Paul Romer on Growth and Cities
BBC Radio’s Global Business this week sees Peter Day in conversation with Professor Paul Romer from Stanford University, Paul Romer is an expert in the causes of long run run growth and his current focus is on the economics of new cities in developed and developing countries. It is a programme well worth listening to, Romer is tremendously optimistic about the opportunities created by faster economic growth - especially growth built around innovation and appropriate rules systems.
read more...»Revision: Green National Product
National income accounts have not, until recently, made any adjustment for the environmental impact of economic growth. Critics argue that because of this omission, the statistics misrepresent improvements in social welfare. For example, no allowance is made for environmental depletion or money spent on correcting environmental damage that is actually recorded as an addition to GDP. GDP only records marketed transactions - at present, there is no market for many important environmental resources and it is also difficult to place monetary values on them. Green accounting is starting to make progress in a number of countries.
One measure is the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) developed by economists at the New Economics Foundation. The ISEW adjusts official data on real national output and makes an allowance for defensive spending (i.e. that incurred in cleaning up for pollution and other forms of environmental damage, together with money spent commuting to work). Not surprisingly, the net growth of ISEW is well below that of the official data for national income, output and spending.
Revision: Sustainable Development
The term ‘sustainable’ means ‘enduring’ and ‘lasting’ and ‘to keep in being’. According to one of the finest environmental economists of his generation, the late David Pearce, sustainable development means that each generation should pass on at least as much “capital” as it inherits, the Pearce approach defines capital in broad terms, to include physical capital (machinery and infrastructure); intellectual capital (knowledge and technology) and also environmental capital (environmental quality and the stock of natural resources).
read more...»Electric cars - subsidise the consumer or producer?
We can expect a battery of articles in the days and weeks ahead on government incentives to grow the UK electric car market. Gordon Brown is reported as favouring a sizeable subsidy for consumers to purchase electric vehicles - according to the FT, buyers of electric cars will be offered discounts of more than £2,000 – paid for by the state – under plans by Gordon Brown to make Britain a leading centre for manufacturing “greener” vehicles.
read more...»
Coal and CO2 emissions - Poland
Almost all of Poland’s power comes from coal and much of the cheap brown coal is very expensive in terms of CO2 emissions.
This level of dependency on a dirty fossil fuel has been headlined this week as the climate change conference in Poland confronts how best to cut emissions. The BBC environment correspondent David Shukman has been at Poland’s largest mine in Belchatow and his report provides a good resource on the issue of how best to encourage some of Europe’s emerging market economies to lower their emissions.
Flood defences, cost benefit and opportunity cost
Money spent on flood defences both here in the UK and overseas raises plenty of interesting questions relating to the use of cost benefit analysis and the opportunity cost of public money. What are the external costs and benefits of flood defence schemes? Are flood fences a pure public good? Who should pay for them? There have been several excellent news articles and video clips on this issue on the BBC web site in recent days - here is a selection
read more...»Revision: Climate Change Policies
A brief revision PowerPoint used in a lesson on climate change policies .... I kept the analysis diagrams outside of the presentation
PowerPoint
Climate_Change_Policies.ppt
Unsustainable world
BBC’s Newsnight has been running an excellent series of programmes - Unsustainable World” - here is the link to the relevant web site
Tim Harford takes a dig at green taxes
VAT on gas and electricity too low? Excise duty on petrol and diesel too high? Yes says Tim Harford in his Undercover Economist slot this week. “Green taxes have been fussy and poorly-targeted, by turns too stringent and too lax ... This government – like most governments – likes to use the tax system as a way of expressing its moral views: hooray for pensioners, down with Jeremy Clarkson. Cheap politics for them, less so for the taxpayer.”
The rest of the article is here
Interrelated markets and climate change
An article in The Times recently explored the economic implications of reducing demand for oil and energy in the West.
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