Payments for environmental services to promote “climate‐smart agriculture”? Potential and challenges

Payments for environmental services (PES) have gained wide popularity as approaches to promote environmentally friendly land use or agricultural production practices. Yet academics have also voiced concerns against seeing PES as a panacea. This article discusses whether PES is an appropriate and promising approach to promote so‐called “climate‐smart agriculture” (CSA) practices, which we define as agricultural production practices that contribute to CO₂ emission reductions and/or removals and provide benefits to farmers via increased productivity and profits and reduced vulnerability to climate change. PES appears most promising for the promotion of CSA practices in small‐scale farming contexts with low incomes. Effective design, however, requires solid estimates of cost and benefit flows from CSA adoption over time, accounting for differences in socioeconomic and ecological conditions, and addressing the risk of leakage. Funding for such PES will likely have to come from public sources, and seems most promising where synergies with other objectives such as agricultural development, food security, and climate adaptation or other environmental services exist. The potential of alternative approaches for CSA support such as taxation with rebates for CSA practices, CSA‐related investment support such as microcredits, and hybrid approaches such as conditional microcredit should be further investigated.     

CRM与6Sigma的一致性与差异性研究

CRM(客户关系管理)和6Sigma是两种十分重要的现代化管理方法.文章对CRM和6Sigma的一致性和差异性进行了研究,首在为两者的集成应用提供支持.     

6S管理在生产管理中的推行方法探析——小议“奥奇丽”推行6S活动

文章介绍了6S管理模式的产生背景、内涵，以及广西奥奇丽股份有限公司推行6S活动的情况，并就该公司推行6S活动的方法进行讨论。     

Public debt and financial development

We examine the role of public debt in financial development. The literature has highlighted its supportive role through providing collateral and benchmark. We contrast this “safe asset” view to a “lazy banks” view: developing banking sectors that lend mainly to the public sector may develop more slowly, because it could make banks profitable but inefficient. Results from country-level and bank-level regressions are more supportive of the “lazy banks” view, but the “safe asset” view seems to play a role at moderate levels of public debt held by banks. There is also evidence of a harmful interaction between public debt and financial repression.     

Estimating the size of the potential market for the Kyoto flexibility mechanisms

Estimating the Size of the Potential Market for the Kyoto Flexibility Mechanisms. — The Kyoto Protocol incorporates three flexibility mechanisms to help Annex I countries to meet their Kyoto targets at a lower overall cost. This paper aims to estimate the size of the potential market for all three mechanisms over the first commitment period. Based on the national communications from 35 Annex I countries, it first estimates the potential demand in the greenhouse gas offset market. Then, it assesses the implications of the EU proposal for ceilings on the use of flexibility mechanisms. Finally, using the model based on the marginal abatement costs of 12 regions, the paper estimates the contributions of flexibility mechanisms to meet the total emissions reductions required of Annex I countries under the four trading scenarios.     

VB6.0的MSComm通信控件应用举例

本文介绍了基于VB6.0的MSComm通信控件相关理论,并以一个实例演示了MSComm控件的主要属性。     

Inverse of the Berge maximum theorem

Summary We consider an inverse of the Berge maximum theorem. We also give an application of our result to fixed point theory.     

INTERSTATE BANKING DEREGULATION AND THE CHANGING NATURE OF BANK MERGERS

We examine a sample of 443 bank mergers between publicly traded banks announced during the 1990s to investigate empirically the role of full interstate banking deregulation. The pre‐deregulation 1990s are characterized by value creation, with mergers involving a high degree of branch overlap experiencing significant announcement gains. Bank mergers in the post‐deregulation 1990s, however, fail to create value, and mergers with a high degree of branch overlap actually experience significant losses. Consistent with prior research, these valuation consequences are magnified for large bank mergers in the 1990s. Overall, our results are consistent with the broader literature on corporate control, suggesting that an economic shock can materially alter industry structure and the economic rationale for the efficient reallocation of assets through merger activity.     

Asymmetric effects of the business cycle on bank credit risk

Prior empirical research on the relation between credit risk and the business cycle has failed to properly investigate the presence of asymmetric effects. To fill this gap, we examine this relation both at the aggregate and the bank level exploiting a unique dataset on Italian banks’ borrowers’ default rates. We employ threshold regression models that allow to endogenously establish different regimes identified by the thresholds over/below which credit risk is more/less cyclical. We find that not only are the effects of the business cycle on credit risk more pronounced during downturns but cyclicality is also higher for those banks with riskier portfolios.     

China＇s Energy Strategy in the Twenty-first Century

I. Introduction As the biggest developing country, China’s energy consumption has increased substantially. China is now the second largest energy consumer in the world and its primary energy consumption accounts for 13.6 percent of the world total. In the global energy market, China seems to have an endless appetite for oil and gas. China depends on imports for more than 40 percent of its oil. According to an estimation by British Petroleum (BP, 2005), from 2000–2004, China’s oil consum…