Developing Asia's Competitive Advantage in Green Products: Learning from the Japanese Experience

Right now, governments around the world are spending record amounts of money to kick-start their economies in response to the financial crisis. Fortunately, a great opportunity exists for this fiscal stimulus to be directed towards "green" economic growth, which can not only provide the new markets and jobs needed immediately for alleviating poverty, but also address the challenges of global warming. Working models already exist, proving that sustainable growth is possible. To achieve this will require social, technical and structural changes, as well as appropriate policies conducive to eco-innovation. For developing countries, there are lessons that can be learned from countries that have already gone through that process. The aim of this paper is to show what lessons can be learnt from the Japanese case. As the world's second largest economy, Japan is not only one of the most energy-efficient economies in the world; it also produces some of the world's leading green technologies. This paper focuses on current trends in the green product market and consumer behavior in Japan, which have been influenced by recent government policies, particularly the ¥15.4 trillion (more than US$100 billion) stimulus package. The aim of this paper is to provide some insight on, and present a repository of selected government policies promoting sustainable development. The scope of this paper will cover areas such as hybrid vehicles, renewable energy, energy efficient home appliances, and green certification schemes. It also provides a brief discussion on the environmental policies of the new Japanese government that came into power on 16 September 2009. The paper attempts to use the most recent data, from June to August 2009, however given the quickly-evolving global environment, these statistics may change drastically by the time this paper is presented.japanese government environmental policies; sustainable development; vehicle pollution policies

Causal Tree Estimation of Heterogeneous Household Response to Time-Of-Use Electricity Pricing Schemes

We examine the distributional effects of the introduction of Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing schemes where the price per kWh of electricity usage depends on the time of consumption. These pricing schemes are enabled by smart meters, which can regularly (i.e. half-hourly) record consumption. Using causal trees, and an aggregation of causal tree estimates known as a causal forest (Athey & Imbens 2016, Wager & Athey 2017), we consider the association between the effect of TOU pricing schemes on household electricity demand and a range of variables that are observable before the introduction of the new pricing schemes. Causal trees provide an interpretable description of heterogeneity, while causal forests can be used to obtain individual-specific estimates of treatment effects. Given that policy makers are often interested in the factors underlying a given prediction, it is desirable to gain some insight to which variables in this large set are most often selected. A key challenge follows from that fact that partitions generated by tree-based methods are sensitive to subsampling, while the use of ensemble methods such as causal forests produce more stable, but less interpretable estimates. To address this problem we utilise variable importance measures to consider which variables are chosen most often by the causal forest algorithm. Given that a number of standard variable importance measures can be biased towards continuous variables, we address this issue by including permutation-based tests for our variable importance results

Evaluating research - Peer review team assessment and journal-based bibliographic measures: New Zealand PBRF research output scores in 2006

This paper concerns the relationship between the assessment of the research of individual academics by peer or expert review teams with a variety of bibliometric schemes based on journal quality weights. Specifically, for a common group of economists from New Zealand departments of economics the relationship between Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) Research Output measures for those submitting new research portfolios in 2006 are compared with evaluations of journal based research over the 2000-2005 assessment period. This comparison identifies the journal weighting schemes that appear most similar to PBRF peer evaluations. The paper provides an indication of the ‘power or aggressiveness’ of PBRF evaluations in terms of the weighting given to quality. The implied views of PBRF peer review teams are also useful in assessing common assumptions made in evaluating journal based research

Certified Computation from Unreliable Datasets

A wide range of learning tasks require human input in labeling massive data. The collected data though are usually low quality and contain inaccuracies and errors. As a result, modern science and business face the problem of learning from unreliable data sets. In this work, we provide a generic approach that is based on \textit{verification} of only few records of the data set to guarantee high quality learning outcomes for various optimization objectives. Our method, identifies small sets of critical records and verifies their validity. We show that many problems only need $\text{poly}(1/\varepsilon)$ verifications, to ensure that the output of the computation is at most a factor of $(1 \pm \varepsilon)$ away from the truth. For any given instance, we provide an \textit{instance optimal} solution that verifies the minimum possible number of records to approximately certify correctness. Then using this instance optimal formulation of the problem we prove our main result: "every function that satisfies some Lipschitz continuity condition can be certified with a small number of verifications". We show that the required Lipschitz continuity condition is satisfied even by some NP-complete problems, which illustrates the generality and importance of this theorem. In case this certification step fails, an invalid record will be identified. Removing these records and repeating until success, guarantees that the result will be accurate and will depend only on the verified records. Surprisingly, as we show, for several computation tasks more efficient methods are possible. These methods always guarantee that the produced result is not affected by the invalid records, since any invalid record that affects the output will be detected and verified

The excellence in research for Australia Scheme: An evaluation of the draft journal weights for economics

In February 2008, the Australian government announced its intention to develop a new quality and evaluation system for research conducted at the nation’s universities. Although the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) scheme will utilize several measures to evaluate institutional performance, we have chosen to focus on one element only: the assessment of refereed journal article output based on ERA’s own journal weighting scheme. The ERA weighting scheme will undoubtedly shape the reward structure facing university administrators and individual academics. Our objective is to explore the nature of the ERA weighting scheme for economics, and to demonstrate how it impacts on departmental and individual researcher rankings relative to rankings generated by alternative schemes employed in the economics literature. In order to do so, we utilize data from New Zealand’s economics departments and the draft set of journal weights (DERA) released in August 2008 by ERA officials. Given the similarities between Australia and New Zealand, our findings should have relevance to the Australian scene. As a result, we hope to provide the reader with a better understanding of the type of research activity that influences DERA rankings at both the departmental and individual level

Research output in New Zealand Economics Departments 2000-2006

This paper considers the research productivity of New Zealand based economics departments over the period 2000 to 2006. It examines journal based research output across departments and individuals using six output measures. We show that Otago and Canterbury performed consistently well over the period, with Otago generally the highest ranked department. The measures used place different emphasis on ‘quality’ versus ‘quantity’. Which measure is used has a significant influence on the rankings of Auckland, Victoria and Waikato. The controversy surrounding the inclusion of ‘visitors’ and the influence of research stars is considered. Rankings of the leading individual researchers are provided