Designing optimal gain sharing plans to promote energy conservation

We analyze the optimal design of gain sharing plans to promote energy conservation. We show how the optimal plan varies as industry conditions and the regulator??s information change. We demonstrate the importance of allowing the energy supplier a choice among plans, some of which offer the prospect of both pronounced financial gains for superior performance and substantial losses for inferior performance.     

Forecasting the economic,energy, and environmental impacts of national energy plans, 1990–2000

The objective of this article is to project the energy, economic, and environmental trade-offs to the year 2000 of President Carter's energy policies. It compares the trade-offs resulting from the National Energy Act of 1978 (NEA) with those from the synfuels strategy of July 1979. A hybrid model is used that consistently links the interindustry forecasting model of the University of Maryland (INFORUM) and the strategic environmental assessment system model (SEAS) with the FOSSIL 79 and ECONOMY 1 models. The study concludes that both these scenarios will a) reduce the growth rate of the economy, b) increase investment at the expense of consumption, and c) develop energy resources but d) deteriorate the quality of the environment in the Mountain States. In particular, in the synfuels scenario, compared with the base case, the study concludes that in the year 2000 energy consumption will increase from 94 to 95 quads, the GNP will decrease from $1.95 to $1.94 trillion, and in the Mountain States the particulates will increase by 67%, sulfur dioxides will increase by 10%, and nitrogen oxides will increase by 40%.     

Motivating energy suppliers to promote energy conservation

We examine the design of regulatory policy to induce electric utilities to deliver the surplus-maximizing level of energy efficiency services, $e^{*}$ . The rebound effect (whereby increased energy efficiency stimulates the demand for energy) typically renders revenue decoupling insufficient in this regard. The additional financial incentive required to induce $e^{*}$ is shown to vary with such factors as the prevailing price of energy, the magnitude of the rebound effect, the extent of observable energy efficiency investments, and the utility’s objective.     

Technology forecast of space robots to the year 2000

Technology forecast of robots for performing assembly and maintenance tasks in space to the year 2000 is made on the basis of forecasting concepts of generation dynamics and precursors. Inputs were obtained from interviews with experts as well as literature review.     

Legacy sectors: barriers to global innovation in agriculture and energy

The US national innovation system has a dual structure: part suited to rapid innovation, and part stubbornly resistant to change. The complex, established ‘Legacy sectors’ that resist change, particularly disruptive innovation, share common features that obstruct the market launch of innovations, over and above the ‘valley of death’ and other obstacles that have been the traditional focus of innovation policy. Innovations in Legacy sectors must penetrate a well-established and well-defended technological/economic/political/social paradigm that favours existing technology, characterised by (1) ‘perverse’ subsidies and price structures that create a mismatch between the incentives of producers and broader social goals, such as environmental sustainability, public health and safety, and geopolitical security; (2) established infrastructure and institutional architecture that imposes regulatory hurdles or other disadvantages to new entrants (3) market imperfections beyond those faced by other innovations: network economies, lumpiness, economies of scale, split incentives, needs for collective action, and transaction costs (4) politically powerful vested interests, reinforced by public support, that defend the paradigm and resist innovations that threaten their business models (5) public habits and expectations attuned to existing technology and (6) an established knowledge and human resources structure adapted to its needs. Beyond these obstacles, more socially desirable technologies that are driven by environmental or other non-market considerations must overcome the lack of agreed replacement standards against which putative alternatives can be judged. We have developed a new, integrative analytic framework for categorising the obstacles to market launch faced by Legacy sectors, and earlier applied this method to energy, health delivery, the long-distance electric grid, building, and air transport. In energy especially, the requirement for innovation is sufficiently urgent that large-scale domestic and collaborative international research should take place even at the cost of possible competitive disadvantage and even if it is some time before the USA adopts carbon charges and thereby puts pressure on the prevailing paradigm of fossil fuel use. We now extend this method to sustainable agriculture. American paradigms in agriculture and in energy are exported worldwide, delaying the development and spread of needed innovations that are not consistent with them. Foreign manufacturers wishing to enter US markets must suit their products in these sectors to American paradigms, while American exports of technology may be insufficiently cost conscious or respectful of environmental sustainability. Developing countries are technology takers and suffer from asymmetric innovative capability. They need to choose sources of technology best suited to their situation. India and China constitute new competitive threats, but also represent ‘innovative developing countries’ that have large domestic markets in which they are launching innovations aimed at their lower income populations.     

Depreciation and the conservation of energy

It is argued that accelerating the rate at which firms can depreciate existing capital can move forward the date at which they will switch to more energy efficient processes. The price effect of inelastic industrial demand for energy might thereby be muted.     

Aspects of ecosystem persistence and the optimal conservation of species

Although ecologists have long recognized the salience of persistence in determining the static and the dynamic behavior of ecological systems, it is only very recently that economists have begun to study this concept in relation to the use of services that are provided by jointly determined ecological-economic systems (ecosystems). As such, there are very few studies of ecosystems that explicitly analyze the ecological and the economic aspects of this use issue. Given this state of affairs, this article has two objectives. First, a new method is used to formally describe and bound the notion of ecosystem persistence. This method explicitly incorporates the stochastic aspects of ecosystems. Second, the bound on persistence is used to study the problem of optimal species conservation.     

Applying tradable permits to biodiversity conservation: Effects of space-dependent conservation benefits and cost heterogeneity on habitat allocation

This paper is concerned with the cost-effective allocation of habitat for species under spatio-temporally heterogeneous economic development. To address the dynamic dimension of the problem we consider tradable development rights as the instrument of choice. A particular challenge in applying tradable development rights is that the conservation benefit of an individual habitat patch depends on its spatial relationship with other habitat patches and thus is an emergent rather than a fixed property. We analyse with a conceptual model the spatial and temporal dynamics of habitats in a region under a tradable development rights market that takes spatial interaction of habitats explicitly into account. In our analysis two different outcomes may emerge depending on the levels of spatial interaction and cost heterogeneity: an “ordered” structure where habitat patches are clustered in space and are stable over time, and a “disordered” structure where habitat patches are scattered in space and subject to high turnover of destruction and recreation. A high level of spatial interaction or a low level of cost heterogeneity favours an ordered structure while a low level of spatial interaction or a high level of cost heterogeneity favours a disordered structure.     

Economic development by the creation of new sectors

The basic theme underlying this paper is qualitative change taking place during economic development. These changes in the composition of the economic system should become one of the most important variables in models of economic growth and development. Our knowledge of the relationship between economic development and qualitative change, however, is still very limited. This paper attempts to shed light on some important aspects of the role played by qualitative change in economic development, by laying the foundations of a model in which changes in the composition of the economic system are endogenously generated by the evolution of the system itself and, in turn, affect its future development. The model has a strong Schumpeterian flavour in that the first entrepreneur entering a market enjoys a temporary monopoly. This temporary monopoly is eroded by the entry of imitators, that gradually increases the intensity of competition. The saturation is reinforced as the demand for what was a new product comes to be satisfied. In this way the adjustment gap initially created by the innovation is eliminated transforming a niche into a mature market, which becomes one of the routines of the economic system. As soon as a sector becomes saturated there is an increasing inducement for incumbent firms to exit and to create a new niche, where once more they will have a temporary monopoly. To put it in another, slightly different, form, we can say that economic development is a process in which new activities emerge, old ones disappear, the weight of all economic activities and their patterns of interaction change.JEL Classification: O0, O12; O30Correspondence to: Pier Paolo Saviotti     

Unemployment or protectionism: Some choices for the USA and Western Europe to the year 2000

This article reports on the economic implications to the USA and Western European economies after imposing protectionist trade policies on selected groups of imports till 2000. The effects of this policy are also presented for Japan and the non-oil-producing developing countries. Before discussing the results of the computations and the import restricting assumptions, a summary of the methodological framework, the World Input-Output Model, used in the computation is presented.     

On the marginal cost of public funds and the optimal provision of public goods

This paper argues that, in models with heterogeneous agents, the concept of the marginal cost of public funds (MCPF) will only be useful if it is compared with an analogous concept for the benefit side. The MCPF does not assume a unique value and is not particularly illuminating in and out of itself. Also gone is the benchmark status of MCPF = 1. Turning to the provision of public goods, using a mechanism design approach, the paper constructs a two-stage proof for Kaplow's [Kaplow, L., 1996. The optimal supply of public goods and the distortionary cost of taxation. National Tax Journal 49, 513–533.] proposition concerning the “irrelevance” of labor supply and distributional concerns in public good provision. This highlights the two fundamental ingredients for his result. First, the provision of public goods per se, when it satisfies the Samuelson's rule, is only potentially Pareto-improving. Second, the actual Pareto improvement will materialize when, or if, one reforms the income tax structure. If the reform is not forthcoming, the decision on public goods provision must rely on redistributional concerns. Finally, the paper generalizes Broadway and Keen's [Boadway, R., Keen, M., 1993. Public goods, self-selection and optimal income taxation. International Economic Review 34, 463–478.] result to a model with many types of agents, many private goods and without making any assumptions regarding which self-selection constraints are or are not binding.     

Biodiversity value and the optimal location of forest conservation sites in Southern Finland

Safeguarding biodiversity has been one of the most important issues in environmental and forest policies since the 1990s. In Southern Finland, decisions concerning further actions for the preservation of forest biodiversity will be made in the coming years. To support policy making, we present a multi-regional model that is applicable in determining the economically optimal regional allocation of conservation sites. Three habitat quality models are evaluated to calculate habitat quality indices used as a surrogate for a biodiversity value in a forest sector model. The scenarios presented provide information about the economic impacts of conservation choices on the forest sector. The overall economic impacts of conservation depend on its scale and regional allocation. Conserving land with high biodiversity value can have less adverse impact on the forest sector than conservation of typical commercial forest sites. When optimizing conservation set-asides, we found that set-asides targeted to certain regions possessing higher/lower than average relative share of ecologically valuable land, caused lower/higher adverse economic impacts on the forest sector. Because it is expensive to search land suitable for conservation, these regions could be respectively favoured/avoided when asking forest owners to offer their land for the new conservation program in Southern Finland, which will be based on voluntariness.     

2000年理论经济学研究综述（下）

二、微观经济学研究和宏观经济学研究的新进展 (一)制度变迁过程的研究 制度变迁过程一直是我国新制度经济学研究的重点.杨瑞龙等在其中国制度变迁方式转换的三阶段假说的基础上,进一步提出了一个关于中国制度变迁的模型--阶梯式的渐进制度变迁模型.杨认为,改革初期,我国的制度变迁有很强的政府主导性,中央政府是主要的制度供给者,此时的制度变迁为"供给主导型制度变迁方式";改革进行到一定阶段后,地方政府在改革中的作用日渐扩大,此时属"中间扩散新制度变迁方式";随着改革的进一步深入和市场主体的确立,我国的制度变迁方式将逐渐过渡到与市场经济内在要求相一致的需求诱致型制度变迁方式,这就是中国制度变迁的三阶段假说.     

2000年理论经济学研究综述（上）

一、政治经济学和社会主义经济理论热点问题讨论 (一)关于深化对劳动和劳动价值论的认识及收入分配问题 中共中央"十五"计划建议提出:"在经济发展的同时,不断增加城乡居民收入,特别是低收入者的收入.深化收入分配制度改革,坚持效率优先、兼顾公平的原则,实行按劳分配、多种分配方式并存的制度,把按劳分配与按生产要素分配结合起来.鼓励资本、技术等生产要素参与收益分配.随着生产力的发展,科学技术工作和经营管理作为劳动的重要形式,在社会生产中起着越来越重要的作用.在新的历史条件下,要深化对劳动和劳动价值论的认识.建立健全收入分配的激励机制和约束机制."     

The emergence of extended metropolitan regions in ASEAN: towards the year 2000

"This article analyses the growth of large Extended Metropolitan Regions in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the period since 1960. The analysis reveals two trends. First, urbanization levels in ASEAN countries are rapidly increasing. By the year 2000, almost 40 per cent of the population will be urban residents. Second, these accelerating processes are creating giant urban regions, called Extended Metropolitan Regions. Analysis of demographic patterns of the emergence of the major urban regions of ASEAN...reveals that these are major areas of economic growth, with industrialization, building development and leisure activities fuelling this process. However, this rapid growth is causing major problems of urban infrastructure provision, land use conflict and environmental deterioration."     

The energy cost of satisfying basic human needs

This article attempts to estimate how much energy is required to satisfy basic human needs; previous estimates of human energy needs exist but are found wanting. The analysis is based on the Latin American World Model, a simple econometric model that, assuming basic needs-oriented development and certain basic needs targets and considering three developing regions (Latin America, Africa, and Asia), determines per capita income levels at which basic needs are satisfied. Using figures for income and price elasticities of commercial energy demand and for noncommercial energy consumption from the literature, we calculated a range of 27 × 10³ to 37 × 10³ kcal/day per capita for the energy cost of meeting basic human needs. This energy cost range is below current per capita world energy consumption, implying that theoretically all people's basic needs could be met at today's world energy consumption level.     

The prospects of energy conservation: A different approach to the fuel demand for space heating

Zusammenfassung Die meisten empirischen Untersuchungen über das Ausmaß der jüngsten Energieeinsparungen verwendeten ökonometrische Beziehungen und Elastizitäten. Diese Arbeit jedoch geht von einer technischen Beschreibung des Services thermische Behaglichkeit aus. Basierend auf empirischem Datenmaterial über die Infrastruktur und das Klima der Stadt Wien werden sowohl die Aussichten und das Potential an Energieeinsparungen quantifiziert als auch der Effekt spezifischer Politiken. Für diesen Zweck wurde ein nichtlineares Optimierungsmodell mit disjunktiven Randbedingungen entwickelt und gelöst.

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Research leading to this paper was supported by a grant from the Austria Federal Ministry of Science and Research, and that support is gretefully acknowledged. We wish to thank P. J. Jansen for discussions on this topic and also the referees for their valuable comments on this paper.     

The contribution of weather variability to economic sectors

Every day, people make economic decisions based on the weather, affecting sales of companies in a wide range of economic sectors. In many cases, the impact of weather on sales is not constant from one season to the next. Yet, the existing research to estimate the influence of temperature on annual sales has not analysed the relationship per season, resulting in potential washout effects and underestimated weather impacts. Drawing upon French economic sectors for empirical evidence, we break down the analysis of the relationship between weather and monthly sales by season. Our methodology provides the cumulative annual contribution of weather to sales and allows deriving the maximum potential annual impact of adverse weather. With our results, analysts and risk managers can better understand the exposure to abnormal weather and consider the potential benefits of mitigating weather risk using the weather parameters we identify to structure bespoke index-based financial instruments.     

An input-output approach to forecasting gross domestic output and employment intensities by sectors

The purpose of this paper is to integrate two commonly known input-output models of Leontief and Stone for employment analysis. Although assumptions of Leontief model are somewhat different from Stone's model, the empirical analysis can be conducted ignoring the difference between competitive and noncompetitive imports in the initial stage. The Leontief model is used to make predictions of gross domestic output on the basis of predicted imports and final demand by sectors. The predicted output is used to derive employment by sectors for a target year and this in turn is used in Stone's input-output framework for the analysis of total labour intensity by sectors. The approach on the estimates of labour intensity by sectors is illustrated using Japan's input-output data.     

2000年中国宏观经济的几个问题

２０００年中国经济发展面临的困难不少，但是经过努力，保持适度快速增长的目标是完全有可能实现的，因为目前确实存在着一些有利因素。对此，我们根据近几年国民经济的运行情况，对一些关键问题进行重新认为和认真对等从而采取切实可行的对策，争取在２０００年使国民经济发展取得新成绩，并为２１世纪我国经济的扶持定局事展奠定一个良好而坚实的基础。