currency and credit in a private information economy in an environment with private information spatial separation and limited communication a currency like object and more standard named credits can be distinguished the credit objects can be used among agents in an enduring relationship that is among agents with known trading histories whereas the currency like object must be used among relative strangers in this environment collectively determined pareto optimal rules make the level of the currency like object and the mix of currency to named credits responsive to individual needs and to economywide states total indebtedness is determined by the number of lenders that is by preference or demand shocks and the mix of currency to credits is determined by transaction patterns among the agents

the distribution of money and prices in search equilibrium this article considers a search theoretic model of monetary exchange agents bargain over both the amount of money and the quantity of goods to be exchanged in bilateral meetings determining endogenously the distributions of money and of prices i show that money is neutral if changes in the money supply are accomplished via proportional transfers however within the class of lump sum transfers an increase of the rate of monetary expansion tends to decrease the dispersion of wealth and prices and to improve welfare when inflation is low but when inflation is high enough the opposite effects occur

towards a genuine exchange value of nature interactions between humans and nature in a principal agent framework abstract this paper discusses the potential for modeling nature and man in an exchange economy we will firstly be outlining the need for exchange values in addition to the usual human evaluation of nature secondly we will be reviewing some basic exchange economy ideas arguing that these ideas can be adopted to a mutually beneficial exchange between humans and nature thirdly in a formal model we will show how the assumption that a civic society can be adapted to a principal agent approach whereby humans are the principal and nature is the agent issues such as property rights an objective concerning nature and services to be exchanged will be introduced this will include the derivation of a behavioral equation for nature as anticipated by humans fourthly a principal agent framework delivers a mutually beneficial exchange such as land for labor and given property rights derived genuine exchange values are interpreted as relative prices reflecting human and natural objectives fifthly the aforementioned problem will be extended to a world with undefined property rights and hints will be given to how this world can be modeled potential applications conflicting questions such as human welfare versus fitness of nature and the distribution of rights will be discussed

microfoundations of macroeconomic fluctuations and the laws of probability theory the principle of large numbers versus rational expectations arbitrage abstract the principle of large numbers shows that the relative deviation for a macro system with n independent elements is of the order of 1 n lucas approach to a microfoundations for macroeconomic fluctuations is thus not capable of explaining the magnitude of observed macroeconomic fluctuations arbitrage activity would largely eliminate correlations created by rational expectations among economic agents when they face counter movements in relative prices the complex nature of many body problems and the statistical feature of aggregate indexes cannot be ignored in a micro macro modeling intermediate structures such as financial markets and industrial organizations are more important than households and firms in generating business cycles

international trade and environmental quality a survey abstract international trade has been incorporating various aspects of environmental issues since 1970 the extent to which environmental problems might affect many facets of trade or vice versa has been the subject of considerable debate over these years in this article we have attempted to establish some of the links between international trade and environmental quality by performing a comprehensive literature review we discuss issues such as establishing direct and indirect effects of international trade on environmental quality effects of trade on economic development environmental quality and energy and their relation with each other and finally the role of governments and international organizations in this context studies have so far revealed some linkages between trade and environment through conventional trade theory however interactions between international trade and types of pollution their sink and assimilative capacity need to be analyzed using a general equilibrium approach currently very little knowledge and agreement on the nature of interactions between trade theories development process and environmental quality exist existing studies have shown that the structure of environmental regulations should be modified to reflect the existence of trade under imperfect competition therefore further research on the interaction between new trade theory and environmental regulation is needed also theoretical and quantitative analysis regarding the effects of environmental regulations on competitiveness and location decision is needed the intensity and type of environmental measures vary across issues and countries therefore harmonizing environmental measures creates an inefficient atmosphere and to assume that trade restrictions will either improve or reverse the environmental damages is a serious mistake given the dynamic and intricate nature of the problem trade and environment debate continues despite vast research and poses a challenge for researchers and policy makers in the foreseeable future

applying contingent valuation in china to measure the total economic value of restoring ecosystem services in ejina region abstract this paper reports an attempt to apply the contingent valuation method cvm in rural china the cvm was used to obtain estimates of willingness to pay for restoring ejina ecosystem services in our survey we used a payment card format and a 12 page survey booklet with maps depicting the reasons why ejina ecosystem deteriorated the means by which ecosystem services could be restored from their current level we used an in person interview along with the survey booklet we employed a parametric model to estimate the benefits of restoring ejina ecosystem results from 700 in person interviews indicate that households would pay an average of 19 37 rmb per year with 20 78 per household for the main river area and 16 41 per household for the rest of hei basin the aggregate benefit to residents of the hei basin is 8 84 million annually for 20 years taking into account an environmental discount rate calculated by using respondent s equivalent utility between periodical payments and lump sum payments the present value of aggregate benefit of restoring ejina ecosystem is 55 33 million these results suggest that the general public in hei valley would be willing to pay to restore the ejina ecosystem although this amount is substantially less than the estimated costs of restoration

from drafts to checks the evolution of correspondent banking networks and the formation of the modern u s payments system 1850 1914 checks remained local payments instruments throughout virtually the entire nineteenth century their significant use in interregional transactions dates only to the 1890s we explain their lagged spatial diffusion by the evolution of centralized payments institutions to coordinate transactions among myriad banks not real technological changes to annihilate distance the pivotal institutions were large correspondent banks especially in new york after the civil war new york funds constituted a national settlement medium and the concentration of bankers balances in new york yielded liquidity and other externalities smoothing the flow of check payments

payment economics studying the mechanics of exchange abstract the five papers that follow this essay were presented at the federal reserve bank of richmond s conference on payment economics held october 23 24 2000 in williamsburg virginia the conference was motivated by the convergence of lines of research in monetary and banking theory that are focused on the institutional arrangements that facilitate exchange at the same time central bank policymakers concerned about the efficiency implications of their involvement in and regulation of clearing and settlement arrangements increasingly seek an economic understanding of these activities it appears that a distinct and coherent field of inquiry is emerging focused on the mechanics of exchange this field which we call payment economics studies both the instruments agents use to make payments and the central role of bank intermediation in facilitating the use of private liabilities in exchange

inside and outside money as alternative media of exchange we study a random matching model of money in which a subset of people called bankers have known histories and the rest called nonbankers have unknown histories earlier we showed that if there are no outside assets then an optimal arrangement has bankers issuing objects banknotes that are used in trades involving nonbankers here the same model is used to compare such exclusive use of inside money to the exclusive use of outside money we show that the set of implementable outcomes using outside money is a strict subset of the set using inside money

a divisible search model of fiat money this paper extends the kiyotaki wright search model of fiat money to allow for divisible money and goods the extension allows me to examine the standard issues in monetary economics such as the neutrality and superneutrality of money by severing the artificial link in the kiyotaki wright model between the money supply and the number of money holders it is shown that money is neutral but not superneutral money growth generates a trading opportunity effect it changes the fraction of different agents in the economy and hence changes the probability with which agents have a successful match in addition money growth has a negative effect on the real money balance that is familiar in walrasian monetary models the balance of the two effects can imply a positive optimal money growth rate

liquidity redistribution and the welfare cost of inflation abstract the long run welfare costs of inflation are studied in a micro founded model with trading frictions and costly liquidity management by modelling the liquidity management decision the model endogenizes the responses of velocity output the degree of market segmentation and the distribution of money compared to the traditional estimates based on a representative agent model the welfare costs of inflation are significantly smaller due to distributional effects of inflation the welfare cost of increasing inflation from 0 to 10 is 0 62 of consumption for the us economy furthermore the welfare cost is generally non linear in the inflation rate

free trade and the environment development system abstract we develop a simulation model to analyze the trade environment development system that contains a number of important advances over the earlier and current theoretical models our model like other models has an income induced pollution policy allows country factor endowments to influence trade patterns and allows production factors to be mobile intersectorally unlike other theoretical models our model treats pollution stemming from both production and consumption in a way that does justice to empirical observations we model pollution policy explicitly as an abatement investment thus effectively allowing for differences in pollution intensive technology across countries in addition we allow for an internationally traded intermediate good a natural resource as a result of this novel approach we find that 1 the benefits of trade i can be either positive or negative and ii depend on country endowments and 2 the pollution effects of trade are closely tied to the benefits of trade our model generally shows higher pollution levels under free trade than autarky however our results do not support the pollution haven hypothesis i e trade causes less pollution in developed countries and more pollution in developing ones some developing countries produce more of the pollution intensive good but ultimately consume less pollution under autarky because they have higher per capita income and thus invest more heavily in environmental upgrading under autarky

the failure of the profit motive e f schumacher used the phrase the failure of the modern experiment by modern experiment he meant two interrelated things in its 300 year or so duration modernity occupies an eye blink of time in the vast span of millennia of human history secondly it is an experiment because this is the first time in this vast history that a society attempted to live without motives and principles that were higher than the material or economic that is without some form of the transcendental schumacher proposed that this experiment is a failure because in its brief history modern society is well on its way to destroying both the natural and the social world the absence of higher motives or principles means that another organizing and motivational principle takes its place and that this principle becomes the core characteristic of modern society the thesis is advanced here that this principle is the profit motive both as a personal psychology and as an economic institution in other words the absence of the transcendental means the presence of the profit motive and the failure of modern society means the failure of the profit motive since the profit motive means the continuous expansion of economic wealth a society based on the profit motive must by necessity be a society committed to perpetual economic growth modern society then present us with a yield equation of terms self interest profit motive growth many writers advocating sustainability still endorse this equation and expect the profit motive with proper manipulation to yield a sustainable society they do not recognize that traditional economic motivation must be replaced by something else if this new sustainable economic world is to come into being this article makes the claim that the replacement of the profit motive does not require a change in human nature but a restoration of human nature in this restoration the profit motive will be replaced by a concern for the common good which can be seen as a practical implementation of the transcendental as an illustration of how this can be brought about it is shown that the motivational principle of the common good can be instituted through two policies a maximum wage that is a ratio of the minimum wage and the statutory transformation of all companies into non profit then we have common good non profit sustainability

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

the welfare cost of inflation in canada and the united states abstract this paper follows lucas econometrica 68 2000 247 and estimates the welfare cost of inflation in the post world war ii canadian and u s economies we use recent advances in the field of applied econometrics to estimate the interest elasticity of money demand and report significantly smaller welfare costs estimates than lucas econometrica 68 2000 247

indivisible labor lotteries and equilibrium abstract this paper considers an economy where labor is indivisible and agents are identical although the discontinuity in labor supply at the individual level disappears as a result of aggregation it is shown that indivisible labor has strong consequences for the aggregate bahavior of the economy it is also shown that optimal allocations involve lotteries over employment and consumption

the market for tradable renewable energy credits abstract as states seek to foster the development of renewable energy resources some have introduced renewable portfolio standards rpss which require retailers of electricity to derive a specified amount of their energy supply from renewable energy resources rpss in texas arizona wisconsin and nevada allow for or require the use of tradable renewable energy credits the price of such credits is expected to reflect the cost premium for generating electricity from renewable resources relative to the market price of conventionally generated electricity using the market to trade renewable energy credits exposes buyers and sellers to risks of imperfect information poor performance and opportunism these risks can be managed through contractual arrangements and regulatory requirements pertaining to property rights in credits pricing term of the contract and assurance of performance

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

economic organization with limited communication this paper presents formal stylized representations of communication accounting systems oral assignment portable object written message and telecommunication systems are considered the environments that allow this formalization are characterized by spatial separation private information and a need to keep track of past actions transfers and shocks in environments that have spatial separation and private information beneficial multilateral arrangements can depend critically on agents ability to communicate to one another values of contemporary shocks and to keep track of histories of past transfers or past announced shocks this paper formalizes this idea and focuses on com

search limited participation and monetary policy a model is developed that employs recent developments in the literature on search models of money to capture the distributional effects of monetary policy in a tractable way deterministic and stochastic versions of the model are studied money is not neutral and these nonneutralities persist whether or not the change in the money supply is anticipated or unanticipated at the optimum monetary policy is geared to correcting distortions in the search sector of the economy while correcting for the persistent effects of past monetary policy actions there is no consensus among macroeconomists concerning the role of monetary policy in the short run however an influential idea is that limited participation in financial markets is an important mechanism behind the short run macroeconomic effects of central bank actions that is there is a component of economic activity that is centralized and interconnected this economic activity involves financial transactions among banks and other financial intermediaries and the agents who hold the assets and liabilities of these financial intermediaries when the central bank injects outside money into the economy or withdraws it the economic agents who are immediately affected by the monetary injection or withdrawal are the participants in these centralized transactions other economic agents who are engaged in more decentralized and less interconnected transactions will not be affected directly by the first round effects of central bank actions thus there will be a distributional effect of monetary injections and withdrawals as first captured in heterogeneous agent models by grossman and weiss 1983 and rotemberg 1984 this distributional effect will matter in interesting ways for the price level nominal interest rates aggregate output foreign exchange rates and the distribution of consumption across the population the grossman weiss and rotemberg models are not analytically tractable because of the difficulty in tracking the distribution of wealth over time however lucas 1990 fuerst 1992 and alvarez and atkeson 1997 among others

weak sustainability and viable technologies abstract the context of the concept of weak sustainability is examined using a three tier hierarchy of value we argue that weak sustainability is relevant only in the context of market exchange at a particular point in time it offers an inadequate guide to the sustainability of social institutions and of the natural world on the other hand georgescu roegen s concept of a viable technology recognizes that the integrity of the social and environmental systems surrounding market activity must be maintained if the human species is to persist through time the concept of viability recognizes that market activity depends not only upon the sustaining functions of the environment but also upon the social sustaining functions of human institutions

economic diversity development capacity and sustainable development of china abstract china s economic growth over the past several decades has been among the highest in the world it has been fueled by cheap fossil fuel energy so energy consumption has risen rapidly but there are signs that negative feedbacks in the form of waste and inefficiency may affect future development if energy throughput exceeds the capacity of the environment to process the inevitable waste from production then the development may not be sustainable we calculate economic diversity using an energy flow network analysis method to explore the relationships of development policy energy use efficiency and sustainable development china and its provinces are presented as a case study and the development status of each province in china is presented china s development policy does not appear to be sustainable over the period 1985 1998 because of unsustainable energy consumption trends and declining economic diversity an energy consumption tax is proposed for increasing diversity and dealing with increasing energy consumption in china

demand side policies for environmental protection and sustainable usage of renewable resources abstract since many renewable resource systems such as tropical and temperate forests coral reefs and wild fisheries are often exploited at unsustainable rates studies aimed at reducing these trends have focused on the market failures associated with over exploitation within this framework the literature devised what we term supply side policies to correct these market failures here we introduce demand side policies into the mix of renewable resource and environmental management policies these policies are designed to increase the demand for goods produced in a sustainable fashion by 1 promoting the long term conservation of natural capital assets 2 promoting the attainment of economic efficiency and 3 providing greater political acceptability relative to supply side policies

market based conservation and local benefits the case of argan oil in morocco abstract market based approaches to biodiversity conservation gained popularity in the 1990s the success of these strategies hinges on first the successful creation or expansion of target markets and second the beneficial involvement of local stakeholders in these markets so that improved incentives induce conservation this paper evaluates these two key elements in the case of argan oil commercialization in southwestern morocco the principal finding is that even when locals appear well positioned to reap ex post benefits one can reject the hypothesis that successful resource commercialization necessarily stimulates local development and reduces poverty most locals participate only superficially in the new and expanded markets for argan oil and the benefits that do trickle down to local households appear to be regressively distributed both regionally and between households the key lies in understanding how opening or expanding markets may induce endogenous product differentiation that easily excludes locals especially the poor and how ex ante market access a variable commonly correlated with wealth conditions households capacity to participate in market induced producer windfalls

payment system settlement and bank incentives in this article we consider the relative merits of net versus gross settlement of interbank payments net settlement economizes on the costs of holding non interest bearing reserves but increases moral hazard problems the put option value of default under net settlement can also distort banks investment incentives absent these distortions net settlement dominates gross although the optimal net settlement scheme may involve a positive probability of default article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

uncertainty inflation and welfare this paper studies the welfare costs and the redistributive effects of inflation in the presence of idiosyncratic liquidity risk in a microfounded search theoretical monetary model we calibrate the model to match the empirical aggregate money demand and the distribution of money holdings across households and study the effects of inflation under the implied degree of market incompleteness we show that in the presence of imperfect insurance the estimated long run welfare costs of inflation are on average 40 to 55 smaller compared to a complete markets representative agent economy and that inflation induces important redistributive effects across households

the welfare cost of inflation under imperfect insurance abstract this paper examines the welfare cost of inflation in an economy where agents hold money in order to smooth consumption in the face of income variability for which there is no insurance the findings indicate that for the type of economies considered here the area under the empirical money demand curve is a poor measure of the welfare cost of inflation this area accounts for only one fourth of the true costs in the case of 5 inflation

when green isn t mean economic theory and the heuristics of the impact of environmental regulations on competitiveness and opportunity cost abstract the conventional neoclassical economic wisdom argues that the opportunity costs of environmental regulations are high with negative implications for costs and profits and by implication for growth and per capita gross domestic product gdp the minority view that environmental controls induce cost offsets that minimise such opportunity costs is marginalised by the conventional wisdom which assumes that economic agents are x efficient in production a behavioral model of the firm is presented in this paper whereby x inefficiency in production prevails even in a world of perfect product market competition that is dominated by rational economic agents in this model environmental regulations affect both the level of x efficiency and the extent of technological change and greener firms can be cost competitive and profitable however private economic agents cannot be expected to adopt green economic policy independent of regulations since in this model there need not be any economic advantage accruing to the affected firms in becoming greener

graduate education in ecological economics abstract interest in graduate education in ecological economics is increasing however no formal plan of study for a phd in ecological economics has been disseminated the lack of a formal plan is problematic as the field of ecological economics matures interest grows and new programs are being developed this paper attempts to fill a void by creating a program of study addressing the proficiencies a graduate student in ecological economics should have upon completion of his her phd based on the us educational system the plan of study presented in this paper has been developed to make the graduate of an ecological economics program as competitive on the labor market as students awarded traditional economics degrees the plan i describe is created to meet the requirements necessary for a phd in ecological economics further fields of specialization are suggested to complement the core of an ecological economics program to enhance the education process and to give the student with an ecological economics degree a higher level of marketability

reformulating the foundations of consumer choice theory and environmental valuation abstract the burgeoning field of environmental valuation has raised serious doubts about the fundamental axioms of consumer choice theory the general validity of the walrasian system and methodological individualism this paper examines these aspects of consumer choice theory paying particular attention to the pioneering contributions of georgescu roegen we argue that evidence from psychology game theory anthropology and contingent valuation surveys reveals a more complex pattern of decision making than that described by neoclassical utility theory we discuss the notions of the invariance of preferences non satiation the principle of complementarity lexicographic preferences and the hierarchy of wants with reference to environmental valuation we also discuss the notion of marginal utility of money the validity of the walrasian system and methodological individualism using scaling concept in hierarchy theory we then address the conflict between theory and reality by introducing a probabilistic binary choice scheme under uncertainty about environmental attributes we argue that these extensions are necessary to account for consumer choices revealed in environmental valuation surveys we conclude with the hope that a reformulation of consumer choice theory based on realistic models of human behavior can be the basis for a viable alternative to neoclassical welfare economics

pollution regulation and abatement efforts evidence from china abstract this paper empirically tests pollution abatement efforts of chinese industries in response to pollution regulations especially the pollution charge instrument practiced in china for about 20 years the impacts of pollution regulation on abatement expenditures are examined for one thousand large and medium chinese industrial polluters the results show that plant level expenditures on end of pipe wastewater treatment are strongly responsive to the pollution charges the estimated elasticities of operation cost and new investment with respect to pollution price are 65 and 27 respectively other command and control regulatory approaches however are not found to have systematic and significant impacts on abatement expenditures

incomplete record keeping and optimal payment arrangements abstract we study a random matching absence of double coincidence environment in which people cannot precommit and in which there are two imperfect ways to keep track of what other people have done in the past money and a public record of all past actions that is updated with an average lag we study how the magnitude of that lag affects the allocations that are optimal from among allocations that are stationary and feasible and that satisfy incentive constraints which arise from the absence of commitment and the imperfect ways of keeping track of what others have done in the past journal of economic literature classification numbers e40 c73 d82

perseverance of perverse subsidies and their impact on trade and the environment theoretical and empirical aspects of policy failures due to subsidies are discussed in the context of international trade a general classification of subsidies that cause environmental externalities is presented the economic and environmental impacts of producer subsidies on international trade are examined with partial equilibrium analysis the magnitude and economic and environmental relevance of subsidies in various sectors is assessed on the basis of empirical indicators finally suggestions are provided on how subsidy related policy failures can be eliminated at national and international levels 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

sustainable growth criteria minimum benchmarks and scenarios for employment and the environment abstract the relationship of economic growth and environmental impact has spurred fierce debates between growth optimists referring to the phenomenon of the environmental kuznets curve and pessimists referring to the limits to growth however no operational set of simple criteria has been developed so far to assess the sustainability of a given growth pattern this is all the more true for measures combining environmental and social criteria the paper undertakes to sketch out such criteria and to assess them by applying them to transdiciplinary sustainability scenarios and model simulations with panta rhei one of the most complex models of the german economy theoretical considerations as well as the empirical work with the model demonstrate that there are indeed trade offs between economic growth and environmental impacts and a positive correlation of growth and employment nonetheless it is still possible to develop carefully orchestrated strategies that combine economic competitiveness low unemployment rates and an easing of the pressure on the environment social and technical innovation reduced working time a modernised social security system green taxes and salary increases proportional to labour productivity growth are essential parts of any such strategy the triple effectiveness of such strategies regarding environmental social and economic sustainability is demonstrated by the model runs

development and government policies of the shrimp farming industry in thailand in relation to mangrove ecosystems abstract intensive shrimp farming arrived in thailand during the 1980s and developed virtually unregulated until 1987 subsidised by the government it quickly became an important export industry and thailand has been the world s largest producer of tiger shrimp since 1991 however the development of the shrimp farming industry in thailand over the last 20 years in relation to its use of mangrove ecosystems is an example of sequential exploitation of natural resources witnessed through the shift in farm development from one region to another this sequential exploitation has caused widespread degradation of mangrove ecosystems and the benefits of the industry may be less than perceived as a result of subsidies and environmental and social impacts this study follows the development of shrimp farming in thailand from the 1940s to 1997 and studies national legislation and associated government policy as examples of driving forces behind this development from our findings it appears that the development of legislation has not followed the same pace as the development of the industry neither temporally nor in content nor implementation and contradictory policies have arisen

incentives communication and payment instruments abstract alternative payment instruments are studied in an economy with private information delayed communication and limited commitment attention is restricted to checks and bank drafts which differ in resource cost and communication characteristics checks are less costly but settlement delays create a limited commitment constraint we find that drafts dominate at low wealths and checks at higher wealths applications to 19th century and modern payment systems are discussed

money is memory abstract this paper examines the sets of feasible allocations in a large class of economic environments in which commitment is impossible following myerson 8 the standard definition of feasibility is adapted to take account of the lack of commitment the environments feature either memory or money memory is defined as knowledge on the part of an agent of the full histories of all agents with whom he has had direct or indirect contact in the past money is defined as an object that does not enter utility or production functions and is available in fixed supply the main proposition is that any allocation that is feasible in an environment with money is also feasible in the same environment with memory depending on the environment the converse may or may not be true hence from a technological point of view money is equivalent to a primitive form of memory journal of economic literature classification numbers e40 c73 d82

labor supply and the double dividend abstract a series of recent articles have argued that environmental taxes and cap and trade permit systems generate large distortions in the labor market the claim is made that the higher prices for dirty goods induced by these incentive based systems generate a tax interaction effect leading to reductions in labor supply that are generally on net welfare reducing for this reason it is argued a double dividend seldom exists however price level increases both by lowering family income and by reducing cross spousal wage substitution effects will tend to have offsetting positive impacts on labor supply these effects are large enough to convert negative labor supply responses to rising prices into positive ones the empirical literature also supports a positive relationship between price level increases and labor supply these observations cast doubt on a central critical assumption underlying the critique of the double dividend in the tax interaction effect literature

inflation and welfare in the steady state this is a paper on expected inflation and welfare in steady state equilibrium the demand for money is an inventory demand with an endogenous payment period the clower constraint is not imposed higher inflation reduces welfare by reducing consumption as people devote more of their real income to maintaining lower average money holdings high inflation does not necessarily promote an increase in the capital stock the mundell tobin effect is absent the policy conclusion is standard deflate at the rate of time preference because capital is held socially optimal consumption falls short of its golden rule level if inside money is allowed it drives out fiat money and welfare is again at a maximum

the evolution of aquaculture in african rural and economic development abstract in africa aquaculture has developed only recently and so far has made only a small contribution to economic development and food security we review developments and identify constraints to the expansion of aquaculture in economic and rural development at the continental national and farm levels past development initiatives failed to achieve sustainable increases in production in contrast a growing number of smallholder farmers in many countries have been adopting and adapting pond aquaculture to their existing farming systems and slowly increasing their production efficiency an evolutionary approach that builds on a fusion of local and outside participation in technology development and transfer appears more likely to produce fish production systems that are more productive and more environmentally and socially sustainable in the long term

asset trading mechanisms and expansionary policy abstract previous authors have argued that the otimal monetary policy is contractionary if buyers value consumption substantially more than sellers there is some randomness and informational constraints make asset trading useful we show that there is an incentive compatible expansionary policy that dominates all incentive compatible contractionary policies