Energy Quality

I just got a "revise and resubmit" for my paper on energy quality. I think the comments should be easy to deal with by putting in a bunch of caveats. I now have three paper resubmissions to deal with but have been so busy with everything else (Environmental Economics Research Hub project, ARC proposals etc). After the Adelaide conference I really need to get to these...

Gapminder

Gapminder have produced one of those cool animated bubble graphs from my sulfur data, you can play with it here. They also have an interactive stack chart. Here is the founder of Gapminder, Hans Rosling in action at TED.

Comment Moderation

Because of spam comments from this this guy and others I'm turning on comment moderation for older posts...

But Swedish Social Scientists are Right Wing

According to this new study Swedish social scientists are more likely to vote for the right wing parties than left wing parties. This is of course, in marked contrast to the situation in the US and anecdotally in Australia. The authors note though that:"Here we have to keep in mind that an american academic to the left may, in actual views, be close to a swedish academic to the right."However,

Too Big to Fail

The Obama administration is acting to do something about the too big too fail phenomenon, which I flagged as a possible policy direction. I'm not enthusiastic though about the anti hedge fund/proprietary trading moves that are accompanying this. Luckily none of the crazier ideas in Jackson's book are included. I'd favor limits on risk budgets rather than just banning institutions from certain

Conservatism of Non-Academic Scientists

There's been discussion lately about how "liberal" professors are (at least in North America). For example, this blogpost and the paper by Ethan Fosse and Neil Gross. The latter argue that people with liberal political views are more likely to want to become professors. Demographic differences explain 43% of the difference in liberalism between professors and others.The interesting thing to me is

ARC vs. NSF

I've been doing more work on my upcoming ARC proposal including meeting with ANU's pro-VC for research (who used to work at the ARC as "Executive Director, Humanities and Creative Arts and as the co-ordinator of the Discovery Projects scheme") and getting her feedback. I've commented before that compared to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) the Australian Research Council (ARC) appears

Follow Up on Europe Research Links

A while ago, I mentioned that I signed up for an EU database of experts. I've now been contacted twice through being a member of this database. The first query was from a consulting firm who need an Australian reviewer on their proposal to the European Union and the second to review a grant proposal (paid) from Cyprus. So it's not a blackhole you throw your name into and never hear anything again

Scott Brown

This doesn't seem to be getting much attention in Australia but it's bad news for getting anything done in the US in the next few years...

Analysis of Copenhagen Accord

Interesting analysis of the Copenhagen Accord from Carlo Carraro and a coauthor. He argues that if the funding for developing countries is primarily used for mitigation actions then the Accord could achieve the goal of getting the world on the path towards the 2C limit on warming. I'm skeptical though that the money will:1. Be spent at all - often aid pledges turn out not to be realised...2. Not

A Picture of price and markets

We can picture the circular flow of economic life in the picture above. The diagram provides an overview of how consumers and producers interact to determine prices and quantities for both inputs and outputs. Note the two different kinds of markets in the circular flow at the top are the product markets,or the flow of outputs like pizza and shoes, at the bottom are the markets for inputs or factors of production like land and labor. Further, See how decisions are made by two different entities ,consumers and business.
Consumers buy good and sell factors of production, Business sell goods and buy factors of production. Consumers use their income from the sale of labor and property. Price in good markets are set to balance consumer demand with business supply; Price in factor markets are set to balance household supply with business demand.
All this sounds complicated. But it is simply the total picture of the intricate web of interdependent supplies and demands, Interconected through a market mechanism to solve the economic problems of what how and for whom. Look at the picture carefully.a few minutes spent studying it will surely help you understand the working of market economy

Market equilibrium

At every moment, some people are buying while the others are selling firms are inventing new products while governments are passing laws to regulate old ones; foreign companies are opening plants in America while American firms are selling their product abroad. Yet in the midst of all this turmoil, Markets are constantly solving the what, how, And for whom. As they balance all the forces operating on the economy, Markets are finding a market equilibrium of supply and demand.
A market equilibrium represents a balance among all the buyers and sellers. Depending upon the price, household and form all want to buy or sell different quantities. the market finds the equilibrium price that simultaneously meets the desire of buyers and sellers. Too high a price would mean a glut of goods with too much output; too low a price would produce long lines in stores and a deficiency of goods. those prices for which buyers desire to buy exactly the quantity that seller desire to sell yield on equilibrium, of supply and demand.

Three problems of economic organization

Every human society, wether it is an advanced industrial nation. A certainly planned economy ,or an isolated tribal nation must confront and resolve 3 fundamental economic problems. Every society must have a way of determining what commodities are produced, how these goods are made and for whom they are produced. Indeed these three fundamental questions of economic organization what, how ,and for whom are crucial today as they were at the dawn of human civilization.
To answer that three questions , Every society must make choices about the economy input and output .Input are commodities or services that are used to produce goods ,And outputs are the various useful goods or service that result from the production process and are either consumed or employed in further production.
Another term for input is factor of production. These can be classified into the broad categories, Such as: Land, Labor, Capital
Restating the 3 economic problems in term of input an outputs, A society must decide(1)what output produce, And in what quantity (2)How to produce them that is, By what techniques inputs should be combined to produced the desire outputs, and (3) For whom the outputs should be produced and distributed.

Consumption Based Carbon Tax

An interesting proposal from Geoff Carmody for a consumption based carbon tax. It cleverly plays on protectionist sentiments and impulses by taxing the carbon content of imports and exempting exports. Every country can set its own carbon tax rate or coordinate as much as they like. I imagine this must have been proposed before. It sounds like a good idea but I can see two major pitfalls:1. Will

Arndt-Corden Division of Economics Joins the Crawford School

As many of you know the Arndt Corden Division of Economics became part of the Crawford School at ANU from 1st January. Following the merger the Crawford school is now ranked 7th or 8th * among economics programs in Australia according to RePEc. I only informed RePEc of the merger yesterday (don't know if anyone else did but they didn't say they already knew) so the change isn't reflected in many

Zhang et al. Now on RePEc

The official version of the Zhang et al. working paper on the effect of environmental news on stock prices is now up at RPI and, therefore, catalogued in RePEc.

Convergence of Energy Efficiency

I've been making more progress in my Environmental Economics Research Hub Project. I still don't have final results, but I am close. The above chart shows the estimated underlying energy efficiency, controlling for the structure of the economy etc. for five countries. I don't quite believe that the US is more efficient than Switzerland but at least the two developing economies are less efficient

EERH Working Papers Statistics for December 2009

A few less downloads and abstract views this month, but December is always a weak month for working papers. For all the details visit the LogEc website

Energy/Capital Ratio and Capital Density

Back in October, I blogged about the energy/capital ratio arguing that it was a rough proxy of the level of energy efficiency and/or environmental technology in a country. The following chart plots the energy/capital ratio against the capital density - the amount of capital per unit land area in a country (both are averages for 1971-2007):Now there could be quite a lot of explanations of the

The Kuznets Curve

The evidence for the original Kuznets curve - a supposed inverted-U shape relationship between inequality and income per capita - is not very strong either. The Y axis shows an average of the available data on the Gini coefficient of income inequality for the period 1971-2007 (mostly from the World Development Indicators) and the X axis average income per capita over the period in 2007 PPP

Corruption and Development

Most of my readers are probably familiar with the correlation between corruption and the level of economic development, but as I was entering the data into my database I thought I'd go ahead and blog about it. The chart shows the 2007 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index on the Y axis and average income per capita over the 1971-2007 period in 2007 PPP dollars (from the Penn

There are More Chinese Students in Australia than in the U.S.

It is hard to believe that there are 50% more Chinese students in Australia than in the U.S. which has 14 times the population of Australia. Digging around on the web I found plenty of other articles from different sources corroborating the 130,000 number.

Krugman on China

I don't want to turn this blog into some kind of pro-China rant but I keep reading so many occidentcentric articles that just fail to see things in any kind of balanced way. Krugman says that China should revalue the Yuan. In the long-term I agree, as the Chinese currency is clearly undervalued. And China was doing exactly that prior to the Global Financial Crisis when they halted abruptly:The