socioeconomic effects of aviation biofuel production in brazil a scenarios based input output analysis derived from renewable feedstocks aviation biofuel is generally perceived as inherently sustainable however its production involves a wide range of sectors and interacts with different actors in society it is therefore important to understand and evaluate not only the environmental impacts of that process but also its socioeconomic effects at present empirical studies assessing socioeconomic aspects of aviation biofuel are rare in scientific literature the aim of this study therefore is to assess key effects of aviation biofuel production on employment gdp and trade balance a scenarios based input output io analysis was used to evaluate these socioeconomic effects taking brazilian aviation biofuel production to 2050 as an example to address the uncertainty of io analysis we have proposed a stochastic simulation approach for the technical coefficients in the io model four distinct scenarios were developed in each three potential combinations of technologies and feedstocks for producing aviation biofuel were evaluated sugarcane via alcohol to jet atj macauba via hydro processed esters and fatty acids hefa and eucalyptus via fischer tropsch ft among other things we found that the production of aviation biofuel would create around 12 000 65 000 jobs while contributing us 200 1100 million to brazil s gdp under different scenarios with different supply chains the socioeconomic effects calculated deterministically were generally higher than the stochastic outcomes which can be explained by factors such as technological learning and economic growth aviation biofuel production showed large positive net socioeconomic effects on employment and gdp although some of the fossil sectors would be negatively affected overall the macauba hefa chain with the highest effects on employment and gdp and the lowest effects on imports seemed to be the most favorable of the scenarios studied despite the relatively high level of uncertainty associated with it

the out of sample success of term structure models as exchange rate predictors a step beyond abstract a large literature suggests that standard exchange rate models cannot outperform a random walk forecast and that the forward rate is not an optimal predictor of the spot rate however there is evidence that the term structure of forward premia contains valuable information for forecasting future spot exchange rates and that exchange rate dynamics display nonlinearities this paper proposes a term structure forecasting model of exchange rates based on a regime switching vector equilibrium correction model which is novel in this context our model significantly outperforms both a random walk and to a lesser extent a linear term structure vector equilibrium correction model for four major dollar rates across a range of horizons

what explains global exchange rate movements during the financial crisis abstract a striking and unexpected feature of the financial crisis has been the sharp appreciation of the us dollar against virtually all currencies globally the paper finds that negative us specific macroeconomic shocks during the crisis have triggered a significant strengthening of the us dollar rather than a weakening macroeconomic fundamentals and financial exposure of individual countries are found to have played a key role in the transmission process of us shocks in particular countries with low fx reserves weak current account positions and high direct financial exposure vis a vis the united states have experienced substantially larger currency depreciations during the crisis overall and to us shocks in particular

currency preferences and the australian dollar abstract we investigate currency substitution and currency complementarity in the case of the australian dollar data spanning 1984 2003 contain evidence of the australian dollar s substitution for the deutschmark and complementarity with the yen and the us dollar consistent with the theory that international variables will in general affect the demand for domestic money atemporally nonseparable preferences also give rise to the possibility of third currency effects our regressions find some evidence of these for example a rise in the us federal funds rate has been associated with rises in the value of the australian dollar against the mark and yen controlling for changes in other interest rates and in money supplies and real outputs

profitability of time series momentum abstract we propose a continuous time heterogeneous agent model consisting of fundamental momentum and contrarian traders to explain the significant time series momentum we show that the performance of momentum strategy is determined by both time horizon and the market dominance of momentum traders specifically when momentum traders are more active in the market momentum strategies with short long time horizons stabilize destabilize the market and meanwhile the market under reacts over reacts in short run long run this provides profit opportunity for time series momentum strategies with short horizons and reversal with long horizons when momentum traders are less active in the market they always lose the results provide an insight into the profitability of time series momentum documented in recent empirical studies

examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 2 review of input output models for the assessment of environmental impacts embodied in trade this paper offers a detailed review of recently described single and multi region input output models used to assess environmental impacts of internationally traded goods and services it is the second part of a two part contribution in part 1 turner k lenzen m wiedmann t and barrett j in press examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 1 a technical note on combining input output and ecological footprint analysis ecological economics we describe how to enumerate the resource and pollution content of inter regional and inter national trade flows with the aim to illustrate an ideal accounting and modelling framework for the estimation of ecological footprints a large number of such environment economic models have been described but only in the last few years models have emerged that use a more sophisticated multi region multi sector input output framework this has been made possible through improvements in data availability and quality as well as computability we identify six major models that employ multi sector multi region input output analysis in order to calculate environmental impacts embodied in international trade results from the reviewed studies demonstrate that it is important to explicitly consider the production recipe land and energy use as well as emissions in a multi region multi sector and multi directional trade model with global coverage and detailed sector disaggregation only then reliable figures for indicators of impacts embodied in trade such as the ecological footprint can be derived

the increase in brazilian household income and its impact on co2 emissions evidence for 2003 and 2009 from input output tables abstract in recent years brazil has experienced economic growth and a recovery of income that has had a positive impact on the consumption of goods in this paper we evaluate the impact of brazilian household consumption on the co2 emissions for 2003 and 2009 using input output tables from the world input output database we used a semi closed model with eight household groups in order to apply the hypothetical extraction method in the consumption structure of each group further we use the result from the hypothetical extraction to evaluate the impacts of the structure consumption of each household group in terms of co2 emissions we find that there is a trade off between the households greater satisfaction from consumption and the increasing setback in emissions from the restructuring and modification of the consumption basket thus this study contributes to the research on emissions by mapping the recent behavior of the brazilian economy in terms of increased income changes in the consumption structure and their impacts on emissions the paper s aggregated results by income and consumption structure based on the intensity of the emissions and their systemic effects add to the discussions on less polluting production processes more conscious consumption of goods and more rational uses of energy and transportation

climate change and trade in agriculture agricultural productivity in both developing and developed countries will have to improve to achieve substantial increases in food production by 2050 while land and water resources become less abundant and the effects of climate change introduce much uncertainty already less resilient production areas will suffer the most as temperatures will rise further in tropical and semi tropical latitudes and water scarce regions will face even drier conditions international trade plays an important role in compensating albeit partially for regional changes in productivity that are induced by climate change while a well functioning international trade system can support the adaptation to climate change related challenges trade policies as such are imperfect instruments to induce less emissions globally a well functioning international trading system can support the adaptation to climate change related challenges hence welfare gains from reforms to trade policies may be greater than normally measured if they also reduce ghg emissions globally

social security and migration with endogenous skill upgrading abstract the aim of the paper is to investigate the joint redistributive effects of migration and pensions and to reassess the sustainability issue raised in the existing economic literature the paper first develops a theoretical framework to analyse the impact of international migration on the labour market the model allows for heterogeneity across native born individuals and for migrants to affect both the wages and the education decision in the recipient country it then explicitly focuses on pensions under alternative migration scenarios the analysis shows that migration causes redistributive effects which increase across group wage inequality however the endogenous educational response by residents partially offsets the redistributive impact of migration while creating additional interest groups migration helps the financial sustainability of the pension scheme but the interaction between migration and pensions causes complex inter and intragenerational redistributive conflicts which are analysed in the paper

the impact of immigration on the human capital of natives implications of the quantity number and quality skill of immigration on the destination economy are analyzed including impacts on value added wages quasi rents rates of return and the skill distribution of the native labor force quantity quality trade offs are considered for both immigrant and native workers medium and long run labor supply responses by natives to immigrant induced changes in wage rates are shown to have second order effects which substantively affect the impacts of immigrants the impact of immigration policy depends on the quality as well as quantity of immigrants the time horizon and the speed of factor market adjustment

returns synchronization and daily correlation dynamics between international stock markets the use of close to close returns underestimates returns correlation because international stock markets have different trading hours with the availability of 16 00 london time stock market series we find dynamics of daily correlation and covariance estimated using two non synchroneity adjustment procedures to be substantially different from their synchronous counterparts conditional correlation may have different signs depending on the model and data type used other findings include volatility spillover from the us to the uk and france and a reverse spillover which is not documented before also unlike previous findings we found the increase in daily correlation is prominent only under extremely adverse conditions when a large negative return has been registered

do momentum based strategies still work in foreign currency markets this paper examines the performance of momentum trading strategies in foreign exchange markets we find the well documented profitability of momentum strategies during the 1970s and the 1980s has continued throughout the 1990s our approach and findings are insensitive to the specification of the trading rule and the base currency for analysis finally we show that the performance is not due to a time varying risk premium but rather depends on the underlying autocorrelation structure of the currency returns in sum the results lend further support to prior momentum studies on equities the profitability to momentum based strategies holds for currencies as well

the statistical distribution of exchange rates empirical evidence and economic implications the abundant evidence that changes in exchange rates have distributions with fatter tails than the normal distribution has led researchers to consider non normal distributions including the student the stable paretian and mixtures of distributions this paper compares the empirical fits of three non normal candidates and the normal distribution for daily changes in the logarithms of exchange rates using maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters and chi square goodness of fit tests the student and mixture of two normals provide the best fits but there is evidence that the distribution parameters may vary over time

how do exchange rates co move a study on the currencies of five inflation targeting countries abstract this paper does three things first it explores the type of asymmetry in exchange rate correlation for five inflation targeting countries we show their currencies co move more closely with the currencies of some influential foreign countries during joint appreciations than joint depreciations against a world currency second it establishes empirically the linkage between interest rate differentials and exchange rate correlation we find evidence that both widening and narrowing interest rate differentials will reduce the correlation third it proposes a new version of the asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation model the model proves to be capable of providing great insight into the two issues investigated

impact of household consumption on co2 emissions danish household consumption increased by 58 over the period 1966 1992 while co2 emissions only increased by 7 using decomposition analysis we investigated the global co2 impact of danish household consumption from 1966 to 1992 our conclusion is that overall growth in private consumption but not changes in the composition of consumption is the key to understanding the increase in co2 emissions however the effect of growth in private consumption has been partly offset by substantial energy conservation in the energy supply and manufacturing sectors

embodied pollution in trade estimating the environmental load displacement of industrialised countries abstract the present paper sets out to aid in the development of environmental load displacement indicators developing the notion of the environmental memory of physical flows we estimated embodied pollution in trade of 18 industrialized countries with a the rest of the world and b developing countries from 1976 to 1994 we found that in the last years of analysis total imports of japan usa and western europe have entailed in general larger air pollutant emissions than local exports the balance of embodied emissions in trade beet seems to follow an inverted u shape across time in japan and western europe and an n shape in the us in the period of analysis japanese and european environmental terms of trade with developing countries improved from the japanese and european point of view whereas american environmental terms of trade with developing countries deteriorated over time although there is no statistical trend between income and embodied emissions in imports in a cross section analysis there does seem to be a positive relationship between both variables at a national level the results suggest that despite many shortcomings this type of assessment may shed useful insights on the international aspects of sustainable development

does the current trade liberalization agenda contribute to greenhouse gas emission mitigation in agriculture abstract this paper contributes to the literature on the trade liberalization climate change nexus by investigating the impact of the current free trade agenda of the european union eu on the effectiveness of a possible greenhouse gas ghg reduction policy for its agricultural sector for the analysis we implement scenarios with a carbon tax on non co2 emissions and trade liberalization both individually and combined in capri a global partial equilibrium model for agriculture scenario results indicate that the simulated trade liberalization by itself has only modest effects on agricultural ghg emissions by 2030 pricing agricultural non co2 emissions in the eu triggers the adoption of mitigation technologies which contributes to emission reductions emission leakage however partially offsets the eu emission savings as production increases in less emission efficient regions in the world the combination of agricultural trade liberalization and carbon pricing increases emission leakage and therefore further undermines global mitigation gains our results hinge on the key assumptions that future trade agreements between non eu countries are not considered and that the climate actions are limited to the eu only despite these limitations we conclude that from a global ghg mitigation perspective trade agreements should address emission leakage for instance by being conditional on participating nations adopting measures directed towards ghg mitigation

international trade and the sustainability footprint a practical criterion for its assessment a simple and minimal criterion for sustainability is that the value of natural capital plus manufactured capital be not decreasing on the basis of any individual country or region the above simple comparison may be misleading as it does not take account of the production of goods for consumption in other countries regions via international trade in other terms the full environmental footprint of a country may not be properly assessed a method of calculating a weak sustainability criterion has been established for both a closed economy approach and an open economy approach there are significant differences between the open and closed economies measures for several regions particularly the middle east overall global sustainability on this criterion has been positive and increasing using a difference equation approach a further analysis has been made of the average proportional rate of change of global sustainability between 1980 and 1990 and its various regional and structural components have been determined these indicate that most of global sustainability growth can be attributed to western europe other asia and japan particularly through high savings ratios the usa on the other hand has made a very small net contribution to the growth in global sustainability

macroeconomics and a bit more reality macroeconomics in its widest sense is a topic which is too diverse to be usefully discussed in a single article i will therefore take a very narrow view of what might be included under this general title and focus my attention on my own main area of interest the development and use of large macro econometric models this is an area which has a long tradition and literature stemming form the pioneering work of tinbergen i937 and the cowles commission klein i950 an extensive survey of the development of modelling may be found in bodkin klein and marwah i99i macroeconometric modelling grew rapidly in importance during the late i950s and the i960s going on to achieve a very influential role inmacroeconomic policy making during the i970s its failure to deliver the detailed economic control which it had seemed to promise then led to a barrage of attacks ranging from disillusion and sceptiscism on the part of policy makers to detailed and well argued acadeinic criticism of the basic methodology of the approach perhaps the most powerful and influential of these academic arguments came from sims i980 in his article macroeconomics and reality sims argued on three quite separate grounds against the basic process of model identification which lies at the heart of the cowles commission methodology firstly that economic theory gives rise to identification restrictions which are typically more complex than those traditionally applied in macroeconometric models in particular he said that theory normally implies complex cross equation restrictions which require system estimation and which cannot be imposed on a single equation basis secondly that traditional identification conditions are often met simply because of the presence of dynamics in the models sims argued that this identification is spurious and technically invalid as purely dynamic terms cannot help in structural identification in the conventional sense finally he said that the importance of expectations effects and the interaction of policy regimes and agents expectations make identification very difficult sims argued that any one of these problems would form a challenging but feasible research agenda but that doing all of these at once would be a programme which is so challenging as to be impossible in the short run he then proposed a methodology based on vector auto regressive var models

on crises contagion and confusion abstract since the tequila crisis of 1994 1995 the asian flu of 1997 and the russian virus of 1998 economists have been busy producing research on the subject of contagion yet few studies have examined empirically through which channels the disturbances are transmitted if there are indeed fundamental reasons for the spillovers we observe we attempt to fill this gap by analyzing how both trade links and the largely ignored financial sector links influence the pattern of fundamentals based contagion we examine the role of international bank lending the potential for cross market hedging and bilateral and third party trade in the propagation of crises

coal use for world economy provision and transfer network by multi region input output analysis concerns surrounding climate change and environmental challenge make the coal utilization network essential not only for understanding the pattern of energy provision and transfer but also for illustrating the interaction between anthropogenic activities and ecological systems at global level this paper fills the research gap by dint of multi regional input output model to outline coal embodied routes from natural boundaries to economic activities and to identify the central hubs in the global coal supply chain based on the most recent available statistics for 2011 as the economic value and environmental influences of different kinds of coals could be remarkably diverse the separation of coal categories in systematic analysis could provide fundamental information regarding the displacement and teleconnection of coal utilization in the world the estimation shows that in weight 64 99 of coal direct supply is ultimately embodied in international trade indicating the crucial roles of trade interlinks in global coal utilization apart from this the findings pertinent to sectoral structure regional supply chain and per capita characteristics of coal embodied utilization could be valuable to identify the global energy routes driven by international trade as well as to facilitate energy and environmental policy

cross currency cross maturity forward exchange premiums as predictors of spot rate changes theory and evidence abstract this paper shows that in predicting the spot rate of a currency the term structures of forward premiums of other currencies have incremental information content in addition to the term structure of the currency s own forward premiums the theoretical model motivating the analysis hinges on the abundant evidence on the co movements of excess returns from investing in different currencies the empirical results are obtained through fiml estimation of a vector error correction model for weekly data on three bilateral us dollar exchange rates

primary energy and greenhouse gases embodied in australian final consumption an input output analysis input output modeling of primary energy and greenhouse gas embodiments in goods and services is a useful technique for designing greenhouse gas abatement policies the present paper describes direct and indirect primary energy and greenhouse gas requirements for a given set of australian final consumption it considers sectoral disparities in energy prices capital formation and international trade flows and it accounts for embodiments in the gross national expenditure as well as the gross domestic product primary energy and greenhouse gas intensities in terms of mj and kg co2 e are reported as well as national balances of primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions

applying physical input output analysis to estimate land appropriation ecological footprints of international trade activities in the last few years some studies have been presented which link land use accounting and input output analysis based on monetary input output tables miots for the calculation of direct and indirect land appropriation of production and consumption activities the compilation of the first comprehensive physical input output tables piots for some western european countries in the 1990s opened new possibilities for linking physical accounting and input output analysis using a physical multiplier for this kind of calculation is more appropriate as the most land intensive sectors are also the sectors with the highest amounts of material flows physical input output analysis illustrates land appropriation in relation to material flows of each of the sectors which is more appropriate from the point of view of environmental pressures than land appropriation in relation to monetary flows of a miot physical input output analysis has so far not been applied for any land related studies based on a physical input output model of the eu 15 physical input output analysis is applied in this paper in order to calculate direct and indirect land requirements for the production of exports from eu 15 to the rest of the world

e equilibria and adaptive expectations output and inflation in the lbs model abstract this paper examines issues of convergence the variability of the dynamic paths and end value outcomes of output and inflation in the london business school lbs macromodel where adaptive learning schemes are used to form expectations of future variables first we examine the sensitivity of the outcomes from an exogenous oil price shock to alternative formulations of the adaptive expectations scheme the results suggest that convergence is not certain for ad hoc specifications of the expectations rule but that where solutions do exist for a range of empirically estimated rules the results show a sufficient degree of similarity particularly for output to suggest more than weak possibly strong e stability nonetheless the dynamic paths for output and inflation differ significantly we then focus on one simple expectations rule and test the variability of model outcomes when the associated hyperparameters differ in some cases this leads to no convergence but where a stable region is found the output and inflation results differ markedly both for the dynamics and for the end values therefore the speed of learning as well as the expectations rule matters for the output and inflation paths

estimation of embodied co2 emissions by general equilibrium model abstract this study estimates the extent to which embodied co2 emissions are increased or reduced when a socioeconomic structural change occurs embodied co2 emissions were estimated by input output models i o models and a general equilibrium model ge model and the respective results were compared the embodied co2 emissions differ greatly depending on the assumptions of the total system the embodied co2 emissions obtained by i o models are much larger than those obtained by the ge model in some cases the total co2 emissions increase even if less intermediate inputs are required owing to technological improvement it is shown that taking i o type embodied emissions alone into consideration is insufficient for the estimation of policy effects careful consideration is necessary to effectively reduce emissions when production and consumption are interconnected in a complex way

is there momentum or reversal in weekly currency returns abstract we investigate whether momentum or reversal is the dominant phenomenon in short horizon one to four week foreign exchange rate returns we find based on a broad sample of 63 emerging and developed market currencies evidence of momentum rather than reversal momentum strategy returns are as large as 8 p a the short term momentum effect appears to be robust returns are larger in the earlier sub period but still exist in the more recent period the strategies are also profitable when the usd is appreciating or depreciating but they perform better in business cycle expansions

why do term structures in different currencies co move abstract yield curve fluctuations across different currencies are highly correlated this paper investigates this phenomenon by exploring the channels through which macroeconomic shocks are transmitted across borders macroeconomic shocks affect current and expected future short term rates as central banks react to changing economic environments investors could also respond to these shocks by altering their required compensation for risk macroeconomic shocks thus influence bond yields both through a policy channel and through a risk compensation channel using data from the us the uk and germany we find that world inflation and us yield level together explain over two thirds of the covariance of yields at all maturities further these effects operate largely through the risk compensation channel for long term bonds

the impact of immigrants on host country crime it is conventionally believed that immigration increases crime rates in the host country however empirical results are not in line with this crime concern we develop a model with endogenous skill upgrading and criminal choices to reconcile the inconsistency

assessment of regional trade and virtual water flows in china the success of china s economic development has left deep marks on resource availability and quality some regions in china are relatively poor with regards to water resources this problem is exacerbated by economic growth flourishing trade activities on both domestic and international levels have resulted in significant amounts of water withdrawal and water pollution hence the goal of this paper is to evaluate the current inter regional trade structure and its effects on water consumption and pollution via virtual water flows virtual water is the water embedded in products and used in the whole production chain and that is traded between regions or exported to other countries for this assessment of trade flows and effects on water resources we have developed an extended regional input output model for eight hydro economic regions in china to account for virtual water flows between north and south china the findings show that the current trade structure in china is not very favorable with regards to water resource allocation and efficiency north china as a water scarce region virtually exports about 5 of its total available freshwater resources while accepting large amounts of wastewater for other regions consumption by contrast south china a region with abundant water resources is virtually importing water from other regions while their imports are creating waste water polluting other regions hydro ecosystems

currency spillovers and tri polarity a simultaneous model of the us dollar german mark and japanese yen this paper presents a simultaneous model of exchange rates between the three major countries in addition to incorporating long run equilibria and short run dynamics the model is designed to capture complex interactions between currencies not normally considered in exchange rate models these interactions are shown to be important via generalised impulse response analysis and the model as a whole to be an economically and statistically superior forecasting tool over relatively short horizons

decomposing multipliers for economic systems involving regional and world trade this paper is concerned with the analysis of linkages between economic systems and the spillover and possible feedback effects one system may have on another it is not a new topic the initial stimulus in the literature coming from machlup i943 and the seminal papers by metzler i950 and chipman i950 almost precisely the same questions raised by these authors have been readdressed subsequently by many writers and in a variety of contexts most recently goodwin i983 has developed a world matrix multiplier with much the same overall objectives as machlup and metzler in mind metzler s proposition was to understand the mechanism by which an expansion or contraction of income in one region or country is transmitted to other regions or countries in addition he assumed that the conclusions apply without modification to the regions within a single country or indeed to any regional classification of the world economy such as the economies comprising eastern europe western europe latin america and similar regions 2 in fact the question has also long occupied the attention of many regional economists working in the context of sub national regions the question of interdependence between sub national regional economies generally assumes a special importance simply because such regions are relatively open economies and are subject to fewer natural and artificial barriers to commodity trade and factor movements than may exist between countries 3 even so interest has focused almost exclusively on regional interdependence through commodity trade and within the framework of multiregional input output systems 4 however there are some exceptions klein and glickman i 9 77 have developed a multiregional model of a fairly aggregative nature which incorporates other regional interdependencies a review of this and similar models has been carried out by glickman i97 7 paralleling this interest in inter regional interdependence at the sub national level there has been a revived interest in questions of linkage at the international level with the advent of the project link model pioneered by klein and hickman 5 the united nations model of the world economy leontief et al

national natural capital accounting with the ecological footprint concept abstract there is a growing consensus among natural and social scientists that sustainability depends on maintaining natural capital however progress to put this ecological condition to practice has been slow not least because of the inability of making these objectives measurable therefore to overcome this obstacle assessment frameworks for natural capital are needed this study presents a simple framework for national and global natural capital accounting it demonstrates using the example of italy an accounting framework which tracks national economies energy and resource throughput and translates them into biologically productive areas necessary to produce these flows this calculation has been applied to over 52 countries with this framework based on the ecological footprint concept human consumption can be compared with natural capital production at the global and national level using existing data

international trade in carbon emission rights and basic materials general equilibrium calculations for 2020 restrictions on co emissions affect international trade and the pattern of comparative advantage this paper based on calculations with a static general equilibrium model suggests that international trade in carbon rights is a substitute for trade in energy intensive goods and thus international trading in carbon rights reduces sectoral effects of emission reductions in our model we surprisingly find that free riding by non signatory countries may not render unilateral action ineffective if the oecd unilaterally cuts global emissions by 5 per cent from 1990 levels by the year 2020 emissions by non oecd regions increase but offset less than 15 per cent of this cutback moreover carbon taxes depress international oil prices and create incentives for increased tradc in natural gas

assessing the energy intensities of imports embodied energy intensities denote the amount of energy direct and indirect that is required to produce one unit of economic output these embodied energy intensities should include imports the energy intensities of imports are in most cases unknown and are therefore often neglected or assumed to be equal to the domestic energy intensities of similar products both assumptions introduce errors in the indigenously calculated embodied energy intensities this certainly applies to countries with a relatively high contribution of imports and a specific economic structure this article advocates to estimate the energy intensities of imports by means of the average energy intensities of the region in which the country is situated in this context different estimation procedures for the embodied energy intensities of imports are presented for a number of countries within oecd europe

an overview of the driving forces behind energy demand in china s construction industry evidence from 1990 to 2012 abstract the rapid urbanization in china has produced a large demand for energy in the past decades it is therefore urgent to have an understanding of the driving forces behind the energy increase in the construction industry this study applies structural decomposition analysis sda to quantify the effects of driving factors from insight into consumption and production the results show that the energy consumption trajectory of china s construction industry is the result of competition between the effect of increasing final demand and improvement in energy efficiency although the effect of consistent efforts in structure optimization by the central government was significant from 2007 to 2012 the potential to save much energy still lies in structure optimization in energy production and final demand according to the projection structural upgrades in economy would be the most important factor for energy reduction in 2020 scenario analysis further indicated that the percentage change of energy increments in 2020 can be reduced at 22 of 2010 level under the optimistic scenario sector aggregation analysis revealed that more aggregates would increase uncertainty to some extent and result in a misinterpretation of the importance of the underlying factors according to the quantitative analysis in this study the percentage change of total embodied energy consumption in the construction industry should be limited below 25 of 2010 level at the end of the 13th five year plan

global warming agreements international trade and energy carbon embodiments an input output approach to the italian case abstract in the kyoto protocol the absence of green house gases ghgs commitments of developing countries non annex i and the more flexible terms of implementation which are allowed to countries shifting toward a market economy transition economies naturally lead to the absence or to less constraining national measures and policies of reduction of the ghgs emissions which in turn may determine a comparative advantage in the production of the highest energy carbon intensive commodities for these countries these arguments are valid also considering the future implementation of the european emission allowance trading scheme eats thus developing countries may become a haven for the production of not environmental friendly commodities in this case the so called pollution haven hypothesis stating that due to freer international trade the comparative advantage may change the economic structure and consequently the trade patterns of the countries linked by trade relationships could occur this would lead to the increase of the transfers of energy and carbon embodied in traded commodities from developing countries and transition economies toward kyoto or eats constrained countries the aim of this paper is to verify if for italy as a kyoto and eats complying country evidence of a change in the trade patterns occurred on the basis of the pollution haven hypothesis does exist and to estimate the magnitude of the under estimation of the carbon actually emitted the carbon leakage the input output model has been used to calculate the intensities of energy consumption and the related green house gases emission for each italian economic sector

immigrants in the american labor market quality assimilation and distributional effects this paper provides evidence on immigrants performance and impact in the u s labor market we document that new immigrants do bring fewer marketable skills to the united states than did earlier cohorts and that changes in the source countries of recent immigrants account for all of this decline in immigrant quality we find no important evidence that quality has declined within immigrant ethnic groups we also show that immigrants assimilate rapidly in the u s market 10 years of u s experience offsets most of the earnings disadvantage of new immigrants and that assimilation is more rapid for groups who start with lower initial wages excerpt

dynamic information spillovers in intraregionally focused spot and forward currency markets abstract this paper proposes an intraregionally focused tri currency modeling framework to investigate dynamic information spillovers across spot and forward exchange rate markets in frontier and emerging country currencies for both price levels and volatilities empirical estimates of structural parameters were obtained using an mgarch mskst model that incorporated the term structure of non deliverable forward ndf and deliverable forward df markets the dominance of regional currencies and the influence of differing forward contract maturities 1 3 6 and 12 months the currencies for nine countries were grouped into three regions northeast asia china korea and taiwan south southeast asia india indonesia and philippines and latin america brazil chile and columbia the currency for each selected country was evaluated within the regionally determined tri currency system we found that ndf markets play a dominant role over df markets with regard to price discovery during periods of tranquility during periods of crisis both ndf and df markets exhibit a more balanced impact on currency market price discovery mechanisms in addition distinct differences were observed across regions currencies in northeast asia were shown to be affected by the chinese renminbi during periods of crisis and the indian rupee could be regarded as the dominant currency in south southeast asia no robust results were obtained with regard to the dominance of currencies in latin america finally our results also suggest important distinctions between the effect of various instrument maturities on ndf and df market returns with df returns being more responsive to longer maturities 6 months and 12 months during tranquil periods ndf returns are more responsive to shorter maturities but during crisis periods this effect is diminished

temporal change of china s pollution terms of trade and its determinants abstract based on the world input output database wiod this study employed a revised pollution terms of trade ptt indicator to investigate the temporal change of china s environmental cost relative to its economic gains from international trade from 1995 to 2009 the results show that china has ptt larger than 1 indicating that china emits more emissions to obtain each unit of value added from exports than its trade partners over the period china s ptt first decreased from 1995 to 2001 and then increased from 2001 to 2009 the further decompositions show that improving technology is the leading driving force to decrease ptt while the change in global trade pattern is the leading force increasing ptt especially after 2001 we further decomposed the temporal change of china s ptt by income group of the trading partners the results show that the change in the global trade pattern is the crucial driving force behind the different changes of ptt by income group

testing the uncovered interest parity using traded volatility a time varying risk premium and heterogeneous expectations abstract this paper carries out an empirical investigation of an extended version of flood and marion s 2000 self fulfilling risk predictions an application to speculative attacks journal of international economics 50 245 268 uip model which incorporates a nonlinear time varying risk premium that depends on both the expected variance of the future exchange rate and the relative worldwide private holdings of domestic and foreign government bonds a novel contribution of our paper is the use of traded currency volatility which is directly observable in the market place to measure expectations about the future volatility of the exchange rate another contribution is the explicit modelling of heterogeneous exchange rate expectations formed by forward looking fundamentalists and backward looking chartists our overall empirical evidence provides strong support for the extended nonlinear uip model we also investigate for the first time the role of traded volatility in the dynamic behaviour of exchange rates and find that high currency volatility is likely to produce oscillatory and unstable exchange rate paths

the economic effects of climate change greenhouse gas emissions are fundamental both to the world s energy system and to its food production the production of co2 the predominant gas implicated in climate change is intrinsic to fossil fuel combustion specifically thermal energy is generated by breaking the chemical bonds in the carbohydrates oil coal and natural gas and oxidizing the components to co2 and h2o one cannot have cheap energy without carbon dioxide emissions similarly methane ch4 emissions an important greenhouse gas in its own right are necessary to prevent the build up of hydrogen in anaerobic digestion and decomposition one cannot have beef mutton dairy or rice without methane emissions climate change is the mother of all externalities larger more complex and more uncertain than any other environmental problem the sources of greenhouse gas emissions are more diffuse than any other environmental problem every company every farm every household emits some greenhouse gases the effects are similarly pervasive weather affects agriculture energy use health and many aspects of nature which in turn affects everything and everyone the causes and consequences of climate change are very diverse and those in low income countries who contribute least to climate change are most vulnerable to its effects climate change is also a long term problem some greenhouse gases have an atmospheric life time measured in tens of thousands of years the quantities of emissions involved are enormous in 2000 carbon dioxide emissions alone and excluding land use change were 24 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide tco2

energy and carbon embodied in the international trade of brazil an input output approach abstract all goods and services produced in an economy are directly and or indirectly associated with energy use and according to the type of fuel utilized with co2 emissions as well international trade is an important factor in shaping the industrial structure of a country and consequently in affecting a country s energy use and co2 emissions this study applies input output techniques to the brazilian economy to evaluate the total impacts of international trade on its energy use and co2 emissions a commodity by industry io model in hybrid units energy commodities in physical units and non energy commodities in monetary units is applied to the brazilian economy in 1995 results show that total energy embodied in the exports of non energy goods of brazil equals 831 pj while total carbon embodied is 13 5 mtc these amounts are larger than the relevant amounts embodied in the imports of non energy goods respectively 679 pj and 9 9 mtc these figures are better understood by contrasting them with the total energy use and the corresponding total carbon emissions of the brazilian economy in 1995 estimated by this work 6781 pj and 99 4 mtc respectively this means that international inflows and outflows of energy embodied in non energy goods are in the order of 10 and 12 of the total energy use while inflows and outflows of carbon embodied in non energy goods are approximately 10 and 14 of the corresponding total carbon emissions of the brazilian economy in 1995 the general picture is that brazil is not only a net exporter of energy 153 pj and of carbon 3 6 mtc embodied in the non energy goods internationally traded by the country in 1995 but also that each dollar earned with exports embodied 40 more energy and 56 more carbon than each dollar spent on imports these findings suggest that brazilian policy makers should be concerned about the extra impacts international trade policy may have on energy use and carbon emissions of the country

examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 1 a technical note on combining input output and ecological footprint analysis in recent years there have been a number of attempts to develop a more comprehensive approach to the issue of measuring resource use and or pollution generation embodied in trade flows including contributions that combine input output techniques and ecological footprint analysis in this two part paper we describe how to enumerate the resource and or pollution content of inter regional and inter national trade flows part 1 and we present a literature review of recent methodological and empirical developments part 2 it is straightforward in principle to extend the basic input output approach to capture international trade flows however in practice problems of data availability and compatibility and of computability of extended input output matrices mean that simplifying assumptions are generally applied but with the implications of these assumptions often not made fully explicit what appears to be absent from previous applications is an account of the analytical method by which ecological footprints should ideally be estimated in an international input output accounting analysis this allows an explicit analysis of the problems that prevent the application of the full method and identification of the most appropriate short cut methods in a transparent way the objective of this paper is to provide such an account

input output and structural decomposition analysis of singapore s carbon emissions singapore is an island city state it lacks conventional energy resources and is alternative energy disadvantaged in the past decade 2000 2010 its energy related carbon emissions increased from 37 8 to 44 4 million tonnes of co2 this paper analyses the city state s carbon emissions from the demand perspective using the input output i o method and investigate the drivers of emission changes using structural decomposition analysis sda it is the first comprehensive analysis of singapore s emissions using the i o framework the results obtained show that exports accounted for nearly two thirds of its total emissions and growth in its emissions in the last decade was largely export driven emissions increased as export oriented industries and export volume expanded fuel switching and energy efficiency however helped to lower growth in emissions besides exports household related emissions accounted for about a quarter of singapore s total emissions the emissions related to different household groups remained fairly stable as increases in embodied indirect emissions were offset by decreases in direct emissions the high income household group registered the largest increase in direct emissions while the middle income household group registered the largest increase in embodied emissions the policy implications of our findings are discussed

connected we stand a network perspective on trade and global food security we analyze the link between virtual water trade that is the flow of water embodied in the international trade of agricultural goods and vulnerability to external shocks from the vantage point of network analysis while a large body of work has shown that virtual water trade can enhance water saving on a global scale being especially beneficial to arid countries there are increasing concerns that openness makes countries more dependent on foreign food suppliers and in this way more prone to external shocks our evidence reveals that the increased globalization witnessed in the last three decades is not associated with the increased frequency of adverse shocks in food production furthermore building on recent advances in network analysis that connect the stability of a complex system to its topological features we find that the world is more interconnected but not necessarily less stable

nitrogen tax and set aside as greenhouse gas abatement policies under global change scenarios a case study for germany the ambitious climate policy objectives of the cop21 agreement require the design and the implementation of effective and efficient policy instruments the effectiveness and efficiency of agricultural abatement options depend on regional climate and natural conditions changes in the global economy global agricultural markets and regional agricultural production thus the assessment of abatement options requires consideration of the global scale the market scale and the regional producer scale we investigate two abatement options discussed controversially in literature both have been partially applied to reduce environmental pollution from agriculture a tax on nitrogen and the obligatory set aside of agricultural land our study provides an assessment of the ecological effectiveness and the economic efficiency of both abatement options under different global scenarios in our policy analysis we combine three applied policy simulation models to develop an integrated economic model framework this model framework considers the global the national and the regional scale and consists of the global general equilibrium model dart bio the partial equilibrium model capri and the regional supply model raumis in the different global scenarios the results show that both abatement options create relatively high marginal abatement costs and that the maximally reached abated greenhouse gas emissions represent only 15 of the quantity required to fulfill the policy targets compared to the obligatory set aside option the nitrogen tax is in both scenarios the more efficient policy with respect to impacts on production and environment a nitrogen tax is less forecastable than the obligatory set aside option our study illustrates the relevance of considering global economic and market change in the assessment of producer targeting environmental policies

forecasting exchange rate for the australian dollar via a vis the us dollar using multivariate time series models the purpose of the paper is to forecast exchange rates by using restricted and unresticted vector autoregressive var models also introduced is an econometric model for the purpose of comparison a comparison of forecast stastistics shows that the restricted model bvar has better forecasting ability compared with the unrestricted var model however the econometric model outperforms both the study also indicates that the exchange rate relative price and three month forward rate are cointegrated thus an error correction model also is considered for the structural one and the forecasting performance improved further for this model

econometric evaluation of the exchange rate in models of the uk economy in june 1972 sterling s fixed parity against the dollar was abandoned and macroeconomic modellers could no longer treat the exchange rate as an exogenous variable a considerable research effort ensued as modellers sought to integrate exchange rate systems into their econometric models none of the resulting systems performed well however and the exchange rate equations often had to be overridden or subjected to heavy residual adjustment in forecasting and policy analysis exercises in the first instance these difficulties came as no surprise given the short series of data available for the floating regime and the uninformative nature of the fixed regime the difficulties have persisted however in an analysis of the historical tracking performance of a recent vintage of the main uk macroeconometric models fisher and wallis i990 find that no model has a particularly good static simulation record with respect to the exchange rate nor are these difficulties purely local ones in his international survey isard i 988 concludes that empirical modeling of exchange rates over the past decade has been largely a failure this paper evaluates the exchange rate mechanisms embodied in current large scale models of the uk economy and develops a new specification that is econometrically preferable the models considered are those of the london business school lbs national institute of economic and social research niesr liverpool university research group in macroeconomics lpl bank of england be and her majesty s treasury hmt as deposited with

international trade related food miles the case of canada abstract at the beginning of the 21st century imports of agricultural and food commodities have become a major part of many nations food baskets indeed the global food system has several merits for nations businesses and individual consumers well being however as increasing evidence suggests that we are approaching an era of climate change and scarcity of cheap energy sources the sustainability of that system must be examined one part of any food commodity chain is its food miles the distance the commodity travels from point of production to point of consumption the required energy and resulting emissions this paper presents a 1 year snapshot of canada s total import related food miles it presents an analysis of the distance imported foods traveled from around the world to major points of consumption in canada and documents the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions related to those imports it presents both a macro scale picture of the equivalent emissions related to transportation of imported food and a micro scale picture which focuses on specific commodities consumed in various parts of the country it then discusses policy implications for food sustainability overall the research highlights that about 30 of the agricultural and food commodities consumed in canada are imported resulting in food miles of over 61 billion tonnes km leading to annual emissions of 3 3 million metric tonnes of co 2 of the various agriculture and food commodities studied fruits and vegetables had the highest food miles related emissions

the role of co2 embodiment in us china trade abstract this study examines the influence of us china trade on national and global emissions of carbon dioxide co2 the three basic questions are as follows 1 what amount of co2 emissions is avoided in the us by importing chinese goods 2 how much are co2 emissions in china increased as a result of the production of goods for export to the us and 3 what are the impacts of us china trade on global co2 emissions our initial findings reveal that during 1997 2003 1 us co2 emissions would have increased from 3 to 6 if the goods imported from china had been produced in the us 2 about 7 14 of china s current co2 emissions were a result of producing exports for us consumers and 3 us china trade has increased global co2 emissions by an estimated 720 million metric tons we suggest that the export of us technologies and expertise related to clean production and energy efficiency to china could be a win win strategy for both countries for reducing their trade imbalance and mitigating global co2 emissions improved international accounting methodologies for assigning responsibility for co2 emissions must be designed to account for the dynamic nature of international trade

quantifying the economic contribution of wild food harvests to rural livelihoods a global comparative analysis this paper empirically quantifies and analyses i the economic contribution of wild foods to rural households ii the household socio economic demographic and geographical correlates of wild food income and iii how wild foods can be better incorporated into integrative food security policies we used household income data from 7975 households in 24 developing countries across three continents collected by the poverty environment network pen we found 77 of households to be engaged in wild food collection from forest and non forest environments even though the share of wild food income in total household income was on average only 4 poorer households and households experiencing shocks derived higher income shares from wild foods state land is the main source of forest derived wild food income while private lands are most important for non forest wild food income considerable regional variation in determinants and the direction of significant relationships indicate there is no one size fits all approach to integrating wild foods into food and forest policies however our results reveal potential to increase household food security by integrating wild foods into national food policies in more customized ways

the term structure of forward exchange premiums and the forecastability of spot exchange rates correcting the errors we develop a framework to extract information regarding subsequent spot rate movements from the term structure of forward exchange premiums while admitting possible deviations from rationality and