the early history of modern ecological economics abstract this paper provides a historical perspective for the discussion on ecological economics as a special field of research by studying the historical background of ecological economics the present discussions and tensions inside the field might become easier to understand and to relate to the study is inspired by other studies of the emergence of new research areas done by sociologists and historians of science and includes both cognitive and social aspects macro trends and the role of individuals the basis for the paper is a combination of literature studies and interviews with key researchers from the field the story opens with the emergence of the new environmental agenda in the 1960s which was influenced by the scientific development in biology and ecology then it is outlined how the environmental challenge was met by economics in the 1960s around 1970 the basic ideas of ecological economics were given modern formulations but it took a long gestation period from the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s before ecological economics took shape during this gestation period the personal relationships between the actors were formed and the meetings that were decisive for the formal establishment of ecological economics took place

ecosystem services from eye opening metaphor to complexity blinder abstract what started as a humble metaphor to help us think about our relation to nature has become integral to how we are addressing the future of humanity and the course of biological evolution the metaphor of nature as a stock that provides a flow of services is insufficient for the difficulties we are in or the task ahead indeed combined with the mistaken presumption that we can analyze a global problem within a partial equilibrium economic framework and reach a new economy project by project without major institutional change the simplicity of the stock flow framework blinds us to the complexity of the human predicament the ecosystem services approach can be a part of a larger solution but its dominance in our characterization of our situation and the solution is blinding us to the ecological economic and political complexities of the challenges we actually face

environmental and ecological economics in the 21st century an age adjusted citation analysis of the influential articles journals authors and institutions we investigate the influence of articles authors journals and institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics we depart from studies that investigated the literature until 2001 and include a time period that has witnessed an enormous increase of importance in the field we adjust for the age effect given the huge impact of the year of an article s publication on its influence and we show that this adjustment does make a substantial difference especially for disaggregated units of analysis with diverse age characteristics such as articles or authors we analyse 6597 studies on environmental and ecological economics published between 2000 and 2009 we provide rankings of the influential articles authors journals and institutions and find that ecological economics energy economics and the journal of environmental economics and management have the most influential articles they publish very influential authors and their articles are cited most the university of maryland resources for the future the university of east anglia and the world bank appear to be the most influential institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics

information disclosure policies evidence from the electricity industry i introduction developed nations environmental policies have evolved substantially in the past several decades early pollution control programs involved command and control approaches policies then frequently included pollution charges tradable permits and other market based instruments most recently a third wave of environmental policy has emerged that emphasizes information provision as an integral part of the risk mitigation strategy here government regulation is replaced or augmented by publicly provided information presumed to assist more cost effective private market and legal forces common examples include the toxics release inventory lead paint disclosures drinking water quality notices and eco labels the empirical effects of such programs however remain largely undetermined this paper examines the impact of a prominent mandatory disclosure program on the fuel mix percentages of large electric utility corporations the prominence of mandatory information policies is not restricted to environmental arenas for example developed countries equity markets generally require firm level financial information provision in many countries agricultural goods require country of origin and other health labels domestic colleges and universities are required by law to inform current and prospective students of crime statistics equity data and performance metrics even significant medical errors must now be disclosed to the community there are several potential advantages of information provision policies and theory suggests that disclosure programs may effectively achieve their goals healy and palepu 2001 provided a survey of the evidence in capital markets brouhle and khanna 2007 demonstrated that information provision can improve product quality in the environmental area kennedy laplante and maxwell 1994 arora and gangopadhyay 1995 maxwell lyon and hackett 2000 kirchhoff 2000 and khanna 2001 showed that the provision of information about pollution may correct a market failure improve performance and enhance welfare despite the literature s theoretical findings the empirical effects of disclosure programs remain inconclusive early studies of securities regulation found mixed results see stigler 1964 robbins and werner 1964 and benston 1973 a more recent literature suggested that disclosure programs in financial markets can achieve their desired effects la porta and lopez de silanes 2006 and greenstone oyer and vissing jorensen 2006 found that both market size and market returns were positively influenced by mandatory disclosure programs in product quality settings chipty and witte 1998 established that resource and referral agencies significantly influenced childcare prices but had no impact on the quality of care in contrast jin and leslie 2003 found that mandatory hygiene grade cards positively affected restaurant quality and health outcomes studies of environmental performance yielded similarly mixed results desvousges smith and rink 1992 found that information based programs influenced attitudes favorable to radon testing but testing itself only increased when mass media dissemination was coupled with community based implementation programs konar and cohen 1997 and khanna quimio and bojilova 1998 found that stock movements associated with toxics release inventory tri announcements led to increased abatement and reduced emissions however bui 2005 found that the declines in emissions after tri reporting events may have been attributable to regulation rather than investor pressure bennear and olmstead 2006 found that drinking water quality notices lowered violations for some systems but not others this paper is the first empirical economic study of the impacts of mandatory information provision in the electric utility industry the disclosure programs considered here differ significantly from the tri information programs examined previously

a note on the role of energy in production abstract energy plays no role in the standard cobb douglas production function cdpf and a trivial role in a three factor cdpf where it is treated as a third input independent of labour and capital starting from an epistemological perspective we treat energy as an input to both labour and capital without which production is impossible we then derive an energy based cpdf ebcdpf in which energy plays a critical role we argue for the redefinition and measurement of real gdp in terms of exergy we conclude that the solow residual measures the contribution of exergy to growth and that the exponents in the ebcdpf should be based on cross country comparative data as suggested by mankiw 1995 rather than the cost share theorem

profit efficiency among basmati rice producers in pakistan punjab farm specific profit inefficiency among basmati rice producers was estimated from a variable coefficient profit frontier the mean level of inefficiency at farm resources and price levels was 28 with a wide range 5 87 average loss of profit was rs 1 222 per hectare socioeconomic factors related to profit loss were the farm household s education nonagricultural employment and a credit constraint institutional determinants of profit loss were a water constraint and the late application of fertilizer punjab wide benefits of increasing farmer s profit efficiency are large a 25 reduction in profit loss among basmati rice producers may generate over rs 240 million in extra profits each rice season rice is a major export commodity for pakistan generating about 2 5 billion pakistan rupees rs annually or 20 of foreign exchange earnings from commodity trade in the early 1980s two varieties dominate in pakistan s international trade in rice basmati 370 a high quality long grained aromatic variety and the medium long grained irri 6 distinct export markets exist for these rices over 90 of the basmati is exported to oil rich middle eastern nations while the mediumlong varieties are mainly marketed in southeast asia in 1983 the export price of basmati was about rs 7 900 per ton while the price of medium long grained varieties averaged rs 2 700 per ton pakistan has a comparative advantage in the international market for basmati but probably not for medium long grained rices azhar and mamhud historically pakistan had a near monopoly in international trade in basmati but now faces increased competition from thailand and the united states efferson therefore pakistan must strive to increase the efficiency of basmati production to retain its comparative advantage and competitive edge in foreign rice markets basmati 370 is a pure line selection made in

useful exergy is key in obtaining plausible aggregate production functions and recognizing the role of energy in economic growth portugal 1960 2009 abstract the role of energy in economic growth is controversial models based on aggregate production functions apf range from the neoclassical which downplay energy due to a cost share theorem but typically rely on exogenous total factor productivity tfp to the ecological economic which acknowledge energy s importance the validity of the apf concept itself is questioned here we apply cointegration analysis to identify apfs between output capital labor and possibly energy measured as primary energy or useful exergy we test for tfp growth by including a time trend we require that plausible apfs verify cointegration non negative output elasticities and granger causality linking inputs to output our method recognizes cases where a plausible apfs do not exist thereby addressing the apf critique b energy impacts growth directly c energy impacts growth indirectly through capital and labor we apply the method to portugal 1960 2009 considering standard and quality adjusted capital labor measures with a time trend or disregarding energy plausible apfs are never found without a trend plausible apfs are found only when considering capital energy labor combinations within these with quality adjusted capital and labor and useful exergy results are consistent with the cost share theorem but energy plays a central role through a constraint on all factors of production

trends in the development of ecological economics from the late 1980s to the early 2000s abstract as the contributions to ecological economics are very diverse recent years have seen some discussion on both how to delimit the field and in which direction it should develop the intention with this paper is to contribute to the discussion by outlining important trends in the development of the field from the late 1980s to the early 2000s the study is inspired by other studies in the sociology and history of science in particular by the theoretical framework regarding scientific fields as reputational organizations which draws attention to both cognitive and social aspects of the formation of a field the basis for the paper is a combination of literature studies interviews with key researchers in the field and participant observations the paper outlines the characteristic cognitive features of ecological economics at the time of the birth of the field it is then described how the development in ecological economics was influenced by broader social factors during the following years and how the field was shaped by the inflow and outflow of different groups of researchers the emergence of different research programmes is outlined as is the organizational development finally the characteristics of ecological economics are summarized and the future prospects are briefly assessed

a parametric approach to efficiency measurement using a flexible profit function although the idea of measuring productive efficiency goes back to farrell 8 the econometric estimation of it began with aigner lovell and schmidt 1 and meeusen and van den broeck 17 in aigner lovell and schmidt 1 and meeusen and van den broeck 17 and their extensions which incorporate either cost minimizing or profit maximizing behavior efficiency is measured relative to a frontier an alternative to the frontier approach that started with hopper 10 and lau and yotopoulos 15 is to measure efficiency mostly allocative without estimating any frontier in the latter approach allocative inefficiency defined as the deviations of the first order conditions of profit maximization or cost minimization is modeled through shadow virtual prices which are parametric functions of observed prices the shadow price approach is extensively used in the literature on efficiency measurement because it has an advantage over the frontier approach which requires distributional assumptions on the error terms especially in cross sectional models in empirical studies on the efficiency of regulated utilities it has been argued that due to the presence of rate of return and other regulations these firms optimize with respect to shadow prices instead of observed prices these studies often fail to consider the possibility that the firms under question may be technically inefficient as well which can affect allocation of inputs 1 this issue is important in both cost minimization and profit maximization cases this paper uses a profit maximization framework and develops a generalized profit function approach that accommodates both technical and allocative inefficiencies in the context of a panel data model the relationship between production technical inefficiency loss of output due to technical inefficiency and profit technical inefficiency profit loss due to technical inefficiency is derived for a flexible production function presently it is believed that the derivation of this relationship is only possible for the self dual production functions we show that if the profit function is translog some popular approaches used in modeling technical and allocative inefficiency are incorrect in particular we show that i models that fail to include technical inefficiency and consider only allocative inefficiency yield biased and inconsistent parameter estimates ii if technical inefficiency is neglected the measure of technical change will be biased the generalized profit function developed here is capable of distinguishing between technical change and time varying technical inefficiency such a distinction is not possible if for example one uses

the relation between marginal product and price in us energy markets implications for climate change policy abstract this paper reports an empirical test of the axioms that describe the relationship between the marginal product and price of factor inputs in us energy markets to do so i estimate a reduced form of a production function that represents the amounts of various energy types that are required to produce a given level of output the partial derivative of this production function is used to calculate the change in output that is generated by a marginal change in the use of coal oil natural gas or electricity a partial adjustment model is used to estimate the relation between the marginal product and price of coal oil natural gas and electricity the results indicate that rational agents manipulate their use of coal oil natural gas and electricity so that the marginal product of these energies adjust to changes in the relative prices of these energies because the marginal products of oil and natural gas are greater than coal less than one heat unit of oil or natural gas is needed to substitute for one unit of coal and this increases the quantity of carbon emissions that can be abated by interfuel substitution the time required to achieve these reductions may be longer than thought previously because of the slow rate at which the relative marginal product adjusts to relative price

health behavior health knowledge and schooling the positive correlation between schooling and good health is well documented one explanation is that schooling helps people choose healthier life styles by improving their knowledge of the relationship between health behaviors and health outcomes that is schooling improves the household s allocative efficiency in producing health this empirical study uses direct measures of health knowledge to test this explanation part of the relationship between schooling and the consumption of cigarettes alcohol and exercise is explained by differences in health knowledge however most of schooling s effects on health behavior remain after differences in knowledge are controlled for

exploring futures for amazonia s sierra del divisor an environmental valuation triadics approach to analyzing ecological economic decision choices in the context of major shifts in boundary conditions abstract this text presents a new methodological approach to ecological economic analysis employing georgescu roegen s flow fund theory of economic process it offers an alternative to monetary valuation based analyses and aims to contribute toward advancing work concerned with addressing complex ecological economic questions as complete wholes the methodology is demonstrated through reference to the empirical case of a proposed rail link between peru and brazil which would cut across the sierra del divisor of western amazonia connecting the pacific and atlantic coasts and further opening up the amazon commodity frontier in order to analyze the potential impacts of the rail link four flow fund representations of economic process two at the regional and two at the local level are developed in order to juxtapose two alternative political economy contexts that might govern the rail link s impacts in the region one where conservation is prioritized over cash income and one where it is not our results suggest that completion of the rail link under the current political economy context which prioritizes cash income over conservation is likely to have substantial negative consequences for forest conservation in both peru and brazil and for local livelihoods throughout the region

the limits of monetization in valuing the environment a reply to gsottbauer et al we welcome the attention of gsottbauer logar and van den bergh thereinafter glv to our contribution however their critique misrepresents what our article was trying to do so it merits a response our article offered a framework for assessing the conditions under which one may or may not engage with processes that value nature in money terms glv argue that first we confuse monetary valuation methods with pricing policies and that most of what we have to say may be relevant for the latter but not for the former second they argue that the assessment criteria we propose are either obvious or unconvincing third they contend that the examples we give to illustrate the applicability of our criteria are not representative and finally they suggest that our concern with whether a particular monetary valuation study or pricing policy contributes to enclosures and neo liberalism is ideological an

consumer health information and the demand for medical care this paper is an empirical investigation of consumer health information using a new direct measure of information the econometric approach treats both information and physician visits as endogenous variables when estimating the demand for medical care the results show that information increases the probability that a consumer uses medical care but that conditional on use the quantity of care consumed is not related to information the results contradict specific implications of models where physicians can create or induce demand for their own services several results suggest that poorly informed consumers tend to underestimate the productivity of medical care in treating illness copyright 1990 by mit press

the rhetorics of ecological economics since the early 1980s there has been a lively discussion about the rhetoric of economics ecological economists however so far have not tried to incorporate this discussion into their work this paper is a first step towards including the discourse on rhetoric into the self awareness of ecological economics after a brief outline of what this discourse is about the importance of metaphors as one aspect of rhetoric is examined connections of the rhetorical discourse to ecological economics as a post normal science are shown it is argued that two rhetorics of ecological economics can be distinguished internal and external rhetoric while the former refers mostly to methodological issues the latter is of particular importance for the political impact that ecological economics can have finally some suggestions for research are made

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

a theory of impact philanthropy this article develops a new model of altruism called impact philanthropy an impact philanthropist is someone who wants to personally make a difference while that motive is straightforward its logical implications are significantly different from other models of philanthropy for example the contributions of other donors can reduce an impact philanthropist s charitable fulfillment as a result cooperation among impact philanthropists can reduce aggregate giving in addition impact philanthropy can lead to a codependent relationship between givers and receivers in which both benefit from the other finally the model suggests a conflict between charitable organizations and its donors concerning the allocation of charitable gifts in particular a charitable organization prefers to spread a donor s contribution across many goods whereas a donor prefers to target his or her contribution at a specific good d 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

does ecological economics have a future contradiction and reinvention in the age of climate change abstract this paper addresses the role of neoclassical methodologies in ecological economics and the contradictions these methodologies pose to the field s critical founding principles we first consider robert costanza s treatment of nicholas stern s global deal and then survey climate change related articles published in this journal over the past five years this survey reveals how mainstream neoclassical methodologies dominate discourse and do so by marginalizing more critical political economy analyses this situation imperils the field s founding vision of a no growth steady state it also fails to address the related growth dynamics of capitalism without such a critical treatment the field s formal embrace of methodological pluralism actually entails an ideological empiricism that renders ecological economics theoretically incoherent this situation undermines the field s historical promise as an alternative economic paradigm ecological economics now faces a problematic future its survival in a form faithful to its founding vision will require an explicit choice to address its internal contradictions and reinvent itself in ways relevant to our contemporary context without such a choice ecological economics will likely succumb to an implicit acceptance of the hegemony of mainstream economic methodologies and their pro growth imperatives

the social and environmental influences of population growth rate and demographic pressure deserve greater attention in ecological economics abstract ecological economists accept that the global population cannot grow forever but papers discussing the relevance of population growth and the prospects for minimising it are rare in the literature on ecological economics even these papers treat population almost exclusively as an issue relating to the scale of human activity the many ways in which population growth rate and local demographic pressures drive negative social and environmental trends remain largely unarticulated the mistaken belief that action to reduce population growth requires involuntary control of people s reproduction has fostered a taboo on the topic and deterred analysis of demographic influences on issues such as inequality unemployment debt social cohesion and conflict this paper discusses how some of these influences relate to ecological economics discourses on natural resources labour capital and governance it argues that population stabilisation is not only ultimately required for a steady state economy but can be a powerful lever in a virtuous cycle of effects diminishing resource consumption and environmental impacts reversing income inequality and undermining the leverage enjoyed by capital over labour a richer more integrated treatment of population dynamics would greatly enhance the ecological economics research agenda in the coming decades

information as regulation the effect of community right to know laws on toxic emissions abstract there is growing academic and policy level interest in the use of information as quasi regulatory mechanisms such as toxic release inventory tri and green labels mandatory disclosure requirements have been touted as market based incentives that may affect firm behavior we provide new evidence on the effectiveness of disclosure requirements by examining firm behavior in response to disclosures of tri emissions we find that firms with the largest stock price decline on the day this information became public subsequently reduced emissions more than their industry peers this is consistent with the view that financial markets may provide strong incentives for firms to change their environmental behavior

parametric estimation of technical and allocative inefficiency with panel data the error components approach to estimating allocative inefficiency imposes restrictive assumptions on the distributions of the errors and functional form the parametric approach does not require special assumptions about the error distribution or technology but typically assumes technical efficiency or restrictive functional forms the parametric approach also allows for systematic firm responses to shadow prices the authors generalize the parametric approach to a panel data setting and show that input and firm specific allocative inefficiency as well as firm specific technical inefficiency can be identified and estimated using a flexible functional form this is demonstrated empirically with an application to u s airlines copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

why ecological economics needs to return to its roots the biophysical foundation of socio economic systems abstract ecological economics was formally established in 1989 with the ambitious vision of developing a new economic paradigm embedding the social and economic systems in the biophysical world ecological economics had its roots in the biophysical understanding of economics that pioneers of the field georgescu roegen 1971 odum 1971 daly 1977 jansson 1984 martinez alier 1987 and others developed while studying the thermodynamic bedrocks shared by natural and social systems subsequently however ecological economics has explicitly but controversially adopted a big umbrella approach to methodological pluralism focusing more on topics such as valuing nature and its functions rather than attempting to understand and quantify the biophysical roots of economic activities biophysical economics was established in response to these concerns focusing more on developing analyses and models of the transformations of nature to generate wealth and approached mostly from an energy and material flows perspective the present paper argues that to achieve its original vision ecological economics must return to its biophysical roots collaboration between the two fields will help the next generation of thinkers to address the socio ecological challenges of the 21st century requiring an energy transformation called for by aspirations such as the green new deal and the un sustainable development goals

the case for methodological pluralism abstract ecology and economics share the same greek root both address complex systems ecology consists of numerous approaches to understanding natural systems energetics population biology food web models hierarchy theory to mention just a few within ecology field knowledge and the reporting of new observations are well respected economics on the other hand is dominated by one pattern of thinking and standard of proof the market model and econometrics within economics field knowledge and observations per se are little valued agreement on a correct method is frequently taken as an indication of the maturity of a science the argument is developed in this paper that all the aspects of complex systems can only be understood through multiple methodologies the agreement on method within economics however seems to reflect stronger pressures within the discipline for conformity than for truth relative to ecology since ecological economics seeks to understand a larger system than either economics or ecology seeks to understand a diversity of methodologies is appropriate and pressures to eliminate methodologies for the sake of conformity should be avoided

testing efficiency hypotheses in joint production a parametric approach n recent years a great deal of research has been directed to the modelling and measurement of technical and allocative efficiency in production with few exceptions this research has been restricted to single product firms however recent developments in duality theory have facilitated the extension of this research to multi product firms the main purpose of this paper is to develop a model of the multiproduct firm in which the possibilities of both technical and allocative inefficiency are incorporated in an econometrically useful way the first model we develop includes a nonneutral2 type of technical inefficiency and three distinguishable types of allocative inefficiency output mix input mix and scale each type of inefficiency is costly to the firm in the sense that each causes a reduction in profit beneath the maximum value attainable under full efficiency the cost of each type of inefficiency depends on the magnitude of the inefficiency and the structure of the underlying production technology in the second model we develop technical inefficiency remains nonneutral but allocative inefficiency is not generally decomposable into output mix input mix and scale components however both technical and allocative inefficiency remain costly to the firm the cost of each type of inefficiency depending on its magnitude and the structure of the underlying production technology we model the technology of a competitive profit maximizing multi product firm with the dual profit function this enables us to use hotelling s lemma to generate a system of profit maximizing output supply and input demand equations these equations are then modified to allow for the possibility of technical and three types of allocative inefficiency a virtue of using the profit function to represent production technology is that it permits a straightforward comparison of maximum profit under full efficiency with actual profit and with the profit that would result from any combination of the four types of inefficiency this enables us to allocate the cost of inefficiency to each of four components our model of inefficiency is parametric and is embedded in a generalized leontief profit function although any flexible specification of the profit function can be used the model is developed in sections ii iv estimation of the model is considered in section v an empirical example designed to illustrate the workings of the model is discussed in section vi section vii concludes

the effect of information on product quality evidence from restaurant hygiene grade cards this study examines the effect of an increase in product quality information to consumers on e rms choices of product quality in 1998 los angeles county introduced hygiene quality grade cards to be displayed in restaurant windows we show that the grade cards cause i restaurant health inspection scores to increase ii consumer demand to become sensitive to changes in restaurants hygiene quality and iii the number of foodborne illness hospitalizations to decrease we also provide evidence that this improvement in health outcomes is not fully explained by consumers substituting from poor hygiene restaurants to good hygiene restaurants these results imply that the grade cards cause restaurants to make hygiene quality improvements

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

behavior of the firm under regulatory constraint a recent article by akira takayama discusses an earlier paper by harvey averch and leland l johnson on fair rate of return regulation of public utilities although takayama p 255 agrees with averch and johnson s general conclusions that a firm will tend to increase its investment with the introduction of an active constraint on its rate of return he criticizes the a j argument as being confusing ambiguous and in error takayama then attempts a clarification and presents a new formulation which leads to the a j result quoted above this comment will discuss several of takayama s criticisms in addition to showing that the so called a j effect cannot be derived from the basic assumptions made by both averch and johnson and takayama 1 we will show that the very assumptions used to prove the a j effect by defining the region of x require an assumption that the a j effect exists in the first place

new foundations for ecological economics abstract ecological economics has been repeatedly described as transdiciplinary and open to including everything from positivism to relativism i argue for a revision and rejection of this position in favour of realism and reasoned critique looking into the ontological presuppositions and considering an epistemology appropriate for ecological economics to meaningfully exist requires rejecting the form of methodological pluralism which has been advocated since the start of this journal this means being clear about the differences in our worldview or paradigm from others and being aware of the substantive failures of orthodox economics in addressing reality this paper argues for a fundamental review of the basis upon which ecological economics has been founded and in so doing seeks improved clarity as to the competing and complementary epistemologies and methodologies in part this requires establishing serious interdisciplinary research to replace superficial transdisciplinary rhetoric the argument places the future of ecological economics firmly amongst heterodox economic schools of thought and in ideological opposition to those supporting the existing institutional structures perpetuating a false reality of the world s social environmental and economic systems and their operation

the approach of ecological economics this paper discusses the major tenets of ecological economics including value pluralism methodological pluralism and multi criteria policy assessment ecological economics offers viable alternatives to the theoretical foundations and policy recommendations of neoclassical welfare economics a revolution in neoclassical economics is currently taking place and the core assumptions of welfare economics are being replaced with more realistic models of consumer and firm behaviour this paper argues that these new theoretical and empirical findings are largely ignored in applied work and policy applications in environmental economics as the only heterodox school of economics focusing on the human economy both as a social system and as one imbedded in the biophysical universe and thus both holistic and scientifically based ecological economics is poised to play a leading role in recasting the scope and method of economic science

ecological economics as a policy science rhetoric or commitment towards an improved decision making process on sustainability abstract with sustainability issues currently attracting increasing political and policy attention this paper examines the impact of the rise of ecological economics in the policy world and its potential influence on the decision making process this study emphasises that ecological economics development is coevolved with and modified to fit specific social economic political and cultural contexts as a policy science ecological economics is context sensitive and action oriented explaining why it is so and what to do about it has become imperative for ecological economists this paper attempts to address the questions such as what are the macroeconomic conditions and political processes that make the formulation and implementation of ecological economic policy possible how should this alternative social reality engage with the dominant decision making process does ecological economics provide the necessary means for prescribing policy measures to achieve sustainable development endeavouring to understand these dimensions of ecological economics has been a dynamic social process and understanding this complex process might provide an opportunity to bridge the divide between policy rhetoric and reality in practice rather than maintain the status quo in order to achieve an improved decision making process on sustainability it highlights the imperative to explicitly study the institutional setting through which sustainable development policy discourse is mediated

an ecological monetary theory abstract while money is critical to the modern world ecological economics does not have a theory of money that is applicable to its theoretical framework and policy prescriptions accordingly the field often defers to an orthodox conception of money that is historically inaccurate and ontologically inconsistent the dualized nature of western philosophy informs orthodoxy by defining money according its function as a medium of exchange this conceptualization creates logical and historical problems that can be addressed by exploring an interdisciplinary literature that defines money according to its nature as a social relation expressed in a unit of account this paper develops an ecological monetary theory that is simultaneously rooted in a socio historical understanding of money s nature and in an ontology of social and ecological embeddedness such a theory provides ecological economists and others concerned with social and ecological equity with a framework from which to address monetary systems and policy

toxics release information a policy tool for environmental protection abstract this study examines investor reactions to the repeated public disclosure of environmental information about firms in the chemical industry and the effectiveness of this information as a decentralized mechanism for deterring their pollution by allowing investors to benchmark the performance of firms repeated provision of the toxics release inventory led firms to incur statistically significant negative stock market returns during the one day period following the disclosure of that information in the years 1990 1994 these losses had a significant negative impact on subsequent on site toxic releases and a significant positive impact on wastes transferred off site but their impact on total toxic wastes generated by these firms is negligible

price distortions and resource use efficiency in indian agriculture a restricted profit function approach this paper develops a generalized profit function that incorporates price distortions resulting from imperfect market conditions sociopolitical and institutional constraints as well as technical and allocative inefficiency the model is applied to test 1 the appropriateness of the neoclassical profit function and 2 the effect of education and farm size on allocative performance using farm level data from indian agriculture empirical results reject the neoclassical profit maximization hypothesis based on market prices in favor of the general model with price distortions and therefore help to improve allocation of inputs and output farm size is found to reduce price distortions only for small farmers copyright 1992 by mit press

ecological economics in relation to democracy ideology and politics two recent studies and policy documents are discussed in the present article one is a un report prepared by experienced politicians as input into the 2012 rio de janeiro conference the other a st

economics for the future beyond the superorganism abstract our environment and economy are at a crossroads this paper attempts a cohesive narrative on how human evolved behavior money energy economy and the environment fit together humans strive for the same emotional state of our successful ancestors in a resource rich environment we coordinate in groups corporations and nations to maximize financial surplus tethered to energy tethered to carbon at global scales the emergent result of this combination is a mindless energy hungry co2 emitting superorganism under this dynamic we are now behaviorally growth constrained and will use any means possible to avoid facing this reality the farther we kick the can the larger the disconnect between our financial and physical reality becomes the moment of this recalibration will be a watershed time for our culture but could also be the birth of a new systems economics and resultant different ways of living the next 30 years are the time to apply all we ve learned during the past 30 years we ve arrived at a species level conversation

economic inefficiency and environmental impact an application to aquaculture production abstract in industries characterized by frequent innovation and high productivity growth substantial variation in produced quantity and input use may occur leading to increased costs an effect that has received little attention is that inefficiency can exacerbate environmental impacts this effect is particularly important if environmentally damaging inputs are overused in addition to increasing firms costs such inefficiency can also increase the environmental impact of the firm s activity this makes the degree of inefficiency in an industry an issue for environmental regulators in this paper we estimate technical and allocative efficiency for a sample of norwegian salmon farmers our results show that both technical and allocative inefficiency on average are significant in explaining the level and variation in farm costs and that the main environmental impact due to inefficiency from the norwegian salmon aquaculture industry has its origin in technical inefficiency

environmental and ecological economics a citation analysis this study looks at two distinct questions dwhat have been the most influential journal articles in environmental economics and ecological economics over the 10 year period 1994 2003 t and dhow much overlap is there between the fields of environmental and ecological economics t we examine the references in all articles published in jeem and ecological economics ee over this period for each of these two fields a list of the top articles and top journals cited by articles published in jeem and ee is presented we also present some results based on our study of the isi journal citation reports we find that there is a significant overlap between the two fields at the journal level the two journals cite similar journals there is a correlation of 0 34 between the number of citations received by the journals that are most cited and the correlation is even higher if journal self citation is excluded the main differences are that ecological economics tends to cite but not be cited by general natural science journals more often than environmental economics does environmental economics cites more heavily from journals rather than other publications and citations in environmental economics are more concentrated on particular journals and individual publications however there is much less similarity at the level of individual articles nonmarket valuation articles dominate the most cited articles in jeem while green accounting sustainability and the environmental kuznets curve are all prominent topics in ee d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

energy eroi and quality of life abstract the near and long term societal effects of declining eroi are uncertain but probably adverse a major obstacle to examining social implications of declining eroi is that we do not have adequate empirical understanding of how eroi is linked directly or indirectly to an average citizen s ability to achieve well being to evaluate the possible linkages between societal well being and net energy availability we compare these preliminary estimates of energy availability 1 eroi at a societal level 2 energy use per capita 3 multiple regression analyses and 4 a new composite energy index lambert energy index to select indicators of quality of life hdi percent children under weight health expenditures gender inequality index literacy rate and access to improved water our results suggest that energy indices are highly correlated with a higher standard of living we also find a saturation point at which increases in per capita energy availability greater than 150 gj or eroi above 20 1 are not associated with further improvement to society

information and effort in contingent valuation surveys application to global climate change using national internet samples this contingent valuation study investigates the issues of information access and respondent effort and is based on a series of national internet samples the focus is on a split sample treatment basic information bi versus enhanced information ei in the latter significantly expanded information is provided about global climate change and the kyoto protocol using a referendum format we compare the treatment effect bi versus ei on willingness to pay wtp we develop measures of respondent effort in accessing optional information through the technology of web based surveys and jointly model effort and wtp using a simultaneous estimation approach results support the use of the joint modeling approach for objective measures of respondent effort and wtp respondent effort is shown to be positively and significantly related to wtp however use of the optional menu is rather modest counts of pages and time spent and is highly variable both across pages and respondents

the ultrasocial origin of the anthropocene abstract the current geological epoch has been dubbed the anthropocene the age of humans we argue that the roots of the anthropocene lie in the agricultural revolution that began some 8000 years ago unique human psychological and cultural characteristics were present in our distant hunter gatherer past but in terms of the biophysical impact of our species agricultural represented an unequivocal and decisive evolutionary break with the transition to agriculture human society began to function as a superorganism functioning as a single unit designed by social natural selection to produce economic surplus where environmental conditions were permitted early human agricultural societies followed the same pattern as a few social insects and exhibited explosive population growth complex and detailed division of labor intensive resource exploitation territorial expansion and a social organization favoring the survival and growth of the supergroup over the well being of individuals within the group similar economic forces lie behind ultrasociality in social insects and humans increased productivity from the division of labor increasing returns to scale and the exploitation of stocks of productive resources exploring the evolutionary mechanisms behind ultrasociality offers insights into the growth imperative that threatens the stability of the earth s life support systems

eroi of different fuels and the implications for society abstract all forms of economic production and exchange involve the use of energy directly and in the transformation of materials until recently cheap and seemingly limitless fossil energy has allowed most of society to ignore the importance of contributions to the economic process from the biophysical world as well as the potential limits to growth this paper centers on assessing the energy costs of modern day society and its relation to gdp our most important focus is the characteristics of our major energy sources including each fuel s energy return on investment eroi the eroi of our most important fuels is declining and most renewable and non conventional energy alternatives have substantially lower eroi values than traditional conventional fossil fuels at the societal level declining eroi means that an increasing proportion of energy output and economic activity must be diverted to attaining the energy needed to run an economy leaving less discretionary funds available for non essential purchases which often drive growth the declining eroi of traditional fossil fuel energy sources and the effect of that on the world economy are likely to result in a myriad of consequences most of which will not be perceived as good

more information is not always better the case of voluntary provision of environmental quality this paper adds to the literature on the voluntary provision of public goods by showing that the warm glow that individuals gain depends on the perceived relative effectiveness of contributions we use a new survey on pro environment behaviors attitudes and knowledge and find that individuals act in accordance with their beliefs regardless of whether or not these beliefs are accurate and engage more frequently in activities that have a higher perceived impact on environmental quality we find that low provision of the public good is greater among people who believe they cannot do much for the environment and do not consider themselves environmentalists

the shallow or the deep ecological economics movement ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation shadow pricing sustainability measures and squeezing nature into the commodity boxes of goods services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic financial and banking discourses there are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social psychological political and ethical facets the relationship with nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching however this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation a shallow movement allied to a business as usual politics and economy has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values if instead ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society the implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st century author s abstract

in search of substantive economics comparing today s two major socio metabolic approaches to the economy mefa and musiasem ecological economics is largely about the substantive in kind study of the economy as opposed to a purely formal economic analysis in money following kapp polanyi and others this article argues that substantive economics is interested in the biophysical and politico institutional structure of the economy rather than in correct prices within a particular axiomatic conformity as in formal economics after outlining the history of the substantive vs formal dichotomy we point out that socio metabolic analyses are ecological economics most significant contribution towards substantive economics the core of this article then compares what could be today s two best candidates for offering a distinctive foundation to ecological economics as substantive economics material and energy flows analyses mefa and multi scale integrated analyses of societal and ecosystem metabolism musiasem while mefa is more easily comparative and historical musiasem is more integrative and comprehensive yet we also argue that socio metabolic analyses represent one of the three pillars of substantive economics and that both mefa and musiasem are still weak in integrating the politico institutional structure second pillar and a theory of needs third pillar if such an integration was done ecological economics would be in a position to offer a full fledge alternative substantive economic theory

ecological economics at a crossroads during the past decade theoretical and empirical advances in neoclassical economics have resulted in the virtual rejection of the two pillars of traditional welfare economics rational economic man and perfect competition surprisingly many ecological economists are moving closer to the discredited neo walrasian welfare model just at the time it is being replaced within the mainstream we call for a return to the roots of ecological economics and an engagement with current developments in mainstream theory this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

economic schools of thought on the environment investigating unity and division how do ecological and heterodox economists differ if at all from each other and from neoclassical economists addressing environmental problems in 2009 we probed this question by conducting an international survey across these communities namely at conferences of the european society for ecological economics the association for heterodox economics and the european association of environmental and resource economists the research was designed to gain insight into the extent to which ecological economics can be described as heterodox and a distinct field from orthodox environmental and resource economics conflicting visions of ecological economics have led to a prevalence of neoclassical articles and thought mixed in amongst more heterodox work we introduce a novel classification of work in the field of environmental policy in order to test for the existence of differences in terms of methodological and ideological approaches how heterodox economists understand environmental issues is also an important question to answer if there is to be more collaboration between them and ecological economists the findings have implications for cooperation and the future direction of both ecological and heterodox economics

influencing the perception of what and who is important in ecological economics abstract in a recent article using citation analysis hoepner et al 2012 make strong claims to have identified the most influential works authors journals and institutions in a hypothetical field they call environmental and ecological economics this paper shows that their work is biased by its framing far from the non subjective approach they claim and highly sensitive to minor data errors more than this the exercise can be seen as another example of how ecological economics is susceptible to suppression by a dominant mainstream economic perspective which attempts to override belittle and dismiss a whole range of alternative thought including that which is heterodox interdisciplinary from the natural sciences and based in the non economic social sciences ecological economics is not the same as agricultural resource or environmental economics and if it were it would be pointless neither can it be understood or treated as a subfield of resource and environmental economics as done by hoepner et al 2012 i argue that the study promotes a limited perspective on social environmental and economic problems that includes an implicit political and ideological framing what is most influential important or high quality in ecological economics is certainly not defined by such work

economic inefficiency in a revenue setting the norwegian whitefish fishery the main focus in the inefficiency literature is on suboptimal input use and how this causes increased costs due to technical and allocative inefficiency production or cost functions are then typ

the second generation of ecological economics how far has the apple fallen from the tree this paper examines the discourse produced in the academic journal ecological economics from its inception in 1989 and compares this discourse with that of the field of environmental economics i used methods for discourse analysis alceste and iramuteq on 6308 abstracts of papers published in four journals namely ecological economics the journal of environmental economics and management environmental values and environmental and resource economics published between 1989 and 2013 the results suggest that the discourses of ecological economics and environmental economics have grown closer over time the semantic classification of co occurrent terms used in ecological economics indicates increasing significance of the notions of ecosystem services and of monetary valuation i argue that this trend is parallel to costanza s career path which suggests the rise of a tacit recognition of the new environmental pragmatic scientific approach i conclude with some of the implications for ee of promoting this kind of discourse to such an extent

influential publications in ecological economics revisited we revisit the analysis of costanza et al 2004 ecological economics of influential publications in ecological economics to discover what has changed a decade on we examine which sources have been influential on the field of ecological economics in the past decade which articles in the journal ecological economics have had the most influence on the field and on the rest of science and on which areas of science the journal is having the most influence we find that the field has matured over this period with articles published in the journal having a greater influence than before an increase in citation links to environmental studies journals a reduction in citation links to mainstream economics journals and possibly a shift in themes to a more applied and empirical direction

what is ecological economics ecological economics addresses the relationships between ecosystems and economic systems in the broadest sense these relationships are the locus of many of our most pressing current problems i e sustainability acid rain global warming species extinction wealth distribution but they are not well covered by any existing discipline environmental and resource economics as it is currently practiced covers only the application of neoclassical economics to environmental and resource problems ecology as it is cur rently practiced sometimes deals with human impacts on ecosystems but the more common tendency is to stick to natural systems ecological economics aims to extend these modest areas of overlap it will include neoclassical environmental economics and ecological impact studies as sub sets but will also encourage new ways of thinking about the linkages between ecological and economic systems we have chosen the name ecological economics for this area of study because it implies a broad ecological interdisciplinary and holistic view of the problem of studying and managing our world the earth from space cover of the journal reflects this global holistic perspective we did not intend to imply with the ordering of the two words in the title that the journal is mainly an economics journal it is intended to be a new approach to both ecology and economics that recognizes the need to make economics more cognizant of ecological impacts and dependencies the need to make ecology more sensitive to economic forces incentives and constraints and the need to treat integrated economic ecologic systems with a common but diverse set of conceptual and analytical tools there was much discussion of other possible names such as economic ecology or ecology and economics or some conjoining of the two words that to me end up being confusing tongue twisters like ecolnomics or econology but ecological economics seemed to get closest to the mean ing we desired while still being evocative to the uninitiated