carrying capacity reconsidered from malthus population theory to cultural carrying capacity in this paper the concept of carrying capacity is investigated to provide an improved understanding about its contribution to solve environmental problems light is shed on its form interpretation and application in biology demography applied and human ecology the analysis begins with an examination of the bedrock of carrying capacity which is malthus population theory and its mathematical formulation the logistic growth equation the investigation shows malthus thinking to be both political and normative furthermore the rigid assumptions of the logistic equation and the uncertainty of its terms are found not to allow an unequivocal calculation and prediction of the upper limits carrying capacity of population growth it is illustrated that in ecology carrying capacity focuses on the quality of an ecosystem pressures on it and corresponding population numbers and less on equilibrium of populations as in biology it is shown that carrying capacity when applied in fields where human activity or human aims are involved is a complex normative concept influenced by ecological dynamics human values and aims institutional settings and management practices however it is demonstrated that the discussion about institutional settings aims and values does not take place as much as necessary for its useful application and operationalization in such fields instead authors fall back on sustainability environmental standards or resilience the main contribution of carrying capacity in applied and human ecology is as a political concept generally highlighting that exponential growth and thus environmental pressures have to be curbed carrying capacity is far from being a universal constraint operationalization will continue to be hampered as long as agreements are missing about which social carrying capacity is to be opted for and when it is considered to have been transgressed

spatial sustainability trade and indicators an evaluation of the ecological footprint the search for frameworks and indicators of sustainable development has taken a prominent place in this journal however some specific aspects have received little or no attention notably the spatial dimension and the role of international trade in indicator development moreover many sustainable development indicators comprise implicit valuations weighting schemes and policy objectives which are insufficiently recognised as such this contribution tries to highlight these issues by means of a review of a recently proposed indicator for ecological economic analysis namely the ecological footprint that has been developed by wackernagel and rees its concept and calculation procedure are criticised on a number of points and it is concluded that the ecological footprint is not the comprehensive and transparent planning tool as is often assumed in explaining our position we will argue that spatial sustainability and regional sustainable development have not been precisely discussed so far neither in the literature on trade and environment nor in that on sustainable development we will defend the view that trade can contribute positively and negatively to environmental unsustainability consequently indicators and models are needed that allow for analysing interactions and trade offs between such opposite effects 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

temporary emancipation from land from the industrial revolution to the present time abstract ecological and thermodynamic analysis shows that the tremendous speed of matter and energy degradation of the earth is the genuine cause of land deterioration the temporary emancipation from land since the industrial revolution still heavily depends upon land based resources especially fossil fuels stored in the past the prophetic views of liebig and marx concerning land deterioration are reconsidered not only the essential differences but also similarities between manufacturing and farming will be presented several technological proposals for a secure food supply will be critically appraised this study suggests a drastic reorientation of economic activites in the future to preserve our land

models of policy under stochastic replanning this paper considers a policy environment in which policy is not set by a single policymaker but by a sequence of policymaking administrations administration turnover is determined by a simple random process the consequences of administration turnover are traced through for two versions of a linear rational expectations model and numerical simulations of various policy environments are presented this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

environmental policy with endogenous plant locations in a game between the governments of two countries each chooses its own environmental policy the nash equilibria of the game are generally not pareto optimal on the one hand each country may want to attract industry giving it an incentive to choose low environmental taxes or standards on the other hand if disutility from pollution is sufficiently high each country might prefer that a firm locates only in other countries this effect tends to make the environmental policy under non cooperation stricter than it would be with cooperation

monetary policy shifts and the term structure we estimate the effect of shifts in monetary policy using the term structure of interest rates in our no arbitrage model the short rate follows a version of the taylor s 1993 discretion versus policy rules in practice carnegie rochester conference series on public policy 39 195 214 rule where the coefficients on the output gap and inflation vary over time the monetary policy loading on the output gap has averaged around 0 4 and has not changed very much over time the overall response of the yield curve to output gap components is relatively small in contrast the inflation loading has changed substantially over the last 50 years and ranges from close to zero in 2003 to a high of 2 4 in 1983 long term bonds are sensitive to inflation policy shifts with increases in inflation loadings leading to higher short rates and widening yield spreads

macroeconomics and the term structure this paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance the topic is important to investors and also to policymakers who wish to extract macroeconomic expectations from longer term interest rates and take actions to influence those rates the simplest model of the term structure is the expectations hypothesis which posits that long term interest rates are expectations of future aver age short term rates in this paper we show that many features of the configuration of interest rates are puzzling from the perspective of the expectations hypothesis we review models that explain these anomalies using time varying risk premia although the quest for the fundamental macroeconomic explanations of these risk premia is ongoing inflation uncertainty seems to play a large role finally while modern finance theory prices bonds and other assets in a single unified framework we also consider an earlier approach based on segmented markets market segmentation seems important to understand the term structure of interest rates during the recent financial crisis jel e31 e43 e52 e58

an investigation of the gains from commitment in monetary policy this paper proposes a simple framework for analyzing a continuum of monetary policy rules characterized by differing degrees of credibility in which commitment and discretion become special cases of what we call quasi commitment the monetary policy authority is assumed to formulate optimal commitment plans to be tempted to renege on them and to succumb to this temptation with a constant exogenous probability known to the private sector by interpreting this probability as a continuous measure of the lack of credibility of the monetary policy authority we investigate the welfare effect of a marginal increase in credibility our main finding is that in a simple model of the monetary transmission mechanism most of the gains from commitment accrue at relatively low levels of credibility in our benchmark calibration a commitment expected to last for only 6 quarters is enough to bridge 75 of the welfare gap between discretion and commitment this seems to justify the well known concern of monetary policy makers about their credibility even in a world with limited access to commitment technologies

federal reserve credibility and the term structure of interest rates abstract in this paper we show how the degree of central bank credibility influences the level slope and curvature of the term structure of interest rates in an estimated structural model we find that historical yield curve data are best matched by the federal reserve conducting policy in a loose commitment framework rather than the commonly used discretion and full commitment assumptions the structural impulse responses indicate that the past history of realized shocks plays a crucial role in determining the dynamic effects of monetary policy on the yield curve finally the regime switching framework allows us to estimate likely re optimization episodes which are found to impact the middle of the yield curve more than the short and long end

new keynesian macroeconomics and the term structure this article complements the structural new keynesian macro framework with a no arbitrage affine term structure model whereas our methodology is general we focus on an extended macro model with an unobservable time varying inflation target and the natural rate of output which are filtered from macro and term structure data we obtain large and significant estimates of the phillips curve and real interest rate response parameters our model also delivers strong contemporaneous responses of the entire term structure to various macroeconomic shocks the inflation target dominates the variation in the level factor whereas the monetary policy shocks dominate the variation in the slope and curvature factors

a matter of opinion how ecological and neoclassical environmental economists and think about sustainability and economics abstract the differing paradigms of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics have been described in various articles and books and are also embedded in different professional associations however we cannot take for granted that the paradigm debates described in the literature are actually mirrored in exactly the same way in the perceptions and opinions of researchers looking at sustainability from an economic perspective this paper presents empirical results from a german case study on how economists and others involved in sustainability research from different schools of thought think about the issues of sustainability and economics how they group around these issues how they feel about the current scientific divide and what they expect to be future topics of sustainability research we analyze the data using cluster analysis based on a literature survey we generated forty sustainability economics related statements and asked 196 sustainability researchers about their degree of agreement or disagreement with these statements in evaluating our survey results we discuss to what extent the clusters that we identified do or do not represent the two schools of thought of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics we also propose some fields of research that can help to bridge the gaps amongst sustainability economics researchers while clearly marking others that are more suitable for a scientific competition of ideas key results of the study are we identify two primary scientific clusters one clearly confirming the existence of the ecological economics school of thought and the other largely capturing the neoclassical environmental view yet there are some surprising exceptions both schools of thought share a conceptual definition of sustainability that is integrative in considering ecological societal and economic dimensions three pillar concept and is geared at preserving the development potentials of society we also find a shared critique of pure economic growth strategies in our sample these shared opinions may provide bridging concepts between the schools of thought also both clusters agree with respect to a wide range of future fields of sustainability economics research yet the research agenda of the ecological economics cluster contains a large number of additional topics primarily related to social distributional and evolutionary aspects of sustainable development strong divides between the clusters that seem to be more suitable for a scientific competition of ideas are primarily related to the question of how to achieve sustainability including appropriate environmental policies

indicators of sustainable development some lessons from capital theory abstract interest in sustainable development has prompted a search for suitable indicators that might complement or supplant the traditional measures of economic success although there is no agreement about the precise meaning of sustainable development one idea which is increasingly in good currency is that sustainable development requires that the stock of capital that one generation passes on to the next be maintained or enhanced further this stock of capital is seen by some to comprise two elements manufactured capital and natural capital the extent to which these are believed to be substitutes or complements is one factor which separates the neoclassical school from some of its critics a premise of this paper is that if capital theory is relevant to sustainable development then it should also be helpful in developing indicators however even within the normal confines of economics capital theory is not a homogeneous body of analysis therefore an exploration of capital theory and its relevance to sustainable development can be expected to generate various perspectives on those measures most useful for gauging the sustainability of economic activity it is these linkages between capital theory in various schools of thought and possible indicators of sustainable development that are the subject of this paper

the interaction of population growth and environmental quality an important question for policy is whether holding constant per capita income and other relevant factors population pressures have a significant effect upon environmental degradation the authors examine the effect of population pressures upon deforestation in 64 developing countries in an attempt to provide relevant empirical findings data on deforestation were drawn from the food and agriculture organizations production yearbook results suggest that a relationship exists between per capita income and deforestation and that for africa rural population density shifts the relationship upward the increase in the rate of deforestation levels off as income increases the rate of growth in per capita income also has a significant negative impact upon deforestation although the magnitude of the effect is small the authors close in stressing that reducing the rate of population growth is not necessarily the best way to reduce the rate of deforestation deforestation in developing countries is really a problem of market failure since property rights are often neither defined nor enforced there is essentially no private cost of deforestation with no long term stake in the land people have no incentive to use land efficiently this situation must be addressed in conjunction with the problems of poverty and population growth

capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development an indicator of weak sustainability the measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction in this paper we present one form that a weak sustainability indicator can take derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non decreasing although subject to qualification at this stage some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries

allocation distribution and scale towards an economics that is efficient just and sustainable abstract the practical policy of issuing tradeable permits for depletion and pollution requires for its implementation the clear separation of the three basic economic goals of efficient allocation equitable distribution and sustainable scale economic theory needs to catch up with policy in recognizing that scale issues cannot be reduced to either allocation or distribution

estimating central bank preferences under commitment and discretion this paper explains u s macroeconomic outcomes with an empirical new keynesian model in which monetary policy minimizes the central bank s loss function the presence of expectations in the model forms a well known distinction between two modes of optimization termed commitment and discretion the model is estimated separately under each policy using maximum likelihood over the volcker greenspan bernanke period comparisons of fit reveal that the data favor the specification with discretionary policy estimates of the loss function weights point to an excessive concern for interest rate smoothing in the commitment model but a more balanced concern relative to inflation and output stability in the discretionary model

the term structure of interest rates in a dsge model with recursive preferences abstract a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model in which households have epstein and zin recursive preferences is solved with perturbation the parameters governing preferences and technology are estimated by maximum likelihood using macroeconomic data and the term structure of interest rates the estimates imply a large risk aversion an elasticity of intertemporal substitution higher than one and substantial adjustment costs furthermore the paper identifies the tensions within the model by estimating it on subsets of these data the analysis concludes by pointing out potential extensions that may improve the model s fit

the time varying volatility of macroeconomic fluctuations we investigate the sources of the important shifts in the volatility of us mac roeconomic variables in the postwar period to this end we propose the esti mation of dsge models allowing for time variation in the volatility of the structural innovations we apply our estimation strategy to a large scale model of the business cycle and find that shocks specific to the equilibrium condition of investment account for most of the sharp decline in volatility of the last two decades jel c51 e32

national natural capital accounting with the ecological footprint concept abstract there is a growing consensus among natural and social scientists that sustainability depends on maintaining natural capital however progress to put this ecological condition to practice has been slow not least because of the inability of making these objectives measurable therefore to overcome this obstacle assessment frameworks for natural capital are needed this study presents a simple framework for national and global natural capital accounting it demonstrates using the example of italy an accounting framework which tracks national economies energy and resource throughput and translates them into biologically productive areas necessary to produce these flows this calculation has been applied to over 52 countries with this framework based on the ecological footprint concept human consumption can be compared with natural capital production at the global and national level using existing data

figuring out the fed beliefs about policymakers and gains from transparency in this paper i use a markov chain monte carlo algorithm to estimate a model of private sector behavior that does not feature private sector knowledge of the monetary policymaking process and instead leaves firms and households uncertain about how monetary policy is set the private sector entertains two competing views of monetary policymaking which i estimate firms and households use bayes law on a rolling data sample to distinguish between those two models i use this setup to study the evolution of beliefs about the federal reserve and the possible gains from transparency

a macro finance model of the term structure monetary policy and the economy this paper develops and estimates a macro finance model that combines a canonical affine no arbitrage finance specification of the term structure with standard macroeconomic aggregate relationships for output and inflation from this new empirical formulation we obtain several interesting results 1 the latent term structure factors from finance no arbitrage models appear to have important macroeconomic and monetary policy underpinnings 2 there is no evidence of monetary policy inertia or a slow partial adjustment of the policy interest rate by the federal reserve and 3 both forward looking and backward looking elements play important roles in macroeconomic dynamics

the history of ecosystem services in economic theory and practice from early notions to markets and payment schemes article i nfo this paper reviews the historic development of the conceptualization of ecosystem services and examines critical landmarks in economic theory and practice with regard to the incorporation of ecosystem services into markets and payment schemes the review presented here suggests that the trend towards monetization and commodification of ecosystem services is partly the result of a slow move from the original economic conception of nature s benefits as use values in classical economics to their conceptualization in terms of exchange values in neoclassical economics the theory and practice of current ecosystem services science are examined inthelight ofthis historicaldevelopment from thisreview we conclude thatthefocus onmonetary valuation and payment schemes has contributed to attract political support for conservation but also to commodify a growing number of ecosystem services and to reproduce the neoclassical economics paradigm and the market logic to tackle environmental problems

the history and current applications of the circular economy concept abstract the challenges of balancing industrial development environmental and human health and economic growth in china and elsewhere in the world are drivers for recent resource use and low carbon development strategies that include the application of the circular economy ce concept a central theme of the ce concept is the valuation of materials within a closed looped system with the aim to allow for natural resource use while reducing pollution or avoiding resource constraints and sustaining economic growth the objectives of this study are 1 to review the history of the ce concept to provide a context for 2 a critical examination of how it is applied currently thematic categories are used to organize the literature review results including policy instruments and approaches value chains material flows and products and technology organizational and social innovation the literature review illustrates the variability in ce project success and failure over time and by region ce successes key challenges and research gaps are identified the literature review results provide useful information for researchers as well as multi stakeholder groups who seek to define the ce concept in practical terms and to consider potential challenges and opportunities it presents when implemented

convergence of inflationary shocks evidence from the caribbean in this paper we aim to shed some light on the inflation dynamics in the caribbean we analyse the inflation rates for twelve countries using various time series methods the results show that the inflation rates are mean reverting processes and that there is evidence of a convergence club in inflation rates within the area which contradicts previous studies our contribution implies a high degree of similarity in the dynamics of our target countries inflation rates

changing concepts of land in economic theory from single to multi disciplinary approaches abstract the role of land in economic theory is surveyed both from a conceptual and historical perspective land has been incorporated in economic theories in various ways originally land used by agriculture was the main motivation for an economic treatment of land this was gradually extended with various other land use categories neoclassical economic theory gave less attention to land use generally regarding land as a production factor of relatively little importance nevertheless specialized sub fields within economics such as regional and urban economics met the demand for explicit spatial analysis including land use considerations attention for environmental and resource problems has stimulated new perspectives on and conceptualizations of land in economic analysis this involves the interaction with other disciplines as well as the use of spatially disaggregated methods of analysis awareness of the richness of ideas on land in economic theory can contribute to enhanced environmental research

a structural decomposition of the us yield curve abstract by expanding the macro part of macro finance models historical fluctuations in us bond yields turn out to be largely consistent with the rational expectations hypothesis we estimate a medium scale macro finance dsge model of the term structure to establish this our finding contrasts with existing macro finance models and suggests that their small scale or non structural perspective on the macroeconomy mutes expectations thereby underestimating the expectations hypothesis potential out of sample forecasts are competitive with more flexible term structure models given the empirical validation we interpret various episodes through the lens of the model and investigate which structural shocks cause the yield curve to contain information about future growth

fiscal policy under loose commitment due to time inconsistency or political turnover policymakers promises are not always fulfilled we analyze an optimal fiscal policy problem where the plans made by the benevolent government are periodically revised in this loose commitment setting the properties of labor and capital income taxes are significantly different than under the full commitment and no commitment assumptions because of the occasional reoptimizations the average capital income tax is positive even in the long run also the autocorrelation of taxes is lower their volatility with respect to output increases and the correlation between capital income taxes and output changes sign our method can be used to analyze the plausibility and the importance of commitment in a wide class of dynamic problems

historical roots for ecological economics biophysical versus allocative approaches abstract a number of economists today are aware that the results of their science are more or less at variance with concrete fact and are alive to the necessity of perfecting it they go wrong rather in their choice of means to that end they try obstinately to get from their science alone the materials they know are needed for a closer approximation to fact whereas they should resort to other sciences and go into them thoroughly not just incidentally for their bearing on the given economic problem until economic science is much farther advanced economic principles are less important to the economists than the reciprocal bearings of the results of economics and the results of the other social sciences many economists are paying no attention to such interrelations for mastery of them is a long and fatiguing task requiring an extensive knowledge of facts whereas anyone with a little imagination a pen and a few reams of paper can relieve himself of a chat on principles pareto 1935 para 2022

what do demand and supply shocks say about caribbean monetary integration this study seeks to ascertain whether the member states of the caribbean community caricom share similar supply and demand shocks if so an argument can be made for the suitability of said countries being part of a currency union the results show that no significant correlation exists for the majority of countries studied and as such no economic justification for the monetary union can be made based on the methodology used however the eastern caribbean currency union eccu whose members are a part of caricom is supported by the results

demand and supply shocks in the caribbean economies implications for monetary union this paper uses the method of structural vector autoregressions to decompose movements of real output and prices into demand and supply innovations for four caribbean economies barbados jamaica trinidad and tobago and guyana the aim of the analysis is to assess if these economies could feasibly form part of a caribbean monetary union correlations between the demand and supply innovations are however typically low indicating that monetary union may lead to greater stabilisation problems for these economies