Suchergebnisse

The South African government is introducing a poverty-reduction policy that will supply households with a monthly 50kWh "Free Basic Electricity (FBE)" subsidy. We show that FBE distorts the energy choices of poor households by encouraging them to cook with electricity, whereas alternatives such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) can deliver a similar cooking service at a much lower cost to society. An alternative energy scheme, such as providing households with clean energy credits equivalent in value to the FBE's cost, could deliver additional energy services worth at least 6% of total household welfare (and probably much more) at no additional public cost; those benefits are so large that they would cover the entire cost of LPG fuel needed to implement the scheme. The analysis is extremely sensitive to the coincidence of electric cooking with peak power demand on the South African grid and to assumptions regarding how South Africa will meet its looming shortfall in peak power capacity. One danger of FBE is that actual peak coincidence and the costs of supplying peak power could be much less favorable than we assume, and such uncertainties expose the South African power system to potentially very high costs of service.

AbstractWhy do some decision makers prefer big multilateral agreements while others prefer cooperation in small clubs? Does enforcement encourage or deter institutional cooperation? We use experiments drawn from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—along with a substantive survey focused on international trade—to illustrate how two behavioral traits (patience and strategic reasoning) of individuals who play key roles in negotiating and ratifying an international treaty shape their preferences for how treaties are designed and whether they are ratified. Patient subjects were more likely to prefer treaties with larger numbers of countries (and larger long-term benefits), as were subjects with the skill to anticipate how others will respond over multiple iterations of strategic games. The presence of an enforcement mechanism increased subjects' willingness to ratify treaties; however, strategic reasoning had double the effect of adding enforcement to a trade agreement: more strategic subjects were particularly likely to favor ratifying the agreement. We report these results for a sample of 509 university students and also show how similar patterns are revealed in a unique sample of ninety-two actual US policy elites. Under some conditions certain types of university student convenience samples can be useful for revealing elite-dominated policy preferences—different types of people in the same situation may prefer to approach decision-making tasks and reason through trade-offs in materially different ways.

Homer-Dixon, Thomas F.: Straw man in the wind. - S. 26-28 Klare, Michael T.: Clearing the air. - S. 28-31 Goodman, Sherri W.: Bad tidings. - S. 31-33 Victor, David G.: Smoke and mirrors. - S. 34-36

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von: Anderson, Alun: After the ice : life, death and geopolitics in the new Artic. - New York/N.Y. : Smithsonian, 2009

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Part I INTRODUCTION -- 1 Introduction and Overview -- 2 Innovation in an Historical Perspective: Tales of Technology and Evolution -- Part II COUNTRY STUDIES -- 3 The United States -- 4 Japan -- 5 Germany -- 6 France -- 7 The United Kingdom -- 8 The Nordic Countries -- Part III INDUSTRY STUDIES -- 9 The Internet -- 10 Computers and Semiconductors -- 11 Banking and Financial Intermediation -- 12 Securities Trading -- 13 Venture Capital -- 14 Pharmaceutical Biotechnology -- 15 Agricultural Biotechnology -- 16 Electric Power -- 17 Automobiles -- Bibliography -- Author Index -- Subject Index