none

This thesis explores some theoretical and empirical issues in the voluntary contributions to public good. Chapter I contains a brief motivation and introduction. In chapters II and III, we analyze two non-cooperative methods for either enhancing or mitigating externality-causing activities. Chapter II deals with positive externality in the public good contribution context, and chapter III with negative externality in the pollution abatement context. Chapter IV contains an empirical analysis of charitable donations by the elderly. Chapter II models the so-called ``corporate challenge gift'' used in real world fund-raising, and adopts the concept to voluntary contributions to public goods more generally. We model the process as a sequential game in public good contributions. One of the agents sets a quantity-contingent matching scheme to leverage higher contributions from the other players. Under the assumption that the preferences of agents are public information and the assumption that the scheme setter can commit to the matching plan, we show that the scheme brings efficient levels of total contributions to the public good. Chapter III applies some ideas from a joint work with Professor Robin Boadway and Professor Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Tremblay on ``Commitment and Matching Contributions to Public Goods'' to the issue of reducing negative externality-causing activity. In particular, it adapts both the Guttman-Danziger-Schnytzer type of rate-matching mechanism and the quantity-contingent matching method for public good contributions to the international pollution abatement problem. In a simple two-country model, we find that both matching schemes induce the countries to internalize the negative externality imposed on the other country. However, perhaps due to the lack of enough policy instruments, they cannot equate the marginal costs of abatement across the countries, leaving room for Pareto improvement. This further improvement can be achieved if the two countries also contribute to a conventional public~good. Chapter IV is an empirical exercise on some positive externality-generating activities by the elderly. It attempts to document the charitable giving of money and time by people aged 60 or above in the 2003 PSID data for the United States and analyze the influences of some economic and demographic factors on these activities. Income, wealth, the subjective rating of health status, and years in school are found to have statistically significant impacts. Income and wealth appear to have distinct influences. The tax price of money donation also has a statistically significant effect on money donations. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2007-11-19 01:48:10.777

The Swedish Environment Protection Act (SEPA) was implemented in 1969 and constituted the first comprehensive Swedish regulation of industry-induced environmental externalities. In keeping with a longstanding corporatist tradition, Swedish policymakers aimed to establish a cooperative climate with industrial producers and instructed the regulatory authorities to strive to reach consensual agreements with affected firms. Despite such accommodations, the environmental adaptation of Swedish industrial production proceeded at a greater pace, during the 1970’s and 1980’s, than in most comparable countries, many of which had implemented seemingly more stringent environmental regulations than had Sweden. This thesis seeks to identify the firm level incentives behind this process, by examining the economic impact of the SEPA upon one of the more pollution-intensive branches of Swedish industrial production, the pulp and paper industry. Guided by previous research, an hypothesis is proposed in which the implementation of the SEPA came to aid the structural rationalization of this industry during the 1970’s and 1980’s, by inducing the exit of marginal, small-scale pulp and paper mills, thereby relaxing the prevailing competition over wood resources and available market space and creating more room for expansion within the surviving mills. As larger firms tend to operate larger mills, the hypothesized effects are suggested to have benefited large-scale producers within the industry, at the expense of their smaller rivals.   The findings of the thesis show that the economic effects of the SEPA were more severe for small as compared to large-scale mills and that regulatory requirements for pollution abatement did contribute to the shutdown of several small-scale mills during the 1970’s and 1980’s. No conclusive evidence could, however, be found for the validity of the thesis’ hypothesis as a whole, as these shutdowns were not predominantly administered by small-scale firms, as predicted by the hypothesis. Rather, the vast majority of these shutdowns were accounted for by some of the largest firms within the industry. Some tentative evidence was found, however, that the implementation of the SEPA may have benefitted certain large-scale producers within the industry, by facilitating acquisitions of smaller firms with valuable assets.

The purpose of this study is to review existing literature of factors that influence farmers’ decision to participate in conservation programs. This study is also intended to collect county data and information on conservation programs and participation in the Kentucky River watershed region, which can be analyzed and used to draw differences in characteristics of the region that would suggest willingness to participate in a trading scheme for improvements in water quality. The results suggest that more participation in a trading scheme from some counties than others should be expected. Counties with more farms and larger farms will probably have higher rates of participation in conservation programs. The cost-share amounts being paid by current government programs must be considered as the minimum staring point to negotiate in a trading scheme. To target the impact of watersheds, such as the Kentucky River in the Mississippi system, that discharges significant amounts of pollutants into the Gulf of Mexico, policy makers and program administrators should be advising and stimulating the adoption of practices with the best abatement performance for such pollutants considering technical complementarity between practices.

This work exploits the general equilibrium modeling framework to simulate complex systems, an economy and an ecosystem. In an economic application, this work leverages a novel data revision scheme to integrate technological detail on electricity generation and pollution abatement into national accounts data in a traditional economic computed general equilibrium (CGE) model. This integration provides a rich characterization of generation and abatement for multiple fuel sources and pollutants across 72 different generation-abatement technology configurations. Results reveal that the benefits of reductions in oxides of nitrogen and sulfur from a carbon policy in the US electric sector are on the order of $10 bn., which rival the policy's welfare costs and make 12-13% carbon abatement economically justifiable without considering any climate benefits. For ecosystem applications, this work demonstrates how the structure of economic CGE modeling can be adapted to construct a Biological General Equilibrium (BGE) model grounded in the theoretical biology literature. The BGE model contributes a novel synthesis of micro-behavioral, bioenergetic features with macroscopic ecosystem outcomes and empirical food web data. Species respond to prevailing ecosystem scarcity conditions that impinge on their energy budgets driving population outcomes within and across model periods. This adaptive capacity is a critical advance over the commonly-taken phenomenological or first-order parametric approaches. The distinctive design of the BGE model enables numerical examination of how changes in scarcity drives biomass production and consumption in a complex food web. Moreover, the BGE model design can exploit empirical datasets used by extant ecosystem models to offer this level of insight for a wide cast of ecosystems. Monte carlo simulations demonstrate that the BGE framework can produce stable results for the ecosystem robust to a variety of shocks and parameterizations. The BGE model's validity is supported in tests against real-world phenomena within the Aleutian ecosystem - both an invasive species and a harvesting-induced trophic cascade - by mimicking key features of these phenomena. The BGE model's micro-founded dynamics, the stability and robustness of its results, and its validity against real-world phenomena offer a unique and valuable contribution to ecosystem modeling and a way forward for the integrated assessment of human-ecosystem interactions.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:49:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:00:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 09809.pdf: 7318754 bytes, checksum: 166979fe7dbb592b70e1bc5fb8417a96 (MD5) / Tese (Doutoramento) / IPEN/T / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:49:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:00:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 09809.pdf: 7318754 bytes, checksum: 166979fe7dbb592b70e1bc5fb8417a96 (MD5) / Tese (Doutoramento) / IPEN/T / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP

Currently, China is facing a challenge of sustainable development. The worsening air quality and increasing haze days in Beijing and many other cities in China have exerted serious health impacts and an economic toll. Pollution control and emission reduction have become an urgent issue that Chinese governments need to tackle. Hence, stricter Environmental laws and Clean Air Plans have been published and implemented in recent years in China. The developed countries had experienced the similar industrial development accompanying by air pollution problem during the middle of last century. Environmental legislating against helped many developed countries solve the pollution and achieved positive EKC trend – air quality improvements along with continuous economic growth. The thesis tries to study the previous lessons and experiences on pollution abatement from some developed countries and find what lesson’s China can draw from them on pollution control and changing towards a sustainable development. The thesis adopts a multi-scientific study method including case studies, economic, technological, legal and institutional analysis. The pollution abatement cases are from the US and UK, because historically the serious air smog episodes due to industrialization had happened in many cities of the two countries, which are like what is happening in China now. Case studies compare the pollution problem in Beijing, Los Angeles and London, and focus on how environmental laws work for emission reduction. The study results show that the economic phase in China now is close to the EKC turning point and is at similar phase comparing to the historical pollution treatment stages during the middle of last century in the US and UK. However, the positive EKC trend does not inevitably come without strong environmental legislation, technological development and economic-social institution sustainability transformation. The implication for China is that the current pollution control laws and its implementation in China at the crucial moment would most likely decide the future environmental, economic, and social situation in China. Loose environmental laws might cause environmental indulgence, while implementation of scientific environmental laws and standards can work effectively on emission reduction and enhancing technology and economic development at the same time. And the scientific based legislation skills from developed countries provide a good lesson to be drawn for China on how to make the laws and standards.

Η παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία μελετά την επίδραση του κόστους περιστολής της ρύπανσης σε συγκεκριμένους κλάδους της ελληνικής βιομηχανίας, την χρονική περίοδο 1993-2006, στην παραγωγικότητά τους. Από θεωρητικής πλευράς εστιάζει στις αντικρουόμενες προσεγγίσεις της win-win υπόθεσης του Porter (1990,1991) και των Porter and Van der Linde (1995) με την νεοκλασική θεωρία, που είχε ως κύριους εκφραστές τους Jaffe και Palmer (1995,1997). Η μεθοδολογική προσέγγιση που ακολουθείται στηρίζεται στην μη παραμετρική μέθοδο της DEA με στόχο την εκτίμηση δεικτών παραγωγικότητας Malmquist (Malmquist Total Factor Productivity Index). Για την μελέτη της επίδρασης του κόστους περιστολής της ρύπανσης σε κλάδους της Ελληνικής βιομηχανίας ακολουθήθηκε η μεθοδολογία που αναπτύχθηκε απο τους Aiken et al., (2009) για τον διαχωρισμό και υπολογισμό μεταξύ regulated-unregulated συναρτήσεων ορίων παραγωγής. Στην εμπειρική εφαρμογή της μελέτης χρησιμοποιήθηκαν δεδομένα απο την ετήσια έρευνα βιομηχανίας της Ελληνικής Στατιστικής Υπηρεσίας σε 23 βιομηχανικούς κλάδους, σύμφωνα με την κωδικοποίηση ΣΤΑΚΟΔ 2003, και παρατηρείται συνολικά επουσιώδης αρνητική επίδραση τους κόστους περιστολής των ρύπων στην παραγωγικότητα. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, κλάδοι με υψηλή ενεργειακή ένταση φαίνεται να εμφανίζουν μηδενική επίδραση των περιβαλλοντικών δαπανών στην παραγωγικότητά τους με μοναδική εξαίρεση του κλάδου των ορυκτών-μετάλλων. / The passage of environmental regulation has been associated with a potential negative or positive effect on firm’s productivity. The present study studies the effect of pollution abatement activities on the productive efficiency of polluting industries in Greece over the period 1993-2006. A methodological approach based on Aiken et al., (2009) study have been developed in order to specify regulated and unregulated production frontiers and to determine the possible link between pollution abatement activities and sector’s productivity growth. Data derived form the Hellenic Statistical Authority has been used in order to estimate the possible association. Our results indicate, for the majority of the manufacturing industries, that increased rates of productivity growth have been simultaneously experienced with decreased rates of pollution abatement.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:46:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T13:58:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 08355.pdf: 5737145 bytes, checksum: 41a2be955830f51bb6b1c0b324fc6c03 (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Dissertacao (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP / FAPESP:00/00610-3