Managing Water under Uncertainty and Risk: The United Nations World Water Development Report 4

This report introduces new aspects of water issues: 1) it reintroduces the 12 challenge area reports that provided the foundation for the first two World Water Development Reports (WWDR); 2) 4 new reports on water quality, groundwater, gender, and desertification, land degradation and drought; 3) in recognition that the global challenges of water can vary considerably across countries and regions, a series of 5 regional reports have been included; 4) a deeper analysis of the main external forces of freshwater resources and possibilities for their future evolution; 5) managing water under uncertainty and risk

Cost-efficient staffing under annualized hours

We study how flexibility in workforce capacity can be used to efficiently match capacity and demand. Flexibility in workforce capacity is introduced by the annualized hours regime. Annualized hours allow organizations to measure working time per year, instead of per month or per week. An additional source of flexibility is hiring employees with different contract types, like full-time, part-time, and min-max, and by hiring subcontractors. We propose a mathematical programming formulation that incorporates annualized hours and shows to be very flexible with regard to modeling various contract types. The objective of our model is to minimize salary cost, thereby covering workforce demand, and using annualized hours. Our model is able to address various business questions regarding tactical workforce planning problems, e.g., with regard to annualized hours, subcontracting, and vacation planning. In a case study for a Dutch hospital two of these business questions are addressed, and we demonstrate that applying annualized hours potentially saves up to 5.2% in personnel wages annually

Renewable electricity generation and transmission network developments in light of public opposition: Insights from Ireland. ESRI Working Paper No. 653 March 2020

This paper analyses how people’s attitudes towards onshore wind power and overhead transmission lines affect the costoptimal development of electricity generation mixes, under a high renewable energy policy. For that purpose, we use a power systems generation and transmission expansion planning model, combined with information on public attitudes towards energy infrastructure on the island of Ireland. Overall, households have a positive attitude towards onshore wind power but their willingness to accept wind farms near their homes tends to be low. Opposition to overhead transmission lines is even greater. This can lead to a substantial increase in the costs of expanding the power system. In the Irish case, costs escalate by more than 4.3% when public opposition is factored into the constrained optimisation of power generation and grid expansion planning across the island. This is mainly driven by the compounded effects of higher capacity investments in more expensive technologies such as offshore wind and solar photovoltaic to compensate for lower levels of onshore wind generation and grid reinforcements. The results also reveal the effect of public opposition on the value of onshore wind, via shadow prices. The higher the level of public opposition, the higher the shadow value of onshore wind. And, this starkly differs across regions: regions with more wind resource or closest to major demand centres have the highest shadow prices. The shadow costs can guide policy makers when designing incentive mechanisms to garner public support for onshore wind installations

The impact of uncertainty on investment plans

In this paper we investigate how demand and output price uncertainty affect investment plans of Belgian manufacturing firms. We obtain time-varying uncertainty measures at the firm and industry level from the Belgian monthly business cycle survey and investment plans from the half-yearly investment survey. Using investment plans instead of realised investment data, e.g. annual accounts data, is, from an informative point of view, superior since it is more likely to reveal the features of the decision formation process and, therefore, it is most closely related to economic theory. Business investment is normally planned well in advance, because it involves time and costs to implement, and theory describes the behaviour of firms at the moment of their decision, which can be assumed to be fully captured in survey data. In order to find robust predictions we estimate three different specifications, each of which can be considered as a benchmark in the literature: two reduced form equations and a structural Euler equation. Our results show that uncertainty depresses investment. These results hold for industry- as well as for firmspecific demand uncertainty. Moreover, referring to Euler equation, uncertainty postpones investment today in favour of investment tomorrow. This effect is stronger for firms with more irreversible investment. Hence, our results seem to confirm to predictions of the real option theory.investment, uncertainty, irreversibility, real options, survey data

The spread of Keynesian economics : a comparison of the Belgian and Italian experiences

Keynesian economics dominated economic thought and macroeconomic policy-making in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the diffusion of Keynesian economics has been uneven. In this paper, we compare the spread of Keynesian economics in two continental European countries: Belgium and Italy. We focus on the post-World War II period, taking as the main message of Keynesian economics that the market is inherently unstable and that the government has a key role in economic life in steering effective demand. We further follow Coddington's distinction between "hydraulic", "disequilibrium" and "fundamentalist" Keynesianism. The study shows that Belgium and Italy were two countries were Keynesian economics gained ground only relatively late. The breakthrough of (hydraulic) Keynesianism came in areas which were close to the policy-making process: setting up national income accounts, the construction of macroeconomic models and correcting regional imbalances. The main difference between the two countries was the strong position of fundamentalist Keynesianism in the academic world in Italy, while in Belgium, disequilibrium Keynesianism was more influential.Keynesian economics, Belgium, Italy, macroeconomic policy-making

Water Marketing as an Adaptive Response to the Threat of Climate Change

Demographic changes and existing water use patterns have placed tremendous pressures upon water supplies, particularly in the West. Global climate change will exacerbate pressures on water resources. The gradual warming of the atmosphere is certain to change the distribution and availability of water supplies, with potentially severe consequences for freshwater supplies. While climate change will have a significant impact on water resources through changes in the timing and volume of precipitation, altered evaporation rates, and the like, the precise nature, magnitude, timing, and distribution of such climate-induced changes are unknown. This uncertainty complicates the task of water managers who are already faced with escalating demands. This article argues that climate change, and its projected effects on water use and supply, calls for a fundamental reexamination of water institutions. In particular, this article suggests that market-based institutions are well suited to address the additional pressures on water supplies due to climate change. Many aspects of water markets, including their flexibility, decentralized nature, and ability to create and harness economic incentives, make them particularly well suited to address the uncertain water forecast. A gradual shift toward water marketing and market pricing will improve the management of water supplies, ensure more efficient allocation of available water supplies and encourage cost-effective conservation measures

Firms' investment decisions in response to demand and price uncertainty

We estimate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms' investment decisions from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms' subjective qualitative expectations. They are close to their theoretical counterparts, the variances of future demand and price shocks. We find that demand uncertainty depresses planned and realized investment, while price uncertainty is insignificant. This is consistent with the behavior of monopolistic firms with irreversible capital (Caballero, 1991). Further, firms revise their investment plans very little. They may do so in response to new information on sales growth, but not as a result of reduced uncertainty.investment, uncertainty, real options, survey data, panel data