RSPT: Lack of Transparency is the Issue

From the point of view of the mining industry and their potential financial bankers in the banking industry there are two key issues:1. How are existing projects where the government hasn't been accounting itself as a passive shareholder to date to be dealt with.2. Whether the government is really going to refund losses in the event of a project failing. The miners and banks are saying they place

IPCC AR5 WGIII

The IPCC has just announced the authors for the Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group III (Mitigation of Climate Change). I am one of the selected authors and will be agreeing to participate. I will be working on a team working on Chapter 5: "Drivers, Trends, and Mitigation".

Exploratory Analysis of Chaves and Koenraadt

A couple of days ago I mentioned the Chaves and Koenraadt paper on malaria. I've looked over it a bit since but would really have to repeat the analysis myself in order to come up with anything conclusive as the time series analysis is so poorly documented. To recap, here is the temperature time series from Kericho in Kenya that they use:One of the models they fit is the basic structural model.

CERF National Conference

In a last minute substitution I am going to be presenting instead of Regina Betz at the CERF National Conference at Old Parliament House on Tuesday at 1pm. Title will be "Modelling Global Energy Efficiency Trends". I'll try to cover both implications for Australian energy efficiency and Chinese and Indian emissions intensity targets in the 15 minutes allowed.

New Controversy on Malaria and Climate Change

Some of my coauthors on our work on malaria and climate change have an article (with others) in the latest issue of Nature. Their main point is that even if climate change has had an effect on the prevalence of malaria in the last century, that effect is swamped by everything else that has been going on. Also that the current distribution of malaria endemicity is no guide to future trends. Both

More on the RSPT

I read a couple more papers on resource taxation and am not much clearer about things. Ben Smith wrote about the impossibility of a neutral resource rent tax and Diderik Lund wrotea recent review.It is pretty clear that a pure "Brown tax" where the mining company immediately gets refunded the tax rate (say 40%) multiplied by all losses minimizes the effect on investment decisions as long as the

Garnaut Says RSPT Needs More Study

Ross Garnaut says that the RSPT needs more study and analysis and that the government hasn't handled this well. Importantly, Garnaut co-authored the paper that initiated interest in such a tax.I'm planning to produce a blogpost soon with some more discussion of the complications involved with this tax. My impression is that the authors of the Henry review did not read recent literature on the

Paper Accepted at Economics Letters

My paper Derivation of the Hicks, or Direct, Elasticity of Substitution from the Input Distance Function has been accepted for publication at Economics Letters. As I've mentioned before, the elasticity of substitution measures the difficulty of replacing one input to production such as energy with another such as capital, usually under the assumption that the level of output must be kept constant

Updated Versions of Papers

An updated version of my paper "Between Estimates of the Environmental Kuznets Curve" is now available in the CAMA Working Paper Series. Also my article "Energy Quality" has been published in Ecological Economics.

Public Policy Precinct at ANU

Lots of public policy initiatives are planned at ANU in which the Crawford School looks to play a major role:ANU Media ReleaseSATURDAY 8 MAY 2010ANU TO ESTABLISH $111.7 million PUBLIC POLICY PRECINCTThe Australian National University (ANU) will play a lead role inboosting Australia's expertise through enhanced teaching and research inpublic policy and will establish a new Australian National

Royalties vs. Rent Taxes

I'm now reading the Henry Review in more detail. The argument against royalties and in favor of a rent tax, which was put forward by Garnaut and Clunies Ross is based on the idea that both are taxes. Because the royalty allows no deductions for costs it acts as an incentive against development of more marginal projects that would have gone ahead in the absence of the tax. The Brown tax

ReSPecT

My immediate reaction to the RSPT proposal was to wonder if it will ever get through parliament as proposed and to suggest that at least the hurdle rate needed to be substantially raised. Today in the Australian, Henry Ergas discusses the "Brown tax" named after E. Carey Brown. I'll admit that I hadn't heard that term before. A quick search found a reference to this in a working paper by Ben

EERH Working Paper Statistics for April 2010

This month's RePEc statistics are in. EERH saw a slight tick up in downloads, probably due to us getting more papers online. We now have 55 papers online.

It's the Economy Stupid

There is all this discussion in the UK about why the Labour Party looks set to lose the election and no-one makes the obvious point: there is (or was) a bad recession and the government has been in power for 13 years. Still it is going to be interesting what happens coalition-wise post-election. I'm a British citizen, so I have some interest I guess...

Will Today's Tax and Superannuation Proposals Actually be Implemented?

Based on the Rudd government's record to date I don't expect these "reforms" to be implemented as announced. The Liberal-National Coalition will oppose them. I expect that the Greens will like them. So, based on the current composition of the Senate, it will depend on Xenophon and Fielding and I have no idea what they'll think. Of course, the legislation would likely wait till after the election.

Angus Maddison Dies

Just heard that Angus Maddison died. The Economist has an obituary. I visited Gronigen a few years ago but didn't get to meet him. Just a few days ago I was checking his data on historical GDP. The work of my colleagues such as Astrid Kander and Paul Warde follows in this tradition in reconstructing the energy history of Europe.