The "Google Way" to Visualize Research

Yesterday, I showed one potential way of visualizing my research areas. Another way is using the web to tell us just like Google does. In fact, I did a Google Scholar search on myself and then put the results (with some cleaning up) into Wordl:I could have also cleaned out my name from the data first (using the replace function in Word) but decided against that. Some of the topics from

Visualizing Research Areas and Links

I've been trying to give an overview of my research for a presentation and came up with this:I've tried to fit various of the topics I've worked on in the last decade within three disciplinary fields and the overlaps between them. In the middle I put "Meta" to represent my interest in meta-analysis and bibliometric analysis. This doesn't cover everything. My recent energy efficiency stuff is

Powerpoint Slide for Crawford School Research Retreat

Call for References: The Role of Energy in Economic Growth

Back in April I did a series of posts on energy and economic growth which serialised a review paper I was editing on the topic. A couple of those have been among my post popular posts in the last few months. Now I am revising the paper again for the final version. The referees made a lot of comments but I am also reading some additional papers and seeing if they fit into the story. So if you

Final Hub Report

The final report for my Hub project titled: "Modeling International Trends in Energy Efficiency and Carbon Emissions" is finally http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/eeneenhrr/1054.htm">up on the EERH website. I've highlighted the key results in previous posts so not so much to add here. This paper also has a lot of literature review and a theoretical model as well as the econometric model 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

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

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

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

Fenner Presentation Slides

Here are the slides for my presentation at the Fenner School today. Because of the way I set things up to allow me to have an "animation" in a pdf file there aren't actually as many slides as there are pages in this document. But I didn't delete the extra pages because this is my emergency copy if my flash drive fails!

My Fenner School Seminar: Thursday 12th November

As I mentioned a couple of months ago I'm giving a seminar at the Fenner School of the Environment and Society at ANU tomorrow, Thursday, at 1:00pm in the Forestry Lecture Theatre. As usual the slides will go up on the web as soon as I've completed them... I'm still working on model runs to put in the presentation as I wasn't pleased with the results I presented in Darwin. I'll show those results

ANZSEE Presentation Slides

Here are the slides for my presentation at ANZSEE in Darwin on Wednesday. I only have 20 minutes to talk including questions so I'm going to have to cut something here. But thought I might as well put everything up for now. I'll be giving a longer version at the Fenner School at ANU on 12th November. Also coming up this month is a presentation at the ANU Economics Showcase 2009. I will be talking

A Statement of Your Most Significant Contributions to this Research Field

I have to write this for the grant applications I'm planning on filing early next year. Usually, in job applications you have to write about your current and planned research. But this is different and a bit weird. It feels a bit like I'm writing my own obituary :) For U.S. grants you just send them your (condensed) CV. Australia is much more into giving money to individuals than for specific

Energy/Capital Ratio

There doesn't seem to be much of relation between energy intensity and GDP per capita. But this chart shows that there is a relationship between energy per dollar of (estimated) capital and GDP per capita:The points off to the top right are mostly oil producers. Apart from those points there seems to be a clear downward trend. High income countries use less energy per dollar of capital than poor

Energy Use per Capita

Yesterday I showed you a chart of energy intensity vs. GDP per capita. There didn't seem to be much relationship in that data. Today we have energy use per capita and GDP per capita:Here there is a clear relationship. Unfortunately, for environmental Kuznets curve advocates it is pretty linear. Energy use is a first order proxy for environmental impact. For example, solar energy might be cleaner

Energy Intensity

Now I've put my database together we can have a first look at the data:Energy intensity is energy in terms of kilogrammes of oil equivalent per dollar of GDP using purchasing power parity adjusted exchange rates in 2005 prices. There are 3663 data points. There certainly doesn't seem to be any simple relationship between the level of income and energy intensity. On the other hand we can see some

UN vs. World Bank Data

I've finally put together the main database for my Environmental Economics Research Hub project on energy efficiency and carbon emissions. I have full data on energy use (by fuel), structure of the economy, GDP, investment, schooling, climate, emissions etc. for 99 countries for the period 1971 to 2007. For my 2002 paper on explaining sulfur emissions I only managed to put together data for 64

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

The Garnaut Review One Year On

Ross Garnaut gave a presentation to a totally full theatre at Manning Clark Centre at ANU yesterday evening, reviewing his Review and the responses to it in the last year. From what he said he pretty much anticipated what would happen especially regarding the lobbying by business for free permit allocations (after all he's chairman of a mining company himself). Still he said that the government's

Progress on "Hub" Project

My research project funded by the Environmental Economics Research Hub is about the international diffusion of energy efficiency technology at the macro-economic level. The project has two main stages. In the first stage I estimate a function that explains energy intensity (=the amount of energy used in the economy/GDP) in terms of the level of inputs like capital, labor, and the various types of