income growth alone what is needed to accelerate reductions in malnutrition is a balanced strategy of income growth and investment in more direct interventions

time series minimum wage studies a meta analysis time series minimum wage studies a meta analysis author s david card and alan b krueger reviewed work s source the american economic review vol 85 no 2 papers and proceedings of the hundredth and seventh annual meeting of the american economic association washington dc january 6 8 1995 may 1995 pp 238 243 published by american economic association stable url http www jstor org stable 2117925 accessed 04 11 2011 15 46

industrialisation catching up and economic growth a comparative study across the world s capitalist economies various hypotheses are examined seeking to explain inter country convergence at the upper end but divergence at the lower end of the world income rankings a model of disequilibrium growth with sector specific technological progress and spillover is developed and then estimated on two samples of capitalist economies 1960 85 it is found that the degree of disequilibrium between agriculture and industry is greatest in the least developed economies but their rate of labor transfer has been slow technological spillover has stimulated productivity growth in less developed agricultural sectors but not in the industrial sectors of the least developed economies copyright 1991 by royal economic society

multilateral productivity comparisons with undesirable outputs in a recent paper in this journal caves christensen and diewert i982 hereafter ccd derive what they term multilateral superlative indexes for use in the comparison of output input and productivity across economic entities the indexes derived are distinguished both by transitivity and by a high degree of characteristicity a term introduced by dreschler i 973 to refer to the degree to which the weights used in a comparison are specific to the observations being compared though the indexes are presented with the application to multicountry comparisons of output input and productivity foremost in mind the authors note that they may be useful in a number of other contexts as well i e firms and industries time series and pooled time series and cross section all of the applications mentioned or implied however have this in common they involve the comparison of productive entities all of whose outputs are sold for positive prices this is not surprising of course since most products with which economists are concerned possess this characteristic however it does render incomplete or potentially misleading the comparison of productive entities which produce significant amounts of undesirable outputs such as water and air pollution since the list of such entities is rather long and includes industries critical to many national and regional economies e g chemicals paper petroleum refining copper and steel the omission of this factor from consideration may be a matter of some importance 2 consider for example a comparison of the productivity of the steel industries

non linear production abatement pollution and materials balance reconsidered abstract in the environmental economics literature the standard approach of modeling non linear production and abatement processes is to treat waste emissions simply as another factor of production cropper and oates j econ lit 30 1992 675 740 that approach does not map the materials flow involved completely and hides moreover the exact links between production residuals generation and abatement this paper shows that production functions with emissions treated as inputs can be reconstructed as a subsystem of a comprehensive production cum abatement technology that is in line with the materials balance principle in a simple economy with full regard of the materials flow it also explores the consequences for allocative efficiency and efficiency restoring taxation of multiple and interdependent residuals generated in the transformation processes of production abatement and consumption finally the paper demonstrates that efficiency may require setting the emissions tax rate above or below conventionally defined marginal abatement cost if the residual subject to abatement is not the only residual causing pollution

examining the heterogeneity in calorie income elasticities a meta analysis abstract several studies conducted over the past three decades on calorie income relationship appear to give inconclusive results this paper reviews these studies and employs meta regression analysis to examine the potential publication bias in the calorie income elasticity as well as the impact of specific study attributes on the elasticities that have been reported in the empirical literature a total of 40 empirical studies which yielded 99 estimated elasticities were considered the results indicate the presence of publication bias in the reported elasticities besides the estimates revealed evidence of positive and significant empirical effect of income on calorie intake from all the studies that goes beyond publication bias study attributes such as ranking of the journal panel data used in the analysis whether expenditure was used as proxy for income year of primary survey sample size and numbers of the years of primary data were found to have statistically significant impacts on the reported calorie income elasticities in the literature

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

thermodynamics and process analysis for future economic scenarios economists are increasingly interested in forecasting future costs and benefits of policies for dealing with materials energy fluxes polluting emissions and environmental impacts on various scales from sectoral to global computable general equilibrium cge models are currently popular because they project demand and industrial structure into the future along an equilibrium path but they are applicable only to the extent that structural changes occur in or near equilibrium independent of radical technological or social change the alternative tool for analyzing economic implications of scenario assumptions is to use leontief type input output i o models i o models are unable to endogenize structural shifts changing i o coefficients however this can be a virtue when considering radical rather than incremental shifts postulated i o tables can be used independently to check the internal consistency of scenarios or i o models can be used to generate scenarios by linking them to econometric macro drivers which can in principle be cge models explicit process analysis can be integrated in principle with i o models this hybrid scheme provides a natural means of satisfying physical constraints especially the first and second laws of thermodynamics this is important to avoid constructing scenarios based on physically impossible processes process analysis is really the only available tool for constructing physically plausible alternative future i o tables and generating materials energy and waste emissions coefficients explicit process analysis also helps avoid several problems characteristic of pure cge or i o models viz 1 aggregation errors 2 inability to handle arbitrary combinations of co product and co input relationships and 3 inability to reflect certain non linearities such as internal feedback loops

economic versus environmental improvement potentials of danish pig farms this article demonstrates how economic and environmental improvement potentials of danish pig farms can be estimated using data envelopment analysis dea to avoid some of the problems associated with the definition of undesirable outputs environmental variables are included as nutrients applied with manure and nutrients removed with the crops these environmental variables are combined with a series of economic variables including the costs of fertilizer furthermore subvector efficiency and a two step analysis are used in order to consider economic and environmental technical efficiency separately the empirical results show considerable improvement potentials especially on the environmental variables sensitivity studies validate that these results are robust to possible uncertainties in the measurement of the environmental variables

beyond publication bias abstract this review considers several meta regression and graphical methods that can differentiate genuine empirical effect from publication bias publication selection exists when editors reviewers or researchers have a preference for statistically significant results because all areas of empirical research are susceptible to publication selection any average or tally of significant insignificant studies is likely to be biased and potentially misleading meta regression analysis can see through the murk of random sampling error and selected misspecification bias to identify the underlying statistical structures that characterize genuine empirical effect meta significance testing and precision effect testing pet are offered as a means to identify empirical effect beyond publication bias and are applied to four areas of empirical economics research minimum wage effects union productivity effects price elasticities and tests of the natural rate hypothesis

the concept of joint production and ecological economics joint production is suggested as one of the conceptual foundations of ecological economics the notion of joint production springs immediately from the application of thermodynamics and has a long history in economic analysis considerations of joint production give rise to philosophical concerns relating to responsibility and knowledge the concept of joint production is easily comprehensible and is also constitutive and supportive of a range of concepts current in ecological economic thought 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

non parametric productivity analysis with undesirable outputs an application to the canadian pulp and paper industry this article extends the chavas cox approach to non parametric analysis by incorporating undesirable outputs to provide a more complete representation of the production technology inner and outer non parametric technology bounds are constructed the methods are illustrated with application to time series data for the canadian pulp and paper industry conventional measures that ignore changes in pollutant outputs underestimate true productivity growth further there is a large gap between estimates generated with reference to inner and outer bounds to the technology suggesting that researchers need to be aware of the limitations of results derived from analyses relying only on dea methods copyright 2001 oxford university press

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

environmental emissions and production economics implications of the materials balance in modeling emissions the literature has usually specified an explicit emission function or treated emissions as a production input we examine the validity of these approaches taking into account the materials balance principle we show that a technology can equivalently be described by i a production function with material and nonmaterial inputs and bounded marginal product of the material input ii a well behaved production function with emissions as an input and iii a well behaved emission function if the materials balance is accounted for as an additional condition we offer a forma derivation of common but not rigorously established modeling approaches

undesirable outputs in efficiency valuations abstract efficiency measurement is usually based on the assumption that inputs have to be minimized and outputs have to be maximized in a growing number of applications however undesirable outputs are incorporated into the production model which have to be minimized in this paper various approaches for treating such outputs in the framework of data envelopment analysis dea are discussed and the resulting efficient frontiers are compared new radial measures are introduced which assume that any change of the output level will involve both undesirable and desirable outputs

modeling undesirable factors in efficiency evaluation abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of decision making units dmus with multiple performance factors which are grouped into outputs and inputs once the efficient frontier is determined inefficient dmus can improve their performance to reach the efficient frontier by either increasing their current output levels or decreasing their current input levels however both desirable good and undesirable bad factors may be present for example if inefficiency exists in production processes where final products are manufactured with a production of wastes and pollutants the outputs of wastes and pollutants are undesirable and should be reduced to improve the performance using the classification invariance property we show that the standard dea model can be used to improve the performance via increasing the desirable outputs and decreasing the undesirable outputs the method can also be applied to situations when some inputs need to be increased to improve the performance the linearity and convexity of dea are preserved through our proposal

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

airline dynamic efficiency measures with a dynamic ram with unified natural managerial disposability abstract in this paper we propose a dynamic range adjusted measure with unified natural managerial disposability to evaluate the dynamic efficiency of 29 airlines during 2009 2015 in a dynamic period the new model can judge automatically whether the airline should be under natural disposability or managerial disposability in the premise of optimizing the overall efficiency we get some findings 1 scandinavian has the highest overall efficiency among these 29 airlines while norwegian s overall efficiency is the least 2 improving undesirable outputs is not the most urgent work of these airlines 3 in order to optimize the overall efficiency most airlines should be under managerial disposability 4 most airlines efficiencies have no obvious fluctuation in this period

winners and losers in transition returns to education experience and gender in slovenia the authors identify winners and losers in slovenia s economic transition by tracing changes in returns to education experience and gender and changes in wage inequality from 1987 to 1991 they find the following relative wages and employment rose for the most educated and fell for the least educated in all industries relative wages and employment rose with years of work experience until pensionable age at pensionable age relative wages increased very rapidly and relative employment was greatly reduced using pension policies to encourage early retirement drastically reduced the supply of very experienced workers either the policy caused firms to bid up wages for workers of pensionable age to keep them from retiring or it caused a selection process in which only the highest paid workers remained in the workforce regardless the pension policy has proved to be costly and early retirements did not make room for the youngest workers but for those just under pensionable age women gained relative to men in both wages and employment primarily because they occupy education and industry groups less adversely affected by the transition not because of economywide reductions in discrimination against women increasing returns to education and experience contributed to wage inequality but the variance in wages also increased for individuals with identical skills big changes in relative wages should signal future reallocation of labor toward more productive higher paying sectors setting minimum wages fixing ranges of pay and indexing wages to inflation did not prevent increases in wage variation from occuring wage minimums did not appear to have an effect presumably because inflation reduced real minimum wages so quickly that most workers were paid above the minimums in slovenia policy changes are reflected in labor market outcomes disabling the tax transfer policy from relatively profitable to relatively unprofitable firms and eliminating worker referendums on wage scales removed mechanisms that tended to compress wage variation greater demand for skilled workers also reflected both the economywide need to cope with uncertainty and such industry specific factors as reduced labor demand especially in less skill intensive industries the results in slovenia contrast sharply with those in eastern germany eastern german workers have had decreasing returns to education and experience but it is not clear how relevant the eastern german experience is to other transitional economies because of western germany s efforts to alleviate problems more similar to the authors findings are the results of flanagan 1993 on the czech republic which show increasing returns to education but decreasing returns to experience in some respects slovenia is atypical because it is richer and more western in orientation than other transitional economies however economies could learn from the experience in slovenia because slovenia also had social ownership full employment coupled with substantial hidden unemployment and an egalitarian wage structure and slovenia has introduced labor market reform and experienced social dislocations similar to those in other transitional european economies

general equilibrium effects of environmental policy a cge modeling approach estimation of emission control cost functions is often carried out in a partial equilibrium framework i e under the assumption that emission control measures have negligible effects on input and output prices in this paper a computable general equilibrium model is used for simulation of the impact on factor prices and resource allocation of reductions of so infx sup no infx su and co2 emissions thus the model includes markets for tradable emission permits and the equilibrium prices of permits reflect the marginal costs of emission control the results suggest that major emission reductions are likely to have general equilibrium effects and thus that emission control cost functions that fail to take these effects into account may give a distorted picture of the economic impact of emission control

rethinking productivity why has productivity focussed on labour instead of natural resources the contribution of natural resources and ecosystems to economic processes still remains under assessed by market evaluation and productivity analysis following the historical lines of the classical productivity debate ranging from the french physiocrats to early neoclassical growth theories the productivity concept underwent a gradual transformation from its previous understanding based on natural resources and other environmental factors to its contemporary narrow notion this paper claims that the course of the classical debate has shaped the scope of predominant contemporary analysis except for some very recent findings multifactor productivity largely focusses on a two factor model material flow analysis mfa provides a useful step for widening the measurement and notion of productivity

spatial dynamic analysis of productivity growth of agri food companies this study analyzes the spatial dynamics in productivity growth and its components for a sample of agri food companies in murcia spain over the period 2005 2014 we find that productivity growth of a company is related to productivity growth of neighboring companies in both the short and long term the marginal effects of the different factors on productivity growth are stronger in the short run rather than in the long run land characteristics and economic territorial conditions have the largest marginal effect on productivity growth and its components this study contributes to the existing literature by including spatial interactions in the analysis of productivity growth

dynamic environmental performance analysis a malmquist index approach abstract this article presents a general framework for dynamic environmental performance analysis by generalizing the approach proposed by kuosmanen and kortelainen kuosmanen t kortelainen m 2005 measuring eco efficiency of production with data envelopment analysis journal of industrial ecology 9 4 59 72 from a static to a dynamic setting for this purpose we construct an environmental performance index epi by applying frontier efficiency techniques and a malmquist index approach compared to other dynamic environmental productivity and efficiency analysis approaches based on these methods our approach builds on the standard definition of eco efficiency as it is presented in the ecological economics literature recognizing the importance to analyze the sources of environmental performance changes we show how changes in overall environmental performance can be decomposed into changes in relative eco efficiency and shifts in environmental technology respectively we apply the presented technique at the macro level to dynamic environmental performance analysis of 20 member states of the european union in 1990 2003 according to the results environmental technical change mostly explains the improvement in overall environmental performance while relative eco efficiency change has been minor for most countries during the sample period

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

production consumption and general equilibrium with physical constraints abstract this paper analyzes the consequences of integrating the conservation laws of mass and energy into the microeconomic models of production consumption and general equilibrium we show that abstract models and especially general equilibrium theory are consistent with these physical constraints but most applied and environmental economic models are not we analyze the consequences of physical conservation laws for substitution possibilities and show that these constraints limit the number of independent substitution processes but not the value of the substitution elasticities finally we propose a method for integrating physical constraints into static microeconomic models with a minimum of changes

cross constrained measuring the cost environment efficiency in material balance based frontier models frontier models based on the material balance principle mbp constitute a major group of environmentally adjusted efficiency methods that produce environmental and economic outcomes but fail to integrate them with measures of allocative efficiency in order to perform a joint cost environmental efficiency analysis drawing insight from the literature on multi criteria analysis the objective of this paper is to extend the mbp framework to new measures of cross constrained cost and environmental allocative efficiency using data envelopment analysis dea cross constrained measures seek for efficiency improvement in one of the two relevant criteria cost and environment consistent with given levels of both production and the outcome of the other criteria the incorporation of these measures into the mbp framework provides an extra decomposition of allocative efficiency in efficiency gains that involve an economic environmental trade off and those that do not the proposed approach is illustrated with an application geared to assessing the efficiency of a sample of greenhouse horticultural production units in almeria spain the results for this case show that it is possible to increase environmental allocative efficiency by up to 34 on average without incurring additional costs

total factor productivity growth in agriculture a malmquist index analysis of 93 countries 1980 2000 in this paper we examine levels and trends in agricultural output and productivity in 93 developed and developing countries that account for a major portion of the world population and agricultural output we make use of data drawn from the food and agriculture organization of the united nations and our study covers the period 1980 2000 due to the non availability of reliable input price data the study uses data envelopment analysis dea to derive malmquist productivity indexes the study examines trends in agricultural productivity over the period issues of catch up and convergence or in some cases possible divergence in productivity in agriculture are examined within a global framework the paper also derives the shadow prices and value shares that are implicit in the dea based malmquist productivity indices and examines the plausibility of their levels and trends over the study period

analysis of environmental efficiency variations a nutrient balance approach recent literature has argued that environmental efficiency ee which is built on the materials balance mb principle is more suitable than other ee measures in situations where the law of mass conversation regulates production processes in addition the mb based ee method is particularly useful in analysing possible trade offs between cost and environmental performance identifying determinants of mb based ee can provide useful information to decision makers but there are very few empirical investigations into this issue this article proposes the use of data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis techniques to analyse variation in mb based ee specifically the article develops a stochastic nutrient frontier and nutrient inefficiency model to analyse determinants of mb based ee the empirical study applies both techniques to investigate mb based ee of 96 rice farms in south korea the size of land fertiliser consumption intensity cost allocative efficiency and the share of owned land out of total land are found to be correlated with mb based ee the results confirm the presence of a trade off between mb based ee and cost allocative efficiency and this finding favouring policy interventions to help farms simultaneously achieve cost efficiency and mp based ee

the income elasticity of money demand a meta analysis of empirical results abstract in this paper we use meta analytic methods to investigate possible sources for the large variation in empirical findings about the income elasticity of money demand our results suggest that the broadness of the monetary aggregate the inclusion of wealth and the consideration of financial innovation exert a significant influence on estimated income elasticities furthermore we find substantial cross country differences in particular between the us and other countries these differences can to some extent be explained by the macrofeconomic environment and the dissemination of payment cards

measurement of agricultural total factor productivity growth incorporating environmental factors a nutrients balance approach this article proposes to use nutrient orientated environmental efficiency ee measures to construct a nutrient total factor productivity index ntfp since nutrient orientated ee measures are consistent with the materials balance principle ntfp index is superior to other existing tfp indexes an empirical study on the environmental performance of an agricultural sector in 30 oecd countries from 1990 to 2003 yielded several important findings first these countries should be able to produce current outputs with at least 50 less aggregate eutrophying power implying that they should have been able to substantially reduce the potential for eutrophication second traditional tfp has grown by 1 6 per annum due to technical progress however there are lags in the responses of several countries to this technical progress third environmental tfp has grown at a slower rate than traditional tfp growth due to reductions in nutrient orientated allocative efficiency finally changes in input combinations could have significantly improved environmental efficiency and productivity these findings favor policy interventions and faster technological transfer to improve environmental performance

measuring the effect of economic growth on countries environmental efficiency a conditional directional distance function approach using a recently developed probabilistic approach of a conditional directional distance function we measure the effect of economic growth on countries environmental efficiency in carbon dioxide emissions for a sample of 99 countries over the period of 1980 2010 our approach directly accounts for the exogenous factors influencing countries environmental production therefore we do not impose the separability condition on the estimated environmental efficiencies when examining the entire sample as well as the sample of developed countries our results reveal an inverted u shaped relationship between countries gdp per capita and environmental efficiency however when examining the relationship for the sample of developing countries the results reveal an n shaped form moreover our results show that countries ratifying the kyoto protocol tend to have higher efficiency scores implying that their mitigation activity is less costly

issue in pollution control interplant cost differences and economies of scale debate on interplant pollution control cost differences focuses on the question of whether a system of taxes or transferable discharge permits should require those plants with low treatment costs to control a higher share of effluents another issue under debate is whether those industries with a large minimum size may be effectively barred by pollution control requirements evidence of the inefficiency of present institutional arrangements is shown by studying production function estimations of 30 pulp and paper mills in wisconsin and michigan a more efficient reallocation of pollution control resources could be effected with more market oriented regimes 58 references 6 tables dck

food demand studies in sub saharan africa a survey of empirical evidence abstract the recent empirical food demand studies on sub saharan africa show significant advances in demand specification and methodology especially in the application of less restrictive and theoretically consistent flexible functional forms the findings to date establish some broad patterns on effect of income household demography and life cycle location and prices on food demand patterns however the numerical values of the demand estimates are less generalizable because of an insufficient number of data points to separate the true demand component from other confounding factors which are linked to differences in modeling and estimation of demand relations the priority for future research is to generate sufficiently detailed demand estimates that have a high utility for disaggregated policy analysis but are based on a theoretically consistent and comparable methodology

valuing social sustainability in agriculture an approach based on social outputs shadow prices abstract interest in sustainability has gained ground among practitioners academics and policy makers due to growing stakeholders awareness of environmental and social concerns this is particularly true for agriculture however relatively little research has been conducted on the quantification of social sustainability and the contribution of social issues to the agricultural production efficiency this paper proposes a framework based on state contingent outputs to compute shadow prices of social outputs our methodological approach is based on the directional distance function and illustrated using a farm level dataset from a sample of catalan arable crop farms in 2015 our results indicate that in the sample of 180 farms included in the analysis efficiency scores are relatively high for the three alternative states of the nature considered in our state contingent analysis in addition our findings show that social outputs shadow prices are positive indicating that producing more social outputs is considered as great value to the farm for the efficient farms the social outputs shadow prices are contingent upon on the state of nature in a way that social outputs shadow prices increase with the improvement in crop growth conditions these results have implications in terms of eu farm payment redistribution

redefining innovation eco innovation research and the contribution from ecological economics while innovation processes toward sustainable development eco innovations have received increasing attention during the past years theoretical and methodological approaches to analyze these processes are poorly developed against this background the term eco innovation is introduced in this paper addressing explicitly three kinds of changes towards sustainable development technological social and institutional innovation secondly the potential contribution of neoclassical and co evolutionary approaches from environmental and innovation economics to eco innovation research is discussed three peculiarities of eco innovation are identified the double externality problem the regulatory push pull effect and the increasing importance of social and institutional innovation while the first two are widely ignored in innovation economics the third is at the least not elaborated appropriately the consideration of these peculiarities may help to overcome market failure by establishing a specific eco innovation policy and to avoid a technology bias through a broader understanding of innovation finally perspectives for a specific contribution of ecological economics to eco innovation research are drawn it is argued that methodological pluralism as established in ecological economics would be very beneficial for eco innovation research a theoretical framework integrating elements from both neoclassical and evolutionary approaches should be pursued in order to consider the complexity of factors influencing innovation decisions as well as the specific role of regulatory instruments and the experience gathered in ecological economics integrating ecological social and economic aspects of sustainable development is highly useful for opening up innovation research to social and institutional changes 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

habit formation and intertemporal substitution in individual food consumption individual food consumption data are used to examine three issues first is food consumption linked intertemporally at the individual level second does the association between current and past consumption reflect habit or heterogeneity third what do the estimates imply about the intertemporal elasticity of substitution the authors find that habit matters that controlling for heterogeneity reduces estimated habit effects and that the product of the estimated intertemporal elasticity of substitution and the risk aversion parameter is less than one these results all lead to rejection of time separable specifications of intertemporal consumption behavior copyright 1996 by mit press

will airline efficiency be affected by carbon neutral growth from 2020 strategy evidences from 29 international airlines abstract in this paper the impact of the carbon neutral growth from 2020 cng2020 strategy on airline efficiency is analyzed based on the predicted data of 29 international airlines during 2021 2023 the data is predicted through neural network following the principle of cng2020 strategy we calculate the emission limit for each airline two models network range adjusted measure with natural disposability and network range adjusted measure with managerial disposability are proposed to discuss the efficiency change when the cng2020 strategy is considered the following findings are gotten 1 under natural disposability the indices related with undesirable output have a larger role in deciding benchmarking airline 2 for most of the 29 airlines cng2020 strategy has little influence on their efficiency

intertemporal analysis of employment decisions on agricultural holdings in slovenia the article attempts to quantify determinants influencing the dynamics of employment decisions on agricultural holdings in slovenia and to test specific aspects of labor reallocation during the transition period by the application of an agricultural household model through the use of a 1991 2000 longitudinal data set for 22 055 farm households quantitative analysis of intertemporal employment decisions by farm holders is carried out using probit techniques the determinants tested relate to the personal characteristics of farm holders gender age education level and potential off farm income household characteristics size structure characteristics of the agricultural holding economic size labor intensity and local labor market conditions the model results generally confirm existing empirical evidence on asymmetrical and irreversible participation of holders on the labor market despite intensive restructuring of agriculture and profound changes in the nonfarm labor market in the analyzed period labor supply of farm holders remains rigid the mobility of labor supply is lower than expected which can be attributed to the importance of structural problems constraining intersectoral mobility low labor mobility reduces the efficiency of labor allocation on agricultural holdings in slovenia elements of this problem emerge on both supply e g low level of educational and professional attainment of reference persons and demand sides of the labor market e g unfavorable local labor market conditions a marked tendency toward maintaining the same employment status is more distinct in the case of holders employed on farm only

measuring and decomposing sustainable efficiency in agricultural production a cumulative exergy balance approach environmental efficiency measures constructed using the materials balance principle have two important shortcomings 1 the ambiguity in the treatment of immaterial inputs and the various types of energy and 2 the lack of universally accepted weights for various material inputs these two limitations are primarily caused by the fact that the materials balance condition is strictly regulated by the law of mass energy conservation and that mass energy content cannot be a good physical common unit of various inputs the use of cumulative exergy content overcomes these problems the use of cumulative exergy content allows the inclusion of life cycle assessment hence facilitates the analysis of the cumulative pollution and total affects on natural resources the present study uses cumulative exergy content to construct new efficiency sustainable measures and decomposes them into technical efficiency and cumulative exergy allocative efficiency in agricultural production empirical applications on oecd agriculture yielded a number of important findings 1 oecd has the potential to save 72 3 of cumulative exergy consumption and improvements can be achieved by being more technically efficient and choosing a better combination of inputs 2 the sustainable efficiency varied enormously across countries and 3 the efficiency levels in 2003 was lower than in 1990 copyright 2010 elsevier b v all rights reserved

alternative methods for environmentally adjusted productivity analysis abstract advances in the productivity with which food is produced around the world have been made possible through the intensive use of industrial inputs that have important environmental impacts like standard measures of macroeconomic performance however commonly used measures of agricultural efficiency and productivity account only for marketed commodities and inputs but ignore the environmental effects of these production processes a more complete analysis of trends in the sector s productivity requires the use of models that incorporate these environmental effects to provide better measures of the contributions of the sector from the social point of view this paper compares the conceptual merits and empirical performance of alternative approaches that can be employed for this purpose input distance functions output distance functions nonparametric methods and index number approaches each of the methods has relative strengths and weaknesses the methods are empirically illustrated using data from the canadian pulp and paper industry

the dynamics of chinese rural households participation in labor markets the work is devoted to the dynamics of labor market participation of chinese rural households based on a theoretical farm household framework the choice between four distinct labor market participation states is empirically analyzed using household data over the period 1995 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a discrete time hazard approach to analyze households labor market participation histories in particular we investigate the movements between autarky and participation in general and more specifically the shifts between part time and full time farming estimation results suggest significant duration dependence more precisely a decreasing risk of moving from one state to another with an increasing time a household occupies one of these states further the likelihoods of starting any participation in labor markets and to start part time farming are considerably higher than to end participation or to return to full time farming in addition we find that labor market participation decisions are significantly related to several household and farm characteristics

food quality calories and household income the authors investigate the relationship between calories food quality and household per capita expenditure using regression and semi parametric methods on a sample of poor households from rural mexico where programa de apoyo alimentario pal a targeted nutritional program is operating the semi parametric method yields an estimate of the elasticity between calorie and expenditure of 0 39 below the median and 0 28 above the corresponding estimates of the elasticity of the calorie price are 0 48 below the median and 0 45 above the authors also examine the extent to which the expenditure elasticity of the calorie price is explained by substitution between and within major food groups it is found that there is a very high incidence of substitution within cereals especially for poor households and that between group substitution explains at most 59 percent of the income elasticity for food quality these estimates suggest that the potential of a cash transfer program to have a positive impact on the food diversity and the nutritional status of households is quite limited the paper is organized as follows section one gives introduction section two describes the data the econometric specification and estimation approaches used and presents and discusses descriptive evidence on the intake of calories and the price of calories in the sample the relationship between calories the cost of calories and household expenditure is studied using regression and semi parametric methods in section three section four concludes by summarizing the policy implications of findings

institutional reform and labor reallocation during transition theory evidence from polish agriculture abstract reallocation of agricultural labor during transition differs widely between regions and countries our analysis shows that agricultural labor reallocation in poland is determined by a the dramatic adjustment of prices and production costs caused by price liberalization and subsidy cuts b regional differences in farm organization and the impact of institutional reforms on these organizations c structural problems constraining intersectoral mobility the latter limit the benefits from the institutional reforms long term efficiency gains and sustainable rural development are conditional upon reducing such structural constraints and improving the functioning of the labor market

the demand for food and calories we investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural maharashtra in india we estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0 3 0 5 a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom the elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature in these indian data the calories necessary for a day s activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage which makes it implausible that income is constrained by nutrition rather than the other way around

environmentally sensitive productivity analysis of the canadian pulp and paper industry 1959 1994 an input distance function approach abstract this study employs a parametric input distance function that incorporates both desirable and undesirable outputs to provide a more complete representation of the production technology from which environmentally sensitive productivity and efficiency measures can be generated this framework also generates pollution abatement cost estimates that are useful for policy making an input based malmquist index of productivity growth that appropriately credits the producer not only for increases in marketable or desirable outputs but also for the production of improved environmental quality through pollution abatement activities is derived from the input distance function the method was applied to time series data from the canadian pulp and paper industry our shadow price estimates indicate that the marginal cost to producers of pollution control has been rising the main conclusion of this study is that productivity improvement from the social viewpoint has been stronger than conventional measures would suggest

regional energy environmental performance and investment strategy for china s non ferrous metals industry a non radial dea based analysis globally china is the largest producer and consumer of common non ferrous metals china s non ferrous metals industry is energy intensive accounting for 24 of the total industrial energy consumption in 2011 in this study we adopted a non radial dea model to examine the energy environmental performance of the non ferrous metals industry from a regional perspective during the 2006 2011 period the energy environmental performance was evaluated by the eco efficiency under natural disposability en eco efficiency under managerial disposability em eco efficiency under natural and managerial disposability enm and enm with desirable congestion enm dc based on the en both the energy conservation and emission reduction potentials were calculated additionally the investment strategy was confirmed by regional types of damages to return dtr in the second stage study the factors influencing eco efficiency were measured using tobit regression and truncated regression models the results indicated that the efficiency scores of en em enm and enm dc were considerably different investment was effective in improving the energy environmental performance for twenty one regions during the whole study period henan had the highest energy conservation and emission reduction potentials the results obtained from the regression models were similar which displayed that the population density and energy price were responsible for the increase in eco efficiency while economic development level and industrial structure affected eco efficiency negatively based on these results policy recommendations for the non ferrous metals industry to improve their performance in a low carbon economy are suggested

a critical review of distance function based economic research on china s marginal abatement cost of carbon dioxide emissions abstract the last few years have witnessed a rapidly emerging literature estimating the marginal abatement cost or the shadow price of carbon dioxide co2 emissions in china using parametric or non parametric distance function approaches this is largely driven by the fact that china has become the world s largest carbon emitter and thus faced mounting domestic and international pressure to mitigate emissions there is an urgent policy need to model and predict the cost burdens of various mitigation scenarios consistent information about the marginal abatement cost of co2 emissions plays a crucial role in addressing this need however the existing literature has suffered from various issues that have severely weakened the scientific support that these studies could potentially provide for sound policy making this paper provides a thorough and critical review of this rapidly emerging literature and identifies important research directions that need the most attention from scholars

an activity analysis model of the environmental performance of firms application to fossil fuel fired electric utilities the productivity of firms when some outputs pollution are undesirable has been studied in the literature for some time in this paper we introduce an environmental performance indicator based on the decomposition of overall factor productivity into a pollution index and an input output efficiency index this indicator is compared to the more conventional jaggi and freedman 1992 model results are given for illustrative purposes using data from u s fossil fuel fired electric utilities the rankings of the utilities obtained with the two models show significant divergence which is due to the different ways in which the undesirable outputs are dealt with as well as due to the different possible tradeoffs between the pollutants released into the atmosphere and the resources used as inputs

justifying the incorporation of the materials balance principle into frontier based eco efficiency models frontier based models are an alternative to traditional eco efficiency ratio indicators this paper considers two different types environmentally adjusted production efficiency models and frontier eco efficiency models and tries to find justification for incorporating the materials balance principle mbp in them similar importance is attached to the economic and environmental outcomes of a production process like economic outcomes can be derived from inputs and outputs and respective prices some cases allow for deriving environmental outcomes from the production function with the mbp after an overview of attempts to incorporate environmental issues in production efficiency models and some reflections why mbp has been neglected in environmental economics and production efficiency analysis the paper gives basic principles to incorporate the mbp in conventional production efficiency methods and shows how this adjustment leads to a more diversified diagnosis of eco efficiency finally potentialities and bottlenecks are discussed exploiting the mbp in production efficiency and eco efficiency analysis will facilitate more pro active eco efficiency research

towards indicators of sustainable development for firms a productive efficiency perspective sustainable development can be reflected by various economic social and environmental factors that are closely interconnected with each other and with the additional dimension of time which stresses the long term perspective of several factors due to their central role in human activities and development firms should play an important part in the attainment of sustainability goals the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the methodology of indicators that allow for the assessment of business participation into sustainable development a fundamental standpoint adopted is to view economic social and environmental efficiency as a necessary but not sufficient step towards sustainability to work out indicators we build on both the concepts of cost benefit analysis and the principles of productive efficiency we assume that we have observations on economic social and environmental factors for a set of decision making units dmus e g firms in an industrial sub sector the efficiency of each dmu is computed from a set of observed data using mathematical programming techniques resulting in dmus that are efficient and define the efficiency frontier among the set of dmus and dmus that are inefficient to cope with the multidimensionality of sustainable development it is important not to base decisions on one unique aggregate sustainability indicator instead it is suggested to develop two or three partial indicators that stress different aspects of the problem the proposed indicators could be used as an aid to detect so called factors of unsustainability and hence to provide for recommendations as to the regulations and incentives or managerial practices that will contribute to overall sustainability c 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved