Enforcement of Intellectual Property,Pollution Abatement,and Directed Technical Change

We theoretically investigate the interaction between endogenous enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs) and tax-financed pollution abatement measures. IPRs affect dirty and clean intermediates alike such that higher IPR enforcement may promote the transition to the clean technology, if this technology is productive enough. If the green technology is relatively unproductive, higher IPRs promote the dirty technology while pollution is increasing. As households are due to subsistence consumption subject to a hierarchy of needs, the level of IPR enforcement as well as the level of abatement measures depends on the state of technology and is increasing during economic development. Thus, if the incentive to enforce IPRs is low the level of abatement measures is also low. This argument provides a theoretical foundation for the observed clash of interests in international negotiation rounds regarding the harmonization of IPR protection and actions to combat climate change.     

Technical Change and Measuring Pollution Abatement Costs: An Activity Analysis Framework

The cornerstones of studies that estimate the effectof environmental regulations on an economy areestimates of the pollution abatement costs incurred bythe manufacturing and electric utility sectors.However, there are concerns regarding the accuracy ofthe surveys used to generate these cost estimates.This paper demonstrates that technical change tends toresult in an increasing share of pollution abatementcosts being impossible to measure. This finding hasimportant implications for estimating the productivityeffects of environmental regulations, developingregulatory budgets, and data collection effortsrelated to environmental accounting.     

Pollution Abatement Subsidies and the Eco-Industry

This paper considers the combination of pollution taxes and abatement subsidies when some polluting firms procure their abatement goods and services from an oligopolistic eco-industry. The regulator must here cope with two simultaneous price distortions: one that comes from pollution and the other which is caused by the eco-industry’s market power. In this context, we show that taxing emissions while subsidizing polluters’ abatement efforts cannot lead to first-best, but the opposite occurs provided it is the eco-industry’s output which is subsidized. When public transfers also create distortions, welfare can be higher if the regulator uses only an emission tax, but subsidizing abatement suppliers while taxing emissions remains optimal when the eco-industry is concentrated.     

财政分权、政府激励与环境治理

本文运用中国省级面板数据构建计量模型,分析了在财政分权的体制下,地方政府激励模式对环境污染和治理的影响.实证结果表明,在以GDP为考核指标的激励下,财政分权显著地提高了各种工业污染的排放量,降低了工业污染治理投资额;同时,工业化和城镇化进程加剧了环境污染程度和治理难度.环境问题的改善需要相关部门对地方政府考核机制做出适当调整,地方政府应在其中发挥更为积极的作用.     

Abatement and Permits when Pollution is Uncertain and Violations are Fined

This paper considers a firm’s choice of abatement and of the number of permits if actual pollution is stochastic such that full compliance cannot be ensured. This straightforward extension induces non-trivial and unexpected comparative static properties, such as: permits and abatement can be either substitutes or complements, higher fines can lower the number of acquired permits (or abatement), and higher permit prices can reduce abatement. Yet integrating these reactions into a (competitive) permit market eliminates puzzling features. This is an additional justification of tradable permits over standards, where regulators must cope with potentially counterproductive firm reactions. A first version of the paper was written at the School of Finance and Economics, University of Technology, Sydney and I am grateful for the enjoyed hospitality. I am also grateful for the valuable comments from an anonymous referee.     

The Impact of Foreign Aid Linked to Infrastructure and Pollution Abatement

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of foreign aid taking into account environmental quality. We develop a dynamic equilibrium model in which public investments in both infrastructure and pollution abatement can be co‐financed using domestic resources and international aid. We consider untied aid, aid fully tied to either infrastructure or abatement and aid equally tied to both expenditures. We find that when the extent to which agents are affected by environmental problems is taken into account, then, regardless of the chances of substitution between factors, transfers linked to both infrastructure and pollution abatement may be the best welfare‐enhancing alternative.     

Air Pollution and Sick-leaves

During the last decade an increasing amount of studies have investigatedthe relationship between air pollution and human health effects. In thisstudy we investigate how these effects in turn induce reduced labourproductivity in terms of sick-leaves, which is an important factor inassessment of air pollution costs in urban areas. For this purpose weemploy a logit model along with data on sick-leaves from a large office inOslo and different air pollutants. Our results indicate that sick-leaves aresignificantly associated with particulate matter (PM₁₀), while theassociations with SO₂ and NO₂, are more ambiguous. We also tryto estimate the induced social costs in terms of lost labour productivity andincreased governmental expenditures, although these estimates are moreuncertain.     

Lethal Effects of Pollution and Economic Growth: Efficiency of Abatement Technology

The accumulation of pollution negatively impacts human health. Extreme increases in pollution, in particular, may have lethal implications for human beings, and, indeed, all living organisms. This paper thus devises a new model of economic growth that takes into account these lethal effects of accumulated pollution via a pollution threshold to show two key results. First, if an abatement technology is relatively inefficient, there exists a stationary steady state in which consumption and pollution stop growing. Second, if the abatement technology is sufficiently efficient, there exists a path along which pollution decreases at an accelerating rate until it finally reaches zero. In this case, consumption grows at a constant rate.     

Valuing The Beneficts of Air Pollution Abatement Using a Health Production Function A Case Study of Panipat Thermal Power Station, India

The Indian economy today is highly prone to industrial pollution and ismaking compliance decisions in order to meet environmental standards.Environmental regulations impose significant costs upon industry that arefairly high and, therefore, require economic justification. This justificationcan be given by estimating the benefits associated with these costs. Whilethe scientific rationale behind air quality preservation is well understood,its economic rationale for a developing country like India, has to beverified. The objective of the present paper is to estimate the economicvalue that people in an urban area in India (Panipat Thermal Power Station(PTPS) Colony in Panipat, Haryana) place upon improving the air quality.The dose-response method, based on the Gerking and Stanley (1986) model,is used to estimate the economic benefits of air quality improvement. Theseestimates range from one to two percent of monthly income. Income andhealth status variables were significant determinants of peoples'willingness to pay (WTP) for air quality improvements. This lends supportto the neo-conventional wisdom `act now to protect the environment beforeit is too late'. These people are ready to pay for environmentalimprovements. We do believe, however, that the relatively successfulapplication of the dose response method at PTPS colony suggests that thetechnique can be more widely applied in developing countries like India.     

国际石墨烯技术与产业发展态势研究

自Andre Geim和Konstantin Novoselov发现从石墨中有效分离石墨烯的方法以来,石墨烯受到了各国政府及产业界的广泛重视。美国、欧盟各国和日本及韩国等国家,相继开展了大量石墨烯研发计划和项目,各国均以应用和产业化为研发重点及导向,十分注重研发成果的商业化应用。当前,石墨烯技术开始进入快速成长期,正在迅速向技术成熟期跨越,其研发主要集中在4个领域:传感器、储能和新型显示、生物医学及半导体材料。有相当数量的石墨烯研发项目已顺利完成并进入商业化准备期,各国政府纷纷制定了石墨烯"商业化时间表",主流企业成为石墨烯技术研发的主体力量。我国在石墨烯技术研发与产业化方面具备一定基础,但仍待进一步布局,期望所做研究能为我国石墨烯技术研发与产业发展提供借鉴。     

技术创新与市场的碰撞--"铱星计划"与"小灵通"的案例比较研究

市场风险是任何一个技术创新项目必须面对的问题，本文通过对两个案例的比较研究。在一个泛相似的技术平台上，对二者目标市场定位、市场风险的差异作了深刻的剖析，并给出了当技术创新遭遇市场时的几点启示。     

Health and Economic Impact of Air Pollution in Jakarta

Jakarta is one of the most polluted cities in the world. Air pollution in Jakarta is above the safe limits specified by the World Health Organization. It is estimated that the health cost of Jakarta's air pollution in 1999 reached $US220 million. In 2001 the government planned to launch a program to control vehicle emissions. This paper aims to estimate economic impact of this program. To achieve this goal, the paper estimates the economic costs of air pollution in Jakarta for the year 2015 with and without the program.     

Flows of Air Pollution,Ill Health and Welfare

We provide a theoretical framework for measuring welfare when pollution influences economic growth by impairing health and driving up defensive medical expenditures. We demonstrate the usefulness of our framework in practice by applying it to data from Swedish valuation studies designed according to the accounting principles suggested here. We estimate that the negative health effects of nitrogen dioxide emissions amount to 0.6% of GDP in Sweden. We also show that a corrective Pigouvian tax should internalize the direct disutility, reduced labor productivity, and increased healthcare expenditures caused by pollution. According to our calculations, harmful health impacts alone (excluding ecosystem effects) justify 65% of the current Swedish tax on nitrogen dioxide.      

The New Geopolitics of Disease: Between Global Health and Global Security

This article describes the emergence of a new geopolitics of disease following the end of the Cold War and offers a framework for thinking about it. Three main questions are asked. First, why is disease now a geopolitical issue? Second, how has this new geopolitics emerged? And third, what are the implications of the emergence of disease as a geopolitical issue for the meaning and practice of global health? It is argued that disease is now seen as a geopolitical issue in terms of four main dimensions: destabilisation, sovereignty, the instrumentalisation of health, and geopolitical economy. Second, this new geopolitics has emerged in the context of larger debates about globalisation, development and security, and has emanated primarily from Northern institutions. Third, drawing on critical approaches to security, it is suggested that while the securitisation of health offers certain benefits, it also carries risks. The article identifies a number of critical tensions in the new geopolitics of disease as a way of negotiating these risks and anchoring the concept of global health security in a larger vision of health in an era of globalisation.     

全球制造网络与本土汽车制造业国际竞争力提升

本文对本土汽车业国际竞争力的测度结果表明,在国内市场本土企业经营效率明显低下,在国外市场本土企业产品尤其是轿车和零部件产品的国际竞争力较弱。本土汽车业国际竞争力不强的重要原因是封闭的生产组织体制和跨国公司的分割式产业组织布局,导致本土汽车制造业陷入升级的低端锁定诅咒。为此,中国本土汽车制造业应通过生产组织体制的创新,实现在全球制造网络当中的将本土制造优势和国际技术创新资源的有机协同,逐步获得汽车产业的知识创新能力和掌控汽车产品的价值势力。     

Trade,Strategic Environmental Policy,and Global Pollution

This paper examines the effects of international trade in a model with global pollution that accumulates over time because of production emissions in each country. If countries cooperatively determine their environmental policies, autarky and free trade in the absence of trade costs generate the same optimal solution. By contrast, if environmental policies are determined noncooperatively, the effects of trade on global pollution and welfare are ambiguous because policy games can result in multiple equilibria. Although trade increases both the lower and upper bounds of the pollution stock, whether trade expands the range of possible steady‐state pollution levels is ambiguous. The analysis then extends to consider trade costs.     

Local versus Global Assessment of Mobility*

Mobility indices are popular tools designed to quantify the extent of income changes by aggregating “local” distributional change into a “global” scalar according to some rule. For some mobility measures, this aggregation rule is only implicit in their standard definition. We derive an insightful approximation to the (statistical) aggregation rule for the important class of mobility indices introduced by Shorrocks (Journal of Economic Theory 19 (1978), 376–93) and further generalized by Maasoumi and Zandvakili (Economic Letters 22 (1986), 97–102), which enables us to characterize their normative properties. We also develop methods for estimation and inference. A substantive empirical contribution emerges from the comparison of mobility between the United States and Germany. Our methods reveal why income mobility is higher in Germany than in the United States: Higher German mobility in the bottom of the distribution is combined with an implicitly higher weighting by the mobility index at the bottom.     

雾霾污染、政府治理与经济高质量发展

本文使用2004—2013年中国286个地级及以上城市PM2.5浓度这一独特的雾霾数据,采用劳动生产率来度量经济发展质量,系统考察了雾霾污染对中国经济发展质量的影响及其传导机制,并创新性地选取能够控制雾霾污染空间溢出效应的空气流动系数以及能够全面度量地方政府环境政策和治理力度的政府环境治理指标作为减缓雾霾污染变量内生性的两个工具变量,在两阶段最小二乘的统一框架内估计了政府环境治理的减霾效果和对中国经济发展质量的影响。研究发现:雾霾污染显著降低了中国经济发展质量;城市化与人力资本是雾霾污染影响中国经济发展质量的两个重要传导渠道;政府环境治理能够有效降低雾霾污染从而促进经济发展质量的提升;雾霾污染对大中城市经济发展质量的负面影响显著高于小城市,且随时间推移雾霾污染的负面效应越来越显著。本文的政策启示是,经济发展质量的提高是经济发展方式转变的前提,政府治霾有助于提升大气环境和经济发展质量,助推中国经济的高质量发展。