global warming technological change and trade in carbon energy challenge or threat is it possible to combat global climate change through north to south technology transfer even without a global climate treaty or do carbon leakage and the rebound effect imply that it is possible to take advantage of technological improvements under the umbrella of a global arrangement only for answering these questions two possible states of the world are discussed one where more energy efficient technologies are transferred unconditionally from the north to the south and where regions do not cooperate in the solution of the global climate problem but unilaterally decide on climate policies and technology transfers one where the north to south technology transfer is tied to the requirement that the south in some way contributes to the solution of the global climate problem rebound and leakage effects hinder a sustainable and welfare improving solution of the climate problem

a note of the theory of international transfers abstract if each of n trading countries supplies each of several international public consumption goods then sufficiently small international transfers have no effect on the consumption production or welfare of any country

multinational public goods provision under multilateral income transfers and productivity differences abstractthis article examines multinational public goods provision under multilateral income transfers and productivity differences across countries under a planner who uses linear approximation for utility maximization we show that 1 a country is an income receiver if it has a higher productivity than the average in producing public goods enabling it to provide more public goods 2 the amount of transfers can be pinned down for all countries with an adjustment cost 3 each country obtains an identical utility increment and 4 the country with the lowest adjustment cost is the best candidate for the planner country all results are derived based on well known information regarding the cost of producing the public goods and income levels

rent seeking and the provision of public goods in this short paper i adopt the public choice school paradigm of modeling a government in order to compare its performance with that of the market in the standard model of the provision of public goods private provision is represented by the cournot nash equilibrium in individual contributions public provision incorporates rent seeking whereby some of the aspects of the allocation are determined indirectly by influence activities of the interested parties thus both allocation procedures yield inefficiency and the question is which procedure results in a greater amount of inefficiency private provision with its free riding incentives or public provision with its rent seeking incentives the results indicate that public provision may well be preferred to private provision of public goods thus superiority of private provision is not guaranteed even in the case of a non benevolent government copyright 1993 by royal economic society

the strategic advantage of being less skilled abstract ability need not pay if public goods are financed by voluntary contributions this result first shown for exogenously given income is reinforced if income is endogenously generated in equilibrium welfare of complete free riders is ranked according to their wage rate whereas for contributors a higher productivity is disadvantageous furthermore it can be shown that the set of contributors consists of the skilled agents and only the less productive will act as complete free riders this results in a strong incentive for being less skilled

optimal acid rain abatement policy for europe an analysis for the year 2000 acid rain causes greater environment damage than would occur if countries act cooperatively based on new estimates of sulphur abatement cost functions the potential gains from cooperation are calculated for europe various cooperative abatement rates are compared with the rates implied by recent international agreements the 30 club and the second sulphur protocol it is shown that the monetary gains from cooperation may be smaller than previously thought the distinction is made between primary and secondary abatement and their respective roles are discussed it is shown that agreed targets can only be met if primary measures eg fuel switching are adopted

a tale of two collectives sulphur versus nitrogen oxides emission reduction in europe a theoretical model of emission reductions is specified that accounts for voluntary and non voluntary behaviour regarding the adherence to the helsinki and sofia protocols which mandated emission reductions for sulphur s and nitrogen oxides nox respectively from this model we derive an econometric specification for the demand for emission reductions that adjusts for the spatial dispersion of the pollutant when tested for 25 european nations the model performs well for sulphur cutbacks less satisfying results are obtained for nox because the model s assumption of a unitary actor at the national level is less descriptive collective action considerations indicate that sulphur emissions are easier to control than those of nox

progressive taxation as social insurance and as a median voter outcome an empirical assessment progressive taxation with a balanced government budget functions as social insurance since individuals with low realized incomes receive a net subsidy from the public sector we calculate the level of taxes that optimally trades off benefits due to such insurance with costs arising from distorted labor supply incentives given the best available evidence on parameter values this optimal rate is roughly 15 percentage points less than the aggregate marginal rate on earned income in sweden as of 1979 we also assess the median voter hypothesis by calculating the rate preferred by the median voter this rate turns out to be about 50 percentage points lower than the actual rate progressive taxation which redistributes income that is a negative income tax can function as insurance since individuals who are unlucky and have low realized incomes are compensated via a net redistribution from the public sector given risk aversion this social insurance is valuable at the same time the provision of insurance generates moral hazard in the form of distorted factor supply incentives thus an optimal pattern of taxation should balance the insurance effects and distortions caused by greater tax progressivity this paper is concerned with the magnitudes of tax rates and progressivity implied by this optimal taxation tradeoff the topic is of particular interest in view of the high tax rates in a number of northern european countries one wonders whether these actual rates may be close to or perhaps even beyond the rates that would optimally balance social insur

olson s exploitation hypothesis in a public good economy a reconsideration since the publication of olson s 1965 the logic of collective action the exploitation hypothesis in which the rich shoulder the provision burden of public goods for the poor has held sway despite empirical exceptions to address such exceptions we establish two alternative exploitation hypotheses based on contributors asymmetric preferences or on their productivity differences regarding the public good the classic hypothesis and its two variants are proven in a novel fashion for asymmetric preferences we also establish the exploitation hypothesis for the joint products model with private and public co benefits our theoretical insights are then illustrated by some empirical examples from the field of international public goods such as military defense and cross border pollution

dyke maintenance and other stories some neglected types of public goods the orthodox summation model of a pure nonexcludable public good assumes that each individual consumes a quantity of public good defined as the sum of all individuals contributions to that good recently hirshleifer 1983 1985 has analyzed models that do not fall within this class at one extreme is the weakestlink in which the total quantity available to each consumer equals the smallest individual contribution at the other is the best shot in which the total quantity available equals the largest individual contribution hirshleifer s example of the weakest link case concerns a circular region of which each citizen owns a pie shaped slice the perimeter is marked by a dyke floods may penetrate the weakest point of the dyke and cause damage equally throughout the region each citizen decides the height and state of repair of that section of the dyke adjoining his piece of land its maintenance constituting his contribution to the public good thus the level of protection enjoyed by all is determined by the least well maintained section of the dyke an example of the best shot case concerns a number of antimissile batteries ringing a city firing at an incoming icbm all that matters is the accuracy of the best shot bliss and nalebuff 1984 discuss dragon slaying as another example of a best shot situation section ii of this paper introduces a class of functions of which the summation weakest link and best shot are examples section iii analyzes the properties of equilibrium when consumers have identical tastes and incomes section iv analyzes the implications of income redistribution in the summation case the equilibrium is unaffected by the initial redistribution over a range and outside that range transfers help the recipient and hurt the donor within the broader class of models however the invariance property does not generally hold and there may be opportunities for paretoimproving income redistribution i give an example similar to the weakest link case in which a pareto improving redistribution is

the voluntary provision of a pure public good the case of reduced cfc emissions and the montreal protocol abstract this paper applies the theory of the voluntary provision of a pure public good to the behavior of nations to curb chlorofluorocarbon cfc emissions during the late 1980s by devising an empirical test we determine that these cutbacks in emissions are consistent with nash behavior when taste parameters are controlled the relationship between emission cutbacks and national income is nearly linear as implied by the theory if the sample is purged of potential outliers then the linear relationship results a significant taste parameter is the extent of political and civil freedoms while a marginally significant parameter is geophysical position in terms of latitude

incentive mechanisms for international public goods under uncertainty of production costs abstract we investigate incentive mechanisms for the optimal supply of and demand for international public goods under cost uncertainty we find the incentive mechanism exists iff the nation wise income as well as the global income would be greater than the critical values determined by cost uncertainty

annual redistribution and lifetime redistribution abstract i propose a method to evaluate the degree of income redistribution throughout a person s life time an international comparison of life time redistribution in the united states the united kingdom and japan has been attempted this comparison clearly shows the differences in the degree of redistribution in each of the countries

the generalized theory of transfers and welfare bilateral transfers in a multilateral world paul samuelson s 1952 1954 classic papers on the transfer problem addressed two separate analytical issues the positive effect of a transfer on the terms of trade and the welfare effect of the transfer on the donor and the recipient since then a considerable body of literature has grown up on the positive analysis while samuelson 1954 himself had extended the 2 x 2 x 2 free trade analysis to allow for tariffs and transport costs subsequent writers have analyzed other extensions of the model for example to allow for nontraded goods as with leisure in samuelson 1971 or general nontraded goods in john chipman 1974 and ronald jones 1970 1975 remarkably however the welfare analysis of transfers has not paralleled these developments since wassily leontief 1936 produced an example of immiserizing transfer from abroad and samuelson 1947 argued that the example required market instability the proposition that has monopolized attention has been that a transfer in the conventional 2 x 2 x 2 model in its free trade version cannot immiserize the recipient or enrich the donor as long as world markets are stable in the walras sense interestingly samuelson 1954 who did extend the positive analysis to include tariffs did not go on to ask whether immiserization of the transfer recipient and hence symmetrically enrichment of the donor in a two country model could now arise consistent with market stability recently the welfare analysis of transfers has been extended in two different directions both apparently unconnected and both yielding the conclusion that transfers from abroad can be immiserizing and that the donor may improve its welfare despite market stability one route to this conclusion has been the introduction of a third economic agent or country that is outside of the transfer process in the appendix of his 1960 paper analyzing the interaction between trade policy and income distribution harry johnson discussed the possibility of welfareparadoxical redistribution between two factor income classes capital and labor in an open economy thereby providing what can be interpreted as a treatment of the threeagent transfer problem for the case in which donor and recipient are both completely specialized in the ownership of a single different factor an independent analysis of the three agent transfer problem using a restrictive model with given endowments of goods and fixed coefficients in consumption was also undertaken in an important paper by david gale 1974 2 brecher and bhagwati bhagwati department of economics columbia university new york ny 10027 brecher department of economics carleton university ottawa on kis 5b6 hatta department of political economy the johns hopkins university baltimore md 21218 we thank the national science foundation grant no 524718 for partial financial support of the research underlying this paper the paper was written when brecher and hatta were visiting columbia university 1981 82 gratefully acknowledged are helpful comments and suggestions from john chipman avinash dixit jacques dreze robert feenstra jacob frenkel ronald jones murray kemp andreu mas colell michael mussa john riley lars svensson and robert willig from anonymous referees and from seminar participants at berkeley harvard minnesota rochester chicago and the university of california los angeles after the present paper was submitted for publication and following its presentation at rochester our attention was drawn to this appendix which was noticed by a student of ronald jones subsequently we learned from makoto yano that motoshige itoh had pointed out an important related paper by ryuotaro komiya and t shizuki 1967 whose condition 11 for the johnson case anticipated our equation 12 below we are grateful for having both of these references brought to our attention 2 gale constructs an example in which the donor is enriched along with the recipient furthermore this immediately implies that a reverse transfer will immis

public goods provision redistributive taxation and wealth accumulation this paper presents an extension of a static model of public goods provision with redistributional taxation as described by uler journal of public economics 93 3 4 pp 440 453 as a dynamic model of wealth accumulation intertemporal consumption and saving behavior strongly affect the relation between redistributive taxation and charitable contribution indeed the analyses presented herein reveal that more patience i e higher saving engenders a lower redistributional tax rate however the optimal redistributive tax rate is not zero because redistributive taxation improves the efficiency of providing public goods that are not improved by balanced growth this paper fills the gap separating static analysis and dynamic analysis and generalizes the results presented by static analysis

strategic transfers and private provision of public goods abstract this paper considers strategic monetary transfers between two agents when these contribute to a mutual public good if the agents differ in their contribution productivity then the less productive agent has an incentive to make large unconditional transfers to the more productive agent although agents move simultaneously in each stage of the game the less productive agent becomes a stackelberg leader furthermore the generic subgame perfect equilibrium is characterized by full specialization

environmental protection and the private provision of international public goods final version received 11 september 2008 international environmental protection like the combat of global warming exhibits properties of publicgoods in the international arena no coercive authority exists that can enforce measures to overcome free rider incentives therefore decentralized negotiations between individual regions serve as an approach topursue ef cient international environmental protection we propose a scheme which is based on the ideasof coasean negotiations and pigouvian taxes the negotiating entities offer side payments to counterpartsin order to in uence their taxation of polluting consumption side payments in turn are self nanced bymeans of externality correcting taxes as we show a pareto ef cient outcome can be attained

identifying the free riders a simple algorithm for determining who will contribute to a public good abstract when a heterogeneous group of people provide themselves with a pure public good the resulting nash equilibrium outcome will divide the group into contributors and free riders this paper proposes a general algorithm for discovering which individuals in the group fall into which of these two classes the algorithm is based on identifying for each individual how much of the public good must be provided by others to drive that individual s contribution to zero

complementarity free riding and the military expenditures of nato allies abstract this paper examines the major influences of an ally s demand for military expenditures demand equations are estimated for a sample of nato nations using the iterative seemingly unrelated regressions technique evidence is presented indicating that structural changes occured in these equations in the early 1970s this instability is the predicted effect of the doctrine of flexible response adopted by nato during this time period the statistical tests show that the medium sized nuclear powers military expenditures responded identically to income and defense spillins the same held true for the lowland allies

transfers and the weakest link an extension of hirshleifer s analysis abstract with the weakest link social composition function analysed by hirshleifer it is shown that an incentive exists for some agents to transfer resources to others so as to achieve higher quantities of the public good the characteristics of such an equilibrium with transfers are examined together with the implications of differing income distributions for the quantity of the public good some observations are offered as to how well the model can capture co operative behaviour

effects of an anticipated expansion in international public goods on public capital accumulation abstract this paper presents a generic model to include public capital accumulation and the services of international public goods provided by a neighbor country it examines the long run and short run responses of private and public capital accumulation in the home country to an anticipated increase in international public goods it is found that the home economy in effect cuts its public capital stock but keeps an unchanged private capital stock in the long run when a neighbor commits itself to expanding the stock of public goods in the future the key factor determining the short run responses of the home country is the extent to which it will match its government spending with a neighbor country s policy which is associated with the relative difference between the marginal utility of consumption and that of home public capital affected by an increase in international public goods

intertemporal labor supply and the distribution of family income the earnings of married women have a more equalizing effect on the distribution of lifetime family earnings or the expected present value of earnings than on the distribution of annual family earnings using panel study of income dynamics longitudinal data the intertemporal variability of wives labor supply causes the correlation between the lifetime earnings of husbands and wives to weaken relative to the correlation between their annual incomes resulting in lower lifetime inequality the inequality of potential income full employment earnings is found to be much greater for lifetime earnings than average annual earnings based on alternative endogenous wage hours models copyright 1989 by mit press

tax transfer policies and the voluntary provision of public goods abstract the purpose of this paper is twofold first it extends previous models of non cooperative private funding of pure public goods by allowing both for distortionary taxation of private goods and for subsidies based on contributions to the public goods second it clarifies the type of behavioral and informational assumptions which are needed to insure neutrality of both lump sum and distortionary policies the analysis is developed in the context of fiscal federalism

strategic risk taking when there is a public good to be provided privately abstract we describe a situation where a risk averse individual has a preference for risk taking in the literature we find this strategic risk behaviour in an altruistic framework where the individual actually benefits from his noninsurance only in the loss outcome in our model all agents are perfectly selfish when a public good is to be provided privately after the insurance decision the player facing greater uncertainty can expect an income transfer from the other individuals through the commitments to the public good this ex ante income transfer is not conditional on the loss

pure public goods versus commons benefit cost duality sandler and arce 1 pure public goods versus commons benefit cost duality by todd sandler school of international relations university of southern california von kleinsmid center 330 los angeles ca 90089 0043 tsandler usc edu 213 740 9695 213 742 0281 fax and daniel g arce m department of economics rhodes college 2000 n parkway memphis tn 38112 1690 arce rhodes edu 901 843 3121 901 843 3736 fax final revision november 2002 sandler is the robert r and katheryn a dockson professor of international relations economics university of southern california and arce is the robert d mccallum distinguished professor of economics business rhodes college sandler s and arce s research was funded through the dockson and mccallum endowments respectively we have profited from the helpful comments of two anonymous referees

why do only the g7 2 countries among united nations members discuss about international public goods a simulation study abstractthis article investigates why only the group of 7 plus china and russia g7 2 countries among 194 united nations members discuss about international public goods by simulating the heterogeneity of income prices and preference parameters on the total provisions and the number of free riders we find that the number of contributors for international public goods is 15 under the 194 member countries while the others are free riders in addition the contributors are the top 15 powerful countries with largest dropout value over the world then the discussion with only 15 countries for public goods is meaningful as large as the heterogeneity of parameters is the number of contributors becomes closer to g7 2

the uniqueness of nash equilibrium in the private provision of public goods abstract this note provides an alternative elementary proof of bergstrom blume and varian s well known result on the uniqueness of nash equilibrium in the private provision of a public good when all goods are normal

weakest link public goods giving in kind or transferring money abstract this paper extends the analysis of weakest link public goods whose level equals the smallest of the agents provision levels by permitting an agent either to increase one s own provision or else augment both one s own provision and that of the other agent s nash equilibria may be either symmetric with agents matching one another s provision or else asymmetric with an in kind transfer by one agent to another an equilibrium with cash transfers but no in kind transfers may be pareto superior to one with only in kind transfers if agents differ in their efficiency then in kind transfers by the low cost agent may dominate a cash transfer the possibility of pareto improving transfers is enhanced as the number of agents increases

the strategic dimension of financing global public goods abstract one challenge in addressing transboundary problems such as climate change is the incentive to free ride transfers from multilateral compensation funds are often used to counteract such incentives albeit with varying success we examine how such funds can change the incentive to free ride in a global public goods game in our game self interested countries choose their own preferred course deciding their voluntary public good provision whether to join a fund that offers compensation for providing the public good and the volume of compensatory payments we show that i total public good provision is higher when those contributing are given more compensation and ii non participation in the fund can be punished if the remaining members decrease their public good provision sufficiently we then examine three specific fund designs in the first the compensation paid to each country is equal to the percentage of above average total costs for public goods provision this design is best able to deter free riding and can establish the social optimum as the equilibrium in the second the compensation paid to each country is a function of the marginal cost of their public good provision here there are significant incentives to free ride in the third case the monetary resources provided by the fund are fixed a design frequently encountered in international funds this design is the one least able to deter free riding

futures trading and the welfare evaluation of commodity price stabilisation it is notorious that commodity prices are volatile and there is a substantial literature on the wisdom of complete or partial elimination of this volatility the modern academic literature starts from waugh i944 who argued that consumers benefit from price volatility since they can take advantage of low prices by increasing consumption and oi i96i who argued the parallel proposition for producers massell i969 noting that waugh had assumed supply side disturbances whilst oi had assumed demand side disturbances provided an integrated model in the same spirit samuelson i972 showed that notwithstanding the contributions of waugh and oi it will not be beneficial within a standard competitive market clearing model to destabilise prices the literature is surveyed in turnovsky i978 this raises the question of whether stabilisation can be justified in the context of a competitive free market in which private agents make optimal stockholding decisions wright and williams i982 a number of authors see for example johnson i967 ch 5 have suggested that the fundamental theorem of welfare economics rules out such intervention standard arguments that would qualify this conclusion are superior governmental access to capital markets or information and the assertion that stabilisation may result in a favourable redistribution of income newbery and stiglitz i98i have stressed the rather more powerful argument that application of the fundamental theorem of welfare economics in an uncertain and explicitly intertemporal context requires the existence of a complete set of forward and contingent contracts markets futures or forward markets do exist for delivery of many important primary commodities at near dates but this is far from sufficient to satisfy the prerequisites of the theorem since agents will use those markets which do exist as substitutes for those that are absent since for example moral hazard considerations prevent widespread trading of crop insurance contracts farmers are obliged to obtain insurance against poor crops through the imperfect substitute of hedging on futures markets the limited range of futures and contingent claims markets invalidates the argument that intervention can never be justified in welfare terms but at the same time this only establishes the possibility of a justification for intervention a specific case must be made for each market futures trading allows market transactors to fix their prices in advance of delivery for example a farmer may completely hedge by selling his entire

successful leadership in global public good provision incorporating behavioural approaches in the standard model of voluntary public good provision and other game theoretic models climate friendly leadership of a country is not successful a unilateral increase of this country s greenhouse gas abatement measures i e contributions to the global public good of climate protection will not lead to a positive reaction by the other countries but instead trigger a reduction of their abatement efforts and thus a crowding out effect in this paper it is shown how this undesired consequence need no longer occur when elements of behavioral economics are incorporated in the otherwise standard model of public good provision in particular strategic complementarities between the public good contribution of the leading country and those of the follower may result either if the follower has specific non egoistic or other regarding preferences or if the leader s contribution positively affects the follower s beliefs i e his conjectural variations about the leader s behaviour

law property and marital dissolution this paper challenges the view that legal rights are not important in affecting whether people divorce but it puts as much emphasis on property rights given for example by the law on alimony as on dissolution rights in the united states the paper sets out two stylised models of marriage and examines the consequences of fuller compensation for economic sacrifices made during marriage if the dominant economic issue in a marriage is who undertakes household tasks then a law giving fuller compensation makes divorce more likely if the dominant issue is child custody divorce is less likely excerpt

consistent estimation of the impact of tax deductibility on the level of charitable contributions when charitable contributions are tax deductible the marginal price of charitable giving in other consumption foregone per dollar of contributions is generally less than unity further if the income tax schedule is a progressive step function the marginal price of contributions is generally a rising step function of the level of contributions the problem of estimating a contributions demand function for individuals is therefore complicated by the spurious correlation between the level of contributions and the observed marginal price we take this econometric problem into account in estimating a contributions demand function using data from the 1972 73 consumer expenditure survey after comparing our results with those of estimation techniques used by other authors we provide evidence on the impacts of alternative tax policies on charitable giving using our estimates of the model parameters

aggregative environmental games this paper expounds a new approach to the analysis of public good and open access resource models developed in a series of recent papers by cornes and hartley and considers the applicability of this approach to modeling current environmental problems i look at a number of possible extensions of the framework survey recent applications to environmental problems and suggest further possible lines of enquiry

annual inequality and lifetime inequality an estimator of inequality in lifetime incomes is derived it can be computed for a population from the distribution of incomes in one year as a result the estimates are as easily calculated as measurements of annual inequality but can be used as measurements of lifetime inequality estimates from this measure and two others have been computed for selected years since 1947 the results are compared by their implications for the level and trend of inequality in the united states

consumer s surplus and price uncertainty this paper investigates the conditions under which expected equivalent variation provides a correct ranking of stabilized and uncertain price situations expected equivalent variation can be recovered from ordinal preferences whereas ex ante equivalent variation requires additional information regarding con sumer attitudes toward income risk the two measures are equal for income risk neutral consumers more important for applied welfare analysis where income risk aversion is presumed expected equivalent variation provides a lower bound for ex ante equivalent variation these two features of expected equivalent variation commend it as a viable welfare measure for applied work copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a note on environmental awareness and cross border pollution considering a nash equilibrium in which a developed country chooses the amount of foreign aid and a developing country sets the emission tax rate and the proportion of the received aid allocated to public abatement of pollution it is shown that an increase in the recipient country s environmental awareness will reduce the level of cross border pollution and benefits the donor though its foreign aid is increased

on a non cooperative theory of technology transfer abstract this paper shows that it might be profitable for a firm with advanced technology to sell the knowledge to a competing firm with less efficient technology and still remain in the business a non corperative equilibrium with technology transfer may pareto dominate the initial equilibrium without technology transfer in this paper it is shown that technology agreement is likely to occur between firms which are reasonably close in terms of their initial technologies such an equilibrium is an interesting possibility in the absence of credibly sustainable collusive outcomes

uniqueness of nash equilibrium in private provision of public goods an improved proof our 1986 paper private provision of public goods presents a theorem on the uniqueness of nash equilibrium in the private provision of public goods richard hirth of the university of pennsylvania and clive fraser of warwick have independently suggested that although our theorem is correct our proof is incorrect each writer proposes an alternative method of proof for the theorem with characteristic charity to our own deficiencies we prefer to view our earlier proof as unduly opaque rather than wrong whichever view one takes a more transparent proof is called for the proof presented here follows the same outline as our 1986 proof but explains a step of the argument that was far from obvious in the original proof this proof uses the notation of the 1986 paper and refers to facts that are proved there

united nations global compact the promise performance gap the united nations global compact ungc was created in 2000 to leverage un prestige and induce corporations to embrace 10 principles incorporating values of environmental sustainability protection of human rights fair treatment of workers and elimination of bribery and corruption we review and analyze the gc s activities and impact in enhancing corporate social responsibility since inception first we propose an analytical framework which allows us to assess the qualities of the ungc and its principles in the context of external and internal elements that influence code effectiveness and implementation second we analyze ungc performance in encouraging companies to become signatory members and bring about demonstrable change in corporate csr sustainability activities in its 10 year report ungc has proclaimed growth in both membership and program activity however all credible and publicly available data and documentation conclusively demonstrate that the ungc has failed to induce its signatory companies to enhance their csr efforts and integrate the 10 principles in their policies and operations the result has been a loss of public trust and support of ungc from important constituencies among civil society organizations and those individuals and groups adversely impacted by corporate activities and resultant negative externalities this diminished credibility has also made ungc largely dependent on the corporate sector for its very survival we conclude that this dependence has in turn impaired and would continue to hinder ungc s ability to fulfill its mission such an outcome raises serious questions as to the viability usefulness and continued existence of ungc

interior matching equilibria in a public good economy an aggregative game approach abstract if the equilibrium generated by a matching mechanism is to be the desired pareto optimal outcome it is necessary for every player to be at an interior solution at that equilibrium using the aggregative game approach developed by cornes and hartley 2003 2007 this paper analyzes the conditions under which matching mechanisms in a public good economy lead to interior matching equilibria at which all agents make strictly positive flat contributions to the public good in particular we show that the distribution of income among the agents is crucial for both the existence of interior matching equilibria and warr neutrality in the case of matching

impure public goods and transfers in a three agent model abstract this paper extends previous models of non cooperative private funding of pure public goods by allowing for impure public goods the analysis is developed in the context of international public goods under certain conditions the consequences of transfers on utility are paradoxical if the preferences are divergent a country may gain by giving a transfer the receiver may lose and these two phenomena may appear at the same time

uncertainty price stabilization and welfare foreign price instability can significantly affect the welfare of an open economy relying heavily on foreign trade for instance japan is vulnerable to oil price increases because 99 percent of its oil is imported similarly grain producers of many countries have advocated price stabilization and received protection from the risk of low foreign prices primary exporters are also concerned about foreign price instability because it contributes to export earnings instability recently itagaki 4 and beladi and samanta 1 investigated the issue of optimal tariff when international trade is subject to price instability their analyses suggest that trade restrictions can improve the welfare of an open economy when international trade is carried out under price uncertainty although the literature on price stabilization policies for a closed economy is extensive the implications of stabilization policies on an open economy facing foreign price instability have received little attention this paper investigates whether a domestic price stabilization policy can improve the welfare of an open economy facing foreign price instability the welfare effects of price stabilization on a closed economy were investigated by waugh 12 oi 8 massell 6 and newbery and stiglitz 7 1 among the contributions in this field gilbert s 3 work on the consequences of international price stabilization for an open economy represents an important advance over models using aggregate social surplus using approximations of welfare gains gilbert suggested that a risk averse country would benefit if the world price of a commodity were stabilized at the pre stabilization mean by an international intervention authority since a small country is a price taker it cannot neutralize price instability originating in the world market what is the optimal policy for a small open economy facing foreign price instability despite its well known optimality free trade is rarely practiced in small countries as evidenced by the common agricultural policy of the european economic community eec

older or wealthier the impact of age adjustment on wealth inequality differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality however as this finding relies on cross sectional data a concern is that older is confused with wealthier we propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross sections which eliminates wealth inequality due to age yet preserves inequality arising from other factors using a new cross country comparable database we examine the impact of age adjustments on wealth inequality across countries and over time we find that the most widely used method yields a substantially different picture of age adjusted wealth inequality than our method 2011 the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

who are the members of the international club this article proposes pragmatic methods that incorporate recent contributions to public good theory to identify the members of the international club and how they select new members this article also suggests simple applications to the recent problems in international clubs such as the euro and nato

what is benefit taxation abstract benefit taxation is a system in which individuals are taxed according to the benefits they receive from public expenditures this paper describes an alternative to the standard lindahl method of determining the distribution of individual benefits from government provided public goods and uses this alternative to calculate benefit taxes this alternative avoids some of the paradoxial features of lindahl pricing and generates outcomes in which all consumers benefit from reduced costs of providing public goods an illustrative calculation shows that benefit taxes defined in this way may be quite regressive

uncertainty domestic distortions and the optimal tariff a number of studies have appeared in recent years incorporating uncertainty in a two sector general equilibrium model of trade particularly noteworthy are the contributions by batra 1 and ingene and yu 4 283 95 among others 3 6 326 31 the literature on the optimal trade policies under domestic factor market distortion in a non stochastic framework is also vast 8 but there has not been any attempt to formulate optimal tariff policy in a stochastic model of international trade characterized by uncertain relative price and factor market distortion recently itagaki 5 292 97 has analyzed the issue of optimal tariff under relative price uncertainty but without any domestic distortions in this context he has shown that for a small open economy facing uncertain terms of trade the optimal tariff is not zero however the analysis of optimal trade policies under domestic distortion along with uncertain terms of trade is conspicuously absent this paper extends their analysis and derives a generalized formula for the optimal tariff in such an economy where a tariff is considered as the only available trade policy a thorough understanding of the optimal trade policies in the presence of domestic factor market distortion and uncertain terms of trade will be useful for many ldc s plagued by growing distortions in this paper we assume that producers maximize their profits and consumers maximize their utility after the import tariff is levied by the policymakers and both international and domestic prices have been observed and the policymakers take into account the behavior of the producers and consumers when they are choosing the optimal tariff rate in the next section the model is presented then we derive the optimal tariff formula for the economy with uncertain terms of trade in the presence of domestic factor market distortions section iii contains a summary and some concluding remarks

the voluntary provision of a public good in an international commons in a global commons countries contribute to global welfare by limiting the environmental damage they do assuming this to be so we examine the characteristics of equilibrium without international coordination with particular focus on how control of damaging emissions relates to country size there is some association between size and burden sharing with larger countries doing more to control emissions but there remain important differences between this and a conventional subscription public good dans un domaine global en propriete commune des pays contribuent au bien etre global en limitant le dommage environnemental qu ils causent ceci etant acquis on examine les caracteristiques d un equilibre sans coordination internationale avec une attention particuliere a la question de savoir comment le controle des emissions dommageables est reliea la taille du pays il y a une certaine association entre la taille du pays et le partage du fardeau de la charge pour le domaine en propriete commune les plus grands pays faisant plus pour controler les emissions mais il existe des differences importantes entre cet arrangement et un bien public conventionnel par souscription

strategic information acquisition and the mitigation of global warming abstract we consider the strategic role of uncertainty and information acquisition for the mitigation of global warming before the countries decide on their contribution to a mitigation of global warming they may invest in information about the country specific benefit of reductions of the emissions of greenhouse gases we show that information acquisition has a substantial strategic value countries may prefer not to learn their benefit of climate protection even if information acquisition does not involve a direct cost this strategic information choice may further decrease the efficiency of the public good provision

theoretical incentive properties of contingent valuation questions do they matter in the field abstract green et al 1998 green d jacowitz k e kahneman d mcfadden d 1998 referendum contigent valuation anchoring and willingness to pay for public goods resource and energy economics 20 2 85 116 show theoretically that stated preference questions about public services can be framed in such ways that if the subjects accept the frame the payoff maximizing behavior will be to answer truthfully one key element of such a theoretically incentive compatible framing is that the hypothetical decision rule specified in the survey instrument is understood to be a majority rule rather than the efficiency rule typically used in cost benefit analysis we conducted field experiments in germany and switzerland to test if a referendum framing as suggested by green et al is effective in reducing strategic misrepresentation in a contingent valuation setting we did not find the expected effects of the framing treatments on stated willingness to pay or on individuals stated beliefs about the social choice context the results do not support hopes that a theoretically incentive compatible framing could be purposefully used to invoke the specific beliefs about the linkage between responses and policy implementation that would make stated preference questions incentive compatible

commodity price stabilization in a peasant economy the peasant household s preferences for price stabilization are shown to depend on observable parameters describing consumption and production decisions a measure of willingness to pay is obtained for the case where the household is engaged in both the production and the consumption of the commodity in question for plausible parameter values it appears likely that the peasant household will prefer price stabilization and that stabilization of the producer price alone dominates complete stabilization

the incentives for north south transfer of climate mitigation technologies with trade in polluting goods the need to transfer climate mitigation technologies towards the developing world has been acknowledged since the beginning of climate negotiations little progress has however been made as shown by article 10 of the paris agreement one reason is that these technologies could become vital assets to compete on global markets this paper presents a partial equilibrium model with two regions the north and the south and imperfect competition in the international polluting goods market to analyze the north s incentives to accept technology transfer results crucially depend on the existence of environmental cooperation when both northern and southern governments set emission quotas non cooperatively inducing fewer global emissions is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the north to accept the transfer in contrast when governments set quotas cooperatively the north has no incentive to share its technology either before or after the agreement technology transfer commitments may be included in the agreement but with no effect on global emissions and global surplus the only impacts are distributional technology transfers and side payments may be substitute instruments

effects of technology transfers on the provision of public goods in this paper we examine the viability ofcooperative policies oriented to the resolution oftransboundary pollution problems using the theory ofprivate provision of public goods in a two countrymodel we analyze the effects on economic welfare ofvoluntary technological transfers oriented to reducingthe emission of pollutants

international public goods and contribution productivity differentials abstract this paper investigates the impacts of productivity differentials in contributing to the public good on national welfare in the context of non cooperative voluntary provision of a pure public good a country with high productivity does not necessarily enjoy high welfare subsidizing the other country in a contribution game may lead to a strong paradoxical result while a lump sum transfer will lead to a weak paradoxical result we also explore the relationship between the price of the public good and the size of an open club in a multi club model

international aid from the recipient perspective public or private good input assistance abstractthis article proposes a theoretical model from the recipient perspective that considers what type of assistance a donor country should provide public good assistance or private good assistance we investigate the effects of migration and free riders under both types of assistance we empirically apply this model to the rapidly growing economies and a large official development assistance disbursement for east asia

unconditional aid and green growth abstract environmentally motivated aid can help developing countries to achieve economic growth while mitigating the impact on emission levels we argue that the usual practice of giving aid conditionally is not effective and we therefore study aid that is given unconditionally our framework is a differential open loop stackelberg game between a fully developed leader country and a developing follower country the leader chooses the amount of mitigation aid given to the follower which the follower either consumes or invests in either costly non polluting capital or cheap high emission capital we show that giving aid conditionally is only rarely effective and if so is based on a forced intertemporal savings effect in all other cases it is ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst moreover we find that the leader gives unconditional mitigation aid only when sufficiently rich or when caring sufficiently about environmental quality if unconditional aid is given in steady state it decreases the steady state level of high emission capital and capital investments in the recipient country as well as the global pollution stock but it has no effect on the levels of non polluting capital and non polluting investments transitional aid accelerates the economic growth of the follower moreover we find that the increase in growth takes place in the non polluting sector

a finnish soviet acid rain game noncooperative equilibria cost efficiency and sulfur agreements abstract this study analyzes cost effectiveness in environmental cooperation between finland and the soviet union it is assumed that the aim of both countries is to attain a given target deposition level at minimum possible sulfur abatement costs cost effective cooperation is compared to noncooperative equilibrium and to the agreement on sulfur emissions between these two countries it is shown that the agreement is not cost effective implies higher abatement costs than under noncooperation and is strategically unstable however the cost differences and the incentives to cheat are small the computations reveal that the main source of potential cooperation benefits is not asymmetrical emission transportation or differences in abatement costs but rather different target deposition levels for finland and the soviet union

pareto optimal redistribution and private charity abstract when private charity exists and is motivated by utility interdependence a non pareto optimal outcome the free rider problem typically arises nevertheless incremental fiscal redistribution cannot achieve a paretian welfare improvement so long as private charity continues at positive levels donors respond to incremental fiscal redistribution by reducing their voluntary contributions by exactly a dollar for every dollar transferred in this way no net transfer is achieved unless incremental fiscal redistribution is pursued to the point where private contributions have been driven to zero alternatively a net transfer may be achieved by fiscal measures which affect donors marginal incentives to donate