World Trade Report 2010

The 2010 World Trade Report will be about trade in natural resources. In the run-up to publication the World Trade Organization is inviting discussion on the topic. Go to their website to participate.

Journal H-Index

Tabulating journals' h-indices is a simple but effective way it seems of ranking them. At least this list makes a lot of sense to me. The ARC could just use that to rank journals, instead of asking for expert opinion. RePEc's ranking only includes citations extracted by the CitEc system. In my case, they only total about 1/6 of my total documented citations. But the resulting ranking seems to

What Do Australian High School Economics Students Need to Know?

Peter Martin links to the most recent HSC and VCE exams in economics. HSC is the high school diploma level exam in New South Wales. Looking through it, it is largely comparable to the college level Intro Economics course I taught in the US with the following differences:1. It's almost entirely macro-economics instead of a 50:50 balance of micro and macro2. There's a very strong emphasis on

Australian Energy Efficiency in Context

Slides for a presentation I will be giving on Tuesday on putting Australia's level of energy efficiency into context. Here's a quick guide...Slide 3 compares Australia's energy intensity (energy/PPP GDP) to 5 developed and 2 developing economies. Australia is mid-way between the US and Canada on the one hand which are relatively inefficient by this measure and Germany, Japan, and the UK which are

Why do Real Economists (and Environmentalists) Hate Stated Preferences?

The only people who like them are some mainstream environmental economists who use stated preference methods, I think. I have a semi-coherent rant in the comments.

The Best University for Economics in Australia

It's either Melbourne or ANU. You'd have to think that good potential grad students are now using the RePEc ranking as a major input to decide where to go to study as as we all know economics is a discipline that is obsessed with rankings and pedigree. I know that several of my colleagues haven't registered in RePEc yet. If they did, it might help push ANU ahead of Melbourne. Of course, I haven't

Why the ARC is not Counting Citations in Economics?

Check out the top Australian departments in RePEc's global ranking. All but QUT have lower ranks based on their citation scores alone than on the basis of all 31 indicators combined. The same is true of the individual Australians in the global ranking (they are harder to find as country affiliation isn't included in the table so you have to search for people by name). Not counting citations will

ESA vs. ERA

The Economic Society of Australia put out its own list of ranked journals last year. Both this list and the ERA list have 37 journals ranked as A* but there are four differences between the two lists. The ESA list included the following four journals that are not in the ERA list:Journal of Environmental Economics and ManagementJournal of Business Economics and StatisticsJournal of Risk and

Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Model of Economic Development

I remembered Mick Common mentioning this book and I saw that it was referred to by http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2009/08/allen-british-industrial-revolution-in.html">Robert Allen. I found that ANU's library had a copy but it was nowhere on the shelves and I put in a missing book search request. It couldn't be found. So I was surprised to get an e-mail while I was in Adelaide telling me to

Decarbonization in Australia?

Roger Pielke has a working paper about the potential or rather the lack of potential for decarbonization of the Australian economy. He says it would be very hard to achieve the Government's targets given historical rates of decarbonization in both Australia and other countries. Penny Wong has reacted that this ignores international trade in permits or offsets. She is right, Australia doesn't plan

ANZSEE vs. AARES

I think that John Tisdell (now at U. Tasmania) and myself are the only two people who attended both the ANZSEE meeting in Darwin and the AARES meeting in Adelaide. There may be others. Sorry, if I forgot about or didn't notice you, but there is certainly not much overlap in participants. Similarly, we found that there was some overlap in topics covered and journals cited by ecological and

ERA Ranked Journal List is Out

The ARC (Australian Research Council) has finally released the ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) ranked journal list that will be used in this year's research assessment exercise. As I've commented that the assessment of economics will not count citations and so the ranking of journals is all that counts in measuring research outputs. All journals are ranked as A*, A, B, and C. A* is

AARES 2010 Paper

Greetings from Adelaide! My first time in South Australia. I just put up a draft paper for our presentations at the AARES meeting here in Adelaide. Papers were meant to be submitted by January 15th to get on the "Conference CD". We ignored that deadline but didn't completely forget about producing a paper :) I'm presenting today, Tuesday, on this topic as part of the annual Environmental

ERA 2010

Detailed information is now available for the ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) 2010 exercise to be carried out by the ARC (Australian Research Council). This is similar to the research quality assessment exercises carried out in the UK. The only social science where they will use citation analysis is psychology. I can see no reason not to use citation analysis in economics except for

In Press

My paper on energy quality was accepted by Ecological Economics. Since returning to academia in November 2008 I've been trying to get published, so it is nice to finally have a success. I probably could have two more if I worked harder to get my other two "revise and resubmit" papers revised and resubmitted.

Long-run Elasticity of Demand for Energy?

I just realised that the elasticity reported in my slides for the Hub workshop for the effect of the purchasing power parity variable on energy intensity is kind of a global price elasticity demand for energy in the long-run. Because it is estimated on averages for the 1971-2007 period it averages out all fluctuations in prices over time except countries' relative price levels compared to the

Slides for Hub Workshop

Here are the slides for my presentation at the Environmental Economics Research Hub 2010 workshop in Adelaide on Tuesday. They have a lot of overlap with http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/02/chinas-emissions-intensity-target-bau.html">my presentation to the China forum we just had at ANU, but there are a couple of new things. There's a slide of global energy intensity. There's also a slide

China’s Emissions Intensity Target: BAU, Feasible, or Infeasible?

I've put up some slides that I'm planning on using at a forum with some people from the Chinese government here at ANU this week that are a preview of where I'm heading for my presentations at the Environmental Economics Research Hub Workshop and AARES Conference in Adelaide next week. There isn't much text on the slides. The basic story is that I use a model of energy intensity to extract the