monitoring changes in economy wide energy efficiency from energy gdp ratio to composite efficiency index since the 1973 world oil crisis monitoring trends in energy efficiency at the economy wide level has been an important component of energy strategy in many countries to support this effort various energy efficiency related indicators have been developed we examine some classical indicators which are often found in national and international energy studies in the 1970s and 1980s we then describe the recent developments in using the index decomposition analysis to give an economy wide composite energy efficiency index based on a bottom up approach this composite index is superior to the classical indicators as an economy wide energy efficiency measure and has lately been adopted by a growing number of countries for national energy efficiency trend monitoring

learning about a new technology pineapple in ghana this paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agri cultural technology in ghana we use unique data on farmers communication patterns to define each individual s information neighborhood conditional on many potentially confounding variables we find evidence that farmers adjust their inputs to align with those of their information neighbors who were surpris ingly successful in previous periods the relationship of these input adjustments to experience further indicates the presence of social learning in addition applying the same method to input choices for another crop of known technol ogy correctly indicates an absence of social learning effects jel d83 013 033 q16

is there a glass ceiling in sweden using 1998 data we show that the gender log wage gap in sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail we interpret this as a strong glass ceiling effect we use quantile regression decompositions to examine whether this pattern can be ascribed primarily to gender differences in labor market characteristics or in the rewards to those characteristics even after extensive controls for gender differences in age education both level and field sector industry and occupation we find that the glass ceiling effect we see in the raw data persists to a considerable extent

women as policy makers evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india this paper uses political reservations for women in india to study the impact of women s leadership on policy decisions since the mid 1990 s one third of village council head positions in india have been randomly reserved for a woman in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head village councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas using a dataset we collected on 265 village councils in west bengal and rajasthan we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved village councils we show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided specifically leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders

the glass ceiling in politics formalization and empirical tests there is a scarcity of women at the apex of political power as well as a lack of methods to disentangle the potential sources of this under representation this article suggests a four step method to test for whether women s under representation can be explained by the existence of a glass ceiling we emphasize that this concept implies discrimination in promotions within the political organization that the discriminatory promotions increase in severity at the top levels of power and that they increase in severity during an individual s career trajectory the proposed method is applied to subnational politics in sweden a long standing world leader in women s descriptive representation the results support the conjecture that a glass ceiling is hindering elected women s rise to political power in this context

technology adoption impact and extension in developing countries agriculture a review of the recent literature given the stagnant agricultural productivity and persistent food insecurity in low income countries notably in sub saharan africa ssa there has been continued interest in the adoption of new technology and its impact on productivity in these regions interestingly there are signs of green revolution in maize and rice in ssa reflected in sharply increasing yield trends in advanced regions to increase crop yields and sustain yield gains recent case studies of technology adoption unanimously recommend the adoption of integrated farm management systems particularly in ssa on the other hand since the 2010s there have been increasing numbers of studies on social network or farmer to farmer technology extension these studies explore more efficient extension systems than traditional public sector extension approaches this article reviews both recent case studies of technology adoption and its productivity impacts as well as studies on agricultural extension to identify common findings shortcomings and major remaining issues

social networks and technology adoption in northern mozambique despite their potentially strong impact on poverty agricultural innovations are often adopted slowly using a unique household dataset on sunflower adoption in mozambique we analyse whether and how individual adoption decisions depend upon the choices of others in the same social networks since farmers anticipate that they will share information with others we expect farmers to be more likely to adopt when they know many other adopters dynamic considerations however suggest that farmers who know many adopters might strategically delay adoption to free ride on the information gathered by others we present empirical evidence that shows that the relationship between the probability of adoption and the number of known adopters is shaped as an inverse u in line with information sharing the network effect is stronger for farmers who report discussing agriculture with others the data contains information which is needed to ameliorate the identification issues that commonly arise in this context in particular social networks are precisely identified and in addition we can control for village heterogeneity and endogenous group formation

can peers improve agricultural revenue crop revenues vary greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood even after controlling for factors including input use technology adoption and other agro climatic factors one hypothesis that may explain the variation in outcomes among farmers is differential access to information through peers using a household survey from india containing detailed information about personal relationships we estimate peer effects on cash crop revenue using a novel spatial econometric technique to control for reflection our results show that 60 of farmers revenue is explained by peers peer effects are particularly large in pesticide use and in the cultivation of a new crop however peer effects in input expenditures and land allocation cannot fully explain the variation in revenue implying peers may also associate with management negotiation and marketing we find that peer effects are significant among farmers self reported peers especially among those peers who are farmers main advisors for agricultural matters although caste based networks both within the same and in adjacent villages are important their effect is smaller than that of self reported peer networks we empirically rule out that our effects are driven by other factors such as geographically correlated unobservables farmers following a lead farmer or economies of scale our findings speak to both the potential and the limitations of peers as sources of agricultural information and highlight the need for future research about how to best integrate peers into agricultural extension

decomposing learning by doing in new plants the paper examines learning by doing in the context of a production function in which the other arguments are labor human capital physical capital and vintage as a proxy for embodied technical c

political competition and politician quality evidence from italian municipalities we use data from italian local level governments for the years 1985 2008 to investigate whether political competition affects the quality of politicians as measured by some ex ante characteristics such as educational level and type of job held we handle endogeneity problems through an instrumental variable approach using as an instrument for political competition a variable taking into account whether the previous municipal council survived until the end of its legislative term two stage least square estimates support the view that political competition positively affects politician quality results are robust to different measures of political competition and to different estimation strategies

estimating the marginal abatement cost curve of co2 emissions in china provincial panel data analysis abstract this paper estimates the marginal abatement cost curve macc of co2 emissions in china based on a provincial panel for the period of 2001 2010 the provincial marginal abatement cost mac of co2 emissions is estimated using a parameterized directional output distance function four types of model specifications are applied to fit the mac carbon intensity pairs the optimal specification controlling for various covariates is identified econometrically a scenario simulation of china s 40 45 carbon intensity reduction based on our macc is illustrated our simulation results show that china would incur a 559 623 yuan t roughly 51 57 increase in marginal abatement cost to achieve a corresponding 40 45 reduction in carbon intensity compared to its 2005 level

optimal path for controlling co2 emissions in china a perspective of efficiency analysis this paper examines the optimal control of co2 emissions from a perspective of efficiency analysis several centralized data envelopment analysis dea models are introduced to study the optimal allocation of co2 emissions under spatial temporal and spatial temporal allocation strategies respectively the models have been used to determine the optimal paths for controlling co2 emissions at provincial and regional levels in china a sensitivity analysis of the optimal path on the emission control coefficient under spatial temporal allocation strategy is further carried out our empirical results show that more developed regions should take emission reduction responsibility earlier than less developed regions in china of the three allocation strategies spatial temporal allocation strategy seems to be a better choice for achieving the optimal control of co2 emissions at country level since it is more encompassing by allowing both timing and spatial substitutions it is also found that there exists an inverted u shape relationship between the aggregate optimal gdp and the emission control coefficient which shows that modest emission reduction policy might be more appropriate for china in order to achieve the joint goals of economic development and co2 emission reduction

are nonconvexities important for understanding growth everyday experience and a simple logical argument show that nonconvexities are essential for understanding growth compared to previous statements of this well known argument the presentation here places more emphasis on the distinction between two of the fundamental attributes of any economic good rivalry and excludability it also emphasizes the difference between public goods and the technological advances that are fundamental to economic growth like public goods technological advances are rionrival goods hence they are inextricably linked to nonconvexities but in contrast to public goods which are nonexcludable technological advances generate benefits that are at least partially excludable hence innovations in the technology are for the most part privately provided this means that nonconvexities are relevant for goods that trade in private markets consequently an equilibrium with price taking in all markets cannot be sustained concluding remarks describe some of the recent equilibrium growth models that do not rely on price taking and highlight some of the implications of these models this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries a survey this paper reviews various studies which have provided a description and possible explanation to patterns of innovation adoption in the agricultural sector the survey points out that the tendency of many studies to consider innovation adoption in dichotomous terms adoption nonadoption may not be appropriate in many cases where the actual decisions are defined over a more continuous range more attention needs to be given to the socio cultural and institutional environment in area studies so that their interrelation with economic factors affecting adoption can be inferred the presence of several interrelated innovations is another aspect that needs to be considered more carefully in future research since a number of simultaneous decisions may be involved furthermore the possibility of regular sequential patterns in adopting components of a new technological package should be specifically addressed in future studies finally the impact of differential adoption rates on land holding distribution merits attention in future research

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

gender quotas and the quality of politicians we analyze the effects of the introduction of gender quotas in candidate lists on the quality of elected politicians as measured by the average number of years of education we consider an italian law which introduced gender quotas in local elections in 1993 and was abolished in 1995 as not all municipalities went through elections during this period we identify two groups of municipalities and use a difference in differences estimation we find that gender quotas are associated with an increase in the quality of elected politicians with the effect ranging from 0 12 to 0 24 years of education this effect is due not only to the higher number of elected women who are on average more educated than men but also to the lower number of low educated elected men the positive effect on quality is confirmed when we measure the latter with alternative indicators it persists in the long run and it is robust to controlling for political ideology and political competition

marginal co2 abatement costs findings from alternative shadow price estimates for shanghai industrial sectors abstract shanghai one of the most developed cities in china is implementing a pilot regional carbon emission trading scheme estimating the marginal abatement costs of co2 emissions for the industrial sectors covered in shanghai s emission trading scheme provides the government and participating firms useful information for devising compliance policies this paper employs multiple distance function approaches to estimating the shadow prices of co2 emissions for shanghai industrial sectors our empirical results show that the overall weighted average of shadow price estimates by different approaches ranges between 394 5 and 1906 1 yuan ton which indicates that model choice truly has a significant effect on the shadow price estimation we have also identified a negative relationship between the shadow price of co2 emissions and carbon intensity and the heavy industries with higher carbon intensities tend to have lower shadow prices it has been suggested that shanghai municipal government take various measures to improve its carbon market e g using the marginal abatement costs of participating sectors firms as a criterion in the initial allocation of carbon emission allowances

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

crop diversity household welfare and consumption smoothing under risk evidence from rural uganda abstract in the wake of climate change there is now a resurgence of interest in the promotion of crop diversification as a climate smart agricultural practice in sub saharan africa the development economics literature suggests that increasing crop diversity is an effective risk management and consumption smoothing strategy in a context characterized by repeated exposure to shocks but weak institutional innovations using panel survey data from rural uganda merged with historical weather data this paper sheds light on the household welfare and consumption smoothing effects of crop diversity we employ instrumental variables methods to control for unobserved heterogeneity and potential reverse causality our study finds that crop diversification is a welfare enhancing strategy that increases consumption and aggregate household diets instrumental variables quantile regression results show that crop diversification generates higher consumption benefits for poorest households in the lower quantile of the consumption distribution than for relatively richer households crop diversification also improves consumption smoothing through reducing households reliance on less effective strategies such as informal insurance and involuntary diet changes as risk coping mechanisms overall the findings suggest that transforming agriculture towards a more diversified cropping system is a viable pathway for improving diets welfare risk management and the resilience of rural households

regional energy efficiency carbon emission performance and technology gaps in china a meta frontier non radial directional distance function analysis abstract at present china is the largest primary energy consumer and carbon emitter in the world meantime china is a large transitional economy with significant regional gaps against such backgrounds the calculated results of energy and carbon performance indicators may be biased without considering heterogeneity across regions to this end after incorporating region heterogeneity this paper provides detailed information regarding energy efficiency carbon emission performance and the potential of carbon emission reductions from regional perspectives which may be important and useful for policy makers our main findings are as follows firstly there is significant group heterogeneity across regions in china in terms of energy efficiency and carbon emission performance secondly there are no considerable differences between total factor and single factor performance indices since there is limited substitutability between energy inputs and other production inputs finally significant carbon emission reductions can be made by catching up for regions with low energy efficiency and carbon emission performance looking ahead the chinese government should adopt measures to promote improvements in terms of energy efficiency and carbon emission performance in the short term

leveling with friends social networks and indian farmers demand for a technology with heterogeneous benefits abstract agricultural technologies typically spread as farmers learn about profitability through social networks this process can be nuanced however when net returns for some farmers may not be positive we investigate how social learning influences demand for a resource conserving technology in eastern uttar pradesh india we identify potential adopters through an experimental auction and randomly select a subset to adopt we exploit this variation in adoption across networks to estimate network effects on demand for the technology one year later using a second auction technology benefits vary and network effects are completely conditional on benefits having a benefiting adopter in one s network increased demand by over 50 whereas having a non benefiting adopter had no effect these effects are strong enough to bring average demand in line with expected benefits for many farmers however demand remains below the market price suggesting that network effects will lead to increased but not rapid widespread adoption

modeling technology adoption in developing countries an analysis of technology adoption decisions by poor farmers is provided some possible empirical models for studying technology adoption are reviewed the issue of theoretical consistency is dealt with in terms of the costs of such consistency measured in data needs and model complexity and the benefits measured in terms of understanding the micro economic foundations of adoption

explaining the performance of contract farming in ghana the role of self efficacy and social capital abstract self efficacy is the belief of an individual to have the ability to be successful in a given domain social capital is the economic value of a person s relationships in the context of this study self efficacy is the belief of a farmer to be able to improve her income with contract farming which increases her actual ability social capital increases the ability of the farmers through social support we surveyed 400 smallholder pineapple farmers and find that both self efficacy and social capital are decisive for their successful integration into contract farming to identify causal effects we use two instruments which are also of interest on their own the historical presence of 1 cocoa cooperatives and 2 christian missionary schools during ghana s colonial period the british established cocoa cooperatives which differed in their performance as a function of biogeographic factors and thus persistently shaped the self efficacy of the farmers roughly at the same time christian missionaries established missionary schools which impacted the traditional societies so that social capital decreased the finding that self efficacy and social capital are still shaped by historic variables could indicate that these variables are only slowly changing or that they only do so in the absence of policy intervention the latter raises the possibility that effective policies could benefit from strong reinforcing feedbacks once self efficacy and social capital improve

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

comparison of technology efficiency for co2 emissions reduction among european countries based on dea with decomposed factors abstract for consistent and effective co 2 reduction many countries need to improve not only the technical efficiency of co 2 mitigation but also environmental responsibility in this study we examine both the technical efficiency and voluntary environmental consciousness vec of 12 european countries using a two stage data envelopment analysis dea in the first stage we measured the technical efficiency of green energy technologies get associated with fossil fuels renewable energy and storage technologies of each country for energy generation with regard to co 2 emissions by surveying get related patents using the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi we decomposed co 2 emissions into the following technological factors energy intensity fuel mix and co 2 emission coefficient in the second stage we quantified the vec in each country by investigating get patent changes via research and development r d investment at given changes in co 2 emissions the results show different aspects for each country in terms of technical efficiency and vec suggesting potential levels of both efficient co 2 reductions and desirable get development by using reference countries as a benchmark our study methodology and results can contribute to establishing effective national technology policy and aid in calls for common responsibility and the active participation of nations in addressing climate change

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

drivers of greenhouse gas emissions in the baltic states a structural decomposition analysis since the mid 1990s three baltic states have significantly increased their per capita gross domestic product gdp and at the same time have managed to keep the co2 equivalent co2e emissions low we used structural decomposition analysis to identify the drivers of change for co2e emissions in these countries between 1995 and 2009 a period that includes the collapse of the soviet union restructuring and economic growth and the great recession the results show that final demand has been the main driving force for increasing emissions in the baltic states and would have caused an 80 64 and 143 emission increase in estonia latvia and lithuania respectively all other factors kept constant this increase has been partly offset by a declining emission intensity of the economy especially in latvia and lithuania whereas in estonia which has one of the highest emission intensities in europe a shift in consumption patterns towards low carbon consumption items and a decarbonizing economic structure were the main balancing factors it is likely that the baltic states will experience a continuation of economic growth given their relatively low per capita gdp which is less than half of the european union average thus adequate carbon policies are paramount

the illusion of sustainability this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled the illusion of sustainability conducted during the time period 1998 to 2001 in kenya the study observed that deworming is a public good since much of its social benefit comes through reduced disease transmission people were less likely to take deworming if their direct first order or indirect second order social contacts were exposed to deworming the introduction of a small fee for deworming drugs led to an 80 percent reduction in treatment rates take up was not sensitive to the exact price level suggesting that it is particularly counter productive to charge small positive prices for the treatment of infectious diseases an intensive school health education had no impact on worm prevention funding for the study derived from world bank nih fogarty international center berkeley center for health research

eco efficiency and convergence in oecd countries this paper assesses the convergence in eco efficiency of a group of 22 oecd countries over the period 1980 2008 in doing so three air pollutants representing the impact on the environment of economic activities are considered namely carbon dioxide text co 2 nitrogen oxides text no mathrm x and sulphur oxides text so mathrm x furthermore eco efficiency scores at both country and air pollutant specific level are computed using data envelopment analysis techniques then convergence is evaluated using the recent approach by phillips and sul econometrica 75 1771 1855 2007 which tests for the existence of convergence groups first we find that eco efficiency has improved over the period with the exception of text no mathrm x emissions second switzerland is the most eco efficient country followed by some scandinavian economies such as sweden iceland norway and denmark in contrast southern european countries such as portugal spain and greece in addition to hungary turkey canada and the united states are among the worst performers finally we find that both the most eco efficient countries and the worst tend to form clubs of convergence

energy intensity developments in 40 major economies structural change or technology improvement this study analyzes energy intensity trends and drivers in 40 major economies using the wiod database a novel harmonized and consistent dataset of input output table time series accompanied by environmental satellite data we use logarithmic mean divisia index decomposition to 1 study trends in global energy intensity between 1995 and 2007 2 attribute efficiency changes to either changes in technology or changes in the structure of the economy and 3 highlight sectoral and regional differences we first show that heterogeneity within each sector across countries is high these general trends within the sectors are dominated by large economies first and foremost the united states in most cases heterogeneity is lower within each country across the different sectors regarding changes of energy intensity at the country level improvements between 1995 and 2007 are largely attributable to technological change while structural change is less important in most countries notable exceptions are japan the united states australia taiwan mexico and brazil where a change in the industry mix was the main driver behind the observed energy intensity reduction

who becomes a politician can a democracy attract competent leaders while attaining broad representation economicmodels suggest that free riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative

why did the incumbency advantage in u s house elections grow theory a simple rational entry argument suggests that the value of incumbency consists not just of a direct effect reflecting the value of resources such as staff attached to legislative office but also of an indirect effect reflecting the fact that stronger challengers are less likely to contest incumbent held seats the indirect effect is the product of a scare off effect the ability of incumbents to scare off high quality challengers and a quality effect reflecting how much electoral advantage a party accrues when it has an experienced rather than an inexperienced candidate hypothesis the growth of the overall incumbency advantage was driven principally by increases in the quality effect methods we use a simple two equation model estimated by ordinary least squares regression to analyze u s house election data from 1948 to 1990 results most of the increase in the incumbency advantage at least down to 1980 came through increases in the quality effect i e the advantage to the incumbent party of having a low quality challenger this suggests that the task for those wishing to explain the growth in the vote denominated incumbency advantage is to explain why the quality effect grew it also suggests that resource based explanations of the growth in the incumbency advantage cannot provide a full explanation

room for improvement in low carbon economies of g7 and brics countries based on the analysis of energy efficiency and environmental kuznets curves abstract carbon emissions which are nowadays targeted for significant reduction cause global warming with climate change producing a series of side effects including economic losses and ecological extinction the data envelopment analysis approach has recently been employed for environmental estimations the target of this study is to introduce a new data envelopment analysis method in order to provide environmental improvement suggestions this study measures the room for improvements in low carbon economies of g7 group and brics group based on the analysis of energy efficiency and environmental kuznets curves the main findings are as follows i the g7 group has greater room for improvement in its carbonization value than the brics group before 2005 however the latter has greater room for improvement in carbonization value than the former after 2005 ii countries with the backfire effect of a high carbon economy include germany italy and south africa iii during the data period three environmental kuznets curves including energy intensity emission intensity and carbonization value do not satisfy the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis that the curves are inverted u shaped on the contrary the three environmental kuznets curves in this study are u shaped

use of multicriteria decision analysis methods for energy planning problems most decision making requires the consideration of several conflicting objectives the term multiple criteria decision analysis mcda describes various methods developed for aiding decision makers in reaching better decisions energy planning problems are complex problems with multiple decision makers and multiple criteria therefore these problems are quite suited to the use of mcda a multitude of mcda methods exists these methods can be divided in three main groups value measurement models goal aspiration and reference level models and outranking models methods from all of these groups have been applied to energy planning problems particularly in the evaluation of alternative electricity supply strategies each of the methods has its advantages and drawbacks however we cannot conclude that one method generally is better suited than the others for energy planning problems a good alternative might be to apply more than one method either in combination to make use of the strengths of both methods or in parallel to get a broader decision basis for the decision maker until now studies of mcda in energy planning have most often considered energy networks with only one energy carrier more advanced energy systems with multiple energy carriers have been neglected even though this field ought to be suitable for use of mcda due to its high complexity many decision makers and many conflicting criteria

the energy intensity in lithuania during 1995 2009 a lmdi approach abstract the measurement assessment and effective mitigation of energy intensity compose a foremost objective of contemporary energy policy although the european union eu member states have been experiencing the convergence in energy efficiency indicators lithuania acceded to the eu in 2004 still remains peculiar with relatively high energy intensity our study therefore is aimed at analyzing the energy intensity trends in lithuanian economy as a whole as well as in separate economic sectors the investigation covers the period of 1995 2009 the logarithmic mean divisia index was applied for decomposition analysis our analysis has shown that energy efficiency falls during economic downturn in order to facilitate these challenges the lithuanian government as well as business should opt for increasing energy efficiency in the most problematic sectors of transport and services in addition the analysis of legal acts namely national energy efficiency programme for 2006 2010 and energy efficiency action plan for 2010 2016 was taken into consideration some suggestions thus were offered for successful implementation of strategic goals outlined in the aforementioned strategic documents

bayesian learning in social networks we study the perfect bayesian equilibrium of a sequential learning model over a general social network each individual receives a signal about the underlying state of the world observes the past actions of a stochastically generated neighbourhood of individuals and chooses one of two possible actions the stochastic process generating the neighbourhoods defines the network topology we characterize pure strategy equilibria for arbitrary stochastic and deterministic social networks and characterize the conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning convergence in probability to the right action as the social network becomes large we show that when private beliefs are unbounded meaning that the implied likelihood ratios are unbounded there will be asymptotic learning as long as there is some minimal amount of expansion in observations we also characterize conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning when private beliefs are bounded

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

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

commercialization of the small farm sector and multidimensional poverty abstract global poverty rates have declined considerably but the number of people living in extreme poverty remains high many of the world s poor are smallholder farmers agricultural commercialization meaning a shift from subsistence to more market oriented farming can play a central role in improving smallholder welfare previous studies evaluated the impact of agricultural commercialization on income poverty but whether income gains from commercialization are really used for satisfying basic needs was hardly analyzed up till now here we evaluate the effect of commercialization on income poverty as well as on the multidimensional poverty index that looks at deprivations in terms of education nutrition health and other dimensions of living standard using data from 805 farm households in kenya we estimate average treatment effects and also analyze impact heterogeneity with quantile regressions results show that commercialization reduces both income poverty and multidimensional poverty the magnitude of the income gains is positively correlated with income level meaning that market linkage support for marginalized farms may be needed to avoid rising inequality however the effect in terms of reducing basic needs deprivations is stronger for the poorest households suggesting that agricultural commercialization contributes effectively to achieving the sustainable development goals

time to change what to sow risk preferences and technology adoption decisions of cotton farmers in china this paper examines the role of individual risk attitudes in the decision to adopt a new form of agricultural biotechnology in china i conducted a survey and a field experiment to elicit the risk preferences of chinese farmers who faced the decision of whether to adopt genetically modified bt cotton a decade ago in my analysis i expand the measurement of risk preferences beyond expected utility theory to incorporate prospect theory i find that farmers who are more risk averse or more loss averse adopt bt cotton later farmers who overweight small probabilities adopt bt cotton earlier

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

are women pawns in the political game evidence from elections to the spanish senate abstract this paper investigates the reasons behind the low representation of women among legislators using data from spain we find that parties tend to nominate female candidates to poorer positions on the ballot we examine whether this is due to voter bias or party bias and find two pieces of evidence supporting the latter female candidates attract more votes and political competition improves the quality of positions to which female candidates are assigned moreover gender quotas fail to erode the strategic nomination of female candidates the evidence in this paper helps explain why quotas in candidate lists might often lead to disappointing increases in the number of elected female politicians

environmental efficiency and abatement cost of china s industrial sectors based on a three stage data envelopment analysis abstract china has gained the reputation of global factory due to its phenomenal industrial growth over the past decades at the same time its industrial energy consumption has resulted in serious environmental problems accordingly there is an urgent and critical need to reduce industrial carbon emissions at a minimum cost without hampering the country s economic development the dual targets for carbon emission intensity and amount from the 12th five year 2011 2015 plan make it necessary to investigate the environmental efficiency and reduction costs of different sectors this study employs a three stage data envelopment analysis model based on a directional distance function approach with radial and non radial slacks of desirable and undesirable outputs considered to measure the environmental efficiency and marginal co2 emission abatement costs of china s 37 two digit industries during 2005 2014 based on the environmental efficiency and abatement cost of the industrial sectors we reached the following conclusions first the adjusted estimates differ significantly from the results that do not consider the influence of environmental factors and it is essential to consider the heterogeneity of industries in proposing emission reduction strategies in addition the stimuli for the smelting and pressing of metal industries result in cost reduction and the supervision on the top nine emitters and the equipment manufacturing industries should be strengthened finally the industrial sectors with large abatement potential are classified into short term and long term key target industries according to the emission abatement cost analyses

welfare impacts of improved chickpea adoption a pathway for rural development in ethiopia we analyse the impact of improved chickpea adoption on welfare in ethiopia using three rounds of panel data first we estimate the determinants of improved chickpea adoption using a double hurdle model we apply a control function approach with correlated random effects to control for possible endogeneity resulting from access to improved seed and technology transfer activities to instrument for these variables we develop novel distance weighted measures of a household s neighbours access to improved seed and technology transfer activities second we estimate the impact of area under improved chickpea cultivation on household income and poverty we apply a fixed effects instrumental variables approach where we use the predicted area under cultivation from the double hurdle model as an instrument for observed area under cultivation we find that improved chickpea adoption significantly increases household income while also reducing household poverty finally we disaggregate results by landholding to explore whether the impact of adoption has heterogeneous effects adoption favoured all but the largest landholders for who the new technology did not have a significant impact on income overall increasing access to improved chickpea appears a promising pathway for rural development in ethiopia s chickpea growing regions

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

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