Environmentally Extended Input–Output Analysis of the UK Economy: Key Sector Analysis

The paper assesses the sustainability of investment in various economic sectors, with the aim of minimizing resource use and generation of emissions. The broad development focus of the paper and the potential for the proposed methodology to be applied in many different countries make it a useful methodological contribution to the global sustainability debate. The UK case is taken for illustration purposes, and (given the availability of the necessary data) this methodology could be applied in countries with various economic structures and specialisations. An environmentally extended static 123-sector UK input–output model is used, linking a range of physical flows (domestic extraction, use of water, and emissions of CO2, CH4, NOx) with the economic structure of the UK. A range of environmentally adjusted forward and backward linkage coefficients has been developed, adjusted according to final demand, domestic extraction, publicly supplied and directly abstracted water, amd emissions of CO2 and NOx,. The data on the final demandadjusted and environmentally adjusted forward and backward linkage coefficients were used in a multi-criteria decision-aid assessment, employing a NAIADE method in three different sustainability settings. The assessment was constructed in such a way that each sector of the UK economy was assessed by means of a panel of sustainability criteria, maximizing economic effects and minimizing environmental effects. This type of multi-criteria analysis, applied here for the first time, could prove to be a valuable basis for similar studies, especially in the developing world, where trade-offs between economic development and environmental protection have been the subject of considerable debate.input–output analysis; environmentally extended; MCDA; key sectors; sustainability; ecological economics; UK

Environmentally Extended Input-Output Analysis of the UK Economy: Key Sector Analysis

The paper assesses the sustainability of investment in various economic sectors, with the aim of minimizing resource use and generation of emissions. The broad development focus of the paper and the potential for the proposed methodology to be applied in many different countries make it a useful methodological contribution to the global sustainability debate. The UK case is taken for illustration purposes, and (given the availability of the necessary data) this methodology could be applied in countries with various economic structures and specialisations. An environmentally extended static 123-sector UK input-output model is used, linking a range of physical flows (domestic extraction, use of water, and emissions of CO2, CH4, NOx) with the economic structure of the UK. A range of environmentally adjusted forward and backward linkage coefficients has been developed, adjusted according to final demand, domestic extraction, publicly supplied and directly abstracted water, amd emissions of CO2 and NOx,. The data on the final demand-adjusted and environmentally adjusted forward and backward linkage coefficients were used in a multi-criteria decision-aid assessment, employing a NAIADE method in three different sustainability settings. The assessment was constructed in such a way that each sector of the UK economy was assessed by means of a panel of sustainability criteria, maximizing economic effects and minimizing environmental effects. This type of multi-criteria analysis, applied here for the first time, could prove to be a valuable basis for similar studies, especially in the developing world, where trade-offs between economic development and environmental protection have been the subject of considerable debate.

Policy-making and policy assessments with partially ordered alternatives

The present work collects three essays on social choice and decision-making in the presence of multiple objectives and severe informational limitations. When feasible alternatives must be ordered according to their performance under various criteria, it is typically necessary to make use of a specific functional relation and assume the implied rates of substitution between scores in different criteria. In the special case of collective choice and voting, rather than having proper rates of substitution, each individually preferred ordering of the alternatives is usually weighted according to its frequency in the population. Both decision frameworks imply the availability of extensive information about such functional relation and the proper weights of each criterion or must acknowledge a vast and arbitrary discretion to those in charge of resolving the decision process. The alternative approach herein discussed consists in applying the Pareto criterion to identify Pareto-superior alternatives in each pairwise comparison, a procedure that easily produces an incomplete ordering. Then, applying a tool of Order Theory, a complete ordering is identified from the linear extensions of the partially ordered set derived from the Pareto criterion. The claim is that this method highlights conflicts in value judgements and in incomparable criteria, allowing to search for a conflict-mitigating solution that doesn\u2019t make assumptions on the reciprocal importance of criteria or judgements. The method is actually a combination of existing but unrelated approaches in Social Choice Theory and in Order Theory and provides outcomes with interesting properties. The essays present, respectively, an axiomatic discussion of the properties of this approach and two applications to policy issues

Non-Basic Needs: Making Space for Incommensurability in the Structure of Well-Being

The concept of need is commonly overlooked by philosophers and social scientists. Often considered exclusively instrumental and/or demarcating minimal attainments, needs are commonly allowed only a minor role in accounts of well-being and related moral and political theories. While this may be true of some conceptions of needs, this thesis defends the critical importance of a different kind of need. These ‘personal needs’ fulfil all necessary conditions for genuine needs, but instead mark out ultimate ends that are far from basic. Moreover, rather than representing preconditions for the lives of human beings in general, personal needs are specific to individuals. Yet also unlike subjective preferences and aims, personal needs are the requirements of things a person is objectively committed to and cannot give up. // Personal needs directly relate to a person’s private evaluation of their own life. Yet they also have wide relevance to other contexts of evaluation within and without philosophy. They play a structural role in a new framework for conceptualising well-being and its role in ethics and policy. In particular, personal needs introduce incommensurability into the fundamental structure of persons’ interests. Located in the same context of individual choice as utility theory, they represent a direct, fundamental challenge to formally monistic teleological conceptions of well-being prevailing in much of social science, policy, and philosophy. Among various potential connections, this framework promises to (a) make sense of some people’s claims that they cannot be compensated for certain losses, (b) help motivate the incommensurability claimed to exist between dimensions in multidimensional well-being measurement (including those drawing on the capabilities approach), and (c) inform approaches to interpersonal distribution that oppose aggregation. This thesis also touches on issues concerning the concept of well-being, the objectivity or subjectivity of well-being, axiology, and coherentist practical reason

Religion and Social Coherentism

Today, prominent academics are questioning the very possibility of a theory of free exercise or non-establishment. They argue that judgments in the area can only be conclusory or irrational. In contrast to such skeptics, this Essay argues that decisionmaking on questions of religious freedom can be morally justified. Two arguments constitute the Essay. Part I begins by acknowledging that skepticism has power. The skeptics rightly identify some inevitable indeterminacy, but they mistakenly argue that it necessarily signals decisionmaking that is irrational or unjustified. Their critique is especially striking because the skeptics’ prudential way of working on concrete problems actually shares much with the methods of others. Part II then argues that the best defense of religious freedom jurisprudence begins with an approach known as coherentism. In political philosophy, coherentism refers to the way legal actors compare new problems to existing principles and paradigms in order to identify solutions that are justified. The Essay then extracts and emphasizes the social aspects of this basic account. It contends that arguments about the meaning of the Constitution appropriately reflect social and political dynamics. The resulting approach, social coherentism, describes a powerful method for generating interpretations of the First Amendment that are justified, not conclusory. This matters at a moment when some defenders of religious traditionalism are suggesting that principled decisionmaking on questions of religious freedom is impossible, and therefore that such issues should be largely surrendered to political processes

Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics

It is possible that the world contains infinitely many agents that have positive and negative levels of well-being. Theories have been developed to ethically rank such worlds based on the well-being levels of the agents in those worlds or other qualitative properties of the worlds in question, such as the distribution of agents across spacetime. In this thesis I argue that such ethical rankings ought to be consistent with the Pareto principle, which says that if two worlds contain the same agents and some agents are better off in the first world than they are in the second and no agents are worse off than they are in the second, then the first world is better than the second. I show that if we accept four axioms – the Pareto principle, transitivity, an axiom stating that populations of worlds can be permuted, and the claim that if the ‘at least as good as’ relation holds between two worlds then it holds between qualitative duplicates of this world pair – then we must conclude that there is ubiquitous incomparability between infinite worlds. I show that this is true even if the populations of infinite worlds are disjoint or overlapping, and that we cannot use any qualitative properties of world pairs to rank these worlds. Finally, I argue that this incomparability result generates puzzles for both consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories of objective and subjective permissibility

Top Management Teams in Family Business: the Role of Non Family Managers

Conceptual framework and literature. The empirical setting: TMTs in italian furniture family firms. TMT diversity at work. The role of non family managers in family business: results from a survey. Diversity among non-family managers in family business: a team-level contingency analyses

International Migration and the Choice of Self-employment

This thesis explores three notions related to the choice of self-employment as a labor market strategy among international migrants. The choice of the topic is motivated by the presumption that self-employment, on top if international labor migration, facilitates the reduction of the inefficiency of the international division of labor. In search of proof for this general hypothesis, the thesis contributes to exiting literature by merging two strands of work. On one hand, it relies on the concepts and methods related to the economics of migration. On the other hand, it takes advantage of the developments in the field of self-employment economics. In light of the gaps identified in existing literature, three operational hypotheses are formulated and tested in three subsequent chapters of the thesis. The first empirical chapter aims to answer the question whether immigrant self-employment is an income-maximizing choice. As simple as it seems, to the best of the author’s knowledge, such a hypothesis has not been empirically tested before. By means of Propensity Score Matching we find statistical twins in the migrant and non-migrant groups, what allows to obtain reliable estimates of the earnings gap. The results show that, indeed, immigrant self-employment is more profitable than employment in the country of origin. Furthermore, it is also proven that it may be even more profitable than wage-employment at the destination. Given the results of the first empirical analysis, the subsequent chapter tests whether immigrant self-employment is driven by labor market discrimination, i.e. whether it is a remedy for the internal labor market imperfections in the host country. This is found to be true, yet only when immigrants' earnings from self-employment actually exceed those from wage-employment. Additionally, the findings of this chapter suggest that the extent of labor market discrimination of immigrants highly depends on the location and the group of reference considered for the analysis of discriminatory wage differences. The third operational hypothesis deals with ethnic economies as an environment which enables immigrants to succeed in business in a foreign country. Existing literature emphasizes the beneficial role of ethnic economies. The contribution of this thesis is that it also explores whether ethnic economies are not sources of business competition at the same time. The hypothesis formulated for this analysis states that ethnic competition decreases, while ethnic complementarity increases the returns to business activity. The general finding of is that ethnic competition may either be benign or detrimental to profits, depending on the extent of ethnic market saturation. As far as ethnic complementarity is concerned, the conducted research shows that, as such, it does not significantly affect returns to ethnic entrepreneurship, but that the relative wealth of one's co-ethnics does have a positive effect on the profitability of local ethnic businesses. The studies conducted within the scope this doctoral research affirm the general hypothesis of this thesis. From this perspective the main conclusions of this thesis are the following: by reallocating to markets where one's skills, abilities or knowledge are relatively scarce, or add to the diversity of supplied products or services, individuals may experience significant income gains; the profitability of immigrant self-employment may not only allow to overcome the labor market inefficiencies related to the international division of labor, but also to the internal market divide; the multilateral benefits of immigrant self-employment can be obtained by letting migrants cluster and take advantage of their cultural and social capital. For both methodological and conceptual reasons the research focuses predominantly on Puerto Rican migration to the US. However, each empirical analysis provides a study of external validity of the obtained results