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.

Open Access Might Not Stay Open Access Forever

I'm a bit late on this news, but I just found out that the kind of open access * B.E. Journals were sold to a publisher called De Gruyter and are now no longer open access at all. So authors who published in these journals in the past have now had their articles go from open access to being quite difficult to access as DeGruyter is not one of the big platform publishers like Elsevier or Springer that a lot of libraries subscribe to. I don't think that this will happen to PLoS or to journals like Theoretical Economics published by the Econometric Society, but it does mean you have to be wary of publishing with less known open access publishers who might suddenly not be open access in the future.

* You had to fill in a form that informed your library about the journal in order to access articles.

New Citation Analysis of Environmental and Ecological Economics

A new citation analysis of environmental and ecological economics has just been published in Ecological Economics. The authors are Andreas Hoepner, Benjamin Kant, Bert Scholtens, and Pei-Shan Yu. It follows up on our papers on influential articles in the field (Costanza et al., 2004; Ma and Stern, 2006) by analyzing articles from 2000-2009. The main characteristics of their research design are:

1. They only look at citations to articles published between 2000 and 2009 in a group of 14 environmental and resource economics journals including Ecological Economics.

2. The main indicator is citations per annum which gives recently published papers much more weight than in most traditional rankings.

3. They distribute citations to authors and institutions on a fractional basis - so each author of our 2004 paper would only get 20% of the citations.

The results are interesting but different to what you might expect. Costanza ends up being ranked 61st in the field as all the above features count against him. C. C. Lee ends up in the 1st position in the ranking. Papers and authors associated with ecosystem services and payments for them are highly ranked which does make sense.

We did not publish a ranking of authors as part of our 2004 and 2006 papers but we did calculate them. So here are the rankings based on number of citations between 1994 and 2003 in articles published in Ecological Economics:



The full pdf is here. A peculiarity of this ranking is that all citations are assigned to the first author due to the limitations of the Web of Science database at the time. Despite this, it seems fairly plausible to me.

For JEEM, we came up with the following ranking:



Full list here.

Academic Job Resources

I just sent out an e-mail to our PhD students full of links to job ad sites etc. and thought it would be useful to post it here too This is mostly going to be on econ jobs. Also, I don't know anything about searching for jobs in Asia and relatively little about non-English speaking Europe though I have been interviewed or discussed job opportunities in several European/Mediteranean countries, now and then.

For Australian academic jobs the main website is:

http://www.unijobs.com.au/

I find that most academic jobs in Australia are posted there.

For the US and international market in economics jobs the best website is JOE/AEA:

http://www.aeaweb.org/joe/

A lot of the top Australian and European etc. universities as well as all US universities will recruit via this website and the AEA meeting in January in the US - if you apply for jobs listed there (apart from Australian ones) you need to be prepared to pay your own way to the AEA meeting. There are also useful articles linked there on the job market in economics. There are other job sites I know of in econ (e.g. The Economist ) but they each have very few jobs listed.

For US policy related see:

http://publicservicecareers.org/

More US academic jobs:

http://chronicle.com/section/Jobs/61/

For US academic jobs you have to be aware of the very tight annual hiring cycle. Most jobs are advertised between September and February depending on field and very few long-term positions are advertised in the rest of the year. In econ, most jobs are advertised in October and November to start the next northern Autumn.

For UK jobs:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/jobs_home.asp?navCode=84

Or

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/

For academic jobs in the EU:

http://www.academicjobseu.com/

It's particularly hard to get good info on academic jobs in the environment area. The AAG has quite a few in geography and related areas but you need to be a member to access it:

http://www.aag.org/cs/jobs_and_careers/jobs_in_geography_center/jobs_in_geography_center_overview

Hope this helps people get aware of what is out there.

Adele Morris' Presentation

Video of Adele Morris' presentation at the Crawford School has now been posted on our website. Please click on the link above to view it.

Follow up on InTech Book

Last year, I blogged about being invited to contribute a chapter to an open access book published by InTech. I declined the invite, not wanting to pay Euro 590 to publish a book chapter with an unknown publisher - book chapters, even in books published by well-known academic presses usually aren't cited much. Furthermore, I have recently concluded that publishing book chapters is detrimental to our university's ranking in the ERA research assessment exercise.* So I don't need any extra book chapters anyway.

The book has now been published and it is interesting to see the finished product. It turns out that the mystery editor was Shariar Khan of Independent University in Dhaka, Bangladesh who is also the author of Chapter 9. The chapters are an odd combination of physical science and social science articles on the theme of fossil fuels and the environment with authors from all around the world.

InTech claim that 2011 was a huge success for the company. They published 60,000 authors in over 1,280 books. The number of downloaded chapters topped 1.7 million in 2011, while the number of unique users exceeded 154,000 each month.

* This is the case in economics at least where book chapters are considered equivalent to C-ranked journal articles on the whole. ERA assesses publications on the basis of both the overall profile of journal publications and a peer review of a 30% sample selected by the submitting university. The 30% covers all journal, book, book chapter etc. items. If you publish a lot of book chapters your 30% sample will have to dig down deeper in your quality profile. So large numbers of publications in low quality outlets hurt more than a few publications in high quality outlets help I think. This is in contrast to the UK REF where each academic only submits their best 4 publications. Total numbers of publications are still useful for funding purposes in Australia. But increasingly the ERA ratings of the university will be used to weight performance on numbers of publications, grants etc...

Google Scholar Citations Continues to Rapidly Gather Members

The rate of take-up is really pretty impressive for a fairly new service. Already eight of my coauthors have created profiles as have at least 12 of my colleagues at Crawford, and more at ANU.

Key Water Indicator Portal

The Key Water Indicator Portal has been released. This is one of the main outputs of the UN-Water Federated Water Monitoring System & Key Water Indicator Portal Project, developed by AQUASTAT of FAO, and coordinated by my former student Amit Kohli. This portal is intended to provide a simple way to view the latest data on UN-Water Indicators, which provide general water-related information on each country. Work on the portal has been ongoing for about a year, and its release was timed (Tuesday 20-March) for a few days before World Water Day.

New Zealand

I haven't posted much here in March because things have been ultra busy with the start of a new semester in late February and over the last ten days I've been in New Zealand. I went to attend the second lead author meeting of Working Group 3 for our work on the 5th Assessment Report (LAM2 WG3 AR5 in IPCC-speak). I also spent a few days travelling around the North Island with Shuang - this photo was taken on the lower slopes of Mount Ruapehu in Tongariro National Park. We got as far as Taupo and then headed back to Wellington. Around Lake Taupo there is plenty of geothermal activity. We visited some hot springs at Tokaanu:



and bathed in the baths there. There was steam rising from the water on the shore of Lake Taupo next to where we stayed too. One day the city of Taupo and much of the central North Island will probably be destroyed in a volcanic eruption. Lake Taupo is the caldera of the world's most destructive volcano. The caldera was formed in a massive eruption around 26,000 years ago. The last major eruption happened in 181 AD when around 30 cubic kilometres of material was erupted in about 20 minutes from vents just off the southeastern shore of the Lake. It is really hard to imagine such an eruption. Large areas of the North Island are covered in thick ash deposits (ignimbrite) from these and other eruptions. Discounting of the future means that human activity goes on all around and on the supervolcano...

Hub Project Almost Wrapped Up

The main paper from my Environmental Economics Research Hub project has just been accepted for publication in Energy Economics. It is titled: "Modeling international trends in energy efficiency and carbon emissions". This is really the background paper behind the paper that Frank Jotzo and I published in Energy Policy in 2010. In that paper we applied this model to assessing climate policy in India and China. This paper goes into much more detail about the factors related to differences in energy efficiency across countries and the trends across the world in energy efficiency over time and whether countries are converging in energy efficiency or not globally (mostly converging if they are growing). I also do a decomposition of global energy use and carbon emissions and provide much more detail on the methods which are a bit innovative on both the theory and econometrics side. As you can tell there is a lot in the paper. There was even more in my original report. I already trimmed that report before submitting it and after refereeing I cut the choice theory model out and slimmed stuff down even more.

My Hub project was funded by the Environmental Economics Research Hub for a year from March 2009 to March 2010 during which I was a researcher in the Arndt Corden Department of Economics at ANU. So it has taken almost two years to go from working paper to acceptance and will be more time until publication. The third paper that emerged from the project was between estimates of the environmental Kuznets curve, which was published in Ecological Economics eventually.

The Hub itself was a research network involving ANU and other Australian universities funded under the CERF scheme that funded research in various environmental areas.

Adele Morris

Adele Morris heads the energy and climate change program at the Brookings Institution. She presented at ANU today on clean energy technology. This covered a lot of the same ground as my lectures in the CRWF 8000 course last semester and again later this semester so the video of her presentation will hopefully be useful for my students when it is available. She also mentioned a paper she coauthored with Warwick McKibbin and Peter Wilcoxen published in the Energy Journal late last year titled: Subsidizing Household Capital: How Does Energy Efficiency Policy Compare to a Carbon Tax?. The paper compares a tax credit for energy efficient household technology with an economy-wide carbon tax. The money raised by the carbon tax is similar to the tax-expenditure of the tax credit. But the effects on emissions are dramatically different. From the abstract:

"This study uses a general equilibrium model to compare environmental and economic outcomes of two policies: (1) a tax credit of 10 percent of the price of household capital that is 20 percent more energy efficient than its unsubsidized counterpart, assuming half of new household investment qualifies for the credit; and (2) a tax starting at $30 ($2007) per metric ton of CO2 rising five percent annually. By 2040, the carbon tax and tax credit reduce emissions by about 60 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. ... Both policies have similar impacts on the federal budget, but of opposite signs."

The dramatic difference can be put down to the rebound effect. This shows how ineffective energy efficiency policy could be as I have explained before

CollEc

CollEc is an interesting new service from RePEc that lets users find connections between economists. As well as showing Erdös number* like paths between economists, it generates two statistics:

Closeness ranking looks at how far an author is, on average, to all others economists.

Betweenness ranking looks how many times an author appears on average on shortest paths between all other economists.

These can give you an idea of how central or typical an economist any one person is as well as how involved they are in mainstream economic research.

Here is the page for me. As there are about 30,000 economists registered in RePEc I am moderately centrally located and quite involved in mainstream networks. Among my coauthors, Ed Barbier is most centrally located and plugged in. Nick Hanley (not a coauthor, current visitor to the Crawford School) is really connected.

I think this could be a good predictor of your chances of getting published in a top journal in economics :)

* Probably we should compute Stiglitz Numbers as I think he is the most famous, most centrally placed economist.

Decomposing the 2010 Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions Rebound

In January, Glen Peters et al. published a short paper in Nature Climate Change on trends in global carbon emissions in the wake of the global financial crisis. The key point was that the rebound in emissions in 2010 was much more rapid relative to the previous trend than in previous economic downturns as illustrated in this figure:



Emissions have returned to the trend that held during the last boom rather than there being a break in trend. Our article, appearing in the same journal, examines the reasons for this using the Kaya Identity. In 2010 GDP grew rapidly and both energy intensity of GDP and the carbon intensity of the energy input (grams of carbon per joule) increased:



In recent decades both the latter factors have declined, but since 2001 carbon intensity has risen due to the carbonization in India and China. Energy intensity does seem to rise in the recovery from recessions but in the past has been mitigated by declining carbon intensity.

The text of our media release follows:

TUESDAY 13 MARCH 2012

GLOBAL EMISSIONS SURGE BACK AFTER GFC

A recent spike in worldwide carbon emissions growth was caused by the rebound from the global financial crisis and is likely to be a one-off, according to a new study from The Australian National University.

The study found that global carbon emissions remain on a relentless upward trend, though efforts to shift to low-carbon energy and cut energy demand are bearing some fruit.

Led by Dr Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy in the ANU Crawford School, the study traced the causes of a surge in carbon emissions during 2010. It found that the surge was due to a combination of unusual factors and was unlikely to happen again.

“The global economy grew very quickly in 2010. In addition, relatively low fossil fuel prices and fiscal stimulus spending on energy-intensive activities like construction contributed to a global emissions surge,” said Dr Jotzo. “The global mix of energy sources also shifted slightly towards higher-carbon sources during 2010.

“The 2010 emissions surge was exceptional. It is likely that global emissions growth slowed in 2011 and the fragile condition of the world economy suggests moderate emissions growth for 2012 as well.”

Dr Paul Burke, a co-author of the study and energy economist at ANU, added that 2010 saw a rare occurrence of energy demand outpacing world economic output, or GDP, as the world rebounded from the GFC.

“For energy demand to grow faster than GDP is most unusual,” said Dr Burke. “Over the last four decades this has only happened on four occasions. Apart from 1990, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the effect was never as strong as it was in 2010.”

The researchers also found that global carbon emissions growth is likely to slow in years to come.

“Thanks to policy efforts to improve energy efficiency and shift to lower-carbon energy supply, combined with greater availability of natural gas and falling costs of renewable energy technologies, we can expect slower emissions growth,” said Dr Jotzo.

“For example, Australia’s emissions from energy and industry fell slightly over the year to September 2011. This was mainly due to a reduction in Australia’s power use and less coal-fired electricity in the energy supply mix. The use of more hydropower, a ramp up of other renewable energy, and energy savings all contributed to the outcome.

“Cutting global emissions remains an enormous challenge, because of the strong underlying growth momentum, particularly in developing countries. Energy efficiency will need to be improved at a rate of knots, and zero-carbon sources deployed faster. China, in many respects, is leading the way, but much stronger policy action is needed in just about all countries,” he said.

The study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

For interviews:

Dr Frank Jotzo – 02 6125 4367
Dr Paul Burke – 02 6125 6566

For media assistance: Sarina Talip – 02 6125 7988

Crawford School Working Papers in February 2012

Here are come highlights of the Crawford School's working papers series in February 2012. You can find the latest published papers from our website and my Scopus RSS feed.

Across all six series we got 2262 abstract views and 828 downloads. The most downloaded papers in each series were:

Crawford School Research Papers:

David Stern - From Correlation to Granger Causality

Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Departmental Working Papers:

Paul J. Burke and Shuhei Nishitateno - Gasoline prices, gasoline consumption, and new-vehicle fuel economy: Evidence for a large sample of countries

ASARC Working Papers:

Raghbendra Jha - Fiscal Policy in Developing Countries: A Synoptic View

Asia Pacific Economics Papers:

Ryuta Ray Kato - THE REFORM OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH INSURANCE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH OF JAPAN

CCEP Working Papers:

David Stern - The Role of Energy in Economic Growth

Development Policy Centre Discussion Papers:

Thomas Pogge - The Health Impact Fund: More justice and efficiency in global health

The only new paper in February was:

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

I really welcome more contributions!

Microsoft Academic Search Update

Back in December I blogged about Microsoft Academic Search. My conclusion was that though it offered some innovative ways of presenting data, it was still in an early stage of development compared to the offerings from Thomson (Web of Science/Researcher ID), Elsevier (Scopus), and Google (Scholar and Citations).

I recently received an e-mail from the project lead for Microsoft Academic Search. They have merged my various profiles. The number of citations is now 2109 which is similar to the number in Scopus. There are still, however, a lot of publications in the profile that aren't mine. It also says I have collaborated with 147 co-authors. I'd be surprised if the number was greater than 37. Based on Google that is roughly the number. The large number must be because of the extraneous publications. People like me are problematic for disambiguation algorithms of this type as we move around a lot.

Though they didn't point this out to me, it seems that there is a way to correct the record. I submitted corrections to my record. It is a similar approach to the Scopus Author Profile. You can identify which articles are not yours and then submit the info to Microsoft. Similarly, you can request author merges.

Microsoft have also opened their API to users. That's beyond my capabilities I think but very interesting.

So, this is potentially a very interesting service, but still really in the "beta" stage. But then, all author profile services have their issues.

Elsevier Responds to the Boycott

Elsevier have responded to the boycott by producing a new e-mail newsletter for authors. The first issue includes a link to a page about the various open access options that Elsevier offer authors. I think some of the boycotters and their sympathisers simply aren't aware of these options. Elsevier hasn't until now highlighted them very much. So I think this is a positive development. Article transfer is also a good innovation - transferring the peer review reports from a journal that rejects a paper to another journal in the group that might instead be interested rather than setting out requesting new referees all over again.

The Other Side of the Elsevier Story

One of the principal complaints against Elsevier is that they charge too much. The other side of the story is that universities are allocating a smaller and smaller part of their budgets to libraries.

The Rise and Fall of Ecological Economics

Mark Sagoff has written an article with this title in the Breakthrough Journal. This is a new publication of the Breakthrough Institute which is a contrarian but self-described "progressive" think tank that has a large focus on environmental issues.

In the article Sagoff mainly claims that ecological economics started promisingly but got sidetracked by adopting environmental valuation and cost-benefit analysis and is now ignored by everyone. There are lots of other discussions about the history of ecology etc. along the way. Sagoff has been a consistent opponent of cost-benefit analysis. I think the essay is very polemical and overemphasizes some trends while ignoring others. Some ecological economists have adopted mainstream approaches to non-market valuation of the environment for largely pragmatic reasons as described. But this is by no means all or even the majority of ecological economists, especially in Europe. Ecological Economics does publish quite a few papers on valuation but also on all kinds of other topics and approaches. We have always taken a very open-minded and eclectic approach. There has been convergence between ecological and mainstream environmental economics over time, but it hasn't been a one way street.

Personally, I have always been opposed to non-market environmental valuation for both practical and philosophical reasons. I don't believe that it is possible to come up with at all credible prices through these approaches and especially not sustainability-relevant prices. And I don't think CBA should be used for making large societal decisions as they are more about distribution than efficiency. I am all for efficiency though in implementing goals once society has decided on them.

Journal of Economic Surveys 2012

Finally, my paper on interfuel substitution has been published in a formal issue of the journal:

Stern D. I. (2012) Interfuel substitution: A meta-analysis, Journal of Economic Surveys 26(2), 307-331.

It has been online on the journal's website since October 2010. A free working paper version is also available. I first blogged about this paper back in 2009 when the working paper went up. Since then we got a grant from the ARC which will allow me to hire a postdoc to look at the issues raised in that blogpost about climate change models. Specifically, will improved estimates of elasticities of substitution between fuels and between energy and capital make a big difference to predicted costs of climate change policies. I'll keep you posted on that over the next three years! :)

Acceptance Rates in the Top Environmental Economics Journals

How hard is it to get published in the top journals in environmental economics? From a variety of sources:



JEEM is a lot tougher to get into than the other two journals, but they aren't exactly easy.

Papers on Drivers and Trends

What are the most classic journal articles on global drivers and trends of greenhouse gas emissions and anthropogenic climate change? Below are some papers that mostly have a lot of citations. Obviously, I don't agree with the content of all of them, but for this purpose I want to illustrate the evolution of thought on this matter. I've included IPCC scenarios, the environmental Kuznets curve, the emissions convergence literature, and papers by natural scientists.

I'm only just getting started on putting this review together, so will welcome any suggestions! In particular is there a journal article that can stand in for the Leggett et al. 1992 report on the IS92 scenarios? (I'm not allowed to include "grey literature"). No, this is not for the IPCC.

Arrhenius, Svante (1896) On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground, Philosophical Magazine Series 5 41 (April): 237-276.

Shafik, N. (1994) Economic development and environmental quality: an econometric analysis, Oxford Economic Papers 46: 757-773.

Holtz-Eakin, Douglas and Thomas M. Selden (1995) Stoking the fires? CO2 emissions and economic growth, Journal of Public Economics 57(1): 85-101.

Dietz, Thomas, and Eugene A. Rosa (1997) “Effects of population and affluence on CO2 emissions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94 (1) (January 7): 175 -179.

Schmalensee, R., Stoker, T. M., & Judson, R. A. (1998) World carbon dioxide emissions: 1950-2050. Review of Economics and Statistics 80: 15-27.

Grübler, Arnulf, Nebojsa Nakicénovic, and David G. Victor (1999) Dynamics of energy technologies and global change, Energy Policy 27: 247-280.

Ruddiman, William F. (2003) The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago, Climatic Change 61(3): 261-293.

Strazicich, Mark C. and John A. List (2003) Are CO2 emission levels converging among industrial countries? Environmental and Resource Economics 24(3): 263-271.

Aldy, Joseph E. (2006) Per capita carbon dioxide emissions: convergence or divergence? Environmental and Resource Economics 33(4): 533-555.

Riahi, Keywan, Arnulf Grübler, Nebojsa Nakicenovic (2007) Scenarios of long-term socio-economic and environmental development under climate stabilization, Technological Forecasting & Social Change 74: 887–935.

Raupach, Michael R., Gregg Marland, Philippe Ciais, Corinne Le Quéré, Josep G. Canadell, Gernot Klepper, Christopher B. Field (2007) Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(24): 10288-10923.

Garnaut, Ross, Stephen Howes, Frank Jotzo, and Peter Sheehan (2008) Emissions in the Platinum Age: the implications of rapid development for climate-change mitigation, Oxford Review of Economic Policy 24(2): 337-401.

Westerlund, Joakim and Syed A. Basher (2008) Testing for convergence in carbon dioxide emissions using a century of panel data, Environmental and Resource Economics 40:109–120.

Vollebergh, Herman R.J., Bertrand Melenberg, and Elbert Dijkgraaf (2009) Identifying reduced-form relations with panel data: The case of pollution and income, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 58(1): 27-42.

Henriques, Sofia Teives, and Astrid Kander (2010) “The modest environmental relief resulting from the transition to a service economy.” Ecological Economics 70 (2) (December 15): 271-282.

van Vuuren, Detlef P., Jae Edmonds, Mikiko Kainuma, Keywan Riahi, Allison Thomson, Kathy Hibbard, George C. Hurtt, Tom Kram, Volker Krey, Jean-Francois Lamarque, Toshihiko Masui, Malte Meinshausen, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Steven J. Smith, and Steven K. Rose (2011) The representative concentration pathways: an overview, Climatic Change 109(1-2): 5-31.

In Defence of Elsevier

The hot topic at the moment in the scholarly publishing world is the growing movement to boycott Elsevier journals. This is a new angle on the open access debate. Elsevier is the biggest publisher of academic journals with over 2600 titles. Yes Elsevier make a lot of profit (About 1/3 of revenues) and they have engaged in dubious practices involving "fake medical journals" but that is no reason for a general boycott in my opinion. The current movement has been sparked by Elsevier's support for the US "Research Works Act". Whatever you think of that potential legislation, Elsevier are hardly the only supporter of it.

I am an associate editor of Ecological Economics which is published by Elsevier. The International Society for Ecological Economics has outsourced publication of their journal to the company. This certainly made sense in the days before electronic publication. Today, it might make a bit less sense given that it would be easier to replicate many of Elsevier's various functions, but it would still be a lot of extra work for the society. Elsevier make the journal available at a heavily discounted price to members of the society. More generally, Elsevier allow authors in all their journals to archive the final version of the paper (before they format it) on their institutional servers. So Elsevier helps us distribute our work and doesn't prevent free access to the results. Seems like a win-win to me, hardly a reason for a boycott. The Scopus citation database is another great service developed by Elsevier. Of course, they charge institutions huge amounts of money for this, but they also provide access for 30 days free of charge to referees for their journals.

Anyway, the whole argument that paying for subscription journals is paying for science twice (the other time is public funding of research grants and scientists' salaries) doesn't make sense. Elsevier is like Walmart. They distribute the product and this costs money. Walmart also makes a lot of money and has some monopoly power. Of course, there are a lot of people boycotting Walmart too, but something of a minority. I don't see why using public money to pay PLOS to publish a paper is morally better than using it for a university library to subscribe to a journal. One way or another the costs have to paid. Publishing in gold open access will allow greater access but favors more heavily funded authors getting published (PLOS does in fact waive publication fees if you can't pay but other publishers don't).

P.S.
For the sake of search engines: Defence seems to be the British spelling and defense the American.

The Inside Story on the 2010 ERA Economics Journals Rankings

Two Monash economists have written a working paper on bias in the selection of the economics journal ranks used in the ERA research assessment exercise in Australia. The selectors were all the full professors in economics in Australia identified by the Economic Society of Australia (ESA). They tended to vote for journals they had published in etc... In fact the rankings of economics journals (since abolished) were not that bad. There were a few glaring anomalies but these weren't the responsibility of the ESA. We are still using these rankings in practice. It's a meme that has stuck at least in economics.

Crawford School Working Papers in January 2012

Here are come highlights of the Crawford School's working papers series in January 2012. Across all six series we got 2198 abstract views and 754 downloads. The most downloaded papers in each series were:

Crawford School Research Papers:

David Stern - From Correlation to Granger Causality

Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Departmental Working Papers:

Pierre van der Eng - Total Factor Productivity and Economic Growth in Indonesia

ASARC Working Papers:

Sunila George, Raghbendra Jha, and Hari K. Nagarajan - The Evolution and Structure of the Two-wheeler Industry in India

Asia Pacific Economics Papers:

Ryuta Ray Kato - THE REFORM OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH INSURANCE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH OF JAPAN

CCEP Working Papers:

Leo Dobes -
Adaptation to climate change: Formulating policy under uncertainty

Development Policy Centre Discussion Papers:

Stephen Howes - An overview of aid effectiveness, determinants and strategies

Congratulations to all the authors!

New papers in January include:

Determinants of Residential Water Consumption: Evidence and Analysis from a Ten-country Household Survey by Quentin Grafton, Michael Ward, Hang To, and Tom Kompas

Adaptation to climate change: Formulating policy under uncertainty by Leo Dobes

Roger Pielke Speaks at Crawford School

Roger Pielke spoke today at the Crawford School about his book The Climate Fix. He mainly focused on how the only real solution to the climate change problem is decarbonization of the energy supply. Energy efficiency will have less effect and population control or reducing GDP are non-starters and will have a relatively small effect. He spent a lot of time on how the required rates of decarbonization to reach climate change targets like reducing emissions by 80% by 2050 are much more rapid than any historical changes. This is true, but doesn't mean it is impossible as we haven't really tried to do it yet. The question is more about political feasibility. His answer is we need to make climate policy a positive about innovation and green jobs rather than a negative about cutting back and being dictated to by science which just ends up with backlash from the public and vested interests. He is in favor of a low carbon tax with the proceeds being earmarked for innovation. I don't really disagree with these conclusions but I think he plays up the unfeasibility thing too much. And he didn't really discuss the political aspects much or really focus on his policy options. In fact some audience members told me afterwards that they didn't think he talked about policy at all.

P.S.

Following an exchange on Roger's blog he pointed to an article he wrote that expands more on the proposed policy than he did in his talk.