Measuring fossil resource inequality—A case study for the UK between 1968 and 2000

This paper quantifies fossil resource inequalities amongst income quintiles in the UK between 1968 and 2000. It calculates a resource-based Gini coefficient using an input-output based resource allocation model.The results show that the Gini coefficient for total fossil resource consumption grew by 24% over the time period. By comparison the Gini coefficient for overall household expenditure rose by only 13%. The increase in resource inequality was prompted by the rising demand by high income quintiles for goods and services such as: “fuel and light” (heating and lighting the home), “car use” (private transportation), “recreation”, “travel” and “other services”. The analysis shows further that the Gini coefficient for “direct” fossil resources (“fuel and light” and “car use”) was lower and rose less steeply than the Gini coefficient for fossil resources embodied in other goods and services (indirect fossil resource requirements).Investigation into the drivers behind direct and indirect resource inequalities suggests a number of policy conclusions. Firstly, it is clear that policy initiatives to reduce fossil resource requirements (and the associated climate change impacts) must pay careful attention to distributional differences. Additionally, increased attention needs to be paid to the inequalities associated with indirect fossil resources consumption as well as the more visible direct resource inequalities.     

Do natural resources help or hinder development? Resource abundance,dependence, and the role of institutions

The resource curse literature presents conflicting evidence on the relationship between natural resources and development. We evaluate the direct effect of resources on developmental outcomes vis-à-vis their indirect effect through the weakening of political institutions using a 3SLS instrumental variable setup that simultaneously estimates development outcomes and institutions. We find that resource abundance and resource dependence affect development outcomes through different channels. While resource abundance generally has a direct positive effect on developmental outcomes, resource dependence has a stronger negative indirect effect that operates through its negative impact on institutional quality. The results also depend on the type of development outcome considered, with more consistent positive direct effects found for physical capital measures and stronger negative indirect effects for human capital development. The use of a simultaneous framework and dual measures of resources reconciles seemingly contradictory findings in earlier work.     

Assessing poverty-deforestation links: Evidence from Swat, Pakistan

This paper contributes to the debate on the links between poverty and forestry degradation; the view that due to poverty and the meeting of subsistence needs the poor use natural resources more intensively and hence cause them to degrade. Using the case of the forest rich Swat district, Pakistan, the paper addresses the issue empirically, historically, and institutionally. We do not find empirical support for the “poverty-environment nexus”, in that the poor and other income groups are equally resource dependent and also show that resource degradation is not associated with poverty. Our historical and institutional analyses provide alternative explanations for resource degradation. Selective and rotating ownership patterns, starting with the 17th century, provided limited incentive for resource conservation. It also created tension between de jure and de facto owners, that has persisted, and is one source of forest degradation. Ill-defined resource rights have also exacerbated the impacts of several other factors contributing to forest degradation which is compounded by poor management, corruption, and perverse incentives.     

相关政策能否营造系统化军民资源拓展空间——基于军民资源政策的实证评价

拓展军民资源是我国破解资源约束、实现结构优化、促进经济社会发展的重大战略举措。基于1978-2021年出台的79份军民资源政策,通过政策文本量化分析,构建基于PMC指数模型的军民资源政策评价指标体系,从政策属性、政策内容、政策理念、政策实施4个维度刻画军民资源政策对军民资源拓展的支撑效果。研究结果显示,不同等级军民资源政策均较好地贯彻了军民资源拓展的指导思想。其中,PMC指数得分较高的军民资源政策场域广阔,能够为更多场景中的军民资源拓展提供空间;PMC指数得分较低的军民资源政策能释放更多的治理资源存量,发挥政策聚焦优势和比较优势,提升军民资源拓展水平。     

Oil and political survival

Political economy theories on the “natural resource curse” predict that natural resource wealth is a determining factor for the length of time political leaderships remain in office. Whether resource wealth leads to longer or shorter durations in political office depends on the political incentives created by the natural resources, which in turn depend on the types of institutions and natural resource. Exploiting a sample of more than 600 political leadership durations in up to 152 countries, we find that both institutions and resource types matter for the effect that natural resource wealth has on political survival: (i) wealth derived from natural resources affects political survival in intermediate and autocratic, but not in democratic, polities; and (ii) while oil and non-lootable diamonds are associated with positive effects on the duration in political office, minerals are associated with negative duration effects.     

In defence of degrowth

This article defends the proposal of sustainable degrowth. A starting premise is that resource and CO2 limits render further growth of the economy unsustainable. If degrowth is inevitable, the question is how it can become socially sustainable, i.e. a prosperous and stable, rather than a catastrophic, descent. Pricing mechanisms alone are unlikely to secure smooth adaptation; a full ensemble of environmental and redistributive policies is required, including - among others - policies for a basic income, reduction of working hours, environmental and consumption taxes and controls on advertising. Policies like these, that threaten to “harm” the economy, are less and less likely to be implemented within existing market economies, whose basic institutions (financial, property, political, and redistributive) depend on and mandate continuous economic growth. An intertwined cultural and political change is needed that will embrace degrowth as a positive social development and reform those institutions that make growth an imperative. Sustainable degrowth is therefore not just a structuring concept; it is a radical political project that offers a new story and a rallying slogan for a social coalition built around the aspiration to construct a society that lives better with less.     

Specifying “regime” — A framework for defining and describing regimes in transition research

It is more and more agreed by research and policy that a long-term sustainability of industrialized societies cannot be achieved without fundamental changes at the level of different societal subsystems, such as the agricultural, transportation or water management systems. This view has lead to an increase in the amount of research carried out about the so-called “transitions”. Transitions comprise long-term, fundamental change in societal subsystems and are seen as encompassing co-evolutionary and mutually reinforcing processes in the economic, technological, institutional and socio-cultural domains. Transition research aims at understanding transitions and at finding methods that facilitate change directed towards societal goals (so-called “transition management”).This paper adds to the growing body of concepts of this young research strand. It suggests a framework for defining and describing “regimes”, the systems resulting from the broad and interdisciplinary view taken by transition research. The concept “regime” is of central importance for transition research, since it defines the level of societal systems on which transitions are mainly analysed. What actually is “the regime” to be researched and possibly managed is however usually not given through clear system boundaries but is a matter of framing and deliberation. In order to guide processes of regime identification, the paper develops five defining characteristics of regimes and gives a definition based on them. Further a method useful to structure and graphically represent knowledge about a regime is introduced. Such a structuring of knowledge is an important first step to understand how a regime “works”.     

SEEA-2003: Accounting for sustainable development?

The revised SEEA-2003 elaborates physical and hybrid environmental-economic accounts, details valuation techniques for natural resources, but rejects monetary valuation of environmental degradation as “modeling”. Preference for physical accounting and corresponding loss of systemic coherence (as compared to the SEEA-1993) prevents meeting the proclaimed objective of assessing sustainable development.     

Measuring resource inequalities: The concepts and methodology for an area-based Gini coefficient

Although inequalities in income and expenditure are relatively well researched, comparatively little attention has been paid, to date, to inequalities in resource use. This is clearly a shortcoming when it comes to developing informed policies for sustainable consumption and social justice. This paper describes an indicator of inequality in resource use called the AR-Gini. The AR-Gini is an area-based measure of resource inequality that estimates inequalities between neighbourhoods with regard to the consumption of specific consumer goods. It is also capable of estimating inequalities in the emissions resulting from resource use, such as carbon dioxide emissions from energy use, and solid waste arisings from material resource use. The indicator is designed to be used as a basis for broadening the discussion concerning ‘food deserts’ to inequalities in other types of resource use. By estimating the AR-Gini for a wide range of goods and services we aim to enhance our understanding of resource inequalities and their drivers, identify which resources have highest inequalities, and to explore trends in inequalities. The paper describes the concepts underlying the construction of the AR-Gini and its methodology. Its use is illustrated by pilot applications (specifically, men's and boys' clothing, carpets, refrigerators/freezers and clothes washer/driers). The results illustrate that different levels of inequality are associated with different commodities. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some possible policy implications of the AR-Gini.     

信息技术与企业竞争优势的关系

通过对信息技术相关文献的研究提出了基于资源基础观的理论框架。研究结果表明,仅有信息技术并不能产生可持续的竞争优势,但企业通过提高信息技术能力而获得无形的、充足的人力资源和商业等资源来获得竞争优势,同时信息技术能力需要信息技术成熟度来展现,资源基础观有助于解释为什么有些企业通过应用同样的信息技术而能够优胜于其它企业。     

Institutions,governance and incentives in common property regimes for African rangelands

The general distinctions between open access, state property, common property and private property are now well established in the academic literature. When applied to African rangelands, however, common property admits a wide variety of resource management regimes. To formulate effective policies it is necessary to understand the structure and operations of particular regimes. In this paper we discuss three examples of common property regimes, two from the southern African nation of Lesotho and one from the west African nation of Senegal, to illustrate some of the key characteristics of common property regimes. In particular, it is important to understand the structure of governance, the types of institutions that govern behavior, and the compatibility between governance, institutions and individual incentives. A common property regime can only be effective if its institutions are compatible with the structure of governance. The extent of its effectiveness also depends upon the incentives and expectations of individuals expected to enforce the rules of the institutions or comply with their terms. At present, most African governments lack the organizational capacity and political will necessary to implement state property regimes, official regulations on resource use, or individual property rights for rangelands resources. In many cases it is more appropriate for governments to define and enforce group rights to particular resources, then help to establish conditions in which internal group dynamics yield efficient resource management outcomes.     

水资源可持续利用及其管理制度的创新

本文以资源可持续利用与制度安排之间的关系为基础，联系我国目前水资源的现状和在管理中存在的问题，分析了我国水资源未实现可持续利用的主要原因：一是在市场经济条件下未形成合理的水价机制，二是未形成集中统一，具有权威的管理机构，三是水资源保护意识不强，污水处理措施不得力，最后针对这些问题从制度创新的角度提出建议。     

A coevolutionary model for promoting agricultural sustainability

This article presents a coevolutionary model of agricultural development that is based on observations from the environmental history of agriculture and the need for addressing development processes toward sustainability. It asserts that the challenge of agricultural sustainability can be fruitfully addressed within an analytical framework that consciously and explicitly considers agricultural development as consisting of processes of coevolution involving agriculture and the surrounding ecological and socioeconomic systems. Widening the processes to include strong interconnectedness with national and global systems with respect to off-farm resources and farm outputs has led to various agro-ecological problems. Strengthening local interaction and interconnectedness in a rural-urban context is found to be essential for developing a system of sustainable agriculture. Such development requires influencing many subsystems and implementing changes in production methods and land use as short-term responses to the problem, and technological development, resource allocation and changes in values as long-term responses. It also requires some sustainability principles and indicators in order to direct actions and to facilitate communications, which can be derived from the model. Applying the model on Swedish agricultural sustainability during the twentieth century reveals some, probably, important findings for “building” sustainable agriculture and lends support to the usefulness of the model.     

Constitutional “Rules” and Intergenerational Fiscal Policy

This paper analyzes the impact of alternative political institutions on sustainable fiscal policies. We study the choice of intergenerational transfers as outcomes of an infinite social security game among successive selfish median voters. Majoritarian systems accord the current median voter maximum fiscal discretion but no direct influence over future policy. This political arrangement sustains, among others, dynamically inefficient transfers and volatile, non-stationary sequences. Constitutional rules award to the minorities veto power over fiscal policy changes proposed by the majority. This unanimity provision is equivalent to partial precommitment. Under constitutional rules, sustainable fiscal policies feature Pareto efficient, non decreasing transfer sequences.     

Scenarios of technology and innovation policies in Europe: Investigating future governance

In Europe, public research, technology and innovation policies are no longer exclusively in the hands of national authorities: increasingly, national initiatives are supplemented by, or even competing with, regional innovation policies or transnational programmes, in particular the activities of the European Union. At the same time, industrial innovation increasingly occurs within international networks. Are we witnessing a change of governance in European innovation policy? Based on some theoretical assumptions concerning the relationship between the “political systems” and “innovation systems” in Europe, the paper speculates about the future governance of innovation policies, trying to pave ways for empirical analyses. It sketches three scenarios stretching from (1) the idea of an increasingly centralised and dominating European innovation policy arena to (2) the opposite, i.e., a progressive decentralisation and open competition between partly strengthened, partly weakened national or regional innovation systems and finally to (3) the vision of a centrally “mediated” mixture of competition and cooperation between diverse regional innovation cultures and a related governance structure.     

Democracy,visibility and public good provision

We examine the role of visibility in influencing government resource allocation across a multiplicity of public goods. We show that a “visibility effect” distorts governmental resource allocation such that it helps explain why governments neglect provision of essential public goods, despite their considerable benefits. We show that greater democratization widens the gap in resource allocation between more visible (such as famine prevention) versus less visible (such as malnutrition prevention) public goods, up to an intermediate level of democracy. Beyond this level, this gap decreases. Furthermore, public goods with low visibility are prone to multiple equilibria in resource allocation, with voter expectations being shown to be important.     

Poverty and resource dependence in rural India

Previous studies of rural households in developing countries have tended to find that the dependence of these households on common-pool resources declines with income. Our study of households in Jhabua, India, finds a more complex relationship. Using the share of resource income in total long-run or “permanent” income as our dependence measure—which we argue is more appropriate than the short-run income-based measure commonly used in the literature—we find that for households that collect any resources at all, dependence exhibits a U-shaped relationship with income. That is, the poorest and richest households depend more on resources than households with intermediate incomes. The poorest and richest households are also found to be least likely to collect, however, indicating that resource use at the income extremes is bimodal—either zero or above average. Moreover, the observed trends for resources as a whole are not mirrored in those for individual resources. Dependence on fuelwood and dung declines with income, for example, while dependence on fodder and construction wood increases. These findings suggest that common-pool resources are a productive source of income not just for the poor but also for the rich, and that improvements in the stocks of these resources can potentially form the basis of poverty reduction efforts in these economies.     

Do increases in energy efficiency improve environmental quality and sustainability?

Governments world-wide increasingly see energy efficiency as an important aspect of sustainability. However, there is a debate in the literature as to whether the impact of improved energy efficiency on reducing energy use might be partially, or more than wholly, offset through “rebound” and “backfire” effects. This paper clarifies the theoretical conditions under which such effects would occur and explores their likely significance using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Scottish economy. We find that for Scotland a general improvement in energy efficiency in the production sectors of the economy initially produces rebound effects that eventually grow into backfire. Energy use ultimately increases in response to an efficiency gain and the ratio of GDP to CO₂ emissions falls. The economic factors underpinning rebound effects are straightforward: energy efficiency improvements result in an effective cut in energy prices, which produces output, substitution, competitiveness and income effects that stimulate energy demands. However, the presence of strong rebound or even backfire does not mean that efficiency-enhancing policies are irrelevant: rather it suggests that such policies operating alone are insufficient to generate environmental improvements. The implication is that a co-ordinated portfolio of energy policies is required.     

Natural resource accounting for Indian states — Illustrating the case of forest resources

Our main objective is to set out and apply a SEEA-based methodology to reflect the true value of forest resources in India's national and state accounts. We establish that a “top-down” approach using available national databases is both feasible and desirable from a policy perspective. In this paper, we address four components of value creation in forests: timber production, carbon storage, fuelwood usage, and the harvesting of non-timber forest products. The results of our analysis suggest that prevailing measures of national income in India underestimate the contribution of forests to income. The income accounts of the Northeastern states in particular are significantly understated by these traditional (GDP/GSDP) measures. We are also able to identify some states which performed poorly in the context of our sustainability framework, reflecting natural capital losses due to degradation and deforestation. Our results highlight the need to integrate natural resource accounting into the national accounting framework in order to generate appropriate signals for sustainable forest management and for the conservation of forest resources which are widely used by the poor in India, as well as being significant stores of national wealth.     

Power fluctuations and political economy

We study (constrained) Pareto efficient allocations in a dynamic production economy where the group that holds political power decides the allocation of resources. For high discount factors, the economy converges to a first-best allocation where labor supply decisions are not distorted. For low discount factors, distortions do not disappear and fluctuate over time. Most importantly, the set of sustainable first-best allocations is larger when there is less persistence in the identity of the party in power (because this encourages political compromise). This result contradicts the common presumption that there will be fewer distortions when there is a “stable ruling group”.