Towards a global multi-regional environmentally extended input-output database

This paper presents the strategy for a large EU-funded Integrated Project: EXIOPOL (“A New Environmental Accounting Framework Using Externality Data and Input-Output Tools for Policy Analysis”), with special attention for its part in environmentally extended (EE) input-output (IO) analysis. The project has three principal objectives:

(a)

to synthesize and further develop estimates of the external costs of key environmental impacts for Europe;

(b)

to develop an EE IO framework for the EU-27 in a global context, including as many of these estimates as possible, to allow for the estimation of environmental impacts (expressed as LCA themes, material requirement indicators, ecological footprints or external costs) of the activities of different economic sectors, final consumption activities and resource consumption;

(c)

to apply the results of the work to external costs and EE I-O for illustrative policy questions.

     

Socio-ecological explanations for crowding-out effects from economic field experiments in southern Africa

Economic and psychological literature mentions three conditions under which the crowding-out effect of pro-social behaviour is likely to occur and to crowd out citizens' moral obligations to behave co-operatively. I use a framed field experiment on joint extraction from a common-pool resource (CPR) where the crowding-out effect has already been reported before in combination with the trust game carried out in farming communities of Namibia and South Africa to replicate these conditions. The research design and the cross-cultural setting enable to explicitly control for these effects. The results of the experiments support that the crowding-out effect depends on:

•

The nature of the external intervention (controlling vs. supportive external intervention)

•

The degree of participants self-determination (high vs. low self-determination in the group)

•

A society's norms of trust and reciprocity (high vs. low trust within the society)

The results imply that outside regulations aiming to conserve natural resources risk worsening the situation when neglecting democratic legitimization as well as local community norms.     

Literature-Related Discovery (LRD): Introduction and background

Discovery in science is the generation of novel, interesting, plausible, and intelligible knowledge about the objects of study. Literature-related discovery (LRD) is the linking of two or more literature concepts that have heretofore not been linked (i.e., disjoint), in order to produce novel, interesting, plausible, and intelligible knowledge (i.e., potential discovery). LRD has two main components that differ in their methodological approach to discovery:

•

Literature-based discovery (LBD) produces potential discovery through analysis of the technical literature alone.

•

Literature-assisted discovery (LAD) produces potential discovery through both analysis of the technical literature and use of selected authors of that literature. These authors generate potential discovery as proposers, workshop/panel participants, or in other active roles.

LRD offers the promise of large amounts of potential discovery, for the following reasons:

•

the burgeoning technical literature contains a very large pool of technical concepts in myriad technical areas;

•

researchers spend full time trying to cover the literature in their own research fields and are relatively unfamiliar with research in other especially disparate fields of research;

•

the large number of technical concepts (and disparate technical concepts) means that many combinations of especially disparate technical concepts exist

•

by the laws of probability, some of these combinations will produce novel, interesting, plausible, and intelligible knowledge about the objects of study.

This Special Issue presents the LRD methodology and voluminous discovery results from five problem areas: four medical (treatments for Parkinson's Disease (PD), Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Raynaud's Phenomenon (RP), and Cataracts) and one non-medical (Water Purification (WP)). In particular, the open discovery systems (ODS) aspect of LRD (start with problem, generate potential solution(s), or vice versa) is addressed, rather than the closed discovery systems (CDS) aspect (start with problem and potential solution(s), generate linking mechanism(s)). In the presentation of potential discovery, a ‘vetting’ process is used that insures both requirements for ODS LBD are met: concepts are linked that have not been linked previously, and novel, interesting, plausible, and intelligible knowledge is produced.The potential discoveries for the PD, MS, Cataracts, and WP problems are the first we have seen reported by this ODS LBD approach, and the numbers of potential discoveries for the ODS LBD benchmark RP problem are almost two orders of magnitude greater than those reported in the open literature by any other ODS LBD researcher who has addressed this benchmark RP problem. The WP problem is the first non-medical technical topic to have been addressed successfully by ODS LBD.In all cases, but especially the medical, we have barely scratched the surface of quantity and quality of potential discovery that could be generated with adequately resourced studies. Based on the many potential discoveries we have obtained, and the promise of far more potential discoveries with adequately resourced studies, we have generated a new paradigm relative to discovery: while the key challenge in traditional discovery is finding a needle-in-a-haystack, the key challenge in ODS LRD (used appropriately) is handling the overwhelming amount of potential discovery available.Additionally, it is our thesis, as the specific ODS LBD studies will demonstrate, that synergistic combinations of our mainly individual potential discoveries are themselves potential discoveries. We demonstrate throughout this Special Issue the synergistic effects of combining a very few potential discoveries or interesting core literature concepts, and believe that these synergistic benefits are operable at larger scales of combination. In the final lessons-learned paper of this Special Issue, we also show that providing evidence for the synergistic benefits of large numbers of potential discoveries or interesting core concepts is very difficult due to the large numbers of potential combinations involved.One variant of the LAD operational mode (identifying disparate discipline recipients for Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) notifications in order to stimulate proposals of new ideas from these disparate disciplines) is presented for WP. Other possible applications of LAD include:

1.

Recipients of solicitation announcements (other solicitations similar to BAA, journal Special Issue calls for papers, etc),

2.

Participants in Workshops, Advisory Panels, Review Panels, Roadmaps, and War Games,

3.

Points of Contact for Field Science Advisors, Foreign Field Offices, Program Officer site visits, and potential transitions.

     

A new methodology for anticipating STEEP surprises

In technological forecasting and futures research on social change, the term wild card (a.k.a. disruptor or STEEP surprise), traditionally refers to a plausible future event that is estimated to have low probability but high impact should it occur.This article introduces:

1.

A Type II Wild Card, defined as having high probability and high impact as seen by experts if present trends continue, but low credibility for non-expert stakeholders of importance.

2.

A four-level typology of wild cards, leading to a systematic methodology for monitoring the emerging awareness and credibility of high probability disruptors and for assessment of stakeholder-specific views about them.

An informal pilot test of the methodology both indicated that the approach has practical value, and highlighted the importance of highly plausible tipping points which could rapidly lead to massive disruption, either toward collapse or reformation in the complex adaptive systems (CAS) making up human civilization.For reasons of historical continuity, wild card-related nomenclature is used throughout the majority of this article although the term STEEP Surprise is advocated for further work. (STEEP being a frequently used acronym denoting five conceptual sectors of importance.)Suggestions for further work include:

•

Research on how to diminish the discounting of Type II phenomena by institutional leaders

•

Monitoring of transitions in the perceived credibility of critical Type II STEEP Surprises by thought leaders

•

A Snowball Survey of wisdom leaders having multidisciplinary expertise from all walks of life to identify specific Type II possibilities (especially positive ones), they see as having greatest importance

•

A Cooperative Clearinghouse on STEEP Surprises for sharing of intelligence on highly probable/highly disruptive events, together with plausible impacts and proactive policies.

     

A functional approach for studying technological progress: Extension to energy technology

This paper extends a broad functional category approach for the study of technological capability progress recently developed and applied to information technology to a second key case—that of energy based technologies. The approach is applied to the same three functional operations—storage, transportation and transformation—that were used for information technology by first building a 100 plus year database for each of the three energy-based functional categories. In agreement with the results for information technology in the first paper, the energy technology results indicate that the functional approach offers a stable methodology for assessing longer time technological progress trends. Moreover, similar to what was found with information technology in the first study, the functional capability for energy technology shows continual—if not continuous—improvement that is best quantitatively described as exponential with respect to time. The absence of capability discontinuities—even with large technology displacement—and the lack of clear saturation effects are found with energy as it was with information. However, some key differences between energy and information technology are seen and these include:

?

Lower rates of progress for energy technology over the entire period: 19-37% annually for Information Technology and 3-13% for Energy Technology.

?

Substantial variability of progress rates is found within given functional categories for energy compared to relatively small variation within any one category for information technology. The strongest variation is found among capability progress among different energy types.

?

More challenging data recovery and metric definition for energy as compared to information technology.

These findings are interpreted in terms of fundamental differences between energy and information including the losses and efficiency constraints on energy. We apply Whitney's insight that these fundamental differences lead to naturally modular information technology artifacts. The higher progress rates of information-based as opposed to energy-based technologies follows since decomposable systems can progress more rapidly due to the greater ease of independent as opposed to simultaneous development. In addition, the broad implications of our findings to studies of the relationships between technical and social change are briefly discussed.     

Infrastructure investment for a transition to hydrogen automobiles

This paper describes work undertaken in the MATISSE project to explore the potential for a sustainable hydrogen transition within Europe and the implications for infrastructure investment. Stakeholder engagement work conducted within MATISSE identified unsustainable aspects of current transport and desirable characteristics of sustainable hydrogen road transport. Key criteria were: emissions reduction, security of energy supply, affordability and economic competitiveness.Results from the ASTRA model show that a transition to hydrogen transport fuels would have an increase in GDP, employment and investment; and growth in a number of sectors (electronic, chemical, mechanical and automotive) associated with hydrogen fuel cell technology. A hydrogen diffusion model shows that in a few years after 2040 all cars in Germany could be hydrogen driven cars. Fast build-up of a network of at least 500 filling stations (in urban areas and at highways) is very important for the market acceptance of hydrogen vehicles and compared with subsidies for vehicles and fuel the necessary investments are very small. For fuel infrastructure:

•

Only a total amount of approx. 200 million Euros are necessary for infrastructure build-up in urban areas.

•

Additional support is needed for installation of hydrogen filing stations on highways (approx. 100 million Euros).

     

Is the CSR Craze Good for Society? The Welfare Economic Approach to Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

Welfare economic analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) equates CSR with the provision of private goods bundled with provision of public goods (or, in the symmetrical case, bundled with the curtailment of public bads). Two common examples are cause-related marketing and “green goods” where private goods are sold at premiums that are then used to pay for provision of public goods and/or curtailment of public bads. This paper expands upon the model of Besley and Ghatak (2007 Besley, T. and Ghatak, M. 2007. “Retailing Public Goods: The Economics of Corporate Social Responsibility,”. Journal of Public Economics, 91(9): 1645–1663. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) for the case of imperfect government to develop a complete typology for analyzing whether the provision/curtailment of public goods/bads will be best served by companies (through CSR), by imperfect governments or by non-profit organizations. Finally the paper discusses the main differences between the welfare economic approach to CSR and the general multi-disciplinary CSR literature.     

A competitive equilibrium for a warm-glow economy

The warm-glow model (Andreoni in J Political Econ 97:1447–1458, 1989; Econ J 100:464–477, 1990) of public goods provision has received widespread interest, yet surprisingly most attention has focused on the voluntary contribution equilibrium of the model, and only very little attention has been devoted to the competitive equilibrium. In this paper, we introduce the concept of competitive equilibrium for a warm-glow economy (henceforth, warm-glow equilibrium) and establish both existence and welfare properties. The warm-glow equilibrium concept may prove to be very useful to the normative and positive theory of public goods provision. First, it is a price-based mechanism achieving efficient outcomes. Second, not only could the warm-glow equilibria outcomes serve as a point of reference to measure free-riding and welfare loss but also, as suggested by Bernheim and Rangel (Behavioral Economics and Its Applications, 2007), in large economies they may be approximated by Walrasian equilibria outcomes.     

An institutional analysis of voter turnout: the role of primary type and the expressive and instrumental voting hypotheses

Recent events highlight primary type as an institutional variable that merits further examination in the economics literature on voter turnout. Using panel data for U.S. gubernatorial elections and treating primary type as a proxy for candidate deviation from the median voter, we test whether primary type changes voter turnout and whether that change is dominated by instrumental or expressive voting. The results show that states with more open primaries tend to have greater voter turnout in general elections, and that this increase reflects the effect of open primaries on expressive voting.

Unemployment and Welfare Participation in a Structural VAR: Rethinking the 1990s in the United States

A report by the Council of Economic Advisers (1997 Council of Economic Advisers. May 1997. “Explaining the decline in welfare receipt, 1993–1996”. May, Washington, DC Executive Office of the President [Google Scholar]) is the first of a group of studies, known as caseload studies, analysing the relationship between the US unemployment rate and the welfare participation rate, with special regard to the 1990s. We examine this relationship in a structural VAR model over the period of 1960–2000 and find that the unemployment rate does not help to predict the welfare participation rate while the converse is more likely to hold. These results are robust to state and year heterogeneity over a period of unprecedented positive correlation between unemployment and welfare participation, i.e. 1990–1998. Further, we find that a shock to the welfare participation rate has a contemporaneous impact on the unemployment rate while the converse is less likely to hold. The main conclusion is that several caseload studies may be based on the wrong assumption that the unemployment rate is an exogenous explanatory variable of the welfare participation rate.     

J. M. Keynes’ influence on institutional portfolio management

In the earlier part of his portfolio management career, J. M. Keynes pursued a short-term, asset allocation-based speculative approach to portfolio management, only to abandon it in the early 1930s in favor of a long-term, security selection approach based on identifying intrinsic value. It was the earlier Keynes who endorsed E. L. Smith’s 1924 Smith, E. L. Common Stocks as Long Term Investments. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1924. [Google Scholar] U.S. monograph, Common Stocks as Long Term Investments, encouraging his insurance company contacts to conduct a similar study in the United Kingdom. This suggestion was taken up in the 1920s and 1930s by U.K. insurance actuaries, whose lead was followed post-1945 by pension fund actuaries. Among the latter, George Ross Goobey is the most well-known, his name being closely associated with the Cult of the Equity, which, with the increasing formalization of institutional portfolio management over the last two or three decades, has transmuted into the Cult of the Benchmark. Underlying this latter cult is the emphasis on asset allocation, which can be traced back to Smith’s monograph. It is ironic that Keynes’ enduring influence is more likely to be felt through his endorsement of Smith rather than by the adoption of the genuine investment approach of his later career.     

Offsetting Versus Mitigation Activities to Reduce $$\hbox {CO}_{2}$$ Emissions: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis for the U.S. and Germany

This paper studies the voluntary provision of public goods that is partially driven by a desire to offset for individual polluting activities. We first extend existing theory and show that offsets allow a reduction in effective environmental pollution levels while not necessarily extending the consumption of a polluting good. We further discuss the impact of an increased environmental preference on purchases of offsets and mitigation activities. Several theoretical results are then econometrically tested using a novel dataset on activities to reduce \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) emissions for the case of vehicle purchases in the U.S. and Germany. We show that environmental preference triggers the stated use of \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) offsetting and mitigation channels in both countries. However, we find strong country differences for the stated purchase of \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) offsets. While such activities are mainly triggered by a high general awareness of the climate change problem in the U.S., the perception that road travel is responsible for \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) emissions to a large extent is more important for driver’s license holders in Germany.     

Trade,product variety and welfare: a quantitative assessment for mainland China

We calculate a variety of welfare gains for Mainland China, following the approach of Romer (1994 Romer, P. 1994. New goods, old theory, and the welfare costs of trade restrictions. Journal of Development Economics, 43(1): 5–38. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), who emphasized that proper modelling of the impact of trade restrictions on the number of available product varieties is crucial for quantifying the welfare impact of trade liberalization. The empirical work presented relies on direct measures of product variety calculated from highly disaggregated trade data. The emerging conclusion is that freer trade has indeed boosted welfare.     

Essential aggregation procedures on restricted domains of preferences

The restricted domains of individuals' preferences that permit the construction of Arrow social welfare functions and nonmanipulable voting procedures in which each of n voters has some power are characterized. In this context a domain is the Cartesian product of n sets of strict preference orderings. Variants of this result are obtained under the additional requirement of neutrality and in the case when alternatives are vectors whose ith components affect only the ith voter. Kalai and Muller's analogous result (J. Econ. Theory16 (1977), 457–469) concerning nondictatorial procedures is discussed and proved as a corollary to the main theorem.     

Effects of a blocking patent on R&D with endogenous survival activities

This study analyzes the effect of strengthening patent protection for innovation and economic growth by introducing a blocking patent into the endogenous growth model developed by Furukawa (Econ Lett 121(1):26–29, 2013a), which features survival activity of patent holders in the R&D sector with a variety-expansion model. Results show that strengthening patent protection can raise the economic growth rate and social welfare through an endogenous survival investment. Additionally, this study examines the effects of increasing subsidies for R&D. We find that increasing R&D subsidy rate can negatively affect economic growth and social welfare because of the investment for survival activities. This result shows the novel role of a blocking patent in determining innovation effects of R&D subsidies. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of patent breadth which is another patent instrument in this model on innovation and economic growth. Results show that the growth and welfare effects of the profit-division rule and the subsidy rate for R&D may vary with the size of patent breadth.