Presentation at AARES Conference

I am giving a presentation at AARES in Port Macquarie next week. Thursday afternoon to be precise. It's titled "Rethinking the Emissions-Income Relationship in Terms of Growth Rates" and is an extension of the Environmental Kuznets Curve and Green Solow Models. My coauthors are Reyer Gerlagh, Paul Burke, and Zeba Anjum. I'm presenting in a session on climate change. My postdoc, Yingying Lu is also presenting in the session on our joint work on sensitivity analysis of the costs of climate change policies. The other two papers are from my colleague Frank Jotzo and Simon Dietz from LSE.

Astrid Kander Interviewed on Radio Washington Al Mundo

Following up from my post on Power to the People, Astrid was interviewed on the radio about her book. The interview starts at minute 37.

Essential Concepts of Global Environmental Governance

I have a very short chapter on the environmental Kuznets curve in this book which will be published later this year (June or July) by Routledge. The book consists of 100 more similar entries on environmental governance topics and will be marketed as a textbook.

Draft ERA 2015 Submission Guidelines Released

This document provides a helpful list of changes from ERA 2012 to ERA 2015. The changes are minor. A good one, is a clampdown on abuse of affiliated researchers - some universities submitted a lot of publications by foreign-based researchers that they claimed as affiliates that did not include any mention of the university submitting the publication to ERA. So it looks like that for the moment the aim of measuring the broader impact of research as the UK REF is attempting to do has been shelved. At least as part of the ERA exercise.

Power to the People

Power to the People - authored by Astrid Kander (my collaborator), Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde is now available from Princeton University Press. The book is the culmination of a long-term research project to reconstruct the energy history of Europe and then explore how developments in energy interacted with developments in the economy. That research is a foundation for our exploration of the role of energy in long-run growth, and our ongoing research under our ARC grant on energy transitions.

Scooped

This is how I feel today:

The positives are that: I'm not a PhD student, we won't waste time on doing the research, and it must have been a good idea (unfortunately an obvious one for those who know the various literatures). Well, I had better read the (working) paper in detail and see if we still have an angle. If we have an angle all will be revealed in due course.

ARC Discovery Projects 2015 Funding Rules Released

The ARC released the funding rules for the current grant round. A single document now also includes the rules for the DECRA, Laureate fellowships, and Discovery Indigenous Grants. A separate document reveals the specific changes to the Discovery program in this round compared to previous rounds. The most important changes, I think, are that :

• You can now apply for five years of funding rather than just three.
• There are no DORA fellowships for 2015!
• The limit on publication costs of 2% of non-salary part of the budget (which could be very little in many cases) is abolished and now you need to justify specifically the publication costs on the proposal.
• International Collaboration Awards are no longer awarded on a pro rata basis but up to $20k and up to 12 months.

The ARC has apparently not yet released the instructions for applicants.

Harvard MIT Atlas of Economic Complexity

This is an interesting effort to assess the complexity of production and the level of local production knowledge across the countries of the world. The index of economic complexity is derived from the diversity and ubiquity of the goods which countries export. The rich data available on world trade is the strength of the indicator but also its weakness. It doesn't take into account of course any of the sophistication a country might have on the service side of the economy or in non-tradables. Australia ranks very badly. Based on the index the Zimbabwean and Australian economies have the same level of sophistication. Australia's complexity has also declined as minerals have increasingly dominated exports over time. With the upcoming demise of Holden and Ford, Australia is going to look even less sophisticated. Obviously, the Australian economy doesn't produce as wide a range of sophisticated products as the major industrial exporters. Still, it does seem that it has more sophisticated knowledge than the developing economies it ranks with in this analysis.