Suchergebnisse

I the recent years, Danish municipalities have increasingly taken up initiatives to improve energy efficiency in private buildings. The paper will present a study on how Danish municipalities in practice have carried out such efforts on convincing private home-owners to improve the energy efficiency of their homes. The study includes a survey amongst 22 Danish municipalities on their initiatives, and case studies of five municipalities. In a theoretical perspective, the municipal initiatives to promote energy retrofitting can be seen as an example on 'Urban Climate governance' (Kern & Alber, 2009; Bulkeley, 2009) that includes different governmental approaches for the local authorities. The challenge of local sustainability is that it is complex and defined on different levels (local, municipal, regional, national, and international), that requires a 'multilevel governance'–approach to succeed (Bulkeley & Betsill, 2005). Moreover, the municipalities 'traditional' regulatory tools are insufficient when it comes to change of private property, therefore other types of governance are needed. From the theoretical perspective the paper will discuss the different types of governance being used in practice, including the types of governance and collaborations, as well as the challenges and shortcomings of the selected approaches. Also, it will discuss the motivations for the local actors to pursue this type of initiatives, in relation to the results achieved.

Noter i marginen

In this paper the authors develop an innovative 21 sector computable general equilibrium model of Armenia to assess the impact on Armenia of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU, as well as further regional or multilateral trade policy commitments. They find that a DCFTA with the EU will likely result in substantial gains to Armenia, but they show that the gains derive from the deep aspects of the agreement. In order of importance, the sources of the gains are: (i) trade facilitation and reduction in border costs; (ii) services liberalization; and (iii) standards harmonization. A shallow agreement with the EU that focuses only on preferential tariff liberalization in goods will likely lead to small losses to Armenia primarily due to a loss of productivity from lost varieties of technologies from the Rest of the World region in manufactured products. Additional gains can be expected in the long run from an improvement in the investment climate. The authors estimate only small gains from a services agreement with the CIS countries, but significant gains from expanding services liberalization multilaterally.

In this paper the authors develop an innovative 21 sector computable general equilibrium model of Armenia to assess the impact on Armenia of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU, as well as further regional or multilateral trade policy commitments. The authors find that a DCFTA with the EU will likely result in substantial gains to Armenia, but they show that the gains derive from the deep aspects of the agreement. In order of importance, the sources of the gains are: (i) trade facilitation and reduction in border costs; (ii) services liberalization; and (iii) standards harmonization. A shallow agreement with the EU that focuses only on preferential tariff liberalization in goods will likely lead to small losses to Armenia primarily due to a loss of productivity from lost varieties of technologies from the Rest of the World region in manufactured products. Additional gains can be expected in the long run from an improvement in the investment climate. The authors estimate only small gains from a services agreement with the CIS countries, but significant gains from expanding services liberalization multilaterally.

The Kyoto Protocol assigns limits for the aggregate emissions of six greenhouse gases, but most economic analyses focus on CO2 abatement. What are the potential gains if policy makers exploit the flexibility in a multi-gas abatement strategy? We extend the EDGE model to include sinks and non-CO2 gases and show that a multi-gas strategy reduces costs by 20-35% in the Western Annex B countries. Marginal abatement costs decrease around 30%, and the cost-effective abatement mix involves relatively more abatement of the non-CO2 gases, which offers many low costs abatement options. Lower marginal abatement costs decrease domestic action by reducing the costs of emissions imports, whereas more low cost abatement options increases domestic action. The low cost abatement options increase domestic action, whereas lower marginal abatement costs reduces domestic action by making imports of emissions cheaper. The net effect of a multi-gas strategy on domestic action is therefore not given a priori. We show that a multi-gas strategy reduces domestic action around 2% in the United States and increases domestic action by around 8% in the European Union. Our sensitivity analyses finally show that the relatively weak growth in non-CO2 baseline emissions accounts for a large share of the savings associated with a multi-gas strategy.