the environmental kuznets curve environmental protection policy and income distribution abstract the effect of economic growth on pollution emissions differs substantially among high income countries i address this issue by analyzing public environmental policy decisions individual heterogeneity relative income effect and the political framework in which policy decisions are taken determine the emergence of the downward sloping segment of the environmental kuznets curve ekc income inequality produces a gap between the country s ability to pay for environmental protection and a country s willingness to pay i test this result by using oecd data on public r d expenditure for environmental protection the conclusion is that contrary to the ek hypothesis moments of the income distribution function other than the mean may be important for the emergence of a virtuous path of sustainable growth in high income countries

a positive effect of human capital on growth abstract recent studies have found that economic growth appears to be unrelated to increases in educational attainment in this note i show that there is a correlation in one dataset but it is typically hidden by unrepresentative observations

total factor carbon emission performance of the chinese transportation industry a bootstrapped non radial malmquist index analysis this paper proposes a non radial malmquist co2 emission performance index nmcpi for measuring dynamic changes in total factor co2 emission performance over time this index enables the consideration of non radial slacks in the conventional malmquist co2 emission index mcpi the nmcpi is calculated based on a non radial directional distance function derived by several data envelopment analysis dea models furthermore nmcpi could be decomposed into an efficiency change ec index and technological change tc index a bootstrapping approach is conducted to introduce statistical inferences into the nmcpi and its decompositions based on the proposed indices the dynamic co2 emission performance change and its decompositions of the chinese regional transportation industry from 2002 to 2010 are investigated the empirical results demonstrate that the total factor carbon emission performance of the transportation industry as a whole decreased by 32 8 over the period and this reduction was primarily caused by technological decline

income distribution and environmental quality in china a spatial econometric perspective abstract paying heed to a surge of concern about the serious and continuous environmental degradation that is currently being witnessed in china in this paper we investigate whether income distribution contributes to environmental deterioration environmental degradation can be linked not only to income growth we argue but also to increases in income inequality the study calculated the gini coefficient of 31 province using a data set of 403 city level data in mainland china and estimated the linkage between income distribution and environmental deterioration utilizing balanced data for 31 chinese provinces during the period 1996 2015 first the degree of environmental pollution was calculated by constructing a comprehensive index system which was formulated using the entropy method based on six environmental indicators then a spatial panel regression model was also employed in order to estimate whether income inequality is likely to be a relevant factor in environmental deterioration in china the estimation results showed that using the index and spatial analysis techniques significant spatial positive agglomeration were found existing between chinese provinces in terms of their levels of environmental degradation the influencing factors estimation results substantiated the existence of an invert u shaped relation lending support to the environmental kuznets curve theory more importantly the study found that income inequality played a significant role in preventing environmental degradation suggesting that an appropriate level of income inequality over a delimited period is beneficial to improving environmental quality it should however also be emphasized that optimizing the country s income distribution is remains an important long term task for the chinese government other factors were found to exert different types and magnitudes of impacts on environmental pollution results showed that many factors for instance energy intensity the share of secondary industry population density and foreign direct investment contribute to environmental deterioration conversely our findings also indicate that rising urbanization levels can have a positive effect on environmental quality in addition no clear evidence was found to suggest that local government expenditure is related to environmental degradation

inequality and the environmental kuznets curve abstract is income inequality harmful to the environment the answer to this question has not reached a consensus in the literature this study seeks to provide insight into this question by examining the influence of income inequality on the environmental kuznets curve ekc i e the impact of income inequality on the ekc turning point two potential mechanisms through which inequality may affect the ekc turning point by reducing public demand for environmental protection and by increasing a power of capital owners to prevent such protection using a large sample n 170 174 of countries we find evidence of the ekc for so2 emissions and income inequality has a significant impact on the ekc turning point income inequality increases the ekc turning point suggesting that high inequality can be damaging to the environment the results are robust to potential outliers different data sources of income inequality a different so2 emissions measure changes in model specification different samples and an alternative estimation method we also find that inequality appears to be more important than corruption in determining the ekc turning point

is trade good or bad for the environment sorting out the causality we seek to contribute to the debate over globalization and the environment by asking what is the effect of trade on a country s environment for a given level of gdp we take specific account of the endogeneity of trade using exogenous geographic determinants of trade as instrumental variables we find that trade tends to reduce three measures of air pollution statistical significance is high for concentrations of so2 moderate for no2 and lacking for particulate matter although results for other environmental measures are not as encouraging there is little evidence that trade has a detrimental effect on the environment

political and economic inequality and the environment abstract this paper analyzes and tests the hypothesis that political and economic equality result in lower levels of environmental degradation based on formal statements of the argument put forward by boyce r 1994 ecological economics 11 169 178 i show that equality may or may not be necessary to minimize degradation under some plausible conditions greater inequality may even be conducive to lower degradation actual results depend primarily on the intersection between the distribution of preferences across groups and the institutional rules two cross national empirical tests tend to support the contention that distributional issues do not systematically explain variations in environmental quality the results reinforce the conclusion that assumptions about the structure of preferences and workings of social choice institutions ignore complex interactions which influence the relationship between degradation and equality

income inequality and the environment aggregation bias in environmental kuznets curves abstract the environmental kuznets curve assumes an inverted u shaped relation between environmental damage and per capita income recently it has been argued in the literature that in addition to income levels the inequality in the distribution of power and income is positively related to environmental degradation we provide an additional argument based on simple aggregation for including a measure of income dispersion in empirical analyses when the relationship between environmental damage and household income is concave e g resembles an environmental kuznets curve then income inequality is negatively related to total environmental damage results from an empirical analysis of cross national variation indicate that the aggregation effect can run counter to and outweigh the political economy effect for some environmental indicators

a comparative study of inequality and corruption this article argues that income inequality increases the level of corruption through material and normative mechanisms the wealthy have both greater motivation and more opportunity to engage in corruption whereas the poor are more vulnerable to extortion and less able to monitor and hold the rich and powerful accountable as inequality increases inequality also adversely affects social norms about corruption and people s beliefs about the legitimacy of rules and institutions thereby making it easier for them to tolerate corruption as acceptable behavior this comparative analysis of 129 countries using two stage least squares methods with a variety of instrumental variables supports the authors hypotheses using different measures of corruption the world bank s control of corruption index and the transparency international s corruption perceptions index the explanatory power of inequality is at least as important as conventionally accepted causes of corruption such as economic development the autho

who bears the incidence of import protection evidence from sri lanka abstract a simple general equilibrium model is employed to measure the incidence of protection this model focuses on the internal relative price effects of protection through the equilibrium conditions of the nontraded goods market the incidence of protection is measured via the concepts of incidence parameter true protection rates and income transfers resulting from protection the model is applied to sri lankan data the results indicate that a high proportion of all trade interventions operate as an implicit export tax that true protection rates to both import competing and exporting sectors are far below the nominal rates of assistance being provided to them and that income loss to exporters is about 4 of gdp we conclude that the incidence of protection falls mostly on the sri lankan exporters

reducing inequalities toward the development of a market for income inequality abstract the objective of this study is to propose the development of a market for income inequality by specifying a firm s contribution to income inequality and outlining a simple model to find the equilibrium price for a given target of income inequality reduction the paper reviews the concepts of firm heterogeneity and externalities in relation to income inequality it then proposes a model by establishing income inequality reduction targets for a population of firms presenting a marginal income inequality reduction cost curve and matching demand and supply to derive the equilibrium price and ends by simulating a market for income inequality reduction using data from a sample of fifteen firms this paper shifts the focus of income inequality research and policy to the firm and proposes a market based mechanism for firms to reduce income inequality

reexamining the empirical evidence for an environmental kuznets curve this paper uses an updated and revised panel data set on ambient air pollution in cities worldwide to examine the robustness of the evidence for the existence of an inverted u shaped relationship between national income and pollution we test the sensitivity of the pollution income relationship to functional forms to additional covariates and to changes in the nations cities and years sampled we find that the results are highly sensitive to these changes and conclude that there is little empirical support for an inverted u shaped relationship between several important air pollutants and national income in these data

exploring the environmental kuznets hypothesis theoretical and econometric problems focussing on the prime example of co2 emissions we discuss several important theoretical and econometric problems that arise when studying environmental kuznets curves ekcs an ekc refers to an inverse u shaped relationship between a pollutant and economic activity the dominant theoretical approach is given by integrated assessment modelling which consists of economic models that are combined with environmental impact models we critically evaluate the aggregation model dynamics and calibration aspects and their implications for the validity of the results we then turn to a discussion of several important econometric problems that go almost unnoticed in the literature the most fundamental problems relate to nonlinear transformations of nonstationary regressors and in a nonstationary panel context to neglected cross sectional dependence we discuss the implications of these two major and some minor problems that arise in the econometric analysis of kuznets curves our discussion shows that ekc modelling as performed to date is subject to major drawbacks at both the theoretical and the econometric level

non compensatory non linear composite indicators for ranking countries a defensible setting composite indicators or indexes are very common in economic and business statistics for benchmarking the mutual and relative progress of countries in a variety of policy domains such as industrial competitiveness sustainable development globalization and innovation the proliferation of the production of composite indicators by all the major international organizations is a clear symptom of their political importance and operational relevance in policy making as a consequence improvements in the way these indicators are constructed and used seem to be a very important research issue from both the theoretical and operational points of view this article aims at contributing to the improvement of the overall quality of composite indicators or indexes by looking at one of their technical weaknesses that is the aggregation convention used for their construction for this aim we build upon concepts coming from multi criteria decision analysis measurement theory and social choice we start from the

sectoral change catching up and slowing down oecd post war economic growth revisited abstract regression analysis of gdp growth since 1950 on pooled oecd cross sections indicates uniform technological catch up in all sectors but lower marginal labour productivity in agriculture the decline in opportunities to reallocate labour explains some of the post 1973 productivity slowdown

an alternative approach to monetary aggregation in dea this paper proposes a set of alternative dea based money indices that are proved to be both theoretically and empirically competing monetary aggregates since they perform as good as the divisia aggregates based on all the results concerning causality forecasting and money demand we conclude that dea money aggregates prove to be at least competing alternatives to the divisia aggregates and hence suggest that these new aggregates may be considered along with the existing weighted monetary aggregates like the divisia ones given the inherent benefit of the doubt weighting mechanism underlying the dea models where the optimal weight assigned by dea to each monetary asset reflects the ongoing financial innovation and the reserve bank of india s policy priority in the distribution of total liquidity we feel that the dea money indices can truly capture the liquidity better with ongoing financial innovations in the economy

inequality as a cause of environmental degradation abstract this paper advances two hypotheses first the extent of an environmentally degrading economic activity is a function of the balance of power between the winners who derive net benefits from the activity and the losers who bear net costs second greater inequalities of power and wealth lead all else equal to more environmental degradation

measuring macroeconomic performance in the oecd a comparison of european and non european countries abstract we study the macroeconomic performance of 19 oecd countries over the period 1970 1990 performance is defined in terms of the ability of a country s macroeconomic managers to provide four services to their citizens a high level of real gdp per capita a low rate of inflation a low rate of unemployment and a favorable trade balance we use linear programming techniques to construct a best practice macroeconomic performance frontier and to measure the performance of each country in each year relative to the frontier we then add two environmental disamenities carbon and nitrogen emissions to the service list and repeat the analysis to see if the performance rankings change throughout the analysis emphasis is placed on a comparison of the performance of 14 european oecd countries with that of five non european oecd countries we find that performance rankings do change and that the relative performance of the european countries declines when the environmental disamenities are added to the service list

intra industry trade and the shifting of protection across sectors abstract recent work on commercial policy has focussed on the incidence of protection across sectors this work has focussed on the relative price effects of intervention and has been developed in a setting of inter industry trade this paper focusses on the incidence of protection in a setting of intra industry trade a three sector general equilibrium model is developed and incidence is explored in a variety of settings the analysis suggests that the non tradeable sector may bear the major burden of protection in a setting of intra industry trade

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

does trade openness improve environmental quality the literature on trade openness economic development and the environment is largely inconclusive about the environmental consequences of trade this study treats trade and income as endogenous and estimates the overall impact of trade openness on environmental quality using the instrumental variables technique we find that whether or not trade has a beneficial effect on the environment varies depending on the pollutant and the country trade is found to benefit the environment in oecd countries it has detrimental effects however on sulfur dioxide so2 and carbon dioxide co2 emissions in non oecd countries although it does lower biochemical oxygen demand bod emissions in these countries we also find the impact is large in the long term after the dynamic adjustment process although it is small in the short term

effects of macroeconomic policies on sectoral prices the effect of macroeconomic policies on the relative prices of internationally traded and domestic goods has been the subject of extensive study analysis of the way in which these policies then affect prices at the sectoral level is complicated by the beterogeneity of sectoral production even the prices of single products usually are determined by both domestic and traded components we present a framework which first traces the influence of macropolicy on the relative prices of exports imports and home goods it then accounts for each sector s degree of tradability which is based on the importance of trade in sectoral income and the influence of macroeconomic policy on sectoral prices to illustrate the use of this approach it is applied to a simulation of trade liberalization in argentina our results suggest that economywide policies had substantial negative effects on both the real exchange rate and the incentives to agricultural exports in an open economy the prices of tradable products are determined by world prices nominal exchange rates and taxes the prices of products which are not tradable are determined by domestic supply and demand which are themselves influenced by the actions and policies of the government some very important economic decisions depend on the price of tradables relative to that of nontradables the real exchange rate we examine here the way in which broader government policies affect the real exchange rate and through it prices at the sectoral level

data envelopment analysis of different climate policy scenarios abstract recent developments in the political scientific and economic debate on climate change suggest that it is of critical importance to develop new approaches able to compare policy scenarios for their environmental effectiveness their distributive effects their enforceability their costs and many other dimensions this paper discusses a quantitative methodology to assess the relative performance of different climate policy scenarios when accounting for their long term economic social and environmental impacts the proposed procedure is based on data envelopment analysis here employed in evaluating the relative efficiency of eleven global climate policy scenarios the methodology provides a promising comparison framework it can be seen as a way of setting some basic guidelines to frame further debates and negotiations and can be flexibly adopted and modified by decision makers to obtain relevant information for policy design three major findings emerge from this analysis i stringent climate policies can outperform less ambitious proposals if all sustainability dimensions are taken into account ii a carefully chosen burden sharing rule is able to bring together climate stabilisation and equity considerations and iii the most inefficient strategy results from the failure to negotiate a post 2012 global climate agreement

regulatory reforms and productivity an empirical analysis of the japanese electricity industry the japanese electricity industry has experienced regulatory reforms since the mid 1990s this article measures productivity in japan s steam power generation sector and examines the effect of reforms on the productivity of this industry over the period 1978 2003 we estimate the luenberger productivity indicator which is a generalization of the commonly used malmquist productivity index using a data envelopment analysis approach factors associated with productivity change are investigated through dynamic generalized method of moments gmm estimation of panel data our empirical analysis shows that the regulatory reforms have contributed to productivity growth in the steam power generation sector in japan

does inequality affect environmental quality evidence from major japanese cities abstract this study investigates whether income inequality affects environmental degradation we use city level data in japan where local governments have limited authority and often use voluntary agreements with private firms we test the hypothesis that inequality weakens residents bargaining power over polluters and has a negative effect on environmental quality our results show that inequality negatively affected air quality in residential and commercial areas during the 1990s but not in industrial areas this evidence suggests that the inequality pollution relationship is not just a correlation but reflects a causal effect of residents bargaining power on environmental quality this implies that equal communities can pressure firms into accepting pollution prevention agreements

commercial policy and intra industry trade abstract this paper constructs a model of intra industry trade within a multi product industry whose output range is limited to that obtainable from a particular type of capital intra industry trade is a natural outcome in this structure without requiring increasing returns to scale or imperfectly competitive markets and with its pattern determined along traditional relative factor abundance lines the volume of this trade will vary inversely with the level of trade restrictions as observed empirically other policies are then considered for their influence on the range rather than the level of domestic production since the former is the more likely policy objective under these circumstances

productivity measurement in radial dea models with a single constant input abstract we consider productivity measurement based on radial dea models with a single constant input we show that in this case the malmquist and the hicks moorsteen productivity indices coincide and are multiplicatively complete the choice of orientation of the malmquist index for the measurement of productivity change does not matter and there is a unique decomposition of productivity change containing two independent sources namely technical efficiency change and technical change technical change decomposes in an infinite number of ways into a radial magnitude effect and an output bias effect we also show that the aggregate productivity index is given by the geometric mean between any two periods of the simple arithmetic averages of the individual contemporaneous and mixed period distance functions

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

the environmental kuznets curve cointegration and nonlinearity this paper clarifies some conceptual shortcomings of the empirical environmental kuznets curve ekc literature that arise because of the hitherto inadequate application of unit root and cointegration techniques the literature to date has ignored the fact and a fortiori the consequences that powers of integrated processes are themselves not integrated processes the paper explains why standard methods should not be applied and discusses some recently proposed viable estimation and testing approaches for cointegrating polynomial regressions the application to co2 and so2 emissions data shows that using appropriate methods leads to strongly reduced evidence for a cointegrating ekc compared to typical but conceptually not sound findings

an economic approach to environmental indices abstract this study uses the directional output distance function from economic productivity theory as an alternative approach to environmental index construction we use the directional output distance function to aggregate multiple environmental objectives into one measure of environmental performance we apply this method to a set of watershed data and compare our results to the existing u s environmental protection agency epa index values when modeling the same set of objectives the directional output distance function and the existing epa index yield similar measures of environmental performance we discuss the mathematical properties of both indices using the axioms of economic index theory and explore the possible advantages to our approach the mathematical properties of the directional output distance function are well established and this approach provides a nonparametric way to aggregate individual characteristics this advances the standard use of a priori weighted summation and circumvents the often contentious selection of index weights

using data envelopment analysis to assess macroeconomic policy performance it is common practice to summarize the macroeconomic performance of countries in terms of the four well known dimensions captured by the magic diamond of the oecd this study provides a comparison of several synthetic indicators that merge the four separate indicators into one single statistic these indicators are inspired by data envelopment analysis dea based models which allow for unequal weighting of the different economic objectives the calculated weights then act as proxies for the true policy priorities comparison of the models focuses on the underlying assumptions as well as on the empirical results they generate

the trade off between income inequality and carbon dioxide emissions abstract we investigate the theoretically ambiguous link between income inequality and per capita carbon dioxide emissions using a panel data set that is substantially larger in both regional and temporal coverage than those used in the existing literature using an arguably superior group fixed effects estimator we find that the relationship between income inequality and per capita emissions depends on the level of income we show that for low and middle income economies higher income inequality is associated with lower carbon emissions while in upper middle income and high income economies higher income inequality increases per capita emissions the result is robust to the inclusion of plausible transmission variables

corruption and the environmental kuznets curve empirical evidence for sulfur abstract we investigate how corruption influences the income level at the turning point of the relationship between sulfur emissions and income using a wide cross national panel of countries at different levels of development and with different degrees of corruption our results support the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis for sulfur we find evidence that the higher the country s degree of corruption the higher the per capita income at the turning point suggesting different income pollution paths across countries due to corruption we build upon a new specification for the ekc developed by bradford et al 2005 that avoids using nonlinear transformations of potentially nonstationary regressors in panel estimation also we account for the indirect impact of corruption on emissions through its impact on per capita income our main findings remain unchanged when we investigate additional heterogeneity allowing for different income slopes across richer and poorer countries

democracy and environmental quality we develop and estimate an econometric model of the relationship between several local and global air pollutants and economic development while allowing for critical aspects of the socio political economic regime of a state we obtain empirical support for our hypothesis that democracy and its associated freedoms provide the conduit through which agents can exercise their preferences for environmental quality more effectively than under an autocratic regime thus leading to decreased concentrations or emissions of pollution however additional factors such as income inequality age distribution education and urbanization may mitigate or exacerbate the net effect of the type of political regime on pollution depending on the underlying societal preferences and the weights assigned to those preferences by the state

a study of optimal weights restriction in data envelopment analysis data envelopment analysis dea is a mathematical programming approach to assessing relative efficiencies within a group of decision making units dmus an important outcome of such an analysis is a set of virtual multipliers or weights accorded to each input or output factor taken into account due to the factor weight flexibility of the dea model a dmu may assign very low factor weight scores to some of its unfavourable inputs or outputs and appear as efficient thus producing nonsensical results in some cases this study focuses on this shortcoming to integrate an optimal weights restriction model and absolute restriction method to restricting weight flexibility in dea so that the evaluation result can be more realistic and finally takes the garbage clearance of each district in kaohsiung city in taiwan as an example for the illustration

incidence theory and the shifting of protection across sectors the south asian experience using the theoretical framework of a simple general equilibrium model this paper examines whether strategies aimed at protecting or promoting manufacturing industries indirectly taxed the agricultural and service sectors a panel data set consisting of five south asian countries over a 26 year time period is employed in the analysis three different estimation procedures are used to account for factors that are country specific and those that are common to all countries the results indicate that the agricultural sector indirectly felt the brunt of the net protection provided to manufactures due to the shifting of protection across sectors the service sector on the other hand indirectly benefited from the general equilibrium spillover effects

is china at the tipping point reconsidering environment economy nexus abstract environmental kuznets curve ekc has become the predominant approach between environmentalists and sociologists to modeling environment economy nexus during the past quarter century also with regard to china the largest industrial pollutant emitter in the world where unprecedented change offers a unique approach to the aggregate emissions in the case of china the question is whether a tipping point can be reached without de industrialization and at a lower income phase than in developed economies it is also the worldwide intrinsic concern of environment economy nexus in the prospective industrialization process of developing countries however china relative researches involve some existing challenges such as cross regional time series various socioeconomic drivers and turning thresholds taking the new normal china economy formulation into consideration a rethink and reexamination of the environment economy relationship was performed using the longest possible environmental and economic data from 30 provincial economies for the period of 1985 2017 different from the existing mostly time series based china ekc literature not only the llc ips fisher unit root tests pedroni and kao panel cointegration tests and the panel ols are used but the problem of cross sectional dependence is handled in panel unit root tests across various cross economies and the error correction based cointegration test is employed allowing for various forms of heterogeneity robust against the cross sectional dependence and the dols estimators are applied to resolve the standard ols for serial correlation and for endogeneity of regressors especially in only small possible china samples in particular the finding contrasts with the overly optimistic research of certain scholars who state that china could be on a clearly different path from the routes of some developed economies in the world realizing the environmental turnaround at low levels of economy and industrialization china economy is not just having a certain environmental dividend effect but mainly faces a more significant environmental pressure effect environmental input and its efficiency is still insufficient to perform the intended pollution reduction effects fundamentally the environmental investment as a proportion of gdp should reach the past levels of some developed economies in the similar pollution economy phase

evaluation of the incentive structure a survey and application to cameroon abstract this article uses a simple general equilibrium framework to evaluate the incentive structure of a country pursuing a mixed import substitution export promotion strategy it illustrates how features of general equilibrium analysis can be incorporated into the traditional balassa corden effective protection framework which is supplemented by the evaluation of the incidence of protection on firms importing and exporting households consumers and taxpayers and the government its application to a less developed country ldc cameroon shows that the burden of tariff protection is shifted 25 in the short run and 64 in the long run on to the unprotected sectors especially exports as a result average nominal protection 58 8 is much higher than protection actually provided to the protected sectors the welfare effect of protection is ambiguous households viewed only as final consumers lose when they are viewed as taxpayers protection may become beneficial in the long run taking substitution possibilities into account when measuring protection has an impact on the ranking of firms according to their nominal and effective protection

corruption income and the environment an empirical analysis abstract in response to the recent growth of a largely theoretical body of literature analysing the linkages between corruption and pollution this paper subjects the corruption pollution relationship to a detailed empirical examination a distinction is drawn between the direct impact of corruption on pollution and the indirect impact which operates through corruption s impact on per capita income and the resultant impact of income on pollution using data for 94 countries covering the period 1987 2000 both direct and indirect impacts of corruption on air pollution emissions are estimated for both sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide corruption is estimated to have a positive direct impact on per capita emissions indirect effects are found to be negative and larger in absolute value than direct effects for the majority of the sample income range as a result the total effect of corruption on emissions is negative for all but the highest income countries in the sample

re exploring the trade and environment nexus through the diffusion of pollution some scholars argue that trade liberalization results in the outsourcing of pollution to pollution havens and this may explain the existence of the environmental kuznets curve ekc in industrialized countries others claim that trade liberalization effectively lessens pollution by allowing a more efficient use of resources and the diffusion of clean technologies in part because these theories generate similar predictions for industrialized countries empirical studies have not provided conclusive evidence for either argument to identify the role of trade i draw on the insights of the diffusion literature and estimate a spatial regression model where trade operates as the mechanism through which pollution shifts from country to country using the case of per capita carbon dioxide hbox co 2 emissions i find that once spatial correlation is accounted for the ekc disappears the effect is even stronger when looking at trade from developing countries only providing support for the pollution haven hypothesis i also show that the hbox co 2 trajectory of developing countries goes above the one previously followed by industrialized countries this suggests that developing countries carry on an additional carbon burden above the one that would be obtained in the absence of trade these findings contribute to the literature on the non economic effects of trade and the constraints of domestic policies when the costs of trade are low

malmquist productivity indexes and fisher ideal indexes comment fare and grosskopf i992 henceforth abbreviated as fg showed that under some conditions the productivity index defined as the geometric mean of two input based malmquist productivity indexes is equal to the quotient of the fisher input quantity index and the fisher output quantity index both fisher indices can be computed from observed prices and quantities these conditions appear to be so strong that they will almost certainly never be fulfilled in practice this is shown by a careful inspection of fg s proof however under slightly milder but more plausible conditions it can be shown that the quotient of the fisher input index and the fisher output index is a reasonable approximation of the productivity index consider a firm at two time periods t o i with different technologies which are modelled by the input correspondences lt y x x can produce y x c rn yce rm it is assumed that the sets lt y are closed and convex and that inputs are strongly disposable the vectors x yt wt pt t o i denote observed inputs observed outputs observed input prices and observed output prices respectively the productivity index is defined as

agricultural incentives in developing countries measuring the effect of sectoral and economywide policies the impact of sector specific direct and economywide indirect policies on agricultural incentives for 18 developing countries for the period 1975 84 are estimated the direct effect is measured by the proportional difference between the producer price and the border price adjusting for distribution storage transport and other marketing costs the indirect effect has two components 1 the impact of the unsustainable portion of the current account deficit and of industrial protection policies on the real exchange rate and thus on the price of agricultural commodities relative to nonagricultural nontradables and 2 the impact of industrial protection policies on the relative price of agricultural commodities to that of nonagricultural tradable goods the authors found that a in almost all cases the direct effect is equivalent to a tax on exportable goods and to a subsidy for importables b the indirect effect also taxes agriculture and dominates the direct effect and c the direct policies for both importables and exportables stabilize domestic producer prices

mechanisms explaining the impact of economic inequality on environmental deterioration abstract rising economic inequality often considered intrinsically harmful is increasingly being viewed as having a number of secondary impacts as well including impacts on health and economic growth the ongoing nature of today s environmental crisis also raises questions about inequality s role in environmental deterioration despite the large number of papers that have been written on this topic no theoretical or empirical consensus presently exists firstly our article identifies that authors conclusions in this area depend on their hypotheses regarding 1 the relationship between individual income and individual environmental pressure 2 the impact of inequality on the social norms that influence individual environmental pressure 3 the interests that social groups have in degrading or protecting the environment 4 how these interests play out in terms of political demands and 5 how these political demands translate into political decisions secondly the study shows that despite enabling a general test of the causal relationship between inequality and the environment the empirical methods utilised do not account for the full range of theoretical mechanisms in play hence the suggestion that a research programme be launched to conduct empirical studies of the five aforementioned hypotheses by applying a recursive approach

economic structure development policy and environmental quality an empirical analysis of environmental kuznets curves with chinese municipal data in many cases the relationship between environmental pollution and economic development can be generally depicted by an inverted u shaped curve or an environmental kuznets curve where pollution increases with income at the beginning and decreases after a certain level of income however what determine the shape of an enviornmental kuznets curve such as the height and the turning point of the curve have not been thoroughly studied a good understanding of the determinants is vitally important to the development community especially for the developing world where income growth is a high priority and yet environmental pollution also needs to be carefully controlled this study analyzes the impacts of economic structure development strategy and environmental regulation on the shape of the environmental kuznets curve with a city level panel dataset obtained from china the results show that economic structure development strategy and environmental regulation can all have important implications on the relationship between environmental environmental quality and economic development but the impacts can be different at different development stages

true protection concepts and their role in evaluating trade policies in ldcs in many ldcs it is not uncommon to find incentives designed to encourage import substitution activities coexisting alongside incentives aimed at encouraging export activities this article evaluates a recent approach to evaluating commercial policy which among other things highlights some of the implications of simultaneously pursuing import substitution and export promotion the study develops a model which emphasises the incidence of protection and identifies the concept of true protection empirical results for a number of ldcs are discussed and the implications of these results evaluated in addition the article contrasts this approach with the effective protection approach to evaluating commercial policy

external shocks purchasing power parity and the equilibrium real exchange rate two approaches are commonly used to determine the equilibrium real exchange rate in a country after external shocks purchasing power parity ppp calculations and the salter swan tradables nontradables model there are theoretical and empirical problems with both approaches and tensions between them in this article the authors resolve these theoretical and empirical difficulties by presenting a model which is a generalization of the salter swan model and which incorporates imperfect substitutes for both imports and exports within the framework of this model the definition of the real exchange rate is consistent both with that of the ppp approach and with that of the salter swan model suitably extended the model however is capable of capturing a richer set of phenomena including terms of trade shocks and changes in foreign capital inflows it also provides a practical way to estimate changes in the equilibrium real exchange rate requiring little more information than is required to do ppp calculations the results are consistent with those of multisector computable general equilibrum models which generalize the trade specification of the small model

income inequality and carbon emissions in the united states a state level analysis 1997 2012 abstract this study investigates the relationship between u s state level co 2 emissions and two measures of income inequality the income share of the top 10 and the gini coefficient each of the inequality measures which focus on unique characteristics of income distributions is used to evaluate the arguments of different analytical approaches results of the longitudinal analysis for the 1997 to 2012 period indicate that state level emissions are positively associated with the income share of the top 10 while the effect of the gini coefficient on emissions is non significant the statistically significant relationship between co 2 emissions and the concentration of income among the top 10 is consistent with analytical approaches that focus on political economy dynamics and veblen effects which highlight the potential political and economic power and emulative influence of the wealthy the null effect of the gini coefficient is generally inconsistent with the marginal propensity to emit approach which posits that when incomes become more equally distributed the poor will increase their consumption of energy and other carbon intensive products as they move into the middle class

competitiveness and productivity a case study of italian firms the purpose of this article is to obtain a synthetic measure of the multi dimensional concept of firm competitiveness and to analyse the role of different factors such as productivity firm size and cluster of industries for determining firm competitiveness in italy an adequate firm specific data set is constructed from balance sheets by using imputation methods for handling missing values the synthetic measure of competitiveness is obtained using a data envelopment analysis dea approach then a tobit model is considered to measure the influence of different factors on the measured competitiveness the results obtained are very interesting and coherent with the characteristics of the italian firms

corruption pollution and the kuznets environment curve abstract this paper examines the implications of corruption and rent seeking behavior by the government for the relationship between pollution and growth cases of both cooperative and non cooperative interaction between the government and the private firm are studied it is shown that corruption is not likely to preclude the existence of an inverted u shaped kuznets environmental curve under both these cases however for any level of per capita income the pollution levels corresponding to corrupt behavior are always above the socially optimal level further the turning point of the kuznets curve takes place at income and pollution levels above those corresponding to the social optimum

drivers of industrial and non industrial greenhouse gas emissions abstract though there has been extensive analysis of the drivers of aggregate carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production there has been much less analysis of the drivers of greenhouse gases in general and especially of aggregate emissions of greenhouse gases from agriculture forestry and other land uses which we call non industrial emissions in this paper we statistically analyze the relationship between both industrial and non industrial greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth and other potential drivers for 129 countries over the period from 1971 to 2010 our analysis combines the three main approaches in the literature into a single framework for investigating the evolution of emissions and income we find that economic growth is a driver of both industrial and non industrial emissions though economic growth has twice the effect on industrial emissions the time effect is negative for both sources of emissions though this effect is larger for non industrial emissions there is also convergence in emissions intensity for both types of emissions but given these other effects there is no evidence for an environmental kuznets curve

biases in technical efficiency scores caused by intra input aggregation mathematical analysis and a dea application using simulated data in data envelopment analysis dea applications involving multiple inputs and outputs inputs are aggregated into the total amounts of each type of input for example if input types labour and capital are used to produce multiple outputs the total amount of labour used to produce all outputs is treated as one aggregated input and the total amount of capital as another resources are not disaggregated into input variables measuring the amount of labour used to produce the first output the amount of labour used to produce the second output the amount of labour used to produce the third output and so on for both labour and capital it is shown that such intra input aggregation causes downward bias in reported technical efficiency scores with variations in bias unrelated to true technical efficiency therefore with few exceptions any technical efficiency comparisons among dmus are invalid the presence of intra input aggregation bias is demonstrated mathematically simulation is used to exhibit it

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

sources of productivity growth using the fare primont decomposition an empirical application to the irish beef sector several competing methodologies for tfp estimation have been developed in the past decades a popular approach in the literature is index number computation the most widely implemented tfp indices

a non parametric analysis of productivity the case of u s and japanese manufacturing a nonparametric analysis of technology technical change and productivity is presented in the context of cost minimizing behavior a number of nonparametric tests concerning the existence and nature of technical change are applied to u s and japanese manufacturing data nonparametric measures of technical change are presented copyright 1990 by american economic association

effective rates of protection when domestic and foreign goods are imperfect substitutes the case of thailand noting that standard calculations of effective rates of protection assume that domestic and foreign goods are perfectly substitutable this paper relaxes that assumption using a fifty four sector general equilibrium model of thailand the authors compute effective rates of protection when the imported and domestically produced good in each sector are assum ed to be imperfect substitutes and compare them with the effective rates of protection as derived using the standard approach their results show that the general equilibrium calculation differs from the standard one not ju st in the ranking and magnitude of the effective rates of protection but sometimes even in the sign copyright 1992 by mit press

the evolution and main determinants of productivity in brazilian electricity distribution 1998 2005 an empirical analysis abstract this paper estimates changes in the productivity of the brazilian electricity distribution sector using data envelopment analysis dea on a panel of 18 firms from 1998 to 2005 the study decomposes the productivity change of these distribution firms in terms of technical efficiency scale efficiency and technical progress this exercise aims to help the understanding of the main determinants of the evolution of productivity focusing its relationship with the restructuring process implemented in the 1990s tfp index records a yearly positive growth rate of 1 3 in the whole period under analysis for all firms technical change was the main component behind this evolution with an average growth of 2 1 per year while technical efficiency presented a yearly negative performance of 0 8 the results prove that in general terms the incentives generated in the reform process do not seem to have led the firms to behave in a more efficient manner

on firm and product specific true protection efforts at providing relevant indices of incentive structure comparative advantage and international competitiveness have led to the concept of true protection such a framework can be used to analyse the incidence of protection across sectors analysis has so far been carried out under the assumption of a uniform tariff and calculations limited to average rates nothing could then be said with respect to the incidence at the firm or product level this article expands on an existing model by 1 presenting firm and product specific true protection indices 2 generalising previous conclusions on true protection to encompass firm and product specific analysis it is shown that failure to take into consideration substitution possibilities may yield incorrect evaluation of the structure and level of protection