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

theoretical and empirical specifications issues in travel cost demand studies the ultimate objective of empirical travel cost demand studies is to obtain an estimate of the welfare derived from utilizing outdoor recreational resources thus it is apparent that travel cost demand equations must be linked to utility maximization deyak and smith freeman bockstael and mcconnell hanemann bockstael hanemann and strand we specify a model of utilitymaximizing recreation demand behavior which postulates that individuals choose the total number of days that they wish to spend at the recreation site this total number of recreation days is the product of the number of trips

testing the efficient redistribution hypothesis an application to japanese beef policy we discuss and model the structure of the political economy of japanese beef markets and we apply bullock s statistical test of the efficient redistribution hypothesis to our model to study the pareto efficiency of japanese beef policy in 1990 and 1991 we found that under the hypothesis that our modeled political economy adequately reflects the true japanese beef political economy we could not reject at the 5 significance level that japanese beef policy was inefficient in 1990 and in 1991 however we could reject inefficiency in 1991 at a 7 level of significance

functional form and welfare measures in truncated recreation demand models this article examines the effect on welfare measures of functional form choice and sample truncation a truncated general box cox model is developed for discriminating between alternative truncated functional forms the model is applied to the valuation of three texas coastal recreation sites neither the truncated double log nor the truncated semilog forms are appropriate for the truncated data used in the empirical analysis different functional forms yield different consumer s surplus estimates when samples are truncated

energy efficiency in the japanese transport sector abstract we examine energy efficiency in the japanese transportation sector since the 1970s comparisons with the united states and other developed economies illustrate that japan primarily stands out due to low activity levels and modal structure rather than modal energy intensity on road automobile energy intensity has shown little improvement albeit from a low base over the past four decades we also consider policy measures undertaken by the japanese government political arrangements in japan after world war ii made it attractive for politicians to pursue energy conservation by making transportation particularly by automobile expensive for the average japanese citizen the revenues raised from various fees and taxes on automobile transportation were redistributed to core supporters of the ruling liberal democratic party these political arrangements have come under fire in recent years calling into question japan s traditional approach towards transportation sector energy efficiency

welfare comparisons of u s dairy policies with and without mandatory supply control the existence of costly dairy surpluses has led some policy makers to argue in favor of mandatory supply controls as an alternative to existing dairy policy a dynamic econometric model is used to simulate the changes in equilibrium prices quantities producer and consumer welfare and government costs that would occur if mandatory controls were adopted the results show that while such a change in policy would eliminate the costs associated with current price supports the benefits accruing to producers would be achieved at the expense of consumers and processors

projection of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by motor vehicles in china policy options and impacts abstract we project the well to wheels wtw and tank to wheels ttw fossil energy use petroleum use and greenhouse gas ghg emissions of the road transport sector in china up to year 2050 and evaluate the effects of various potential policy options with the fuel economy and environmental impacts feei model http www feeimodel org the policies evaluated include 1 vehicle fuel consumption improvements 2 dieselization 3 vehicle electrification and 4 fuel diversification with plausible policy scenarios under the business as usual scenario road transport in china would create 410 520 million metric tons mmt of oil equivalent of ttw oil demand three to four times the current level 28 36 billion gj of wtw energy demand and 1900 2300 mmt of co 2 equivalent of wtw ghg emissions by 2050 the policies in the same order as above are projected to reduce the ttw oil demand by 35 10 29 and 44 and reduce wtw ghg emissions by 34 5 12 and 13 respectively by 2050 this evaluation reveals that the fuel consumption improvement policy could achieve greater benefit in reducing oil use fossil energy use and ghg emissions implications of each policy option are discussed and the uncertainties associated with the policy scenarios are analyzed

additive efficiency decomposition in two stage dea kao and hwang 2008 kao c hwang s n 2008 efficiency decomposition in two stage data envelopment analysis an application to non life insurance companies in taiwan european journal of operational research 185 1 418 429 develop a data envelopment analysis dea approach for measuring efficiency of decision processes which can be divided into two stages the first stage uses inputs to generate outputs which become the inputs to the second stage the first stage outputs are referred to as intermediate measures the second stage then uses these intermediate measures to produce outputs kao and huang represent the efficiency of the overall process as the product of the efficiencies of the two stages a major limitation of this model is its applicability to only constant returns to scale crs situations the current paper develops an additive efficiency decomposition approach wherein the overall efficiency is expressed as a weighted sum of the efficiencies of the individual stages this approach can be applied under both crs and variable returns to scale vrs assumptions the case of taiwanese non life insurance companies is revisited using this newly developed approach

estimating recreation demand using the properties of the implied consumer surplus consumer surplus estimates are random variables while they are generally recognized as stochastic little attention was given to their properties prior to bockstael and strand s 1987 evaluation of conventional practices for using recreation demand models in benefit measurement their paper as well as all the research it stimulated adopted a similar strategy namely to judge the methods for estimating demand or random utility models based on the properties of their respective consumer surplus estimates this paper proposes a different strategy to define estimators based on the properties of their implied consumer surplus estimates this type of argument is not new and usually is associated with the rationale offered for bayesian estimators 2 however the motivation for the estimator proposed here can be based on minimizing the mean squared error of the consumer surplus estimates moreover it can be constructed from the statistics usually reported with ordinary least squares ols estimates

measuring the social costs of suboptimal combinations of policy instruments a general framework and an example abstract since most agricultural programs employ two or more policy instruments simultaneously it is notable that little research has attempted to find optimal instrument combinations and no research exists which evaluates the social costs unrealized benefits of combining instruments suboptimally in our paper we report a simple and feasible method to find optimal policy instrument combinations and we provide the first general formal approach to measuring the social costs of suboptimal policy instrument combinations our approach is illustrated in an analysis for five major u s crops corn feed grains wheat rice cotton the simple model we employ for the illustration suggests that except for the feed grains program the observed programs combined policy instruments quite suboptimally we conclude that agricultural economics research now can and should begin placing increased emphasis on studying optimal policy instrument combinations

a test of the equality of closed ended and open ended contingent valuations a test is developed to find whether open ended and closed ended contingent valuation mechanisms lead to significantly different results the test is based on joint estimation of willingness to pay responses to open and closed ended questions asked of the same sample of individuals in a public good example individuals do respond differently depending on question format possible explanations include different incentives for strategic behavior and respondents lack of familiarity with the open ended question type no differences in willingness to pay were found in a private good example

estimating the precision of welfare measures abstract three methods for constructing standard deviation and or confidence intervals for welfare estimates have been employed in the recreation demand literature a taylor s series approximation the bootstrap and a method proposed by krinsky and robb this paper presents the results of two sets of simulation experiments designed to examine the accuracy of these methods the first simulation examines the methods accuracy in estimating the standard deviation of welfare estimates the second simulation examines the accuracy of the methods in constructing confidence intervals

the effects of eu corn cotton and sugar beet policies on greek producers a multimarket analysis this article examines the welfare effects of the european union s common agricultural policy cap corn cotton and sugar beet regimes practiced in greece after its 1981 entry into the european union since greek farmers produce corn cotton and sugar beets on the same land in different years we model these markets as horizontally linked by incorporating the demand for corn in our model we take into account that corn is used as feed in livestock production we use line integral theory to properly deal with the complications of welfare measurement in a multimarket setting we estimate producer welfare effects of greek corn cotton and sugar beet policy and use bootstrapping techniques to obtain confidence intervals for the welfare measurements our analysis indicates that the income transfers to greek farmers corn cotton and sugar beet growers as well as livestock producers considered as a total rose between 1981 and 1992 the 1992 cap reform led to a stabilization of income transfers to crop farmers and lessened the negative impact on livestock producers

endogenous price policies and international wheat prices vanzetti and kennedy s herein vk comment on our earlier paper sarris and freebairn gives us the opportunity first to clarify the differences in the models to present a generalization of the analysis that includes their results as well as ours as special cases and then to point out some salient features of our model that seem to have been unnoticed by them consider our model of a homogenous commodity produced consumed and traded by n countries which are characterized by the following linear demand and supply curves notation follows vk except that we maintain the additive random variables and hence keep the time subscript

a model of production with supply management for the canadian agricultural sector the production structure of the canadian agricultural sector is modeled by an output constrained multiproduct profit function to account for the existence of supply management policies the le chatelier effects of supply constraints are illustrated and the comparative statics of supply management is shown to depend under input normality on the type of jointness convexity is tested and accepted and nonjointness is rejected by the estimated normalized quadratic profit function the results support the hypothesis of nonjointness due to allocatable fixed factors decreasing the supply of managed commodities will increase the supply of unrestricted commodities while total input use is reduced

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

bootstrapping your fish or fishing for bootstraps precision of welfare loss estimates from a globally concave inverse demand model of commercial fish landings in the u s great lakes we extend holt and bishop s 2002 normalized quadratic inverse demand function by obtaining measures of precision of elasticities and consumer welfare loss estimates due to reductions in commercial landings in the u s great lakes even with curvature constraints imposed confidence intervals are obtained by using the bootstrap subsample bootstrap and subsample jackknife

an empirical investigation of the consistency of nested logit models with utility maximization global conditions under which nested logit models are consistent with utility maximization are provided by daly and zachary and by mcfadden recently borsch supan and herriges and kling have provided conditions under which a nested logit model is locally consistent however previous work has not discussed implementation of these conditions here three alternative approaches to checking and formally testing for the consistency conditions using classical statistics are investigated in addition a bayesian approach to interpreting and imposing the local consistency conditions is provided the application is based on anglers choices regarding sportfishing alternatives in southern california

crop failure price regulation and emergency imports of japan s rice sector in 1993 in 1993 an extraordinarily cool summer in japan brought about low rice yields which caused considerable disturbances to the rice markets japan imported a large amount of rice as an emergency measure two controversies about japan s rice policies were raised particularly in that period the first centred on the effectiveness of the price regulation policies in stabilizing rice prices and farmers incomes the second involved the newspapers arguments that the emergency imports harmed other countries especially developing countries these controversies were examined with a world trade computable general equilibrium model

the implications of model specification for welfare estimation in nested logit models nested logit models are increasingly being used to value environmental amenities the implications of nesting structure choice of estimator fiml or sequential and restrictions on parameters across nested groups on welfare estimates are examined these issues have received little previous attention model selection criteria that can be used to distinguish among the models are extended and applied additionally a simulation procedure is implemented to construct standard errors for the welfare measures

bootstrapping in applied welfare analysis bootstrapping procedures are used to estimate the statistical properties of common empirical welfare measures results from a monte carlo experiment indicate that welfare estimates such as marshallian consumer surplus often exhibit significant bias standard errors of welfare estimates are found to often exceed the magnitude of the point estimate for typical cross section data sets and are generally larger than the difference between comparable hicksian and marshallian measures precision of welfare estimates can be markedly enhanced through generating larger data sets obtaining better model fits and through imposition of innocuous inequality restrictions on the demand function parameters

does question format matter valuing an endangered species a three way treatment design is used to compare contingent valuation response formats respondents are asked to value an endangered species the red cockaded woodpecker and the restor ation of its habitat following a natural disaster for three question formats open ended payment card and double bounded dichotomous choice differences in survey response rates item non response rates and protest bids are examined bootstrap techniques are used to compare means across formats and to explore differences in willingness to pay wtp distribution functions convergent validity is found in a comparison of mean wtp values although some differences are apparent in the cumulat ive distribution functions differences across formats are also identified in item non response rates and proportion of protest bids overall the payment card format exhibits desirable properties relative to the other two formats

welfare estimation using the fourier form simulation evidence for the recreation demand case the paper considers the estimation of welfare measures when the functional form of demand is unknown an adaptation of an argument of gallant 1987 is used to show that welfare estimators based on a fourier functional form for demand will be consistent under weak assumptions simulation evidence is presented for equivalent variation true demand is a generalized box cox function estimated demand is a fourier form and equivalent variation is estimated by applying vartia s 1983 algorithm to the estimated demand function the estimator of equivalent variation has small asymptotic bias in the case of the assumed family of data generating processes

total factor energy efficiency of regions in china abstract this paper analyzes energy efficiencies of 29 administrative regions in china for the period 1995 2002 with a newly introduced index most existing studies of regional productivity and efficiency neglect energy inputs we use the data envelopment analysis dea to find the target energy input of each region in china at each particular year the index of total factor energy efficiency tfee then divides the target energy input by the actual energy input in our dea model labor capital stock energy consumption and total sown area of farm crops used as a proxy of biomass energy are the four inputs and real gdp is the single output the conventional energy productivity ratio regarded as a partial factor energy efficiency index is computed for comparison in contrast to tfee our index is found fitting better to the real case according to the tfee index rankings the central area of china has the worst energy efficiency and its total adjustmentof energy consumption amount is over half of china s total regional tfee in china generally improved during the research period except for the western area a u shape relation between the area s tfee and per capita income in the areas of china is found confirming the scenario that energy efficiency eventually improves with economic growth

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

equilibrium selection in sequential games with imperfect information abstract games with imperfect information often feature multiple equilibria which depend on beliefs off the equilibrium path standard selection criteria such as passive symmetric or wary beliefs rest on ad hoc restrictions on beliefs we propose a new selection criterion that imposes no restrictions on beliefs we select the action profile that is supported in equilibrium by the largest set of beliefs we conduct an experiment to compare the predictive power of the existing and our novel selection criteria in an application on vertical multi lateral contracting we find that our criterion outperforms the other selection criteria

payoff levels loss avoidance and equilibrium selection in games with multiple equilibria an experimental study i introduction game theoretic solution concepts carry the implication that a change in payoff levels a modification to a game by adding the same positive or negative constant to all payoffs should have no effect on behavior such changes do not affect expected payoff differences between strategies under any given beliefs about opponents actions so that best response correspondences and therefore nash equilibria pure or mixed are unaffected when the game has multiple nash equilibria game theory does not rule out the possibility that payoff level changes will lead to a change in which equilibrium is played but it does not predict when such sensitivity will be present or how it will be manifested when the game has a unique equilibrium game theory specifically predicts that changing payoff levels can have no effect so game theory is at least silent as to whether changes in payoff levels can affect players choices and at most explicitly rules out such an effect this implication relies however on the game s payoffs reflecting the true preferences of the players that is the equivalence between payoffs and expected utilities when payoffs are monetary gains or losses as in economics experiments with human subjects this equivalence cannot be taken for granted and the robustness of behavior to changes in payoff levels becomes an empirical question indeed there is evidence dating back at least to kahneman and tversky 1979 suggesting that payoff level changes can affect behavior 1 while their prospect theory was not developed specifically with payoff level effects in mind it can in some cases yield specific predictions for how they ought to affect behavior more recently cachon and camerer 1996 found that decisions in a coordination game experiment could be sensitive to changes in payoff levels when these changes affected the signs of payoffs positive payoffs became negative or vice versa they noted that their results could be explained by loss avoidance which they defined to be a tendency to avoid choices that with certainty yield negative payoffs in favor of alternatives that could yield positive payoffs 2 on the basis of this finding they conjectured that loss avoidance could be used as a criterion for equilibrium selection cachon and camerer s notion of loss avoidance is one of several ways that individuals could treat losses and gains differently in this paper we distinguish between their notion which we call certain loss avoidance and another type which we call possible loss avoidance and define as a tendency to avoid strategies that give a possible negative payoff in favor of one that gives a certain positive payoff we will sometimes use the term loss avoidance to encompass both certain and possible loss avoidance 3 the goal of this paper is to test for loss avoidance in strategic behavior in cases where payoffs are expected money payments to do so we design and conduct an experiment using a stage game well suited for such a test stag hunt a symmetric two player game with one risky action and one safe action and with multiple nash equilibria figure 1 shows three versions of stag hunt with the risky and safe actions labeled r and s these games differ only in payoff level so they are equivalent from a game theoretic standpoint as long as the payoffs represent the players preferences for example they have the same three nash equilibria the pure strategy equilibria r r and s s and a mixed strategy equilibrium in which both players choose r with probability 2 3 when these payoffs represent monetary gains and losses then despite this seeming equivalence our notions of loss avoidance make qualitative predictions regarding how individuals choices might change across the games in the high payoff game shh all payoffs are gains so neither type of loss avoidance will have an effect on behavior

restricting the market for quota an analysis of tobacco production rights with corroboration from congressional testimony regulatory programs that restrict output levels often impose restrictions on the transfer of rights to produce or to use particular inputs in this paper we use a unique cross section time series data set from north carolina to quantify the welfare effects of transfer restrictions for poundage quota under the u s flue cured tobacco program we find that the deadweight costs of such restrictions are small but that the distributional effects are substantial we analyze congressional testimony on quota transfer legislation and conclude that our estimates of the distributional effects are consistent with expressed views of market participants

the effects of trade liberalisation abstract the liberalisation of agricultural trade has been an important component of the uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations under the gatt a considerable amount of research effort has been expended on estimating the costs of agricultural protectionism most of this activity has been based on a partial equilibrium framework with conventional quantification of the distributive benefits and costs to be expected from liberalisation attempts at general equilibrium analysis have been fewer but provide evidence of the economy wide gains from the removal of protection whilst these analyses have had a powerful influence on the nature of the political discussions on agricultural trade policy they have not helped define the details of politically acceptable alternatives to current agricultural supports the reasons are the technical economic data and statistical problems which restrict the interpretation of results to broad generalisations and the failure of analyses to focus on the most important political concerns indicating these concerns may help define the focus of future research but it is doubted if conventional economic analysis has very much more to offer

the economic effects of supply controls the simple analytics of the u s peanut program a gricultural commodity programs employ a wide variety of policy tools to regulate u s agriculture price supports are the most common form of intervention but rights to sell at the supported price are allocated very differently under different commodity programs under recent feed grain programs for example the right to sell at the supported price is linked to acreage set asides agreements not to produce on certain acres in other programs sales by individual farmers are controlled under marketing orders sponsored by the u s department of agriculture usda 2 a third method is through permanent maketing quotas that directly limit output only two major commodity programs those for tobacco and peanuts currently allocate the right to sell in this way the peanut program is the subject of this article 3

welfare losses due to market power hicksian versus marshallian measurement this paper warns against the use of marshallian welfare loss in applied analysis of market power we show how to compute the hicksian deadweight loss from an ordinary demand then from an experiment using real data on twenty one sectors of the french food industry we find that the marshallian deadweight loss poorly approximates the exact hicksian measure hence it is advisable to use the latter in applied welfare analysis copyright 2001 oxford university press

the distributional effect of the rice policy in japan 1986 2010 abstract this study aims to evaluate the distributional effect of the governmental rice policy in japan on producers consumers and government expenditures from 1986 to 2010 using a partial equilibrium model policy measures include government purchase of rice output payment and acreage control the simulation result shows that acreage control has been the principal policy measure for transferring income to producers especially since the enforcement of the wto agreement on agriculture acreage control is the policy measure with the lowest total efficiency and highest budgetary efficiency this result implies that the government s goal of transferring income to producers with minimum government cost has been achieved through a combination of policy measures

determining market power exertion between buyers and sellers empirical techniques commonly used in industrial organization to measure market power exertion typically assume imperfectly competitive behaviour by firms on only one side of the market firms on the other side are assumed to be perfectly competitive in this paper we extend traditional neio methods by developing a method to estimate market power exertion when firms on both sides have potential market power using monte carlo simulations we find that the model correctly estimates market power exercised by firms on either or both sides of a market and also correctly estimates firms technology parameters when applied to the us leaf tobacco market findings indicate that cigarette manufacturers exert some monopsony power in purchasing leaf tobacco while producers organized as a cartel exhibit no countervailing monopoly market power copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

judging agricultural policies a survey this survey provides a structured picture of 40 years of literature which uses welfare economic tools to judge agricultural policy challenges and developments of normative agricultural policy analysis are discussed in an easily accessible graphical framework it is shown how the literature has gone from examining a very small discrete set of simple policies to a much broader often continuous set of policies that combine policy instruments simultaneously the importance of the pareto criterion used to explore the limits of how government can affect welfare is revealed moreover given the importance of the objective of income redistribution in agricultural policy agricultural economists have often departed from the purely efficiency oriented tradition in economics it is shown that they have tried to incorporate equity considerations by either adding these criteria as constraints to the social welfare function or directly incorporating these criteria in the functional form of the social welfare function

efficient redistribution through commodity markets efficiency in redistribution is measured in terms of deadweight loss generated per dollar of economic surplus transferred between consumers and producers of a commodity by means of market intervention the implications of supply and demand elasticities for efficiency in redistribution are examined with special attention to the comparison of production control and deficiency payment programs the results may be used to aid in the evaluation of commodity programs and as a basis for consideration of the hypothesis that observed policies are efficient given the political power of interest groups

goals and consequences of rice policy in japan 1965 80 the change in welfare of producers and consumers government cost and the deadweight loss arising from the various forms of government interventions into the rice market in order to protect domestic producers in japan are estimated in a partial equilibrium framework results of the quantitative analysis indicate that the motivation of the government was to minimize budget costs in achieving the target level of producer price support while consumer welfare had an insignificant weight in the government s objective function it is aiso found that acreage control is a second best policy to reduce social inefficiency produced from other forms of market distortions

consumer s surplus without apology the purpose of this paper is to settle the controversy surrounding consumer s surplus and by so doing to validate its use as a tool of welfare economics i will show that observed consumer s surplus can be rigorously utilized to estimate the unobservable compensating and equivalent variations the correct theoretical measures of the welfare impact of changes in prices and income on an individual i derive precise upper and lower bounds on the percentage errors of approximating the compensating and equivalent variations with consumer s surplus these bounds can be explicitly calculated from observable demand data and it is clear that in most applications the error of approximation will be very small in fact the error will often be overshadowed by the errors involved in estimating the demand curve the results in no way depend upon arguments about the constancy of the marginal utility of income consequently this paper supplies specific empirical criteria which can replace the apologetic caveats frequently employed by those who presently apply consumer s surplus moreover the results imply that consumer s surplus is usually a very good approximation to the appropriate welfare measures to preview below i establish the validity of these rules of thumb for a

is the lithuanian economy approaching the goals of sustainable energy and climate change mitigation evidence from dea based environmental performance index abstract even though lithuania has seen extensive social and political transformations there is still a gap in the literature on environmental performance of lithuanian economy specifically the environmental pressures stemming from economic activities have never been analysed in lines with the principles of production economics this paper therefore aims to estimate the environmental performance index epi for lithuanian economic sectors the paper presents the underlying trends in greenhouse gas emissions in lithuania the environmental performance index is estimated by employing the data envelopment analysis in the spirit of the hicks moorsteen indices the present analysis is based on the data from the world input output database specifically the environmental technology is defined in terms of the value added carbon and nitrous oxide emissions labour capital and energy results of the analysis imply that the analysed economic sectors can be grouped into the four clusters with respect to the mean epi and its rate of growth pulp paper and agricultural sectors fall into the best performing group featuring the highest mean epi and the highest growth rate petroleum production and air transport sectors are those featuring the lowest environmental performance therefore the latter sectors should be given an especial importance when developing strategies for increase in sustainability

an axiomatic theory of a risk dominance measure for bipolar games with linear incentives bipolar games are normal form games with two pure strategies for each player and with two strict equilibrium points without common equilibrium strategies a normal form game has linear incentives if for each player the difference between the payoffs for any two pure strategies depends linearly on the probabilities in the mixed strategies used by the other players a measure of risk dominance between two strict equilibrium points of a bipolar game with linear incentives is characterized by 11 axioms journal of economic literature classification number c72

some results on the variance of welfare estimates from recreation demand models this paper examines three points concerning the variances of consumer welfare measures 1 the size of variance estimates depend on the assumed source of error 2 the precision of welfare estimates as measured by the coefficient of variation generally falls with an increase in the size of the welfare change and 3 the difference between marshallian and hicksian welfare measures also depends on the assumed source of error and may be small relative to the standard error these results are demonstrated analytically using the linear or semilog demand function a simple simulation experiment illustrates the possible magnitude of these points

explaining differences in milk quota values the role of economic efficiency this paper explores the relationship between milk quota values and economic efficiency in order to analyze current government interventions in quota allocations among producers for this purpose we estimate a short run variable cost function using a panel of spanish dairy farms quota values are then decomposed into economic efficiency price and scale effects in order to assess the relative influence of these factors on quota values we find that efficiency is important in explaining quota values but is uncorrelated with observable farm characteristics this casts doubts on the government s ability to allocate quotas to efficient farms in the way a well functioning quota market does

the effect of common sources of regression error on benefit estimates discussions of the sources of error in recreation demand analysis are common in the existing literature the most traditional line of thought e g gum and martin considers the error component in predicting the individual s recreation behavior to arise from unmeasured socioeconomic factors others e g hanemann attribute at least some of this error to fundamental randomness in human behavior applied statisticians e g hiett and worrall on the other hand suggest that recall of annual number of recreational trips i e the quantity demanded is subject to substantial error still others e g brown et al have argued that recall of explanatory variables such as travel expenses contains error despite the discussion of potential error sources there is no work which relates the sources of error in the demand relationship with benefit measurement 1 of practical importance in recreational demand estimation is whether error assumptions have an influence on welfare measures since it is for public policy decision purposes that recreational demand estimation is usually undertaken will the estimated consumer surplus derived from demand analysis be independent of the assumed source of the error in the regression the purpose of this paper is to explore how the assumptions about sources of error influence estimates of recreation benefits a discussion of the various sources of error in de

valuing resource access with seminonparametric techniques an application to clear lake the focus of this investigation is three fold first seminonparametric techniques are considered in order to avoid the pitfall of imparting bias on value estimates second the efficacy of seminonparametric techniques are explored in an empirical setting by valuing recreational access at clear lake iowa finally a technique from eastwood and gallant 1991 is adapted and applied to the count data model

further results on willingness to pay for nonmarket goods abstract some implications of substitution relationships between private and public goods for measuring the value of changes in nonmarket goods such as environmental quality are explored if a market good is hicks neutral to quality for some price vector the total value of discrete changes in quality consisting of both use and nonuse value can be measured from empirical demand coefficients a plausible motivation for neutrality is developed in the contexts of specifying incomplete demand systems for weak complements to quality and measuring nonuse value when the consumption of weak complements is held at zero previous results on bounding marginal willingness to pay for nonmarket goods are also strengthened

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

a variable returns to scale data envelopment analysis model for the joint determination of efficiencies with an example of the uk health service a multi activity dea model for the joint determination of efficiencies with variable returns to scale is developed in this paper the model contains an element of complexity that is not present in the previous dea models for estimating returns to scale it is found that apparent overall efficiency may hide scale inefficiency in individual activities the model is applied to study the performance of individual specialties of national health services trusts in the uk it is argued that efficiency can be defined from two different perspectives either as the most efficient internal allocation of resources or the most efficient overall allocation of resources this distinction becomes important when looking at the efficiency of parts of inefficient dmus the relationship between size and returns to scale is also explored this method allows the determination of optimal size of an activity

risk dominance and perfect foresight dynamics in n player games abstract in perfect foresight dynamics an action is linearly stable if expectation that people will always choose the action is self fulfilling a symmetric game is a pim game if an opponent s particular action maximizes the incentive of an action independently of the rest of the players this class includes supermodular games games with linear incentives and so forth we show that in pim games linear stability is equivalent to u dominance a generalization of risk dominance and that there is no path escaping a u dominant equilibrium existing results on n player coordination games games with linear incentives and two player games are obtained as corollaries

economic rents under supply controls with marketable quota we analyze the distribution of economic rent between owners and renters of marketable production quotas and examine how this distribution changes with increases in marginal costs while quota owners unambiguously lose because of a marginal cost increase quota renters may gain depending on whether the marginal cost shift is divergent parallel or convergent using output and input prices county production quotas and quota rental rate data we estimate a marginal cost function for north carolina flue cured tobacco to demonstrate how wage increases affect owners and renters welfare

functional form and the statistical properties of welfare measures this paper uses monte carlo analysis to compare the variance of consumer s surplus for several functional forms for demand although the semilog and linear forms fit the data well by statistical criteria the coefficients of variation for consumer s surplus generated by these forms were substantially larger than for the double log and linear log forms while this paper is framed in the travel cost approach to recreational demand there are implications for the choice of functional form whenever the measure of interest is a nonlinear transformation of the estimated parameters in an influential article ziemer musser and hill note the importance of the choice of functional form for the magnitude of estimated measures of welfare change in a study of the demand for a recreation site based on the travel cost model they report nearly a fourfold difference between consumer s surplus based on a linear demand curve and surplus computed from a semilog demand their research emphasizes that good estimates of demand may not yield good estimates of welfare the estimate of consumer s surplus is a

food insecurity income inequality and the changing comparative advantage in world agriculture i would like to argue in this article that in the process of economic development in land poor countries in asia agriculture faces three distinctly different problems food insecurity sectoral income inequality and the declining food self sufficiency associated with the declining comparative advantage in agriculture at the high income stage massive imports of food grains to asia if they occur will aggravate the world food shortage which will have significant implications for the poverty incidence in the world i argue that in order to avoid such a tragedy asia should expand farm size to reduce labor cost by adopting large scale mechanization sub saharan africa should realize a green revolution in grain production and latin america should further expand its grain production capacity

environmental efficiency analysis of china s regional industry a data envelopment analysis dea based approach abstract china s economic has got remarkable achievements during the past 30 years which has brought tremendous pressure on natural resources and serious environmental pollution at the same time in this paper we aim to make environmental efficiency analysis of china s regional industry data envelopment analysis dea method is incorporated and the slacks based measure sbm model considering undesirable outputs is introduced to measure the environmental efficiency of different regions big data theory is introduced in the collection and selection of the input and output data of the regions further we evaluate the environmental efficiencies of china s industry using data from 2008 to 2012 the results show that apart from several developed provinces the environmental efficiencies of china s industry are generally low and the environmental efficiencies of the regions did not show any increasing trend through the past 5 years additionally lager differences exist in environmental efficiencies between the regions in china finally we suggest the chinese government to focus on the low environmental efficiencies and the unbalanced development of its regional industry

impact of domestic content requirement on the us tobacco and cigarette industries abstract using a log linear equilibrium displacement model we quantify the impact of the recent domestic tobacco content requirement on us cigarette manufacturing we investigate effects on us growers and manufacturers and competing tobacco imports the policy increased domestic use of us grown tobacco but induced a small negative output effect tobacco imports decreased substantially the paper also discusses the political economic incentives for us manufacturers to comply with such policies the political cooperation between us growers and manufacturers decreases the opposition of the latter to protectionist policies championed by the former

measuring option prices from market behavior abstract option prices can be calculated from empirical demand models given knowledge of the utility theoretic structure implied by the demand specifications and the joint density of the random variables consumers face formulas for option price are given for three common weakly complementary demand specifications because it can be difficult to assess behavioral uncertainty and calculate option prices in practice knowledge of the sign of option value is important since it is a guide to the bias from ignoring this type of uncertainty the sign of option value is determined for sources of uncertainty that have proved elusive in previous treatments

regulation in the u s rice industry 1965 89 a partial equilibrium framework is used to estimate the deadweight loss arising from government intervention in the u s rice market in order to protect domestic producers the efficiency of the rice program is compared to other grain programs deadweight losses relative to taxpayer and consumer costs from rice programs in recent years were only slightly higher compared to the same measure associated with major commodity programs the primary source of deadweight losses in rice programs result from set asides the potential savings from completely decoupling the rice program are estimated to reach 387 million for 1987

how wrong can you be implications of incorrect utility function specification for welfare measurement in choice experiments despite the vital role of the utility function in welfare measurement the implications of working with incorrect utility specifications have been largely neglected in the choice experiments literature this paper addresses the importance of specification with a special emphasis on the effects of mistaken assumptions about the marginal utility of income monte carlo experiments were conducted using different functional forms of utility to generate simulated choices multi nomial logit and mixed logit models were then estimated on these choices under correct and incorrect assumptions about the true underlying utility function estimated willingness to pay measures from these choice modeling results are then compared with the equivalent measures directly calculated from the true utility specifications results show that for the parameter values and functional forms considered a continuous quadratic or a discrete linear attribute specification is a good option regardless of the true effects the attribute has on utility we also find that mistaken assumptions about preferences over costs magnify attribute mis specification effects

risk attitudes and the stag hunt game a stag hunt game with the risky and safe actions has two pure nash equilibria that are pareto rankable the risky action leads either to the pareto superior equilibrium high payoff or to out of equilibrium low payoff depending on the opponent s action both players may want to obtain high payoff but uncertainty about the opponent s action may prevent them to take such strategic risk this paper investigates how information about the risk attitude of an opponent affects a player s action choice in the stag hunt game i find that although a subject s propensity to choose the risky action depends on her opponent s risk attitude it does not depend on her own risk attitude

did investment become green in china evidence from a sectoral panel analysis from 2003 to 2012 under conditions of policy incentives and energy transition an investment is considered to become green if greater investment would support a reduction in the proportion of total energy consumption involving coal use however few empirical studies have attempted to investigate green investment in china at the sector level using panel data for 5 sectors in china between 2003 and 2012 we tested the relationships between investment and different factors including carbon dioxide co2 emission reduction policies and energy structure by building panel models for the national sample the results demonstrated that investment did not become green and mainly relied on gross domestic product gdp during the 2003 2012 period in china although investments in the industry sector and the commerce and services sector were weakened by the co2 emission regulations chinese climate policies had no effect on investment in the agriculture sector or the construction sector and had a positive effect on investment in the transportation sector moreover the proportion of total energy consumption involving coal use had no effect on investment in the construction sector or the commerce and services sector but had a negative effect on investments in the agriculture sector and the transportation sector investment in the industry sector showed strong viscosity to low price coal consumption finally we propose a series of policy implications based on the test results which may guide green investment