Why is Japan’s carbon emissions from road transportation declining?

Average fuel efficiency of vehicles improved substantially over the last three decades in Japan. Yet, the carbon emissions from on-road passenger vehicles continued to increase until 2000, and then turned to a steadily declining trend. We empirically investigate this disparity. To that end, we apply an analogue of the Copeland-Taylor decomposition, combined with an empirically estimated behavioral model of car ownership and utilization choice, to economically decompose vehicle carbon emissions into the scale, composition, and technique effects over our study period, 1990–2015. We find that exogenous demographic changes such as population size, driver’s license holdings, or labor migration across regions can only explain this disparity partially. After accounting for endogenous changes in household’s geographically-explicit transport demand by the estimated behavioral model, the predicted emissions match the time path of the observed emissions surprisingly well. Of all the factors in the behavioral model, the fuel cost per unit of driving accounts for the largest share of the total variation in the observed emissions. Our result indicates that 60% of the technique effect is offset by the perverse effect of induced transport demand due to the lower fuel cost. Importantly, the induced demand comes from both the intensive margin (driving) and the extensive margin (car ownership).     

Risk in international business and its mitigation

While risk mitigation and management preparedness of MNEs have escalated to the top of the corporate agenda, international business literature is lacking pertinent conceptual and empirical studies. As an opener to this special issue, we offer several perspectives on country risk and its mitigation. We discuss conceptual and empirical challenges in researching risk in international business. We conclude with a commentary on the six papers included in this special issue on international business risk.     

Internationalisation and risk: Literature review,integrative framework and research agenda

Based on an in-depth review of 134 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1971 and 2018, this article presents a systematic accumulation and analysis of existing research on internationalisation and risk. The review shows that although risk has received great attention in the internationalisation literature in recent years, important gaps remain in relation to the risk implications of internationalisation, the impact of risk on internationalisation strategy, and the strategies used to assess and manage risk in the internationalisation process. Our study contributes to existing knowledge by synthesising and organising existing research into an overarching integrative framework that provides a comprehensive understanding of the risk phenomenon, including the interrelations between risk and internationalisation and the sources and consequences of risk. In addition, the review contributes by identifying important gaps in the literature and suggesting directions for future research to improve our understanding of the complex interrelationship between risk and internationalisation.     

融资约束的成因与解决之道:基于理论文献的评述

十八大以来,供给侧结构性改革在各行各业如火如荼地开展,如何使信贷资金等宝贵资源更加有效地配置给高效率的企业,从而缓解企业的融资约束是目前必须考虑的问题。论文先描述融资约束的经济后果,再从成因入手,对理论界关于融资约束的解决之道进行了评述,对政府部门和商业部门如何缓解“融资贵、融资难”具有借鉴意义。     

Lessons from approaches to informal housing and non-compliant development in Turkey: An in-depth policy analysis with a historical framework

This article examines informal housing/non-compliant development and related formalisation practices in Turkey. An in-depth policy analysis is conducted within a historical framework to underline outcomes and policy performance of approaches and formalisation initiatives. The analysis was conducted by taking the earlier studies focusing on the formalisation practices and debates in the international literature into consideration in order to understand how the case of Turkey confirms, contradicts or adds to the existing body of the literature. Formalisation practices in Turkey, especially the recent one implemented in 2018, have been successful to secure land tenure rights to a certain extent. However, these attempts have not addressed the issues such as mitigating hazard risks, enabling public participation, managing the processes transparently and inspecting the non-compliant development put forward by the scholars. The outcomes of the policy analysis are compared with the approaches of transition and developed economies in Mediterranean Basin. As a result of these comparisons, remarkable similarities were found. The findings of the analysis can be a harbinger of the future for other countries on a rapid development path by means of a considerable policy exchange between countries with similar population and GDP.     

Sustainable agricultural practices,environmental risk mitigation and livelihood improvements: Empirical evidence from Northern Ethiopia

Using sustainable agriculture practices has various economic, social and environmental benefits. Determining the attitude of farmers toward risk is an important first step in understanding their behaviour and coping strategies to mitigate environmental risks. This paper investigates the dual impacts of some agricultural practices on agricultural yields and farmers’ livelihoods considering sustainable farmland. Cross-sectional data is collected from farmers in six rural villages in Tigray region, Northern Ethiopia using structured questionnaires. Results show that education, labour supply, agricultural extension services, attitudes, social capital, risk mitigation attitudes, farming experience and soil conditions are factors that significantly affect farmers’ decisions to adopt these practices. The practices are adopted either in isolation or jointly of integrated sustainable practices that increase crop production, household income and asset. Therefore, government and other development actors should promote their adoptions especially in drought-prone, degraded and water-stressed areas     

Flood risk management in Austria: Analysing the shift in responsibility-sharing between public and private actors from a public stakeholder's perspective

The frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events are expected to increase due to the effects of climate change and socio-economic development. Potentially higher flood risk, hence, triggered debate about a shift in flood risk management from mainly public to increasingly private involvement. So far, public flood mitigation schemes were standard modes to deal with flood hazards in many countries, including Austria. With high implementation and maintenance costs as well as substantial losses remaining, alternative management approaches have increasingly been discussed. This paper analyses the debate on shifting responsibilities in flood risk management from public to private actors and whether or not the current governance arrangement would accommodate this shift in the public-private divide. Based on qualitative research, we explicitly analyse this potential shift from an institutional perspective and not from the perspective of individual homeowners, taking the case study of Dornbirn (Austria) as an example. The results show that, firstly, the current governance arrangement hardly encourages property-level flood risk adaptation measures. Secondly, several factors stabilise the current governance arrangement and prevent a shift in the public-private divide. Although the need for an increased sense of responsibility among private actors seems to be evident among interviewees, strong historical narratives and adaptive expectations lead to a society seeing public authorities to be responsible for flood risk management and trust their expertise as well as the technical flood infrastructure. However, such areas of expertise and law are fragmented and therefore impede a redistribution or enforcement of responsibilities. Furthermore, fixed costs delay a shift in the public-private divide as the traditional engineering approach (i.e. structural measures) is predominant with high investments in the current system but limited investment in risk communication to raise awareness. Yet, a shift towards sharing responsibility might contribute to flood risk management for risks to remain manageable.     

Current issues in tourism: Mitigating climate change in sustainable tourism research

This paper adopts a problematising review approach to examine the extent of mitigating climate change research in the sustainable tourism literature. As climate change has developed into an existential global environmental crisis and while tourism's emissions are still increasing, one would expect it to be at the heart of sustainable tourism research. However, from a corpus of 2573 journal articles featuring ‘sustainable tourism’ in their title, abstract, or keywords, only 6.5% covered climate change mitigation. Our critical content analysis of 35 of the most influential papers found that the current methods, scope and traditions of tourism research hamper effective and in-depth research into climate change. Transport, the greatest contributor to tourism's emissions, was mostly overlooked, and weak definitions of sustainability were common. Tight system boundaries, lack of common definitions and incomplete data within tourism studies appear to hamper assessing ways to mitigate tourism's contribution to climate change.