Presentation at IAEE Meeting in Perth

I'm presenting on Tuesday afternoon at the IAEE Conference in Perth in one of the parallel sessions from 2-3:30pm. I've put my slides up on the web but as usual they probably aren't that informative without the accompanying talk. Several of us from ANU will be at the meeting and I am looking forward to meeting up with old and new colleagues from elsewhere. This is also my first time ever visiting Western Australia the only Australian state or mainland territory I haven't yet been to.

Taxes versus Trading versus Revenue Recycling

My colleagues Jack Pezzey and Frank Jotzo have a forthcoming paper in JEEM: "Tax-versus-trading and efficient revenue recycling as issues for greenhouse gas abatement" on the relative performance of emissions taxes versus emissions trading under uncertainty about both abatement costs and BAU emissions as well as different levels of revenue recycling. Uncertainty about future costs of abating emissions is well known to lead to a welfare advantage of emissions taxes over permit trading. They show that uncertainty about BAU emissions is more important and further increases the advantage of taxes. I think this is important because the massive fluctuations in the price of carbon in the EU market for example seems to be largely due to fluctuations in economic activity. They write: "overall our results substantially boost the welfare case for using a carbon tax instead of trading."

However, they argue that whether the raised revenue is efficiently recycled through cuts in existing distorting taxes will be practically of much greater significance than these differences between taxes versus trading. In the presence of existing distorting taxes an emissions tax can have negative impacts on welfare if those taxes are not also reduced - the so called "tax-distortion effect". However, I would have thought that the giving away of free permits or exclusion of activities from control is likely to be greater in extent than exemptions under a carbon tax. This would further increase the advantages of taxes. Or maybe I'm wrong about that?

Expert Review Registration Open for FoD WG3 AR5

Registration for expert review of the first order draft of Working Group III's contribution to the IPCC AR5 is now open. We'll be dealing with all these comments in Vigo in November. Right now we are still working on getting the FoD together :)

Nature Climate Change Article on the Introduction of Carbon Pricing in Australia

My colleague Frank Jotzo has an article in Nature Climate Change discussing the introduction of the carbon price in Australia from 1st July this year. It's a good summary if you haven't been following this issue closely.

Reminder: Christian Gross Seminar 29th June

Sorry that I haven't posted much recently. Things have been very busy with wrapping the seminar up and grading and preparing a course for next semester. As well Stephan Bruns is visiting from Jena to work with me and we are making good progress on our meta-analysis project. Christian Gross will also be here, but only for one day - 29th June - I will meet him at the IAEE meeting in Perth before that. Christian is giving a seminar at Crawford School at 12:30 on 29th June in Seminar Room 1 in the Stanner Building. More details are available here.

IEA Announce that Global CO2 Emissions Rose 3.2% in 2011

IEA announce that global CO2 emissions rose 3.2% in 2011. This is in line with our prediction in our Nature Climate Change paper that emissions growth in 2011 would be slower than in 2010 though it is still really quite rapid.

Special Issue of "Ephemera" on Carbon Markets

Ephemera is an open-access journal on "theory, politics, and organization". You can access the special issue here.

Google Scholar Changes Search Page

Google has "updated" the Google Scholar home page. This includes changing the linked to Advanced Search to a tiny arrow inside the search box. You have to hover over it for a while or click on it to realize that it links to Advanced Search. As far as I can see, the new interface does not include the option to only search certain fields such as "business and economics" which the old Google Scholar Advanced Search allowed.

Visitors

We just hosted a quick visit by Bob Costanza and Ida Kubiszewski to the Crawford School. Bob gave a public lecture and Bob and Ida participated in roundtable discussions with PhD students and faculty from the Crawford School and the Fenner School.

I have some more colleagues lined up to visit later this year. Next month, Stephan Bruns will be visiting Crawford for the whole of June. He will be working with me on our energy-GDP causality research. He will give a presentation in our economics PhD seminar series. At the end of the month, Christian Gross, also from Jena, will visit briefly and give a seminar. In September/October, Astrid Kander will visit to work on our ARC project.

Energy Strategy Reviews

A new journal in the energy sphere: Energy Strategy Reviews. The journal claims that it:

"provides authoritative content on strategic decision-making and vision-sharing related to society's energy needs. The journal stimulates the exchange and sharing of knowledge and best practice in energy strategy, planning and implementation."

An interesting graph in the opening editorial shows the number of academic papers produced by each country based on data from Scopus:



China is about to overtake the US. I wonder what caused the big jump in China's share in 2004-5?

PhD Applications

Unlike North America, applying to do a PhD in the social sciences and humanities here in Australia requires lining up a supervisor (=advisor) up front. Therefore, it is more like applying to do a PhD in the natural sciences and engineering in the US. If you don't have a supervisor who is interested we won't take you on as a PhD student. This is despite the fact that at ANU there is significant coursework required in the economics programs, which makes it seem more like a US PhD.* There are some useful tips for PhD applications in this blog post, though this seems a bit too much for an initial approach. I don't need Powerpoint slides, for example. But I do want a CV and grades can be useful too. If you just send an e-mail with no CV I will have to ask you right away for a CV, unless it is really obvious from your letter that you are not suitable. At Crawford, we have an "Expression of Interest" process that tells prospective students what information we need. This is kind of an informal application process (without an application fee), which allows us to assess whether there is a supervisor interested in supervising you and whether you have a chance to be accepted or get funding etc. You can just approach a supervisor directly too, but this gives an idea of the information we are going to need.

Personally, at this stage, I'm only interested in taking on students who are really good, well prepared, and interested in working in an area closely related to my current and future research interests. My recent working papers and this blog can give you an idea about what those are. This is going to result in the best experience for the student in launching a career. A student working on something only vaguely related to what I do is going to get a lot less useful input from me, beyond basic tips on how to do research, and is going to have to be very self-motivated. I won't be helpful in putting them in touch with important people in the field etc.

If you have different skills to me though - for example, you are familiar with some modeling or math techniques other than econometrics - that could be good as we could complement each other.

* I can supervise students in either our economics or our environment programs.

Southerners are "American" while Northerners are "German"

I know I have seen this image and data before (in a book we got for free at a geography conference) but I ">just saw it again and now the connections to US politics sprung into my mind. Southerners tend to see themselves as either as unhyphenated Americans or Black. In the north, relatively few people see themselves as just American and instead remember their ethnic ancestry and are proud of it. The largest ancestry is German though the English were the "charter group" and hence the United States speaks English rather than German.

In a past academic life :) I taught cultural geography and researched ethnic distribution in cities....

It seems that the core "red states" area is also the area where people identify as American most. Well, this isn't quite true:



but I think interesting all the same.

Mexico and the UK have the Toughest Climate Change Policies

The Mexican legislature passed one of the strongest national climate-change laws so far on 19 April reports Nature. The UK and Mexico now have similar binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. IN my opinion, another piece of evidence against the simplistic environmental Kuznets curve theory. At least, against the theory that income-related preferences drive emissions reductions. Mexico has world mean income per capita - in fact I often think that Mexico is a microcosm of the world as a whole - many of its indicators are near world means. That means it is not a poor country, of course, but it is not rich either.

Public Lecture by Bob Costanza at the Crawford School

Bob Costanza is visiting the Crawford School at ANU and giving a public lecture:

‘Ecosystem services come of age: Linking science, policy, and participation for sustainable human well-­being’
Tuesday 15 May 2012
5:00pm - 6:00pm
Weston Theatre, JG Crawford Building 132, Lennox Crossing, ANU

More details and RSVP here.

Costanza is University Professor of Sustainability in the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University. He is also editor-in-chief and co-founder of the new journal Solutions. Bob was the founding president of the International Society for Ecological Economics and founding editor of Ecological Economics. He has a very impressive record of high impact publications.

On a personal note, my PhD advisor, Cutler Cleveland studied for his masters degree with Bob at Louisiana State University. Bob was also my wife, Shuang's PhD adviser. And I coauthored a paper with Bob in 2004. I often think that ecological economists should have "Costanza numbers" like the well-known Erdös numbers :)

Crawford School Working Papers in April 2012

This month the three most downloaded papers across our six active working paper series were:

Carbon Pricing that Builds Consensus and Reduces Australia's Emissions: Managing Uncertainties Using a Rising Fixed Price Evolving to Emissions Trading, Frank Jotzo, 36 downloads.

IMF Programs: Who Is Chosen and What Are the Effects?, Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee, 22 downloads.

Total Factor Productivity and Economic Growth in Indonesia, Pierre van der Eng, 16 downloads.

Total downloads were 651 with 2135 abstract views across the six active series.

There are also quite a lot of new papers:

Papers by Hal Hill, Shuhei Nishitateno, and Budy Resosudarmo in the Arndt-Corden series.

Three new papers in the ASARC series.

Papers by Andrew Macintosh and Kaliappa Kalirajan in the CCEP series.

Also a paper by Stephen Howes in the Development Policy series.

Sorry for omitting coauthors.

Global Trends Graph Updated to 2010

As I'm preparing for my first lecture later this week in CRWF 8000 I'm updating my slides from last semester. I'm using the data we collected for our paper on the 2010 rebound in carbon emissions to update a graph I've used to open a few presentations in the last couple of years:



This introduces the big picture trends of growth energy use and climate change. It's now updated to 2010 showing the rebound from the GFC world recession (or economic slowdown :)). This is just the first slide to be updated. This one looks at emissions in four key countries:



Australia obviously, the two biggest emitters - China and the US - and the UK which industrialized first. The main thing to notice is the continued meteoric rise of emissions in China, which passed the US in 2006 as the largest emitter.

Seminar @ Crawford School on 29th June

Christian Gross, who will be visiting from the Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena, Germany, will give the seminar. It will take place in Seminar Room 1, Stanner Building from 12:30 to 1:30.

TITLE: Can Declining Energy Intensity Mitigate Climate Change? Decomposition and Meta-Regression Results

ABSTRACT: Ever since the First Assessment Report on Climate Change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990, there is an ongoing debate on the quantification of greenhouse gas emissions for the future. Based on a modified version of the Kaya Identity we argue that the observed reduction in carbon dioxide intensity (CO2/GDP) from 1971 to 2008 was mainly a result of nonrecurring attempts to reduce the energy intensity of production (Energy/GDP) e.g. an extension of the service economy as well as the off-shoring of pollution intensive production. Using meta-significance testing (Stanley, 2005; 2008) based on 80 studies on the relationship between energy and economic growth, we find that, in fact, energy and growth are strongly interlinked, so that a slowdown in the decrease in energy intensity or even a recurring increase is possible. Ceteris paribus, this would also entail an increase in carbon dioxide intensity. We suggest that the only strategy to achieve sustainability is to reduce the multiplier between carbon dioxide intensity and energy intensity, namely the carbon dioxide intensity of energy (CO2/Energy). As a consequence, if our projections are true, the time frame to do so is smaller than normally assumed.

Great Post on Value of Blogging, Tweeting etc. about Research

Interesting post on the Impact of Social Science Blog. I especially like this graph:



Melissa Terras started tweeting and blogging about papers that she published in the past, which had now been added to her university's depositary. These posts resulted in large increases in downloads for the papers as shown in the graph.

Calculating an Individual Impact Factor Using Scopus

Citation impact factors for journals are widely used to evaluate journal quality, though there is a lot of criticism of the use of this statistic especially to evaluate papers published in those journals. So why not compute an impact factor for an individual researcher rather than for a journal. This is really easy to do using Scopus. Do an "Author Search" and then select "Citation Overview". You will get an output looking like this (minus the green box):



The 2011 five year impact factor is the average citations received in 2011 for papers published by this researcher in the five years 2006-2010. The 2011 citations to articles published in the five year window are highlighted by the green box. There are a total of 47 such citations in this case. And there are 10 articles in the database. So the impact factor is 47/10 = 4.7. The 2010 impact factor was 6.4. Scopus covers more journals in the social sciences than the Web of Science does and so this impact factor is probably not directly comparable to the Journal Citation Report impact factors. In the natural sciences the numbers will be closer.

I think this is definitely worth computing for job or tenure candidates etc. in fields where journal articles dominate. You can't apply it to a new PhD but for those who have done a post-doc etc. or more senior candidates, I can't see why not.

Global Warming Preceded by Increasing Carbon Dioxide Concentrations during the Last Deglaciation

So says a paper published last week in Nature by Jeremy Shakun et al. The authors construct new temperature and CO2 series for the last deglaciation period between 22 and 6000 years ago. This is the key figure from the paper:



Clearly the rise in CO2 preceded the main rise in temperature at the end of the ice age. CO2 in the atmosphere also stabilizes before temperature does and most convincingly CO2 falls before the Younger Dryas cold period. I'm actually surprised by the length of the lag.

But the picture is confused by the different behavior of the northern and southern hemispheres. Temperature actually increased in the southern hemisphere before CO2 began to rise:



So based on this data alone perhaps both CO2 and northern hemisphere temperature were driven at different speeds by southern hemisphere temperature.* The authors address this issue with a simulation exercise using an NCAR model. They find they can reproduce the paleotemperature data quite well using greenhouse gases, orbital effects on insolation (amount of sunlight) in the simulation but not so well without the greenhouse gases. This suggests that greenhouse gases do amplify the warming effect due to increased insolation but that they don't initiate deglaciation. This model based evidence is usually considered stronger evidence than empirical time series evidence by climate scientists. But it is the kind of evidence that non-scientists are especially skeptical of.

* Our own paper in Nature in 1997 showed that southern hemisphere temperature Granger caused northern hemisphere temperature in the observational record.

Ecological Economics Best Paper Prize

Elsevier has offered a prize for a Best Paper Award for Ecological Economics, which we would like to announce or present to the winner at the ISEE Conference in June. The members of the editorial board are supposed to each nominate a paper and then the editor and associate editors will pick the best.

The criteria are to find the "outstanding paper published in Ecological Economics in 2010-2011 that uniquely advances research and praxis in ecological economics."

With more than 500 papers published I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed in coming up with a suggestion. So I was wondering if any of you have any ideas.

Meta-Analysis of Energy-GDP Causality Literature

An interesting paper by Chi-Chung Chen of National Chung-Hsing U., Taiwan and coauthors was recently published in Energy Policy that carries out a meta-analysis of the energy-GDP causality literature.

I've written about this literature on the blog before and originally worked on the topic in my PhD dissertation resulting in a paper published in Energy Economics. I also have a paper I am working on that investigates this issue in our long-run Swedish dataset.*

There is a very large literature on the topic, but as yet no agreed consensus. Studies in this tradition use dynamic time series models to test for Granger Causality or cointegration between energy use and economic output. Studies vary in their methods, the samples they use, what other variables are included in the model etc. Outcomes are either no causality, GDP causes energy, energy causes GDP, or bidirectional or mutual causation.

Chen et al. use a multinomial logit model to assess the effects of various variables on the probability of a study resulting in each of these four outcomes. Here are the key results:



I've edited their table for clarity... The numbers indicate the change in probability of the given outcome for a unit increase of the variable. So researchers are more likely to find that GDP causes energy in developing countries (Develop) and less likely to find that result in OPEC and Kyoto Annex 1 countries where energy causes GDP is more likely to be found. Larger economies though (GDP) are more likely to have GDP causes energy as are studies with more recent data (that including Year 2000) but higher total energy use (EC) is likely to result in a finding of energy causes GDP.

The method variable takes the value of one when a standard Granger Causality test was used and is zero for other methods. Not using the Granger Causality method is more likely to result in a finding of no causality.

I can certainly buy that using different methods can result in different findings if one method is more appropriate than another. But is there really a difference of this sort between countries of these types? Or is something else going on here? My collaborators, Christian Gross and Stephan Bruns are going to be presenting related work at the IAEE Conference in Perth in June. So I'll be writing more about this topic in future...

* This version of the paper that I presented at a workshop in Michigan last year is only an early draft.

Journal of Economic Structures

A new open-access economics journal from Springer. The title is a bit enigmatic but turns out it is the official journal of the Pan-Pacific Association of Input-Output Studies. There are so far few quality open access journals in economics with the leading ones being the Econometric Society's Quantitative and Theoretical Economics. And, of course, the Journal of Economic Perspectives is also open access now. There are other open access journals in economics of course but they don't have the reputation of these. And the B.E. journals seem to have become non-open access and were never quite that model anyway. In my opinion, there is less momentum to open access in economics than in biology say because of the strong working paper culture in economics means that most papers do have a free version available on the web and the role of funders in pushing open access is much smaller as funding dollars are much less important in economics.

Google Scholar Metrics

Google Scholar has just released metrics for journals. The main indicator is an h-index for the period 2007-2011. The top list of all publications (in English) strangely lists RePEc and arXiv as the 4th and 5th top journals. RePEc is certainly not a journal, MPRA could be considered as a journal, I suppose, but it's not listed and neither is SSRN. Another interesting result is that Ecological Economics is the fourth ranked journal with the term "economic" in its title! I don't think that passes the "laugh test" as far as mainstream economists are concerned.

Top Three Crawford Working Papers in March 2012

This month, I decided to do something a little different and just highlight the three most downloaded papers:

Total Factor Productivity and Economic Growth in Indonesia, Pierre van der Eng, 27 downloads.

Adaptation to climate change: Formulating policy under uncertainty, Leo Dobes, 24 downloads.

Impacts of border carbon adjustments on China's sectoral emissions: simulations with a dynamic computable general equilibrium model, Qin Bao, Ling Tang, ZhongXiang Zhang, Han Qiao and Shouyang Wang, 23 downloads.

Total downloads were 793 with 2471 abstract views across the six active series.