are future taxes discounted in this paper i examine empirically the question of whether or not the public recognizes the future taxes implied by current deficitfinanced expenditures as discussed by barro 1 it seems that such recognition does not occur but that by a new hypothesis presented here the aggregate economy behaves much as if it did this alternative hypothesis relies on the widely accepted efficient markets and permanent income hypotheses and it requires considerably less sophistication and information on the part of the average economic agent than does barro s hypothesis

measuring the efficiency of energy intensive industries across european countries abstract this study evaluates the energy efficiency trends of five energy intensive industries in 23 european union eu countries over the period 2000 2009 in particular the performance of the construction electricity manufacturing mining and quarrying and transport sectors is examined the analysis is based on data envelopment analysis dea combined with the malmquist productivity index mpi which allows for distinctions between efficiency and technology changes over time at the second stage of the analysis cross classified multilevel modelling is applied to analyse the main drivers behind efficiency performance using a number of sector and country characteristics based on dea results an overall improvement in efficiency is observed in all sectors over the period the decomposition of the mpi indicates that technology change is primarily responsible for the improvements achieved in most sectors the results obtained by the cross classified model show among other things that the high electricity prices energy taxes and market share of the largest generator in the electricity market have a negative effect on industrial energy efficiency

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

input orientated data envelopment analysis framework for measuring and decomposing economic environmental and ecological efficiency an application to oecd agriculture this paper presents an input orientated data envelopment analysis dea framework which allows the measurement and decomposition of economic environmental and ecological efficiency levels in agricultural production across different countries economic environmental and ecological optimisations search for optimal input combinations that minimise total costs total amount of nutrients and total amount of cumulative exergy contained in inputs respectively the application of the framework to an agricultural dataset of 30 oecd countries revealed that i there was significant scope to make their agricultural production systems more environmentally and ecologically sustainable ii the improvement in the environmental and ecological sustainability could be achieved by being more technically efficient and even more significantly by changing the input combinations iii the rankings of sustainability varied significantly across oecd countries within frontier based environmental and ecological efficiency measures and between frontier based measures and indicators

dynamics of productivity taking into consideration the impact of energy consumption and environmental degradation abstract this study deals with the nonparametric frontier analysis in the case of the eu 28 countries for a period spanning from 1993 to 2015 it provides statistical inference about the radial output based measure of technical efficiency under the assumption of constant returns to scale crs and it performs scale analysis that allows determining the nature of scale inefficiency of each data point furthermore an order approach is developed for determining partial frontiers both traditional malmquist luenberger and bootstrapped malmquist productivity indexes between 1993 and 2015 are constructed analysis of productivity change by decomposing the total factor productivity index into efficiency change and technical change is performed showing respectively whether productivity gains derive mainly from improvements in efficiency or are mostly the result of technological progress in this sense the results can provide european policy makers with an improved understanding of the process of technological and efficiency change helping them to improve the design of their environmental and energy policies

returns to scale damages to scale marginal rate of transformation and rate of substitution in dea environmental assessment abstract this study discusses a new use of dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment to measure mrt marginal rate of transformation and rs rate of substitution between desirable and undesirable outputs to discuss mrt and rs this study first examines a concept of disposability from the perspective of corporate strategies to adapt a regulation change on undesirable outputs the concept of disposability is separated into natural and managerial disposability then this study explores the computational framework of rts returns to scale and dts damages to scale the type of rts is measured within the natural disposability while the type of dts is measured within the managerial disposability considering the two types of disposability this study discusses mrt and rs between desirable and undesirable outputs as an illustrative example this study applies the proposed approach to evaluate the performance of us coal fired power plants this study finds that the regulation policy on no x and so 2 has been effective on their emission controls under us clean air act caa the regulation on co 2 or a major source of the global warming and climate change is still insufficient in the united states therefore this study recommends that us federal and local governments should regulate the amount of co 2 emission under the caa

sustainability development for supply chain management in u s petroleum industry by dea environmental assessment abstract environmental assessment and protection are important concerns in modern business consumers are interested in environmental protection they avoid purchasing products from dirt imaged companies even if their prices are much less than the ones produced by green imaged companies the green image is very important for business survivability in our global market a business concern associated with the green image is how to attain corporate sustainability where companies can attain both economic success and pollution prevention in their operations there is tradeoff between economic prosperity and environmental concern to attain a high level of corporate sustainability companies need to measure the current performance in terms of their operational and environmental achievements this study proposes a use of data envelopment analysis dea for such assessment the proposed dea assessment provides corporate leaders and managers with not only the measure of corporate sustainability but also information regarding how to invest for technology innovation for abatement of undesirable outputs e g co 2 as an application this study utilizes the proposed approach to measure the corporate sustainability of petroleum firms in the united states the petroleum industry is functionally separated into integrated and independent companies the integrated companies referred to as major have their large supply chains for both upstream e g exploration development and production of crude oil or natural gas and downstream e g oil tankers refineries storages and retails meanwhile the independent companies focus upon the upstream function but not the downstream in their business operations the empirical comparison between the two groups of petroleum firms identifies that the integrated companies outperform the independent companies because a large supply chain incorporated into the former group provides them with both a scale merit in their operations and an opportunity to obtain consumer s opinions on their business operations thus the large supply chain system covering business functions for upstream and downstream enhances corporate sustainability in the u s petroleum industry it is easily envisioned that the empirical findings discussed in this study are useful in preparing business strategy and industrial policy for the petroleum industry of not only the united states but also other nations involved in oil and gas production

deadweight loss in environmental policy the case of the european union member states abstract with increased competition for scarce public financial resources and increased pressure on environmental policy it is necessary to determine the effectiveness of current environmental policy therefore the aim of this article was to determine the deadweight loss in public spending on the preservation of environment quality including national expenditures and the common agricultural policy in individual eu countries between the years of 2005 2016 to determine the relative differences in efficiency on environmental policy between eu countries bootstrapped data envelopment analysis and malmquist total factor productivity index decomposition was used it was found that generally the environmental prospects for european countries has improved over the last decade and have been reversely correlated to the deadweight loss however the inefficiency level of eu countries policy is on average relatively higher than what was reported in different regions of the world the highest efficiency of environmental spending has been therefore achieved in central eastern european and scandinavian countries and spain

an empirical test of the effects of government deficits on money demand there is a great deal of interest in how govenment deficits affect macroeconomic variables accordingly there is a large body of theoretical and empirical work on the topic this paper examines the relationship between deficits and interest rates among the difficulties in exploring this relationship is that when conducting monetary policy the federal reserve often targets interest rates such a policy can cloud any relationship between deficits and interest rates a way to avoid this problem among others is to estimate money demand functions that contain a measure of the market value of government debt no evidence is found to support a positive relationship between government debt and money demand this finding implies budget deficits do not affect interest rates through money demand

dea radial and non radial models for unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability theoretical extension by strong complementary slackness conditions abstract this study proposes a use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment all radial and non radial models are discussed under natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability implies corporate strategy by which a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to decrease a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector a firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy supported by economists indicates negative adaptation to a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses corporate strategy by which a firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its performance by utilizing new environmental technology and or new management this type of strategy supported by corporate strategists in u s business schools indicates positive adaptation to the regulation change on undesirable outputs using the proposed dea assessment this study examines the relationship among energy consumption economic development and environmental protection in japanese prefectures to theoretically extend the use of dea for environmental assessment this study incorporates strong complementary slackness conditions scscs into the proposed radial models the incorporation of scscs has three methodological strengths first dea scscs can handle an occurrence of multiple reference sets and multiple projections second the incorporation of scscs makes it possible to restrict dual variables multiples in a specific range without any prior information finally dea scscs can bypass the conventional procedure i e a radial model combined with an additive model used for dea radial measurement

how efficient is the substitution of debt for taxes in influencing demand a 52 country macro theoretic model is developed in order to test the ricardian view that debt and tax finance are equivalent the alternative traditional view is that government expenditures financed by tax revenue affect the economy in profoundly different ways than expenditures financed by bond issuance a rigorous testing of the model indicates that a present value preserving transfer of income from future generations affects the consumption of the current generations in a positive for solvent countries or negative for debt ridden countries way an explanation for this divergence in consumer s behaviour is attempted via the concept of debt illusion

measuring efficiencies and returns to scale of nippon telegraph telephone in production and cost analyses this article provides a theoretical framework related to data envelopment analysis dea in which an analytical relationship among eight different efficiency concepts is defined and explored in terms of production and cost analyses this article extends the theoretical basis into the measurement of scale economies se and returns to scale rts a unique feature of the se rts measurement is that the proposed approach is based upon the measurement regarding not only production activity but also cost performance as an important case study this article applies the dea based approach to measure the eight efficiency concepts and se rts of nippon telegraph telephone ntt this study finds that ntt has maintained high se and increasing rts in the operations of 39 annual periods from 1953 through 1992

measuring ecological efficiency with data envelopment analysis dea abstract the measurement of ecological efficiency provides some important information for the companies environmental management ecological efficiency is usually measured by comparing environmental performance indicators data envelopment analysis dea shows a high potential to support such comparisons as no explicit weights are needed to aggregate the indicators in general dea assumes that inputs and outputs are goods but from an ecological perspective also bads have to be considered in the literature bads are treated in different and sometimes arbitrarily chosen ways this article aims at the systematic derivation of ecologically extended dea models starting from the assumptions of dea in production theory and activity analysis a generalisation of basic dea models is derived by incorporating a multi dimensional value function f extended preference structures can be considered by different specifications of f e g specifications for ecologically motivated applications of dea

technical efficiency of economic systems of eu 15 countries based on energy consumption in the present study data envelopment analysis is used to determine the technical efficiency index of eu 15 countries from 1980 to 2008 using cross country comparison technical efficiency index represents the capacity of an economy to produce a higher level of gross domestic product for a given level of total energy input the level of the technical efficiency index is determined from the energy mix fossil fuels non fossil fuels nuclear energy of each country and depends on the maximization level of the production of the gross domestic product of the economic system without waste of energy resources the current study is applied in the case of the eu15 countries its scope is to highlight the differentiations of country classifications before and after the integration of nuclear energy in the energy mix of each country the main result is that the integration of nuclear energy as an additional input in the energy mixture affects negatively the technical efficiency of countries also when an economy achieves a decrease of the energy consumption produced from fossil fuels and a better exploitation of renewable energy sources clearly improves its capacity to produce more output with the given levels of inputs

testing ricardian equivalence a reconsideration empirical evidence on the determinants of private consumption in 52 countries over the period 1979 88 indicates that in contrast to the ricardian equivalence proposition a significant relationship exists between consumption and the variable the ratio of tax revenue to changes in government debt which measures the extent of substituting debt for tax financing the results obtained from estimating euler equations for the representative individual s stochastic dynamic optimization problem are favourable to the proposition that the choice between current taxation and debt issuance to finance a given government expenditure stream is relevant to the determination of the level of aggregate demand

returns to scale and damages to scale on u s fossil fuel power plants radial and non radial approaches for dea environmental assessment abstract this study proposes a new use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment paying attention to a methodological bias i e different methods produce different results dea is analytically classified into radial and non radial approaches the radial approach determines the level of unified operational and environmental efficiency by measuring an inefficiency score the score indicates the distance of a projection from an observed performance to an efficiency frontier in contrast the non radial approach determines the level of unified efficiency by measuring a total amount of slacks because each slack indicates inefficiency to avoid the methodological bias this study considers the use of radial and non radial approaches in this study we consider a production process where all organizations produce not only desirable good but also undesirable bad outputs as a result of their business operations to unify the two types of outputs this study discusses the concept of disposability which is separated into natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability indicates negative adaptation to a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates corporate strategy by which a firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified efficiency by utilizing new environmental technology and or new management this type of strategy indicates positive adaptation to the regulation change under the two disposability concepts this study discusses how to measure rts returns to scale under natural disposability and dts damages to scale corresponding to rts on undesirable outputs under managerial disposability the two scale measures are analytically discussed by the proposed radial and non radial approaches with scscs or without scscs where scscs indicate strong complementary slackness conditions an illustrative example on u s fossil fuel power plants indicates a policy implication that they need to introduce new technology for environmental protection this study also discusses a necessity of examining a methodological bias in energy studies empirical findings identified in this study document the practicality of the proposed approaches to measure rts dts

carbon pricing revenues could close infrastructure access gaps introducing a price on greenhouse gas emissions would not only contribute to reducing the risk of dangerous anthropogenic climate change but would also generate substantial public revenues some of these revenues could be used to cover investment needs for infrastructure providing access to water sanitation electricity telecommunications and transport in this way emission pricing could promote sustainable socio economic development by safeguarding the stability of natural systems which constitute the material basis of economies while at the same time providing public goods that are essential for human well being for a scenario that is consistent with limiting global warming to below 2 c we find that domestic carbon pricing without redistribution of revenues across countries has substantial potential to close existing access gaps for water sanitation electricity and telecommunication however for the majority of countries carbon pricing revenues would not be sufficient to pave all unpaved roads and for most countries in sub saharan africa they would be insufficient to provide universal access to all types of infrastructure except water if some fraction of the global revenues of carbon pricing is redistributed e g via the green climate fund more ambitious infrastructure access goals could be achieved in developing countries our paper also bears relevance for the design of climate finance mechanisms as it suggests that supporting carbon pricing policies instead of project based finance might not only permit cost efficient emission reductions but also leverage public revenues to promote human development goals

methodological comparison between dea data envelopment analysis and dea da discriminant analysis from the perspective of bankruptcy assessment abstract this study compares dea data envelopment analysis with dea da discriminant analysis in terms of bankruptcy assessment recently many dea researchers propose a use of dea as a quick and easy tool to assess corporate bankruptcy meanwhile other dea researchers discuss a use of dea da for bankruptcy based financial analysis the two groups are very different from the conventional use of dea because we have long applied dea to the measurement of operational performance or productivity analysis the two research groups open up a new application area bankruptcy based financial assessment for dea this study discusses methodological strengths and weaknesses of dea and dea da from the perspective of corporate failure the proposed comparative analysis has the three main criteria a how to handle negative data in financial variables b how to handle data imbalance between default and non default firms and c how to identify a failure process over time this study finds that dea is a managerial tool for the initial assessment of corporate failure and dea is useful for busy corporate leaders and financial managers in contrast dea da is useful for researchers and individuals who are interested in the detailed assessment of bankruptcy and its failure process in a time horizon

distributional impacts of climate change mitigation in indian electricity the influence of governance abstract studies that examine the distributional impacts of climate change mitigation policies often neglect the influence of institutions that implement these policies this study examines the short term consumption side distributional impacts of expanding low carbon electric supply in the state of maharashtra india with a focus on the influence of regulatory discretion in pricing households welfare impacts from economy wide electricity price shocks are simulated against a baseline that is calibrated to actual household economic and electricity service conditions including actual electricity budgets block tier prices and supply rationing industrial price impacts are propagated to households using a leontief input output analysis regulatory pricing decisions are evaluated based on social welfare metrics for economic efficiency and income inequality the analysis reveals new linkages between climate change mitigation electricity policy and income distribution low income households can be shielded from mitigation impacts without losses in aggregate welfare to the extent that regulators can recover mitigation costs through industrial price increases regulators flexibility to distribute costs across households is constrained by industrial customers migration off the grid reduced supply interruptions to the rural poor from the resulting demand contraction are a potential co benefit of mitigation distributional impacts therefore depend on other electricity policies that are driven by the political economy of the sector

analysis of energy end use efficiency policy in spain abstract the implementation of saving measures and energy efficiency entails the need to evaluate achievements in terms of energy saving and spending this paper aims at analysing the effectiveness and economic efficiency of energy saving measures implemented in the energy savings and efficiency action plan 2008 2012 eap4 in spain for 2010 the lack of assessment related to energy savings achieved and public spending allocated by the eap4 justifies the need of this analysis the results show that the transport and building sectors seem to be the most important from the energy efficiency perspective although they did not reach the direct energy savings that were expected there is scope for reduction with the appropriate energy measures for the effectiveness indicator the best performance are achieved by public service agricultural and fisheries and building sectors while in terms of energy efficiency per monetary unit the best results are achieved by transport industry and agriculture sectors authors conclude that it is necessary that central regional and local administrations will get involved in order to get better estimates of the energy savings achieved and thus to affect the design of future energy efficiency measures at the lowest possible cost to the citizens

alternative measures of environmental technology structure in dea an application abstract the nonparametric data envelopment analysis dea literature on environmental efficiency ee considers handling undesirable outputs in two alternative ways either in their original forms with the assumption that these are weakly disposable or in various translated forms with the assumption that these are strongly disposable choosing a particular approach implies adoption of a particular distinct treatment of undesirable outputs and hence yields a distinct set of ee estimates to explore the effects of the interplay between choice of ee measure and specific treatment of undesirable outputs this paper attempts to generate all possible output oriented ee measures based on these two alternative approaches furthermore guided by the argument that slacks are important in identifying properly the efficiency behavior of firms it proposes two new alternative slacks based formulations of ee one based on the range directional model and the other on the generalized proportional distance function model using a confected data set of ten firms and a real life data set of 22 oecd countries our empirical analysis reveals that first ee scores are influenced not only by the choice of disposability assumption for undesirable outputs but also by the way these are treated in various translated forms second the choice of any particular treatment of undesirable outputs plays no role in influencing the rankings of firms and third our two new alternative ee formulations are at the least viable alternatives to existing ee measures in ranking firms according to their eco efficiency behavior

operational synergy in the us electric utility industry under an influence of deregulation policy a linkage to financial performance and corporate value abstract sueyoshi et al 2009 have examined a synergy effect between electricity and gas services in the us electric utility industry they have compared electricity specialized firms with diversified utility firms in their financial performance and corporate value a problem of their study is that it has not empirically measured the operational performance of the electric utility firms as an extension of the preceding study this research investigates the operational performance of 104 us electric utility firms 1990 2004 by fully utilizing dea data envelopment analysis this study finds the three new policy implications first the synergy effect has not existed in the operational performance of diversified utility firms before and after the deregulation on the us electricity markets thus core business concentration is more effective for electric utility firms than corporate diversification to enhance their operational performance under the current us deregulation policy second the operational performance has had an increasing trend until 1996 and a decreasing trend after 1996 thus the us deregulation policy has been influential on their operational performance third the enhancement in operational performance of electric utility firms has improved their financial performance the improvement in financial performance has increased their corporate value thus this study finds the business causality among operational performance financial performance and corporate value in the us electric utility industry

dea environmental assessment on u s industrial sectors investment for improvement in operational and environmental performance to attain corporate sustainability abstract environmental assessment has recently become an important business concern because consumers are interested in environmental protection they try to avoid purchasing products from dirt imaged companies which do not pay attention to environmental protection even if their prices are much less than the ones produced by green imaged companies thus a green image is very important for corporate survivability in a global market this study considers corporate sustainability indicating that companies need to consider both economic prosperity and pollution prevention in their operations to discuss the issue from corporate strategy for modern business this study discusses a use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment by focusing upon research and development r d strategy as well as technology innovation and selection for reduction of undesirable outputs e g co 2 emission this type of research has never been explored in previous studies it is easily envisioned that the proposed dea environmental assessment will guide corporate leaders in identifying how to invest for technology innovation to reduce an amount of undesirable outputs to discuss the practicality this study applies the proposed approach to 153 observations on s p 500 corporations in 2012 and 2013 the empirical investigation confirms that investors pay more serious attention to company s green image and the reality for a long run sustainability than profitability in a short run concern furthermore the energy sector is the best investment target among seven industrial sectors examined in this study the measurement of corporate sustainability can serve as an empirical basis in selecting what type of technology is fitted for a specific industry

output effects of government purchases the theoretical analysis focuses on the distinction between temporary and permanent movements in government purchases under plausible conditions the temporary case involves an output response that is positive less than one to one with the change in government purchases and larger than that generated by an equal sized but permanent shift in purchase the equilibrium real rate of return rise in the temporary case but changes little in the permanent one defense purchases are divided empirically into permanent and temporary components by considering the role of temporary wars no temporary shifts in nondefense purchases were isolated empirical results verify an expansionary output effect for temporary purchases that exceeds that of permanent purchases the results for some other expectational hypotheses are found to be generally supportive of the theory

the effect of carbon tax on per capita co2 emissions new huadu business school 09zd050 national social science foundation of china 09zd050 08ajy022 research foundation of ministry of education of china 10jzd0018 fundamental research funds for the central universities 2010221051

promoting renewable energy sources for heating and cooling in eu 27 countries abstract in addition to public policies aimed at improving the energy efficiency of buildings eu authorities have also promoted the use of renewable energy sources for heating and cooling uses res h c this paper analyses the main policy measures implemented in eu 27 countries up to 2009 i e subsidies tax incentives financial support and feed in tariffs twenty three member states mss have developed some of these policy measures the most widespread measure is the subsidy 22 mss have implemented these because from a political point of view subsidies provide a straightforward approach to promote the use of res h c secondly tax incentives have been used for reducing investment costs and making renewable energy profitable thirdly financial incentives and feed in tariffs have been used sparingly while financial incentives might be used more extensively for promoting res h c if they are accompanied by other policy measures feed in tariffs are not likely to be implemented significantly in the future because this measure is not designed for household heat producers

new evidence on the ricardian equivalence theorem a multicointegration approach this paper derives major theoretical constructs which underlie richardian equivalence and using multicointegration methodology empirically tests whether they bear out results indicate that government spending and revenues are cointegrated however the cointegrating scalar is less than one therefore in order for government to obey its intertemporal budget constraint debt and government revenue must be multicointegrated they are not additional evidence indicates that saving and debt may be weakly cointegrated the findings suggest that failure of richardian equivalence may be due to public rather than private sector failure

environmentally sensitive productivity growth a global analysis using malmquist luenberger index abstract we examine conventional and environmentally sensitive total factor productivity tfp in 41 developed and developing countries over the period of 1971 to 1992 due to the non availability of reliable input and co 2 emissions price data the study uses directional distance function to derive malmquist luenberger ml productivity index the index allows us to decompose the tfp into measures of technical and efficiency changes dea is used to compute the directional distance functions we find that tfp index value is not different when we account for the co 2 emissions relative to the situation when they are freely disposable but for the components of tfp change technical and efficiency changes the null hypothesis of whether the indexes are the same under two different scenarios cannot be accepted issues of catch up and convergence or in some cases possible divergence in productivity are examined within a global framework the paper also studies the impact of openness on conventional and environmentally sensitive measures of productivity

an assessment of electricity and income distributional trends following rural electrification in poor northeast brazil highlights c comprehensive analysis of brazil s recent rural electrification efforts c new methodology to analyze energy and income equity trends ex post electrification c analysis indicates immediate social benefits for electrified households c we cannot establish a direct link between electricity use and income in the short run c electrification thus should be integrated in long term rural development strategies abstract rural electrification is considered to be a key strategy for poverty alleviation and sustainable development it should therefore include 1 expanding electricity access and 2 enable new consumers to increase their electricity consumption in this paper we ask how brazil s recent rural electrification efforts have managed to reach these objectives a new method to measure energy and income equity is presented which uses estimations of non parametric density curves for the analysis of energy and income distributional trends following electrification by applying our method to a panel data set from two brazilian states situated in the country s poor northeast region we find that 1 rural consumers take up electricity consumption after electrification and that 2 low consumption levels give way to higher electricity consumption levels after only a few years this indicates immediate social benefits for households through consumption of electricity services however our analysis cannot verify a direct link between electricity use and rural income generation in the short term the results emphasize the need for government and other actors to integrate rural electrification into broader rural development strategies in order to enable long term welfare increases through electricity use

heterogeneous technologies strategic groups and environmental efficiency technology gaps for european countries abstract this paper measures technology tg and environmental efficiency technology gaps eetgs in 25 european countries over two distinct periods 2002 and 2008 examining the possible effect of adopted environmental regulations and the kyoto protocol commitments on environmental efficiency technology gaps however the introduction of the metafrontier in our analysis puts into our discussion the role of heterogeneous technologies and its effect on the above mentioned measures employing a directional distance function we investigate whether there is an actual difference in terms of environmental efficiency and efficiency performance among european countries considering the technological frontiers under which they operate the construction of individual frontiers has been realized employing a large number of variables that are highly correlated with countries learning and absorbing capacity new technological knowledge and using economic theory and classical frontier discrimination like developed vs developing north vs south and participation in the eurozone or not the overall results indicate a crucial role of heterogeneous technologies for technology gaps in both periods moreover a significant decrease for both measures although in different percent has been recorded emphasizing the key role of knowledge spillovers

photovoltaic power stations in germany and the united states a comparative study by data envelopment analysis abstract this study compares photovoltaic pv power stations between germany and the united states to examine which country more efficiently provides renewable energy in their usages for the comparative analysis this study utilizes data envelopment analysis dea as a methodology to evaluate the performance of pv power stations from the perspective of both solar and land usages a total of one hundred sixty pv power stations eighty in germany and eighty in the united states are used for this comparison the demand for sustainable energy and energy security has been rapidly increasing over the past decade because of concerns about environment and limited resources pv solutions are one of many renewable technologies that are being developed to satisfy a recent demand of electricity germany is the world s top installer and consumer of pv power and the united states is one of the top five nations germany leads the way in installed pv capacity even though the nation has less solar resources and land area due to limited solar resources low insolation and sunshine and land area the united states should have a clear advantage over germany however the empirical result of this study exhibits that pv power stations in germany operate more efficiently than those of the united states even if the latter has many solar and land advantages the surprising result indicates that the united states has room for improvement when it comes to utilizing solar and land resources and needs to reform the solar policy for such a purpose feed in tariff fit may be an effective energy policy at the state level in the united states because the fit provides investors such as utility companies and other types of energy firms with financial incentives to develop large pv power stations and generation facilities for other renewable energy it may be true that the fit is a powerful policy tool to promote pv and other renewable installation and support a reduction of an amount of greenhouse gases however the fit poses a large financial burden to consumers with a massive increase in renewable energy installation like in germany and spain therefore it is necessary for the united states to consider how to align a policy with a speed of technology innovation to balance between the benefit and the cost derived from the policy implementation on renewable energy in addition this study discusses policy issues regarding cost allocation due to fit among stakeholders related to the electric power industry at the end this study proposes a new type of wholesale electricity market that provides simultaneous trading on electricity and greenhouse gas emissions by fully utilizing modern computer science technology that exists in universities and national laboratories of the united states

tax incentives to promote green electricity an overview of eu 27 countries this paper provides a comprehensive overview of the main tax incentives used in the eu 27 member states mss to promote green electricity sixteen mss use tax incentives to promote green electricity simultaneously with other promotion measures especially quota obligations and price regulation however not all available technologies are promoted for example six mss germany romania slovak republic denmark sweden and poland have included an exemption on the payments of excise duties for electricity when the electricity is generated from renewable energy sources res this tax incentive is the most widely used limited tax incentives in personal income tax are available in belgium france czech republic and luxembourg in corporate tax tax incentives consist mainly of a deduction in the taxable profit belgium greece czech republic and spain lower tax rates in vat are applied in three mss france italy and portugal only spain and italy use effective tax incentives in property tax as a great diversity of tax incentives has been used to promote green electricity this adds another difficulty to the eu objective of providing a renewable energy policy framework but also it offers a useful set of case studies which can be used to inform eu policy development

weak and strong disposability vs natural and managerial disposability in dea environmental assessment comparison between japanese electric power industry and manufacturing industries the economic concept of weak and strong disposability has long dominated studies on dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment this study reviews the two disposability concepts from their conceptual and methodological implications in particular this study is interested in the concept of weak disposability because the concept is believed to have an analytical capability to measure an occurrence of congestion the two economic concepts on disposability accepted by production economists are replaced by natural and managerial disposability in this study the natural disposability implies an environmental strategy by which a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to reduce a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector a firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy indicates negative adaptation in contrast the managerial disposability indicates an opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses an environmental strategy by which a firm considers a regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified performance by utilizing new clean air technology and or new management the strategy indicates positive adaptation considering the two groups of disposability this study compares between weak strong disposability and natural managerial disposability in terms of their conceptual and methodological differences focusing upon the concept of congestion and technology innovation furthermore using the concept of natural and managerial disposability this study compares japanese electric power firms with manufacturing firms this study finds that the manufacturing firms outperform the electric power firms under natural disposability an opposite result is found under managerial disposability this empirical study also finds that the two groups of japanese firms have attained desirable good congestion due to technology innovation based upon such empirical results this study identifies two policy implications one of the two implications is that the two groups of japanese industries have attained a high level of technology innovation by a result of environmental regulation the other is that the electric power industry operates more efficiently to reduce the co2 emission than the manufacturing industries

transport and co2 productivity growth and carbon dioxide emissions in the european commercial transport industry in the last decades transport activities persistently increased in the eu27 and were strongly coupled to growth in gross domestic product like most production processes they are inevitably linked with the generation of environmentally hazardous by products such as co2 emissions this leads to the question of how to promote a sustainable transport sector that meets both environmental protection targets and economic requirements in this context the objective of this paper is to compare the co2 sensitve productivity development of the european commercial transport industry for the period between 1995 and 2006 we calculate a malmquist luenberger productivity index to investigate the effects of country specific regulations on productivity and to identify innovative countries our results show a high variation in the co2 sensitive productivity development and a slight productivity decrease on average efficiency losses indicate that the majority of the countries were not able to follow the technological improvements induced by some innovative countries

environmental assessment for corporate sustainability by resource utilization and technology innovation dea radial measurement on japanese industrial sectors abstract this study proposes a new use of dea data envelopment analysis radial approach to examine the corporate sustainability of japanese industrial sectors the concept of corporate sustainability is measured by its subcomponent measures including uen unified efficiency under natural disposability uem unified efficiency under managerial disposability uenm unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability uei unified efficiency for intermediate measurement and uenm dc unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability with desirable congestion among the five measures the uei examines a degree of how each firm can efficiently utilize its resources the uenm dc examines a degree of how the firm can reduce an amount of undesirable outputs by technology innovation and or managerial change such a combined use between uei and uenm dc has been never explored in dea environmental assessment the empirical results obtained from the proposed approach have identified two important implications one of the two implications is that the japanese energy industry has been long under governmental regulation so that energy firms do not have corporate governance capabilities at the level of other industrial sectors which are competing in a global market in particular the implication is applicable to japanese electric power firms it is necessary for them to change their corporate governances e g by adding new executive board members who have international experience and or woman executives as widely found in american and european energy industries so that they can pay attention to consumers not regulatory agencies of the japanese government the other implication is that technology innovation can more effectively improve the performance of the energy sector employing high efficiency and low carbon generation technologies to achieve desirable fuel mix is essential for improving the corporate sustainability of the japanese energy sector

the structure of economic modeling of the potential impacts of climate change grafting gross underestimation of risk onto already narrow science models scientists describe the scale of the risks from unmanaged climate change as potentially immense however the scientific models because they omit key factors that are hard to capture precisely appear to substantially underestimate these risks many economic models add further gross underassessment of risk because the assumptions built into the economic modeling on growth damages and risks come close to assuming directly that the impacts and costs will be modest and close to excluding the possibility of catastrophic outcomes a new generation of models is needed in all three of climate science impact and economics with a still stronger focus on lives and livelihoods including the risks of large scale migration and conflicts

dea radial measurement for environmental assessment and planning desirable procedures to evaluate fossil fuel power plants abstract energy policy depends on a proper use of methodology in guiding a large energy issue such as the global warming and climate change dea is one of such methodologies that are often used for preparing environmental policy which is closely linked to various energy issues unfortunately the use of dea applied to environmental policy is insufficient often misguiding policy makers and other individuals who are involved in energy issues this study provides three guidelines for a use of dea in preparing environmental assessment first it is important to prepare both primal and dual formulations to confirm whether information regarding all production factors i e inputs desirable and undesirable outputs is fully utilized in dea assessment second dea has model variations in radial and non radial measurements it is necessary for us to examine environmental issues by different models in order to avoid a methodological bias existing in those empirical studies finally dea environmental assessment needs to incorporate the concept of natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability indicates that a firm negatively adapts a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates that a firm positively adapts the regulation change because the firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity

evaluating environmental performance using data envelopment analysis the case of european countries abstract environmental efficiency is considered to be a critical pillar of sustainable development consequently improving environmental performance has aroused attention at both the local and global level this study evaluated the environmental performance of european union eu countries using the data envelopment analysis dea approach and the global malmquist luenberger index although literature using the dea approach to measure environmental performance exists this study s main contribution was considering different types of undesirable outputs and using long term panel data on eu countries in particular the dea window analysis technique was applied to evaluate the environmental performance of 27 eu countries in cross sectional and time varying data during the period 2000 2017 three dea models were examined labor capital and energy were used as common inputs with a combination of different outputs including gross domestic product carbon dioxide and particulate matter emissions and waste the empirical results revealed that the trends in the environmental performance of the entire eu and its individual countries were similar under all examined models environmental performance was indeed negatively affected by the financial crisis of 2007 2008 this impact was mainly observed in eastern eu countries furthermore both economic and environmental variables significantly influenced countries overall efficiency the analysis using the global malmquist luenberger index elucidated that overall eu countries experienced the efficiency improvement during the study period although fluctuations were observed these results enable countries and policymakers to understand their environmental performance identify strengths and weaknesses and set targets for further improvement based on the current best practices of comparable peers

are consumption and government expenditures substitutes or complements morishima elasticity estimates from the fourier flexible form 1 introduction macroeconomists paid relatively little attention to the economic effects of government expenditures and to alternative methods of financing those expenditures until barro 1974 1979 1981 challenged conventional views on the economic impact of government activity much of the literature stimulated by these studies addressed the effects of alternative financing methods for a given path of government expenditures but barro 1981 also stressed the fact that government expenditures can provide direct welfare to economic agents and that variations in the level of government expenditures may have an impact on the consumption decisions of households as a result many studies estimate the extent to which economic agents treat government expenditures as substitutes to or complements with private consumption expenditures e g kormendi 1983 aschauer 1985 graham and himarios 1991 ni 1995 the degree of substitution or complementarity between private consumption and government expenditures is of crucial importance in assessing the impact of fiscal policies on economic welfare thus it is important to establish the extent to which federal expenditures and private consumption are substitutes or complements as a guide to the design of fiscal policies there is much disagreement about the extent to which consumption and government expenditures are substitutes or complements in use for economic agents 1 studies differ in their details so it is difficult to know what might account for such diverse results but it seems fair to say that the relationship between government expenditures and consumption is largely an open question the diversity of the results however may be a consequence of a number of restrictive assumptions that have been used in various studies many of these assumptions appear hard to justify a priori studies typically estimate the parameters of an equation containing private consumption and government expenditures often assuming that the relevant choice variable for the representative household is an aggregate consumption measure given by the sum of nondurables and services consumption e g aschauer 1985 reid 1985 bean 1986 campbell and mankiw 1990 or the sum of nondurables services and the service flow from durable goods e g kormendi 1983 graham and himarios 1991 this implies that each component of private consumption expenditures is a perfect substitute for the household an assumption for which there is no compelling theoretical basis similarly government expenditures defense nondefense and state and local are typically aggregated e g feldstein 1982 aschauer 1985 reid 1985 graham 1993 with various studies excluding either federal or state and local expenditures just as for private consumption expenditures these aggregation assumptions should be tested rather t han simply imposed in applied work in addition although substitution elasticities are generally not constant in an optimizing framework they are often assumed to be constant in applications by using a single aggregate of consumption or a utility function that imposes a constant elasticity of substitution e g aschauer 1985 and ni 1995 finally none of the above mentioned studies computes elasticities of substitution in a manner consistent with microeconomic utility maximization principles 2 in this article we provide estimates of elasticities of substitution between consumption and government expenditures based on the demand systems approach that has been widely used in testing the neoclassical theory of household behavior see eg deaton and muellbauer 1980 and the survey of barnett et al 1992 this approach has a number of attractive features making it a substantial improvement over the applied studies available in the macroeconomics literature the estimates in this article are based on an optimizing framework where both government and consumption expenditures are treated as choice variables by the representative household

government deficits and aggregate demand abstract the evidence presented in this paper indicates that changes in government spending transfers and taxes can have substantial effects on aggregate demand the estimates also indicate that the promise of future social security benefits significantly reduces private saving each the basic implications of the so called ricardian equivalence theorem is contradicted by the data the results are consistent with the more general view of the effects of fiscal actions and fiscal expectations that is described in the paper

returns to scale and damages to scale under natural and managerial disposability strategy efficiency and competitiveness of petroleum firms environmental assessment recently becomes a major policy issue all over the world this study discusses how to use data environment analysis dea for environmental assessment for planning corporate strategy and international competitiveness an important feature of dea environmental assessment is that it classifies outputs into desirable good and undesirable bad outputs because all private and public entities produce not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs as a result of their production activities this study proposes the two types of output unification for dea environmental assessment by using a non radial model one of the two output unifications is that it considers a decrease in an input vector along with a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as natural disposability the other unification considers an increase in an input vector but a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of strategy is referred to as managerial disposability both unifications increase the vector of desirable outputs after developing the two concepts on disposability this study theoretically explores how to measure returns to scale rts under natural disposability and damages to scale dts under managerial disposability to document the practicality of the proposed approach this study applies it to compare the performance of national oil firms with that of international oil companies this study identifies four important findings on the petroleum industry first national oil companies outperform international oil companies in the unified efficiency under natural disposability second international oil companies outperform national oil companies in the unified efficiency under managerial disposability third national oil firms exhibit a mixed result on rts while international oil firms exhibit decreasing rts finally both national and international oil companies exhibit increasing dts implying that all oil firms need to decrease their operational sizes for improving their environmental performance on co2 emission as an alternative strategy the result suggests that they need to introduce technology innovation e g clean air technology into their business operations the technology based strategy has more practicality than the size reduction in their operations

an analysis of spain s global and environmental efficiency from a european union perspective abstract sustainable economic growth from the environmental point of view is one of the commitments of the eu 28 different measures have been implemented to deal with this issue this work analyses spain s natural efficiency and management efficiency in their static and dynamic sense for the years 2005 2012 in comparison eu 28 the analysis has been carried out using the malmquist index and natural and managerial efficiency three variables have been considered as inputs work gross fixed capital formation and final energy consumption two variables are the outputs the gdp as a desirable output and greenhouse effect gas emissions as an undesirable output the result is that spain s managerial efficiency and natural efficiency are though their values are lower evolving in a similar manner to those of the countries which have been at the heart of the eu longer these levels of efficiency are higher than those of the block of countries which have joined the eu 28 more recently the natural malmquist index results indicate that these are the countries which have had a greater growth in productivity above spain s and the average of the more veteran countries

china s regional sustainability and diversified resource allocation dea environmental assessment on economic development and air pollution abstract environmental protection including the prevention of air pollution and health hazard materials such as pm2 5 and pm10 is now a very serious policy issue in china after attaining the rapid economic growth and development the pm stands for particular matter indicating the size of both solid particles and liquid droplets found in air unfortunately the economic development has produced a serious healthcare problem in not only china and other surrounding nations to enhance people s healthcare and appeal a good national image to the world china is recently looking for the new industrial and environmental policy direction to attain social sustainability in terms of economic development and environmental prevention to discuss policy implications on the new policy direction this study utilizes data envelopment analysis dea for assessment on its regional performance by incorporating pm2 5 and pm10 as undesirable outputs along with two disposability concepts i e natural disposability and managerial disposability no previous dea study has incorporated the amount of pm2 5 and pm10 in empirical investigation using a simulated data set for the period of 2013 2014 this study measures the efficiency of municipality cities under four different types of regional classifications the empirical results indicate that the chinese government should distribute its economic resources to cities which locate in the northwest region including lanzhou xining yinchuan and urumqi and reinforce more strict regulation on energy consumptions for environmental prevention in major cities e g beijing tianjin shanghai and chongqing the industrial policy change from the economic growth to the environment protection is essential for the future of china which is currently the second largest economic power in the world the environmental protection can enhance the china s image of contributing in economics industry and environmental protection to all other nations it can be envisioned that the new policy effort reduces the regional imbalance and increases the social sustainability in china the empirical findings and policy implications discussed in this study are applicable to not only china but also other industrial and developing nations and those are useful in guiding their industrial and environmental policy development

environmental assessment by dea radial measurement u s coal fired power plants in iso independent system operator and rto regional transmission organization abstract the economic concept of weak and strong disposability on undesirable outputs dominated the previous discussions on dea data envelopment analysis radial measurement for environmental assessment this study reexamines the economic concept from the perspective of corporate strategies on how to adapt a regulation change on undesirable outputs the economic concept of disposability conventionally accepted by production economists is replaced by natural and managerial disposability in this study the natural disposability implies an environmental strategy that a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to reduce a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector the firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy indicates negative adaptation meanwhile the managerial disposability indicates an opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses an environmental strategy by which a firm considers a regulation change on undesirable outputs as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified operational and environmental performance by utilizing new technology and or new management the strategy indicates positive adaptation considering the two types of disposability this study discusses how to measure unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability by dea radial models to document the practicality of the proposed dea environmental assessment this study applies it to compare the performance of u s coal fired power plants under isos rtos independent system operators regional transmission organizations with that of the other power plants not belonging to any organization this study identifies two empirical findings one of the two findings is that the latter coal fired power plants outperform the former power plants belonging to isos rtos in terms of three efficiency measures this result indicates that isos and rtos do not provide an effective coordination for coal fired power plants at the level that can be found in the other power plants the other finding is that there is technological improvement in the operation of coal fired power plants

government debt government spending and private sector behavior a current period tax reduction financed by issuing government debt shifts the timing of tax collection from the current period to the future if the future taxes implied by government debt are not fully perceived and discounted by the private sector there will be a net wealth effect that increases private sector consumption thus reducing capital accumulation and growth if on the other hand the implied future taxes are perceived and discounted by the private sector the current period tax reduction will be used to increase private saving to pay for the future taxes and government debt will be absorbed without any real effects on the economy the effects of government spending financed by current period taxation also depend upon private sector perceptions 2 if the benefits of government spending are ignored private sector consumption will decrease in accordance with the reduction in permanent disposable income to the extent that government spending is on consumption type goods that are perceived as substitutes for privately provided consumption goods there will be a relatively greater reduction in private sector consumption to the extent that government spending is on investment type goods yielding future goods and services that are perceived as substitutes for future privately provided consumption goods there will be a relatively smaller reduction in private sector consumption the standard approach to modeling private sector consumption saving behavior involves a rather asymmetric set of assumptions as to how the private sector perceives the various elements of government fiscal policy 3 current period taxes are assumed to be fully perceived but current period government spending is implicitly assumed to be completely ignored by the private sector in considering permanent personal disposable income the private sector is assumed to be forward looking in its assessment of income and taxation the stock of government debt is nevertheless included as part of the stock of private wealth the implicit assumption associate professor of economics graduate school of business university of chicago 1101 east 58th street chicago il 60637 i thank eugene fama levis kochin michael mussa paul evans and an anonymous referee for helpful comments i am particularly grateful to daniel benjamin for contributing many hours of discussion and laura lahaye who was a research assistant and valuable adviser on earlier drafts the theoretical debate on the burden of the debt has been long standing gerald o driscoll 1977 documents ricardo s nineteenth century position robert barro 1974 reopened the debate by introducing the fundamental issue of intergenerational transfers also discussed in merton miller and charles upton 1974 the empirical side of the debate was initiated by levis kochin s 1974 attempt to test for the effects of deficits on consumption and by martin feldstein s 1974 attempt to test for the effects of social security wealth on consumption other empirical contributions include jess yawitz and laurence meyer 1976 myself 1978 and j earnest tanner 1978 1979 with respect to the effects of government deficits and debt and barro 1978 michael darby 1979 and dean leimer and selig lesnoy 1982 with respect to social security wealth see also interesting recent papers by john seater 1982 who generates detailed tests of the effects of deficits and debt on consumption charles plosser 1982 who explores the effects of government spending and debt shocks on interest rates and feldstein 1982 who attempts tests similar to some in this paper see fn 29 2martin bailey s 1962 1971 development of the effects of government spending on private consumption and aggregate economic activity is the seminal contribution paul david and john scadding 1974 extend bailey s ideas and provide some supporting empirical evidence more recently willem buiter 1977 and myself 1978 developed models based on bailey s earlier work barro 1981 has an interesting paper on related issues see also david aschauer 1982 3the standard approach incorporates fiscal policy through the concept of personal disposable income and by including the stock of government debt as part of personal wealth see for example the empirical specification of albert ando and franco modigliani 1963 which has been the basis of most empirical consumption studies since and feldstein 1974 for one of the more influential papers based on the ando modigliani specification

the tax versus debt controversy in a multivariate cointegrating system the empirical literature is replete with evidence that budget deficits and government debt affect traditional view or do not appreciably affect ricardian equivalence private consumption however the validity of the relative empirical estimates can be questioned to the extent that they do not adequately distinguish among countries with varying levels of indebtedness the present paper attempts to address this problem by using johansen s cointegration technique and by sorting the sample countries into groups according to the ratio of debt to gdp the empirical evidence generated finds support for the debt illusion hypothesis as a means of expounding variations in consumers behaviour among countries with varying degrees of indebtedness

consumer choice on ecologically efficient water heaters marketing strategy and policy implications in japan abstract this study examines how consumers select ecologically efficient water heaters in japan energy conservation in household water heating is increasingly important for reducing an amount of co 2 emission because the share of water heating in household energy consumption is approximately 30 recently japanese households have widely used ecologically efficient electric heat pump water heaters eco cute or gas fired water heaters eco jozu the total number of such efficient water heaters sold in japan was more than 2 5 million at the end of 2008 this study investigates various factors and impacts of marketing strategy for promoting the appliances in japan we apply mixed and nested logit models to a disaggregated choice data on water heaters from 2004 to 2008 this study considers retail energy prices a government financial support and marketing activities as important factors for appliance selection in addition we consider consumers housing attributes such as floor space and age of building this empirical study finds two business implications one of the two implications is that an increase in an energy price may enhance a choice probability of eco cute and eco jozu because a price increase invites consumer s consciousness on energy conservation so that a cost reduction on energy consumption becomes essential in a use of the efficient appliances the other implication is that marketing activities especially by recommendations from sales representatives and or housing suppliers are important for consumer behaviors the other important findings are discussed in this study this business experience in japan is useful to the other countries where ecologically efficient water heaters are not popular at the current moment

enabling private sector investment in microgrid based rural electrification in developing countries a review access to electricity is widely recognized as an important factor for economic and social development low rates of access particularly in remote rural areas in regions such as sub saharan africa south asia and southeast asia have led developing nations and international organizations to set ambitious goals to expand the reach of electricity decentralized solutions such as microgrids have been proposed as cost effective solutions to reaching communities located far from central grid infrastructure lack of capital from public and donor sources has severely impeded achieving access goals leading to calls for greater private sector participation in electrification activities however due to the high level of risk associated with decentralized electrification projects in low income areas marginal expected returns on investment and a lack of clear and effective public policy the private sector has not shown significant interest in participating in such projects the purpose of this paper is to review barriers to private sector participation in decentralized electrification projects and to identify solutions that have been implemented and proposed to overcome these barriers the barriers discussed include unsecure revenue streams inability to finance projects and long term project risks such as grid encroachment the range of interventions and business models reviewed include methods to secure reliable demand subsidy models risk guarantees and different revenue models this paper does not include an analysis of the effectiveness of the different interventions described future research should evaluate the relative costs and benefits of these interventions in order to provide robust policy guidance to decision makers in developing countries

investment strategy for sustainable society by development of regional economies and prevention of industrial pollutions in japanese manufacturing sectors abstract a balance between industrial pollution prevention and economic growth becomes a world wide issue to develop a sustainable society in many industrial nations to discuss the issue this study proposes a new use of dea environmental assessment to determine how to effectively allocate capital for developing regional industries the amount of capital is used to invest for technology innovation for both local economic growth and environmental protection in this study the proposed approach separates outputs into desirable and undesirable categories inputs are also separated into two categories one of which indicates an amount of investment on capital assets the other category is used for production activities the proposed approach unifies them by two disposability concepts this study has evaluated the performance of manufacturing industries in 47 prefectures local government units in japan by unified efficiency under natural disposability uen unified efficiency under managerial disposability uem and unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability uenm the uenm is further separated into its two cases with and without a possible occurrence on desirable congestion or technology innovation on undesirable outputs this study has empirically confirmed that japanese manufacturing industries need to make their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution substances by investing in technology innovation furthermore most of economic activities are currently located at metropolitan regions e g tokyo in japan to develop a sustainable society japan needs to allocate capital into regions with a high level of investment effectiveness by shifting the manufacturing industries from the metropolitan regions to much promising local areas identified in this study such a shift along with technology innovation makes it possible to reduce air pollutions in the entire japan by balancing economic growth and pollution prevention this empirical study confirms that the proposed approach is useful in both guiding regional planning and developing a sustainable society it is easily envisioned that the proposed approach is useful for not only japan but also the other industrial and developing nations

aggregate consumption and deficit financing an attempt to separate permanent from transitory effects many previous empirical studies of the ricardian equivalence hypothesis have found a relatively high degree of future tax liability discounting such that current deficits appear to have relatively little or no influence on current consumption demand however the validity of these empirical estimates can be questioned as they may not have adequately distinguished between permanent and transitory income flows this paper attempts to address this problem by using cycle averaging as a simple method of capturing the permanent path of income over time the empirical evidence generated in this paper rejects the strict debt neutrality proposition of the ricardian equivalence hypothesis

meeting electrification s social objectives in south africa and implications for developing countries electrification programmes and projects are usually planned and evaluated on the basis of their economic financial and socio economic performance it is not usually recognised that electrification is often carried out for social objectives of poverty alleviation and political effect examination of electrification in south africa reveals clearly that initial electrification was to meet economic objectives later socio economic objectives were adopted and recently the objectives were social social electrification particularly rural electrification is not viable according to usual assessment methods which are frequently distorted to provide the justification for a project to proceed the technology of network electrification changed to meet the constraints challenging usual perceptions about the relative costs of urban and rural electrification and the potential for photovoltaic electrification adopting a specification for social electrification allows suitable tariffs for electrification to be identified indicates how capital investment decisions might be modified for social electrification and identifies implications for electricity industry restructuring a better understanding of electrification s social objectives has implications for projects and programmes in other developing countries

dea environmental assessment in time horizon radial approach for malmquist index measurement on petroleum companies abstract the climate change and various pollutions have been influencing our societies and economies the environmental assessment to be discussed in this study is increasingly important because it serves as an initial step toward pollution prevention corporate leaders policy makers researchers and individuals who are interested in environmental protection have been paying attention to the assessment so that they can prepare policy suggestions on the global warming and climate change as a methodology for the assessment this study proposes a use of data environment analysis dea in a time horizon most of data sets on the climate change are sampled in a time series where the performance of organizations fluctuates every moment in applying the dea environmental assessment to such a data set it is necessary for us to classify outputs into desirable e g oil production and undesirable e g co 2 emission categories because all organizations usually produce not only desirable but also undesirable outputs as a result of their economic activities to unify the two different types of outputs this study incorporates the concept of natural and managerial disposability into the computational framework of dea and extends them into a time horizon for the research purpose this study incorporates malmquist index into the proposed dea environmental assessment to examine an occurrence of a frontier shift among multiple periods the frontier shift indicates a technology progress and or managerial innovation during an observed period the index is further separated into four subcomponents in a time horizon these subcomponents are differently expressed under the natural and managerial disposability thus eight different subcomponents on the malmquist index are proposed to measure the frontier shift as an application this study uses the proposed dea approach to examine whether the frontier shift due to technology progress occurs or not in the petroleum industry from 2005 to 2009 our empirical study finds that the industry has not exhibited any major frontier shift under natural disposability but showing a considerable frontier shift under managerial disposability in other words the petroleum firms have improved their environmental performance by eco technology to reduce an amount of co 2 emission during the observed annual periods

an evaluation of energy environment economic efficiency for eu apec and asean countries design of a target oriented dfm model with fixed factors in data envelopment analysis abstract this paper aims to offer an advanced assessment methodology for sustainable national energy environment economic efficiency strategies based on an extended data envelopment analysis dea the use of novel efficiency improving approaches based on dea originates from the so called distance friction minimisation dfm method to design a feasible improvement strategy for low efficiency dmus we develop here a target oriented to dfm model however in many real world cases input factors may not be flexibly adjusted in the short run in this study we integrate the to dfm model with a fixed inflexible factor ff approach to cope with such more realistic circumstances super efficiency dea is next used in our comparative study on the efficiency assessment of energy environment economic targets for the eu apec and asean a a countries employing appropriate data sets from the years 2003 to 2012 we consider two inputs primary energy consumption and population and two outputs co 2 and gdp including a fixed input factor viz population on the basis of our dea analysis results eu countries appear to exhibit generally a higher efficiency than a a countries the above mentioned to dfm ff projection model is able to address realistic circumstances and requirements in an operational sustainability strategy for efficiency improvement in inefficient countries in the a a region

the implementation of decentralised biogas plants in assam ne india the impact and effectiveness of the national biogas and manure management programme abstract the indian government s national biogas and manure management programme nbmmp seeks to deliver renewable energy services to households across the country by facilitating the deployment of family sized 3 anaerobic biogas digesters nbmmp policy is implemented at three levels from government and state nodal agency via private contractors to households creating multiple institutional arrangements we analysed the scheme in assam north east india focusing on how policy was implemented across two districts and interviewing stakeholders in rural households state and non state institutions the top down supply side approach to policy enables government to set targets and require individual states to deploy the scheme which benefits households who can afford to participate nbmmp delivered improved energy service outcomes to a majority of households although the level of knowledge and understanding of the technology amongst users was limited training and education of householders and particularly women is needed in relation to the maintenance of digesters feedstock suitability and the environmental and potential livelihood benefits of digestate a revised bottom up approach to policy which highlights the contextual and demand side issues around adopting the technology may deliver monetary benefits from market competition and enable development of community focused microfinance schemes to improve the affordability of biogas systems

productivity in multiple output public service a quadratic frontier function and malmquist index approach abstract the purpose of this study is to analyse the development of productivity and structural efficiency for an extended period of time 1974 to 1987 in the production of public social insurance services in sweden the analysis is based on the estimation of a deterministic flexible single input multiple output frontier production function the findings indicate a productivity decrease for the entire period from 1974 to 1987 of 18 percent in the period 1974 to 1982 productivity decreased by approximately 30 percent but at the end of the period 1984 to 1987 there was a productivity recovery of about 11 percent

slack adjusted dea for time series analysis performance measurement of japanese electric power generation industry in 1984 1993 abstract using a new slack adjusted data envelopment analysis sa dea model which explicitly incorporates an influence of slacks into its efficiency measurement this study discusses a use of various efficiencies and index measures for dea dynamic analysis an analytical formulation to determine the type of return to scale rts is proposed for the new dea model this paper mathematically discusses when multiple solutions occur on rts and how to deal with such a difficulty as an important case study this paper applies the proposed dea approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power generation companies from 1984 to 1993 two policy implications are suggested for guiding the japanese electric power industry

ricardian equivalence empirical evidence from developing economies abstract the strong underlying assumptions of the barro ricardo equivalence proposition rep raise doubts on its validity especially for developing countries this paper attempts to analyze the validity of the rep and the sources of deviation from rep for a large sample of developing countries although the results are of a mixed nature they suggest that the presence of liquidity constrained individuals may be the source of deviation from the rep the analysis also indicates that public spending is a poor substitute for private consumption and hence implies that temporary increases in public spending may have some expansionary effect on aggregate demand

dea environmental assessment in a time horizon malmquist index on fuel mix electricity and co2 of industrial nations abstract climate change and global warming become a major policy issue in the world economic activities produce not only desirable outputs e g electricity but also undesirable outputs e g co 2 emission the important policy issue is how each nation can balance between economic development and environmental protection to attain a sustainable society in attaining the sustainable society environmental assessment is increasingly important because it can serve as an initial step toward the green growth of each nation for the purpose this study proposes a new use of dea data environment analysis for environmental assessment in a time horizon the proposed use of dea incorporates malmquist index to examine the degree of a frontier shift among multiple periods the frontier shift indicates a technology progress and or managerial innovation during an observed period the index is conceptually separated into six subcomponents which are further divided into twelve different subcomponents six subcomponents two disposability concepts under the natural and managerial disposability in the index measurement it is necessary for us to consider a frontier crossover among different periods because technology innovation usually has a time lag until it really appears as an empirical application this study utilizes the proposed approach to identify the relationship among fuel mix electricity and co 2 of ten industrial nations this study finds three important empirical findings first there is a time lag in technology innovation on electricity generation and co 2 emission reduction consequently it is necessary to consider the existence of a frontier crossover in assessing the electric power industry second nuclear generation as found in france as well as hydro and renewable energy as found in netherlands are important for the development of a sustainable society although the former is associated with a very high level of risk and the latter has a limited generation capacity finally the electric power industry has been making a corporate effort to reduce the amount of co 2 emission by utilizing nuclear and renewable energy

the static and dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy a malmquist index analysis of oecd countries abstract in recent years renewable energy and environmental efficiency have been interesting issues for both academics and industry actors when discussing sustainable development against this background the present study examines the environmental efficiency of renewable energy from the static and the dynamic perspective in 31 oecd countries a study conducted to understand the impact of renewable energy across countries as a non parametric methodology data envelopment analysis is used to measure environmental efficiency through multiple inputs and outputs labor capital and renewable energy supply are the three inputs while gdp is the desirable output and carbon emissions are the undesirable output to measure the dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy the malmquist productivity index is applied to estimate the average efficiency change from 2004 to 2011 the results demonstrate geographical differences in environmental efficiency across the oecd countries in oecd america have the highest average environmental efficiency and those in oecd europe have the largest standard deviation we also find that dynamic efficiency is influenced by the global financial crisis triggered in the united states further we show that oecd countries implement both catch up and frontier shift strategies to improve environmental efficiency

effects of government spending on private investment this paper investigates the effects of military and non military public expenditures on gross private investment using cointegration and error correction analysis the latter type of public spending is disagreggated into expenditures of infrastructure consumption and other general government expenditures the empirical evidence from four emerging european countries namely greece ireland portugal and spain suggests that in some cases public capital spending stimulates investment while in others it depresses it also the results tentatively indicate that defence spending exerts no influence on private investment thus adding to the ongoing controversy of the economic effects of military spending

analysis of the eu policy package on climate change and renewables abstract in 2009 the eu decided to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at least by 20 in 2020 compared to 1990 and to supply 20 of energy needs by 2020 from renewable energy sources this paper uses an energy model coupled with a non co 2 greenhouse gas model to assess the range of policy options that were debated to meet both targets policy options include trading of renewable targets carbon trading in power plants and industry and the use of the clean development mechanism to improve cost efficiency the models also examined fairness by analysing the distribution of emission reduction in the non emission trading sector the distribution of co 2 allowances in the emission trading sector and the reallocation of renewable targets across member states the overall costs of meeting both targets range from 0 4 to 0 6 of gdp in 2020 for the eu as a whole the redistribution mechanisms employed significantly improve fairness compared to a cost effective solution

the malmquist total factor productivity index the definitions of the malmquist output and input quantity indexes specified by d w caves l r christensen and w e diewert 1982 are applied in this study based on these indexes a malmquist total factor productivity index is derived for general production structures the definition maintains the fundamental characteristic of a productivity index as a ratio between an output quantity change index and an input quantity change index this index provides a remedy for the shortcoming of the traditional definition of the malmquist productivity index in that the latter does not correctly measure changes in productivity in the presence of changes in returns to scale copyright 1996 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

carbon intensity in production and the effects of climate policy evidence from swedish industry we analyze carbon intensity performance at firm level and the effectiveness of the swedish co2 tax carbon intensity performance is derived from a production technology and measured as changes in t

an empirical analysis on the substitutability between private consumption and government purchases abstract this paper estimates substitutability of government purchases for private consumption using an optimal consumption model the utility function features several types of nonseparabilities the paper finds that gmm estimates are affected by the specification of nonseparability between private consumption and government purchases by the restriction of time separability and by the measurement of real interest rates

can r d expenditure avoid corporate bankruptcy comparison between japanese machinery and electric equipment industries using dea discriminant analysis abstract this study compares data envelopment analysis discriminant analysis dea da with altman s financial ratio analysis to identify the position of dea da in financial performance analysis then this study applies dea da to examine whether research and development r d expenditure influences the financial performance of japanese machinery industry and electric equipment industry the investigation of dea da identifies that the r d expenditure makes a positive impact on the financial performance of japanese machinery industry but it yields a negative impact on japanese electric equipment industry the result implies that the influence of r d expenditure on financial performance including the avoidance of bankruptcy depends upon the type of a manufacturing industry a rationale regarding why such a discrepancy has occurred between the two japanese manufacturing industries is because the life cycle of electric equipments is shorter than that of the machinery products furthermore the electric equipment industry faces more fierce competition than the machinery industry this study suggests that the japanese electric equipment industry needs r d expenditure for competition in its global market however it is a high risk and high return investment in contrast the japanese machinery is a technologically mature industry where the r d expenditure influences positively its financial performance in this sense the r d expenditure is a low risk and necessary investment

access and affordability of electricity in developing countries summary a key objective of developing countries is to provide affordable access to modern energy services in order to support economic and social development the paper presents a number of arguments for why and in which way energy access and affordability can play a key role in national development programs and in achieving the millennium development goals approaches for measuring accessibility and affordability are presented drawing on case studies of bangladesh brazil and south africa countries with different rates of electrification affordability of using electricity is examined in relation to the energy expenditure burden for households and time consumption conclusions focus on lessons learned and recommendations for implementing policies instruments and regulatory measures to tackle the challenge of affordability

accounting for behavioral effects of increases in the carbon dioxide co2 tax in revenue estimation in sweden in this paper we describe how behavioral responses of carbon dioxide co 2 tax increases are accounted for in tax revenue estimation in sweden the rationale for developing a method for this is a

public goods merit goods and the relation between private and government consumption in this paper we investigate the relation between public and private consumption by constructing a general government spending data set by function for 12 european countries in particular we split government consumption into two categories the 1rst category public goods includes defence public order and justice the second category merit goods includes health education and other services that could have been provided privately equations from a relatively general permanent income model are estimated by gmm the estimates are fairly robust in showing that public goods substitute while merit goods complement private consumption however the relation between merit goods and private goods turns out to be stronger than that between public goods and private goods thus in the aggregate government and private consumption are complements c

enabling mini grid development in rural india summary rural electrification rates in india lag behind government goals in part due to the inability of distribution companies discoms to fund central grid expansion in the absence of central grid electrification mini grids offer significant potential for an immediate pathway toward rural electrification and the attendant gains in economic growth and productivity yet private investment in mini grids has been virtually absent in india using a comprehensive life cycle cost analysis we find that mini grids based on solar pv power and storage are more economical than incumbent energy services available to households without central grid connection under current law a prospective entrepreneur in india does not require a license or certification in order to build a mini grid and subsequently provide electricity services in the area covered by said installation conversely there is no legal or regulatory framework that specifies what is to happen if the central grid were to be extended to an area that is already covered by a mini grid we report detailed survey evidence from interviews with entrepreneurs analysts and policymakers whose assessments converge on the same point mini grid investments would be jeopardized in the event of central grid extension precisely because discoms would by regulatory order provide electricity services at highly subsidized rates well below their full economic cost our fieldwork suggests that the threat of central grid extension is a gateway barrier preventing mini grid development in india the issues associated with the gateway barrier have common elements with the so called holdup problem as identified in the economics of organizations there have been two recent federal policy guidelines and one actual state level policy addressing the regulatory status of mini grids we examine the effectiveness of these policies proposals in terms of an entrepreneur s willingness to develop mini grids in the future

eco efficiency analysis of power plants an extension of data envelopment analysis abstract in public discussion on environmental policy the notion of eco efficiency is often used the joint production of goods and undesirable outputs such as pollutants which may not be freely disposable without costs causes difficulties to measure the overall performance of the firm because of the absence of market prices for the undesirable outputs we are not able to estimate the environmental costs some of the measurement and evaluation difficulties can be overcome by employing data envelopment analysis dea as the efficiency measurement vehicle we propose the use of two different approaches in the first approach we start by decomposing the problem into two parts 1 the problem of measuring technical efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the inputs and 2 the problem of measuring so called ecological efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the undesirable outputs separately those two efficiency indicators are then combined in the second approach we treat pollutants as the inputs in the sense that we wish to increase desirable outputs and decrease pollutants and inputs the approaches are applied to the problem of measuring the efficiency of 24 power plants in a european country

dea approach for unified efficiency measurement assessment of japanese fossil fuel power generation this study discusses a new dea data envelopment analysis approach to measure the unified operational and environmental efficiency of energy firms it is widely known that they produce not only desirable good outputs e g electricity but also undesirable bad outputs e g co2 as a result of their plant operations the proposed approach incorporates an output separation desirable and undesirable outputs for the performance evaluation of energy firms in addition to the output separation this study separates inputs into energy and non energy inputs consequently the proposed approach incorporates not only the output separation but also the input separation within a computational framework of dea non radial measurement this study compares the proposed approach with other previous dea approaches used for the performance evaluation of energy firms after the methodological comparison this study applies the proposed approach for measuring the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation this empirical study confirms that the implementation of kyoto protocol 2005 has not been effective on the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation during the observed period 2004 2008 although the empirical result is inconsistent with the current japanese environmental policy under kyoto protocol it contains policy implications for guiding the future direction of japanese environmental policy on the electric power industry

a neoclassical perspective on budget deficits i n the 1988 presidential campaign virtually every serious candidate spoke of the urgent need to trim government budget deficits public opinion polls have identified federal deficits as a key economic issue second only to unemployment while many economists are relieved by what they perceive to be a long overdue political response to a critical economic problem others regard the fuss as much ado about nothing it is indeed remarkable that economists can disagree so severely over an issue which commands such a uniform reaction from laymen of widely different ideologies and political affiliations generally speaking there are three schools of thought concerning the economic effects of budget deficits neoclassical keynesian and ricardian before proceeding further it is useful to review the basic structure and implications of each paradigm the neoclassical paradigm envisions farsighted individuals planning consumption over their own life cycles budget deficits raise total lifetime consumption by shifting taxes to subsequent generations if economic resources are fully employed increased consumption necessarily implies decreased saving interest rates must then rise to bring capital markets into balance thus persistent deficits crowd out private capital accumulation in the current economic environment most economists would agree that these consequences would be highly detrimental

demand customer base line and demand response in the electricity market a survey the increasing use of demand side management as a tool to reliably meet electricity demands at peak time has stimulated interest among researchers consumers and producer organiza tions managers regulators and policymakers this research reviews the growing literature on models which are used to study demand customer base line cbl and demand response in the electricity market after characterizing the general demand models the cbl based on which the demand response models are studied is reviewed given the experience gained from the review and existing conditions the study combines an appropriate model for each case for a possible application to the electricity market moreover it discusses the implications of the results in the literature these aspects are studied independently the main contribution of this survey is attributed to the treatment of the three issues as sequentially interdependent the review is expected to enhance the understanding of the demand cbl and demand response in the electricity market and their relationships the objective is conducted through a combination of demand and supply side managements in order to reduce demand through different demand response programs during peak times this enables electricity suppliers to save costly electricity generation and at the same time reduce energy vulnerability