median voters or budget maximizers evidence from school expenditure referenda some readers may have found these results of greater interest were we able to confirm the directional hypotheses of the certainty setter model in addition to finding that spending is related to the reversion the much weaker prediction of the uncertainty model yet the failure of the certainty when base elections were optional their infrequent occurrence might be expected under either a median voter or a setter model for those districts that did hold base elections the observations appear consistent with a setter model but are either inexplicable by or inconsistent with a median voter model finally both a the relationship between the number of budget elections and the presence of base elections and b the outcome of mandatory base elections in 1978 provide a set of observations that are challenging to either model a similar challenge was posed by our investigation of budget elections when we called attention to the inadequacy of static full information models rather than resolving the question of the simple setter model against the simple median voter model our results indicate that both may be inappropriate and that endeavors dealing with complexities omitted here are warranted

sustainability policy and environmental policy a theoretical representative agent economy with a depletable resource stock polluting emissions and productive capital is used to contrast environmental policy which internalises externalised environmental values with sustainability policy which achieves some form of intergenerational equity the obvious environmental policy comprises an emissions tax and a resource stock subsidy each equal to the respective external cost or benefit sustainability policy comprises an incentive affecting the choice between consumption and investment and can be a consumption tax capital subsidy or investment subsidy or a combination thereof environmental policy can reduce the strength of the sustainability policy needed more specialised results are derived in a small open economy with no environmental effects on utility

has the median voter found a ballot box that he can control this paper examines the appropriateness of the median voter hypothesis within an agenda control framework where the alternative to a proposed expenditure level is the existing level evidence from new york state school districts suggests that within this institutional setting the actual level of public service provision does not differ significantly from the median voter s preferred level the evidence also suggests that demand function parameter estimates for educational expenditures are not sensitive to the assumption that the public service output level corresponds to the median voter s private equilibrium

energy exploration on wilderness privatization and public lands management this note reviews three perspectives relevant to the balance of private and public interests in land resources 1 the technical feasibility of private exploitation of publicly held lands 2 economic efficiency and 3 valuative questions of social welfare it concludes that greater attention to the technical economic and social value of land resources is essential to the development of reasonable guidelines for the allocation of property rights policy in some cases will favor privatization and in other cases will favor wilderness the level of public debate in deciding these cases will be raised if it avoids ideology and rhetoric and concentrates on more relevant issues 88 references 1 table

expectations capital gains and income i introduction this article argues that the distinction between expected and unexpected capital gains losses is fundamental to the measurement of income the way capital gains are treated can have a significant impact on major macroeconomic statistics such as national income and saving the balance of payments government income and saving and depreciation see gale and sabelhaus 1999 joisce and wright 2001 the recent sale of spectrum licenses is a case in point the spectrum a natural asset over which governments enforce property rights became unexpectedly valuable as a result of the development of mobile telephones in 2000 and 2001 some governments realized gains of 30 billion or more in a day by auctioning licenses to use sections of the spectrum see un statistics division 2000 the concept of income although widely used remains vague it is necessary to inquire why the concept of income is needed and what use it serves the main purpose of income is to provide guidance to households or other economic units including government on the rate at which they can afford to consume when there is uncertainty about future resources the more successfully measured income meets this requirement the greater its power as an explanatory variable for the analysis of consumer behavior the treatment of expected and unexpected capital gains in income measurement is a continuing source of controversy 1 even in a perfect foresight setting the concept of income is not straightforward hicks 1946 considered a number of definitions two in particular command support in the literature hicksian income no 1 is the maximum amount that can be consumed while maintaining wealth intact 2 hicksian income no 2 is the maximum sustainable level of consumption the general consensus that emerges from the literature is that with perfect foresight all capital gains are included in hicksian income no 1 however asheim 1996 shows that some capital gains are excluded from hicksian income no 2 when the interest rate varies over time both income concepts coincide when the interest rate is fixed when the perfect foresight assumption is relaxed a distinction must be drawn between expected and unexpected capital gains it is important that we move beyond a perfect foresight setting because the concept of income has been developed primarily to assist decision taking under uncertainty if income is meant to act as a budget constraint indicating the resources available for consumption each period the important question is how should a rational consumer react to unexpected capital gains this article develops a general theoretical framework for the measurement of hicksian income no 1 under uncertainty that is capable of handling all kinds of capital gains on all kinds of assets ranging from money market assets to mineral deposits 3 first the concept of income with perfect foresight is developed and analyzed in the following section uncertainty is introduced income depends on expectations of future receipts that are liable to be revised with the passage of time the time at which income in a particular period is measured is therefore crucial income can be measured at any time but attention has tended to focus on the beginning and end of the period hicks 1946 178 79 described income as measured at these times as ex ante and ex post income ex ante income as noted by eisner 1990 p 1180 is essentially the same as friedman s 1957 concept of permanent income ex post income as defined by hicks now usually described as haig simons income after two earlier proponents of the concept is a widely used objective measure familiar to most economists however it is conceptually flawed because it utilizes two different and generally inconsistent set of expectations those held at the beginning and end of the period we define a family of conceptually consistent income measures each based only on the expectations held at the time of measurement that we describe as generalized hicksian income

testing genuine savings as a forward looking indicator of future well being over the very long run genuine savings gs have been much used in recent years as an indicator of a country s sustainability according to some theorists e g arrow et al 2012 under certain conditions a country with a positive level of gs should experience non declining future utility given the assumption of unlimited substitutability among all forms of capital sometimes called weak sustainability this paper reports the first very long run tests of gs also called comprehensive investment or adjusted net savings as a forward looking indicator of future well being we assemble data for british capital back to 1765 and construct several net investment measures which are used as indicators of two alternative measures of future well being consumption per capita and real wages an allowance for a value of time due to exogenous technological progress is included in some gs measures and we demonstrate the importance of this measure and the choice of discount rate over the very long run on the whole our results do not reject the postulated relationship between gs and future well being and show gs can be a forward looking indicator of future well being for periods of up to 100 years

the role of investment specific technological change in the business cycle this is a quantitative investigation of the importance of technological change speci c to new investment goods for postwar us aggregate uctuations a growth model that incorporates this form of technological change is calibrated to us data and simulated using the relative price of new equipment to identify the process driving investmentspeci c technology shocks the analysis suggests that this form of technological change is the source of about 30 of output uctuations 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

social indicators and comparisons of living standards abstract construction of an international index of standards of living incorporating social indicators and economic output typically involves scaling and weighting procedures that lack welfare economic foundations revealed preference axioms can be used to make quality of life comparisons if we can estimate the representative household s production technology for the social indicators this method is applied to comparisons of gross domestic product gdp and life expectancy for 58 countries neither gdp rankings nor the rankings of the human development index hdi are consistent with the partial ordering of revealed preference a method of constructing a utility consistent index incorporating both consumption and life expectancy is suggested

endogenizing the median voter public choice goes to school this paper investigates implications of the relationship between voter self selection and the behavior of politicians voter self selection arises in elections because only a portion of eligible voters actually vote it is likely to be more pronounced whenever the implied net benefits from a given electoral choice are disproportionately distributed across voters public choice theory predicts that incumbent officials will manipulate this self election pursuant to the maximization of their personal objective functions this paper provides evidence from school bond elections that politicians influence voter self selection via manipulation of election parameters

growth accounting with investment specific technological progress a discussion of two approaches two approaches taken to the embodiment question are compared and discussed quantitative theory and traditional growth accounting the two approaches give very different estimates for the contribution of investment specific technological advance to economic growth therefore the approach taken matters it is argued that the measures used in traditional growth accounting to gauge the importance of investment specific technological progress have little economic content unlike the measure obtained from quantitative theory

an alternate test of the tiebout hypothesis this paper has presented an indirect test of the tiebout hypothesis that does not require explicit consideration of the interaction between the markets for housing and local public services the results suggest that at least in the case of elementary and secondary education when allowed to choose from a selection of jurisdictions individuals locate so as to minimize the allocative inefficiency that results from collective provision of local services

sustainability and technical progress a rigorous model connects together the following three basic concepts 1 sustainability meaning the generalized future power of an economy to consume over time 2 green nnp meaning a current measure of national income that subtracts off from gnp not just depreciation of capital but also more generally depletion of environmental assets evaluated at current efficiency prices 3 technological progress meaning a projection onto the future of the so called solow residual a simple general formula is derived some crude calculations suggest a possibly strong effect of the residual which hints that our best present estimates of long term sustainability may be largely driven by predictions of future technological progress

capital goods measured tfp and growth the case of spain the effect of investing in equipment and or structures on tfp and long run growth is investigated here we argue that economies can grow in spite of stagnant tfp if the investment rate is inefficiently high we study the case of spain where real gdp per worker grew at 2 74 percent annually and tfp was stagnant during 1996 2007 we show that low spanish tfp is due to low istc and an inefficiently high investment in residential structures we quantify the effect of the housing boom of the 2000s the total cost of subsidies to residential structures in terms of tfp and income growth

natural resources national accounting and economic depreciation stock effects abstract hartwick s analysis of incorporating resource depletion in standard national income accounting is extended to the consideration of stock effects under both certainty and uncertainty

the effect of the expansion of the voting franchise on the size of government this paper examines the claim that expansion of the voting franchise has been an important factor in the growth of government state government spending and state and local spending are explained using a panel of 46 states for 1950 88 elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests led to higher turnout particularly among the poor and a poorer pivotal voter as predicted we find that these changes a fall in the income of voters relative to state income and the ouster of republicans from state government led to a sharp rise in welfare spending but no change in other spending

the new approach to wilderness preservation through benefit cost analysis over the last 15 years economists of resources for the future led by john krutilla have been developing a new approach to wilderness preservation this paper offers a concise exposition of their approach and adds a few new steps the basic ingredient of the new approach is a perception of declining net benefits of wilderness development and rising net benefits of wilderness preservation over time these alter the entire shape of the benefit cost analysis of potential development the new steps involve reversibility postponability and recognition of multiple interest rates

social accounting and welfare measurement in a growth model with human capital this paper addresses social accounting and welfare measurement in an economy where human capital is an important factor in the economic system human capital accumulation depends on the time consumers spend in education however human capital is also a separate argument in the production function facing firms which gives rise to a production externality in a command optimum where the externality is internalized we show that an augmented nnp measure is the appropriate welfare indicator we also discuss the taxtransfer system required for the decentralized economy to reach a command optimum

the net national product and exhaustible resources the effects of foreign trade abstract it is the widely held view that estimates of national income should be corrected for the value of the extracted exhaustible resource stock this correction implies the counter intuitive result that the national income of an oil producer is unaffected by its vast oil reserves in this paper we review the definition of national income and discuss its relation to national welfare we show that an extra income should be imputed to the resource owning country based on the exportable resource stock part of the net adjustment for resource use is made to the income of the resource using and not the resource producing country

the role of technological progress in testing adjusted net savings evidence from oecd countries abstract in this paper we investigate the relationship between comprehensive measures of savings and changes in future consumption in oecd countries this relationship is at the basis of the interpretation of adjusted net savings as a weak sustainability indicator and so evidence of its validity provides support to the use of this indicator we construct various measures of comprehensive savings for 20 oecd countries to include depletion from non renewable resources human capital investment and technological progress given their importance especially for rich countries we focus on the role of technical progress and human capital in the form of changes in education level we do not find strong evidence in favor of including green adjustments in the conventional net savings however we find compelling evidence for the inclusion of technological progress since this involves a forward looking term the above result suggests that to construct an indicator of weak sustainability from conventional net savings some estimate of future technological progress is needed

budget referendums and government spending evidence from swiss cantons vortrag im forschungsseminar der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen fakultat der universitat basel schweiz am 20 november 2000

investment and economic growth abstract the paper revisits the old question how much does investment contribute to economic growth building on recent work of maurice scott it suggests that the analysis of growth in developing as in the industrial countries would benefit from a capital accumulation approach in the following analysis economic growth is related to three variables all greatly influenced by the quality of economic policies the rate of investment the social rate of return to investment and the investment induced returns to labor

evidence on voter preferences from unrestricted choice referendums from 1939 to 1968 florida used a unique referendum system to set property tax rates for public school operating expenditures at the median millage rate selected by voters these referendums revealed the entire distribution of voter preferences which is not possible in the standard up or down referendum we are the first to use the florida referendum data the form of the ballot played an important role in how people voted voting machine elections were much more likely than paper ballots to result in rejections of the recommendations of school boards and produced much greater dispersion of expressed preferences

the concept of income in a general equilibrium this paper derives a concept of aggregate real income for a competitive economy in general equilibrium consisting of heterogeneous infinitely lived people and relates it to current and future consumption possibilities an important characteristic of our measure of income which we call real income is that deflation is carried out using a consumption deflator rather than any price index of output we suggest that it may be inappropriate to regard capital gains as income we also present a coherent treatment of the effects of changes to the terms of trade on real income and explain the implications of this for resourceexporting economies hicks 1939 defined income as the maximum amount a man can spend and still be as well off at the end of the week as at the beginning since then there has been a succession of attempts to apply this definition the problem is as hicks acknowledged that the correct interpretation of as well off is by no means clear weitzman 1976 and asheim 1997 suggest that income is equal to the level of consumption which could be sustained indefinitely out of the capitalized value of current income and equate this to being as well off at the end of the week as at the beginning eisner 1988 argues specifically that in a total incomes system effects arising from asset price changes and conventionally regarded as capital gains should be included with income here building on earlier work by sefton and weale 1996 asheim and weitzman 2001 and pemberton and ulph 2001 we provide a comprehensive account of the implications of the idea that as well off should be understood to mean that the present discounted value of current and future utility should be unchanged over the interval considered we work in the context of a general equilibrium taking the prices established in the general equilibrium as given we first look at income from the production side showing that in an economy where prices and the interest rates satisfy an intertemporal efficiency condition income along an equilibrium path can be interpreted as a weighted average of the value of the current and future consumption bundle plus a term adjusting for changes in the nominal price level converting prices to real prices by deflating by the divisia consumption price index removes the need for this adjustment these results are suggestive first they offer a way of defining the income of a household entirely in terms of its consumption possibilities second they indicate that to calculate real income deflation is best carried out using a price index of consumption this is a substantial divergence from current national accounting practice third because we have assumed constant returns there is a trivial aggregation result that aggregate income is equal to the sum of the incomes from the individual sectors

a model of optimal plant size with an application to the demand for cognitive achievement and for school size a model of optimal plant size is developed which predicts that 1 plants experience increasing returns to in plants inputs 2 the relative price of plant output is greater in rural areas than in urban areas and 3 plants are larger in urban areas than in rural areas the model s predictions appear to be consistent with behavior in a number of consumer services e g grocery movie and library services these predictions are more rigorously tested and are strongly supported when demand functions for cognitive achievement and for school size are estimated these regressions also lend support to the quality quantity model of fertility

genuine savings and sustainability genuine savings gs has emerged as the leading economic indicator of sustainable economic development at the country level it derives from the literatures on weak sustainability wealth accounting and national income accounting we discuss the theoretical underpinnings of gs focusing on the relationship between changes in a nation s extended capital stock and the future path of consumption the indicator has entered widespread use propelled by the world bank s publications despite its varying performance as a predictor for future consumption notwithstanding the extensive body of literature reviewed promising future research avenues are identified

net national product as an indicator of sustainability net national product nnp can potentially serve several objectives among others to measure value added and to be an indicator of welfare in the aftermath of the world commission on environment and development however it also seems important to investigate whether the concept of nnp can serve as an indicator of sustainability my point of departure following hicks 1946 ch 14 is therefore to require that nnp should measure what can be consumed in the present period without reducing future consumption possibilities and in line with this to argue that the nnp should equal the maximum per capita consumption level that can be sustained if sufficiently many facilitating assumptions are made then a concept of nnp that serves as an exact indicator of sustainability can easily be constructed for instance for a closed economy with a constant population a stationary technology and with only one capital good it follows that the present does not reduce future consumption possibilities if and only if it does not decrease the stock of the single capital good hence under the assumption that the one capital good k is identical to the one consumption good x nnp defined as y x k measures the maximal sustainable consumption at time t because then x y is equivalent to k the purpose of this note is to establish that with multiple capital goods it is not in general possible to construct an exact indicator of sustainability on the

national accounts and environmental resources in the paper optimal growth theory is used to derive the appropriate definition of the net national product concept when there are environmental resources and environmental damage to take into account the basic conclusions are that conventional defined np should be corrected by deducting environmental damage and adding the value of the net change of all resources

investment specific technological change and growth accounting greenwood et al 1997 long run implications of investment specific technological change american economic review 87 3 342 362 and 2000 the role of investment specific technological change in the business cycle european economic review 44 91 115 and hercowitz 1998 the embodiment controversy a review essay journal of monetary economics 41 217 224 have claimed that the jorgenson form of growth accounting is conceptually flawed and severely understates the importance of technological progress embodied in new capital goods for explaining growth to the contrary this paper shows that in its technology aspects their model is a special case of the jorgensonian growth accounting model what they call investment specific technological change is shown to be closely related to the more familiar concept of total factor productivity tfp growth statements about the one can be translated into statements about the other empirically differences between their conclusions and those of growth accounting studies about the extent to which embodiment explains us economic growth are found to relate more to data than to methodology

on the welfare significance of national product under interest rate uncertainty abstract this paper examines the effects of uncertainty on the relationship between comprehensive nnp and sustainable equivalent consumption it is shown that the classical identity continues to hold in expectations when the discount factor is a stochastic diffusion process taking the form of geometric brownian motion with drift such a result may be useful as a point of departure for classifying the effects that various forms of uncertainty have on the welfare significance of national product

does restricting choice in referenda enable governments to spend more if school boards represent the preferences of the median voter referendums to approve school expenditures should not constrain school expenditures if school boards would choose expenditures larger than the median voter s preference referendums that restrict voters to approving or disapproving a school board s recommended expenditure level will result in expenditures larger than the median voter would prefer however florida used a unique referendum system which guaranteed the median voter s most preferred outcome using florida education expenditures as a benchmark the evidence suggests that spending was slightly higher in restricted choice referendum states than in florida

towards an ecologically based society a rawlsian perspective abstract this paper evaluates several contemporary environmental issues using the standard of john rawls theory of justice rawls has systematically criticized the kind of utilitarian thought that has dominated recent discussions about natural resources and the environment some environmental analysis of late has made use of rawls ideas by focusing on a single aspect of rawls philosophy the difference principle governing treatment of the disadvantaged to the exclusion of other important rawlsian principles selected strands of rawls thought of particular relevance to environmental concerns are reviewed and assessed here particularly the concepts of time preference public goods and social savings as well as the difference principle these ideas are then employed as yardsticks to assess contemporary environmental concerns in three areas 1 water use in the sub humid american west 2 u s federal timber policy and 3 energy and the international economy it is concluded that although rawls clarifies a number of difficult issues his ethical framework needs to incorporate explicit concern for the biophysical basis of society it is suggested that a next step is the recognition that each generation needs to transmit to the following generation a healthy sustainable and aesthetically pleasing natural world

this blessed plot when should capital gains on land be regarded as income national balance sheets for a number of advanced economies show land to be a valuable form of natural capital whose value has increased sharply over the last twenty years or so this paper investigates when or whether capital gains on land should be counted as a component of income while development projects can lead to increases in rental rates and land values it is shown that although the benefits any project should be counted as income increases in rental rates and land values should not normally be seen as additional real income however if land benefits from exogenous land saving technical progress the resulting capital gains can be seen as income applying the same principle to human capital it is shown on a steady growth path that these capital gains are equal to weitzman s 1997 growth premium in the relationship between income and sustainable consumption

capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development an indicator of weak sustainability the measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction in this paper we present one form that a weak sustainability indicator can take derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non decreasing although subject to qualification at this stage some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries

adjusting green nnp to measure sustainability weitzman provides a foundation for nnp as the stationary equivalent of a wealth maximizing path when there is a constant interest rate and no exogenous technological progress here the implications of weitzman s foundation are explored in a case encountered in resource models i e the case of non constant interest rates in a setting that allows for exogenous technological progress an expression for nnp is obtained that adjusts green nnp for anticipated capital gains and interest rate effects to produce a measure that indicates sustainability this result is important when measuring the relative sustainability of resource rich and resource poor countries i introduction how should net national product nnp be adjusted for the depletion of natural and environmental resources a prerequisite for examining this problem is to decide on an underlying notion of income at the personal level hicks 1946 defines income as the consumption that if kept constant would yield the same present value as a person s actual future receipts since market prices are not influenced by any single person this notion of income equals a person s maximal sustainable consumption at the national level national income can likewise be defined as the consumption that if kept constant would yield the same present value as the actual future consumption path unless the nation is a small open economy faced with given international prices this notion of national income will exceed

a contribution to the theory of welfare accounting a kind of unified theory is proposed as a dynamic generalization of the standard consumer surplus methodology for evaluating welfare changes the unified theory allows rigorous dynamic welfare comparisons to be inferred between any two economic situations from just knowing current incomes and observing a short run market demand schedule essentially the change in present discounted future utility is exactly captured by the formula difference in current income plus consumer surplus this well known formula is thereby shown to cover a far wider class of welfare comparisons than is customarily treated in the textbook static case

the political economy of benefits and costs a neoclassical approach to distributive politics this essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions the model emphasizes the economically arbitrary from a welfare point of view importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation we explore the implications of a legislator s objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale

towards a more inclusive and precautionary indicator of global sustainability abstract we construct a hybrid economic indicator of the sustainability of global well being which is more inclusive than existing indicators and incorporates an environmentally pessimistic physical constraint on global warming our methodology extends the world bank s adjusted net saving ans indicator to include the cost of population growth the benefit of technical progress and a much higher precautionary cost of current co 2 emissions future warming damage is so highly unknowable that valuing emissions directly is rather arbitrary so we use a novel inductive approach we modify damage and climate parameters in the deterministic dice climate economy model so it becomes economically optimal to control emissions in a way likely to limit warming to an agreed target here 2 c if future emissions are optimally controlled our ans then suggests that current global well being is sustainable but if emissions remain uncontrolled our base case ans is negative now and our corresponding modified dice model has an unsustained development path with well being peaking in 2065 current ans on an uncontrolled path may thus be a useful heuristic indicator of future unsustainability our inductive method might allow ans to include other very hard to value environmental threats to global sustainability like biodiversity loss and nitrogen pollution

comparing augmented sustainability measures for scotland is there a mismatch we estimate and compare two empirical measures of the weak sustainability of an economy for the first time the change in augmented green net national product gnnp and the interest on augmented genuine savings gs yearly calculations are given for each measure for scotland during 1992 1999 augmentation means including using projections to 2020 changed production possibilities enabled by exogenous technical progress or changing oil prices the change in augmented gnnp and the interest on augmented gs are both always positive showing no sustainability problem for scotland then according to the assumptions underlying our weak sustainability calculations however the former greatly exceeds the latter even when macroeconomic fluctuations are taken into account this is a mismatch which poses an unresolved problem with the theory resolving it may require respecifying the utility functions used in mainstream growth theory

green accounting in imperfect market economies the idea of measuring the national welfare level by using the green nnp net national product has gained much attention lately this paper summarizes the research on social accounting in imperfect market economies by putting the results into a unified framework the main contribution of the paper is to relate the form of the national welfare measure to the functioning of the economic system and therefore to explicitly address the informational requirements implicit in social accounting

the median voter model in public choice theory the changing perception by public choice theorists about the relevance of the median voter model is a result of excessive extrapolation of the conclusions of theoretical models to the real world early in the 1970s the median voter model was often accepted as implying that the output produced in the public sector was what was most preferred by the median voter this claim is excessive because the median voter model is only a model of demand aggregation under majority rule and has little to say about the supply side of the public sector in the late 1970s many scholars identified several circumstances under which the model would not apply in theory but these critiques of the model were often viewed as reasons to abandon the median voter model altogether the model went from having excessive claims that made the model appear to be more powerful than it really is to excessive claims that made the model appear to be less powerful than it really is these latter claims were often in response to the earlier claims rather than to the model appropriately applied

the choice of municipal government structure and public expenditures numerous empirical studies have attempted to measure the effect of varying government structures on public expenditures i argue that these prior may have produced biased estimates as they are predicated on the assumption that government structures are exogenous

u s economic growth at the industry level the u s economy has expanded rapidly in recent years with total factor productivity the source of growth most closely identified with technological gains rising sharply since the mid 1990 s see e g bureau of labor statistics 1999 william gullickson and michael j harper 1999 mun s ho et al 1999 daniel e sichel 1999 this strong aggregate performance and the well documented explosion of investment in computers and other high tech equipment have led many to believe that the united states has experienced a permanent technology led growth revival it is essential however to disaggregate estimates of economic growth to the industry level to understand the new trends in the u s economy productivity growth the ability to produce more outputs from the same inputs differs widely among industries for the economy as a whole negative productivity growth in one industry can offset positive productivity growth in another and jorgenson 1990 shows that a measure of productivity based solely on aggregate data is valid only under very stringent conditions we avoid the limitations of an aggregate measure of productivity by decomposing u s growth across industries for the period 1958 1996 by breaking down the u s economy into 37 industries 35 private industries private households and general government we identify the contribution of each industry to aggregate productivity growth this enables us to isolate the underlying sources of gains in productivity and provides a better understanding of the forces driving the u s economy economy wide productivity from an aggregate production function increased 0 45 percent per year during 1958 1996 while methodology developed by evsey domar 1961 for aggregating over industries yields an aggregate estimate of 0 48 percent over the same period however industry productivity growth ranged from 1 98 percent in electronic and electric equipment to 20 52 percent in government enterprises highlighting fundamental differences in technology and productivity growth across industries these results show that the aggregate production function provides a reasonable estimate of productivity trends over long periods but also masks important differences among industries

accounting for the wealth of nations the net versus gross output controversy and its ramifications there has been a longstanding controversy over the use of net versus gross measures of national product in accounting for economic growth most recently reflected in several papers which have examined the role of environmental variables it is argued in this paper that the two measures are not substitutes but complements which reveal different aspects of the growth process gross product is the correct output concept for estimating the structure of production while net product is the correct concept for measuring the welfare consequences of economic growth an alternative to the conventional solow growth accounting framework is then presented in which the change in national wealth is decomposed into its component elements copyright 1992 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

raw materials profits and the productivity slowdown a factor price frontier framework is used to clarify the analogy of an increase decrease in raw material prices with autonomous technological regress progress factor price profiles are estimated for the manufacturing sector of the united states the united kingdom germany and japan the production model in conjunction with estimates obtained from the factor price frontier attributes much of the slowdown in manufacturing productivity to the rise in relative raw material prices part of the apparent productivity riddle may have to do with the use of double deflated national accounting measures of value added which have an inherent measurement bias

national account of timber and forest environmental resources in sweden this paper outlines an extension of the national account of income from forest resources in sweden 1987 incorporating changes in timber inventories production of nonmarketed timber and nontimber goods and depletion or improvement in vital environmental stocks such as soil nutrients biodiversity and carbon sinks the total net value added provided by forest resources and forestry labour 1987 is estimated to 22 billions sek this is one third more than the contribution of forestry to ordinary gnp

an operative framework for total hicksian income measurement application to a multiple use forest a methodology for estimating total hicksian income in multiple use forests is presented the approach consistently incorporates commercial as well as non commercial economic values and enables the measurement of national accounting aggregates taking into account variation in man made and natural capital innovative solutions are developed i for the estimation of non market values such as recreation where an attempt to determine exchange values has been made simulating markets ii for timber where standing timber valuation methods have been extended to cover uneven stands and iii for carbon fixation valuation where only permanently fixed carbon after 1990 has been taken into account the methodology is applied to a multiple use pinewood in the guadarrama mountains near madrid spain timber cattle grazing hunting recreation carbon fixation and conservation values are measured and integrated in the accounting system using primary microeconomic data from the case study results indicate the importance of non commercial income which accounts for 51 of the total income and the social relevance of the analysed forest implying that only 31 of the total income generated is appropriated by the forest owner

measuringincome and measuring sustainability we examine what interpretation can be given to inclusive income understood to be consumption plus the value of the net increase in all relevant capital stocks we introduce the concept of instantaneously constant value income defined as the maximum amount the economy can consume at a moment of time and keep the expected present value of utility of current and future generations constant we argue that this income concept captures some of the concerns underlying sustainability our main result is that inclusive income equals instantaneously constant value income we show that this result holds in a very general setting and in particular carries over to models incorporating technological progress when such progress can be captured by augmented stocks of knowledge an important implication of our main result is that it provides a very simple method for deriving inclusive income which does not involve any linearization of the hamiltonian

data envelopment analysis for unified efficiency evaluation an assessment of regional industries in china abstract data envelopment analysis has recently gained popularity and attention in operational and environmental assessment a common feature of previous studies is decreasing an input vector to decrease the vector of undesirable outputs which is referred to as natural disposability however little research has considered how to increase the amount of capital input for clean production technology to decrease the amount of undesirable outputs in a data envelopment analysis framework which is referred to as managerial disposability thus this paper proposes an improved approach that considers measuring unified operational and environmental efficiency for managerial disposability and compares this approach with the one for natural disposability the proposed approach provides a positive strategy to reduce undesirable outputs and improve unified efficiency through increasing capital investment in clean production technology a case study of regional industries in china in 2006 2010 utilizing this approach is also presented the empirical study shows that the unified efficiencies of regional industries in china have relatively high scores for managerial disposability and increasing capital investment is vital to achieve sustainable development in clean production technology

a dynamic approach to pes pricing and finance for interlinked ecosystem services watershed conservation and groundwater management a theory of payment for ecosystem services pes pricing consistent with dynamic efficiency and sustainable income requires optimized shadow prices since ecosystem services are generally interdependent this requires joint optimization across multiple resource stocks we develop such a theory in the context of watershed conservation and groundwater extraction the optimal program can be implemented with a decentralized system of ecosystem payments to private watershed landowners financed by efficiency prices of groundwater set by a public utility the theory is extended to cases where land is publicly owned conservation instruments exhibit non convexities on private land or the size of a conservation project is exogenous in these cases conservation investment can be financed from benefit taxation of groundwater consumers while volumetric conservation surcharges induce inefficient water use a dynamic lump sum tax finances investment without distorting incentives since the optimal level of conservation is generated as long as payments are correct at the margin any surplus can be returned to consumers through appropriate block pricing the present value gain in consumer surplus generated by the conservation induced reduction in groundwater scarcity serves as a lower bound to the benefits of conservation without explicit measurement of other benefits such as recreation biodiversity and cultural values

the determination of local public expenditures and the principal and agent relation a case study the principal and agent relationship is important in the public sector there elected or appointed representatives act on behalf of the citizens of their jurisdictions this paper examines the importance of the budget referendum which allows the principals to approve or disapprove the proposal of a set of agents in the context of local public expenditure decisions we test the null hypothesis that the institution of referendum when compared to a nonreferendum institution does not lead to significantly different expenditure behavior

capital gains and net national product in open economies it is shown within a given framework that with the world economy following an egalitarian path the aggregate capital gains being positive is equivalent to the interest rate tending to decrease this result is of importance for the concept of net national product in open economies in particular with positive aggregate capital gains an open economy cannot sustain consuming the return on its capital stocks since some part of the return must be used to augment the country s national wealth it is established that a country s share of world wide sustainable consumption equals its share of worldwide wealth

measuring technical progress in gross and net products abstract on the optimal path of a constant returns economy with capital and non renewable resource inputs the rate of exogenous technical progress in nnp for use in weitzman s technical progress premium equals the rate of progress in gross production divided by one minus the production elasticity of the resource flow

the capital gains from trade are not enough evidence from the environmental accounts of venezuela and mexico abstract in principle a country cannot endure negative genuine savings for long periods of time without experiencing declining consumption nevertheless theoreticians envisage two alternatives to explain how an exporter of non renewable natural resources could experience permanent negative genuine savings and still ensure sustainability the first one alleges that the capital gains arising from the expected improvement in the terms of trade would suffice to compensate for the negative savings of the resource exporter the second alternative points at technological change as a way to avoid economic collapse this paper uses the data of venezuela and mexico to empirically test the first of these two hypotheses the results presented here prove that the terms of trade do not suffice to compensate the depletion of oil reserves in these two open economies

long run implications of investment specific technological change an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the more traditional hicksneutral form of technological progress the balanced growth path for the model is characterized and calibrated to u s national income and product account nipa data the quantitative analysis suggests that investment specific technological change accounts for the major part of growth jel e13 030 041 047

on the welfare significance of green accounting as taught by parable abstract green nnp is a national accounting concept that subtracts off from gnp not just depreciation of capital but also depletion of environmental assets for a time autonomous technology green nnp has a rigorous welfare interpretation as an exact measure of the economy s future power to consume the present paper extends the standard framework to cover the case of labor augmenting technological progress for this special case of time dependence a powerful conceptual parable applies it is as if the conclusion from a simple minded welfare story told by the standard neoclassical one sector growth model covers a far more general situation involving any number of different types of capital any convex production possibilities set and fully optimizing behavior implications and applications are discussed

modeling investment sector efficiency shocks when does disaggregation matter the most straightforward way to analyze investment sector productivity developments is to construct a two sector model with a sector specific productivity shock an often used modeling shortcut accounts for such developments using a one sector model with shocks to the efficiency of investment in a capital accumulation equation this shortcut is theoretically justified when some stringent conditions are satisfied using a two sector model we consider the implications of relaxing several of the conditions that are at odds with the u s input output tables including equal factor shares across sectors the effects of productivity shocks to an investment producing sector of our two sector model differ from those of efficiency shocks to investment in a one sector model notably expansionary productivity shocks boost consumption in every period whereas expansionary efficiency shocks cause consumption to fall substantially for many periods

empirical testing of genuine savings as an indicator of weak sustainability a three country analysis of long run trends genuine savings has emerged as a widely used indicator of sustainable development this approach to conceptualising what sustainability is about has strong links to work published by anil markandya and colleagues over 20 years ago in this paper we use long term data stretching back to 1870 to undertake empirical tests of the relationship between genuine savings gs and future well being for three countries britain the usa and germany our tests are based on an underlying theoretical relationship between gs and changes in the present value of future consumption based on both single country and panel results we find evidence supporting the existence of a cointegrating long run equilibrium relationship between gs and future well being and fail to reject the basic theoretical result on the relationship between these two macroeconomic variables this provides some support for the gs measure of weak sustainability

non public competition and public school performance evidence from west virginia abstractin this study we investigate whether non public school enrolment affects the performance of public school districts if homeschooling and private schools act as competition public school districts test scores should be positively associated with non public enrolment using data on west virginia county school districts and controlling for endogeneity with an instrumental variables approach we find that a one standard deviation increase in relative non public enrolment in a county is associated with statistically significant improvements in public school district test scores our findings thus confirm that non public enrolment and the competition it provides act to improve rather than impede public school performance

innovation and productivity growth the puzzle confronting economists has been that the rate of growth of output that was being observed has been much larger than the rate of increase in the principal resources that were being measured it is now clear that this puzzle is of our own making because we have been using measures of capital and labor which had been refined and narrowed in ways that excluded many of the improvements that have been made in the quality of these resources theodore w schultz 1962

growth accounting when technical change is embodied in capital this paper revisits the hypothesis that technical change is embodied in capital it extends old results to make them more relevant to the contemporary debates about the adjustment of investment goods for quality change and about the role of embodied technical change as a source of economic growth it is shown that the failure to adjust capital for quality change has the effect of suppressing the quality effects into the conventional total factor productivity residual and it is found that approximately 20 percent of the residual growth of quality adjusted output could be attributed to embodied technical change copyright 1992 by american economic association

does total factor productivity drive housing prices a growth accounting exercise for four countries abstract housing prices diverge from construction prices after 1997 in four major countries besides total factor productivity tfp differences between construction and the general economy account for the evolution of construction prices in the us and germany but not in the uk and spain