environmental policy and exports evidence from chinese cities we study environmental regulation and its role for trade in china specifically we assess the effectiveness of an environmental policy in china that introduced stricter regulations on sulfur dioxide so2 emissions in targeted cities to identify the causal effect of this policy on exports we use sectoral export data for a panel of chinese cities and exploit variations in exports between cities and sectors over time and in a second step between firm types we find a relative fall in sectoral exports in targeted cities after the implementation of the policy which is sharper the more polluting the industry further we find that the observed effect is mainly driven by privately owned firms whereas exports of state owned firms seem to be unaffected by the new policy this finding is consistent with the preferential political treatment of state owned firms in china

the role of property rights in determining the environmental quality income relationship article i nfo this paper examines the role of property rights in shaping the relationship between environmental quality and income it develops an analytical framework that integrates the effects of property rights evolution natural resource attributes agent characteristics and production technology on the environment income relationship the substantive strength of this framework lies in its ability to rationalize a wide range of environment income relationships the model shows that the u shaped environment income relationship which is consistent with the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis can arise only under specific model conditions thus the framework provides an additional explanation for non universality of ekc we provide evidence in support of our framework from case studies of various natural resources

evolution of population resource dynamics models abstract this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of brander and taylor s 1998 model and its descendants from the following perspectives population growth substitutability innovation capital accumulation property rights and institutional designs and modeling approach this survey aims to contribute to a better understanding of population and resource dynamics models in general and facilitate further application of the model framework to relevant circumstances although often treated as exogenous in optimal growth models making population growth an endogenous function allows us to analyze broader effects of economic activities on population the issues of substitutability innovation and capital accumulation are intertwined allowing a model to address the effect of an endogenous technological change on substitutability between natural and man made capital facilitates our analyses of sustainability issues to address internalizing inter generational externalities in resource use incorporating property right changes and institutional designs to this type of model is a useful exercise but careful attention is needed for the consistency between such an arrangement and the mathematical representation of the depicted economy finally although the common criticism regarding convenient mathematical assumptions applies to the existing bt type models the use of computer simulation can relax such assumptions to better represent the intended relationships between the relevant variables

environmental regulations and industrial competitiveness evidence from china economic activities are closely related to real world environmental issues currently more attention is paid to the association between environmental regulations and industrial competitiveness ic because of pressures on economic development and environmental protection in this study we identify and explain the association between environmental regulations and ic in china as the largest developing country in the world china has the unavoidable responsibility of protecting the environment and promoting global economic development we analyse the mechanisms behind environmental regulations and industrial competiveness at the provincial level and conclude that the impact of environmental regulations upon ic is not a simple linear one but a u shaped relationship it is argued that the crucial intervention to activate the u shaped relationship or porter s hypothesis is innovation which can be triggered by stringent regulations and well designed policies

the innovation impact of the eu emission trading system findings of company case studies in the german power sector abstract this paper provides a detailed analysis of how the european emission trading system eu ets as the core climate policy instrument of the european union has impacted innovation towards this end we investigate the impact of the eu ets on research development and demonstration rd d adoption and organizational change in doing so we pay particular attention to the relative influences of context factors policy mix market factors and public acceptance and firm characteristics value chain position technology portfolio size and vision empirically our qualitative analysis is based on multiple case studies with 19 power generators technology providers and project developers in the german power sector which were conducted in 2008 09 we find that the innovation impact of the eu ets has remained limited so far because of the scheme s initial lack of stringency and predictability and the relatively greater importance of context factors additionally the impact varies significantly across technologies firms and innovation dimensions and is most pronounced for rd d on carbon capture technologies and organizational changes our analysis suggests that the eu ets on its own may not provide sufficient incentives for fundamental changes in corporate innovation activities at a level which ensures political long term targets can be achieved

a statistical approach to economic forecasting a recently developed statistical model called bayesian vector autoregression has proven to be a useful tool for economic forecasting such a model today forecasts a strong resurgence of growth in the second half of 1985 and in 1986

environmental regulation and competitiveness empirical evidence on the porter hypothesis from european manufacturing sectors abstract this paper investigates the weak and strong versions of porter hypothesis ph focusing on the manufacturing sectors of 17 european countries between 1997 and 2009 the hypothesis that well crafted and well enforced regulation would benefit both the environment and the firm was originally proposed by porter 1991 and porter and van der linde 1995 to date the literature has analyzed the impact of environmental regulation on innovation and on productivity mostly in separate analyses and focusing on the usa the few existing contributions on europe study the effect of environmental regulation either on green innovation or on performance indicators such as exports we instead look at overall innovation and productivity impacts first focusing on overall innovative activity allows us to account for potential opportunity costs of induced innovations second productivity impacts are arguably the most relevant indicators for the strong ph as a proxy of environmental policy stringency we use pollution abatement and control expenditures pace one of the few sectoral level indicators available we remedy upon its main drawback namely potential endogeneity by adopting an instrumental variable estimation approach we find evidence of a positive impact of environmental regulation on the output of innovation activity as proxied by patents thus providing support in favor of the weak ph this result is in line with most of the literature on the other front we find no evidence in favor of the strong ph as productivity appears to be unaffected by the degree of pollution control and abatement efforts

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

the effects of urban agglomeration economies on carbon emissions evidence from chinese cities abstract this study expounded the mechanism of the effects of urban agglomeration economies on carbon emissions based on the theory of agglomeration economies based on the stirpat model we built an econometric model we then used the method of spatial econometrics to estimate the effects of urban agglomeration economies on carbon emissions through matching the firm level data and panel data of 283 prefecture level and above cities from 2003 to 2010 in china the results reveal that both specialization and diversification agglomeration can significantly promote carbon emission reduction in local and neighboring cities through the agglomeration externalities specifically specialization agglomeration of low end technology industry has significant reduction effects on carbon emission of local and neighboring cities in most cases while the diversification agglomeration has increased it the specialization and diversification agglomeration of midrange technology industry have increased the carbon emissions of the local and neighboring cities furthermore the specialization and diversification agglomeration of high end technology industry have significant carbon emission reduction effects in varying degrees for the local and neighboring cities

does environmental regulation affect energy efficiency in china s thermal power generation empirical evidence from a slacks based dea model abstract data envelopment analysis dea has gained much popularity in performance measurement of power industry this paper presents a slack based measure approach to investigating the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and the environmental regulation of china s thermal power generation we first calculate the total factor energy efficiency without considering environmental constraints an environmental performance indicator is proposed through decomposing the total factor energy efficiency the proposed approach is then employed to examine whether environmental regulation affects the energy efficiency of china s thermal power generation we find that the environmental efficiency plays a significant role in affecting energy performance of china s thermal generation sector decreasing the discharge of major pollutants can improve both energy performance and environmental efficiency besides we also have three main findings 1 the energy efficiency and environmental efficiency were relatively low 2 the energy and environmental efficiency scores show great variations among provinces 3 both energy efficiency and environmental efficiency are of obvious geographical characteristics according to our findings we suggest some policy implications

industrial structure and capital flows this paper provides a new theory of international capital flows in a framework that integrates factor proportions based trade and financial capital flows a novel force emerges capital tends to flow toward countries that become more specialized in capital intensive industries this composition effect competes with the standard force that channels capital toward the location where it is scarcer if the composition effect dominates capital flows away from the country hit by a positive labor force productivity shock a flow reversal extended to a quantitative framework the model generates sizable current account imbalances between developing and developed countries broadly consistent with the data

the effects of environmental regulation and technical progress on co2 kuznets curve an evidence from china based on environmental kuznets curve theory a panel data model which takes environmental regulation and technical progress as its moderating factors was developed to analyse the institutional and technical factors that affect the path of low carbon economic development the results indicated that there was a co2 emission kuznets curve seen in china environmental regulation had a significant moderating effect on the curve and the inflection of co2 emissions could come substantially earlier under stricter environmental regulation meanwhile the impact of technical progress on the low carbon economic development path had a longer hysteresis effect but restrained co2 emission during its increasing stage and accelerated its downward trend during the decreasing stage which was conducive to emission reduction strict environmental regulation could force the high carbon emitting industries to transfer from the eastern regions to the central or the western regions of china which would make the co2 kuznets curve higher in its increasing stage and lower in its decreasing stage than that under looser regulation furthermore energy efficiency energy structure and industrial structure exerted a significant direct impact on co2 emissions we should consider the above factors as essential in the quest for low carbon economic development

structural innovation and efficiency effects of environmental regulation evidence from china s carbon emissions trading pilot conventional wisdom argues that environmental regulation can trigger both structural adjustments and enhanced innovation we test this conjecture by using a difference in differences approach to analyze the impacts of china s carbon emission trading cet pilot policy on energy consumption we find that compliance with the cet regulation has triggered statistically significant adjustments in energy structure industrial structure and technological innovation adjustments in industrial structure also contribute to enhanced total factor energy efficiency whereas increased technological innovation has mixed effects on energy efficiency we show that in the short run government led innovation does not immediately contribute to improvement in energy efficiency whereas enterprise led innovation has a negative impact it indicates that cet regulation can affect energy efficiency through industrial structure and technological innovation overall our results provide new evidence for the strong version of the porter hypothesis our results also provide strong scientific support for china s recent transition towards market based carbon mitigation strategies

has democratization reduced infant mortality in sub saharan africa evidence from micro data does democracy help babies survive in sub saharan africa by using retrospective fertility surveys conducted in 28 african countries i compare the survival of infants born to the same mother before and after democratization to disentangle the effect of democracy from that of changes in population characteristics which is infeasible with country level statistics on infant mortality i find that infant mortality falls by 1 2 percentage points 12 of the sample mean after democratization in the post cold war period relevant aspects of democracy appear to be the combination of multiparty elections and leadership change

climate policy instruments and industry effects and potential responses in the swedish context efficient policy instruments for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases are essential for the realization of a successful climate policy general economic policy instruments have the potential for providing efficient emission reduction as they equalise marginal costs for emission reduction between different actors they also provide incentives for a great variety of responses such as energy efficiency improvements fuel substitution and reduced consumption of carbon intensive products however as a result of the fact that it has so far been impossible to implement policy instruments on a global scale these instruments are often adapted in such a way that some of their potential advantages are eliminated in this paper the possibility of different policy instruments to contribute to reductions in industrial co2 emissions while preserving the competitiveness of industry is evaluated theoretically the consequences of increasing the cost of co2 emission in various industrial sectors are also discussed attention is directed towards carbon taxes emission trading and regulation co2 taxes without tax reductions and emission trading with allocation through auctioning have theoretical advantages in a global climate regime but may lead to significant disadvantages if implemented in a single or a small groups of countries emission trading with free intensity based allocation would in this case have a major advantage in combining incentives for emission reductions through efficiency improvements and fuel substitution with little impact on production levels less

how environmental regulations affect innovation in the australian oil and gas industry going beyond the porter hypothesis the impact of environmental regulation on innovation is of central interest to many industries and policy makers alike while traditional research adopts a top down view of regulation and attempts to measure the innovation response the more bottom up view of contemporary theory argues that firms produce innovations that exceed compliance levels as a competitive strategy we approach this dichotomy by investigating innovation introduced by australian oil and gas firms in light of environmental regulatory compliance burden and firm level characteristics including competitive capabilities analyses of survey responses executive level interviews and conference proceedings reveal both regulatory top down and competitive advantage bottom up perspectives explain innovation in this industry regression analyses reveal that product service and novel innovations all types are related to a high compliance burden competitive skills research and development activity and engagement in formal collaborations interview and conference data add nuance to our findings revealing collaborative compliance frameworks result in similar innovation outcomes

comparative statics of a monopolistic firm facing price cap and command and control environmental regulations abstract an exhaustive comparative statics analysis of a model of a monopolistic firm facing price cap regulation and a variety of commonly implemented command and control environmental regulations is carried out the comparative statics are intrinsic to each of the models and thus form their basic empirically testable properties several unanticipated results emerge from the analysis in particular it is shown that a subset of the intrinsic comparative statics are qualitatively invariant to all of the commonly employed command and control environmental regulations that a price cap regulated profit maximizing monopoly might face while others are specific to the type of command and control environmental regulation in place

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

the joint demand for health care leisure and commodities implications for health care finance and access in vietnam abstract this paper explores linkages between the demand for health care providers and the consumption of food non food goods and leisure in vietnam using a mixed continuous discrete dependent variable model cross price elasticities calculated from the model suggest there are strong substitution effects between health care leisure and certain commodities the model allows us to explore the implications of replacing user fees with alternative forms of health care finance such as commodity taxes in particular the results suggest financing public health care services with a non food sales tax rather than user fees would be more progressive and would improve access to care

the long run volatility puzzle of the real exchange rate abstract this paper documents large cross country differences in the long run volatility of the real exchange rate it shows that the real exchange rate of developing countries is approximately three times more volatile than the real exchange rate in industrial countries the paper shows that this difference in volatility cannot be explained by the fact that developing countries face larger shocks both real and nominal recurrent currency crises or by different elasticities to these shocks arch estimations find a much higher persistence of deviations of the variance of the rer from its long run value when the economy suffers shocks of various kinds

energy saving power generation dispatching in china regulations pilot projects and policy recommendations a review abstract environmental protection and climate change have become one of the most important issues of great concern consequently improving energy efficiency and developing renewable energy have also become the fundamental energy policies of all countries around the world china has put forward the ambitious goal to speed up the construction of the resource conserving and environmentally friendly society in copenhagen global warming summit held in november 2009 china made a solemn commitment by 2020 the co 2 emissions per unit of gdp i e carbon intensity will decrease by 40 to 45 compared with that in 2005 therefore increasing energy efficiency reducing energy consumption and protecting environment will undoubtedly become the urgent task in china hence energy saving and emission reduction prove to be the developing trend the energy saving power generation dispatching espgd measures trial printed by national development and reform commission ndrc was required to carry out energy saving power generation dispatching so as to maximize the environmental benefits which the renewable energy and other clean energy create minimize the energy consumption and pollutant emissions and promote the secure efficient and clean electric power system the implementation of espgd is facing enormous challenges both in technology and in regulations how to realize the balance among energy conservation environmental protection and economic efficiency under the premise of secure and stable system operation and how to promote the effective implementation through the policy measures are the key problems to be resolved urgently for china to thoroughly carry out espgd this paper introduces the concept of espgd elaborates the influences of espgd on the entire electric power industry discusses the situation and comparison of espgd in the pilot provinces and puts forward technical and policy suggestions for the effective implementation of espgd

energy efficiency and carbon trading potential in malaysia abstract the damage inflicted by global warming is happening far faster than any experts have predicted or anticipated since the kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to fight global warming through reducing global greenhouse gases ghgs emission the world climate pattern has worsened at an accelerated rate beyond expectation while developed countries sanctioned by the protocol are committed to achieve their ghg emission targets developing nations play similar roles on a voluntary basis since almost all of the ghgs emissions come from energy sector it is obvious that energy policy and related regulatory frameworks play imperative roles in realizing the kyoto protocol objectives with carbon dioxide co 2 touted as the main remedy in the ghgs emissions it is only reasonable that carbon trading becomes the essential element in the protocol recently a milestone is marked in the kyoto protocol with the 2009 climate summit in copenhagen denmark with all participating countries further committed themselves in fulfilling the protocol s obligations before the commitment period due in 2012 it is worthwhile to review the various energy efficiency efforts and carbon trading potential in malaysia a country which although does not bear any obligation has ratified and lauded the cause of the protocol malaysia as a developing nation is seen as a direct beneficiary from carbon trading and in this paper how the country energy policies have evolved over the years with concerted efforts from the government to minimize its carbon footprint through numerous energy efficiency implementations are discussed in length the impact from the 2009 climate summit on malaysia is also briefed

total factor energy efficiency of regions in china abstract this paper analyzes energy efficiencies of 29 administrative regions in china for the period 1995 2002 with a newly introduced index most existing studies of regional productivity and efficiency neglect energy inputs we use the data envelopment analysis dea to find the target energy input of each region in china at each particular year the index of total factor energy efficiency tfee then divides the target energy input by the actual energy input in our dea model labor capital stock energy consumption and total sown area of farm crops used as a proxy of biomass energy are the four inputs and real gdp is the single output the conventional energy productivity ratio regarded as a partial factor energy efficiency index is computed for comparison in contrast to tfee our index is found fitting better to the real case according to the tfee index rankings the central area of china has the worst energy efficiency and its total adjustmentof energy consumption amount is over half of china s total regional tfee in china generally improved during the research period except for the western area a u shape relation between the area s tfee and per capita income in the areas of china is found confirming the scenario that energy efficiency eventually improves with economic growth

the influence of chinese environmental regulation on corporation innovation and competitiveness abstract according to porter hypothesis appropriate environmental regulation can promote corporation innovation the innovation will even offset the corporation loss caused by environmental regulation and improve corporation competitiveness in order to explore the porter hypothesis practical situation in china this paper does an empirical study to explore this mechanism by using chinese pollution intensive corporations panel data samples during 2007 2012 results show that the implementation of flexible control policies has achieved initial success environmental regulation has significant positive effects on corporation s innovation but the fact of its weak effects also partly explains why environmental regulation still has negative effects on corporation competitiveness even it is insignificant from the point of regional differences east and middle regions have weak but not strong porter hypothesis phenomenon while that of the west region is not significant return on assets roa and gross domestic product gdp in the east region are relatively higher which is not based on high energy consumption and environmental pollution but due to the high transformation rate of research and development expenditure r d to roa for the middle region even it shows signs of the strong porter hypothesis but due to the fact that government gives fiscal subsidies and tax returns to companies to cover the cost from environmental regulation it only has the weak but not strong porter hypothesis phenomenon since this mechanism is not consistent with that of porter hypothesis

energy intensity and foreign direct investment a chinese city level study article i nfo in this paper we investigate the relationship between the energy intensity of chinese cities and the location of foreign firms employing a unique dataset of 206 of the largest prefecture level cities between 2005 and 2008 our results reveal a non linearinverted u shaped relationship between energy intensity and city level per capita income with the majority of cities on the downward slope of the curve we also find evidence of a significant and negative relationship between the foreign direct investment fdi flows into a city and energy intensity however this effect varies by geographic location reflecting differences in the ability of regions to absorb and benefit from environmental spillovers the relatively small economic effect of fdi can in part explained by the propensity for foreign firms to invest in energy intensive sectors coupled with the trend for china to invest heavily in capital intensive industries

the new wave of private capital inflows push or pull abstract this paper studies the determinants and sustainability of the widespread private capital inflows to middle income countries after 1989 the key question is whether these flows are mostly pulled by attractive domestic conditions or pushed by unfavorable conditions in developed countries an analytical model focusing on country risk is developed and used empirically it is argued that the observed improvement in country creditworthiness is mostly due to the decline in international interest rates and that therefore its importance as a proximate cause does not support the pull interpretation all things considered in most countries the key answer that emerges is push

privatizing an open access resource and environmental degradation abstract we develop a tractable dynamic model of the exploitation of an environmental resource with endogenous property rights we are able to explain both the evolution of property rights and environmental quality the model demonstrates that the development of property rights may emerge from within a community as a response to the overexploitation of an open access resource in the equilibrium of our model the resource is fully privatized and resource quality is greater than under the open access steady state we show that while environmental quality may initially decline privatizing the resource reduces its exploitation and eventually environmental quality improves

different types of environmental regulations and heterogeneous influence on green productivity evidence from china this paper attempts to examine if the strong version of porter hypothesis is supported in china by investigating how different regulatory instruments and the relative stringency impact green productivity we use a slacks based measure sbm and luenberger productivity index accounting for undesirable outputs to evaluate the industrial green productivity growth rates of china s 30 provinces the estimates imply an unsustainable development model in china with significant regional differences by employing a panel threshold model and a province level panel dataset during 2000 2012 empirical results show that both command and control and market based regulation have a non linear relationship with and can be positively related to green productivity but with different constrains on regulation stringency there are double thresholds with the command and control and exists an optimal range of stringency for productivity improvement while a single threshold has been found with the market based regulation and its current stringency is reasonable for most of provinces moreover based on china s reality the productivity effect driven by market based regulation is much stronger than that of the command and control the mechanism of informal regulation is much more complicated consequently we find evidence to support the strong porter hypothesis that reasonable stringency of environmental regulations may enhance rather than lower industrial competitiveness

the cost of regulation osha epa and the productivity slowdown the slowdown in productivity growth in the u s economy during the 1970 s has been a matter of great concern to policymakers associated as it is with inflation unemployment and declining real wage growth this paper examines the impact on productivity growth of government regulation specifically worker health and safety regulation by the occupational safety and health administration osha and environmental regulation by the environmental protection agency epa looking at data for 450 manufacturing industries between 1958 and 1978 the study finds a large negative relationship between such regulation and productivity growth using these results about 30 percent of the decline in productivity growth in manufacturing during the 1970 s may be attributed to such regulation several previous studies have looked at the contribution of regulation to the productivity slowdown many of these have inferred that the contribution must be small on the basis of the relatively small amount spent on complying with such regulations edward denison 1979 estimates that only about 16 percent of the productivity slowdown in the 1972 75 period was due to regulation 35 percentage points out of a slowdown of 2 17 percentage points paul portney 1981 notes that little of gnp is spent on pollution control under 2 percent concluding that therefore pollution regulations could have little effect on productivity growth norsworthy et al 1979 also find a small impact of pollution abatement capital expenditures on productivity growth studies based on econometric estimation of the regulation productivity relationship have found a wide range of results gregory christainsen and robert haveman 1981 find regulation reduced labor productivity growth by 27 percentage points using time series data and measures of total federal regulation robert crandall 1981 finds a strong relationship between pollution abatement capital and productivity growth but this relationship disappears when a measure of energy intensity is included robin siegel 1979 observes a significant contribution 5 percentage points from pollution control expenditures to the productivity slowdown for 1965 73 but not for later years finally frank gollop and mark roberts 1983 examine data for a set of electric utilities and find that regulation of emissions had a large impact on total factor productivity growth lowering it for regulated firms by 59 percentage points many other factors might help to explain the productivity slowdown including the rise in energy prices the long and severe recession and declines in research and development expenditures there have been a variety of studies examining the contributions of each factor to the slowdown they generally conclude that many factors contributed to the slowdown but that a sizable fraction of the slowdown remains unexplained by the estimated contributions of all the factors considered

assessment of present conventional and non conventional energy scenario of pakistan abstract it has become the universal fact that the energy is one of the key factors for the smooth and faster upgradation of the socio economic activities in any country in pakistan s history of over 60 years the country presently is facing possibly the worst energy crisis that has geared back the socio economic development below the level of critical sustainability and tolerance of the people every walk of life and industrial activities have declined due to long electricity shut down every day since last few years in view to access the current status of available energy resources the present research study has been carried out to review and assess the demography of the country versus energy sectors energy supplies consumptions status of fossil fuel resources oil gas coal conventional non conventional electricity generation and past present future energy demand supply during 2001 2011 the results of this assessment indicate that conventional resources in pakistan are and will not be enough to meet the ever growing energy demand and consequently highlight the importance of the renewable energy sources that are apparently encouraging in the country but have not been developed to any satisfaction priority is imperative to be given for the adequate development of renewable energy sectors in addition to the present energy mix

what do emissions markets deliver and to whom evidence from southern california s nox trading program a perceived advantage of cap and trade programs over more prescriptive environmental regulation is that enhanced compliance flexibility and cost effectiveness can make more stringent emissions reductions politically feasible however increased compliance flexibility can also result in an inequitable distribution of pollution we investigate these issues in the context of southern california s reclaim program we match facilities in reclaim with similar california facilities also located in non attainment areas our results indicate that emissions fell approximately 24 percent on average at reclaim facilities relative to our counterfactual furthermore we find that observed changes in emissions do not vary significantly with neighborhood demographic characteristics

renewable energy consumption economic growth nexus for china abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth in china for the period 1977 2011 autoregressive distributed lag approach ardl to cointegration and johansen cointegration techniques are employed by including intermittent variables namely carbon dioxide emissions and labor we also employed granger causality test in order to determine the direction of the causality among the variables the results show that there is a bi directional long term causality between renewable energy consumption and economic growth this finding implies that growing economy in china is propitious for the development of renewable energy sector which in turn helps to boost economic growth we also find that labor influences renewable energy consumption in the short term however there is no evidence of long or short run causality between carbon emissions and renewable energy consumption this implies that actual level of renewable energy in china is still insignificant and not considerably exploited in order to contribute to the mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions

does environmental regulation drive away inbound foreign direct investment evidence from a quasi natural experiment in china abstract this paper investigates whether environmental regulation affects inbound foreign direct investment the identification uses the two control zones tcz policy implemented by the chinese government in 1998 in which tougher environmental regulations were imposed in tcz cities but not others our difference in difference in differences estimation explores three dimension variations specifically city i e tcz versus non tcz cities industry i e more polluting industries relative to less polluting ones and year i e before and after the tcz policy we find that tougher environmental regulation leads to less foreign direct investment meanwhile we find that foreign multinationals from countries with better environmental protections than china are insensitive to the toughening environmental regulation while those from countries with worse environmental protections than china show strong negative responses

is environmental efficiency trade inducing or trade hindering abstract global efforts to identify strategies for sustainable economic growth and development underline the need for understanding important links between environmental policies and international trade in this paper by constructing an environmental efficiency index for 111 countries from 1980 to 2009 we are able to empirically test for one such link an improvement in the environmental efficiency index in terms of carbon dioxide emissions reflects a decrease in the cost of efforts to mitigate the environmental costs associated with growth countries that improve their environmental efficiency are found to experience strong international trade effects both through increased exports and increased imports while the positive link between efficiency improvements and exports is supportive of the porter hypothesis the positive link between efficiency improvements and imports is supportive of strong positive income effects on account of environmental efforts these results which are robust to alternative estimation strategies lend strong support to global efforts to improve countries environmental efficiencies

environmental regulation and environmental productivity the case of china abstract constrained by the dual mission of supporting industrial growth and reducing emissions china s traditional emission reduction oriented environmental policies unavoidably face a dilemma this study adopts the gml index to calculate china s industrial productivity by considering environmental factors in addition based on the assumption of industry heterogeneity the author examines the non linear relationship between china s environmental regulation and environmental productivity and calculated the optimal regulation environment for industries according to this study when impact of undesirable outputs pollutant emissions is considered environmental regulation and environmental productivity are positively correlated which to some degree validates the porter hypothesis at present environmental regulation has significant positive effects on clean production industries but shows a lag effect on pollution intensive industries the degree of environmental regulation and environmental productivity show an inverted u shaped relation and display three thresholds it should be noted however that the relationship between regulation and productivity may vary across industries these findings have clear policy implications rather than continually increasing the level of environmental regulation the government should establish standards for individual industries that emphasize flexibility

propagation of speculative cycles the exchange rate channel abstract the nominal and real exchange rates are key relative prices within and between economies their volatility and gyrations can have significant cumulative effects on the development pattern of financially integrated economies the article documents the linkage between global risk aversion and the exchange rate of some developed and developing economy currencies characterised by large short term interest rate differentials if capital flows can drive exchange rates and transmit international speculative cycles inside the economic system a careful design of monetary policy exchange rate and capital management regimes is a fundamental ingredient of a successful development strategy

strategic quality competition and the porter hypothesis abstract this paper offers new support for the porter hypothesis within the context of a quality competition framework we use a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation in which two firms simultaneously choose to produce either a high environmentally friendly quality or low standard quality variant of a good before engaging in price competition in this simple setting we show that a nash equilibrium of the game featuring the low quality good can be pareto dominated by a different strategy profile in which both firms opt in favour of the green product our analysis demonstrates that in such a case both firms stand to profit from the introduction of a rule penalizing any firm refusing to produce the environmentally friendly product we also find that consumers themselves may benefit from such regulations this is always the case when shifting from low quality to high quality production brings about a cost efficiency improvement

carbon intensity in production and the effects of climate policy evidence from swedish industry we analyze carbon intensity performance at firm level and the effectiveness of the swedish co2 tax carbon intensity performance is derived from a production technology and measured as changes in t

how does administrative pricing affect energy consumption and co2 emissions in china despite reforms china still largely applies the cost plus pricing mechanism for the energy sector government administrative energy pricing leads to energy price distortions which could result in not only the excessive and wasteful energy consumption but also environmental deterioration thereby undermining energy conservation and emission abatement using fossil fuel subsidies as a proxy for the level of energy price distortions this paper estimates the subsidy of 22 chinese departments during the period 2006 2010 and adopts the price gap approach to analyze the impacts of subsidy removal on energy consumption and co2 emissions for the various sectors and energy types the results demonstrate that removing energy subsidies would reduce energy consumption and emissions by 3 77 and 2 85 respectively but the effects vary across sectors the transport storage and post sector and the electricity gas and water supply sector are much more affected by energy subsidies removal than other sectors with respect to energy types fuel oil and natural gas are sensitive to subsidies indicating the magnitude of their consumption this suggests that removing subsidies on these fuel types could significantly reduce co2 emissions finally we comprehensively discuss relevant policy issues on energy price formation reform

the economics of tropical deforestation this paper provides a survey of first wave economic studies of tropical deforestation and land use these studies of tropical forest land conversion are generally at the cross country level we also conduct a synthesis cross country analysis of tropical agricultural land expansion the results show that agricultural development is the main factor determining land expansion but institutional factors have an important influence income effects tend to vary from region to region and do not always display an environmental kuznets curve relationship copyright 2001 by blackwell publishers ltd

command and control revisited environmental compliance and technological change in swedish industry 1970 1990 this paper addresses the issue of environmental policy instrument choice for achieving deep emission reductions in the industrial sector specifically it provides a a theoretical and empirical

environmental policy the porter hypothesis and the composition of capital effects of learning and technological progress abstract in this paper the effect of environmental policy on the composition of capital is investigated by allowing for nonlinearities it generalizes xepapadeas and de zeeuw j environ econ manage 37 1999 165 and determines scenarios in which their results do not carry over in particular we show that the way acquisition cost of investment decreases with the age of the capital stock is of crucial importance we also focus more explicitly on learning and technological progress among others we obtain that in the presence of learning implementing a stricter environmental policy with the aim to reach a certain target of emissions reduction has a stronger negative effect on industry profits which implies quite the opposite as to what is described by the porter hypothesis