the limits of explanation testing the internalization theory of the multinationial enterprise the paper explores the difficulties of testing the internalization approach in the modern theory of the multinational enterprise the structure of the theory is elaborated and the conclusion drawn that testing cannot occur at the most general theoretical level but that the theory requires careful restricting assumptions to be placed on it to allow rigorous testing several empirical circumstances would constitute refutation if they could be shown to hold however the use of unconventional cases or outliers does not constitute disproof more rigour is required in formulating and testing the theory but the current verdict on the theory must be not disproven

new technology adoption in us telecommunications the role of competitive pressures and firm level inducements in this study we examine the reasons for the differential adoption levels of a new technology that of electronic switching across firms in the us telecommunications industry using theoretical postulates from the market structure inducements approach to firm behavior and the behavioral theory of the firm we propose that the incentives to adopt a new technology are positively related to the competitive pressures faced by a firm in its micro market negatively related to past levels of performance and positively related to slack availability our sample consists of 40 of the largest firms in the industry we use firm level data collected for the years 1973 1978 1981 1984 and 1987 and the results indicate strong support for our proposition our findings show that in general market effects via the mechanism of competitive pressures generated are strong in explaining inter firm variations in levels of technology adoption in the period since moves to deregulate the industry began however the firm level effects are equally strong if not stronger in explaining such variations both in the period leading up to the commencement of deregulatory moves and also immediately thereafter

on the practical limits to substitution abstract this paper considers the arguments for weak vs strong sustainability the weak sustainability position held by many mainstream neoclassical economists such as solow and weitzman is that almost all kinds of natural capital can be substituted by man made capital the contrary position known as strong sustainability holds that many of the most fundamental services provided by nature cannot be replaced by services produced by humans or man made systems the paper discusses the limits of substitution from a physical point of view it concludes that while there is considerable scope for substitution in some domains the limits to substitutability in the medium term at least are real and important in effect the paper supports the strong sustainability position

a theory of voting equilibria a voting equilibrium arises when the voters in an electorate acting in accordance with both their preferences for the candidates and their perceptions of the relative chances of various pairs of candidates being in contention for victory generate an election result that justifies their perceptions voting equilibria always exist and the set of equilibria can vary substantially with the choice of voting system we compare equilibria under the plurality rule approval voting and the borda system we consider a candidate positioning game and find that the plurality rule imposes little restriction on the position of the winning candidate in three candidate races while approval voting leads to a winner positioned at the median of the voter distribution we contrast campaign activities intended to influence voter preferences with activities meant to influence only perceptions of candidate viability

tourism demand forecasting models choice of appropriate variable to represent tourists cost of living abstract price is generally regarded as a major determinant of demand tourism has two price elements the cost of travel to the destination and the cost of living for tourists in the destination previous studies where econometric forecasting models have been developed for international tourism demand usually take the consumer price index in a country to be a proxy for the cost of tourism in that country owing to lack of appropriate data this article attempts to evaluate the performance of proxy variables compared with a specific tourists cost of living variable within the context of tourism demand forecasting models

the organizational foundations of x inefficiency a game theoretic interpretation of argyris model of organizational learning abstract this paper addresses the issue why does x inefficiency persist in many organizations when its existence nature and causes are known and when everyone stands to gain from correcting the errors that cause it and why are some organizations able to learn while others appear not to we construct a model of persisting x inefficiency based on argyris concepts of organizational learning it is argued that organizations succeed in eliminating x inefficiency by achieving a critical mass of individuals willing to admit and correct error once achieved this critical mass may lead to a new stable and efficient equilibrium

is neoclassical microeconomics formally valid an approach based on an analogy with equilibrium thermodynamics abstract the relation between thermodynamics and economics is a paramount issue in ecological economics two different levels can be distinguished when discussing it formal and substantive at the formal level a mathematical framework is used to describe both thermodynamic and economic systems at the substantive level thermodynamic laws are applied to economic processes in ecological economics there is a widespread claim that neoclassical economics has the same mathematical formulation as classical mechanics and is therefore fundamentally flawed because 1 utility does not obey a conservation law as energy does 2 an equilibrium theory cannot be used to study irreversible processes here we show that neoclassical economics is based on a wrong formulation of classical mechanics being in fact formally analogous to equilibrium thermodynamics the similarity between both formalisms namely that they are both cases of constrained optimisation is easily perceived when thermodynamics is looked upon using the tisza callen axiomatisation in this paper we take the formal analogy between equilibrium thermodynamics and economic systems far enough to answer the formal criticisms proving that the formalism of neoclassical economics has irreversibility embedded in it however the formal similarity between equilibrium thermodynamics and neoclassical microeconomics does not mean that economic models are in accordance with mass energy and entropy balance equations in fact neoclassical theory suffers from flaws in the substantive integration with thermodynamic laws as has already been fully demonstrated by valuable work done by ecological economists in this field

remodeling international tourism demand old theory and new evidence abstract the purpose of this study is to advance the tourism demand theory by excluding simultaneous effects of exchange rates and prices in empirical models formulating an alternative pricing modus operandi consistent with recent research in the area and demonstrating the efficacy of the use of an industrial production index ipi as a proxy for income a panel fully modified ordinary least squares fmols method is employed to estimate the inbound tourism demand for turkey study findings suggest that the inclusion of exchange rates and prices as mutually exclusive components can be misleading the ipi is not a good proxy for income and country specific coefficients need to be analyzed to accurately explain determinants of tourism demand for countries in the panel

when are plurality rule voting games dominance solvable this paper studies the dominance solvability by iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies of plurality rule voting games for any number of alternatives and at least four voters we find sufficient conditions for the game to be dominance solvable ds and not to be ds these conditions can be stated in terms of only one aspect of the game the largest proportion of voters who agree on which alternative is worst in a sequence of subsets of the original set of alternatives when the number of voters is large almost all games can be classified as either ds or not ds when the electorate is sufficiently replicated then if the game is ds a condorcet winner always exists and the outcome is the condorcet winner

sustainability and biophysics basis of technical and economic processes a survey of the reconciliation by thermodynamics abstract in spite of the existence of a generalized debate about sustainable development the natural constraints imposed by the irreversibility nature of technical and economic transformations are normally less discussed the second law of thermodynamics entropy law reveals the unidirectional and irreversible aspect of such transformations and it can be used as an auxiliary tool to deal with sustainability assessment the exergy a concept derived from entropy can offer qualitative measurements of resources depletion and environmental impact not covered by mass or energy this opens opportunities to enrich the sustainability discussion the multiple interactions among the ecosystem the economic environment and the technical level are highlighted along with discussions about how the entropy concept has improved the description of the three levels the aim of this paper is to review the environmental sustainability concept from the perspective of entropy law offering a survey of relevant applications of exergy available in literature

micro equity for sustainable development selection monitoring and exit strategies of micro angels abstract sustainable development requires balancing environmental social and financial concerns this requires investors to select and monitor entrepreneurs who would balance these triple concerns at the same time there has been considerable attention to small is beautiful and micro investors have stepped in to look for such eco entrepreneurs to the classical institutional logic of economic returns they add the logic of social returns as well as the logic of environmental and local safeguards this study looks at investment clubs in france which have been coping with this balance of people planet and profitability for the last three decades we study their preferences in the selection process for investment projects in the entrepreneurs monitoring process as well as their exit strategies using principal components analysis we find that a large number of selection criteria can be regrouped into underlying factors that take into account two out of the three major dimensions of sustainable development at a time we find that four factors lie beneath the criteria used by the micro angels in the monitoring process we have also been able to establish a one to one correspondence between four of the six major exit strategies and four selection factors suggesting a prior relationship between selection process criteria and preferred exit strategies

a piecewise linear approach to modeling and forecasting demand for macau tourism abstract in this paper we construct and use a piecewise linear method to model and forecast on a monthly basis the demand for macau tourism data over the period january 1991 december 2005 and a seasonally adjusted series for tourism demand are used the study examines 4 forecasting horizons ranging from 6 to 24 months in advance mean absolute percentage errors and root mean square errors are adopted as criteria for evaluating the accuracy of the forecasting exercises finally the forecasts of piecewise linear model are compared with those of autoregressive trend model seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average and its arch rival fractionally integrated autoregressive moving average models the piecewise linear model is more accurate than the three benchmark models tested and the improvement is practically significant

a reexamination of the role of thermodynamics for environmental economics abstract as the discussion about the role of thermodynamics in environmental economics has not led to a conclusion yet a more fundamental approach seems to be necessary which also takes into consideration the relationship between economics and the natural sciences in general to this end value theory is chosen as a starting point because it is the centerpiece of every economic theory it is shown that neoclassical environmental economics suffers from serious deficiencies because of its value concept heedlessly copied from classical mechanics thermodynamics can be expected to be helpful to redress these defects because the economy can be thought of as a dissipative structure dependent on its environment the obvious way to integrate thermodynamics consists in the formulation of thermodynamic constraints to complement neoclassical environmental economics but this approach remains unsatisfactory because the neoclassical mechanical hardcore is incompatible with the entropy law and its implications evidently the neoclassical paradigm and its value concept have to be given up but the alternative of the energy theory of value must be rejected because its determinism cannot be reconciled with the richness of human behaviour as thermodynamic analogies offer no solution either there is a dilemma between the necessity and the apparent impossibility of adequately integrating thermodynamic concepts it turns out that a normative inconsistency is responsible which is due to the demand for intergenerational justice therefore the integration of thermodynamics into environmental economics hinges on a meta economic value decision if sustainability is adopted as the guiding principle the insights of thermodynamics call for a macro economic environmental policy setting absolute limits to the economy but this macro policy is incompatible with neoclassical economics so that a social reconstruction of economics based on a social theory of value becomes necessary in sum thermodynamics is important for environmental economics besides fulfilling a general heuristic function it also fulfils a decisive conceptual and an analytical function insofar as it helps to justify sustainability and to operationalize macro economic environmental policy

cointegration analysis of quarterly tourism demand by hong kong and singapore for australia hong kong and singapore are two of the most important and fastest growing markets for tourists to australia the purpose of this paper is to investigate movements in the long run demand for tourist travel by these two origin countries for australia some of the leading macroeconomic variables examined to explain tourism demand are incomes in hong kong and singapore tourism prices in australia and transportation costs and exchange rates between the two countries and australia seasonally unadjusted quarterly data are used for hong kong for the period 1975 1 1996 4 and for 1980 4 1996 4 for singapore several proxy variables are used for the incomes of tourists from hong kong and singapore to explain quarterly tourist arrivals to australia the augmented dickey fuller test for unit roots is examined in the univariate framework and johansen s maximum likelihood procedure is used to test for cointegration and to estimate the number of cointegrating vectors error correction models are estimated to exp

tourism demand modelling and forecasting a review of recent research abstract this paper reviews the published studies on tourism demand modelling and forecasting since 2000 one of the key findings of this review is that the methods used in analysing and forecasting the demand for tourism have been more diverse than those identified by other review articles in addition to the most popular time series and econometric models a number of new techniques have emerged in the literature however as far as the forecasting accuracy is concerned the study shows that there is no single model that consistently outperforms other models in all situations furthermore this study identifies some new research directions which include improving the forecasting accuracy through forecast combination integrating both qualitative and quantitative forecasting approaches tourism cycles and seasonality analysis events impact assessment and risk forecasting

on the life cycle metaphor where ecology and economics diverge abstract there is an attractive analogy between nature and industry based on the similarity of natural functions and certain industrial activities for instance animals ingest eat and digest food finally there are metabolic wastes firms are analogous to organisms in several respects insofar as they consume material resources process digest them and produce output products and excrete wastes firms like organisms also compete with each other for resources curiously enough one of the apparent differences between natural and man made systems is actually not one like the industrial system the natural system does not recycle everything however there are at least four real and important differences between the biosphere ecology and the technosphere economy first there is no primary producer in the economic system analogous to what photosynthesizers play in the biosphere inputs to the economy are mostly natural resources capital services and labor second in the economic system output is a heterogeneous mix of manufactured products and services labor in economics is an input but not an output the economic system recycles much less than the ecological system but utilizes a far greater suite of elements in the biosphere there are no products as such growth is tantamount to accumulation of embodied solar exergy in the form of cellulose sugars lipids and proteins the biosphere produces only wastes and more of itself plus dead matter third in the biosphere there are no markets there is no medium of exchange like money and there is nothing analogous to paid labor exchanges are involuntary i e by predation parasitism or theft fourth evolution in nature is driven by differentiation by random mutations of the genome and darwinian selection based on reproductive success in economics differentiation is based on discovery invention and innovation by intelligent economic agents and selection is based on competition at the individual or firm level either way the economic system is not closely analogous to an ecosystem attempts to use ecological concepts in an economic context are often misleading and unjustified the paper discusses the implications of the eco eco mismatch for resource accounting and life cycle analysis

tourism in the balearic islands a dynamic model for international demand using panel data abstract the balearic islands are one of the most important tourist destinations in the mediterranean sea the tourism sector dominates the economic activity of the islands the purpose of this study is to identify and measure the impact of the main determinants of the inbound international tourism flows the annual panel data set includes the number of arrivals from the 14 most important generating countries during the period 1991 2003 and a number of possible explanatory variables taking into account the changing structure of consumer preferences a dynamic model is estimated the estimated coefficient for the lagged dependent variable may be reflecting the importance of consumer loyalty to the destination as a determinant of tourism demand the results suggest that the demand is heavily dependent on the evolution of economic activity in each of the origin countries and on the relative cost of living of tourists in the destination this study also suggests that diversification of promotion and provision of high quality services are some recommended measures of tourism policy

the use of cpi for tourism prices in demand modelling abstract the non fare components or tourism prices are often proxied by consumer price indices cpi in tourism demand models the argument for this is that tourism prices move in close concert with general consumer prices it is not immediately obvious that this is true as tourist spending differs from general consumer spending this paper investigates the evidence for the use of cpi for tourism prices employing a variety of methods and data for 10 important tourist destinations price series for major tourist expenditure items were estimated these were found with a few exceptions to correlate very highly with the destination s cpi the high correlations persisted even after linear time trend effects were removed from the series in the case of australia detailed data on tourist origins numbers spending breakdowns and on price changes were used to derive sound tourism price indices for major origins of tourists to australia the tourism price series were found to correlate very highly with the australian cpi the results confirm that it is reasonable to use cpi as a proxy for tourism prices in demand models however interpretation of the estimated coefficient is problematical

the failure of the profit motive e f schumacher used the phrase the failure of the modern experiment by modern experiment he meant two interrelated things in its 300 year or so duration modernity occupies an eye blink of time in the vast span of millennia of human history secondly it is an experiment because this is the first time in this vast history that a society attempted to live without motives and principles that were higher than the material or economic that is without some form of the transcendental schumacher proposed that this experiment is a failure because in its brief history modern society is well on its way to destroying both the natural and the social world the absence of higher motives or principles means that another organizing and motivational principle takes its place and that this principle becomes the core characteristic of modern society the thesis is advanced here that this principle is the profit motive both as a personal psychology and as an economic institution in other words the absence of the transcendental means the presence of the profit motive and the failure of modern society means the failure of the profit motive since the profit motive means the continuous expansion of economic wealth a society based on the profit motive must by necessity be a society committed to perpetual economic growth modern society then present us with a yield equation of terms self interest profit motive growth many writers advocating sustainability still endorse this equation and expect the profit motive with proper manipulation to yield a sustainable society they do not recognize that traditional economic motivation must be replaced by something else if this new sustainable economic world is to come into being this article makes the claim that the replacement of the profit motive does not require a change in human nature but a restoration of human nature in this restoration the profit motive will be replaced by a concern for the common good which can be seen as a practical implementation of the transcendental as an illustration of how this can be brought about it is shown that the motivational principle of the common good can be instituted through two policies a maximum wage that is a ratio of the minimum wage and the statutory transformation of all companies into non profit then we have common good non profit sustainability

forecasting international tourist flows to macau abstract the vector autoregressive var modelling technique is used to forecast tourist flows to macau from eight major origin countries regions over the period 2003 2008 the existing literature shows that the var model is capable of producing accurate medium to long term forecasts and also separate forecasts of the explanatory variables are not required a further justification for using the var technique is that it permits an impulse response analysis to be performed in order to examine the ways in which the demand for macau tourism responds to the shocks in the economic variables within the var system the implications of this analysis are discussed the forecasts generated by the var models suggest that macau will face increasing tourism demand by residents from mainland china since the needs of chinese tourists tend to be different from those from other origin countries regions especially western countries the business sectors in macau need to pay considerable attention to catering for the needs of chinese tourists

perception judgment and motivation in manufacturing enterprises findings and preliminary hypotheses from in depth interviews abstract in depth interviews with decision makers in 113 well regarded small and medium size metalworking enterprises in argentina mexico and the united states suggest that such individuals often perceive market technological and public policy data in a highly imperfect manner and thus address themselves to problems which are variants sometimes remote variants of those actually confronted this leads to mistaken judgments and the use of judgmental heuristics to solve problems further biases results additional complications result from the fact that enterprise objectives vary from task to task these findings and preliminary hypotheses have major implications for the analysis of entrepreneurial behavior

the price competitive position of mediterranean countries in tourism evidence from the thomson brochure abstract tourism in the mediterranean region is highly dependent on the few large mass market tour operators situated in the north european tourist originating countries price competition is intense both between the tour operators and between the mediterranean countries themselves this paper uses the hotel package prices listed in the thomson summer and winter brochures to develop relative price indexes of each mediterranean country with respect to the mediterranean average indexes are developed in the 3 star 4 star 5 star 7 nights and 14 nights half board holiday packages the prices in the thomson brochure can be regarded as a unified internally consistent set of price data compiled by the largest uk tour operator and offered to uk tourists desiring a thomson summer holiday the change through time of the competitive relative price ranking of hotels regions and countries listed in the thomson brochure may be regarded as an important competitive indicator by industry operators and national policy makers concerned about tourism development

competition in tourism among the mediterranean countries this paper examines tourism competition among the mediterranean countries with particular emphasis on greece the estimated model includes as explanatory variables an income index a price index of the host country a price index of the competitors spain portugal and italy and exchange rate the results show that the main determinants of greece s tourism demand are both price indexes and exchange rate they also show that spain seems to be greece s main competitor

from microscopic to macroscopic theories entropic aspects of ecological and economic processes abstract the paper discusses the relevance of thermodynamics and related theories to ecological economics it is argued that it is not useful to apply the entropy term directly to economic processes physical entropy terms defined on a microscopic level for isolated systems are quite far from economic and ecological reality only theories that deal with the development of open systems far from thermodynamics equilibrium provide the important link between entropy and evolution towards higher complexity major new impulses for ecological economics come especially from evolutionary ecological theories these quite recent theoretical approaches incorporate the knowledge of far from equilibrium thermodynamics and explain dynamic changes in ecosystems on a macroscopic level from a thermodynamic perspective thermodynamic approaches provide a heuristic base for the analysis of economy environment interactions important implications of these approaches concern time irreversibility ecological efficiency and the interdependencies of environmental problems and evolution

towards a centerpiece for ecological economics this paper offers a hypothesis with cognitive claims for a social theory that is relevant for ecological economics as background a fable has ego metaphorically viewed as a horse driven to problematic extremes with the solution becoming an integration and balance of means with the other horse empathy the ego n empathy hypothesis starting with a new root metaphor which is extended with a pre analytic vision the main support for the cognitive claims is with a mathematical model and a metaeconomic analysis armed with both scope and precision along with an assortment of corroborative evidence from different disciplines the paper provides support for establishing a new center cognitive claims have ego and empathy apart giving value and possibilities and together as ego empathy giving an emergent value possibility this possibility suggests a rallying point for transdisciplinary work and a theoretical centerpiece for ecological economics suited as such the economic ego of homo economicus is distinguished from the political ego of sacro egoismo corroboration with adam smith s moral philosophy political economy is highlighted the individual person of an empirical ethics stemming from both self interest and fellow feeling is resurrected to support the hypothesis awareness emerges like a complementary consciousness an added value strikingly similar to smith s impartial spectator empirical demonstration concludes this integration of interests with a metaeconomic analysis for the case of soil and water conservation policy in the north american farming population taken together the root metaphor with reasonable scope and precision corroboration and demonstration help to structure the ego n empathy hypothesis d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

forecasting turkey s tourism revenues by armax model abstract an appropriate armax model is applied to forecast international tourism revenues for turkey for the post 2001 economic crisis international tourist arrivals were seasonally dependable on earlier arrivals at lagged periods one two and four this implies high levels of repeat visiting through this model the future international tourists arrivals are forecast for the 2002 2007 period to determine possible revenues for that same period international tourism revenues can be explained by the current arrivals a first order autoregressive and a stochastic moving average filter at lag 3 for the 1963 2001 sample period future values of revenues are forecasted based on this model the estimated models and their forecasts may be important for the economy of turkey which is currently recovering from the recent economic crisis once us dollars expenditure per tourist is forecasted the gap between forecasts and needs can be defined more rationally to overcome economic crises in short discrepancy analysis may aid marketing promotion to increase arrivals and tourist expenditures

selecting the condorcet winner single stage versus multi stage voting rules in this paper i study elections where voters are strategic i find that the commonly used voting rules such as plurality rule majority rule approval voting and single transferable vote do not always select the condorcet winner and suffer from multiple equilibria multi stage voting rules offer a way to get around this problem i introduce two voting rules multi stage runoff and the nominate two rule that select the condorcet winner as the unique equilibrium outcome under mild conditions i show that a third class of voting rules binary voting trees also select the condorcet winner

even the bad times are good a behavioural theory of transformation pressure a theory of transformation pressure was developed in sweden in the 1990s whichsuggested that structural changes rationalisations and innovations are stimulatedby pro t crises arising for example from negative demand shocks and restrictiveeconomic policies firms will then either become more creative or abandon anovercon dent risk prone and irrational status quo strategy a quali ed theorystates that productivity will increase as external pressures become stronger but onlyup to a certain point a competing quali ed theory maintains that productivity ismaximised if periods of hard pressure are succeeded by periods of nancial andtechnical consolidation scale advantages and weaker demands for defensive actionsto raise productivity key words transformation pressure x inef ciency productivity growth irratio nality economic psychologyjel classi cations d24 d81 l21 o31

determinants of demand for international tourist flows to turkey abstract this article describes the development and findings of a set of models used to identify the most important of the following selected variables influencing international tourist flows to turkey per capita income relative prices relative exchange rate promotional expenditure the turkish government has invested a substantial amount in promoting foreign tourism and special events eg political unrest the demand for travel was measured both by the number of tourists and by the total tourist expenditure data were obtained from secondary sources and analysis was by least squares multiple regression income price and exchange rate were found to be important factors but the impact of promotional expenditure was minimal

the inflation process a micro behavioral analysis this paper covers some essential ideas of a much larger study by james dean and myself of the way in which the behavior of economic agents when aggregated contributes to the process of inflation space limitations dictate a compromise between brevity and minimal completeness therefore many of the basic ideas will be stated baldly qualifying remarks are omitted the conventional macro approach can be subsumed under the slogan of too much money chasing a given amount of goods it does not explain how specific absolute prices are set further a theory of money demand creation from a micro viewpoint is missing i shall emphasize the world where real live flesh and blood humans set prices and where their activities influence the demand for money the essential scheme is simplicity itself inflation is determined by incentives that lead sellers using decision rules based mostly on conventional behavior to raise absolute prices which in turn creates an increase in the demand for credit which in its turn the banking system accommodates to some degree can we start with a set of reasonable postulates about firms and markets consistent with this type of firm behavior i believe we can the postulates i focus on taken from x efficiency theory can be summarized by the following phrases 1 inert areas 2 mostly nonmaximizing behavior 3 incomplete employment contracts 4 imperfect markets including some bargaining power and 5 a take it or leaveit bargaining style

strategic voting equilibria under the single nontransferable vote previous investigations of strategic voting equilibria in mass electorates have looked only at single member districts i shall investigate such equilibria in multimember districts operating under the single nontransferable vote system what appear to be the most natural equilibria conform to the m 1 rule according to which strategic voting in m seat districts produces exactly m 1 vote getting candidates in equilibrium any others having their support totally undercut this result provides the beginnings of a formal underpinning for reed s recent extension of duverger s law to the japanese case the model also generates specific and empirically testable hypotheses concerning the exceptions to the m 1 rule that one ought to expect in equilibrium i test these hypotheses with japanese data finally the model also reveals a type of strategic voting that is specific to multimember districts i use japanese data again to explore the empirical importance of this kind of strategic voting

digitalization and energy consumption does ict reduce energy demand abstract this article investigates the effect of digitalization on energy consumption using an analytical model we investigate four effects 1 direct effects from the production usage and disposal of information and communication technologies ict 2 energy efficiency increases from digitalization 3 economic growth from increases in labor and energy productivities and 4 sectoral change tertiarization from the rise of ict services the analysis combines empirical and theoretical findings from debates on decoupling energy consumption from economic growth and from debates on green it and ict for sustainability our main results effects 1 and 3 tend to increase energy consumption effects 2 and 4 tend to decrease it furthermore our analysis suggests that the two increasing effects prevail so that overall digitalization increases energy consumption these results can be explained by four insights from ecological economics a physical capital and energy are complements in the ict sector b increases in energy efficiency lead to rebound effects c ict cannot solve the difficulty of decoupling economic growth from exergy d ict services are relatively energy intensive and come on top of former production in future digitalization can only boost sustainability when it fosters effects 2 and 4 without promoting effects 1 and 3

between a rock and a soft place ecological and feminist economics in policy debates abstract the field of ecological economics includes both economic analysis on the one hand and discussions of normative values and visions for society on the other using feminist insights into cultural beliefs about the relative hardness and softness of these two sides this essay discusses how ecological economists can use this unique between space in order to better inform policy the current crisis of global climate change it is argued requires that economists move beyond modeling and measurement while ecological thinkers need to re examine beliefs about markets and profit

is tourism an engine for economic recovery theory and empirical evidence abstract the purpose of this study is to examine the causal relationships between tourism development and economic growth for this purpose the dumitrescu and hurlin 2012 technique was employed to analyze the casual link between tourism development and economic growth in seven european countries the results showed that there is bidirectional causality between growth in tourism receipts and economic growth suggesting that economic growth and tourism development are interdependent and that tourism development stimulates economic growth and vice versa in these countries theoretical and practical implications are discussed within the realms of growth conservation feedback and neutrality hypotheses

the balance of trade and exchange rates theory and contemporary evidence from tourism abstract the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of exchange rate depreciations and appreciations on the tourism trade balance specifically we employed linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag ardl cointegration techniques to analyze the extent to which currency depreciations and appreciations affect the united states u s bilateral tourism trade with canada mexico and the united kingdom u k the results showed that the depreciation of the u s dollar subsequently improves the u s trade balance with all three trading partners however while the appreciation of the u s dollar deteriorates the u s bilateral tourism trade balance with canada and the u k it does not ultimately affect the u s bilateral tourism trade with mexico in the long term these results provide evidence contradicting the j curve theory supporting the postulations of the ml condition theoretical and policy implications are discussed within the realms of j curve theory marshall lerner ml condition international trade and tourism

graduate education in ecological economics abstract interest in graduate education in ecological economics is increasing however no formal plan of study for a phd in ecological economics has been disseminated the lack of a formal plan is problematic as the field of ecological economics matures interest grows and new programs are being developed this paper attempts to fill a void by creating a program of study addressing the proficiencies a graduate student in ecological economics should have upon completion of his her phd based on the us educational system the plan of study presented in this paper has been developed to make the graduate of an ecological economics program as competitive on the labor market as students awarded traditional economics degrees the plan i describe is created to meet the requirements necessary for a phd in ecological economics further fields of specialization are suggested to complement the core of an ecological economics program to enhance the education process and to give the student with an ecological economics degree a higher level of marketability

modelling inbound international tourism demand in small pacific island countries abstractin this study we estimate inbound international tourism demand models at the individual source market destination and overall destination levels for fiji cook islands tonga and vanuatu f

x efficiency and technical efficiency efficiency measurement has become a very popular field in applied economics in recent years and with this interest there has been a large intellectual investment in refining the empirical methods available to researchers in the area in this paper we relate these developments to harvey leibenstein s original 1966 insight into the psychological ideas underlying the notion that economic agents may not achieve maximal efficiency in their productive decisions and behaviour of course it is always possible to argue that apparent inefficiency only arises from a failure of the observer to realise what it is that is being maximized however we evade this easy escape route into non falsifiable hypothesizing and instead take at face value the fact that too many empirical studies have come up with substantial measures of inefficiency for us to ignore its importance for normative economics

sustainability analysis of a society based on exergy studies a case study of the island of samso denmark abstract the danish island samso has since 1997 initiated a process through which the island should reach a state where it would be able to supply its own energy such a situation was reached since 2005 after having established 21 windmills and the island is now a net exporter of electricity to the danish power network at the same time the buildings in the more habituated areas were connected to 4 district heating plants which generate heat from combustion of straw in some cases combined with supplementary inputs from photo thermal devices meanwhile certain activities on the island such as running the ferries cars factories and heating in more distant areas are still dependent on significant input of fossil fuels the inhabitants have recently stated a wish to move on towards being independent of fossil fuels in 2030 and carbon neutral during the next decades as a consequence the idea came up to develop a method for the sustainability analysis of a society which would assist in governing the transitional process in the direction of increasing sustainability therefore a framework has been developed based on the concept exergy that may reveal where large consumptions are taking places such areas are likely to be sensible targets for action or at least increased attention basic methods have been developed that allows to account for infrastructure transfers inputs and outputs and consumption in terms of exergy and taking into account whether the exergy storages or flows can be considered to be renewable or not the framework has been developed for six societal sectors the energy sector the public sector the private households the agricultural sector the industry commerce and trade sector and nature nature is here considered an activity that provides the society with an exergy that may also be of value to our societies often referred to as ecosystem services based on the estimated amount of infrastructure and transfers inputs and outputs a number of sustainability indicators have been developed that may be monitored over time and which may serve to indicate whether potential measures undertaken also lead the society in the right direction an attempt to evaluate the potential importance of wastes has also been carried out as in organic waste could play an important role in acquiring the amount of bio diesel required to run the ferries in the future the results demonstrate that the already existing overhead in production of electricity leaves the island with many options and a great opportunity to be independent of fossil fuels in near future in fact it might well be that socio economical perspectives will turn out to be the more severe obstacles in the transition process adjacent to this work a carbon model has also been set up to reveal the consequence of proposed measures and strategies to the carbon budget of the island jorgensen and nielsen 2014

tourism forecasting to combine or not to combine abstract existing non tourism related literature shows that forecast combination can improve forecasting accuracy this study tests this proposition in the tourism context by examining the efficiency of combining forecasts based on three different combination methods the data used for this study relate to tourist arrivals in hong kong from the top ten tourism generating countries regions the forecasts are derived from four different forecasting models autoregressive integrated moving average arima model autoregressive distributed lag model adlm error correction model ecm and vector autoregressive var model all forecasts are ex post and the empirical results show that the relative performance of combination versus single model forecasts varies according to the origin destination tourist flow under consideration which parallels previous findings regarding the relative performance of individual forecasting methods the results also vary with the combination techniques used furthermore although the combined forecasts do not always outperform the best single model forecasts almost all the combined forecasts are not outperformed by the worst single model forecasts this suggests that forecast combination can considerably reduce the risk of forecasting failure this conclusion also implies that combined forecasts are likely to be preferred to single model forecasts in many practical situations

international tourism demand models inclusion of marketing variables abstract national tourist organizations often spend considerable sums in foreign countries on promoting the particular country as a tourist destination only seldom however is marketing activity incorporated as an explanatory variable in models of the demand for international tourism in such cases it should be possible to assess the impact of promotional expenditure in terms of the tourist visits and tourist expenditure generated where marketing is used to explain international tourism demand caution must be exercised in interpreting the empirical results poor results cannot be used to reach sensible conclusions and when good results are obtained the full implications of the estimated coefficients need to be explored

stability and coordination in duverger s law a formal model of preelection polls and strategic voting this paper investigates the dynamics of the wasted vote phenomenon and duverger s law i construct a theoretical model in order to consider how preelection polls serve to inform the electorate about the relative chances of the candidates and how that information acts over time to decrease the support of the trailing candidate the results shed light on how public opinion polls can aggregate information in the electorate and coordinate voters on the viable candidates in the election specifically i show that in a bayesian game model of strategic voting there exist non duvergerian equilibria in which all three candidates receive votes in the limit these equilibria require extreme coordination however and any variation in beliefs leads voters away from them to one of the duvergerian equilibria thus non duvergerian equilibria are unstable while two party equilibria are not in addition i describe how preelection polls provide information to voters about the viability of candidates and can thus be used by voters to coordinate on a duvergerian outcome

a branch of economics is missing micro micro theory jn the life history of most sciences there are movements toward the study of larger aggregates or toward the detailed study of smaller and more fundamental units my impression is that in most fields the movement toward the study of more micro units has predominated yet in economics in the 1930 s the movement was in the macro direction both physics and biology in the last three decades have made great strides by studying smaller and smaller entitiesphysics by studying more minute fundamental particles and biology by studying the fundamental elements determining genetics in a general sense economics has not been moving in this direction although some work of this nature exists the purpose of this paper is to review some samples of the work that exists and to argue that this area must become a major field of economic research and study the question of how individuals in multiperson firms influence firm decisions seems like such a natural question to ask that it is amazing that it is not part of the formal agenda of economists as a profession of course it has been asked but not by present day economists in their professional capacity in other words micromicroeconomics has never become an established field for the most part theorists have not only not raised this question but they have continued to develop micro theory in such a way as to discourage economists from raising this question part of the reason for this lies in the maximizing and optimizing biases of conventional micro theory and part can be ascribed to the consequences of the long period required to refine the theory so that elements that did not fit the basic model were discarded

x efficiency rent seeking and social costs this paper investigates shifts in cost functions of monopoly and regulated firms operating under conditions of x inefficiency and rent seeking behavior we show that x inefficiency and rent seeking have significantly different implications for economic welfare distinctions are drawn between pecuniary and real x inefficiency and between sunk and continuing rent seeking costs in general for a given cost shift rent seeking behavior implies larger social costs than does x inefficiency theory however cost shifts caused by either x inefficiency or rent seeking are observationally equivalent this implies empirically measured cost shifts cannot unambiguously be attributed to either cause

the second law the fourth law recycling and limits to growth abstract despite counter examples in nature it has been argued that total recycling is impossible for an industrial society as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics in this paper it is shown that there is no such limitation however it is also shown that there must be a large stockpile of inactive materials as well as an exogenous source of exergy e g from the sun for a stable steady state recycling system to function the paper also discusses briefly some of the implications for economic growth

preference domains and the monotonicity of condorcet extensions an alternative is a condorcet winner if it beats all other alternatives in a pairwise majority vote a social choice correspondence is a condorcet extension if it selects the condorcet winners and nothing else whenever a condorcet winner exists it is well known that condorcet extensions are not monotonic hence not nash implementable when all preferences are admissible but are implementable when restricted to a domain in which condorcet winners always exist we fill the gap by studying the intermediate domains and find that monotonicity is violated on all such domains

economic de growth vs steady state economy in recent years the concept of economic de growth decroissance based on the literature of nicolas georgescu roegen e g 1 3 has found a revival in france italy spain and other countries in the popular as well as in the academic literature therein authors took on board georgescu roegens categorical rejection of a steady state economy sse as proposed by herman daly 4 they argue that economic degrowth is the only viable alternative goal to the growing economy this position is challenged in this article and it is concluded that the two concepts are in fact complements economic de growth is not a goal in itself but the rich north s path towards a globally equitable sse moreover the de growth literature can benefit from the strong economic historic roots of the sse and from daly s macroeconomic concepts while in return being able to give lessons about bottom up approaches this would be particularly important for the population issue where daly proposes limited birth licences unfortunately statements on demography are inconsistent and underdeveloped in the de growth literature further it is concluded that most criticisms of the sse are due to a too narrow and technocratic interpretation of the concept instead the sse should be defined as a quasi steady state resting in a dynamic equilibrium and as an unattainable goal which can and probably should be approximated

entropy structure and organisational change abstract the paper sets out a basis for rigorous thermodynamic characterisation of structural change and of organisational interdependencies between economic and environmental processes many attempts have been made to exploit entropy as a generic explanatory variable it has widely been proposed that entropy is a measure of the level of dis order of a system of how mixed up things are then as organisation is often thought synonymous with some notion of order it has been a small step to propose that increasing organisation is the converse of increasing entropy another suggestion has been that social system structure and change can be explained in terms of a tendency towards maximum entropy production the lotka principle of maximum energy dissipation all these notions must be rejected the putative entropy order connection has its inspiration in boltzmann s probabilistic interpretation of thermodynamic entropy as a measure of microscopic disorder this order principle is simply not applicable under conditions far from thermodynamic equilibrium prigogine conditions which prevail for all important economic and ecological processes under such conditions the relationship between entropy production and changes in structure or organisation is multi faceted and situation specific attempts to account for the specificity of societal activities in terms of a generic scalar measure of organisation or dissipation are largely after the fact and in no way do away with the need for analysis of institutional and ethical dimensions of human action in their own right when properly allied to institutional analysis however the far from equilibrium thermodynamics furnishes a rich impetus for a coevolutionary perspective in ecological economics with promise of incisive treatments of in particular issues of system environment codependency and of the time in determinacies of economy environmental change

theory of the firm past present and future an interpretation hence even if the partial equilibrium analyst knows full well that the actual situation is not really a competitive one he probably will still make a first try using the competitive model with good old fashioned profit maximization and if the results appear too odd appropriate qualifications may still be able to take care of them more simply than if he had started with a cumbersome managerial model in saying this i am showing my bias 18 p 30