What is Business as Usual for China and India?

My paper with Frank Jotzo in Energy Policy argued that while India's goal of cutting emissions intensity by 25% between 2005 and 2020 was likely to be similar to the business as usual reduction in emissions, China's goal was much more ambitious. China aims to reduce emissions intensity by 40-45% over this time frame, while we estimated it would decline by 24% under business as usual.By contrast,

World Atwitter

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

Back Home

I'm finally back from my trip to Europe (mainly work) and Asia (mainly family visit/vacation). As an Australian the only country we visited that seemed expensive overall was Denmark. Sweden no longer seems to be a terribly expensive country as it once seemed to be. The Big Mac index doesn't agree though. Thailand, our last stop, is of course way cheap but I noticed that drinks in Starbucks don't

Submitted my Main Hub Paper

I finally submitted the main report on my Environmental Economics Research Hub project to a journal. It took a while because I wanted to approach the paper fresh in order to hack out around 5,000 words to get it down below 10,000 words. And I've been busy working on completing a bunch of other projects, as you may have noticed. I blogged about the paper when I finished the working paper back in

Purchasing Power Parity vs. Market Exchange Rates

Latest in a series of articles by Richard Tol criticizing the IPCC AR4 WGIII report. This article focuses on the effect of using market exchange rates or purchasing power parity adjusted exchange rates (PPP) to project future emissions. Models that use market exchange rates, including the IPCC SRES projections project higher future emissions and emissions growth than models that use PPP exchange

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.

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

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

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

Does the Natural Resource Curse not Apply in Democracies?

One of my colleagues, Sambit Bhattacharya, has an article out on natural resources and corruption. Their conclusion is:"Resource-rich countries are often cursed by corruption and governance problems. This column shows that the natural resource curse burdens non-democracies, but countries with better democratic institutions are not corrupted by such endowments. For governments accountable to their

World Values Map

I was visiting the World Values Survey website in the process of collecting more data for my EERH project.Thought I'd post this fascinating "map" from their homepage:Not surprisingly, the English speaking countries (sorry Quebecois) are found grouped together. I found this was also the case for levels of sulfur abatement technology. Similarly the Germanic or Protestant countries occupy a common

Penn World Table vs. World Development Indicators

Today, we had a presentation from Prasada Rao of University of Queensland on the theory of constructing international comparisons of income. He also covered some more practical aspects concerning the recent new international price comparison benchmark - ICP 2005. As everyone knows, the prices of identical goods vary across countries as exemplified by the Big Mac Index. But actually constructing

Europe Research Links

Today I attended a workshop on research collaboration between Australia and Europe. My impression was that in the areas I work in it's probably pretty hard to get funded by the European Union. Ironically, it seemed that if you have specific expertise about Australia you are more likely to be able to join a funded project. 2/3 of EU funding goes to FP-7 (Framework Program 7) "Cooperation" projects

China Update 2009

Today I attended the 2009 China Update at ANU. It's a day of presentations by researchers from Australia, China, and the US on the latest economic situation in China. We received a book edited by Ross Garnaut, Ligang Song, and Wing Thye Woo containing most of the papers presented. However, the best two presentations of the day, in my opinion - the first and last presentations of the day, aren't

George Friedman

If you've been around the investment blogosphere for a while, you've probably come across the writings of George Friedman, CEO of Stratfor, a "private global intelligence firm". Today, I heard George Friedman of Stratfor speak here in Australia. I guess it was part of his global book tour. His book - the next 100 years - was on sale. Usually, I don't read the stuff he writes as it seems very