Narrow Results

Licensing of foreign green technologies is not free to the home country, hence causing tradeoffs in the domestic welfare. This paper constructs a two-stage game model to explore the impact of international green technology licensing on the environment and social welfare. Results show that the total amount of pollution under licensing may be larger than that under no licensing whereas the social welfare under licensing may be smaller than that under no licensing. This implies that foreign technology transfer may not be socially preferred and harmful to the domestic environment. In addition, trade liberalization may help reduce the environmental harm when the import tariff is moderate.

The role of social capital in economic development has been a subject of interest to both academics and practitioners of development for several decades. However, empirical evidence on social capital in the context of developing countries is still relatively scant. This study explores the effects of social capital on economic development in Indonesia, a large and multi-ethnic developing country. Using district-level data for 2006–2019, we find that the relationships between social capital and economic development are complex. There are both favorable and unfavorable effects of social capital on economic development, as well as nonlinear effects. Hence, we cannot draw unequivocal conclusions on the benefits or disadvantages of social capital for economic development. Nevertheless, this study finds that trust among people across different ethnic groups, participation in communal works and social activities, and trust in government are the most important forms of social capital needed to improve people’s welfare.

Recent happiness studies show that income explains only 2% of the variance in happiness. Quality-of-life indicators also correlate less with income but more with advances in knowledge at the world level. Individuals and nations still engage in the rat race for higher incomes due to the competition for relative standing, the ignoring of the environmental disruption effects, our accumulation instinct, the influence of advertising and peer pressure, and the inadequate recognition of the habituation effect. In addition, economists over-estimate the costs of public spending, emphasising the excess burden of taxation, ignoring the negative excess burden in the public spending side and ignoring the grosser inefficiency of private consumption. These considerations suggest that more public spending in the right areas like education, research, and environmental protection may be much more welfare-improving despite some unavoidable inefficiencies. The restriction of private cars in Singapore may be desirable despite being excessive in accordance to the narrower economic analysis. It may also be appropriate to emphasise non-income factors important for welfare, including freedom and democracy.

Despite recent intense interest, happiness studies have been impeded by some conceptual and methodological problems, including viewing happiness (well-being/welfare) as different over different persons, as relative, multi-dimensional, non-cardinally measurable, interpersonally non-comparable and using non-cardinal and interpersonally non-comparable methods of happiness measurement. Using the evolutionary biology of happiness, this paper argues that happiness is absolute, universal, and uni-dimensional and is also cardinally measurable and interpersonally comparable. This is needed to make choices motivated by reward (pleasure) and punishment (pain) consistent with fitness maximization. However, happiness indices obtained by virtually all existing methods of happiness measurement are largely non-cardinal and non-comparable, making the use of averaging in group happiness indices of dubious philosophical validity. A method of measuring happiness to give cardinal and interpersonally comparable indices is discussed. These may contribute towards the more scientific study of happiness that is based on sounder methodological grounds as well as yielding more useful results.

Poverty is an interlacement of income distribution below a threshold value and inequality within that boundary. To unthread the fabric of poverty and understand the dimensions of impoverishment below and around the poverty line, a deeper examination of different facets of deprived and starving households is required. This paper attempts to provide an additional tool in monitoring poverty reduction by computing density ratio and decile density trends by applying Kernel density function for the consumer expenditure distribution from the National Sample Survey Organization’s 55th (2000), 61st (2005), 66th (2009) and 68th (2012) quinquennial rounds. The progressive Indian state Kerala has exhibited a higher density ratio with the poverty tail flattening when compared with the backward State Bihar. The ways and means to succeed in reaching the end of the sea of hardship in Bihar are explored keeping in view some of the most impressive achievements of Kerala, a developed Indian state.

This study evaluates the partial exclusion effects of store promotion. We find that a manufacturer with a better brand name has a higher willingness-to-pay for promotion services offered by retail stores or online platforms. The promotion results in higher sales-weighted average prices (wholesale and retail) and a larger inter-brand price gap. The stores or platforms extract more profits from manufacturers and consumers through the promotion services. The effects on consumer surplus and social welfare depend on whether the promotion alters consumer preferences. If it does, more consumers would be choosing their less-preferred brands because of the larger inter-brand price gap, which would be socially inefficient. If it does not, the promotion may help to correct the price distortion, but the social welfare effect is positive only when the promotion effect is small enough. In both cases, the promotion services reduce the total consumer surplus by softening inter-brand competition.

In this paper we introduce a new family of poverty measures for comparing and ordering social situations. The aggregation scheme of these poverty measures is based on the one-parameter family of exponential means. The poverty measures introduced satisfy interesting properties and the dual decomposition of the underlying exponential means induces a natural decomposition of the proposed poverty indices themselves into three underlying factors: incidence, intensity, and inequality among the poor.

Inequality, asymmetry, and the median-mean ratio are related but different concepts, although they have been frequently treated as equivalent in the literature. In this paper, we find important connections between these three concepts under particular conditions. We show that the Atkinson family and the generalized entropy class of inequality indices are simple functions of the medianmean ratio when a distribution is symmetrizable by a power transformation. In such a case, the coefficient of asymmetry can be interpreted as the aversion inequality parameter of a social planner, and a social evaluation function à la Kolm-Atkinson is shown to be equivalent to median income. A social evaluation function that depends only on mean income and inequality of opportunity is found as a by-product. In addition, the Hannah-Kay family of concentration indices (of which the Herfindahl-Hirschman is a special case) is also obtained as a function of the median-mean ratio. We illustrate these results empirically using the CPS dataset for the U.S. (1992—2007) and the EU-SILC dataset for the European Union (2005–2007).

The Human Biomedical Research Act: Overview and International Comparisons.

Tissue Banking in Singapore – An Evolving Enterprise.

After Ebola, Social Justice as a Base for a Biobanking Governance Framework.

Community Engagement for Biobanking Research: Perspectives from Africa.

Investing in Technology for Water Sustainability.

Water Policy Response to Water Scarcity and Future Climate Change Impacts.

Recirculation Aquaculture Systems (RAS): An Opportunity for the SE Asian Aquaculture Industry.

In a symmetric setting with constant marginal costs, the welfare loss from mergers depends on the aggregate response of non-participating firms. This response in turn depends on the degree of concavity of the demand. As the degree of concavity of demand is not observable, we obtain conditions that guarantee that the premerger elasticity of demand can be used for antitrust purposes.

Chinese Low-rent housing subsidy has been increasing year by year. However, it will be a very one-sided view if we only take the increasing number of subsidy into consideration when evaluating the effects of subsidy policy on low-rent housing lessees. Thus we studied on the impact of subsidy increase on low-rent housing lessees' welfare in China, and explored a valid way to evaluate the utility of the subsidy policy. At first, basing on the theory of welfare, we analyze the indifference curve model within consumption budget condition. After that, we applied the Cobb–Douglas utility function to establish a low-rent housing lessees' welfare model. Finally, some suggestions, especially in regard to the use of Information Technology to support subsidy making and protect low-rent housing lessees' welfare, are given to the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development of the People's Republic of China (MOHURD) and local Municipal Commissions of Housing and Urban–Rural Development (MCOHURD).

In today’s economy, information technology is present in all aspects of life and has the potential to be used for the development of society. The study aims to find hidden connections between the evolution of poverty in developing countries and information technology. The methodology of the study is based on the monitoring of statistical data from the world atlas Knoema, which characterizes the economic development of countries and the level of poverty, as well as data from the International Telecommunication Union, which characterizes the level of development of information technology in countries around the world. As a result of the study, the evolutionary changes of gross domestic product and the development of information technology were traced, with the subsequent establishment of a relationship between them, confirmed on the basis of the method of rating scores. Finally, a comparative analysis was made to identify the causal links between the evolution of poverty and information technology through the precise indicators that Knoema and the International Telecommunication Union collect to trace the regulatory environment within a country such as the affordability of ICT services, ICT literacy, and the poverty rate. It was found that despite the availability of information technology price policy in developing countries and the uneven growth of GDP mainly in post-Soviet countries, except for the period of the COVID-19 crisis, gaps were identified in the form of low or no ICT literacy at poverty thresholds of 3.8–9.8%. This demonstrates the hidden links between poverty and population’s practical knowledge of information technology, and may constrain the socio-economic development of developing countries. The findings can be used by policymakers as a tool to combat poverty, and are also useful to scholars and economists who work on the digitalization of the population and inclusive education.

Since the early 1980s, the international market of airline passengers is witnessing major turbulences. While in the USA, the EU or the ASEAN different strategies have been adopted to face the new situation, Arab countries show no clear strategy. Given the importance of this market for labor and nonlabor mobility in the Region, this paper investigates the impact of further liberalization on passengers and on welfare. To this end, an Indicator of Openness was computed and incorporated into an econometric model. The results show that increased competition decreases fares as well as carriers' revenue but increases consumer surplus. The computed net effect on society welfare is positive.

In this paper, we extend a new open economy macroeconomics (NOEM) model to examine the effects of a corporate tax reduction on home and foreign countries. The feature of this open economy model is that cross-border relocation of firms is allowed. We show that (i) a reduction in the home corporate tax rate induces an exchange rate appreciation (depreciation) when the degree of cross-border firm mobility is large (small) and (ii) when the degree of cross-border firm mobility is large (small), a reduction in corporate tax is beneficial (detrimental) to the domestic country but detrimental (beneficial) to the foreign country.

The assumption of a fixed amount of land remaining in agriculture regardless of changing climate conditions — one of the features of the “dumb farmer scenario” — is likely to bias the estimated social welfare impacts of climate change. In order to quantify this bias, we employ a demand-supply framework to determine both the amount of land allocated to agricultural and nonagricultural uses as well as the social welfare associated with this allocation choice when no market distortions exist. We present an application of our model to the Southeastern United States and simulate the effects of changing climate conditions on land allocation in the region between 2007 and 2040. We find a very modest welfare bias when maintaining current farmland preservation policies and a more substantial bias if we assume that additional land policies are instituted which have spillover welfare effects in other land-using sectors.

The difference in land use modeling approaches is an important uncertain factor in evaluating future climate scenarios in global economic models. We compare five widely used land use modeling approaches: constrained optimization, constant elasticity of transformation (CET), the additive form of constant elasticity of transformation (ACET), logit, and Ricardian. We demonstrate that the approaches differ not only by the extent of parameter uses but also by the definition of conversion cost and the consideration of comparative advantage implied by land heterogeneity. We develop a generalized hybrid approach that incorporates ACET/logit and Ricardian to account for both conversion cost and comparative advantage. We use this hybrid approach to estimate future climate impacts on agriculture. We find a welfare loss of about 0.38–0.46% of the global GDP. We demonstrate that ignoring land heterogeneity or land conversion costs underestimates climate impacts on agricultural production and welfare.

This paper presents the overall and distributional welfare effects of alternative multi-regional emissions trading coalitions relative to unilateral action. It focusses on meeting Paris Agreement pledges and more emissions reduction targets consistent with 2^∘C and 1.5^∘C temperature pathways in 2030. The results from seven computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are compared. Across all models, welfare gains are highest with a global market and increase with the stringency of targets. All regional coalitions also show overall welfare gains, although lower gains than the global market. The models show more variability in the gains by a participant. Depending on the model, participants may benefit more from some regional arrangements than from a global market or face modest losses compared to the domestic reductions alone, due to interactions between carbon targets and fossil fuel markets. The scenario with a joint China–European Union emissions trading system in all sectors is consistently favorable for participants and provides the highest economic gains per unit of emissions abated.

Macro-hedging is one of the most important issues in hedging, but there are very few studies on the welfare impact of macro-hedging. To bridge a gap in the literature of macro-hedging, this paper introduces a method that generalizes and extends existing models of macro-hedging in several significant ways. We first assume the existence of basis risk in a small country to hedge in futures markets instead of forward contracts and relax the full-hedging assumption. We use the quantity being hedged in futures contracts as a decision variable. We also relax the restrictive assumption regarding the form of the spot price. We then derive the formula to estimate the welfare gain which can be easily implemented in any empirical case. In contrast to quasi-simulation being used in some existing approaches, our proposed method can be used for any real data, including future data, but existing methods in the literature cannot. Our approach is for investors for their investment decision-making when they use macro-hedging as their trading strategy.

This paper computes the welfare gains from optimal hedging with futures contracts for an oil-exporting country. Unlike previous studies, this paper derives the welfare gains under a more realistic futures hedging model. This is accomplished by considering basis risk and by relaxing the full-hedging assumption. Furthermore, this is the first paper to derive the welfare gains under optimal hedging strategies. We also incorporate the empirical relationship between spot and futures prices within our models, rather than the theoretical relationship which most studies employ. The models were developed under a dynamic stochastic optimization framework and the optimal consumption and value functions were found using the method of Endogenous Gridpoints. The results showed that the choice of the optimal hedging strategy employed led to a slight improvement in the country’s welfare gains relative to full hedging. We also found that the strategies with the highest welfare gains were the most effective at volatility reduction. Finally, this paper provides compelling evidence for the use of optimal macro futures hedging as an effective risk management tool for oil-exporting developing countries.