Prepaid Metering and Electricity Consumption in Developing Countries

I've written an Energy Insight policy brief for the EEG Programme with my PhD student Debasish Das on prepaid metering and its effect on electricity consumption.

The bottom line is that consumers who are switched to prepaid metering significantly reduce their electricity consumption. 

Debasish is working on a study of the effect of prepaid metering in Bangladesh and some preliminary results are in this paper. This graph shows the estimated difference in monthly electricity consumption between consumers in two areas of Dhaka, Bangladesh around the time that one group was switched to prepaid metering:

 

 

Electricity consumption in the treated group fell by 17%. This graph didn't make it into the final version of the paper, because it was deemed to be too mathy. Debasish has a very large dataset that he obtained from the Bangladesh electric utilities. He's still working on getting this into a usable form. But hopefully we will have some more results soon.

The Impact of Electricity on Economic Development: A Macroeconomic Perspective

I have a new working paper out, coauthored with Paul Burke and Stephan Bruns. The paper is one of those commissioned for the first year of the Energy for Economic Growth program, which is funded by the UK Department for International Development and directed by Catherine Wolfram.  The paper was actually completed in January 2017, but there has been a lot of delay in getting approval for publication. The project and the paper focuses on the role of electricity in economic development in Africa and South Asia, the two regions of the world where electricity is least accessible.

Access to and consumption of electricity varies dramatically around the world. Access is lowest in South Sudan at 4.5% of households, while consumption ranges from 39 kWh per capita – this includes all uses of electricity not just household use – in Haiti to 53,000 kWh per capita in Iceland – driven by aluminum smelting. Consumption is 13,000 kWh per capita in the US. Electricity use and access are strongly correlated with economic development, as theory would suggest:

Access and consumption have increased strongly in many poorer countries in recent years – will this have beneficial effects on development? The specific questions that DFID asked us to answer were:

• How serious do electricity supply problems have to be in order to constitute a serious brake on economic growth?

• To what degree has electrification prolonged or accelerated economic growth?

• What can be learned from the development experience of countries that have invested successfully in electrification?

In principle, it should be easier to find evidence for causal effects using more disaggregated micro level data as some variables can more easily be considered exogenous, and randomized trials and other field experiments are possible. On the other hand, growth is an economy-wide, dynamic, and long-term process with effects that cannot usually be captured in micro studies. Therefore, macroeconomic analysis is also needed. Our paper is complemented by a paper covering the microeconomic aspects of these questions.

Despite large empirical literatures – such as that on testing for Granger casuality between electricity use and economic growth – and suggestive case evidence, we found few methodologically strong studies that establish causal effects for electricity use, access, infrastructure, or reliability on an economy-wide basis. The best such study that we found is a paper by Calderon et al. in the Journal of Applied Econometrics. But this paper actually tests the effects of an aggregate of different types of infrastructure on growth.

We propose that future research focuses on identifying the causal effects of electricity reliability, infrastructure, and access on economic growth; testing the replicability of the literature; and deepening our theoretical understanding of how lack of availability of electricity can be a constraint to growth.

Annual Review 2017

I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. As I mentioned in last year's review, I am still struggling with work-life balance. It feels like that there is never enough time to get the work done I need to do and I am always making excuses for not getting things done. So, stopping and looking at what I did get done can help provide some perspective.

I was IDEC (Crawford's economics program) director till the end of the year. Ligang Song will take over as IDEC director in 2018. We continued to work on developing and seeking approval for new programs. We made some progress, but the final outcome will only be known in 2018 (hopefully). There was also quite a lot of work on the review of the Crawford School, the future of Asia-Pacific economics at ANU, economics at Crawford and ANU etc. The Arndt-Corden Department of Economics is officially a separate organizational unit from IDEC. Our plan is that going forward Arndt-Corden will represent the research, outreach, and PhD program components of all the economics activity at Crawford and IDEC will continue as the masters teaching program. This too is a work in progress. 

ANU environment and resource economists, Paul Burke, Frank Jotzo, Quentin Grafton, Jack Pezzey, and me

I made two international trips - one to Singapore and one to Europe and two short trips in Australia to Brisbane and Melbourne.  I went to the Singapore meeting for the IAEE international conference. My wife, Shuang, and son, Noah, came along too and we extended our stay to spend time in Singapore. We took the new direct flight from Canberra to Singapore, which is very convenient. From February there will also be Qatar Airways flights from Canberra, but apparently they will stop in Sydney before continuing to Singapore. That will just save time (maybe) on going between terminals in Sydney. To get to Europe I flew to Adelaide and then took Emirates via Dubai.

I was in Brisbane for the AARES conference. I have always found that the conference is much more dominated by agricultural economics than the journal but almost everything at the conference this time was agriculture related. Most of the environment papers dealt with agricultural impacts. I decided not to go in 2018, though the program is looking more balanced.

In December I traveled to Spain, Germany, and Israel. I gave a seminar at ICTA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona on the role of energy in modern economic growth. This was part of a series of seminars funded by the Maria de Maeztu program.

Speaking at ICTA, UAB, Barcelona

From there, I went on to Germany to work with Stephan Bruns on our ARC project and climate change paper. Alessio Moneta also visited from Pisa for a couple of days. Totally by coincidence, I arrived in Göttingen on the same day as Paul Burke who was touring Germany as part of his Energy Transition Hub activities:

Stephan Bruns, Krisztina Kis-Katos, Paul Burke, and me in Göttingen

We made quite good progress on both projects while I was there, but there is still much to do. We are just over the halfway point with the ARC DP16 project. One short paper is already published in Climatic Change, which discusses the accuracy of projections of future energy intensity. We also have another working paper on the restructuring of the US electricity generation industry and energy efficiency and have a paper under review on aircraft fuel economy.

We also completed and submitted our paper on the macroeconomic aspects of electricity and economic development for the DFID funded EEG project. Publication of the working papers and announcement of the next stages of the project have been much delayed, but there should be news on the latter soon. Together with our PhD student Akshay Shanker, I made a lot of progress on our contribution to a Handelsbanken Foundation funded project headed by Astrid Kander. Well, Akshay did most of the work... The paper  – about why energy intensity declines over time – will now be part of Akshay's PhD thesis.

I published fewer papers than last year, which isn't a surprise, as last year was a record year. There were five articles with a 2017 date:

Stern D. I., R. Gerlagh, and P. J. Burke (2017) Modeling the emissions-income relationship using long-run growth rates, Environment and Development Economics 22(6), 699-724. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Stern D. I. (2017) How accurate are energy intensity projections? Climatic Change 143, 537-545. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Zhang W., D. I. Stern, X. Liu, W. Cai, and C. Wang (2017) An analysis of the costs of energy saving and CO2 mitigation in rural households in China, Journal of Cleaner Production 165, 734-745. Working Paper Version | Blogpost
 
Stern D. I. and J. van Dijk (2017) Economic growth and global particulate pollution concentrations, Climatic Change 142, 391-406. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Stern D. I. (2017) The environmental Kuznets curve after 25 years, Journal of Bioeconomics 19, 7-28. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

and there is one in press at the moment:

Bruns S. B. and D. I. Stern (in press) Overfitting bias and p-hacking in Granger-causality testing: Meta-evidence from the energy-growth literature, Empirical Economics. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

I also published a comment on a paper in Scientometrics:

Stern D. I. (2017) Comment on Bornmann (2017): Confidence intervals for journal impact factors, Scientometrics 113(3), 1811-1813. Blogpost

Follow the links to the blogposts to find out more about each paper.

I also published between 1 and 3 book chapters. It's often hard to work out when exactly a book chapter is published or not! This one is definitely published and it's open access for now. I only do book chapters where I can update an existing survey paper for the purpose. I posted 5 working papers, two of which have already been published and two are in the review process. In total, 6 papers are currently submitted, resubmitted, or in revision for resubmission.

Citations almost reached 14,000 on Google Scholar (h-index: 45) and will be well in excess of that for the end of 2017 when all this year's citations are finally included in Google's database.

I became an editor at PeerJ as part of their expansion into the environmental sciences. So far, I haven't actually handled a paper but I'm sure there will be some relevant submissions soon.

On the teaching side, I convened Masters Research Essay for the first time in the 1st Semester and taught Energy Economics for the last time for now in the second semester. My first PhD student here at Crawford, Alrick Campbell, received his PhD at the July graduation ceremony. He is currently a lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.

I have been blogging even less this year than last. This will be the 19th post for 2017, whereas last year there were 35. Lack of time and increased use of Twitter are to blame. My Twitter followers now number more than 750, up from over 500 last year. The most popular blogpost this year was "Confidence Intervals for Journal Impact Factors".

Looking forward to 2018, it is easy to predict a couple of things that will happen that are already organized:

1. As mentioned above, I am ending my term as director of our economics program, IDEC, at the end of this calendar year. I am hoping to be able to focus a bit more on my research and get more balance in the coming year.

2. I will be the convener for Masters Research Essay and teach Environmental Economics in the first semester. I last taught environmental economics 10 years ago at RPI, so it will be quite a lot of work. I was getting a bit tired of teaching Energy Economics and if I did this course, Paul Burke could teach one of our compulsory first year masters microeconomics courses, so I decided to take it on. Both these courses are in the 1st semester and so I won't be teaching in the 2nd semester.

3. Early in the new year we will put out a working paper for our time series analysis of global climate change. We are currently revising the paper to resubmit to the Journal of Econometrics.

Nothing came of the job I applied for last year beyond the Skype interview, but I applied for another one this year...

Annual Review 2016

I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. The big change this year mentioned at the end of last year's review is that we had a baby in February. I ended up taking six weeks leave around the birth. Since then, I've been trying to adjust my work-life balance :) I'm trying to get more efficient at doing things, dropping things that aren't really necessary to do, trying to schedule work time more. None of these things are that easy, at least for me. It's mainly anything that isn't work, baby, or housework that gets squeezed out. I'm still director of the International and Development Economics program at Crawford. I will now be director for the next six months at least, after which I hope to pass this role on to someone new, but they haven't been identified as yet. During my time as director, we've made less progress on various initiatives than I would have liked due to internal ANU politics.

The highlights for the year were being elected a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. I attended the annual ASSA symposium and other events in November where new fellows are welcomed. Also, our consortium was awarded a five year contract by the UK DFID to research energy for economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In particular, we are looking at how electrification can best enhance development. Also in November I attended the "Research and Matchmaking Conference" in Washington DC, where we presented the results of our first year of research and interacted with policymakers from developing countries and others. In the first year, the main activity has been writing 18 state of knowledge papers. I've have writing a paper with Stephan Bruns and Paul Burke on macroeconomic evidence for the effects of electrification on development.

Work got started on our ARC DP16 project. Zsuzsanna Csereklyei joined us at ANU as a research fellow working on the project. She is focusing on the technology diffusion theme. 

I published a record number of journal articles - in total, eight! Somehow a lot of things just happened to get published this year. It's easiest just to list them with links to the blogposts that discuss them:

Ma C. and D. I. Stern (2016) Long-run estimates of interfuel and interfactor elasticities, Resource and Energy Economics 46, 114-130. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Bruns S. B. and D. I. Stern (2016) Research assessment using early citation information, Scientometrics 108, 917-935. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Stern D. I. and D. Zha (2016) Economic growth and particulate pollution concentrations in China, Environmental Economics and Policy Studies 18, 327-338. Working Paper Version | Blogpost | Erratum

Lu Y. and D. I. Stern (2016) Substitutability and the cost of climate mitigation policy, Environmental and Resource Economics 64, 81-107. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Sanchez L. F. and D. I. Stern (2016) Drivers of industrial and non-industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological Economics 124, 17-24. Working Paper Version | Blogpost 1 | Blogpost 2

Costanza R., R. B. Howarth, I. Kubiszewski, S. Liu, C. Ma, G. Plumecocq, and D. I. Stern (2016) Influential publications in ecological economics revisited, Ecological Economics. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Csereklyei Z., M. d. M. Rubio Varas, and D. I. Stern (2016) Energy and economic growth: The stylized facts, Energy Journal 37(2), 223-255. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Halkos G. E., D. I. Stern, and N. G. Tzeremes (2016) Population, economic growth and regional environmental inefficiency: Evidence from U.S. states, Journal of Cleaner Production 112(5), 4288-4295. Blogpost

I also updated my article on economic growth and energy in the Elsevier Online Reference Materials. Citations shot past 11,000 on Google Scholar (h-index: 42) and will total more than 12,000 when all citations for this year are eventually collected by Google.

I have two papers currently under review (also two book chapters, see below). First, there is a survey paper on the environmental Kuznets curve, which I have now resubmitted to a special issue of the Journal of Bioeconomics that emerged from the workshop at Griffith University I attended last year. So, this should be published soon. Then there is our original paper on the growth rates approach to modeling the emissions-income relationship. I have resubmitted our paper on global particulate concentrations. We have a revise and resubmit for the paper on meta-Granger causality testing.

Some other projects are nearing completion. One is a new climate econometrics paper. Stephan Bruns presented our preliminary results at the Climate Econometrics Conference in Aarhus in October. I posted some excerpts from our literature review on this blog. We are also still wrapping up work on our paper on the British Industrial Revolution. Last year, I forecast we would soon have a working paper out on it. I'll have to make that forecast again! We also want to turn our state of knowledge paper for the EEG project into a publication. Of course, there is a lot more work at much earlier stages. For example, this week so far I've been working on a paper with Akshay Shanker on explaining why energy intensity has declined in countries such as the US over time. It's not as obvious as you might think! We've been working on this now and then for a couple of years, but now it looks much more like we will really complete the paper. I'm going to see if I can complete a draft in the next day or so of a paper following up from this blogpost. And, of course, there are the DP16 projects on energy efficiency and there are some long-term projects that I really want to return to and finish, but other things keep getting in the way.

My first PhD student here at Crawford, Alrick Campbell, submitted his PhD thesis in early December. It consists of four papers on energy issues in small island developing states (SIDS). The first of these looks at the effect of oil price shocks on economic growth in SIDS using a global vector autoregression model. He finds that oil price shocks have only small negative effects on most oil importing SIDS and positive effects, as expected, on oil exporting countries such as Bahrain or Trinidad and Tobago. These results are interesting as many of the former economies are fairly dependent on imported oil and would be expected to be susceptible to oil price shocks. The remaining papers estimate elasticities of demand for electricity for various sectors in Jamaica, look at the choice between revenue and price caps for the regulation of electric utilities, and benchmark the efficiency of SIDS electric utilities using a data envelopment analysis. My other student (I'm also on a couple of other PhD panels), Panittra Ninpanit, presented her thesis proposal seminar.

Because of the baby, I didn't travel as much this year as I have in previous years. I gave online keynote presentations at conferences in Paris and at Sussex University on energy and growth.  In September and October I visited Deakin U., Curtin U., UWA, and Swinburne U. to give seminars. Then in late October and early November I visited the US for a week to attend the EEG conference in Washington DC, mentioned above.

I only taught one course this year - Energy Economics. I got a reduction in teaching as compensation for being program director instead of receiving extra pay. As a result, I didn't teach in the first semester, which was when the baby arrived.

Total number of blogposts this year was slightly less last year, averaging three per month. As my Twitter followers increase in number - now over  500 - I find that readership of my blog is becoming very spiky with a hundreds of readers visiting after I make a post and tweet it and then falling back to a low background level of 20-30 visits per day. The most popular post this year was Corrections to the Global Temperature Record with about 650 reads.

Looking forward to 2017, it is easy to predict a few things that will happen that are already organized:

1. Alessio Moneta and Stephan Bruns will visit Canberra in late February/early March to work on the rebound effect component of the ARC DP16 project.
2. I will visit Brisbane for the AARES annual conference and Singapore for the IAEE international conference. I just submitted an abstract for the latter, but it's pretty likely I'll go, especially as there are now direct flights from Canberra to Singapore.
3. I will be the convener for Masters Research Essay in the first semester and again teach Energy Economics in the second semester.
4. I will publish two book chapters on the environmental Kuznets curve in the following collections: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Economics and The Companion to Environmental Studies (Routledge).

In the realm of the less predictable, for the first time in five years I actually applied for a job. I had a Skype interview for it a two weeks ago. I wasn't really looking for a job but just saw an attractive advertisement that a former Crawford PhD student sent me. No idea if anything more will come of that...

The Electricity "Cost Share"

This graph shows the value of electricity divided by GDP for 130 countries in 2013 plotted against GDP per capita. I used the 2015 price of electricity reported by the World Bank Doing Business report, IEA data on electricity use in 2013 and GDP data from the Penn World Table. Cost share is in inverted commas because GDP isn't gross output and electricity is used for consumption as well as production. The fitted curve is a quadratic.

There is a general trend to lower cost shares at higher income levels. But the electricity cost share is very low in some poor countries like Ethiopia simply because they don't use much electricity. It is also low in many oil producing countries such as Kuwait who subsidize electricity. In Kuwait a kWh costs 0.7 U.S. cents. By contrast, in Jamaica a kWh cost 41.6 U.S. cents. The highest cost share is in Macedonia.

I think we should expect that total energy cost shares will be more declining with income. This is because poor countries use more of other energy sources and rich countries use less of energy other than electricity. This matches the longitudinal data we have from Sweden and Britain.

I put this data together for our Energy for Economic Growth project.

Mid-Year Update

It's the first official day of winter today here in Australia, though it has felt wintry here in Canberra for about a week already. The 1st Semester finished last Friday and as I didn't teach I don't have any exams or papers to grade and the flow of admin stuff and meetings seems to have sharply declined. So, most of this week I can just dedicate to catching up and getting on with my research. It almost feels like I am on vacation :) Looking at my diary, the pace will begin to pick up again from next week.

I'm working on two main things this week. One is the Energy for Economic Growth Project that has now been funded by the UK Department for International Development. I mentioned our brainstorming meeting last July in Oxford in my 2015 Annual Report. I am the theme leader for Theme 1 in the first year of the project. In the middle of this month we have a virtual workshop for the theme to discuss the outlines for our proposed papers. I am coauthoring a survey paper with Paul Burke and Stephan Bruns on the macro-economic evidence as part of Theme 1. There are two other papers in the theme: one by Catherine Wolfram and Ted Miguel on the micro-economic evidence and one by Neil McCulloch on the binding constraints approach to the problem.

The other is my paper with Jack Pezzey on the Industrial Revolution, which we have presented at various conferences and seminars over the last couple of years. I'm ploughing through the math and tidying the presentation up. It's slow going but I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! This paper was supposed to be a key element in the ARC Discovery Projects grant that started in 2012.

In the meantime, work has started on our 2016 Discovery Projects grant. Zsuzsanna Csereklyei has now started work at Crawford as a research fellow funded by the grant. She has been scoping the potential sources of data for tracing the diffusion of energy efficient innovations and processing the first potential data source that we have identified. It is hard to find good data sources that are usable for our purpose.

There is a lot of change in the air at ANU as we have a new vice-chancellor on board since the beginning of the year and now a new director for the Crawford School has been appointed and will start later this year. We are also working out again how the various economics units at ANU relate to each other... I originally agreed to be director of the Crawford economic program for a year. That will certainly continue now to the end of this year. It's not clear whether I'll need to continue in the role longer than that.

Finally, here is a list of all papers published so far this year or now in press. I can't remember how many of them I mentioned on the blog, though I probably mentioned all on Twitter:

Bruns S. B. and D. I. Stern (in press) Research assessment using early citation information, Scientometrics. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Stern D. I. and D. Zha (in press) Economic growth and particulate pollution concentrations in China, Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. Working Paper Version | Blogpost
 
Lu Y. and D. I. Stern (2016) Substitutability and the cost of climate mitigation policy, Environmental and Resource Economics. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Sanchez L. F. and D. I. Stern (2016) Drivers of industrial and non-industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological Economics 124, 17-24. Working Paper Version | Blogpost 1 | Blogpost 2

Costanza R., R. B. Howarth, I. Kubiszewski, S. Liu, C. Ma, G. Plumecocq, and D. I. Stern (2016) Influential publications in ecological economics revisited, Ecological Economics. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Csereklyei Z., M. d. M. Rubio Varas, and D. I. Stern (2016) Energy and economic growth: The stylized facts, Energy Journal 37(2), 223-255. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Halkos G. E., D. I. Stern, and N. G. Tzeremes (2016) Population, economic growth and regional environmental inefficiency: Evidence from U.S. states, Journal of Cleaner Production 112(5), 4288-4295. Blogpost

Annual Review 2015

I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. I ended last year noting that I had had a full year since I ended being research director at the Crawford School. I didn't know then that I would be taking on another administration/leadership role before the year was over. But, in July, I took over as director of the International and Development Economics Program. So far, this seems to be less work than being research director was and so more compatible with research productivity! In the first part of the year I was chairing the ANU submission to ERA 2015 in economics. The result was disappointing for the ANU, with economics overall falling from a 5 to a 4 as did econometrics (FoR 1403). Applied economics (FoR 1402) fell from a 4 to a 3. We have developed a strategy to turn things around and I am pretty confident we will get a 4 next time. The positive news was that economic theory (FoR 1401) went up from 4 to 5. Also, policy and administration (1605) went from 3 to 5, which was very good news for the Crawford School.

Abu Dhabi
 
Perhaps the best professional news this year is that we got awarded an ARC Discovery Projects Grant for research on "Energy Efficiency Innovation, Diffusion and the Rebound Effect." We are expecting that Zsuzsanna Csereklyei will be joining us next year to work as a post-doc on the project. My colleague Paul Burke also got a DECRA fellowship.

I am also part of a team together with Astrid Kander of Lund University and Sophia Henriques and Paul Sharp at University of Southern Denmark that won a grant from the Handelsbanken Research Foundation on “Energy Use and Economic Growth: a Long-run European Study (1870-2013). The money will mostly fund Sophia and there is some additional  travel money. As I won't be traveling to Sweden in the near future (see below), it looks like Akshay Shanker - one of our PhD students - who I am working with on a directed technological change paper - will use the money to travel to Sweden early in 2016.

Punting on the River Cherwell, Oxford
 
In July, I traveled back to the UK after returning to Australia from conferencing in the Middle East (see below). I attended a brainstorming workshop at Oxford Policy Management (in Oxford, of course, at Pembroke College) to prepare a proposal to get funding for research on electricity and economic growth and development from the UK, Department For International Development. At this point, it looks likely that our consortium will get the grant but this isn't confirmed yet.

Pembroke College, Oxford

We got four journal articles accepted for publication including our papers on carbon dioxide emissions in the short-run in Global Environmental Change and on global energy trends in Energy Economics, and articles in: Environmental and Resource Economics (still "in press") and the Journal of Cleaner Production (January 2016 publication date). In the meantime, our Energy Journal paper accepted in 2014 is still in press and doesn't yet show up on the journal website.... I also released four working papers that aren't yet published: Two with Stephan Bruns - one on research assessment using citations and another on meta-analysis of Granger causality test statistics, a third one with my former masters student Luis Sanchez, and the fourth one with a long list of coauthors headed by Bob Costanza. We have received revise and resubmits for the latter two and resubmitted the papers. I have another paper coauthored with Chunbo Ma where we also received a revise and resubmit that we are now working on. When we do, we'll also put out a working paper. We also did a revise and resubmit on a paper submitted in mid 2014, which is now under second review. I now have a spreadsheet to help keep track of all these projects!

Right now, I have ten publications in various stages of the review and publication process. Two are in press, three resubmitted after revision, two we are revising, and three in first review.  First review at that journal - we've already sent one to a bunch of other journals.

I also published two book chapters. One is an article on the energy GDP relationship in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the other a chapter in a Routledge book on energy and poverty.

One milestone this year was passing 10,000 citations on Google Scholar and an H-Index of 40. I also just went over 4,000 citations on Scopus.


Champagne Pool, Waiotapu Thermal Area, near Rotorua

I went to the AARES conference in Rotorua in February, the IAEE meeting in Antalya, and for the first time to the International Energy Workshop, which was in Abu Dhabi. I also gave a seminar at University of Queensland in September and was invited to a workshop at Griffith University in October. Finally, I went to the Economics and Business PhD Conference at UQ in early November to comment on a PhD student's paper. Locally, I moved house and suburb in Canberra, buying a house for the first time in my life.

Since August, Donglan Zha has been visiting Crawford from Nanjing Aeronautics and Astronautics University. We are going to work on modeling concentrations of air pollution in China. I also have a new PhD student since the beginning of the year, Panittra Ninpanit. Her first PhD paper will be on decomposition of carbon emissions in Thailand using input-output analysis.

I taught the quantitative methods section of our environmental management research methods course over five weeks in the first semester. This is a tough subject to teach in such a short time slot. I thought I did well, but I got my worst evaluations so far at Crawford School. I guess most people don't like doing statistics. I also taught my energy economics course again and will continue to teach it in the future. It has been rebranded as an economics course, IDEC8089, instead of a general Crawford School course (CRWF8017). This doesn't seem to have affected participation from across different ANU programs too much.

Ecological Economics has gone to a new editorial model where there are several editors who handle much of the incoming flow of paper submissions and associate editors like me play a lower key role. I was offered to be one of the new editors, but I decided that the cost/benefit trade-off wasn't good enough and after 13 years (!) as an associate editor it was time for others to play a bigger role. I have joined the editorial advisory board for Nature Energy, a new journal that will start publishing in 2016.

As I am getting more involved in Twitter, I posted fewer blogposts this year - only 38. The most popular was: "The Industrial Revolution Remains One of History's Great Mysteries?" Second was:
"The Extent and Consequences of P-Hacking in Science" and third: "Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Short Run: The Rate and Sources of Economic Growth Matter".

As always, it is possible to predict some of the things that will be happening in the coming year, though this year is more uncertain than most. First, I'm not sure how long I will be IDEC director for.  Our main innovation in the program that we hope happens in 2016 is a new degree targeting the private fee-paying market for masters degrees (rather than scholarship funded). I'll let you know more if it is successful. Second, my wife is expecting a baby due on 5 February. So, I haven't submitted any abstracts to conferences as I normally would.... We will see how things go.

On the predictable side, I hope to put out three new working papers early in the new year. Two will be the last two papers from our DP12 ARC grant. One is the paper coauthored with Chunbo on estimaing elasticities of substitution and the other the paper on the industrial revolution coauthored with Jack Pezzey. All the math for the latter paper is now nailed down and it is just a question of polishing. Another will be based on a paper I just submitted to the Journal of Bioeconomics for a special issue based on the Griffith workshop. As mentioned above, Zsuzsanna Csereklyei should be moving to Canberra in early 2016 to start work on the ARC grant.

Backyard at our new house