carbon allowance allocation in the transportation industry abstract this study proposes models for projecting reductions in co 2 emissions of 10 20 30 and 40 compared to business as usual bau using a carbon allowance allocation policy and both unimodal and intermodal modes of transportation the results show that for 10 to 80 decreases in free carbon allowance the intermodal ratio increased from 1 01 to 53 44 which led to decreases in carbon emissions and demand ranging from 10 41 to 48 19 and 8 45 to 7 57 respectively when free carbon allowances are decreased the demand for intermodal systems increases accordingly these results suggest that a carbon allowance allocation policy could mitigate transportation carbon emissions with a relatively small negative impact on economic activity

is the co2 emissions reduction from scale change structural change or technology change evidence from non metallic sector of 11 major economies in 1995 2009 the contribution of non metallic sector to global co2 emissions is increasing however there are very few studies on non metallic sector co2 emissions from international comparative perspective this paper proposes an integrated model employing lmdi logarithmic mean divisia index decomposition technique and topsis the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution method to contribute to the existing literature by filling the gap that the drivers of aggregate and national level non metallic sector co2 emissions and its impacts on co2 emissions reduction have not been estimated by relevant models first we analyze drivers of non metallic sector co2 emissions in bric countries and g7 countries using lmdi decomposition method second we evaluate the low carbon development of non metallic sector in the 11 major economies from a comprehensive viewpoint of main drivers using topsis assessment model finally based on the results of the model this paper presents some implications for the non metallic sector co2 emissions reduction and low carbon development

measuring and assessing capacity utilization in the manufacturing sectors of nine oecd countries following a tradition established by cassels klein and hickman we employ the economic theory of cost and production and define economic capacity output as that output at which short and long run average total cost curves are tangent to one another capacity utilization cu rates are then computed as the ratio of actual to capacity output we implement this framework empirically by specifying and estimating a translog variable cost function for the manufacturing sectors of nine oecd countries we find that by the end of the historical sample the early 1980s pervasive and chronic excess capacity exists while the average cost consequence of excess capacity was relatively modest in the 1960s the burden increased considerably after opec i and after opec ii the premium was as large as 15 of average total costs we also find that electricity and fuel price increases had small impacts on capacity output relative to that from labor or capital finally we adjust conventional measures of multifactor productivity growth for changes in cu and find that the adjusted growth is larger after 1973 than that based on traditional procedures

stocks flows and some exchange rate dynamics for the currency substitution model abstract the paper argues that the treatment of stocks and flows in portfolio balance models of exchange rate determination is inadequate and that this hampers the analysis of exchange rate dynamics a proposed resolution is reworked into the currency substitution model in addition to providing explicit solutions for the spot rate of exchange depreciation under different expectational hypotheses an attempt is made to clarify the dynamic properties of the model inter alia it is shown how exchange rate overshooting is possible without having to assume market frictions how a deteriorating current account deficit can coexist with an appreciating exchange rate and more generally how portfolio induced jumps in the exchange rate are linked to balance of payments flow influences on the evolution of the exchange rate

sources of aggregate labour productivity growth in canada and the united states abstract in this paper we propose a decomposition technique to examine the sources of industrial contribution to aggregate labour productivity growth we show that in terms of pure labour productivity growth the manufacturing and service sectors contributed equally to the aggregate canada u s labour productivity growth gap during the 1987 98 period but in terms of total industrial contributions which also take into account the contributions from a change in relative size the service sector was the largest contributor we also find that high labour productivity growth industries did not attract resources from stagnant industries a phenomenon consistent with baumol s cost disease of stagnant industries jel classification o47 c43

employment and structural impacts of material efficiency strategies results from five case studies abstract in order to come up with a sound assessment of the effects of material efficiency innovations on growth employment and competitiveness different economic mechanisms have to be considered from a methodological point of view the analysis must be able to account for technology specific aspects the employment impacts of five innovations are analyzed plastic and paper recycling increased life span of automobiles car sharing and bio based products time horizons for all strategies are scenarios until 2020 the economic impacts are context specific with regard to innovation technology and country the economic impacts highlight substantial structural adjustments the overall economic net impact on employment tends to be neutral to positive stronger positive economic impacts result if first mover advantages can be established

comparative studies of national incomes and prices income comparisons between persons or groups of persons in different countries are a special field of inquiry mainly because there are different currency units for the most part the other theoretical and empirical problems encountered in international income comparisons are similar to those of within nation comparisons between different persons at the same time or different groups of persons either interspatially or what is more common intertemporally e g constant price series of national income the qualifications mainly and for the most part are included because some writers hold that international comparisons are complicated or even invalidated by differences in consumption patterns sometimes differences in tastes are held to underlie these variations in consumption patterns variations that are often much larger between countries than those found between regions within a country or between different periods in the same country this essay focuses in its methodological aspects on these special problems the basic problems that are common to international and within nation comparisons are left to the standard literature on national accounts 2 we turn now to the currency unit problems and reserve the question of tastes for a later section

a growing trend toward knowledge work in canada abstract this paper answers three questions related to the growing trend toward knowledge occupations in canada i what was the magnitude of the trend between 1971 and 1996 ii was the trend a widespread phenomenon or was it restricted to specific industries iii what are the proximate causes of the trends using five censuses 1971 1981 1986 1991 1996 and the input output i o data the paper provides evidence that the canadian economy is becoming increasingly knowledge based although the upgrading trends differ across knowledge occupations moreover we find that this phenomenon is spread across all industrial sectors finally using a decomposition analysis borrowed from wolff and baumol three factors the substitution effect the productivity lag effect and the demand effect have been examined in order to shed some light on these trends we find that these effects vary according to the nature of the knowledge involved in these different groups of occupations thus reflecting not only the importance of the technological change skill bias but also the increasing complexity of controlling and managing the new economic activities

decoupling co2 emissions and industrial growth in china over 1993 2013 the role of investment abstract since industrial sector is a leading energy consumer and co 2 emitter in china the degree of the decoupling of co 2 emissions and industrial growth plays a critical role in realizing the energy conservation and emission reduction goals of china this is the first study to present a specific investigation on the decoupling of co 2 emissions and industrial growth in china from 1993 to 2013 using an extended logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi model focusing on both energy related and process related co 2 emissions and introducing three novel investment factors i e investment scale investment share and investment efficiency we highlight and explore the remarkable role of investment in the mitigation and decoupling of co 2 emissions with industrial growth the results show that china s industrial sector experienced the weak decoupling during 1993 2013 the investment scale is the most important factor responsible for the increase in co 2 emissions and the inhibition of the decoupling the investment efficiency effect has a volatile trend and overall it plays the most significant role in reducing co 2 emissions followed by the energy intensity effect and process carbon intensity effect whereas the energy mix carbon coefficient and investment share have marginal effects among 36 industrial sub sectors the seven factors of rcmcp raw chemical materials and chemical products nmp nonmetal mineral products and spfm smelting and pressing of ferrous metals have significant effects on the decoupling thus the three sub sectors should be among the top concerns for abating co 2 emissions finally we provide policy recommendations considering both conventional and investment factors for china s industrial sector to realize emission reduction targets

decomposing industrial co2 emissions of southern european countries into production and consumption based driving factors abstract industry is a leading economic sector in european countries as well as a major carbon emitter european industry has been quite successful in abating the environmental pressures and carbon emissions and increasing its energy efficiency from production over the last years however focusing only on the production side may not lead to the desired sustainable development since there are other forces such as the international trade and consumption patterns which also shape the evolution of industrial co 2 emissions the aim of this study is to investigate how changes in production and consumption of industrial products affect the co 2 emissions of industries in four southern european countries during the period 2000 2011 to this purpose a new model of index decomposition analysis is developed in order to decompose the change in co 2 emissions of the industrial sectors of greece italy spain and portugal moreover the examined period in this study is split into two sub periods 2000 2008 and 2008 2011 in order to investigate the impact of the recent economic crisis on both the driving factors and industrial co 2 emissions the overall evolution of industrial co 2 emissions was quite similar in all the countries and the decomposition results of the two sub periods revealed substantial homogeneity across countries two production based driving factors the economic activity and the energy intensity were the main driving factors which shaped the total change in co 2 emissions of industries in the examined countries the consumption based driving factors contributed mostly to the increase in industrial co 2 emissions but not at the same level as the production based ones furthermore industrial production was more significantly affected by the economic crisis than consumers expenditures the decomposition results performed at a sectoral level revealed that it was difficult for southern european consumers to switch to a more environmentally conscious use of industrial products and their consumption preferences were not significantly affected by the consequences of the economic crisis

index decomposition analysis applied to co2 emission studies index decomposition analysis ida was first extended from energy consumption to energy related co2 emission studies in 1991 since then many studies have been reported covering various countries and emission sectors however unlike the case of energy consumption studies a comprehensive literature survey that focuses specifically on emission studies has so far not been reported in this paper we attempt to fill this gap by reviewing 80 papers appearing in peer reviewed journals from 1991 to 2012 in this application area the first part of this paper deals with the developments with regard to the ida approaches used by researchers and the scope and focus of their studies in the second part the empirical results reported in the surveyed studies are analyzed consolidated and presented by emission sector the objective is to reveal the relative contributions of key effects on changes in the aggregate carbon intensity and this is done by emission sector and by country the findings of both parts are useful in understanding the development of ida in the application area of emission study as well as the key drivers of aggregate carbon intensities in the past and their possible future developments

change in energy related co2 carbon dioxide emissions in portuguese tourism a decomposition analysis from 2000 to 2008 abstract tourism is an activity with great potential in portugal at a time of economic crisis tourism is seen as an opportunity to boost the economy and provide sustainable economic growth this strategic path based on tourism has to be accomplished in order to make better use of the economic advantages but at the same time respecting the environment and environmental goals to which portugal is committed so it becomes important to analyze what effects contribute more to emissions in this sector as well as which tourism subsectors are more responsible for the increase of emissions the objective of this work is to identify the effects in which co2 carbon dioxide emissions in tourism can be broken down and analyzed as well as their evolution and which of them has more importance in determining emissions for that in this study a decomposition technique based on logarithmic mean divisia index was used in the 2000 2008 period for five tourism subsectors in portugal in general tourism activity is the most important effect energy mix carbon intensity and energy intensity effects also proved important

an examination of the effects of government purchases in an open economy this paper examines the effects of permanent and transitory changes in government purchases in the context of a model of a small open economy that produces and consumes both traded and nontraded goods the model incorporates an equilibrium interpretation of the business cycle that emphasizes the responsiveness of agents to intertemporal relative price changes it is demonstrated that transitory increases in government purchases lead to an appreciation of the real exchange rate and an ambiguous change although a likely worsening in the current account while permanent increases have an ambiguous impact on the real exchange rate and no effect on the current account when agents do not know whether a given increase in government purchases is permanent or transitory the effect is a weighted average of these separate effects the weights depend on the relative variances of the transitory and permanent components of government purchases in the past few years a considerable amount of effort has been devoted to examining the effects of macroeconomic policy in an open economy such issues as exchange rate overshooting deviations from purchasing power parity sterilization and monetary control the effectiveness of monetary policy and the choice between alternative exchange rate regimes have been at center stage the models that have been employed to study these issues have run the spectrum from variants of the mundell fleming model such as dornbusch 1976 turnovsky 1981 and kimbrough 1983a to wage contracting and indexing models like bhandari 1982b and flood and marion 1982 to equilibrium models of the business cycle along the lines of bhandari 1982a saidi 1982 and kimbrough 1983b to the closely related intertemporal utility maximization models with money of helpman 1981 and stockman 1980 1983 one common thread that in a sense unifies all of these and other recent contributions is that they are concerned primarily with the effects of alternative monetary and exchange rate policies that the central bank might enact in light of the development and refinement during this period of the monetary approach to the balance of payments and the exchange rate it is not surprising i would like to thank phil brock jeremy greenwood gary zarkin and two anonymous

the recent slowdown of productivity growth the slowdown of productivity growth in the developed countries during the seventies will in this paper be viewed as a combined effect of three closely interacting forces i a long term deterioration in the efficiency and flexibility of some basic mechanisms of the economic and political systems of these countries ii the fading away of a number of uniquely favourable circumstances for productivity growth during the fifties and sixties and iii the exposure of these economies to unusually severe macroeconomic disturbances in the seventies careful inspection of time series with attempted modifications for cyclical factors suggests that there was hardly any general slowdown of productivity growth among developed countries before approximately i972 4 1 as we know the situation is radically different since then labour productivity growth per year for the entire national economy gdp per man hour seems to have fallen between the periods i960 73 and i973 9 by about i 2 percentage points in the united states 45 by about 24 percentage points in western europe2 45 and by about 5 9 percentage points in japan 6o table i see also fig i the slowdown was of about the same size in the business and manufacturing sectors see table i to calculate the extent of the slowdown of total factor productivity growth is of course a much more hazardous matter to which i will return later if just the various system changes and the fading away of the uniquely favourable factors had been the dominating forces behind the productivity growth slowdown we would expect the slowdown to have been gradual rather than abrupt as it turned out to be this abruptness as well as its timing makes the dramatic macroeconomic disturbances around i972 4 a prime suspect when looking for the villain behind the productivity growth slowdown indeed it is a basic hypothesis of the paper that these macroeconomic disturbances were not only by themselves strongly unfavourable for productivity growth but that they also revealed and accentuated the gradual deterioration of the

efficient allocation of co2 emissions in china a zero sum gains data envelopment model abstract the appropriate allocation of co 2 emission quotas can build up a solid foundation for future emissions trading building co 2 emissions allocation mechanism has significant practical implications based on radial zero sum gains data envelopment zsg dea allocation model this paper uses a non radial zsg dea model to allocate co 2 emissions between different chinese provinces unlike previous studies treating co 2 as the input variable we treat co 2 as the undesirable output variable the modified model can better reflect macro production process while earlier relevant models treated co 2 emissions as inputs this paper contributes to the existing resource allocation method and allocates china s provincial co 2 emissions from the view of technical efficiency the results of our paper reveal that 1 between 2006 and 2010 the cumulative optimal amounts of co 2 emissions were higher than the actual amounts in 12 provinces and lower in other 18 provinces 2 several energy abundant provinces such as shanxi and inter mongolia need to take more responsibilities in co 2 emissions reduction 3 after the zsg dea allocation all provinces co 2 emissions are on zsg dea frontier which reflects the overall pareto optimality

fiscal policy and stabilization of exchange rates under alternative criteria this paper examines the role of fiscal policy in the determination of the exchange rate in a small open economy and discusses the efficiency of feedback rules in minimizing the volatility of the exchange rate two criteria are introduced to stabilize the large fluctuations in exchange rates i minimizing the variance of the exchange rate and ii minimizing the expected squared gap between the full and incomplete current information values of the exchange rate the two criteria are based on different beliefs regarding the working of the market forces and require the choice of diametrically opposed policy rules

energy prices and productivity growth the sharp decline in economic growth since 1973 presents a problem comparable in scientific interest and social importance to the problem of unemployment in the great depression of the 1930s conventional methods of economic analysis have been tried and have been found to be inadequate this paper outlines a new framework for understanding the slowdown in economic growth we find that the fall in u s economic growth since 1973 has been due to the dramatic decline in productivity growth within the new framework we identify higher energy prices as an important determinant of the productivity slowdown

comparing structural decomposition analysis and index to analyze and understand historical changes in economic environmental employment or other socio economic indicators it is useful to assess the driving forces or determinants that underlie these changes two techniques for decomposing indicator changes at the sector level are structural decomposition analysis sda and index decomposition analysis ida for example sda and ida have been used to analyze changes in indicators such as energy use co2 emissions labor demand and value added the changes in these variables are decomposed into determinants such as technological demand and structural effects sda uses information from input output tables while ida uses aggregate data at the sector level the two methods have developed quite independently which has resulted in each method being characterized by specific unique techniques and approaches this paper has three aims first the similarities and differences between the two approaches are summarized second the possibility of transferring specific techniques and indices is explored finally a numerical example is used to illustrate differences between the two approaches

using an extended lmdi model to explore techno economic drivers of energy related industrial co2 emission changes a case study for shanghai china although investment and r d activities can exert significant effects on energy related industrial co2 emissions eice related factors have not been fairly uncovered in the existing index decomposition studies this paper extends the previous logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi decomposition model by introducing three novel factors r d intensity investment intensity and r d efficiency the extended model not only considers the conventional drivers of eice but also reflects the microeconomic effects of investment and r d behaviors on eice furthermore taking shanghai as an example which is the economic center and leading co2 emitter in china we use the extended model to decompose and explain eice changes also we incorporate renewable energy sources into the proposed model to carry out an alternative decomposition analysis at shanghai s entire industrial level the results show that among conventional macroeconomic factors expanding output scale is mainly responsible for the increase in eice and industrial structure adjustment is the most significant factor in mitigating eice regardless of renewable energy sources the emission reduction effect of energy intensity focused on by the chinese government is less than the expected due to the rebound effect but the introduction of renewable energy sources intensifies its mitigating effect partly resulting from the transmission from the abating effect of industrial structure adjustment the effect of energy structure is the weakest although all the three novel factors exert significant effects on eice they are more sensitive to policy interventions than conventional factors r d intensity presents an obvious mitigating effect while investment intensity and r d efficiency display an overall promotion effect with some volatility the introduction of renewable energy sources intensifies the promotion effect of r d efficiency as a result of the green paradox effect finally we propose that co2 mitigation efforts should be made by considering both macroeconomic and microeconomic factors in order to achieve a desirable emission reduction effect

integrated weighting approach to carbon emission quotas an application case of beijing tianjin hebei region abstract the coordinated development of beijing tianjin hebei region has been included in the chinese 12th five year plan as a national strategy accordingly the cooperation of energy saving and environmental protection is an important part at the present stage establishing carbon emission trading market in china is regarded as an effective measure to reduce and control carbon dioxide emission meanwhile it is an important task for government to allocate carbon emission quotas among regions in order to explore the cross provincial carbon trading market mode of china this paper aims to construct a comprehensive index and use the integrated weighting approach to simulate the carbon quota allocation of beijing tianjin hebei region the results show that firstly the indicator of responsibility which is about 0 56 is given relatively more weight among the three indicators by comparison the weights of capacity and potential are 0 13 and 0 30 secondly the provinces with strong economic ability and lower carbon reduction potential may get fewer proportions of carbon emission quotas such as beijing thirdly since undertaking the function transfer and dispersal of beijing and tianjin hebei should have a relatively high carbon emission quotas in the future carbon trading market these results may provide insightful support for decision makers to promote collaborative carbon reduction and allocate carbon quotas in beijing tianjin hebei region of china

common trends and drivers of co2 emissions and employment a decomposition analysis in the industrial sector of selected european union countries the countries of the european union face the challenge of reversing the declining role of industry and achieving their targets for sustainable development combining industrial growth with fewer environmental repercussions and more jobs this paper uses a decomposition analysis in order to quantify the effect of the driving factors on two indicators of sustainable industrial development co2 emissions and employment in five european union countries during 2000 2011 the decomposition method applied is the log mean divisia index i and the models developed comprise some common or closely related driving factors the parallel investigation of the factors affecting the two indicators offers useful insights into relevant complementary and or antithetical effects the timeframe of the study is divided into two time periods before and after the start of the economic crisis 2000 2007 and 2007 2011 respectively this time division enables the evaluation of the impacts of the economic crisis directly on the drivers and indirectly on the two indicators it was deduced that in both time periods the two main drivers of industrial co2 emissions and employment were economic growth and resource intensity which counterbalance each other structural changes appeared to have a rather marginal effect even if the general tendency was the expansion of less energy labour intensive sectors finally changes in the fuel mix used in industry were beneficial to emissions reduction in all the examined countries especially in the second time period the results obtained show that the examined eu countries have not found a solid path towards sustainable and inclusive industrial development yet the stronger economies seem to move faster to this direction though

the lmdi approach to decomposition analysis a practical guide in a recent study ang energy policy 32 2004 compared various index decomposition analysis methods and concluded that the logarithmic mean divisia index method is the preferred method since the literature on the method tends to be either too technical or specific for most potential users this paper provides a practical guide that includes the general formulation process summary tables for easy reference and examples

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

towards a national circular economy indicator system in china an evaluation and critical analysis abstract it is widely acknowledged that china s economic miracle has been achieved at the expense of its natural capital and environment in order to deal with this problem the circular economy ce has been chosen as a national policy for sustainable development national laws and regulations have been enacted to facilitate the implementation of ce and national ce demonstration projects have been initiated such that national benchmarking activities could be completed china is the first country to release nationally focused ce indicators so that objective and credible information on the status of ce implementation can be recognized these ce indicators are valuable metrics for policy and decision makers and can help achieve ce goals and outcomes this unique indicator system has not been communicated to international communities this paper aims to more broadly introduce this unique national ce indicator system china s ce efforts are first detailed with various provisions of the national indicator system a critical analysis of such an indicator system is presented we show that certain benefits can be gained but substantive revision is also needed due to the lack of a comprehensive set of sustainability indicators which should include social business indicators urban industrial symbiosis absolute material energy reduction and prevention oriented indicators concerns related to barriers on implementation are also presented in this paper the knowledge gained from chinese efforts on ce indicators are valuable to both developed and developing nations seeking to implement sustainable development measures within their regulatory policies

government spending and the exchange rate this paper investigates the effects of govenment spending on real and nominal exchange rates within the context of an open economy equilibrium rational expectations model the model predicts that both real and nominal exchange rates appreciate in response to anticipated and unanticipated increases in government spending empirical evidence from germany for the period 1975 2 1989 4 provides some weak support for the predictions of the model

the economic growth enigma capital labour and useful energy abstract we show that the application of flexible semi parametric statistical techniques enables significant improvements in model fitting of macroeconomic models as applied to the explanation of the past economic growth since 1900 in us uk and japan the new results demonstrate quite conclusively the non linear relationships between capital labour and useful energy with economic growth they also indicate that output elasticities of capital labour and useful energy are extremely variable over time we suggest that these results confirm the economic intuition that growth since the industrial revolution has been driven largely by declining energy costs due to the discovery and exploitation of relatively inexpensive fossil fuel resources implications for the 21st century which are also discussed briefly by exploring the implications of an aceges based scenario of oil production are as follows a the provision of adequate and affordable quantities of useful energy as a pre condition for economic growth and b the design of energy systems as technology incubators for a prosperous 21st century

regional allocation of co2 emissions allowance over provinces in china by 2020 the mitigation efforts of china are increasingly important for meeting global climate target since the rapid economic growth of china has led to an increasing share in the world s total co2 emissions this paper sets out to explore the approach for realizing china s national mitigation targets submitted to the unfccc as part of the copenhagen accord that is to reduce the intensity of co2 emissions per unit of gdp by 40 45 by 2020 as well as reducing the energy intensity and increasing the share of non fossil fuel consumption through regional allocation of emission allowance over china s provinces since the realization of china s mitigation target essentially represents a total amount emission allowance allocation problem an improved zero sum gains data envelopment analysis optimization model which could deal with the constant total amount resources allocation is proposed in this study by utilizing this model and based on several scenarios of china s economic growth co2 emissions and energy consumption a new efficient emission allowance allocation scheme on provincial level for china by 2020 is proposed the allocation results indicate that different provinces have to shoulder different mitigation burdens in terms of emission intensity reduction energy intensity reduction and share of non fossil fuels increase

international technological knowledge differences and economic growth comparisons usa versus west germany and sweden versus norway 1963 1988 the main interest in this paper is governed by the methodology for making evolutive growth comparisons in the international context the paper analysis differences in levels and changes of these levels of aggregate output between the above mentioned countries in terms of differences in factors input and levels of technological knowledge for the period 1963 1988 sources of economic growth in each country are also examined on an annual and average annual basis th conclusion is that technological knowledge differences between countries hold a central role in explaining output differences between them a slight overtake of the technological lead is observed in comparing sweden and norway between 1977 and 1985 when a recovery by sweden begining in 1986 is detected a certain part of the output differences between the us and west germany is explaining by the differences in technology between these two countries however capital intensity in the us is found to be almost double in 1988 and this accounts fo

from green growth to sound policies an overview abstract green growth is an attractive slogan with a variety of possible meanings this essay critically examines several potential meanings of this slogan and provides a brief overview of some of the main implications of the other papers in this special issue taken together these papers argue for the importance of careful analysis of energy environmental policies particularly ambitious ones claiming to offer huge benefits with little or no cost

the impact of industrial structure efficiency on provincial industrial energy efficiency in china abstract regional disparity in terms of industrial energy efficiency is noticeable in china due to the unbalanced economic progress in past decades analyzing the provincial industrial energy efficiency and its influencing factors is of great significance to formulate differentiated policies to date the influence of many social economic factors on the industrial energy efficiency have been examined but the impact of the inter industry structure has almost been ignored in this paper the slacks based measure model incorporating undesirable output is applied to evaluate the industrial energy efficiency both at the provincial level and the sectoral level in china for the period 2010 to 2016 then industrial structure efficiency is introduced which reflects the inter industry structure and takes the sectoral level energy efficiency into consideration and the impact of the industrial structure efficiency on provincial industrial energy efficiency is tested by tobit regression model the results show that huge discrepancies of provincial industrial energy efficiency exist and the industrial structure efficiency is confirmed to be a determinative factor to the provincial industrial energy efficiency with the coefficient of 0 525 policy recommendations are provided for adjusting the provincial inter industry structure and improving the industrial energy efficiency

climate change policy market structure and carbon leakage abstract the 1997 kyoto protocol on climate change obliges the industrialized countries to initiate the international effort of abating anthropogenic greenhouse gas ghg emissions if such an initiative is to be taken the associated competitive effects may lead to significant relocation of developed countries energy intensive production this paper examines this issue i adopt an oligopolistic structure combined with increasing returns to scale production technologies to represent the strategic interaction among the firms producing energy intensive products this representation is then embedded within a multi regional computable general equilibrium model which in turn is used for quantifying these relocational effects the results suggest that significant relocation of energy intensive industries away from the oecd may occur depending on the type of market structure with leakage rates as high as 130 in which case ghg control policies in the industrialized countries actually lead to higher global emissions

characterizing an equitable allocation of shared costs a dea approach abstract in many applications to which dea could be applied there is often a fixed or common cost which is imposed on all decision making units this would be the case for example for branches of a bank which can be accessed via the numerous automatic teller machines scattered throughout the country a problem arises as to how this cost can be assigned in an equitable way to the various dmus in this paper we propose a dea approach to obtain this cost allocation which is based on two principles invariance and pareto minimality it is shown that the proposed method is a natural extension of the simple one dimensional problem to the general multiple input multiple output case

allocating fixed costs and resources via data envelopment analysis abstract in this paper we show that data envelopment analysis dea can be viewed as maximising the average efficiency of the decision making units dmus in an organisation building upon this we present dea based models for a allocating fixed costs to dmus and b allocating input resources to dmus simultaneous to allocating input resources output targets are also decided for each dmu numeric results are presented for a number of example problems taken from the literature

disaggregating energy use cap among china s provinces the 2015 paris climate change negotiations represents the most ambitious worldwide effort to date to combat climate change as the largest energy consumer and carbon emitter china pledges 60 65 cut in carbon intensity below 2005 levels by 2030 to accelerate china s climate efforts china has also committed to cap its primary energy use at 4 8 billion tons of coal equivalent in 2020 this paper proposes an equitable and efficient scheme to disaggregate this national goal among provinces a three step disaggregation procedure is proposed which takes into account the initial allocation national redistribution and inter provincial adjustment first this study allocates the incremental energy quota taking 2010 as the base year second part of the energy quota is set aside by the central government for redistribution purposes while an incremental energy quota index comprising equity and efficiency criteria is used for initial allocation among provinces finally historical efforts and inter provincial energy flows are considered for inter provincial adjustment this disaggregation scheme is flexible and can be easily extended to allocation and management of other resource and environmental targets the empirical findings can assist decision makers in identifying which provinces are likely to over consume the energy quota relative to the proposed allocation and which provinces are likely to perform better in energy conservation moreover the results show that the energy cap set for 2020 is unachievable without further action market based instruments such as an energy allowance trading market are strongly recommended to achieve the energy use target in an equitable and cost effective manner

allocation of carbon dioxide emission permits with the minimum cost for chinese provinces in big data environment abstract the environmental problem and global warming have drawn many governments attention in order to solve the problem reasonable allocation of carbon dioxide emission cde permits is an important issue because it sets the targets for the decision making units to control the amount of carbon dioxide emission in this paper a new data envelopment analysis approach is proposed to evaluate the efficiency of decision making units in a big data environment and set the carbon dioxide emission permits for each decision making unit with the minimum costs comparing with the previous works on carbon dioxide emission permits allocation we firstly allocate the amount of carbon dioxide emission permits taking account into the cost each decision making unit should take to achieve its target moreover two kinds of linear programming problems are developed under efficiency invariance principle and efficiency changeability principle respectively as the allocation of carbon dioxide emission permits causes the minimum cost the decision making units are more easily to accept the allocation alternative finally our approach is applied to the carbon dioxide emission permits allocation among chinese provinces the results show that the approach can well allocate the cde permits with the minimum cost and also reveal the relationship between the marginal cost of reducing cde permits and the adjustment on them

a new frontier approach to model the eco efficiency in european countries abstract this study aims to evaluate the resource and environment efficiency problem of european countries we specify a new stochastic frontier model where gross domestic product gdp is considered as the desirable output and greenhouse gases ghg emissions as the undesirable output capital labor fossil fuels and renewable energy consumption are regarded as inputs gdp ghg ratio is maximized given the values of the other four variables the study is divided into two distinct periods 2000 2004 and 2005 2011 this division is related to the implementation of the kyoto protocol in 2005 and will allow us to evaluate the difference between the levels of efficiency before and after the establishment of environmental targets since stochastic frontier models are typically ill posed a new maximum entropy approach to assess technical efficiency which combines information from the data envelopment analysis and the structure of composed error from the stochastic frontier approach without requiring distributional assumptions is presented in this work

olympic ranking based on a zero sum gains dea model abstract it is usual to rank the participant countries in the olympic games in accordance with the number of medals they have won an alternative ranking is suggested in this paper this ranking is based on each country s ability to win medals in relation to its available resources this is an efficiency that can be measured with the help of data envelopment analysis dea for which two models exist the traditional dea model that takes into account variable returns to scale and a dea model based on the premise that the sum of the gains is zero constant sum of outputs it is the latter that is developed in this paper

green growth from a growing eco industry to economic sustainability abstract there are many questionable assumptions in the discussion of economic growth one of them is the idea that governments are able to achieve sustained high growth another one is the believe that the solution to pressing financial and social problems centers on higher growth it is also questionalble however to say that giving up on economic growth as a paradigm is the necessary condition to tackle the environmental crisis in actuality solving such problems is about radical growth in environmental and resource saving technologies it is also about radical de growth in products and processes that undermine long term living and production conditions this paper describes some best practice cases of green growth and the conceptual generalisations given by the oecd and other established institutions in europe and asia it traces the transformation of the concept of green growth and evaluates the strategy that accompanies it

a comparison of environmental and energetic performance of european countries a sustainability index recently european countries agreed on a new 2030 pact establishing challenging levels for a set of climate and energy indexes in order to achieve a more competitive safe and sustainable energy system in order to evaluate current sustainability performances of european countries from the environmental and energetic perspectives this research proposes a multi criteria decision analysis mcda that starting from both eurostat data and the analytic hierarchy process ahp allows a direct comparison of nations to this aim multiple indexes are taken into account e g greenhouse gas ghg emissions government expenditures for environmental protection recycled and reused waste from electric and electronic equipments weees recycled and reused waste from end of life vehicles elvs recycled materials from municipal solid wastes msws share of renewable energy re in electricity share of re in transport share of re in heating and cooling and primary energy consumption this assessment model provides a sustainability value for each european country and the related ranking with the european average results show as even nowadays twelve out of twenty eight european countries have a value greater than the european average in 2013 top four nations sweden denmark finland and austria have high indexes of sustainability and sweden is the best country from both the environmental and energetic perspectives

dea models for resource reallocation and production input output estimation abstract this paper discusses the inverse data envelopment analysis dea problem with preference cone constraints an inverse dea model can be used for a decision making unit dmu to estimate its input output levels when some or all of its input output entities are revised given its current dea efficiency level the extension of introducing additional preference cones to the previously developed inverse dea model allows the decision makers to incorporate their preferences or important policies over inputs outputs into the production analysis and resource allocation process we provide the properties of the inverse dea problem through a discussion of its related multi objective and weighted sum single objective programming problems numerical examples are presented to illustrate the application procedure of our extended inverse dea model in particular we demonstrate how to apply the model to the case of a local home electrical appliance group company for its resource reallocation decisions

environmental efficiency of land transportation in china a parallel slack based measure for regional and temporal analysis abstract as the second largest economic entity in the world china plays an important role in controlling global carbon dioxide co 2 emissions the land transportation sector including railway transportation and road transportation has been the most important source of emissions in china and the average co 2 emissions of land transportation were 529 31 million tons during the period 2009 2012 in this study a parallel slack based measure data envelopment analysis model is proposed which is used for evaluating the overall efficiency of the land transportation sector and individual efficiencies of the railway transportation and highway transportation subsectors at the same time considering co 2 emissions the empirical results lead to three conclusions a only anhui province is efficient each year during 2009 2012 b the environmental efficiency of the eastern area in china is the best followed by the central area with the western area being the worst c the performance of railway transportation is better than that of highway transportation these three conclusions lead to policy suggestions to promote highway transportation technological innovation and narrow the regional imbalances in land transportation this paper makes two main contributions the model advances improvements to methods used in the data envelopment analysis technique and also provides governments with a practical and yet easy to adopt perspective to implement land transportation performance measurement that aids in decision making

decomposition analysis for assessing the progress in decoupling industrial growth from co2 emissions in the eu manufacturing sector decomposition analysis is used in this paper not only to explain changes in industrial co2 emissions but also to comparatively evaluate the progress made in 14 eu countries in decoupling emissions from industrial growth the analysis is performed for the period 1990 2003 by distinguishing two time intervals for assessing progress prior to and following the agreement on the kyoto protocol the refined laspeyres model is used to determine the impact of 5 explanatory factors output energy intensity structure fuel mix and utility mix the obtained results are further elaborated in order to assess the real efforts undertaken in each country and their effectiveness in dissociating the economic and environmental dimensions of development moreover a rescaling procedure is implemented in order to adjust efforts to the average progress in the eu and proceed to a fair comparative evaluation it is found that most eu countries made a considerable but not always sufficient decoupling effort while no significant acceleration is observed in the post kyoto period

efficiency and allocation of emission allowances and energy consumption over more sustainable european economies abstract efficient use of energy reduction in fossil fuel dependence and control of co2 emissions are all fundamental to development of a sustainable economy competitiveness in energy use saves imports of oil and gas increases gross domestic product and creates new jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors this study identifies the more or less competitive european union member states in terms of sustainable growth using data envelopment analysis dea model and proposes new allocations of country greenhouse gas limits and energy consumption using a zero sum gains dea model the analysis of european countries fills a gap in the existing literature and contributes to the discussion on the 2020 2030 european strategy proposing an efficiency based indicator which measures country performance in terms of economic social and environmental factors gdp represents the economic factor population represents the social factor and emissions final and renewable energy consumption are the environmental factors the numerical results show that the initial allocations are inefficient applying the modelled reallocation the most efficient countries are rewarded by potential increases in emission and energy consumption while the least efficient countries must bring about decreases to achieve full efficiency

energy related ghg emission in agriculture of the european countries an application of the generalized divisia index abstract sustainable agriculture food security and welfare of the farmers require an integrated analysis of the performance of the agricultural sector in this paper we follow the energy environment economy framework and focus on decomposition of changes in the energy related greenhouse gas ghg emission in agricultural sectors of the selected european union eu countries the research relies on country level data from fao and eurostat describing economic activity energy use and ghg emission in the agricultural sectors of the european countries during 1995 2012 the main drivers carbon factor of energy consumed in agriculture energy intensity of agricultural production and growth in agricultural production and their impacts on the energy related ghg emissions in agriculture are analysed for selected countries the generalized divisia index is applied to decompose the changes in the energy related ghg emissions france latvia and belgium appeared as the only countries with increase in ghg emissions during 1995 2012 in the case of france energy intensity went up along with increase in the scale of agricultural production in latvia and belgium an increase in carbon factor appeared as the major factor driving an increase in ghg emissions the appropriate policies need to be employed in these countries seeking to reduce ghg emissions from energy consumption in agriculture improvements in energy efficiency appear to be a more feasible mean for ensuring further reductions in ghg emission

a dea approach for estimating the agricultural energy and environmental efficiency of eu countries this study attempts to evaluate the energy and environmental efficiency of the primary sectors of the eu member state countries the evaluation is based on a non radial data envelopment analysis dea model which allows for non proportional adjustments to energy inputs and undesirable outputs and thus it provides different estimations for energy and environmental efficiency scores the 2001 2008 time period was selected for this research one of the most important findings is that countries like germany sweden or austria with strong environmental protection standards appear to be less energy and environmentally efficient compared with countries like denmark belgium spain france or ireland in addition a series of eastern european countries achieve low efficiency scores which can be characterized as expectable due to low technology level being implemented in the primary production process there are also two sub periods for this research the first one 2001 2006 covers the fully coupled with specific cultivations period for subsidy administation and the second 2007 2008 where the new decoupled subsidy scheme was implemented there are significant hints for considerable changes of energy and environmental efficiency after the implementation of the the new cap with the new member states siginificantly differ of both energy and environmental efficiency copmared with the older ones

the dynamic adjustment path for perfectly foreseen changes in monetary policy abstract this paper investigates the real effects of announced or perfectly foreseen changes in monetary policy produced by the mundell tobin effect a particularly good place to study these non neutralities appears to be the period between announcement and implementation of new policies at announcement the economy jumps to a new equilibrium path moving continuously even after implementation all transition paths between announcement and implementation are established to be scalar multiples of each other the path depends upon the structure of the economy and the discounted present value of the change in policy both algebraic and diagrammatical analyses are presented

exchange rate expectation formation process a consistency test this paper investigates the consistency property of exchange rate expectations formation process using cointegration techniques the consistency property is a precursor to testing the rationality of the expectation formation process though it is weaker than rationality the results support cointegratability between the spot and the expectation exchange rate series thus upholding the consistency hypothesis

factorial decomposition of co2 emissions a generalized divisia index approach abstract this paper introduces a novel approach to estimating the impact of the major factors driving co 2 emissions gdp energy consumption population their carbon intensities and other related indicators that may be chosen arbitrarily the suggested approach is based on the generalization of the divisia index to interconnected factors the approach also extends the kaya identity by explicitly including gross domestic product and energy consumption a computer program in r language aimed at automating the calculations is supplied factorial analysis of the united states and china s co 2 emissions is provided as an example of application

long and short term interest rates in a risky world abstract the paper develops and tests a general equilibrium model in which variability or risk affects the choice of portfolios our measures of variability include only the variability of unanticipated growth in monetary and non monetary aggregates and our tests use data ending with the change in federal reserve procedures in october 1979 we find that increased variability of unanticipated money growth raises demands for debt and money and reduces the demand for real capital interest rates on both short and long term debt rise by a risk premium we estimate the size of the risk premium before and after the october 1979 change and we show that the change in federal reserve procedures moved the economy to a less efficient point

a spatial temporal decomposition approach to performance assessment in energy and emissions abstract there has been growing interest among researchers and policymakers in comparing or benchmarking countries on the basis of their performance in energy consumption or energy related co 2 emissions such studies allow variations among countries to be revealed the contributing factors identified and the scope for improvement better understood at the same time tracking changes or quantifying improvements in energy use or emissions over time in a country have long been a focus area of researchers and policy makers to provide a fuller picture on country performance in a multi country study over time it would be of interest to integrate the above mentioned spatial and temporal analyses in a single analysis framework this paper deals with this issue using the technique of index decomposition analysis a spatial temporal approach is introduced and two application cases are presented to illustrate how the approach can be applied the first analyzes variations and changes in the aggregate co 2 intensity of electricity production for ten countries from 1990 to 2010 and the second deals with variations and changes in the aggregate energy intensity for eight economic regions of china from 2002 to 2012 in addition two different ways of presenting the results are introduced our study shows that the proposed approach can supplement studies which are conducted purely on a spatial or temporal basis