managing technological development lessons from the newly industrializing countries this survey looks at the technological development of the newly industrializing countries to draw some important lessons for firms and governments in other developing countries first inventing products and processes is not at the center of the technological development needed for successful industrialization it is at the fringe what is at the center is acquiring the capabilities needed for efficient production and investment second some countries have overemphasized the drive for technological self sufficiency and paid a high price in poor productivity what makes the best economic sense is to combine foreign and local technological elements and to do this in a way that progressively develops local capabilities in areas where they can be more efficient third the acquisition of technological capability does not come merely from experience though experience is important fourth the economic environment through its influence on the technological efforts of firms is very important in determining the productivity of a country s resources

how do scholars approach the circular economy a systematic literature review abstract circular economy ce aims to overcome the take make dispose linear pattern of production and consumption proposing a circular system in which the value of products materials and resources is maintained in the economy as long as possible in recent years there has been a proliferation of scholars publications on the topic this study presents the results of a systematic literature review exploring the state of the art of academic research on ce the paper examines the ce body of literature with a systematic approach to provide an exhaustive analysis of the phenomenon with rigorous and reproducible research criteria the revisited material consists of 565 articles collected through the web of science and scopus databases and has been evaluated using specific structural dimensions to group literature into analytical categories starting from being a concept studied in connection with industrial ecology ce has slowly acquired its independent role in academic research framed mainly into environmental sustainability related studies as a result of policies implementation academic production is mainly concentrated in china and europe employing tools and methods for modelling processes and supporting decision making for ce implementation e g life cycle assessment and material flow analysis ce studies follow three main lines of action the first aims to change the social and economic dynamics at macro and administrative level the second to support firms in circular processes implementation at micro level to spread new forms of consumption and product design the third developed at meso level discusses industrial symbiosis experiences ce is associated with a variety of concepts and waste management emerges as the most relevant sub sector ce is also strongly connected with the concept of sustainability proposing ways to operationalize its implementation at the environmental and economic level while scholars only marginally consider social and institutional implications the most explored practices are those related to cleaner production aiming at reducing environmental impact and waste production along the life cycle of a product and optimizing the performance and efficiency of processes conversely studies on ce may devote greater attention to strategies for social and institutional changes able to transform the upstream process of production and consumption considering business model strategies scholars mainly focus on studying closing material loops strategy while slowing the loops which requires a radical change of consumption and production patterns is only marginally included with respect to ce implementation this study s findings highlight ce as an evolving concept that still requires development to consolidate its definition boundaries principles and associated practices

estimating the supply of environmental benefits by agriculture a french case study there has been an increasing public interest in promoting the supply of environmental benefits by agriculture the environmentally sensitive area scheme addresses this challenge by offering farmers voluntary agreements entrants are compensated for complying with a package of prescribed farming practices designed to secure conservation goals this paper emphasizes the uptake of agreements from two perspectives i ex post it considers why some eligible farmers join a proposed scheme and why some do not ii ex ante it discusses how non eligible farmers would behave if they were proposed a well defined scheme ex post perspective refers to farmers actual behaviour which is observed by the environmental agency whereas the ex ante perspective is related to their contingent one a single economic model is derived to deal with both cases econometric results from a french case study with respect to wetland preservation are given there is some consistency between the empirical results obtained in both cases and to some extent it may be argued that contingent behaviour predicts the actual one

explaining the university run enterprises in china a theoretical framework for university industry relationship in developing countries and its application to china this paper explains and evaluates the evolution of the ures university run enterprises in china by building a new theoretical framework on the university industry relationship unlike the triple helix or the new economics of science that advocates a certain type integration or separation of university industry relationship we take a contingent or context specific perspective on the relationship having the context of developing countries in mind the framework developed in this paper explains in what condition universities would keep distance from industry or become entrepreneurial to take a part in the functions of industry i e setting up and running their own business enterprises in this typology the basic determinants are internal resources of university absorptive capacity of industrial firms and existence of intermediary institutions as well as the propensity of university for ures the paper has argued that the chinese universities since the market oriented reform had strong propensity to pursue economic gains and strong internal r d and other resources to launch start ups and thus established their own firms i e ures given the low absorptive capacity of industrial firms and the underdeveloped intermediary institutions the recent adjustment of the ures in china can also be understood in terms of changes in the above three factors such as universities weakened propensity to pursue economic gains relative decline of superiority of university resources and improved external environment

calculating the welfare costs of import restrictions in the imperfect substitutes model this paper supplies equations for partial equilibrium calculations of the welfare effects of tariffs and quotas when the imported good and the competing domestic good are imperfect substitutes in demand the equations take into account the response of the price of the domestic substitute although other studies have acknowledged this response they have failed to account for it in their welfare calculations to demonstrate the importance of this response it is shown how it affects the calculations for the welfare costs of tariffs and quotas on us imports of footwear it is shown that ignoring the response of domestic prices leads to significant overstatement of the welfare costs of tariffs and significant understatement of the welfare costs of quotas for the industry

creating integrated business and environmental value within the context of china s circular economy and ecological modernization abstract this paper investigates the challenges and opportunities of how firms and organizations can and will be able to strike a better balance between economic growth and environmental stewardship in the context of china s emerging circular economy policy paradigm and based on ecological modernization theoretic approaches based on three company case studies in the information technology and electronic industries in china we identify and demonstrate how a blended business and environmental value can be created from adopting a sustainable supply chain management approach the adoption of a sustainable supply chain management approach is rapidly becoming a key business challenge and opportunity in china and other large emerging economies around the world where our greatest environmental management challenges currently reside and will continue to exist for many years to come the value creation framework proposed in research focuses on evaluating three case study companies who appear in various stages of an electronic industry supply chain value creation within a supply chain can provide the impetus for organizations to adopt circular economy sustainable supply chain practices for competitive reasons in addition we describe how a value proposition can be evaluated at two levels of analysis a more specific micro level and a more general meso level of analysis the four major business value dimensions include cost reduction revenue generation resiliency and legitimacy and image the initial findings are that a variety of opportunities exist for electronic firms in emerging and developing countries while results from this study provide an important scholarly foundation to develop and refine sustainable supply chain management practices in emerging and developing economies

determinants of environmental investments testing the structural model abstract the main purpose of this study is to provide the needed additional quantitative evidence regarding the introduction of environmental technologies and to increase the possibility for generalization and thus policy application of conclusions to achieve that purpose a conceptual model is developed and then tested on a large database of firms from various industries with the use of structural equation modeling the results show that policy measures past environmental investments the importance of environmental technologies for customers and the firm performance have a positive effect on environmental investments furthermore the results show that policy measures are a second order three factor construct

eco innovation in the transition to a circular economy an analytical literature review abstract in the ongoing sustainability debate the circular economy ce has been steadily gaining ground as a new paradigm at the same time eco innovation ei has been recognised as a key element in carrying out the transition from a linear to a circular system of production and consumption however little information can be found concerning whether and how ei can actually facilitate the change to a ce while extensive literature on ei and a growing body of research exploring the ce already exist there is as yet no comprehensive understanding concerning the connections between these two concepts drawing on academic contributions from the fields of ei and ce this analysis seeks to clarify and synthesise findings at the intersection of these two fields the aim is threefold derive literature based working definitions of ce and ei review the role of ei at ce s macro meso and micro levels and characterise ce inducing ei in terms of targets mechanisms and impacts our literature review shows that an ei driven techno economic transition to a ce requires specific solutions i e different forms of ei driven clean congruence at distinct levels of operation generally speaking movement toward a ce is found to be contingent on systemic ei that is not only intense in technology but also involving dynamic and holistic combinations of service innovations and novel organisational set ups

a resource based perspective on corporate environmental performance and profitability drawing on the resource based view of the firm we posited that environmental performance and economic performance are positively linked and that industry growth moderates the relationship with the returns to environmental performance higher in high growth industries we tested these hypotheses with an analysis of 243 finns over two years using independently developed environmental ratings results indicate that it pays to be green and that this relationship strengthens with industry growth we conclude by highlighting the study s academic and managerial implications making special reference to the social issues in management literature

differences and similarities between ecological and economic models for biodiversity conservation abstract in this paper we investigate an important obstacle which substantially complicates co operation between ecologists and economists but which has received little attention so far differences between the modelling approaches in economics and ecology to understand these differences 60 models addressing issues relevant to biodiversity conservation have been selected randomly from eight international economic and ecological journals the models have been compared according to a number of criteria including the models level of generality the mathematical techniques employed for formulation and solution of the models the level of complexity and the way time space and uncertainty are taken into account the economic models sampled are formulated and analysed analytically tend to be relatively simple and are mostly used to investigate general questions furthermore they often ignore space dynamics and uncertainty although some ecological models have similar properties there is also a substantial number of another type of ecological models that are relatively complex and analysed by simulation these models tend to be rather specific and often explicitly consider dynamics space and uncertainty the integrated ecological economic models are observed to lie in the middle between ecological and economic models an unexpected result is that they are not more complex than ecological and economic models as one could have expected from a simple merger of models from both disciplines but have an intermediate complexity

towards a consensus on the circular economy abstract the growing importance of the concept of the circular economy as a way to attain sustainable development has encouraged scholars to propose different ways to understand it given the large number of studies done on the circular economy their differing approaches and their multiple applications this paper attempts to propose a consensus view of the basic notions of the circular economy framework and highlight its relationship with eco innovation to that end this study carried out a systematic literature review that resulted in four main outputs a knowledge map of the circular economy an analysis of the main notions of the concept principles and determinants of a circular economy finally this study brings to light some remarkable examples of eco innovations developed for implementation in the circular economy

compensation payments for habitat heterogeneity existence efficiency and fairness considerations abstract compensation payments for voluntary conservation measures have become an important tool for biodiversity conservation worldwide each year substantial financial resources are spent on such measures particularly in the context of agri environmental schemes in europe a debate has started on whether this money is spent effectively in response to this debate it has been suggested that a portfolio of measures leading to habitat heterogeneity be implemented although payments for heterogeneous conservation measures have been analysed in the literature it has never been questioned that payments can be designed in a way that encourages enough land users to carry out each conservation measure within a portfolio of measures the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that such payments do not always exist moreover in cases where payments for habitat heterogeneity exist the payment scheme may require overcompensation of the land users posing a limit to both efficiency and fairness considerations

globalization and the environment determinants of firm self regulation in china critics assert that globalization is detrimental to the environment because it encourages location of polluting industries in countries with low environmental regulations we suggest that globalization might also have positive environmental effects because global ties increase self regulation pressures on firms in low regulation countries using survey data from firms in china we find that multinational ownership multinational customers and exports to developed countries increase self regulation of environmental performance

measuring trade creation and trade diversion in the central american common market a hicksian alternative abstract a large number of empirical studies on customs union formation or economic integration base their evaluation of the welfare implications of regional integration schemes on trade creation and trade diversion measures that are derived from an ordinary marshallian import demand curve this approach is however influenced by the path dependence problem which affects the reliability of the estimated results this paper derives alternative hicksian measures of trade creation and trade diversion using the popular notions of compensating and equivalent variation these notions allow for more exact estimation of the welfare impact since they incorporate the path independence condition these new measures are applied to the integration effort in the central american common market cacm the overall results show that economic integration in central america has been largely trade diverting for the selected commodity groups

the optimal allocation of conservation funds abstract this paper presents a framework to evaluate alternative designs of conservation programs and their implications for the allocation of conservation funds we show that the efficient allocation of conservation funds must consider two important pooling effects cumulative effects and interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits ignoring the cumulative effects of environmental benefits may cause conservation funds to be overly dispersed geographically and as a result may result in minimum environmental benefits when the budget is small ignoring the interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits may result in not only misallocation of conservation funds among geographical areas but also incorrect resources being targeted for conservation practices implications of these results for the design of conservation programs are discussed

bioeconomics of spatial exploitation in a patchy environment abstract this paper presents a model of renewable resource exploitation that incorporates both intertemporal dynamics and spatial movement the model combines the h s gordon vernon smith hypothesis of a rent dissipation process with ricardian notions that resources are exploited across space in a pattern dependent upon relative profitabilities the population structure is characterized in a manner consistent with modern biological ideas that stress patchiness heterogeneity and interconnections among and between patches generally we find the equilibrium patterns of biomass and effort across the system to be dependent upon bioeconomic conditions within each patch and the nature of the biological dispersal mechanism between patches we use simple examples to illustrate how the distribution of effort throughout the system reflects the heterogeneity and the spatial biological linkages

the optimal dynamic allocation of conservation funds under financial uncertainty abstract this paper analyses a situation where the survival of an endangered species depends on certain types of conservation measures being carried out regularly yet there is financial uncertainty in the future periodical availability of a budget to finance the conservation measures one option to insure against future budget uncertainty is to save money to maximise the long term survival of the endangered species it has to be decided in each period whether to spend the available money now or to allocate it to future use the paper provides an ecological economic model for this stochastic dynamic optimisation problem the findings include that the available money should be allocated as evenly as possible among periods which may require some precautionary saving in early periods to take uncertainty into account under certain conditions however increasing uncertainty may at least temporarily increase the optimal payment among other parameters the amount of precautionary actions depends on the magnitude of natural variation in the species population

an ecological economic modelling procedure to design compensation payments for the efficient spatio temporal allocation of species protection measures abstract using an interdisciplinary approach we present an ecological economic modelling procedure to design compensation payments for species protection we develop our procedure on the example of white stork protection in a spatio temporally structured landscape generated by human land use the proposed procedure is able to solve complex allocation problems such as the spatio temporal allocation of a budget among more than two areas with spatially differing species specific cost and benefit functions of any shapes furthermore the procedure delivers the efficient compensation payments not only qualitatively but quantitatively and is hence relevant to the implementation of species protection policies

green chemistry and green engineering in china drivers policies and barriers to innovation with the world s largest population and consistently rapid rates of economic growth china faces a choice of whether it will move towards a more sustainable development trajectory this paper identifies the different factors driving innovation in the fields of green chemistry and green engineering in china which we find to be largely driven by energy efficiency policy increasingly strict enforcement of pollution regulations and national attention to cleaner production concepts such as circular economy we also identify seven key barriers to the development and implementation of green chemistry and engineering in china they are 1 competition between economic growth and environmental agendas 2 regulatory and bureaucratic barriers 3 availability of research funding 4 technical barriers 5 workforce training 6 industrial engineering capacity and 7 economic and financial barriers our analysis reveals that the most crucial barriers to green chemistry and engineering innovations in china appear to be those that arise from competing priorities of economic growth and environmental protection as well as the technical challenges that arise from possessing a smaller base of experienced human capital we find that there is a great deal of potential for both the development of the underlying science as well as its implementation throughout the chemical enterprise especially if investment occurs before problems of technological lock in and sunk costs emerge c 2012 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

the role of policy labels keywords and framing in transitioning waste policy abstract the last decade has seen a new wave of ambitious policies in order to address the mounting ecological damage caused by high levels of consumerism and the depletion of resources to manufacture short life cycle products in this paper zero waste and sustainable materials management are examined as prominent labels of an evolving waste policy discourse towards waste prevention and reduction and material cycles using discourse analysis key documents are comparatively assessed presenting the origins of these two concepts and how they entered the waste policy domain the different framing tactics and governance models are then presented the findings demonstrate that the different discourse paradigms around the concept of waste and materials influences what policy initiatives measurement tools and outcomes are pursued although zero waste and sustainable materials management are gaining popularity as indicators of shifting waste policy towards sustainable production and consumption policy particularly with increasing discussion and application of circular economy governance models in europe and china a distinction still exists between the conceptualisation and implementation within and across the two concepts it is in this transition towards a circular economy that it is valuable to review the role of policy labels keywords and framing context in waste policy and the ability of enhanced waste management to assist in the development of more sustainable and environmentally acceptable economic and social behaviour models

spatially uniform versus spatially heterogeneous compensation payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures the importance of compensation payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures has grown over the past decade particularly in connection with agri environmental policy given that both the costs and the benefits of biodiversity enhancing land use measures are subject to spatial variation the criterion of cost effectiveness calls for spatially heterogeneous compensation payments however when deciding whether to implement uniform or heterogeneous compensation payments the regulator has to compare the disadvantage of uniform payments in terms of cost effectiveness with the disadvantages of spatially heterogeneous payments to help resolve this issue this paper provides a simple ecological economic model that allows the reduced cost effectiveness associated with uniform payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures to be assessed for different types of benefit and cost functions

an insight into the italian chemical sector how to make it green and efficient abstract the present research moves from the consideration that the implementation and the dissemination of circular economy processes is a hotspot in european ecosystem management and that eu countries must converge towards the same targets considering the relevance of chemical sector economic and environmental impact we aim at unveiling the economic and institutional determinants of sectoral performances in terms of circular economy and resource efficiency by means an oecd procedure we built a circular economy index for the chemical sector following a panel data model has been applied on 20 italian regions in order to test two economic hypotheses and a politico institutional one this allowed us to capture the features most likely to affect circular performances within the regions the findings reveal that regional socio economic background plays a fundamental role in improving firm performance level while institutions and sectoral economic dynamic are not strong flywheel of circular economy

uniformity versus differentiation in regulating externalities abstract in the regulation of pollutant emissions a regulator may treat different sources with different costs and environmental damage as though they were the same for institutional informational or transaction cost reasons this may occur despite the efficiency gains from regulatory differentiation of sources this issue has been a source of much controversy in the environmental economics literature and is examined here from a theoretical perspective using a two pollutant economy emissions and net social benefits are compared for the case of efficient differentiated regulation and the case of uniform undifferentiated regulation of the aggregate of the two pollutants we show when aggregate emissions will be greater than equal to or less than efficient emissions and we derive conditions for each of these three possibilities further we show that when marginal costs and benefits become more steeply sloped the inefficiency associated with undifferentiated regulation increases

towards circular economy implementation a comprehensive review in context of manufacturing industry the concept of circular economy ce is to an increasing extent treated as a solution to series of challenges such as waste generation resource scarcity and sustaining economic benefits however the concept of circularity is not of novel as such specific circumstances and motivations have stimulated ideas relevant to circularity in the past through activities such as reuse remanufacturing or recycling main objectives of this work are to provide a comprehensive review of research efforts encompassing aspects of resources scarcity waste generation and economic advantages to explore the ce landscape in the context of these three aspects especially when they are considered simultaneously based on an idea of a comprehensive ce framework propose an implementation strategy using top down and bottom up approach in a concurrent manner to fulfill this objective a comprehensive review of state of the art research is carried out to understand different ideas relevant to ce motivation for the research and context of their recurrence main contributions of this paper are a comprehensive ce framework and a practical implementation strategy for a regenerative economy and natural environment the framework emphasizes on a combined view of three main aspects i e environment resources and economic benefits it also underlines that joint support of all stakeholders is necessary in order to successfully implement the ce concept at large scale the proposed framework and implementation strategy also identify new avenues for future research and practice in the field of ce