estimating the marginal law of a time series with applications to heavy tailed distributions this article addresses estimating parametric marginal densities of stationary time series in the absence of precise information on the dynamics of the underlying process we propose using an estimator obtained by maximization of the quasi marginal likelihood which is a likelihood written as if the observations were independent we study the effect of the neglected dynamics on the asymptotic behavior of this estimator the consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimator are established under mild assumptions on the dependence structure applications of the asymptotic results to the estimation of stable generalized extreme value and generalized pareto distributions are proposed the theoretical results are illustrated on financial index returns supplementary materials for this article are available online

a multi regional input output analysis of the pollution haven hypothesis from the perspective of global production fragmentation pollution haven hypothesis is an important debate on the environmental effects of international trade the pattern of which has been reshaped obviously by global production fragmentation recently the production process is distributed globally and the pollution haven effect of international trade is becoming more complicated for instance intermediate product trade corresponds to the largest share of embodied emissions and the share of emissions induced by the global value chain related trade is increasing gradually the aim of this paper is to make a comprehensive analysis on the pollution haven hypothesis in carbon emissions embodied in three different trade patterns from global bilateral and national perspectives we propose a method to parcel the pollution haven hypothesis in a multi regional input output analysis and discuss the contribution of production fragmentation for global emissions it is found that international production fragmentation generates global emissions savings the intermediate product trade has a negative balance of avoided emissions the final product trade becomes increasingly less environmentally effective during the period 1995 2009 there are significant differences in the environmental effects of different trade patterns for each country

technology international trade and pollution from us manufacturing pollution emitted by us manufacturers declined markedly over the past several decades even as real manufacturing output increased i first show that most of the decline in us manufacturing pollution has resulted from changing production processes technology rather than changes in the mix of goods produced i then show that increased net imports of polluting goods international trade accounts for only a small portion of the pollution reductions from the changing mix of goods together these two findings demonstrate that shifting polluting industries overseas explains only a minor part less than 10 percent of the cleanup of us manufacturing jel f18 l23 l60 o30 q52 q53

on the frequency of large stock returns putting booms and busts into perspective textabstractnumerous articles have investigated the distribution of share prices and find that the returns are fat tailed nevertheless there is still controversy about the amount of probability mass in the tails and hence about the most appropriate distribution to use in modeling returns this controversy has proven hard to resolve as the alternatives are non nested we employ extreme value theory focusing exclusively on the larger observations in order to assess the tail shape within a unified framework we find that at least the first two moments exist this enables one to generate robust probabilities on large returns which put the recent stock market swings into historical perspective

models of stock returns a comparison in this paper a discrete mixture of normal distributions is proposed to explain the observed significant kurtosis fat tails and significant positive skewness in the distribution of daily rates of returns for a sample of common stocks and indexes stationarity tests on the parameter estimates of this discrete mixture of normal distributions model revealed significant differences in the mean estimates that can explain the observed skewness and significant differences in the variance estimates that can explain the observed kurtosis an alternative explanation for the observed fat tails is the symmetric student model the result of a comparison between the models is that the discrete mixture of normal distributions model has substantially more descriptive validity than the student model for many years both financial economists and statisticians have been concerned with the description of stock market returns the form of the distribution of stock returns is a crucial assumption for mean variance portfolio theory theoretical models of capital asset prices and the prices of contingent claims for example understanding the behavior of the variance is essential to option pricing models empirical tests of asset pricing models and the efficient markets hypothesis draw statistical inferences that are also conditional on distributional assumptions the most convenient assumption for financial theory and empirical methods is that the distribution of security rates of return be multivariate normal with parameters that are stationary over time since the normal distribution is stable under addition any arbitrary portfolio of stocks will also be normally distributed with the additional assumption of risk aversion mean variance theory follows furthermore the assumptions of normality and parameter stationarity are required for most of the econometric techniques typically used in empirical research tests of the normality hypothesis on the daily returns of the dow jones industrial stocks by fama 121 revealed more kurtosis fatter tails than that predicted from a sample of independent and identically distributed normal variates fama concluded from this evidence that the distribution of price changes conforms better to the stable paretian distribution with characteristic exponent

examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 2 review of input output models for the assessment of environmental impacts embodied in trade this paper offers a detailed review of recently described single and multi region input output models used to assess environmental impacts of internationally traded goods and services it is the second part of a two part contribution in part 1 turner k lenzen m wiedmann t and barrett j in press examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 1 a technical note on combining input output and ecological footprint analysis ecological economics we describe how to enumerate the resource and pollution content of inter regional and inter national trade flows with the aim to illustrate an ideal accounting and modelling framework for the estimation of ecological footprints a large number of such environment economic models have been described but only in the last few years models have emerged that use a more sophisticated multi region multi sector input output framework this has been made possible through improvements in data availability and quality as well as computability we identify six major models that employ multi sector multi region input output analysis in order to calculate environmental impacts embodied in international trade results from the reviewed studies demonstrate that it is important to explicitly consider the production recipe land and energy use as well as emissions in a multi region multi sector and multi directional trade model with global coverage and detailed sector disaggregation only then reliable figures for indicators of impacts embodied in trade such as the ecological footprint can be derived

do individual preferences explain the environmental kuznets curve abstract some economists maintain the optimistic view that individual preferences of rich people eventually lead to a virtuous circle relationship between rising income and environmental degradation in this article i review some of the models that establish a relationship between individual preferences and environmental quality these models provide a basis for discussion of the key role played by two factors individual preferences and technology they do not however capture the distributive conflicts that occur between different social groups in the process of defining environmental policy neither do they provide a good basis for distinguishing between environmental costs caused by the decisions of particular consumers and those which affect the same consumers this point is related to the various manners in which environmental costs are displaced displacement often occurs within a country for current costs and is even clearer and more relevant when costs are transferred across a great distance or to a remote future in such cases there are few incentives to reduce consumption or alter its composition displacement moreover can become a strategy pursued more or less consciously for maintaining high and rising levels of consumption without dealing with the associated environmental costs

responsibility and trade emission balances an evaluation of approaches this paper compares two concepts to evaluate the international responsibility of a country with respect to its emissions using a multi regional input output model we show that the trade emission balance and the responsibility emission balance yield the same result in practical work however a lack of data availability implies that the same technology assumption has been commonly adopted in that case also a third alternative exists which simply evaluates the emissions embodied in the trade balance of the country this third alternative yields the same results as the other two approaches at the aggregate level at the level of individual products however the results are clearly different and it turns out that the third alternative answers a different question that is it is appropriate for measuring the emission content of the products that cross the border in our empirical application we consider spain in 1995 and 2000 distinguishing nine different gases co 2 ch 4 n 2 o sf 6 hfcs pfcs so 2 nox and nh 3 c 2010 elsevier b v all rights reserved

shared producer and consumer responsibility theory and practice abstract over the past decade an increasing number of authors have been examining the nexus of producer versus consumer responsibility often dealing with the question of how to assign responsibility for internationally traded greenhouse gas emissions recently a similar problem has appeared in drafting the standards for the ecological footprint while the method traditionally assumes a full life cycle perspective with full consumer responsibility a large number of producers businesses and industry sectors have started to calculate their own footprints see www isa org usyd edu au adding any producer s footprint to other producers footprints or to population footprints which all already cover the full upstream supply chain of their operating inputs leads to double counting the sum of footprints of producers and consumers is larger than the total national footprint the committee in charge of the footprint standardisation process was hence faced with the decades old non additivity problem posing the following dilemma for the accounting of footprints or any other production factor if one disallows double counting but wishes to be able to account for producers and consumers then one cannot impose the requirement of full life cycle coverage the supply chains of actors have to be curtailed somehow in order to avoid double counting this work demonstrates and discusses a non arbitrary method of consistently delineating these supply chains into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive portions of responsibility to be shared by all actors in an economy

from production based to consumption based national emission inventories abstract under the united national framework convention of climate change unfccc countries are required to submit national emission inventories nei to benchmark reductions in greenhouse gas ghg emissions depending on the definition and system boundary of the nei the mitigation options and priorities may vary the territorial system boundary used by the unfccc has been critiqued for not including international transportation and potentially causing carbon leakage to address these issues past literature has argued in favour of using consumption based nei in climate policy this article discusses several issues in moving from the standard production based nei to consumption based nei first two distinct accounting approaches for constructing consumption based nei are presented the approaches differ in the allocation of intermediate consumption of imported products second a consistent method of weighting production based and consumption based nei is discussed this is an extension of the previous literature on shared responsibility to nei third due to increased uncertainty and a wide system boundary it may be difficult to implement consumption based nei directly into climate policy several alternative options for incorporating consumption based inventories into climate policy are discussed

linking namea and input output for consumption vs production perspective analyses evidence on emission efficiency and aggregation biases using the italian and spanish environmental accounts we integrate input output and namea tables for spain and italy in 1995 2000 and 2005 in order to address the hot policy issue of sustainable consumption and production a comparison of production and consumption perspectives may have relevant policy implications we deal with the domestic technology assumption and primarily the aggregation bias that may result when calculating indirect emission using different sector aggregations in the analyses e g 16 30 50 extended input output analysis provides analyses of the emissions embodied in domestic consumption and domestic production by considering the structure of intermediate inputs and environmental efficiency in each production sector our empirical findings show that different sectoral aggregation significantly biases the amount of emissions for the consumption perspective though differently in the two countries italy surprisingly show consumption production ratios around or lower than one but in line with some major work at eu level our results thus suggest that special attention must be paid when interpreting the ee ioa of country estimated amounts of embodied emissions both in domestic final demand and those directly associated with the production sectors when the sectoral aggregation level has a low definition as considered in some recent similar studies

border carbon adjustments based on avoided emissions addressing the challenge of its design abstract carbon pricing is an essential instrument to address climate change however international differences in carbon control policies may cause not only carbon leakage but also competitiveness disadvantages in this context border carbon adjustments are a promising tool for discouraging these problems but designing a real world border carbon adjustment instrument implies to consider significant issues technical feasibility data availability the risk of retaliation from developing countries and its compatibility within the world trade organization legal framework there are still no conclusive answers about a proper design this paper is an attempt to address the above mentioned challenges proposing a carbon border tax cbt based on avoided emissions such a cbt is applied at a product level and not at a sector level and all international prices are deflated to guarantee that import like goods received a treatment similar to like domestic products using the wiod we simulate a cbt based on avoided emissions applied by the european union and we compare the results with a cbt based on embodied emissions

price dynamics in a vertical sector the case of butter we develop a reduced form model of price transmission in a vertical sector allowing for refined asymmetric contemporaneous and lagged own and cross price effects under time varying volatility the model is used to investigate the wholesale retail price dynamics in the u s butter market the analysis documents the nature of nonlinear price dynamics in a vertical sector it finds strong evidence of asymmetric retail price responses both in the short term and the longer term but only weak evidence of asymmetric wholesale price responses asymmetric retail responses play a major role in generating a skewed distribution of butter prices the empirical results indicate the presence of imperfect competition at the retail level

carbon transfer within china insights from production fragmentation abstract production fragmentation not only reshapes trade patterns but also reallocates trade related emissions this study employs china s multi regional input output tables for 2007 2010 and 2012 to explore the effect of production fragmentation on virtual carbon trade derived from three trade patterns i e final goods trade intermediate goods trade for the final stage of production and value chain related trade results showed that inter provincial trade within china reduced the national carbon emissions by 208 mt and 114 mt in 2007 and 2012 the first two trade patterns contributed to the reduction while value chain related trade resulted in carbon growth the four trillion yuan stimulus package promoted the development of energy intensive industries while inter provincial trade increased national carbon emissions by 247 mt in 2010 moreover this study revealed a list of provinces trade patterns and sectors with the high carbon reduction potential

a review of recent multi region input output models used for consumption based emission and resource accounting abstract the interest in consumption based emission and resource accounting has grown significantly many studies juxtapose consumer emissions carbon footprint and producer territorial emissions of greenhouse gases in order to demonstrate the effects of trade on the national emission budget to this end a respectable number of studies have been undertaken worldwide in order to estimate emissions embedded in international trade of numerous countries and world regions input output approaches and increasingly multi region input output mrio models are commonly chosen as they provide an appropriate methodological framework for complete carbon footprint estimates at the national and supra national level with increasing processing capabilities of computers and a wider availability of economic accounts environmental accounts and trade data such models are now being implemented on a wide scale after a brief overview of salient single region input output studies i provide an in depth review of the most recent multi region input output models used for the purpose of consumption based environmental accounting the main methodological features and important results are described for around twenty studies covering the years 2007 to 2009 this is followed by a detailed review of studies dealing with uncertainty in mrio analysis an area which has not received a lot of attention so far i conclude that further research is mainly needed in two areas a improvements in data availability and quality and b improvements in the accuracy of mrio modelling

the empirical merit of structural explanations of commodity price volatility review and perspectives this paper presents both the history of and state of the art in empirical modeling approaches to the world commodity price volatility the analysis builds on the storage model and key milestones in its development specifically it is intended to offer a reader unfamiliar with the relevant literature an insight into the modeling issues at stake from both a historical and speculative viewpoint the review considers primarily the empirical techniques designed to assess the merits of the storage theory it does not address purely statistical approaches that do not rely on storage theory and that have been studied in depth in other streams of the commodity price literature the paper concludes with some suggestions for future research to try to resolve some of the existing empirical flaws and hopefully to increase the explanatory power of the storage model

economic growth and environmental degradation the environmental kuznets curve and sustainable development abstract in this paper we critically examine the concept of the environmental kuznets curve ekc it proposes that there is an inverted u shape relation between environmental degradation and income per capita so that eventually growth reduces the environmental impact of economic activity the concept is dependent on a model of the economy in which there is no feedback from the quality of the environment to production possibilities and in which trade has a neutral effect on environmental degradation the actual violation of these assumptions gives rise to fundamental problems in estimating the parameters of an ekc the paper identifies other econometric problems with estimates of the ekc and reviews a number of empirical studies the inference from some such ekc estimates that further development will reduce environmental degradation is dependent on the assumption that world per capita income is normally distributed when in fact median income is far below mean income we carry out simulations combining ekc estimates from the literature with world bank forecasts for economic growth for individual countries aggregating over countries to derive the global impact within the horizon of the bank s forecast 2025 global emissions of so 2 continue to increase forest loss stabilizes before the end of the period but tropical deforestation continues at a constant rate throughout the period

food security and storage in the middle east and north africa in times of highly volatile commodity markets governments often try to protect their populations from rapidly rising food prices which can be particularly harsh for the poor a potential solution for food deficit countries is to hold strategic reserves which can be called on when international prices spike but how large should strategic stockpiles be this paper develops a dynamic storage model for wheat in the middle east and north africa mena region where imported wheat dominates the average diet the paper uses the model to analyze a strategy that sets aside wheat stockpiles which can be used when needed to keep domestic prices below a targeted price this paper shows that if the target is set high and reserves are adequate the strategy can be effective and robust contrary to most interventions strategic storage policies are counter cyclical and when the importing region is sufficiently large a regional policy can smooth global prices this paper shows that this is the case for the mena region nevertheless the policy is more costly than the pro cyclical policy of a targeted intervention that directly offsets high prices with a subsidy similar to food stamps

varying the var for unconditional and conditional environments abstract accurate forecasting of risk is the key to successful risk management techniques using the largest stock index futures from 12 european bourses this paper presents var measures based on their unconditional and conditional distributions for single and multi period settings these measures underpinned by extreme value theory are statistically robust explicitly allowing for fat tailed densities conditional tail estimates accounting for volatility clustering are obtained by adjusting the unconditional extreme value procedure with garch filtered returns the conditional modelling results in iid returns allowing for the use of a simple and efficient multi period extreme value scaling law the paper examines the properties of these distinct conditional and unconditional trading models the paper finds that the biases inherent in unconditional single and multi period estimates assuming normality extend to the conditional setting

stocks to use ratios and prices as indicators of vulnerability to spikes in global cereal markets we identify critical stocks to use ratios surs for major grains and for an index of total calories from these grains the latter appears to be a promising indicator of vulnerability to large price spikes when the current price shows no cause for concern more generally our results suggest that stocks data though no doubt unreliable can be valuable complements to price data as indicators of vulnerability to shortages and price spikes

worldwide acreage and yield response to international price change and volatility a dynamic panel data analysis for wheat rice corn and soybeans this study estimates a worldwide aggregate supply response for key agricultural commodities namely wheat rice corn and soybeans by employing a newly developed multi country crop and calendar specific seasonally disaggregated model with price changes and price volatility applied accordingly the findings reveal that although higher output prices serve as incentives to improve global crop supply as expected output price volatility acts as a disincentive depending on the crop the results show that own price supply elasticities range from about 0 05 to 0 40 output price volatility however has negative correlations with crop supply implying that farmers shift land other inputs and yield improving investments to crops with less volatile prices simulating the impact of price dynamics since 2006 we find that price risk has reduced the production response of wheat in particular and to a lesser extent rice thus dampening price incentive effects the simulation analysis shows that the increase in own crop price volatility during the 2006 2010 period has dampened yield by about 1 2 for the crops considered

trade and the environment from a southern perspective the relationship between free trade and the environment is one of the main issues of contention between environmental and ecological economics environmental economics assumes a positive relationship between free trade economic growth and environmental policies environmental externalities may cause important damage however trade is not to be blamed for this instead the fault lies with policy inadequacies at the national level on the other hand some ecological economists criticise the assumptions of environmental economics especially the immobility of production factors and the positive correlation between income and environmental quality they plead for measures to prevent deterioration of northern environmental standards in a race to the bottom due to ecological dumping from the south in this paper we argue that neither environmental economics nor northern ecological economics take into account the structural conditions determining the international trade system based on some new empirical evidence on material flows we stress the notion of environmental cost shifting if physical and political ecology perspectives are adopted a southern approach to the trade and environment issue may arise 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

global biofuels key to the puzzle of grain market behavior these jumps in the prices of these three major grains have also revealed the these jumps in the prices of these three major grains have also revealed the chaotic state of economic analysis of agricultural commodity markets economists chaotic state of economic analysis of agricultural commodity markets economists and scientists have engaged in a blame game apportioning percentages of responand scientists have engaged in a blame game apportioning percentages of responsibility for price spikes to bewildering lists of factors which include a surge in meat sibility for price spikes to bewildering lists of factors which include a surge in meat consumption caused by unprecedented increases of income of the vast populations consumption caused by unprecedented increases of income of the vast populations of china and india idiosyncratic regional droughts and fi res speculative bubbles a of china and india idiosyncratic regional droughts and fi res speculative bubbles a new fi nancialization of grain markets the slowdown of global agricultural research new fi nancialization of grain markets the slowdown of global agricultural research spending jumps in costs of energy and fertilizers shifts in interest rates the decline spending jumps in costs of energy and fertilizers shifts in interest rates the decline of the dollar the surge in biofuels demands bans on genetically modifi ed plants of the dollar the surge in biofuels demands bans on genetically modifi ed plants and climate change several observers have claimed to identify a perfect storm in and climate change several observers have claimed to identify a perfect storm in the grain markets in 2007 2008 a confl uence of some of the factors listed above the grain markets in 2007 2008 a confl uence of some of the factors listed above the continuing confused state of the economics of grain price volatility may the continuing confused state of the economics of grain price volatility may seem odd after all grain markets have many of the features of textbook competiseem odd after all grain markets have many of the features of textbook competitive models the products are relatively uniform their primary producers and tive models the products are relatively uniform their primary producers and ultimate consumers are atomistic price takers prices and outputs in the united ultimate consumers are atomistic price takers prices and outputs in the united states and other developed countries are unusually well measured by the standards states and other developed countries are unusually well measured by the standards of most goods and services in the world economy with data freely available from of most goods and services in the world economy with data freely available from

an empirical examination of the pollution haven hypothesis for india towards a green leontief paradox using input output analysis we examine whether india can be regarded as a pollution haven we calculate the extra co2 so2 and nox emissions induced by 1 billion rupees of additional exports this is compared with the reduction of indian pollution caused by an import increase of equal size in contrast to what the pollution haven hypothesis states for developing countries we find that india considerably gains from extra trade comparing 1996 1997 with 1991 1992 the gains have only increased indicating that india has moved further away from being a pollution haven the outcome is robust to changes in the underlying assumptions

an emergy and decomposition assessment of china japan trade driving forces and environmental imbalance abstract with the robust development of economic globalization international trade should be fairly conducted in order to strengthen the relations among different nations currently due to different resource endowments and trade policies different nations face different resources and environmental challenges previous studies suggested that even when trade seems balanced in monetary terms it may be unequal in terms of resources exchanges due to different purchasing power of national currencies as such imbalance also exist in terms of environmental quality of traded resources and related environmental costs and emissions such as embodied energy water land carbon ecosystem services under such circumstances it is necessary and urgent to identify environmental imbalance of international trade and seek appropriate tools so that more balanced and fairer trade among nations can be implemented this study investigates the quality of resource flows exchanged between china and japan during the period 2000 2012 emergy accounting a well established environmental accounting method is used in this study to quantify the environmental work past and present ecosystem services embodied in traded resources within a broader emergy based bio physical perspective a logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi decomposition approach is applied to identify the driving forces that affect the evolution of import export resources balance in the investigated period lmdi decomposes the driving forces into three factors a scale factor which depends on the total export volume b technology factor which depends on the emergy intensity of trade emergy of traded resources and c structural factor which depends on the trade structure mix of exchanged commodities results show that china was a net emergy exporter in the years 2000 and 2005 with figures of 7 46e 22 sej yr and 5 76e 21 sej yr respectively but was a net importer in the years 2008 and 2012 with imported emergy figures of 8 82e 22 sej yr and 2 43e 23 sej yr respectively scale and technology factors are the most significant drivers to promote china japan trade from an emergy point of view i e from the point of view of environmental quality assessment while the influence of structural factor was relatively marginal trade imbalance and lack of focus on environmental value of resources cannot be the basis for stable economic relations with partner countries which calls for compensation measures in money or resource terms this study by investigating the sustainability of china japan international trade also suggests a methodological approach to increase worldwide trade stability and fairness

trade from resource rich countries avoids the existence of a global pollution haven hypothesis abstract free trade agreements are currently receiving much attention in the media and politics one important question concerning free trade is its effect on the environment for example in carbon dioxide emissions the goal of this paper is to provide evidence on the validity of the pollution haven hypothesis using a multi regional input output approach for six regions and the rest of the world as a whole our findings indicate that in the period from 1995 to 2009 international trade has allowed the global economy to reduce its overall co2 emissions compared to a hypothetical situation without international trade the total amount of emissions saved was 15 06 gt in the period under consideration however not all of the seven regions in our model have been able to reduce their co2 emissions through trade global value chains have led to china becoming a pollution haven for other regions and its exports have increased world emissions to 1 28 gt co2 in 2008 however what allows a net saving of emissions on a global scale is the supply of energy and natural resources from a set of peripheral economies which in our geographical categorization are mostly integrated in the region of the rest of the world

inter and intra seasonal crop acreage response to international food prices and implications of volatility understanding how producers make decisions to allot acreage among crops and how decisions about land use are affected by changes in prices and their volatility is fundamental for predicting the supply of staple crops and hence assessing the global food supply situation this study makes estimations of monthly i e seasonal versus annual global acreage response models for the world s principal staple food crops wheat corn soybeans and rice primary emphasis is given to the magnitude and speed of the allocation process estimation of intra annual acreage elasticity is crucial for expected food supply and for input demand especially in the light of the recent short term volatility in food prices the econometric results indicate that global crop acreage responds to crop prices and price risks input costs as well as a time trend depending on respective crop short run elasticities are about 0 05 to 0 40 price volatility tends to reduce acreage for some of the crops comparison of the annual and the monthly acreage response elasticities suggests that acreage adjusts seasonally around the globe to new information and expectations given the seasonality of agriculture time is of an essence for acreage response the analysis indicates that acreage allocation is more sensitive to prices in the northern hemisphere spring than in winter and the response varies across months

a theory of commodity price fluctuations this paper studies the price fluctuations of storable commodities that are traded in open markets and are subject to random shocks to demand or more particularly to supply it relaxes the common assumption that the shocks are identically and independently distributed in favor of temporally dependent and periodic disturbances the existence of a unique stationary rational expectations equilibrium is demonstrated for each of the models analyzed and testable implications of the models are derived an illustrative empirical investigation is then undertaken for the model with periodic disturbances using monthly time series observations for seven commodities over the period 1960 93

are smallholder farmers better or worse off from an increase in the international price of cereals citation nakelse t dalton t j hendricks n p hodjo m 2018 are smallholder farmers better or worse off from an increase in the international price of cereals food policy 79 213 223 https doi org 10 1016 j foodpol 2018 07 006

world supply and demand of food commodity calories between the summers of 2006 and 2008 corn prices more than tripled from roughly 2 50 bushel to nearly 8 00 bushel prices for rice soybeans and wheat rose by similar or greater amounts the exceptionally large and unanticipated rise in prices was attributed to many factors including 1 ethanol subsidies 2 commensurately rising oil prices 3 unexpectedly large demand growth from china and india and 4 weatherrelated factors such as drought in australia while some have argued that the commodity price boom much like earlier housing and stock market booms were due to a

scale technique and composition effects in trade related carbon emissions in china this study applies structural decomposition analysis to evaluate the scale composition and technique effects of trade related carbon emissions in china mainland from 1987 to 2007 the initial findings indicate that the increasing magnitude of china s trade both in terms of the carbon emissions embodied in exports and the carbon emissions avoided via imports had large scale effects during the whole period the technique effect caused by changes in input mix sector energy intensity fuel mix and carbon coefficients effectively offset part of the scale effect during the entire period but failed to do so during some sub periods changes in trade composition caused a relative small increase in the carbon emissions created by exports but a relative small decrease in the carbon emissions avoided via imports during the whole period

competitive storage and commodity price dynamics by buying cheap and selling dear risk neutral commodity speculators can smooth commodity prices and induce serial dependence in price even when none would exist under a simple process of supply and demand commodity prices are variable and strongly positively correlated from one year to the next the variability is often explained by supply factors and the autocorrelation by the activities of speculators we show that this explanation is not consistent with the evidence speculation can substantially increase autocorrelation for prices that are weakly autocorrelated in its absence but not to the high levels that are observed in the data

the carbon content of japan us trade we analyze the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in trade between japan and the us extending the japanese government s linked japan us input output model to include carbon emission coefficients for each sector we estimate that in 1995 japan us trade reduced us industrial emissions by 14 6 million tons of co2 equivalent and increased emissions in japan by 6 7 million tons for a global savings of 7 9 million tons these quantities are less than one percent of each country s total emissions trade with the rest of the world reduced emissions by much larger amounts roughly four percent of each country s emissions the sectoral patterns of carbon intensity are strongly correlated between japan and the us in addition greater carbon intensity has a small but significantly positive effect on net exports policies that tax or otherwise regulate carbon emissions are needed to discourage this destructive route to competitiveness however the most important policy implication may be that us industry could cut its carbon emissions by more than half if it matched the environmental performance of industry in japan r 2007 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

international commodity agreements design and performance abstract this article traces the design and performance of the five currently or recently active international commodity agreements icas in cocoa coffee natural rubber sugar and tin following detailed discussion of each of these the author makes three observations that icas can only be successful provided that they command a consensus in their industries that existing agreements are not robust enough with regard to exchange rates and that existing agreements are poorly drafted the author argues that the collapse of the tin agreement in october 1985 may have marked the end of the postwar chapter in the commodity intervention story he finds it improbable that new icas will emerge and suggests instead that more of the existing agreements will lapse

identifying supply and demand elasticities of agricultural commodities implications for the us ethanol mandate we present a new framework to identify supply elasticities of storable commodities where past shocks are used as exogenous price shifters in the agricultural context past yield shocks change inventory levels and futures prices of agricultural commodities we use our estimated elasticities to evaluate the impact of the 2009 renewable fuel standard on commodity prices quantities and food consumers surplus for the four basic staples corn rice soybeans and wheat prices increase 20 per cent if one third of commodities used to produce ethanol are recycled as feedstock with a positively skewed 95 percent confidence interval that ranges from 14 to 35 per cent jel q11 q16 q42 q48

accounting the effects of wto accession on trade embodied emissions evidence from china abstract the indicators of the emissions embodied in exports the balance of emissions embodied in trade and the net emissions contributed by trade are used to measure the trade embodied environmental impacts from various angles a counterfactual scenario of without wto accession is formed as the comparative baseline with the support of a dynamic computable general equilibrium model then the difference between factual and counterfactual scenarios is worked out to reflect the impact of china s wto accession on emissions embodied in trade according to the present study wto accession produced a measureable increment of the emissions embodied in exports through exports expansion which slightly intensified environmental stress in china if considering the difference in emissions embodied in exports and imports then the difference of the balance of emissions embodied in trade between factual and counterfactual scenarios indicate that china has suffered more local emissions than its trade partners after its wto accession if considering the offset effect of imports embodied emissions to domestic emissions then the difference of the net emissions contributed by trade between factual and counterfactual scenarios indicate that wto accession had a trivial effect on aggregating trade embodied emissions the study results suggest that china should continue pushing for trade liberalization and at the same time reduce the adverse effects on the environment by reducing its total emissions intensity of domestic production and optimizing trade structure

measuring emissions avoided by international trade accounting for price differences abstract net emissions avoided by trade nea are the difference between the pollution that would have been produced in a country if it had not exported any products and all the imports required to satisfy its domestic demand had been produced internally and its actual emissions the domestic technology assumption dta applied to an input output model is the appropriate method to estimate the nea the usual implementation of the dta involves that the country analyzed should produce a quantity of products equivalent to the monetary value of the imports required to satisfy its final demand i e monetary dta however due to price differences the same physical quantity of goods in different countries could have a different monetary value and the estimation of the nea would be biased we show that a physical dta focused on the pollution to produce domestically the imports measured in physical units would be a better approach we have applied both methodologies to analyze greenhouse gas emissions in spain 1995 2007 both methodologies show that spain is avoiding emissions through trade however the nea increases up to three times when applying the physical dta showing that results from the monetary dta are biased by price differences