renewable energy for continuous energy sustainability in malaysia abstract demographic change dramatic population increase and rapid industrial growth are major trends emerging in malaysia climate change and depletion of fossil fuel along with the rise in petroleum prices have forced the malaysian government to rethink strategies to be more in line with other developed countries including the decision to embark on renewable energy re resources as a better source of energy amongst the global energy mix the malaysian government is making frantic efforts to make policies re programmes and incentives more effective so as to promote and develop the use of re malaysia is rich with fossil fuel but these are fast depleting although re is necessary current re resources are still not enough therefore exploration into other resources must be considered in order to meet future energy demands the objective of this paper is to identify the potential of available renewable energy resources in malaysia as well as the country s current implementation strategies this paper also discusses the different re policies in malaysia in order to determine the potential of re various sources and published materials in conferences international journals and information released by relevant government bodies and miscellaneous resources are used this research has revealed that among all the renewable energy sources that are present in malaysia biomass and solar energy are the most prospective ones plus renewable energy re sources are quite advantageous as they are free from greenhouse gas ghg emissions and related global warming effects they can also be applied in off grid electricity generation for rural communities

wind power price trends in the united states struggling to remain competitive in the face of strong growth the amount of wind power capacity being installed globally is surging with the united states the world leader in terms of annual market share for three years running 2005 2007 the rapidly growing market for wind has been a double edged sword however as the resulting supply demand imbalance in wind turbines along with the rising cost of materials and weakness in the u s dollar has put upward pressure on wind turbine costs and ultimately wind power prices two mitigating factors reductions in the cost of equity provided to wind projects and improvements in project level capacity factors have helped to relieve some of the upward pressure on wind power prices over the last few years because neither of these two factors can be relied upon to further cushion the blow going forward policymakers should recognize that continued financial support may be necessary to sustain the wind sector at its current pace of development at least in the near term though this article emphasizes developments in the u s market for wind power those trends are similar to and hold implications for the worldwide wind power market

uncovering spatial productivity centers using asymmetric bidirectional spillovers abstract the principal contribution of this paper is to present the first method to sift through a large number of firms in an industry to uncover which firms act as large spatial total factor productivity tfp growth centers we define a large spatial tfp growth center as a firm that is a large net generator of spatial tfp growth spillovers i e it is a source of large tfp growth spill outs to other firms vis a vis the size of the tfp growth spill ins that permeate to the firm from other firms we use this definition because other things being equal firms would want to locate near a firm that is a net generator of tfp growth spillovers in the process of presenting the above method we make three further contributions two of which are methodological and the other relates to our application first rather than follow the literature on spatial frontier modeling by considering spatial interaction between firms in a single network we introduce a more sophisticated model that is able to account for spatial interaction in multiple networks second we obtain bidirectional spatial tfp growth decompositions by complementing a unidirectional decomposition in the literature where the spillover components are spill ins to a firm with a decomposition that includes spill out components third from a spatial revenue frontier for u s banks 1998 2015 we find a number of cases where banks that represent large spatial tfp growth centers have branches that cluster together while in several states we find no such clusters

using stochastic frontier analysis to measure the impact of weather on the efficiency of electricity distribution businesses in developing economies abstract this paper analyses the influence of weather variables on the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in argentina brazil chile and peru covering 82 firms which represent more than 90 percent of the distribution market of energy delivered for the period 1998 2008 stochastic frontier analysis sfa is applied using a translog input distance function two different approaches are evaluated weather in the production function and weather in the inefficiency term the efficacy of one over the other is determined using nested models weather data are collected from meteorological stations 429 and nasa 3423 coordinates a geographic information system gis is used for locating the firms service areas and their weather conditions a combination of cost only and cost quality models is proposed for cost only models the results suggest that on average there is a significant increase in measured efficiency when weather is incorporated in the production function under the cost quality models on average the effect of weather is much lower this suggests that firms have internalised the effects of weather and have adapted their networks to the environment in which they operate a company level analysis indicates that across models a significant number of companies are affected by weather regulators are advised to make proper adjustments of efficiency scores when specific firms face important efficiency changes due to weather

a cautionary note in using patterns of shocks to determine optimal exchange rate policy an exploration of nepalese and indian exchange rate relations 1964 1994 nepal and india are developing countries in asia whose hard peg has existed for almost forty years as well as no restriction on capital mobility between both countries however empirical results suggest that nepal and india do not face symmetric patterns of shocks and are thus not suitable for a fixed exchange rate under this criteria one possible explanation may be that the monetary authority plays some role in the short run to reduce the cost of the exchange rate regime this suggests that some caution should be used in basing optimal exchange rate policy on this single criteria

real exchange rates within and between currency areas how far away is emu the renewed quest for a european monetary union raises the question is europe ready for a common currency we compare the conditional variance and the persistence of real exchange rate shocks within the german monetary union and between germany and eight european countries to assess the viability of a monetary union in europe the results suggest a europe of two speeds a core union among germany her smaller neighbors and france would be viable today further reduction of real exchange rate variability is needed in contrast between these countries and denmark italy and the united kingdom alternatively monetary union should be postponed until further adjustment has occurred such a waiting period would neither require nor benefit much from further tightening of the current ems copyright 1994 by mit press

the nature of shocks in europe and in germany demand and supply shocks in the participating countries this paper addresses that question empirically using a bivariate var identification of the underlying orthogonal demand and supply shocks is achieved using only long run restrictions data for 16 european countries

a spatial productivity index in the presence of efficiency spillovers evidence for u s banks 1992 2015 abstract we present the methodology for a new spatial decomposition of total factor productivity tfp growth the relevant literature is underdeveloped as there is just one short study which proposes a partial spatial tfp growth decomposition we develop this literature in four respects the first two developments are methodological to go from a partial decomposition to a complete one first we augment the partial decomposition with a cost efficiency spillover growth component second we introduce own and spillover allocative efficiency growth components third we provide a more detailed coverage of the spatial decomposition of tfp growth fourth in contrast to the traditional application to geographical areas e g countries in the relevant literature we apply our decomposition using firm level data which suggests that there can be an important role for spatial productivity analysis in or our application is to large u s banks over the period 1992 2015 among other things we find for the average large u s bank that tfp growth since the financial crisis has become much more dependent on the bank itself and less so on spatial spillovers

a review on global wind energy policy with the increasing negative effects of fossil fuel combustion on the environment in addition to limited stock of fossil fuel have forced many countries to inquire into and change to environmentally friendly alternatives that are renewable to sustain the increasing energy demand energy policy plays a vital role to mitigate the impacts of global warming and crisis of energy availability this paper explores the wind energy industry from the point of view of the wind energy policy it is noticed that energy policy could help increasing wind power generation as well as stimulating the energy industry it may be stated that without specific energy policy a country would not be able to solve the acute problems like reducing greenhouse gases ghgs emission scarcity of energy etc this paper discussed the existing successful energy policies for few selected countries based on literatures it has been found that fit rps incentives pricing law and quota system are the most useful energy policies practiced by many countries around the world then status of wind energy policy for malaysia was investigated and compared with few selected countries around the world

understanding technology choice in electricity industries a comparative study of france and denmark abstract the ability to predict how national electricity industries will respond to the challenges of competition and the demand for sustainability requires a good understanding of the nature of technological systems and a workable theory of technology choice so far two distinct theoretical perspectives the economic and socio political concepts of technological systems have competed for dominance in policy analysis and policy making this paper is a comparative study of the way in which the electricity industries of denmark and france responded to a series of challenges beginning with the 1973 oil crisis and continuing through the present push to liberalise electricity markets focussing on the forces that directed technological change in these two nations i examine the relative importance of economic and socio political factors my analysis indicates that socio political factors which together can be described as political traditions have shaped technology choice the danish and french electricity industries have pursued several objectives in addition to economic efficiency this has limited the function of free markets thus they should be understood as political structures whose most important characteristic is the distribution of power in this context the economic perspective represents a normative demand for the re arrangement of political values technological choice which radically departs from the status quo implies a significant redistribution of political power and is therefore very difficult

a political economic critique on the theory of optimum currency areas and the implications for east asia in recent years dynamic debate has arisen as to the desirability and feasibility of creating a monetary union in east asia while the debate has relied heavily on the theory of optimum currency areas this theory has weaknesses in explaining the actual formation of monetary unions at this point political economy analysis appears to demonstrate stronger explanatory power this paper provides a systematic review of the main developments in the literature on optimum currency area theory and in the political economy literature on monetary union in addition it addresses the feasibility of an east asian monetary union by applying the findings in these two academic strands to the region it finds that even though formation of an east asian monetary union may be to some extent feasible from an economic perspective the region s political situation does not appear favourable for the creation of one

did the euro common currency increase or decrease business cycle synchronization for its member countries we use two variants of markov switching models to assess changes in output synchronization since the creation of the euro out of eight eurozone countries investigated only one the netherlands has synchronization increased since euro adoption supporting the endogenous optimal currency area argument of frankel and rose however in three other cases business cycle synchronization actually fell since the euro s creation thus the endogeneity of the optimal currency area criteria can go both ways adopting a common currency may increase synchronization for nations ready for a common currency but it can lower synchronization for nations that are far from synchronized before monetary unification

productivity and efficiency estimation a semiparametric stochastic cost frontier approach this paper proposes a flexible stochastic cost frontier panel data model where the technology parameters are unknown smooth functions of firm and time effects which non neutrally shift the cost frontier the model decomposes inefficiency into firm and time specific components and productivity change into inefficiency change technical change and scale change we then apply the proposed methodology to the norwegian salmon production data and analyze technical efficiency as well as productivity changes

what goes up recent trends in china s energy consumption since 1996 china s energy output has dropped by 17 while primary energy use has fallen by 4 driven almost entirely by shrinking output from coal mines and declining direct use since china is the world s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases it is important to understand the sources of this apparent transformation and whether it portends a permanent change in patterns of energy use this remarkable reversal of the long term expansion of energy use has occurred even as the economy has continued to grow albeit more slowly than in the early 1990s generation of electric power has risen implying a steep fall in end uses particularly in industry available information points to a variety of forces contributing to this phenomenon including rapid improvements in coal quality structural changes in industry shutdowns of factories in both the state owned and non state segments of the economy improvements in end use efficiency and greater use of gas and electricity in households a combination of slowing economic growth industrial restructuring broader economic system reforms and environmental and energy efficiency policies has apparently led to at least a temporary decline in and perhaps a long term reduction in the growth of energy use and therefore greenhouse gas emissions

the analysis on wind energy electricity generation status potential and policies in the world abstract energy is an essential ingredient of socio economic development and economic growth many countries frequently held meetings and discussions has energy agenda these countries are working to balance energy demand and supply renewable energy technology is one of the solutions which produces energy by transforming natural phenomena into useful energy forms wind energy is a reliable and promising renewable energy wind energy becomes more and more attractive as one of the clean renewable energy resources the installed capacity of electricity generation from wind energy is rapidly increasing in many countries and these countries are implementing variety incentive policies therefore the importance of wind energy is expected to increase much more in the coming decades the presented study comprehensively reviews wind energy in terms of three aspects namely status potential and policies analyses and assessments for the first time to the best of the author s knowledge this review paper covers the status potential and policies of the wind energy the issues faced and the latest research also the current situation potential and development of the increasing are discussed this study is presented recommendations for increasing the installed capacity of wind power

semiparametric smooth coefficient stochastic frontier model this paper proposes a semiparametric smooth coefficient spsc stochastic production frontier model where regression coefficients are unknown smooth functions of environmental factors z technical inefficiency is specified in the form of a parametric scaling function which also depends on the z variables thus in our spsc model the z variables affect productivity directly via the technology parameters as well as through inefficiency a residual based bootstrap test of the relevance of the environmental factors in the spsc model is suggested an empirical application is also used to illustrate the technique

microfoundations for stochastic frontiers the purpose of the paper is to propose microfoundations for stochastic frontier models previous work shows that a simple bayesian learning model supports gamma distributions for technical inefficiency in stochastic frontier models the conclusion depends on how the problem is formulated and what assumptions are made about the sampling process and the prior after the new formulation of the problem it turns out that the distribution of the one sided error component does not belong to a known family moreover we find that without specifying a utility function or even the cost inefficiency function the relative effectiveness of managerial input can be determined using only cost data and estimates of the returns to scale the point of this construction is that features of the inefficiency function u z can be recovered from the data based on the solid microfoundation of expected utility of profit maximization but the model does not make a prediction about the distribution

a literature survey on proposed african monetary unions this study provides a survey of recent advances in the literature on proposed african monetary unions the survey comprises about 60 empirical papers published during the past fifteen years four main strands are discussed individually and collectively notably the proposed west african monetary zone wamz east african monetary union eamu southern african monetary union samu and african monetary union amu we observe a number of issues with establishing the feasibility and or desirability of potential monetary unions inter alia variations in choice of variables empirical strategies sampled countries and considered periodicities we address this ambiguity by reviewing studies with scenarios that are consistent with hegelian dialectics and establish selective expansion as the predominant mode of monetary integration some proponents make cases for strong pegs and institutions as viable alternatives to currency unions using cluster analysis disaggregating panels into sub samples and distinguishing shocks from responses in the examination of business cycle synchronisation provide more subtle policy implications we caution that for inquiries using the same theoretical underpinnings variables and methods just by modifying the scope context and periodicity may only contribute to increasing the number of conflicting findings authors should place more emphasis on new perspectives and approaches based on caveats of and lessons from the european monetary union emu and cfa zones

a frontier measure of u s banking competition the three main measures of competition hhi lerner index and h statistic are uncorrelated for u s banks we investigate why this occurs propose a frontier measure of competition and apply it to five major bank service lines fee based banking services comprise 35 percent of bank revenues so assessing competition by service line is preferred to using a single measure for traditional activities extended to the entire bank as the lerner index and the h statistic together explain only 1 percent of hhi variation and the hhi is similarly unrelated to the frontier method developed here current merger acquisition guidelines should be adjusted as banking concentration seems unrelated to likely more accurate competition measures

towards european monetary union without the ems towards emu without the ems paul de grauwe this paper examines the causes of the breakdown of the ems arguing that ems credibility has always been impaired by recessions this has relevance both for the future of monetary union in europe and for the path by which it might be attained i argue that in comparison with the erm the present more flexible exchange rate arrangements will ease not exacerbate some of the technical problems in making the transition to emu i then analyse the political economy of monetary union and identify the main stumbling blocks that remain finally i set out a specific proposal that takes advantage of the new opportunities to move forward towards emu

european monetary union a cointegration analysis this paper employs systems based cointegration techniques developed by johansen 1988 1995 to determine which european union countries would form a successful economic and monetary union emu based on long run behavior of the nominal convergence criteria laid down in the maastricht treaty the original 12 european union countries are analyzed together nominal exchange rates real exchange rates longterm interest rates and government budget deficits are each analyzed for co movements among the 12 countries and various subgroups of them the results suggest that not all of the 12 original countries of the european union could possibly form a successful emu over time unless several countries made significant adjustments

the southern african development community suitable for a monetary union abstract this paper investigates whether a monetary union is desirable among the countries of the southern african development community sadc we employ a generalised auto regressive conditional heteroscedasticity garch model to consider the share of the variation in real exchange rates rers vis a vis south africa that can be explained by the divergence in monetary and fiscal policies the results show that monetary integration would substantially eliminate real exchange rate variation due to different monetary policies for some members the study concludes that a monetary union that embraces all sadc members would amass large costs relative to the benefits and hence would not be desirable