The Role of Energy in Economic Growth

A few months ago I serialized a paper I was revising on the role of energy in economic growth. I didn't include all the material in the paper and it wasn't serialized in order. The paper will be appearing next year in Ecological Economics Reviews, which is an annual edition of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. A working paper version of the paper is now available in the new working

Greg Combet

Today Greg Combet, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, spoke at the Crawford School on "Australia in a climate changed world – Moving forward to Cancún and beyond". Frank Jotzo and Carolyn Hendricks gave follow-up presentations on international and domestic aspects of the current climate change policy debate.The Australian is emphasizing his reiteration of the 5% unconditional

Highly-Cited Papers are More Likely to Cite Highly-Cited Papers

An interesting paper in PLOS ONE performed an analysis of all papers published in 2003 that are included in the intersection of the Scopus and ISI databases. They find that the most cited papers in the following 5 years are more likely to cite other highly cited papers than lower ranked papers are to cite highly cited papers relative to how much each group cited less highly cited papers. This is

A Clarification, 14 Years On...

Maybe it is a bit late for this, but quite a few papers I get sent for review cite our 1996 paper in World Development as a rationale for estimating an environmental Kuznets curve model for a single country. We wrote:"We believe a more fruitful approach to the analysis of the relationship between economic growth and environmental impact would be the examination of the historical experience of

EEN Symposium on Monday

The http://stochastictrend.blogspot.com/2010/10/een-symposium-22-24-november.html">EEN Symposium at the Crawford School starts on Monday. I'm giving my presentation at 1:30pm. The slides are here. For more details on the Symposium please visit the Crawford School website.

Call for Papers

The Journal of Industrial Ecology has a call for papers on the topic of "Greening Growing Giants". Quoting from the call:"Questions relevant to this special issue include but are not limited to: What quantities of resources will be required globally in the near future, given the current dynamics of per capita resource use in developing countries? What role does the demand in industrial countries,

Madsen et al.: Four centuries of British economic growth: The roles of technology and population

In a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Growth* Jakob Madsen et al. test the ability of alternative endogenous growth theories to explain the British Industrial Revolution. They conclude that Schumpetarian growth theory can explain the data while "semi-endogenous growth theory" cannot. Madsen recently won an ARC fellowship to pursue this research further. Interestingly, when the change

Did Incomes Grow in Pre-Industrial England?

This is a current point of contention among economic historians. Gregory Clark thinks that in the long-run they did not though they fluctuated considerably. In the wake of the Black Death incomes were high due to the increase in land per worker and they subsequently fell as population grew till eventually rising gain as the industrial revolution approached. I think this much is agreed but the

Recent Papers of Interest in Ecological Economics:

van den Bergh, J. C. J. M., Environment versus growth — A criticism of “degrowth” and a plea for “a-growth”, Ecological Economics.van den Bergh makes a much more extensive version of the main argument I made in my review of Tim Jackson's book Prosperity without Growth. There aren't policy levers that can directly stop growth and it might not be what is needed to solve environmental problems

Article Level Metrics

Public Library of Science are providing an Excel file with details of citations and page views for all 18,000 + articles that they've published so far. Not sure what to do with it apart from note that the most viewed article is Why Most Published Research Results are False. It's only the 7th most cited article though. The winner by that metric is "Human MicroRNA Targets". The correlation between

World Atwitter

This is just very cool:One minute of global Twitter activity.

ARC Releases Proposed Changes to Discovery Program

They are looking for feedback on the proposals, but are planning to put them in place in time for the next round of Discovery applications in around 4 months time exactly. The main changes from what I gather are:1. A new separate fellowship for early career researchers (ECRs).2. The regular Discovery scheme will no longer take any special note of ECR applications.3. "there will be revised