nonconvexities in the production of timber biodiversity and carbon sequestration abstract fixed logging costs and administrative constraints on logging regulations can create nonconvexities in forestry production sets that include timber and nontimber products managing forests to produce multiple values at a landscape level through the aggregation of stands that are completely or partially specialized in the production of timber or nontimber products can consequently be superior to management systems that treat all stands uniformly even when all stands are identical both fixed costs and administrative constraints are empirically important sources of nonconvexity in tropical rainforests the former is more important when the nontimber product is carbon sequestration while the latter is more important when the nontimber product is biodiversity protection uniform management appears to be superior for the joint production of timber and carbon sequestration while specialized management might often be superior for the joint production of timber and biodiversity at least at low discount rates

sense and no n sense of energy security indicators energy security ranks high on the policy agenda of many countries to improve on energy security governments undertake regulatory measures for promoting renewable energy increasing energy efficiency or curbing carbon dioxide emissions the impacts of such measures on energy security are typically monitored by means of so called energy security indicators in this paper we show that the common use of wide spread energy security indicators falls short of providing a meaningful metric regulatory measures to improve on energy security trigger ambiguous effects across energy security indicators we conclude that a major pitfall of energy security indicators is the lack of a rigorous microeconomic foundation

transition towards a low carbon economy a computable general equilibrium analysis for poland in the transition to sustainable economic structures the european union assumes a leading role with its climate and energy package which sets ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets by 2020 among eu member states poland with its heavy energy system reliance on coal is particularly worried on the pending trade offs between emission regulation and economic growth in our computable general equilibrium analysis of the eu climate and energy package we show that economic adjustment cost for poland hinge crucially on restrictions to where flexibility of emission abatement revenue recycling and technological options in the power system we conclude that more comprehensive flexibility provisions at the eu level and a diligent policy implementation at the national level could achieve the transition towards a low carbon economy at little cost thereby broadening societal support

fossil fuel supply leakage and the effectiveness of border measures in climate policy abstract understanding fossil fuel supply behaviour is crucial for interpreting carbon leakage and assessing the potential effectiveness of border measures in climate policy in most computable general equilibrium models this fossil fuel supply is derived from a constant elasticity of substitution production function in which a natural resource is treated as a fixed factor we show that this leads to endogenously decreasing supply elasticities and sharply increasing marginal leakage rates for large coalitions that have ambitious emissions targets particularly when fuel exporters participate in the coalition we propose an alternative production function that has a constant elasticity of fuel supply which results in more stable leakage rates and a different share of trade related leakage the role of this model variation for the assessment of border measures in climate policy turns out to be limited in those cases where the model versions differ most i e large coalition ambitious targets border measures have a small effect anyway

financial deregulation and productivity growth in banking sector empirical evidence from bangladesh this article examines the effects of regulatory reform on productivity growth in the bangladesh banking industry we use a unique balanced panel dataset comprising bank level annual data from the e

spatial distribution of species populations relative economic values and the optimal size and number of reserves we examine the tradeoff between the number and average size of nature reserves when the costs of enforcing reserve boundaries are negligible we find analytically that the relative price of biodiversity has a positive impact on the optimal total reserved area but an ambiguous impact on the optimal number of reserves simulation modeling of floral diversity in a tropical timber concession reveals that the resolution of this ambiguity depends on spatial distributions of the populations of tree species whether or not they are spatially aggregated clumped the impact of biodiversity price on optimal reserve number remains analytically ambiguous when enforcement costs are not negligible multiple reserves being economically superior to a single reserve now requires in addition to aggregation a biodiversity price that is sufficiently high to offset the effects of enforcement costs most of our simulation scenarios generate threshold biodiversity prices that do not exceed a leading estimate of the marginal value of a higher plant species in the bioprospecting literature several smaller reserves evidently can be economically superior to a single larger one even in the presence of enforcement costs

good things do not always come in threes on the excess cost of overlapping regulation in eu climate policy since the mid 1990 s the european union eu aims at pushing global climate policy the objective is to promote international cooperation by the adoption of substantial eu wide greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and their least cost implementation our quantitative impact assessment of the eu climate and energy package shows that the myriad of instruments used in the eu to curb greenhouse gas emissions is doomed to generate substantial excess cost we conclude that eu climate and energy policy should better disentangle its choices of objectives targets and policy instruments on rigorous economic grounds in order to improve the coherence and overall cost effectiveness of policy initiatives

alternative designs for tariffs on embodied carbon a global cost effectiveness analysis in the absence of effective world wide cooperation to curb global warming import tariffs on embodied carbon have been proposed as a potential supplement to unilateral emissions pricing we consider alternative designs for such tariffs and analyze their effects on global welfare within a multi region multi sector computable general equilibrium cge model of global trade and energy our analysis suggests that the most cost efficient policy could be region specific tariffs on all products based on direct plus electricity emissions in the end however the potential cost savings through carbon tariffs must be weighed against the administrative costs as well as legal issues and political considerations

foreign investment and spillover efficiency in an underdeveloped economy evidence from the mexican manufacturing industry abstract in this paper we consider the question whether differences in technical efficiency of mexican plants in part derive from spillover efficiency associated with foreign direct investment we use labour productivity as a measure of technical efficiency and relate this to capital intensity labour quality and scale of production we measure the degree of competition by different concentration indices and the final factor determining efficiency is the presence of foreign subsidiaries if there is a positive relation between efficiency of domestic plants and the foreign participation of various industries we conclude that there is a spillover of technical efficiency the empirical evidence from the study indicates that this is the case

policy relevant nonconvexities in the production of multiple forest benefits abstract this paper challenges common assumptions about convexity in forest rotation models which optimize timber plus nontimber benefits if a local optimum occurs earlier than the globally optimal age policy based on marginal incentives may achieve suboptimal results policy relevant nonconvexities are more likely if i nontimber benefits dominate for young stands while the optimal age depends primarily on timber benefits or ii nontimber benefits dominate for mature stands and also determine the optimal age nonconvexities may create either temporary or persistent difficulties policymakers may improve efficiency by exploiting the relationship between the timber only optimum and the global optimum

are green hopes too rosy employment and welfare impacts of renewable energy promotion in view of pressing unemployment problems policy makers across all parties jump on the prospects of renewable energy promotion as a job creation engine which can boost economic well being our analytical model shows that initial labor market rigidities in theory provide some scope for such a double dividend however the practical outcome of renewable energy promotion might be sobering our computable general equilibrium analysis of subsidized electricity production from renewable energy sources res e in germany suggests that the prospects for employment and welfare gains are quite limited and hinge crucially on the level of the subsidy rate and the financing mechanism if res e subsidies are financed by labor taxes welfare and employment effects are strictly negative for a broad range of subsidy rates the use of an electricity tax to fund res e subsidies generates minor benefits for small subsidy rates but these benefits quickly turn into significant losses as the subsidy rate exceeds some threshold value

trade liberalization and technical efficiency in the indonesian chemicals industry this article examines the impact of trade reform on technical efficiency on the indonesian chemicals industry using firm level panel data the effects of trade reform on technical efficiency are an

spatial interactions in multiple use forestry and substitution and wealth effects for the single stand abstract forestry models often ignore spatial relationships between forest stands this paper isolates the effects of stand interactions in multiple use forestry through a straightforward extension of the single stand model effects of stand interactions decompose into wealth and substitution effects and may cause time varying patterns of resource use for a forest stand simulations illustrate that a stand s role even in steady state may alternate an emphasis on timber with an emphasis on nontimber optimal management plans differ substantially depending on whether the manager values nonmarket goods from neighboring stands the model offers insights for improving heuristic forest level optimization models in current usage

the efficiency cost of protective measures in climate policy despite recent achievements towards a global climate agreement climate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions remains quite heterogeneous across countries energy intensive and trade exposed eite industries in industrialized countries are concerned on stringent domestic emission pricing that puts them at a competitive disadvantage against producers of similar goods in other countries with more lenient emission regulation this paper focuses on climate policy design in the united states of america us and compares the economic implications of four alternative protective measures for us eite industries i output based rebates ii exemptions from emission pricing iii energy intensity standards and iv carbon intensity standards using a large scale computable general equilibrium model we quantify how these protective measures affect competitiveness of us eite industries we find that protective measures can improve common trade related competitiveness indicators such as revealed comparative advantage or relative world trade shares but at the same time may lead to a decline in the output value for eite industries because of negative income effects the economy wide cost of emission abatement under protective measures increase as compared to uniform emission pricing stand alone such that the gains of protective measures for eite exports may be more than compensated through losses in domestic eite demand

the global markets for coking coal and iron ore complementary goods integrated mining companies and strategic behavior abstract the global market for coking coal is linked to the global market for iron ore since both goods are complementary inputs in pig iron production moreover international trade of both commodities is highly concentrated with only a few large companies active on both input markets given this setting the paper presented investigates the strategy of quantity setting cournot mining companies that own both a coking coal and an iron ore division do these firms optimize the divisions output on a firm level or by each division separately division by division first using a theoretical model of two cournot duopolies of complementary goods we find that there exists a critical capacity constraint below above at which firm level optimization results in identical superior profits compared with division level optimization second by applying a spatial multi input equilibrium simulation model of the coking coal and iron ore markets we find that due to the limited capacity firms gain no substantial additional benefit from optimizing output on a firm level

foreign investment and technology transfer a simple model abstract this paper develops a model in which international technology transfer through foreign direct investment emerges as an endogenized equilibrium phenomenon resulting from the strategic interaction between subsidiaries of multinational corporations and host country firms the model explicitly recognizes two types of costs the costs to the multinational of transferring technology to its subsidiaries and the learning costs of domestic firms the analysis points to the importance of the learning efforts of host country firms in increasing the rate at which mncs transfer technology the paper also explores some of the reasons why learning investment in host country firms may be suboptimal

foreign direct investment spillovers and productivity growth in indonesian garment and electronics manufacturing inflows of foreign direct investment generate externalities that spill over to domestic firms and raise their productivity this article examines the extent of spillover effects of foreign direct investment for firms in the highly disaggregated garment isic 3221 and electronics industries isic 3832 in indonesia both are export intensive industries but differ greatly in technological sophistication and labour intensity changes in both the productivity level and rate of growth in each industry are decomposed into the effects of technological change technical efficiency change and scale efficiency change and then the impacts of spillovers on each component and on total productivity are estimated the findings suggest that foreign direct investment generates a positive effect on total productivity change technical efficiency change technological change and scale efficiency change in the garment industry in contrast foreign direct investment contributes significantly negatively to total productivity technological change and scale efficiency change but has no significant effect on technical efficiency change in the electronics industry

the dynamic relationship between agricultural sustainability and food energy water poverty in a panel of selected sub saharan african countries abstract the relationship between food energy water resources and agricultural sustainability has got a significant policy attraction that generally in favor of livelihood of the poor which is largely affected by climate change food security challenges poor access of water resources and less access of electricity these challenges generally faced by less developing countries while sub saharan african ssa countries has no exemption to escape out from this food water energy poverty nexus due to inadequate socio economic and environmental action programs of sustainable development this study examined the dynamic nexus between agricultural sustainability and food energy water poverty in a panel of selected ssa countries over the period of 1980 2013 the study used pooled least squares regression pooled fixed effects and pooled random effects regression techniques to absorb country specific time variant shocks the hausman 1978 test results reveal that country specific shocks influence the food energy water poverty model therefore the fixed effects regression results are consider a better fit model than that of the pooled random effect model the overall results conclude that agricultural value added cereal yields and forest area significantly decreases food energy water poverty nexus leading to higher economic growth and price levels at the cost of environmental degradation in general agricultural sustainability is the prerequisite for reducing food energy water poverty

foreign investment and productive efficiency the case of mexico this paper examines whether the relative performance of firms within mexican manufacturing industries varies systematically with the presence of foreign subsidiaries it also analyzes how foreign entry influences the technological structure in host country industries the findings suggest that 1 foreign presence in an industry is positively correlated with structural efficiency and 2 foreign entry is related to structural changes only in the modern part of the industries the most important source of spillover efficiency is found to be in the competitive pressure induced by the foreign firms i introduction a widely held view among economists studying foreign investment is that one of the important contributions to the host country is likely to stem from external effects or spillovers the spillovers can be of different kinds the foreign firms may influence the productivity and growth of the domestically owned firm they may change the nature and evolution of concentration they may alter financing marketing and technological and managerial practices in the industries that they enter et cetera because of great methodological difficulties in investigating these effects empirically in addition to lack of data few empirical investigations appear in the literature three available econometric studies deal with the influence of foreign investment on the technical efficiency of host country firms one focuses on australia caves 1974 one on canada globerman 1979 and one on mexico blomstrom and persson 1983 all three find some support for the spillover benefit hypothesis but none of the studies analyzes the nature of spillover efficiency in depth the present paper is an attempt to identify through what mechanisms the spillover efficiency of foreign investment takes place by analyzing the effects of foreign investment on the productive efficiency of the industrial structure in mexico we will examine whether the relative performance of firms within an industry varies systematically with the presence of foreign subsidiaries we will also analyze the impact of foreign investment on structural change that is how foreign entry influences the technological structure in host country industries

differences and similarities between ecological and economic models for biodiversity conservation abstract in this paper we investigate an important obstacle which substantially complicates co operation between ecologists and economists but which has received little attention so far differences between the modelling approaches in economics and ecology to understand these differences 60 models addressing issues relevant to biodiversity conservation have been selected randomly from eight international economic and ecological journals the models have been compared according to a number of criteria including the models level of generality the mathematical techniques employed for formulation and solution of the models the level of complexity and the way time space and uncertainty are taken into account the economic models sampled are formulated and analysed analytically tend to be relatively simple and are mostly used to investigate general questions furthermore they often ignore space dynamics and uncertainty although some ecological models have similar properties there is also a substantial number of another type of ecological models that are relatively complex and analysed by simulation these models tend to be rather specific and often explicitly consider dynamics space and uncertainty the integrated ecological economic models are observed to lie in the middle between ecological and economic models an unexpected result is that they are not more complex than ecological and economic models as one could have expected from a simple merger of models from both disciplines but have an intermediate complexity

rent capture and the feasibility of tropical forest management hyde amacher and magrath 1996 imply that deforestation and timber rents logging revenue minus logging costs other than timber fees are not subjects that justify policymakers attention arguing that market responses limit the scope of deforestation

cost effective unilateral climate policy design size matters given the bleak prospects for a global agreement on mitigating climate change pressure for unilateral abatement is increasing a major challenge is emissions leakage border carbon adjustments and output based allocation of emissions allowances can increase effectiveness of unilateral action but introduce distortions of their own we assess antileakage measures as a function of abatement coalition size we first develop a partial equilibrium analytical framework to see how these instruments affect emissions within and outside the coalition we then employ a computable general equilibrium model of international trade and energy use to assess the strategies as the coalition grows we find that full border adjustments rank first in global cost effectiveness followed by import tariffs and output based rebates the differences across measures and their overall appeal decline as the abatement coalition grows in terms of cost the coalition countries prefer border carbon adjustments countries outside the coalition prefer output based rebates

clean development investments an incentive compatible cge modeling framework the clean development mechanism established under the kyoto protocol allows industrialized annex i countries to offset part of their domestic emissions by investing in emissions reduction projects in developing non annex i countries computable general equilibrium analysis of the clean development mechanism s impacts so far mimics the clean development mechanism as a sector emissions trading scheme thereby overstating its potential to save climate change mitigation costs this study develops a novel approach that represents the clean development mechanism more realistically by compensating clean development mechanism implementing sectors for additional abatement cost and by endogenizing clean development mechanism credits as a function of investment compared with previous representations the proposed approach is more consistent in its incentive structure and investment characteristics at the sector level an empirical application of the new methodology demonstrates that the economy wide cost savings from the clean development mechanism tend to be lower than suggested by conventional modeling approaches while clean development mechanism implementing sectors do not lose in output

us climate policy a critical assessment of intensity standards intensity standards have gained substantial momentum as a regulatory instrument in us climate policy energy intensive and trade exposed industries are traditionally opposed to initiatives for domestic carbon pricing as they are particularly vulnerable to competitiveness losses and refer to counterproductive emission leakage in a unilateral climate policy context this has led to policy proposals where intensity standards on energy and carbon might at least in part substitute for explicit carbon pricing via taxes or emission allowances in this paper we study the economic efficiency properties of intensity standards as an instrument of unilateral climate policy we first develop a theoretical partial equilibrium framework and show that standards can have an ambiguous effect on carbon leakage we then use an applied computable general equilibrium model of the global economy to gain quantitative insights into the effects of intensity standards for the case of the us our numerical results show that intensity standards may rather increase than decrease carbon leakage moreover standards can lead to considerable welfare losses compared to uniform emission taxing the tradability of standards across industries is a mechanism that can reduce these negative effects

impact of optimal storage allocation on price volatility in energy only electricity markets recent studies show that the fast growing expansion of wind power generation may lead to extremely high levels of price volatility in wholesale electricity markets storage technologies regardless of their specific forms e g pump storage hydro large scale or distributed batteries are capable of alleviating the extreme price volatility levels due to their energy usage time shifting fast ramping and price arbitrage capabilities in this paper we propose a stochastic bilevel optimization model to find the optimal nodal storage capacities required to achieve a certain price volatility level in a highly volatile energy only electricity market the decision on storage capacities is made in the upper level problem and the operation of strategic regulated generation storage and transmission players is modeled in the lower level problem using an extended stochastic bayesian cournot based game the south australia sa electricity market which has recently experienced high levels of price volatility and a 30 bus ieee system are considered as the case studies our numerical results indicate that 50 price volatility reduction in the sa electricity market can be achieved by installing either 430 mwh regulated storage or 530 mwh strategic storage in other words regulated storage firms are more efficient in reducing the price volatility than strategic storage firms

efficient multiple use forestry may require land use specialization considered at the landscape scale economically efficient multiple use of forests may require land use specialization if managers attempt to satisfy legitimate multiple use demands from society by managing all lands for all outputs both commodity and amenity values of the forest may be inappropriately supplied and management inputs may be inefficiently deployed these results run counter to some of the prescriptions called new forestry

embodied carbon tariffs in a world where the prospects of a global agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions are bleak the idea of using trade policy as an implicit regulation of foreign emission sources has gained many supporters in countries contemplating unilateral climate policies embodied carbon tariffs tax the direct and indirect carbon emissions embodied in imported goods the appeal seems obvious as oecd countries are on average large net importers of embodied emissions from non oecd countries carbon tariffs could substantially extend the reach of oecd climate policies we investigate this claim by simulating the effects of embodied carbon tariffs with a computable general equilibrium model of global trade and energy use we find that embodied carbon tariffs do effectively reduce carbon leakage however the scope for improvements in the global cost effectiveness of unilateral climate policy is limited the main welfare effect of the tariffs is to shift the burden of oecd climate policy to the developing world

non competitive market behaviour in the international coking coal market in this paper a primal dual programming model of international coking coal trade is constructed to test for non competitive market behaviour world trade in 1996 is simulated under perfect competition and various non competitive market structures statistical tests are used to compare simulated trade flows with actual data assuming cournot nash behaviour an all consumer oligopsony market structure is preferred to alternative models under an all consumer oligopsony world coking coal prices and trade are lower than under perfect competition under an oligopsonistic structure welfare gains from productivity increases in australian coal mines might largely accrue to coal buyers

the effect of market conduct on international steam coal trade abstract this paper is concerned with the determinants of international steam coal trade most quantitative work in explaining such trade has been stymied by the apparent failure of the competitive model to account for observed and anticipated trade flows in general authors have sought institutional explanations for this failure the hypothesis explored by this paper is that the exercising of market power by certain agents in the market can lead to trade patterns consistent with those observed and anticipated this hypothesis is explored through a simple model of imperfect market equilibrium in addition to perfect competition we examine cournot nash monopoly south africa duopoly south africa australia and duopoly monopsony south africa australia japan with a competitive fringe of producers us canada poland china colombia using the equilibrium model of coal trade we examine these market structures and evaluate the extent to which they can explain existing and anticipated trade patterns

targeting incentives to reduce habitat fragmentation the fragmentation of wildlife habitat has long been recognized as a principal threat to terrestrial biodiversity in this paper we develop a theoretical model to analyze the spatial targeting of incentives for the restoration of forested landscapes when land quality is spatially heterogeneous and wildlife habitat can be enhanced by reducing fragmentation we consider a regulator who uses subsidies to encourage the conversion of private agricultural land to forest on a pre defined set of landscapes the regulator can observe land use choices but not the opportunity costs on individual land parcels the important insight to emerge from the theoretical analysis is that solutions at or near corners are a strong possibility on each landscape either none or all of the agricultural land should be converted to forest corner solutions are directly linked to the spatial process determining habitat benefits to verify the theoretical insight we present a simulation of the effects of incentive based policies on the spatial distribution of forests in south carolina the empirical methodology integrates an econometric model of land use change with gis based landscape simulations the empirical findings strongly support our conjecture regarding corner solutions and the optimal targeting policy is shown to produce substantial welfare gains over a spatially uniform incentive

modeling strategic investment decisions in spatial markets abstract markets for natural resources and commodities are often oligopolistic in these markets production capacities are key for strategic interaction between the oligopolists we analyze how different market structures influence oligopolistic capacity investments and thereby affect supply prices and rents in spatial natural resource markets using mathematical programming models the models comprise an investment stage and a supply stage in which players compete in quantities we compare three models a perfect competition and two cournot models in which the product is either traded through long term contracts or on spot markets in the supply stage tractability and practicality of the approach are demonstrated in an application to the international metallurgical coal market results may vary substantially between the different models the metallurgical coal market has recently made progress in moving away from long term contracts and more towards spot market based trade based on our results we conclude that this regime switch is likely to raise consumer rents but lower producer rents while the effect on total welfare is negligible

assessing market structures in resource markets an empirical analysis of the market for metallurgical coal using various equilibrium models abstract the prevalent market structures found in many resource markets consist of high concentration on the supply side and low demand elasticity market results are therefore frequently assumed to be an outcome of strategic interaction between producers common models to investigate the market outcomes and underlying market structures are games representing competitive markets strategic cournot competition and stackelberg structures that take into account a dominant player acting first followed by one or more players we add to the literature by expanding the application of mathematical models and applying an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec which is used to model multi leader follower games to a spatial market using our model we investigate the prevalent market setting in the international market for metallurgical coal between 2008 and 2010 whose market characteristics provide arguments for a wide variety of market structures using different statistical measures to compare model results with actual market outcomes we find that two previously neglected settings perform best first a setting in which the four largest metallurgical coal exporting firms compete against each other as stackelberg leaders while the remainders act as cournot followers second a setting with bhpb acting as sole stackelberg leader

environmental efficiency and labour productivity trade off or joint dynamics a theoretical investigation and empirical evidence from italy using namea in this paper we test an adapted ekc hypothesis to verify the relationship between environmental efficiency namely emissions per unit of value added and labour productivity value added per employee we exploit namea data on italy for 29 sector branches and 6 categories of air emissions for the period 1991 2001 we employ data on capital stock and trade openness to test the robustness of our results on the basis of the theoretical and empirical analyses focusing on innovation firm performances and environmental externalities we would expect a positive correlation between environmental efficiency and labour productivity a negative correlation between the emissions intensity of value added and labour productivity which departs from the conventional mainstream view the hypothesis tested is a critical one within the longstanding debate on the potential trade off or complementarity between environmental preservation and economic performance which is strictly associated with the role of technological innovation we find that for most air emission categories there is a positive relationship between labour productivity and environmental efficiency labour productivity dynamics then seem to be complementary to a decreasing emissions intensity in the production process taking a disaggregate sector perspective we show that the macro aggregate evidence is driven by sector dynamics in a non homogenous way across pollutants services tend always to show a complementary relationship while industry seems to be associated with inverted u shape dynamics for greenhouse gases and nitrogen oxides this is in line with our expectations in any case ekc shapes appear to drive such productivity links towards complementarity the extent to which this evidence derives from endogenous market forces industrial and structural change and policy effects is discussed by taking an evolutionary perspective to innovation and by referring to impure public goods arguments

strategic behaviour in international metallurgical coal markets abstract this paper analyses whether prices and trade flows in the international market for metallurgical coals were subject to non competitive conduct in the period 2008 to 2010 to do so i develop mathematical programming models a stackelberg model two varieties of a cournot model and a perfect competition model for computing spatial equilibria in international resource markets results are analysed with various statistical measures to assess prediction accuracy of the models the results show that real market equilibria cannot be reproduced with a competitive model however real market outcomes can be accurately simulated with the non competitive models suggesting that market equilibria in the international metallurgical coal trade were subject to strategic behaviour of coal exporters

vertical fiscal externalities and the environment we show that imposition of a state level environmental tax in a federation crowds out pre existing federal taxes we explain how this vertical fiscal externality can lead unilateral state level environmental policy to generate a welfare gain in the implementing state at the expense of other states even absent any environmental benefits using a computable general equilibrium model of the canadian federation we show that vertical fiscal externalities can be the major determinant of the welfare change following environmental policy implementation by a state government our numerical simulations indicate that as a consequence of vertical fiscal externalities state governments can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 20 percent without any net cost to themselves

are renewable energy policies climate friendly the role of capacity constraints and market power abstract this paper studies the impacts of renewable energy support policies on energy prices fossil fuel supply and thus carbon emissions from fossil fuels such supports are climate friendly if the renewables are already competitive against fossil fuels but if the renewables are not yet competitive the climate change impacts are often ambiguous and are sensitive to capacity constraints of renewables production and to the fossil fuel market structure if the renewables do not have capacity constraints then the subsidies are subject to the green paradox under perfect competition but might be climate friendly under monopoly supports for capacity constrained renewables under perfect competition lead to more current fossil fuel supply but delay fossil fuel exhaustion time and these effects are reversed under monopoly our results highlight the importance of considering the long term effects on fossil fuel supply as well as capacity constraints and market power in designing renewable energy policies and evaluating their carbon footprints

foreign direct investment exports and domestic performance in mexico a causality analysis abstract most empirical work on the effects of outward oriented policies in developing countries has identified openness with trade however openness involves much more than just trade this paper analyses the relationship among trade foreign direct investment and domestic income in mexico during the period 1980 i to 1999 iv on the basis of the granger non causality procedure recently developed by toda and yamamoto journal of econometrics 66 1995 225 and dolado and lutkepohl econometric review 15 1996 369 the results support the effectiveness of the outward looking orientation policy in this country

mode size and location of foreign direct investments and industry markups abstract several studies find that inward foreign direct investment fdi raises host industries competition and productivity using aggregate fdi measures the monetary flows or the change in the industries foreign production share yet fdi flows are composed of many individual heterogeneous investments reflecting this heterogeneity i ask how the average traits of the individual investments that constitute the fdi flow further affect the host while the results show that inward fdi does heighten competition for us manufacturing industries in 1987 1991 price cost markups fall even more when foreign investments locate further away from incumbent industry which is consistent with endogenous location choice

fdi impact and spillover evidence from china s electronic and textile industries m ultinational corporations mncs may invest in a host country when they possess non tangible productive assets that cannot be easily licensed but can be transferred within the firm direct equity participation in the host country is therefore required for mncs to reap the rents from their nontangible productive assets which may include technological know how marketing and managing skills relationships with suppliers and customers and reputation if foreign direct investment fdi does effectively convey these assets we should expect fdi to boost the productivity of the host country firms that receive fdi a more complex issue is the indirect spillover effects of fdi to non fdi domestic firms to the extent that fdi may bring new products and technologies to the host country non fdi receiving domestic firms may also stand to benefit from fdi through personnel turnover demonstration effects and knowledge spillovers the presence of fdi in a certain industry however may exert adverse effect on domestic firms in that industry by enjoying better technologies and lower production costs firms with fdi may cut into the market share of domestic firms without fdi in a short run imperfectly competitive market structure the productivity of domestic firms may be reduced when sales fall so that fixed costs are spread over fewer units in the long run however the increased competition induced by the increased presence of fdi in domestic industries may force

optimal emission pricing in the presence of international spillovers decomposing leakage and terms of trade motives abstract carbon leakage provides an efficiency argument for differentiated emission prices in favor of emission intensive and trade exposed sectors under unilateral climate policy however differential emission pricing can be used as a beggar thy neighbor policy to exploit terms of trade adopting an optimal tax framework we propose a method to decompose the leakage and terms of trade motives for emission price differentiation we employ our method for the quantitative impact assessment of unilateral climate policy based on empirical data we find that the leakage motive yields only small efficiency gains compared to uniform emission pricing likewise the terms of trade motive has rather limited potential for strategic burden shifting we conclude that in many cases the simple first best rule of uniform emission pricing remains a practical guideline for unilateral climate policy design

imperfectly competitive equilibria in international commodity markets the simple model of perfect competition in spatial markets has been widely applied in analyzing international agricultural trade yet many markets do not appear to be perfectly competitive this paper offers a new and efficient method for computing spatial equilibrium in oligopolistic or oligopsonistic markets the authors apply the technique to an analysis of several hypotheses of market conduct in the international wheat market that have been put forward by other authors they conclude that a cournot nash duopsony model does not perform well in explaining trade

the war making state and privatisation states created with the central purpose of defending national independence resist the process of macro economic reform since it appears to limit their power to pursue this aim the states of the former centrally planned economies were marked out by their extreme subordination to the military drive so the resistance to reshaping the war making state into a market facilitating state is considerable the transition tends to be halted where the old structures of central control are ended without markets supplying alternative imperatives a rent seeking state is created these themes are examined in relationship to privatisation of state owned enterprises in four countries russia china vietnam and the ukraine

output based rebating of carbon taxes in a neighbour s backyard competitiveness leakage and welfare we investigate how in an open economy carbon taxes combined with output based rebating obr perform in interaction with the carbon policies of a large neighbouring trading partner analytical results suggest that whether the purpose of the obr policy is to compensate firms for carbon tax burdens or to maximize welfare accounting for global emission reductions the obr rate should be positive in policy relevant cases numerical simulations for canada with the us as the neighbouring trading partner indicate that the impact of us policies on the obr rate will depend crucially on the purpose of the canadian obr policies if for a given us carbon policy canada s aim is to restore the competitiveness of domestic emission intensive and trade exposed eite firms to the same level as before the introduction of its own carbon taxation we find that the necessary domestic obr rates will be insensitive to the foreign carbon policies however if not only the canadian carbon tax but also an equally high us tax is introduced compensatory canadian obr rates will be up to 50 lower depending on the sector and on us obr policy if the policy objective is to increase economy wide allocative efficiency welfare of canadian policies by accounting for carbon leakage the us policies will have only a minor downward pressure on desirable obr rates in canada practical choices of obr rates hardly affect overall domestic economic performance thus output based rebating qualifies as an instrument for compensating eite industries without a large sacrifice in terms of economy wide allocative efficiency

the world price of coal a significant increase in the seaborne trade for coal over the past 20 years has unified formerly separate coal markets into a world market in which prices move in tandem by virtue of its large domestic market the usa has become the residual supplier and price setter in the world coal market changes in multifactor productivity have been the primary cause of the long term fluctuations in coal prices that have been observed in the usa since the end of the second world war and in the world coal market

effects of corn stover year to year supply variability and market structure on biomass utilization and cost the availability of corn stover can vary considerably from year to year in a region due to annual changes in yield and area planted with corn such variations interacting with biomass market structures can affect biomass cost and utilization rate this study first characterizes year to year variations in corn stover supply for the us in general and for selected major us corn producing counties in particular there have been 20 30 year to year variations in stover supply in the us since 1975 game theoretic analysis is then applied to examining corn stover utilization rate and production cost in three market structures the analysis reveals that a free market structure will take the form of oligopoly oligopsony where large stover supply variations will expose both biorefineries and farmers to significant price volatility price equilibrium will shift significantly from year to year of the three market structures analysed the derisked supply market structure will be most favorable to biorefineries and farmers under this structure biorefineries will maintain a stover supply region that is based on derisked lower than average yield density to buffer for the supply uncertainty associated with annual variations this market structure results in significantly less volatility in biomass cost while on average only 63 of collectable stover will be used for biofuel production our findings suggest that year to year variation in corn stover availability will increase feedstock cost and reduce its potential for biofuel production

a regional dynamic general equilibrium model of alternative climate change strategies outcomes and noncooperative equilibria this study finds that cooperative policies show much higher levels of emissions reductions than do noncooperative strategies that there are substantial differences in the levels of controls in both the cooperative and the noncooperative policies among different countries and that high income countries may be the major losers from cooperation jel h41 q4 q2 q20

does foreign direct investment lead to productivity spillovers firm level evidence from indonesia this paper examines whether spillovers from foreign direct investment fdi make any contribution to productivity growth in the indonesian chemical and pharmaceutical firms using plant level panel data the spillover effects from fdi are analyzed using a stochastic frontier approach and productivity growth is decomposed using a generalized malmquist output oriented index the results show positive productivity spillovers from fdi higher competition is associated with larger spillovers and domestic firms with r d gain more spillover benefits compared to those without r d fdi spillovers are found to be positive and significant for technological progress and positive but not significant for technical and scale efficiency change

opportunity cost estimation of ecosystem services land use changes rank among the most significant drivers of change in ecosystem services worldwide the enhancement of important services such as biodiversity and carbon sequestration requires modifications in land use that can lead to the decline in other ecosystems services targeting the most suitable areas for particular land uses based on comparative advantages requires opportunity cost information across large regions this is a demanding task because the input output relations are ill defined and determined by spatially heterogeneous operational and environmental conditions to address this methodological challenge this paper presents a two stage semiparametric technique that enables multi dimensional production possibility frontiers to be estimated from data provided by biophysical models specific advantages of the proposed frontier approach are its flexibility with regard to assumptions on the convexity of the production possibility set and its freedom from any separability assumptions for the input output space and the space of the heterogeneous background variables the method is illustrated for a case study of 18 central and eastern european countries results show that opportunity costs of changes in ecosystem services provision differ substantially between regions those areas having already relatively high levels of carbon sequestration have a comparative advantage in sequestering carbon opportunity costs of biodiversity are generally positively related with the level of biodiversity up to a turning point after which they are negatively related to illustrate the policy consequences of the observed economies and diseconomies of scope we compare two management regimes to illustrate the potential gains from smart land management