Suchergebnisse

Recent contributions by Brookes (1990), Saunders (1992), and Inhaber and Saunders (1994) argue that cost‐effective improvements in energy efficiency may, in the long run, lead energy use to grow more rapidly than it would in a world of fixed technologies. Since efficiency improvements may be viewed as a form of technological change that both reduces the effective cost of energy services and stimulates economic activity, energy demand may, under some circumstances, rise even as energy productivity improves. This paper examines this hypothesis using a simple model that distinguishes the roles of energy and energy services in production activities. In this model, improved energy efficiency can‐not give rise to increased energy use unless: (i) energy costs dominate the total cost of energy services and (ii) expenditures on energy services constitute a large share of economic activity. Since neither of these assumptions is empirically plausible, the paper concludes that energy efficiency improvements will yield long‐run reductions in energy use under the assumptions of the model.

This paper examines the interplay between discounting and the distribution of welfare between generations in formulating climate change response strategies. The analysis shows that one can understand Nordhaus's (1994) standard representative agent model for climate policy analysis as a reduced form of an overlapping generations model that embodies more realistic demographic assumptions. In this setting, alternative Pareto efficient allocations may be supported as competitive equilibria given appropriate sets of income transfers between generations. Numerical simulations establish that increased intergenerational transfers entail reduced monetary discount rates and increased rates of greenhouse gas emissions abatement. Short‐run policy choices are highly sensitive to normative judgments concerning the relative weight attached to the welfare of future generations.

We discuss the recent emergence of "deliberative ecological economics", a field that highlights the potential of deliberation for improving environmental governance. We locate the emergence of this literature in the long concern in ecological economics over the policy mplications of limited views of human action and its encounter with deliberative democracy scholarship and the model of communicative rationality as an alternative to utilitarianism. Considering criticisms over methods used and the focus of research in deliberative decision-making, we put orward a research agenda for deliberative ecological economics. Given the promising potential of deliberative processes for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of environmental decision-making, work in this area could help advance both theory and practice in environmental governance.

This volume will include scenarios of geophysical and economic impacts from global warming beyond a doubling of greenhouse gases. Analyses will examine geophysical, ecological, and economic impacts, physical and institutional lags, alternative scenarios with and without policy intervention, institutional change, political-economic barriers to effective policy, and prescriptions for change. Perspectives will include those from physical and biological sciences, as well as economics

Empirical studies provide compelling evidence that economic agents do not adopt the complete range of energy‐efficient technologies that are cost‐effective under prevailing prices and market conditions. Analysts commonly attribute this anomaly to the use of high discount rates in energy‐related decisions‐an interpretation that is difficult to reconcile with standard models of rational choice. This paper recasts the controversy from the perspective of economic theory and finds that market failures related to asymmetric information, bounded rationality, and transaction costs are major contributors to the so‐called "efficiency gap."