the solution to the tullock rent seeking game when r 2 mixed strategy equilibria and mean dissipation rates in tullock s rent seeking model the probability a player wins the game depends on expenditures raised to the power r we show that a symmetric mixed strategy nash equilibrium exists when r 2 and that overdissipation of rents does not arise in any nash equilibrium we derive a tight lower bound on the level of rent dissipation that arises in a symmetric equilibrium when the strategy space is discrete and show that full rent dissipation occurs when the strategy space is continuous our results are shown to be consistent with recent experimental evidence on the dissipation of rents

fuel demand elasticities for energy and environmental policies indian sample survey evidence india has been running large scale interventions in the energy sector over the last decades still there is a dearth of reliable and readily available price and income elasticities of demand to base these on especially for domestic use of traditional fuels this study uses the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids using micro data of more than 100 000 households sampled across india the la aids model is expanded by specifying the intercept as a linear function of household characteristics marshallian and hicksian price and expenditure elasticities of demand for four main fuels are estimated for both urban and rural areas by different income groups these can be used to evaluate recent and current energy policies the results can also be used for energy projections and carbon dioxide simulations given different growth rates for different segments of the indian population

optimization of india s power sector strategies using weight restricted stochastic data envelopment analysis abstract india s power sector has a significant impact on the country s development and climate change mitigation efforts optimization of energy planning is therefore key to achieving the overall planning goals the hierarchical multi objective policy optimization is a policy centric multi level bottom up iterative approach designed from a developing country perspective utilizing the optimality principle of dynamic programming it is applied to the indian power sector by grouping the strategies into three portfolios namely power generation mix demand side efficiency group and supply side efficiency group each portfolio is optimized taking into account the objectives of cost minimization and comprehensive risk and barrier reduction the portfolios are further combined and optimized at a higher level with respect to higher level objectives namely economic growth energy equity energy security and climate sustainability this paper focuses on the second level optimization utilizing data envelopment analysis dea both the deterministic and stochastic variations have been analysed and the results compared in respect of unrestricted as well as restricted weight models the analysis shows that weight restricted stochastic dea model is most appropriate for efficiency optimization of power sector strategies the methodology can be effectively used for energy planning in developing countries

the effect of urbanization on energy use in india and china in the ipets model abstract urbanization is one of the major demographic and economic trends occurring in developing countries with important consequences for development energy use and well being yet it is only beginning to be explicitly incorporated in long term scenario analyses of energy and emissions we assess the implications of a plausible range of urbanization pathways for energy use and carbon emissions in india and china using the integrated population economy technology science ipets model a computable general equilibrium cge model of the global economy that captures heterogeneity in household types within world regions and into which we have introduced income effects on household consumption preferences we find that changes in urbanization have a somewhat less than proportional effect on aggregate emissions and energy use a decomposition analysis demonstrates that this effect is due primarily to an economic growth effect driven by the increased labor supply associated with faster urbanization the influence of income on household consumption is strong and indicates a potentially rapid transition away from traditional fuel use and toward modern fuels such as electricity and natural gas results also indicate important directions for future work including the implications of alternative types and driving forces of urbanization over time a better understanding of possible changes in consumption preferences associated with income growth and the urbanization process and modeling strategies that can produce disaggregated household consumption outcomes within a cge framework

rents dissipation and lost treasures comment in an interesting recent paper dari mattiacci and parisi 2005 extended tullock s 1980 rent seeking game with an entry decision the mixed strategies identified by dari mattiacci and parisi for the case of increasing returns in the contest success function r2 do not constitute an equilibrium of the game they study however these strategies are an equilibrium if the strategy space of the game is restricted by a minimum expenditure requirement and this minimum expenditure requirement is an element of a specific interval

investigating m3 money demand in the euro area abstract euro area monetary growth has exceeded its target since 2001 likewise recent empirical studies did not find evidence in favour of a stable long run money demand function in contrast to the bulk of the literature we are able to identify a stable long run money demand relationship this result is obtained when the analysis is done without the short run homogeneity restriction between money and prices the basic equation can be improved by allowing for asymmetric adjustment in a low inflation environment opportunity costs of holding money have decreased thus the apparent monetary overhang is reconciled within standard models

rent seeking in general equilibrium a didactic illustration in the first part of the paper a simple general equilibrium model is developed which allows a graphic illustration of some of the basic ideas in rent seeking literature general equilibrium means that the alternative uses of available resources for both consumers and producers are made explicit the standard partial analysis of rent seeking is re interpreted in a general welfare theoretic framework thereby clarifying such diverse terms as consumer and producer surplus profits and rents to be captured the initial models of tullock and krueger are used to describe the social harm done by rent seeking activities in terms of a social cost benefit calculus

stock market downswing and the stability of european monetary union money demand this article analyzes the question whether money demand in the euro area underwent a structural change in the end of 2001 when m3 money growth started to considerably overshoot the reference value set by the european central bank it is found that conventional specifications of money demand have in fact become unstable whereas specifications that are augmented with equity returns and volatility remain stable using such an augmented specification it turns out that the high m3 growth rates have not led to excess liquidity and thus do not pose a measurable threat to price stability

modeling household cooking fuel choice a panel multinomial logit approach we use three rounds of a rich panel data set to investigate the determinants of household cooking fuel choice and energy transition in urban ethiopia we observe that the expected energy transition did not occur following economic growth in ethiopia during the decade 20002009 regression results from a random eects multinomial logit model suggest that households economic status price of alternative energy sources and education are important determinants of fuel choice in urban ethiopia the results also suggest the use of multiple fuels or fuel stacking behavior by households we argue that policy makers could target these policy levers to encourage transition to cleaner energy sources

demand side management potentials for mitigating energy poverty in south africa abstract south africa is severally posited to be africa s most industrialized nation with an economy heavily reliant on energy with depleted electricity reserve margin which led to massive load shedding and rationing of electricity in 2008 eskom has stepped up the construction of additional power plants to cover for growing supply deficits emerging trends however favour demand side management dsm initiatives as alternatives to building additional supply capacity due to environmental and economic constraints this research evaluates the electricity per capita for 2007 2011 and 2016 on provincial basis assuming 100 and 36 8 residential sector consumption of generated electricity to show declining electricity per capita values a scenario simulation for 100 50 and 30 household participation of cloth washers and cloth dryers optimal dispatch is then modelled to show the enormous dsm potentials in terms of electricity cost reduction and supply flexibility a modified genetic algorithm mga is used in the dispatch of participating loads on the medupi power plant which has been modelled to operate with carbon capture and sequestration ccs technology dsm potentials of 6938 34 mw 3469 18 mw and 2081 51 mw are computed for 100 50 and 30 household participation for cloth washers and cloth dryers

tests for parameter instability in regressions with i 1 processes this article derives the large sample distributions of lagrange multiplier lm tests for parameter instability against several alternatives of interest in the context of cointegrated regression models the fully modified estimator of phillips and hansen is extended to cover general models with stochastic and deterministic trends the test statistics considered include the supf test of quandt as well as the lm tests of nyblom and of nabeya and tanaka it is found that the asymptotic distributions depend on the nature of the regressor processes that is if the regressors are stochastic or deterministic trends the distributions are noticeably different from the distributions when the data are weakly dependent it is also found that the lack of cointegration is a special case of the alternative hypothesis considered an unstable intercept so the tests proposed here may also be viewed as a test of the null of cointegration against the alternative of no cointegration the tests are applied to three data se

monetary targeting in germany the stability of monetary policy and of the monetary system abstract for more than two decades the deutsche bundesbank has followed a strategy of pre announcing targets for the growth in broad money such consistency has not conflicted with limited flexibility in policy implementation the stable policy environment may have contributed to the stability of the monetary system in general and money demand in particular thus facilitating the maintenance of the strategy

rent seeking behaviour of retaliating agents this paper has examined a rent seeking game where the players take a more sophisticated approach to evaluating the potential strategies and counter strategies of their rivals than in the standard nash case we have derived the conditions for the existence of symmetric and nonsymmetric equilibria for the game and derived the properties of these equilibria three results merit repeating first we find that rent dissipation will not in general be complete second and in contrast to much of the traditional literature we find that the socially optimal result of zero rent seeking is sometimes a feasible equilibrium outcome for our game finally there exist rent seeking configurations in which the best play of one of the rivals is to withdraw from the game or alternatively stated where it is not optimal for a rival to contest the rent by entering the game in these nonsymmetric cases it would appear that tullock s conjecture about the value of preemptive moves remains valid this is true even when the strategies and counter strategies available to the players are much more complex than in the traditional nash approach

investigating m3 money demand in the euro area new evidence based on standard models monetary growth in the euro area has exceeded its target level especially since 2001 likewise recent empirical studies did not find evidence in favour of a stable long run relationship between the variables entering the money demand function instead the equation appears to be increasingly unstable if more recent data are included since the link between money balances and macroeconomic variables seems to has become rather fragile these results put serious doubts concerning the rationale of monetary aggregates in the monetary policy strategy of the ecb however if the analysis is done without imposing a short run homogeneity restriction between money and prices a stable long run money demand relationship can be identified where recursively estimated parameters are almost stable in addition the corresponding error correction model survives a wide array of specification tests including procedures for nonlinearities and parameter instability hence the apparent monetary overhang is in line with standard models of money demand behaviour and is not expected to lead to a rise in inflation

from linear fuel switching to multiple cooking strategies a critique and alternative to the energy ladder model abstract promoting sustainable development requires evaluating the technical and policy options that will facilitate the adoption and use of energy efficient and less polluting cooking stoves and practices the transition from traditional to modern fuels and devices has been explained by the energy ladder model that suggests that with increasing affluence a progression is expected from traditional biomass fuels to more advanced and less polluting fuels in this paper we evaluate the energy ladder model utilizing data from a four year 1992 96 case study of a village in mexico and from a large scale survey from four states of mexico we show that an alternate multiple fuel model of stove and fuel management based on the observed pattern of household accumulation of energy options rather than the simple progression depicted in the traditional energy ladder scenario more accurately depicts cooking fuel use patterns in rural households the multiple fuel model integrates four factors demonstrated to be essential in household decision making under conditions of resource scarcity or uncertainty a economics of fuel and stove type and access conditions to fuels b technical characteristics of cookstoves and cooking practices c cultural preferences and d health impacts this model also allows better estimates of the expected fuelwood demand and indoor air pollution in rural households

dissipation of contestable rents by small numbers of contenders the theory of rent seeking with its origins in the observations of gordon tullock 1967 or to use jagdish bhagwati s 1982 proposed term the theory of directly unproductive profit seeking activities is concerned with the potentially adverse effects on resource allocation of incentives to cap ture and defend artificially contrived rents and transfers the scope for so cial loss proposed by the theory derives from the relation between the value of a contestable prize and the value of the resources attracted into the con test to determine the beneficiary of the prize underlying this social loss is a specification of how rational behavior by optimizing agents links the value of the prize sought to the resources expended it has been traditional to assume competitive behavior in describing the activities of lobbying and influence seeking then if some further condi tions are satisfied l the total value of the resources expended precisely equals the value of the prize sought so dissipation is complete 2 conse quently the social cost associated with contestability of a rent can be in ferred from the value of the rent itself and the detailed and hard to come by information on individual outlays made in the course of the contest be comes unnecessary by basing their analyses on competitive dissipation contributors to the rent seeking literature see the review by robert tollison 1982 have been able to presume that the observed value of a contested rent is an exact measure of the associated social cost of monopoly power or regu lation similarly in the trade theoretic literature where the rights contested are to quota premia or revenues from trade taxes krueger 1974 bhagwati

free entry and efficient rent seeking this paper concerns rent seeking and the extent to which rents are dissipated under various circumstances gordon tullock s 1967 insight that expenditures made to capture an artificially created transfer represent a social waste suggested that the cost to the economy of monopoly and regulation is greater than the simple harberger 1954 deadweight loss indeed under tullock s original formulation and in the extensions of his work by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 rents are exactly dissipated at the social level 1 is spent to capture 1 so that the total welfare loss from such activities is equal to the harberger triangle plus the rectangle of monopoly profits

on measuring energy poverty in indian households summary the relationship between energy and poverty is obvious and goes both ways recognizing this this paper provides a short overview of different approaches to measuring energy poverty it then presents a novel two dimensional measure of energy poverty and energy distribution that combines the elements of access to different energy types and quantity of energy consumed an assessment of the extent of energy poverty and changes in energy distribution pattern are analyzed by applying this measure to indian household survey data for 1983 2000 the analysis shows a significant reduction in the level of energy poverty and a rapidly developing subcontinent the new measure is a good complement to conventional monetary measures and is general enough to be applied to other developing countries

energy poverty in china an index based comprehensive evaluation abstract energy poverty has got increasing attention during the latest three decades measuring energy poverty is the premise of policy making to alleviate energy poverty there is no unified energy poverty measurement that has been widely accepted this paper reviews the commonly used energy poverty measurements through classifying them into three categories energy service availability energy service quality and satisfaction of energy demand for human s survival and development this paper also analyzes the suitability of the commonly used energy poverty measurement for china from the prospective of data availability and index applicability furthermore we construct a new energy poverty comprehensive evaluation index in this study and the index is illustrated to evaluate regional energy poverty in china the evaluation results indicate that china s energy poverty showed an alleviating trend from 2000 to 2011 and during this period china s energy service availability improved slightly energy consumption cleanliness showed no significant change energy management completeness decreased with fluctuations and household energy affordability and energy efficiency improved continually in addition china s regions show different characteristics of energy poverty for example middle reaches of yangtze river region showed the worst energy availability and eastern coastal region showed the worst energy management completeness several policy implications for energy poverty alleviation are also proposed in this study including for instance increasing investment on energy infrastructure and spreading energy management organization in rural area decreasing relative cost on household commercial energy consumption and encourage the utilization of modern clean and efficient household energy consumption equipment

the macroeconomy of angola breaks and persistence in angolan macro data using long range dependence techniques we examine the order of integration of angola s macro variables from a fractional viewpoint based on a small open economy model the series examined are money reserves credit money supply lending rate exchange rates cpi gdp oil revenues and government expenditure for the period of january 2000 to december 2013 the results suggest that the variables are nonstationary with orders of integration equal to or higher than 1 suggesting nonmean reverting behaviour structural breaks reveal that the series reflect the imf intervention in angola in 2003 to control inflation policy implications are derived

rent seeking and entry abstract it is the purpose of this paper to develop a market equilibrium model of rent seeking with entry the model determines the optimal amount of rent seeking activities by individuals the equilibrium number of rent seekers and hence also the total amount of rent seeking in the industry

africa energy future alternative scenarios and their implications for sustainable development strategies abstract the long term forecasting of energy supply and demand is of prime importance in africa due to the steady increase in energy requirements the non availability of sufficient resources the high dependence on fossil fuels to meet these requirements and the global concerns over the energy induced environmental issues this paper is concerned with modelling possible future paths for africa s energy future and the related emissions future energy demand is forecasted based on socio economic variables such as gross domestic product income per capita population and urbanisation the long range energy alternative planning system leap modelling framework is employed to analyse and project energy demand and the related emissions under alternative strategies for the period of 2010 2040 results of scenarios including business as usual bau policies moderate energy access and accelerate energy access policies renewable energies promotion and energy efficiency policies and their environmental implications are provided the study provides some policy insights and identifies synergies and trade offs relating to the potential for energy policies to promote universal energy access enable a transition to renewable energy and mitigate climate change for a sustainable development

rent seeking in natural resource quota allocations this paper examines the incentives for rent seeking in the allocation of natural resource quotas to competing user groups by political bodies the political body has discretion in making the allocation and competing user groups rent seek to influence the allocation we investigate ways in which the governmental body can affect the behavior of the players by setting the ground rules for the competition a political body can affect an allocatively pareto efficient outcome by choosing an appropriate default pre rent seeking policy surprisingly an allocatively efficient default policy is unlikely to minimize social costs however winner take all default policies are likely to maximize not minimize rent seeking a competitive post allocation market reduces rent seeking but is not either itself or in combination with an efficient default policy capable of minimizing social costs however forcing winners in political redistributions to fully compensate losers both lowers the rent seeking levels relative to a potential compensation criterion and when used together with an efficient default policy is capable of obtaining the first best solution of an allocatively efficient allocation with zero rent seeking

the design of rent seeking competitions in the standard tullock model of rent seeking as a noncooperative game aggregate expenditures by seekers can equal exceed or fall short of total rents depending on what is assumed about the number of seekers and the marginal return to a seeker s investment if the supply of an input into the rent seeking process is controlled by a politician who receives payment from seekers for it the indeterminacy of the process becomes a less serious problem he supplies it and designs the rent seeking game to maximize his wealth the author derives expressions for the number of seekers and the marginal return parameter which maximize the politician s wealth in one input and two input rent seeking processes

when black meets green a review of the four pillars of india s energy policy abstract india is one of the most important global players in the energy sector in terms of production and consumption the way in which the country shapes its energy policy not only affects india itself but also the global climate action on the one hand india led by pm narendra modi declares the commitment to pro climate actions including the enhancement of the energy efficiency and renewable capacity on the other hand the development of india s conventional energy sector coal was indicated as one of the reasons for the us exit from the paris agreement this dilemma lead to a discussion on the shape of india s energy policy seen from the climate s standpoint in this context the article discusses the pillars of india s energy policy presented by modi in 2016 the main energy pillars access efficiency sustainability and security are juxtaposed with the previous indian strategic documents concerning the energy sector including electricity national electricity policy of 2005 draft national energy policy of 2017 a climate energy policy analysis is extended by legal comments on indian energy law as a result the article draws a picture of india s energy policy and climate agenda in black conventional energy and green renewable capacity colours

estimating and combining national income distributions using limited data a major problem encountered in studies of income inequality at regional and global levels is estimating income distributions from data that are in summary form in this article we estimate national and regional income distributions within a general framework that relaxes the assumption of constant income within groups we propose a technique to estimate the parameters of a beta 2 distribution using grouped data we model regional income distribution using a mixture of country specific distributions and examine its properties we use the techniques to analyze national and regional inequality trends for eight east asian countries and two benchmark years 1988 and 1993

on the social costs of rent seeking versus the social costs of production flexibility in this paper an analysis is provided of two alternative methods of defensive behaviour by a firm first rent seeking and second potential adjustment by way of investing in product flexibility from the analysis it emerges that at times rent seeking may be socially superior less socially wasteful to other more traditional means of responding to threats this paper therefore suggests that in circumstances where some type of defensive or aggressive activity by firms is available rent seeking while constituting gross social waste may be a net social gain given the alternative options available to the firm

legal expenditure as a rent seeking game legal expenditures at a civil trial constitute an interesting type of rent seeking contest in civil litigation there is a natural interaction between the objective merits of the case and the outcome of the contest institutions such as fee shifting do not generally have a counterpart in other rent seeking contests the endogenous decision to participate in the rent seeking contest corresponds to the decision by the plaintiff to bring a case and the decision by the defendant to defend it the desirability of fee shifting is very sensitive to the value of the parameter which describes the legal technology

how stable is the demand for money in emerging economies one of the key elements of implementing the monetary policy is stability of the demand for money the literature includes a large number of studies that have tested the stability of the money demand in developed as well as less developed countries but not in emerging economies of eastern europe as market based data becomes available from these countries there is an urgency to test old theories for these modern market oriented economies in this article we consider the experiences of armenia bulgaria the czech republic hungary poland russia and the slovak republic using the bounds testing approach to error correction modelling and cointegration we show that money demand is stable in these countries

reducing subsidies on household fuels in india how will it affect the poor kerosene and lpg are widely used in households in india for lighting and cooking these fuels have historically been subsidized as part of the restructuring of the energy sector the government is committed to limiting these subsidies this paper examines the impact of reducing energy subsidies on the welfare of the poor the paper uses data from nationally representative surveys of over 100 000 households the paper concludes that the case for reducing lpg subsidies is strong although the kerosene subsidy is an inefficient means of subsidizing fuel use by the poor reduction in it will need to be supported by other policies that would limit the adverse impacts

risk averse rent seeking with shared rents this paper presents a nash equilibrium model of rent seeking behavior in which risk averse players expend resources to obtain a share of a rent as for example in contests for import quota licences results are obtained relating the equilibrium level of lobbying effort by each player to the value of the rent in particular reduced individual lobbying effort is associated with higher rents contested if players are sufficiently risk averse the question of whether the value of rents is a good measure of the resource cost of rent seeking is also considered a simple approximation involving risk and risk aversion parameters is derived for the proportion of rents dissipated in long run equilibrium risk and risk aversion are seen to reduce the rent dissipation ratio below unity copyright 1987 by royal economic society

densification what does it mean for fuel poverty and energy justice an empirical analysis energy is increasingly at the forefront of the global political agenda while there is a longstanding literature relating to fuel poverty and increasingly energy justice there remains little evidence which explores its link with the urban form specifically the purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between the urban consolidation hypothesis and the cultivation of energy justice in australia this study uses data from the household income and labour dynamics in australia hilda survey years 2007 2014 a national probability sample and indefinite life panel the substantive findings of this study demonstrate that for low income and renting households greater urban density corresponds to a higher likelihood of experiencing fuel poverty further for households with a dwelling type described as an apartment two or three storeys there is a separate and quite generalisable indication that this type of dwelling is associated with a lower likelihood of experiencing fuel poverty this study connects the debate regarding urban consolidation and energy consumption to the fuel poverty and energy justice literature alongside this contribution this study also provides policymakers and planners with new evidence to inform remediation policies that are directed at supporting the fuel poor

rent seeking aspects of political advertising political contests have all the usual characteristics of rent seeking games characterized in the recent volume edited by buchanan tollison and tullock 1980 that is to say resources are committed to a distributive contest where the social pie is not necessarily enlarged but rather divided up a policy enacted via a winner take all apportioning since political advertising is one method of influencing electoral outcomes we might expect competitive political advertising to exhibit rent seeking losses of the usual sort the extent of the rent seeking losses associated with political advertising depends upon the extent to which advertising affects voter perceptions of the relative merits of electoral alternatives political proponents may well completely dissipate any electoral rents at stake through their advertising efforts yet still increase social welfare if political advertisments provide sufficiently valuable information to the electorate on the other hand if advertising has no effect on voter perceptions or provides information of dubious value then rent dissipating advertising may generate substantial rent seeking losses

analysis of the energy access improvement and its socio economic impacts in rural areas of developing countries abstract access to modern energy is one of the most basic requirements for development in rural areas of developing countries there are a large number of people who do not have access to lpg and depend on traditional biomass such as wood crop and dung for cooking in addition energy has numerous and complex links with poverty reduction therefore it is important to estimate the impacts of energy access improvement on socio economic situation in the rural areas of developing countries quantitatively this study focuses on socio economic impacts of cooking demand through changes in stoves adopted by the rural households we have developed an energy economic model of rural areas in india to analyze the links between energy income and health hazard applying both opportunity cost for using fuelwood and exposure to resipirable suspended particulate matter rspm as a result of the analysis there is a positive relation between the opportunity cost and the average rspm exposure of women in the rural areas following to increase in the opportunity cost that is income the cost of an improved wood stove becomes relatively lower first than that of a traditional wood stove and then a gas stove attains price competitiveness it is achieved that the average rspm exposure is below the who and japanese criteria for suspended particulate matter spm 190 and 100 g m3 at the opportunity cost of us 9 and 15 gj respectively

assessing the extent and intensity of energy poverty using multidimensional energy poverty index empirical evidence from households in india abstract in this paper we have made a comprehensive assessment of the extent and various socio economic implications of energy poverty in india amartya sens s capability approach to development underpins the analysis of household level data taken from the india human development survey ii ihds ii 2011 12 using the multidimensional energy poverty index mepi the overall results show that energy poverty is widespread in india and the existence of energy poverty also coincides with the other forms of deprivations such as income poverty and social backwardness for example dalits lower caste and adivasis tribal are found to be extremely energy poor compared to the other social groups in india the results also reveal that it is the responsibility of women to manage the domestic chores such as collection of firewood and making of dung cake in traditional indian households inefficient use of such biomass fuels is found to cause health hazards

a generalized model of rent seeking behavior in this paper i present a formal analysis of rent seeking games in which the players valuations for the prize are represented as vectors the players in this game are risk neutral and may not be indifferent to who wins the contestable rent if it is someone else both tullock s original rent seeking model and the public goods rent seeking model by katz et al turn out to be special cases of this more general model

energy poverty an overview abstract in the coming decades the energy sector will have to face three major transformations concerned with climate change security of supply and energy poverty the first two have been extensively analysed but less attention has been paid to the third even though it has a great influence on the lives of millions of people this paper presents an overview on energy poverty different ways of measuring it and its implications according to the who indoor pollution causes an estimated 1 3 million deaths per annum in low income countries associated with the use of biomass in inadequate cookstoves although energy poverty cannot be delinked from the broader more complex problem of poverty in general access to energy infrastructures would avoid its most serious consequences and would help to encourage autonomous development according to the iea the cost of providing universal access to energy by 2030 would require annual investment of 35 billion i e much less than the amount provided annually in subsidies to fossil fuels finally the paper argues that energy and energy poverty need to be incorporated into the design of development strategies

constructing historical euro zone data existing methods of reconstructing historical euro zone data by aggregation of the individual countries aggregate data raises numerous difficulties especially due to past exchange rate changes the approach proposed here is designed to avoid such distortions and aggregate exactly when exchange rates are fixed we first compute growth rates within states aggregate these then cumulate this euro zone growth rate to obtain the aggregated levels variables the aggregate of the implicit deflator plice index coincides with the implicit deflator of our aggregate nominal and real data we apply the method to euro zone m3 gdp and prices over the previous two decades 1 background with the introduction on 31 december 1998 of the irrevocably fixed euro exchange rates eleven countries of the european union entered a new monetary union from that date onwards monetary policy for these countries is set by the newly formed european central bank ecb the governing council of the ecb bases its monetary policy on medium term assumptions regarding real gdp growth and the trend decline in the velocity of circulation of m3 ecb 1999a p 40 therefore the construction of historical data for aggregate m3 and gdp for the euro zone is of practical relevance to policy makers in addition any econometric model for euro zone countries requires such historical data this paper describes an approach to doing so from the aggregate data of the individual member states a number of previous reconstructions are noted but as these have important drawbacks an approach related to that in t6rnqvist 1936 is proposed and its properties are discussed although there have been many important contributions to index number theory see section 4 few are directly relevant to the problem confronted here where we wish to use the national aggregates from member states not the individual item data usually input into index calculations to construct a euro zone aggregate moreover the inherently non stationary nature of those national aggregates both from unit roots inducing integrated time series

nigeria s energy poverty insights and implications for smart policies and framework towards a smart nigeria electricity network a thorough and exhaustive review of relevant literature and associated works is carried out to critically examine energy poverty in nigeria with respect to ownership and income using the desktop approach and empirical formulas the persistent failure of public infrastructure like healthcare education and security to the poor electricity generation transmission and distribution capacity in the country is examined alongside current government s contribution to buoying our generation capacity and electricity access through policies and investment the findings of the review reveal the urgent need for the smart roll out of distributed generation units in order to stimulate and encourage the ongoing diversification of the economy and also the need for a sustainable road map that incorporates the successes of countries faced with similar challenges this review paper also proposes the need for palliatives in form of subsidized solar home systems shss through a sustainable and economically viable means for off grid homes to assuage the effects of non availability of grid electricity

energy poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation is there a trade off energy poverty alleviation has become an important political issue in the most recent years several initiatives and policies have been proposed to deal with poor access to modern sources of energy in many developing countries given the large number of people lacking basic energy services an important question is whether providing universal access to modern energy could significantly increase energy demand and associated co2 emissions this paper provides one of the few formal assessments of this problem by means of a simple but robust model of current and future energy consumption the model allows mapping energy consumption globally for different classes of energy use quantifying current and future imbalances in the distribution of energy consumption our results indicate that an encompassing energy poverty eradication policy to be met by 2030 would increase global final energy consumption by about 7 roughly 20 ej the same quantity of energy could be saved by reducing by 15 energy consumption of individuals with standards above current european levels the additional energy infrastructure needed to eradicate energy poverty would produce 44 183 gtco2 over the 21st century and contribute at most 0 13 c of additional warming

leadership and expenditures in rent seeking models the theory of rent seeking begun by tullock 1967 krueger 1974 and posner 1975 is now well established the analysis of these models typically involves studying properties of the symmetric noncooperative nash equilibrium defined in terms of pure strategies rent seeking expenditures in a 1980 article tullock first noted and in 1984 later elaborated upon several situations where the traditional nash equilibrium of equal rent seeking payments by identical players failed to exist this failure could arise for two reasons first even though the second order conditions were satisfied at the candidate symmetric equilibrium point 2 once at that point all agents had a conditional incentive to choose zero rent seeking to avoid negative payoffs thus the traditional point while locally optimal as indicated by the second order conditions was not globally optimal the second possible reason for failure was that at the traditional point the second order conditions were violated the problems arise because r a parameter affecting the conditional probability of successful rent seeking may be too large the principal consequence is that the traditional model with myopic agents does not capture some of the potential behaviour of the players a particularly worrisome feature is that agents may find it privately optimal to spend in total more on rentseeking than the value of the prize as well benefits sometimes accrue to agents if they can block entry by preemptive play tullock 1984 97 has conjectured that there is another game in the precommitment stage in which the parties attempt to make the first commitment so that no one else will enter in this paper we consider a two player noncooperative rent seeking game where agents are allowed to adopt and potentially benefit from other than a passive stance towards their rivals firms must choose to be either leaders or followers and consistent with that decision and their beliefs about their rivals strategies then choose their rent seeking expenditures firms thus have the option of becoming stakelberg leaders or stakelberg followers 3 the analysis begins insection 2 we provide three principal results that serve to characterize the range of possible equilibria the results critically depend

illegal markets and the social costs of rent seeking this paper argues that making goods or services illegal results in an increase in the social costs associated with rent seeking the increased social cost is in the form of negative externalities that result from market participants use of coercion and violence in attempts to control trade in the illegal good consequently the social costs of rent seeking will exceed the value of resources dissipated in rent seeking competition and where the external costs exceed the undissipated portion of the tullock cost the social cost of rent seeking is greater than the sum of tullock and harberger costs

the use and effect of political propaganda in democracies this paper examines the influence of political propaganda on voters and analyses the behavior of the interest groups in the face of the influence being exercised by propaganda semi truths are distributed among the electorate the decision taken by a voter results from his basic opinion and from the parts of information he receives the analysis shows that the greater the likelihood of a certain decision being reached by a fully informed electorate the more probable it is that the same decision will be reached by a rationally uninformed electorate the pecuniary interest of an interest group is however also positively correlated with the probability that the electorate reaches a decision which is agreeable to that interest group it has finally become appar ent that the results of the approach concur well with empirical studies

efficient rent seeking under varying cost structures the rent seeking paradigm which was introduced by tullock 1967 has proven useful for exploring a variety of economic decisions that lie outside the traditional profit maximizing framework early applications of tullock s insight becker 1968 krueger 1974 posner 1975 demsetz 1976 foster 1981 and others usually assumed the entire value of the rent would be dissipated by competition following the fashion of economic profits in competitive markets in 1980 tullock structured a simple game reflecting the decisions made in rent seeking the results generated by his model suggest residual rents may accrue to rent seekers and under certain conditions resist dissipation a number of studies followed tullock s 1980 paper corcoran 1984 corcoran and karels 1985 higgins shugart and tollison 1985 tullock 1984 1985 and 1987 which explore the dissipation of excess rents under various assumptions

urban and rural energy use and carbon dioxide emissions in asia the process of urbanization has been shown to be important for economic development environmental impacts and human wellbeing particularly in developing countries in this paper we compare structure data sources and scenario results of four integrated assessment models that are capable of analyzing different aspects of urbanization the comparison focuses on residential sector energy use and related co2 emissions based on a set of urbanization scenarios for china and india important insights from this model comparison include that i total fossil fuel and industrial co2 emissions at the regional level are not very sensitive to alternative rates of urbanization and are largely dependent on the linkage between urbanization and economic growth via differentiated labor productivity in urban and rural areas ii alternative urbanization pathways may yield different results for the share of solid fuels in residential energy use thereby affecting the number of people relying on these fuels and the associated adverse health impacts and iii alternative economic growth scenarios can only be assessed for their welfare implications if urban and rural household are distinguished even though that distinction does not always strongly affect aggregate outcomes which is often due to two effects that compensate each other in total it can be concluded that urbanization and heterogeneity of households and consumers are clearly relevant for distributional effects and associated health and social impacts

determinants of household energy consumption in india improving access to affordable modern energy is critical to improving living standards in the developing world rural households in india in particular are almost entirely reliant on traditional biomass for their basic cooking energy needs this has adverse effects on their health and productivity and also causes environmental degradation this study presents a new generic modelling approach with a focus on cooking fuel choices and explores response strategies for energy poverty eradication in india the modelling approach analyzes the determinants of fuel consumption choices for heterogeneous household groups incorporating the effect of income distributions and traditionally more intangible factors such as preferences and private discount rates the methodology is used to develop alternate future scenarios that explore how different policy mechanisms such as fuel subsidies and micro financing can enhance the diffusion of modern more efficient energy sources in india

monopoly deregulation in the presence of tullock activities we give the condition for a welfare improving monopoly deregulation when the decision making process cannot be insulated from tullock activities and players are risk neutral

euro area money demand and international portfolio allocation a contribution to assessing risks to price stability this chapter argues that a stable broad money demand for the euro area over the period 1980 2011 can be obtained by modelling cross border international portfolio allocation we first observe that in this first decade of the new millennium the breakdown of standard money demand specifications for the euro area and the strong developments in annual m3 growth coincide with large net flows in portfolio invest ment in the euro area we then estimate a new money demand which turns out to be stable by including variables explaining portfolio flows omitted in the traditional specifications

estimating long run economic equilibria with stochastic trends an asymptotic theory is provided to analyze a menu of currently existing estimators of cointegrated systems we study in detail the single equation ecm seecm approach of hendry our theoretical results lead to prescriptions for empirical work such as specifying seecm s nonlinearly and including lagged equilibrium relationships rather than lagged differences of the dependent variable as covariates simulations support these prescriptions and point to problems of overfitting not encountered in the semiparametric approach of phillips and hansen 1990

a general analysis of rent seeking games in this paper we reconsider the basic model of efficient rent seeking we stress the importance of the shape of the players reaction curve in order to understand the impact of the technology of rent seeking on the structure of the outcome of the game we give a complete characterization of the pure strategy equilibria moreover the possibility of preemption by a stakelberg leader is discussed according to the nature of the technology of rent seeking available to the agents

cooperative rent seeking this paper presents an analysis of cooperation in the context of a repeated rent seeking game which can be thought of as modeling bilateral situations such as military political conflict labor business lobbying gang illegal activities or criminal civil law suits the potential for mutually advantageous agreements is explored using the repeated nature of the game as the mechanism which sustains the cooperation the nash bargaining solution is applied to symmetric as well as asymmetric rent seeking situations the asymmetries can derive from the players valuing the rent differently or choosing sequentially

efficient rents 1 rent seeking behavior in the long run we have analyzed long run behavior in rent seeking under several conditions and behavioral hypotheses the question of interest is whether or not the long run expenditures will exactly equal the value of the rents our results depend on the type of competitive response which is assumed to exist in the long run and on the r value governing the probability of winning

the strategic advantage of interdependent preferences in rent seeking contests we study rent seeking contests where the set of players contains two groups of players one with independent preferences and the other with negatively interdependent preferences it turns out that the latter experience a strategic advantage in general two player contests and in n player contests with non increasing marginal efficiency for general n player contests with increasing marginal efficiency the strategic advantage prevails provided convexity of contest technologies is sufficiently weak for strongly convex contest technologies other types of equilibria exist including one where individualists receive strictly higher pay off

costly distribution and the non equivalence of tariffs and quotas when governments impose a quota or tariff on imports it is well known that the resulting rents and revenues trigger costly rent seeking and revenue seeking activities which are welfare reducing and may be economically more significant than the efficiency losses resulting from the protectionist induced resource misallocation repeated interaction among firms can eliminate wasteful rent and revenue seeking expenditures through cooperation we show that while aggregate outcomes are equivalent under tariffs and quotas if cooperation arises the conditions under which cooperation arises differ by policy this difference arises because a firm must incur additional cost to physically import and distribute the goods associated with additional quota licenses whereas there is no such cost when it comes to consuming additional tariff revenue thus quotas and tariffs are non equivalent we provide a simple sufficient condition under which cooperative elimination of rent seeking under quotas is easier than cooperative elimination of revenue seeking under tariffs and therefore a quota is the preferred policy whenever the policy admits cooperation

stackelberg rent seeking in this paper i present a formal analysis of rent seeking games in which the players do not move simultaneously i consider rent seeking situations where the players are risk neutral and may value the prize differently the subgame perfect equilibrium outcome in this stackelberg game provides several surprising and interesting results i extend the problem to deal with cases of in complete information concerning the value a player has for the politically contestable rent

long run equilibrium and total expenditures in rent seeking the lure of excess profits or rents associated with monopoly power gives rise to expenditures to obtain these rents competitive rent seeking behavior is recognized as a factor which must be included among the wastes associated with monopoly power tullock 1967 posner 1975 1 the expenditures are aimed at transferring wealth rather than its creation and the use of resources to obtain this transfer is a loss to society how important rent seeking is as a part of the total monopolistic waste hinges on the size of the total expenditures induced by a given level of excess profits

rent seeking rent defending and rent dissipation in the preceding analyses of rent defending the posner model yielded welfare losses in excess of the combined areas of the tullock rectangle and the harberger triangle in only one instance furthermore this particular circumstance necessitated voluntary participation in a game with a negative expected value 13 for the tullock rogerson model the explicit addition of rent defenders had no impact on aggregate dissipation

rent seeking with non identical sharing rules the primary object of this paper is to examine the role of differential sharing rules within a collective rent seeking setting on the possible non existence of nash equilibrium focusing on groups that distribute part of the rent equally among their members and the residual according to relative effort we show that in rent seeking societies applying the two polar sharing rules equilibrium never exists in the general case where groups apply different but not necessarily the polar sharing rules we study the relationship between group variability in distributing rents and the problem of non existence of equilibrium in the rent seeking game

an experimental investigation of efficient rent seeking the debate about the measurement of the amount of rent dissipated in rent seeking activities is unable to be answered by observations from the naturally occurring environment current theoretical investigations have indicated that a number of factors will affect the amount of rent that can be assumed to be dissipated by rent seeking the theory of efficient rent seeking predicts that the number of rent seekers their risk posture their ability to enter and exit the rent seeking process and the manner in which the probability of receiving a rent is determined will affect the amount of rent that is dissipated

econometric analysis of aggregation in the context of linear prediction models this paper deals with the problem of aggregation where the focus of the analysis is whether to predict aggregate variables using macro or micro equations the grunfeldgriliches prediction criterion for choosing between aggregate and disaggregate equations is generalized to allow for contemporaneous covariances between the disturbances of micro equations and the possibility of different parametric restrictions on the equations of the disaggregate model a new test is proposed of the hypothesis of perfect aggregation which tests the validity of aggregation either through coefficient equality or through the stability over time of the composition of the regressors across the micro units the tools developed in the paper are then applied to employment demand functions for the uk economy disaggregated by 40 industries firstly a set of unrestricted log linear dynamic specifications are estimated for the disaggregate equations and then linear parameter restrictions are imposed as appropriate corresponding unrestricted and restricted aggregate equations are estimated two different levels of aggregation are considered aggregation over the 23 manufacturing industries and aggregation over all 40 industries of the economy in both cases the hypothesis of perfect aggregation is firmly rejected for the manufacturing industries the prediction criterion marginally favors the aggregate equation but over all industries the disaggregated equations are strongly preferred

rentless rent seeking and abnormal returns the assumption that seekers of a monopoly privilege from government will dissipate the expected value of future related rents by costly pursuit of the privilege is frequently used though subject to a growing debate tullock has described a set of plausible circumstances where strategic bidding for a single prize leads to net gains for the rent seeking participants 2 that is even with competition for rents less than full dissipation of future gains may obtain tullock also identifies other circumstances where the process is a zeroor negative sum game if the theory of rentless rent seeking holds under any set of circumstances empirical work designed to identify wealth effects associated with a regulatory event is destined to fail indeed such empirical analysis may find no effect when in fact a regulatory restriction has occurred yet reports of empirical research on regulatory effects have supported the hypothesis that rents have been generated 3 do such empirical results implicitly support tullock s theory of efficient rent seeking are such results purely random observations of one of many discrete regulatory processes involving the same firms where the overall expected value is zero 4 or is there an explanation of such results that is consistent with full dissipation of rents and systematic observation of abnormal positive returns for shareholders of directly affected firms this article offers another explanation for observing profitable rent seeking that is compatible with tullock s observations and rent dissipation theory the next section gives the explanation that section is followed by a brief summary

uncertain monopoly rent and the social cost of rent seeking abstract assuming that monopoly rent is uncertain we derive a dissipation rate formula that generalizes the hillman and katz formula we show that for large enough variance the dissipation rate increases with mean monopoly rent

risk aversion in rent seeking and rent augmenting games the effects of risk aversion are examined for two types of expenditures in rent seeking contests a rent seeking expenditures which improve the probability that the rent is obtained and b rent augmenting expenditures which increase the size of the rent to be awarded risk aversion is shown to reduce expenditures of type b unambiguously while having an indeterminate effect on those of type a these two contrasting results are shown to derive from the very different effects rent seeking and rent augmenting expenditures have on the riskiness of a player s position

m3 money demand and excess liquidity in the euro area recent empirical studies have found evidence of unstable long run money demand functions if recent data are used if the link between money balances and the macroeconomy is fragile the rationale of monetary aggregates in the ecb strategy has to be doubted in contrast we present a stable long run money demand relationship for m3 for the period 1983 2006 to obtain the result the short run homogeneity restriction between money and prices is relaxed and a break in the income elasticity of money demand after 2001 is taken into account measures of excess liquidity do not show significant inflation pressures

money demand in euroland abstract this paper explores the determinants of alternative monetary aggregates in euroland a sample consisting of quarterly data covering the 1980 1 1998 4 period is considered we are interested whether a conventionally defined money demand equation is stable in some aggregates as opposed to others both long run and short run relationships are considered in this paper overall the results indicate that broad narrow money demand in euroland is a stable unstable function of euroland wide income and interest rates

the incidence of overdissipation in rent seeking contests tullock s analysis of rent seeking and overdissipation is reconsidered we show that while equilibrium strategies do not permit overdissipation in expectation for particular realizations of players mixed strategies the total amount spent competing for rents can exceed the value of the prize we also show that the cross sectional incidence of overdissipation in the perfectly discriminating contest ranges from 0 50 to 0 44 as the number of players increases from two to infinity thus even though the original analysis of overdissipation is flawed there are instances in which rent seekers spend more than the prize is worth

which countries avoid carbon intensive development abstract this paper explores the underlying development outcomes and cumulative emissions trajectories of 20 middle income countries from eastern europe latin america north africa and south asia first well being outcomes are assessed defined in terms of access to education democratic and legal rights and the infrastructures that support physical health second emissions trajectories are estimated to 2050 taking into account current trends in energy consumption and carbon intensity a likely start date for stringent climate policy arising from the paris agreement 2020 and maximum feasible rates of mitigation comparing these estimates to a per capita allocation from the global carbon budget associated with 2 c ten countries have low carbon development trends that will not exceed their allocation of these costa rica and uruguay are achieving very high well being outcomes while many more are delivering good outcomes in at least two domains of human need however most are seriously deficient in terms of social well being education democratic and legal rights these results call into question the socio economic convergence of developing countries with industrialised countries but they also reaffirm the low emissions cost of extending good infrastructure access and physical health outcomes to all demonstrated by the existence of multiple countries that continue to avoid carbon intensive development

consumer resistance and monopoly behavior under franchise contestability the probability of a deregulation under anti monopoly consumer lobby is generated at the cournot nash equilibrium of a lobbying game which depends on the monopoly rent and the deadweight loss this probability is increasing and convex in monopoly price when the deregulation probability constraint is binding the monopolist s price rises with the number of consumers the competitive price and the given ceiling probability the social cost of a monopoly under franchise contestability differs from the posner measure

measuring energy poverty focusing on what matters abstract the provision of modern energy services is recognised as a critical foundation for sustainable development and is central to the everyday lives of people effective policies to dramatically expand modern energy access need to be grounded in a robust information base metrics that can be used for comparative purposes and to track progress towards targets therefore represent an essential support tool this paper reviews the relevant literature and discusses the adequacy and applicability of existing instruments to measure energy poverty drawing on those insights it proposes a new composite index to measure energy poverty both the associated methodology and initial results for several african countries are discussed whereas most existing indicators and composite indices focus on assessing the access to energy or the degree of development related to energy our new index the multidimensional energy poverty index mepi focuses on the deprivation of access to modern energy services it captures both the incidence and intensity of energy poverty and provides a new tool to support policy making

rent seeking with multiple winners this paper examines the impact of the number of winners allowed by regulators on rentseeking expenditures it is demonstrated in a widely used model that an increase in the number of winners will decrease total rent seeking expenditures this result is generally obtained regardless of whether the firms are risk averse or risk lovers when regulators award coveted market franchises there will be smaller welfare losses if more winners are allowed

efficient rents 2 free entry and efficient rent seeking in the competition for a monopoly right in which the number of bidders is fixed tullock and others have found the value of the resources spent in the aggregate to capture the transfer to be sometimes less than and sometimes greater than the value of the monopoly we think this approach to be incomplete since it leaves unanswered the question of what determines the number of individuals who will vie for the right to be the monopolist it is unsatisfactory to imagine for example that the franchisor sets the number of contestants one could then foresee that rent seeking would arise to influence the permissible number of bidders and this merely moves the rent seeking dissipation question one step back