sustainable de growth mapping the context criticisms and future prospects of an emergent paradigm article i nfo sustainable de growth is both a concept and a social grassroots northern movement with its origins in the fieldsofecologicaleconomics socialecology economicanthropologyand environmentalandsocialactivistgroups this paper introduces the concept of sustainable de growth by mapping some of the main intellectual influences fromthese fields with special focus on the francophone and anglophone thinking about this emergent notion we propose hypotheses pertaining to the appeal of sustainable de growth and compare it to the messages enclosed within the dominant sustainable development idea we scrutinize the theses contradictions and consequences of sustainable de growth thinking as it is currently being shaped by a heterogeneous body of literature and as it interacts with an ample and growing corpus of social movements we also discuss possible future paths for the de growth movement compared to the apparent weakening of the sustainable development paradigm

an econometric analysis of exploration and extraction of oil in the u k continental shelf this paper develops an econometric model for the analysis of exploration and production policies of price taking suppliers and derives theoretically consistent exploration and output equations for oil which explicitly take account of the oil discovery process and the intertemporal nature of exploration and production decision the model is then applied to an empirical analysis of oil exploration and extraction on the united kingdom continental shelf ukcs over the period 1978 1 1986 4 the analysis explicitly takes account of the available engineering information concerning the pressure dynamics of the petroleum reserves and the geological knowledge pertinent to the discovery process and presents formal statistical tests of the significance of these factors for the explanation of output and exploration in the north sea copyright 1990 by royal economic society

identifying barriers toward a post growth economy a political economy view abstract in this paper we take a political economy perspective on barriers that inhibit a transition beyond the growth paradigm that is we frame transition barriers as looming conflicts of interest specifically we investigate potential transition barriers within three case studies first unemployment represents the most commonly cited reason why economic growth is considered indispensable second alternative indicators to gross domestic product gdp have not succeeded in replacing gdp as a standard metric of economic welfare third pension schemes rely on economic growth to offset demographic change in each of these three examples we identify actor interest constellations that foster the status quo of a growth economy we conclude that compensating some of those actors who would presumably be worse off in a post growth economy may be necessary though not sufficient for a transition

green goals and full employment are they compatible abstract two empirical correlations are studied one between economic growth and environmental impacts and the other between the lack of economic growth and unemployment it is demonstrated that at a global level economic growth is strongly correlated with environmental impacts and barriers to fast decoupling are large and numerous on the other hand low or negative growth is highly correlated with increasing unemployment in most market economies and strategies to change this lead to difficult questions and tradeoffs the coexistence of these two correlations which have rarely been studied together in the literature on green growth degrowth and a growth justifies ambivalence about growth to make key environmental goals compatible with full employment the decoupling of environmental impacts from economic output has to be accompanied by a reduction of dependence on growth in particular strategies to tackle unemployment without the need for growth several of which are studied in this article need much more attention in research and policy

reserve and land prices with exploration under uncertainty abstract arrow and chang j econom environ manag 9 1 10 1982 analyze an exploration extraction model with uncertainty about the distribution of deposits reserve prices do not exhibit any rising trend when the unexplored land area is big but in order to know what happens when the unexplored area is smaller a probabilistic analysis not yet performed ibid p 10 is required their conjecture of a rising trend at less than the discount rate is confirmed however land prices can be expected to grow faster than reserve prices which helps discriminate between arrow and chang s and other rationalizations of the failure of resource prices to rise at the discount rate

working time reduction and employment experiences in europe and economic policy recommendations the paper seeks to evaluate the evidence on the employment effects of the collective working time reductions in europe over the past 20 years while theoretical analyses produce contradictory assessments most empirical studies show positive employment effects but take insufficient account of the conditions under which the reductions in working time were implemented these conditions for the success of collective working time reductions include an active training policy designed to minimise skill shortages in the labour market the modernisation of work organisation wage increases in conjunction with productivity gains and a more equal income distribution

duopoly in exhaustible resource exploration and extraction strategic considerations of exploration and extraction are investigated in a two player two period two stage perfect equilibrium framework relative to two plant monopoly the duopolists explore more and extract more period by period a mixed game in which there is co operation upstream in exploration and cournot competition down stream in quantitites extracted is investigated we also note that increasing returns to scale in exploration can introduce an unstable solution with a corner solution the presumed stable equilibrium

barriers and opportunities for alternative measures of economic welfare this paper explores a number of barriers and opportunities facing alternative measures of economic welfare by conducting semi structured in depth interviews with potential users in both belgium and germany the barriers that they identified are grouped into three categories context factors are embedded in the policy context and agendas that shape the environment in which an indicator percolates indicator factors depend on specific characteristics of the indicators while user factors relate to the level of experience and expertise of the users of indicators and the institutional culture in which they operate drawing on the different barriers that are reported we identify four opportunities to increase the policy value of alternative measures of economic welfare harmonizing and updating the methodological framework extending macroeconomic models to include a wider range of welfare related items improving the communication around these indicators and promoting indicator and researcher entrepreneurship these opportunities should be regarded as recommendations to the scientific community that works on these alternative measures the process of overcoming the different barriers listed in this paper should not be insurmountable as there is clear international public support for using health social and environmental statistics as well as economic statistics to measure societal progress and human well being

on the portents of peak oil and other indicators of resource scarcity economists have studied various indicators of resource scarcity but largely ignored the phenomenon of peaking due to its connection to non economic physical theories of resource exhaustion i consider peaking from the economic point of view where economic forces determine the shape of the equilibrium extraction path within that framework i ask whether the timing of peak production reveals anything useful about scarcity i find peaking to be an ambiguous indicator if someone announced the peak would arrive earlier than expected and you believed them you would not know whether the news was good or bad however i also show that the traditional economic indicators of resource scarcity price cost and rent fare no better and argue that previous studies have misconstrued the connection between changes in underlying scarcity and movements in these traditional indicators

market power in nonrenewable resource markets an empirical dynamic model this paper estimates a dynamic model of the world markets for five nonrenewable resources over the period 1970 2004 and tests for market power in each of these markets the results show that during the study period the world markets for copper iron lead tin and zinc were characterized by oligopolistic behavior our model enables us to estimate an upper bound for the price elasticity of demand for those markets exhibiting market power we find that the demand for copper iron lead and zinc is relatively inelastic while the demand for tin is extremely elastic

on measuring natural resource scarcity conclusions concerning trends in natural resource scarcity may depend critically on the choice of scarcity index unfortunately the prevalence of vertical integration in natural resource industries has hindered the use of some otherwise desirable scarcity measures in this paper duality theory is used to derive an econometric procedure for estimating one such measure the shadow price of the resource in situ empirical results for the canadian metal mining industry indicate that resource scarcity as measured by this shadow price has decreased substantially over time

measuring resource scarcity in non renewable resource with an application to oil and natural gas in alberta in this paper annual canadian exploration data are used to estimate a multiple output translog exploration cost function a new definition of depletion is introduced and its estimated coefficient is found to be statistically significant the fitted cost function parameters are then used to obtain estimates of the marginal costs of exploration for oil and gas our estimated marginal exploration costs are smaller than in previour studies because we have allowed for technical progress which offsets the depletion effects these marginal cost estimates are employed along with previous estimates of exploration rents to measure resource scarcity we find some evidence for the increased scarcity of oil and gas in alberta for oil there is a 10 1 per year increase in scarcity along the trend line while for natural gas there is a 2 4 per year increase in scarcity along the trend line

limits to economic growth as shown by a computable general equilibrium model abstract economic growth is distinguished from commercial growth and is defined in this article as the growth of the value a society puts in monetary terms on all commercial and non commercial goods and values it possesses during a certain period a computable general equilibrium model is used to show the impact of changes in the endowments preferences and production possibilities on economic income which in the model comprises all wealth besides land with its natural resources and labor energy is the key endowment to drive an economy the model leads in an intuitive way to the following conclusions 1 societies should start to use appropriate indicators for true economic growth rather than just for commercial growth as measured by gross national product 2 all types of economic growth are limited no matter if based on endowment growth production efficiency growth or changes in preferences 3 economic growth should be oriented more towards increasing production efficiency and less towards using more natural resources 4 human population growth puts at risk the possibilities for average economic growth per person 5 we should get better prepared to use solar energy in the future 6 besides economic growth there exists pure utility growth which is not measurable in monetary terms it includes much of scientific progress in the long run and is of great importance even though it cannot be included in an indicator of economic growth

environment versus growth a criticism of degrowth and a plea for a growth in recent debates on environmental problems and policies the strategy of degrowth has appeared as an alternative to the paradigm of economic growth this new notion is critically evaluated by considering five common interpretations of it one conclusion is that these multiple interpretations make it an ambiguous and rather confusing concept another is that degrowth may not be an effective let alone an efficient strategy to reduce environmental pressure it is subsequently argued that a growth i e being indifferent about growth is a more logical social aim to substitute for the current goal of economic growth given that gdp per capita is a very imperfect indicator of social welfare in addition focusing ex ante on public policy is considered to be a strategy which ultimately is more likely to obtain the necessary democratic political support than an ex ante explicit degrowth strategy in line with this a policy package is proposed which consists of six elements some of which relate to concerns raised by degrowth supporters

an exploration of alternative measures of natural resource scarcity the case of petroleum resources in the u s abstract the concern about natural resource scarcity has traditionally focused on changes in the cost quality and availability of energy and material inputs to the production process ecological economists are increasingly concerned with an additional aspect of scarcity the growing scarcity of environmental services that sustain human economic existence the analysis here explores economic and biophysical indicators of natural resource scarcity the indices are quantified for the extraction of petroleum resources in the u s the economic indicators are the market price of crude oil and natural gas the unit capital plus labor cost of extraction and the average total cost of extraction dollars per btu extracted the biophysical index is the energy return on investment eroi all indices show a trend of decreasing and then increasing scarcity of petroleum at the wellhead the economic and biophysical cost indices indicate that the 1960s marked the transition from a decreasing to an increasing cost resource base the market price of oil is influenced by nonscarcity forces to the extent that it does not reflect that turning point the increase in the energy cost of petroleum extraction is in stark contrast to the changes in the energy cost of producing other goods and services in the u s economy which generally declined in the last 20 years the increase in the energy cost of extraction has important economic implications from 1954 to 1987 the fraction of total industrial output in the u s generated in the petroleum extraction sector declined almost 40 despite the declining share of its output the petroleum industry s share of direct energy use fossil fuels and electricity generally increased in that period the result is a clear increase in the amount of energy diverted from other potential uses to secure an additional unit of output in the petroleum sector none of the indicators reflect to any degree substantial nonmarketed environmental cost of petroleum extraction the biophysical perspective however emphasizes the coupling between physical scarcity and the demands that extraction places on renewable resources and ecosystem services the extraction of one barrel of oil equivalent for example requires 250 gallons of fresh water and emits more than 60 pounds of co2 and these costs are increasing

oil exploration under climate treaties abstract in this paper we focus on how an international climate treaty will influence the exploration of oil in non opec countries we present a numerical intertemporal global equilibrium model for the fossil fuel markets the international oil market is modelled with a cartel opec and a competitive fringe on the supply side following a nash cournot approach an initial resource base for oil is given in the non opec region however the resource base changes over time due to depletion exploration and discovery when studying the effects of different climate treaties on oil exploration two contrasting incentives apply if an international carbon tax is introduced the producer price of oil will drop compared to the reference case this gives an incentive to reduce oil production and exploration however the oil price may increase less rapidly over time which gives an incentive to expedite production and exploration in fact in the case of a rising carbon tax we find the last incentive to be the strongest which means that an international climate treaty may increase oil exploration in non opec countries for the coming decades and reduce opec s market share

economic indicators of resource scarcity a critical essay abstract the theoretical arguments of the conceptual and empirical literature on economic indicators of long run resource scarcity are logically flawed if resource allocators were informed of the nature of resource scarcity their behavior and the economic indicators it generates would reflect the scarcity but if they were so informed we could simply ask them if resources were scarce if they are not informed their behavior and economic indicators are as likely to indicate their ignorance as the reality unfortunately there is no way of knowing whether they are informed or not unless we already know whether resources are scarce

political economy constraints on carbon pricing policies what are the implications for economic efficiency environmental efficacy and climate policy design abstract economists traditionally view a pigouvian fee on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions either via carbon taxes or emissions caps and permit trading cap and trade as the economically optimal or first best policy to address climate change related externalities yet several political economy factors can severely constrain the implementation of these carbon pricing policies including opposition of industrial sectors with a concentration of assets that would lose considerable value under such policies the collective action nature of climate mitigation efforts principal agent failures and a low willingness to pay for climate mitigation by citizens real world implementations of carbon pricing policies can thus fall short of the economically optimal outcomes envisioned in theory consistent with the general theory of the second best the presence of binding political economy constraints opens a significant opportunity space for the design of creative climate policy instruments with superior political feasibility economic efficiency and environmental efficacy relative to the constrained implementation of carbon pricing policies this paper presents theoretical political economy frameworks relevant to climate policy design and provides corroborating evidence from the united states context it concludes with a series of implications for climate policy making and argues for the creative pursuit of a mix of second best policy instruments

green accounting and economic policy abstract through the lens of conventional national accounting resource depletion and natural environment degradation often appear misleadingly as desirable economic growth the old system of national accounts sna has been revised and a set of environmental satellite accounts proposed certain weaknesses however pervade the new proposals the conventional measurements remain largely unaltered and the satellite accounts are of unclear purpose and unnecessarily complex as proposed they rely on the valuation of environmental stocks while the economically more important flow accounts to their detriment are to be derived indirectly from changes in stock values the sna the paper stresses is primarily an economic framework incapable of capturing all environmental change and the national accounts are far more useful economically than environmentally greening the accounts would be optional for most affluent countries whose overriding environmental concern is pollution this can be addressed directly through taxation and regulation pollution information in satellite accounts can indeed be valuable but revised and fully integrated resource accounting is a priority concern for those developing countries that are running down natural resources and for which conventional accounting distorts macroeconomic measurement analysis and policy the paper argues that green accounting can only ensure income sometimes called weak sustainability which should be considered as a step leading ultimately to an ecological or stronger sustainability

the 35 hour workweek in france straightjacket or welfare improvement workweek reduction laws may be beneficial if market interactions do not fully take into account the preferences reflected in declining secular trends in working hours the most recent law in france shortened the workweek from 39 to 35 hours in 2000 for large firms and in 2002 for small firms analysing differences between large and small firm employees before and after the law we find that aggregate employment was unaffected but labour turnover increased as firms shed workers who became more expensive survey responses indicate that the welfare impact of the law was different across groups of workers women but not men may have benefited from coordination to a shorter workweek and there is also evidence of negative welfare effects for managers possibly due to the law s administrative burden marcello estevao and filipa sa

exploration and scarcity noting that a suggested measure of natural resource scarcity resource rent is unobservable we show that rent is linked to observable marginal exploration cost a two period model of extraction and exploration reveals that rent is equal to this cost when discovery is certain under risky exploration cost data can be used to bound rent the model also indicates how exploration uncertainty affects the competitive firm s extraction and exploration decisions finally the behavior of u s oil and gas exploration costs suggests that these costs were rising in the postwar era which has different implications for scarcity than indicated by other measures of scarcity

working time reduction policy in a sustainable economy criteria and options for its design abstract reducing per capita consumption particularly amongst high income groups is often deemed necessary to reduce the environmental impacts of the global economy far from implying a necessary reduction in wellbeing some research suggests this could actually improve it as reduced expenditure means a reduced need for income and hence paid work then there is the possibility for average working hours to fall providing increased leisure time in which to pursue happiness through less consumption intensive but more time consuming ways to date however there has been little critical discussion of the details of what policy might need to cover to allow and encourage substantial working time reduction in a way that successfully reconciles these environmental and wellbeing goals this article addresses this gap in the literature it begins by reviewing the conditions under which working time reduction could bring environmental and wellbeing benefits it then presents examples of innovative voluntary working time policies from the netherlands and belgium drawing these elements together the article presents a new green life course approach for working time policy design it argues that as a complement to more conventional working time policies this could be a valuable tool to combine environmental and wellbeing goals

steady state growth in a hotelling model of resource extraction this paper re examines the hotelling model of optimal nonrenewable resource extraction in light of stock effects and technological progress we assume functional forms for cost and demand so that the solution to the hotelling problem is a steady state consistent with the empirical observation that the growth rates of market prices have remained zero over a long period of time we use data on 14 minerals from 1970 to 2004 to estimate the supply and demand functions using sur and 3sls and to test the model we validate the model for 8 of 14 minerals c 2007 elsevier inc all rights reserved

commodity price volatility with endogenous natural resources abstract natural resource reserves are exogenous in models of small commodity exporters changes in the stock of reserves play no role in the macroeconomy including in business cycle volatility trade dynamics or exchange rate volatility we consider richer supply dynamics and model exploration and depletion we show that an endogenous supply of reserves is important for capturing the stylised facts associated with commodity price shocks including a commodity currency the crowding out of non commodity activity dutch disease and a volatile business cycle we also consider how exploration and depletion affect the ranking of optimal monetary and taxation policies when natural resource reserves are held fixed monetary policy is an efficient tool for stabilising the effects of commodity price shocks however when exploration and depletion are accounted for using interest rates to stabilise the effects of commodity price changes becomes inefficient using taxes on the resource sector specifically an ad valorem royalty remains efficient

the economics of degrowth economic degrowth is ecologically desirable and possibly inevitable but under what conditions can it become socially sustainable how can we have full employment and economic stability without growth what will happen to public spending and to public debt how would production be organised in a degrowing economy and under what plausible socio political conditions could such grand changes happen standard economic theories and models ignore these questions for them economic growth is an axiomatic necessity this article reviews recent contributions in the economics of degrowth and identifies research avenues for ecological economists

an analysis on the structural stability of okun s law a cross country study okun s law postulates an inverse relationship between movements of the unemployment rate and the real gross domestic product gdp this article investigates okun s law for 15 oecd countries and checks for its the structural stability by using data on employment and the labour force whether structural instability is caused either from the demand side or supply side is inferred

the shifting natural wealth of nations the role of market orientation this paper explores the effect of market orientation on known natural resource wealth using a novel dataset of world wide major hydrocarbon and mineral discoveries consistent with the predictions of a two region model the empirical estimates based on a large panel of countries show that increased market orientation causes a significant increase in discoveries of natural resources in a thought experiment whereby economies in latin america and sub saharan africa remained closed they would have only achieved one quarter of the actual increase in discoveries they have experienced since the early 1990s the results call into question the commonly held view that natural resource endowments are exogenous

reserve characteristics and mining costs an empirical study of the phosphate industry this paper deals with an estimation of phosphate mining cost function here it is argued that other characteristics of reserves besides their size could be quite important in the cost function the result of a cross sectional analysis of phosphate mining in the world shows that reserve size and average total cost have a positive and modest statistically significant relationship in one of the two models among many qualitative characteristics and location factors tested in this paper overburden grade ore product ratio water availability and the price of capital are significant with expected signs finally the results confirm the existence of economies of scale in phosphate mining which seem to be more related to mining technology than to reserve size

the political economy of refunded emissions payment programs abstract we study the effects on the equilibrium tax of refunding firms pollution tax payments can lobbying yield stricter environmental policy do imperfect property rights affect policy clean firms may favor higher pollution levies but insecure property rights reduce this incentive

emission taxes and optimal refunding schemes abstract we examine how refunding emission taxes to firms dependent on market shares should be designed while refunding is harmful under perfect competition a first best self financing tax tax refunding scheme exists if the marginal damage from pollution exceeds the marginal distortion in an imperfectly competitive output market with symmetric firms under pre investment in cleaner technology with short term abatement opportunities a first best refunding scheme exists if pollution refunding can be made dependent on both market and investment shares

resource characteristics extraction costs and optimal exploitation of mineral resources this paper modifies the traditional theories ofnon renewable resource exploitation where reserve sizeis assumed to be the major determinant of extractioncosts in a competitive model of resourceexploitation characteristics of aggregate reservesare considered as a determinant of extraction cost then dynamic solutions for the price and exploratoryefforts are developed various price paths arefeasible under different assumptions with regard tothe changes in the reserve characteristics over time past empirical research shows that there is noconsistent price path for all materials in fact itis the quality of newly discovered reserves as well astheir size that has affected material prices todemonstrate the complexity of a firm s decision torecover mineral from new deposits potentials forsubstantial high quality marine mineral resources areevaluated as a substitute for land based resources however several factors including the decreasingtrend in marine mining r d expenditures and thepotential impact of large scale marine mining on priceof minerals indicate that mining of mostnon hydrocarbon marine minerals will not take place inthe near future

grade selection under uncertainty least cost last and other anomalies abstract grade selection rules for heterogeneous resource deposits with increasing marginal extraction costs are derived it is shown that contrary to the conventional wisdom it can be optimal to extract the least cost deposits last there are a number of rules that are compatible with dynamic profit maximization under certainty nevertheless none explains empirical regularities in actual extraction patterns when uncertainty about future price is introduced however the theoretical model conforms closely not only to observed grade selection patterns but also to observed mineral industry price paths

refunded emission payments theory distribution of costs and swedish experience of nox abatement in this paper we discuss the effect of refunding environmental charges taxes are often resisted by polluters because they imply both abatement and tax costs when charges are refunded the incentives for abatement are essentially the same as for a tax as long as there are many producers the incidence and distribution of costs is however different lower net tax payments reduce resistance from the polluters and make refunded emissions payments politically easier to implement at a sufficiently high charge level to have significant abatement effects we describe and examine the refunded emissions payment scheme as a policy instrument and compare it with taxes and permits with regard to allocative properties distribution of costs property rights and consequently the politics of implementation as an empirical example the swedish charge on nitrogen oxides is analyzed

incomplete markets intra industry firm heterogeneity and investment abstract we argue that as a result of incomplete factor markets firm specific variables representing selected characteristics of firms may influence and differentiate firms investment behavior within industries this paper operationalizes and test the framework with a simple institutionally motivated model of investment in uranium exploration our results suggest that cash flow and firm specific expertise influence and differentiate firms exploration investment behavior in the uranium industry these findings imply that the ways in which incomplete factor input markets distinguish firms also influence and differentiate their investment behavior

beyond gdp measuring and achieving global genuine progress article i nfo while global gross domestic product gdp has increased more than three fold since 1950 economic wel fare as estimated by the genuine progress indicator gpi has actually decreased since 1978 we synthesized estimates of gpi over the 1950 2003 time period for 17 countries for which gpi has been estimated these 17 countries contain 53 of the global population and 59 of the global gdp we compared gpi with gross domestic product gdp human development index hdi ecological footprint biocapacity gini coefficient and life satisfaction scores results show a significant variation among these countries but some major trends we also estimated a global gpi capita over the 1950 2003 period global gpi capita peaked in 1978 about the same time that global ecological footprint exceeded global biocapacity life satisfaction in almost all countries has also not improved significantly since 1975 globally gpi capita does not increase beyond a gdp capita of around 7000 capita if we distributed income more equitably around the planet the current world gdp 67 trillion yr could support 9 6 billion people at 7000 capita while gpi is not the perfect economic welfare indicator it is a far better approximation than gdp development policies need to shift to better account for real welfare and not merely gdp growth

the german energy transition as a regime shift abstract in this paper i use the resilience framework to interpret the project of transforming the german energy system into a renewable energy sources res based system the so called energiewende as a regime shift this regime shift comprises several transformations which are currently altering the technological political and economic system structure to build my argument i first sketch how technological political and economic developments reduced the resilience of the conventional fossil nuclear energy regime and created a new res regime second i depict recent changes in german public discourse and energy policy as the shift to the res regime third i highlight the challenges involved with increasing the resilience of the res regime in particular sufficient resilience of the electricity transmission grid appears to be crucial for facilitating the transformation of the whole energy system

regulatory capture a review this article reviews both the theoretical and empirical literatures on regulatory capture the scope is broad but utility regulation is emphasized i begin by describing the stigler peltzman approach to the economics of regulation i then open the black box of influence and regulatory discretion using a three tier hierarchical agency model under asymmetric information in the spirit of laffont and tirole 1993 i discuss alternative modelling approaches with a view to a richer set of positive predictions including models of common agency revolving doors informational lobbying coercive pressure and influence over committees i discuss empirical work involving capture and regulatory outcomes i also review evidence on the revolving door phenomenon and on the impact that different methods for selecting regulators appear to have on regulatory outcomes the last section contains open questions for future research copyright 2006 oxford university press

japanese labour in the 1990s stability and stagnation we review the state of the labour market and employment practices in japan over the past 15 years and try to evaluate the nature of the changes that have been occurring we also look at how government policy has reacted to the conditions in the labour market and what implications this has for the future although there has been a continual shift of resources away from manufacturing and agriculture into services employment practices have not been changing so rapidly and job protection is actually stronger this along with wage restraint accounts for why unemployment has only increased by some 2 5 percentage points during almost a decade of stagnation we also note that much government policy has acted to maintain existing employment practices and that labour economists are divided as to whether or not this is a good thing

explaining efficiency differences among large german and austrian banks cost efficiency scale efficiency and productivity change are estimated by data envelopment analysis and cost efficiency is regressed on explanatory variables no evidence is found for average productivity responding to deregulation over the period studied state owned banks are found to be more cost efficient likely owing to cheaper funds and cooperative banks to be about as cost efficient as private banks increasing economies of scale but decreasing economies of scope provide rationale for m as among banks with similar product portfolios interbank and capital market funding is found to be more cost efficient than deposits when the cost of retail networks is controlled

estimates of marginal discovery costs for oil and gas previous estimates of the finding costs for oil and natural gas reserves have been impeded by the joint cost problem in exploration the solutions have been either to estimate the finding cost for an oil gas aggregate or to allocate total finding costs between oil discoveries and gas discoveries according to rules chosen by the researcher in this paper the joint cost problem is circumvented by estimating a multiple output exploration cost function which is used to calculate the predicted values of marginal finding costs for oil and gas these values are then compared with independent estimates of the shadow prices of reserves for oil and gas to help settle the debate over whether marginal finding costs provide a good measure of rent

the time path of scarcity rent in the theory of exhaustible resources there is now a consensus in the literature on resource economics that a depletable resource should command a price in excess of its marginal extraction cost simply to reflect the opportunity cost of using a unit of it today rather that conserving it for the future but how this excess is to change along an optimal or competitive equilibrium path of resource use is still an unresolved question this might at first seem puzzling since according to the fundamental theorem of economics of exhaustible resources or hotelling i 93 i rule on an optimal path price minus marginal extraction cost also termed interchangeably as scarcity rent user cost or royalty should steadily grow over time at the social rate of discount however the literature contains sharply contrasting views on the subject for example kay and mirrlees 1975 have argued that since along an optimal path the scarcity rent grows exponentially as a finite stock of a resourcexnears exhaustion then situations in which the resource stock is still very large and yet the price greatly exceeds the marginal extraction cost should indicate that the price is significantly above its optimal level and that the resource is overconserved in stark contrast to this view heal i976 has argued that as the resource stock nears exhaustion the difference between price and marginal cost or what he termed social cost of extraction falls monotonically to zero hanson i980 analyses the same model as heal s but unlike heal who assumes the unit extraction cost to be convex he postulates it to be concave and yet like heal concludes that the scarcity rent will be monotonically declining over time solow and wan i976 analyse a still different situation where resource deposits differ in quality and the unit extraction cost increases as higher grade deposits are exhausted and extraction proceeds to lower grades they show that along an optimal path the shadow price of a resource must rise at the real rate of interest despite differential extraction costs but that the difference between price and the marginal extraction cost or what they call degradation charge declines monotonically over time to zero these sharply differing conclusions suggest that far from being resolved the question of how scarcity rent changes over time is much in want of a close scrutiny the need for such a scrutiny becomes even stronger once it is noted

optimal exploration for and exploitation of heterogeneous mineral deposits abstract we model exploration for and production from a multiple deposit nonrenewable resource exploration is viewed as a bayesian process involving learning about undiscovered reserves and is undertaken both to improve the quality of and to replenish known reserves known reserves are not physically defined but depend on the realizations of discrete episodes of exploration elsewhere and on decisions at each instant about the margin between ore to be mined and low grade material to be rejected the appropriate measure of resource scarcity the sustainable level of the contribution of the resource and the treatment of depletion in the national accounts are considered

a public choice view on the climate and energy policy mix in the eu how do the emissions trading scheme and support for renewable energies interact abstract in this paper we analyze the rationale for an energy policy mix when the european emissions trading scheme ets is considered from a public choice perspective that is we argue that the economic textbook model of the ets implausibly assumes 1 efficient policy design and 2 climate protection as the single objective of policy intervention contrary to these assumptions we propose that the ets originates from a political bargaining game within a context of multiple policy objectives in particular the emissions cap is negotiated between regulators and emitters with the emitters abatement costs as crucial bargaining variable this public choice view yields striking implications for an optimal policy mix comprising res supporting policies whereas the textbook model implies that the ets alone provides sufficient climate protection our analysis suggests that support for renewable energies 1 contributes to a more effective ets design and 2 may even increase the overall efficiency of climate and energy policy if other externalities and policy objectives besides climate protection are considered thus our analysis also shows that a public choice view not necessarily entails negative evaluations concerning efficiency and effectiveness of a policy mix

assessing the degrowth discourse a review and analysis of academic degrowth policy proposals abstract debates on ecological and social limits to economic growth and new ways to deal with resource scarcity without compromising human well being have re emerged in the last few years central to many of these is a call for a degrowth approach in this paper a framework is developed to support a systematic analysis of degrowth in the academic literature this article attempts to present a clearer notion of what the academic degrowth literature explores by identifying organising and analysing a set of proposals for action retrieved from a selection of articles the framework is applied to classify proposals according to their alignment to ecological economics policy objectives sustainable scale fair distribution and efficient allocation type of approach top down versus bottom up and geographical focus local national or international a total of 128 peer reviewed articles focused on degrowth were reviewed and 54 that include proposals for action were analysed the proposals identified align with three broad goals 1 reduce the environmental impact of human activities 2 redistribute income and wealth both within and between countries and 3 promote the transition from a materialistic to a convivial and participatory society the findings indicate that the majority of degrowth proposals are national top down approaches focusing on government as a major driver of change rather than local bottom up approaches as advocated by many degrowth proponents the most emphasised aspects in the degrowth literature are related to social equity closely followed by environmental sustainability topics such as population growth and the implications of degrowth for developing nations are largely neglected and represent an important area for future research moreover there is a need for a deeper analysis of how degrowth proposals would act in combination

optimal pricing use and exploration of uncertain natural resource stocks abstract units of natural resources to be called mines are assumed distributed over an unexplored territory according to a poisson process in space at any moment total reserves and unexplored land are given society can determine the rate of consumption and the rate of exploration reserves are drawn down by consumption and increased by discoveries made during exploration the amount of unexplored land is decreased by exploration at any moment the payoff of society is a concave function of consumption less a linear function of exploration with future payoffs discounted optimal policies are considered and in particular it is shown for a large amount of unexplored land the shadow prices of reserves and of unexplored land move in random cycles but show only a slight upward tread thereby casting some light on the failure of mineral prices to rise at the market rate of interest

the economics of exploration for non renewable resources abstract the literature on exploration for non renewable resources is surveyed following a brief synopsis in section 2 section 3 focuses on issues related to the world market for resources section 4 considers more microeconomic supply related issues linked to the exploration of the small region or play section 5 turns to the small but growing literature on exploration as a learning process related to r d the latter sections pay particular attention to empirical and policy aspects

does the u s health care sector suffer from baumol s cost disease evidence from the 50 states this study examines if health care costs in the united states are affected by baumol s cost disease it relies on an empirical test proposed by hartwig 2008 and extended by colombier 2010 and uses a panel data set of 50 states over the 1980 2009 period the results suggest that health care costs grow more rapidly when economy wide wage increases exceed productivity gains the findings are fairly robust with respect to time and state fixed effects individual state time trends and two stage least square estimation consequently this study suggests that the u s health care sector suffers from baumol s cost disease

energy and depletable resources economics and policy 1973 1998 abstract this paper reviews the impact of the literature in depletable resources and energy economics over the period 1973 1998 particularly the initial period of publication of the journal of environmental economics and management 1974 1998 a discussion of prominent policy issues in this arena is provided along with an indication of what academic economics papers have contributed to that debate this is followed by a citation analysis of contributions in the fields of energy and exhaustible resource economics for each of these two fields a list of the top papers in each five year period from 1974 to 1998 is presented along with a list of the top journals in each decade based on average citations per article the top ten cited articles in the fields in the journal of environmental economics and management are also presented

the prerequisites for a degrowth paradigm shift insights from critical political economy abstract what would it take for a degrowth paradigm shift to take place drawing on contemporary critical political economy scholarship this article identifies four prerequisites for socio economic paradigm shifts deep crisis an alternative political project a comprehensive coalition of social forces promoting the project in political struggles and broad based consent it is argued that on the one hand there is much to suggest that current crises cannot be resolved under existing institutional frameworks and that degrowth is a political project that provides solutions to some of the key problems currently facing humanity on the other hand the prospects for a degrowth paradigm shift remain bleak unlike political projects that became hegemonic in the past degrowth has neither support from a comprehensive coalition of social forces nor any consent to its agenda among the broader population