Greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand: a preliminary consumption-based analysis

Abstract: New Zealand’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are usually calculated by taking total emissions as reported under the Kyoto Protocol or the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and simply dividing by population. However this focuses on emissions associated with production within New Zealand. From the point of view of individuals, these are not the emissions they control, and hence can mitigate. Individuals can calculate their “carbon footprint” but tools to do this typically focus on a few categories of emissions (mostly electricity, direct fuel use and waste) and emissions footprints are not available for a wide range of households so cannot be used for comparative analysis. This paper explores how the carbon emissions related to the consumption categories of households in New Zealand vary with household characteristics. We use product consumption data from the 2007 Household Economic Survey. Consumption within each category is linked to a carbon intensity multiplier (tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per dollar of consumption) which is derived from: the official 2007 input–output table of 106 industries produced by Statistics New Zealand; energy data on carbon dioxide per petajoule of fuel in each industry from the Energy Data File; and the Energy Greenhouse Gas Emissions Report both provided by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Previous literature has used similar methods to calculate the incidence of a carbon tax (e.g. Creedy and Sleeman [2006]). This paper uses these methods in order to study which sectors of household expenditure offer the greatest opportunities for mitigation and how these opportunities vary with household characteristics such as income decile, region and household composition

Estimating Consumption- Based Poverty in the Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey

Inequalities in health are linked with poverty, but quantifying the health/poverty nexusis hampered by data constraints. In particular, the most common measure of poverty compares consumption with poverty lines, but consumption surveys often do not collect detailed health data. Conversely, the large repository of internationallycomparable Demographic and Health Surveys has detailed health data but no consumption data. This has led DHS researchers who want to control for socioeconomic status use an asset index defined in terms of housing characteristics and the ownership of durable goods. While this is a valid conception of poverty, it is difficult to compare it with the more-common consumption-based measure. This paper presents a simple poverty scorecard for Ethiopia based on the poverty-mapping approach of Elbers et al. (2003). It allows researchers to estimate the likelihood that consumption is below a given poverty line using nine verifiable, inexpensive-to-collect indicators found in both Ethiopia’s 2005 DHS and in the 2004/5 Household Income, Consumption, and Expenditure Survey. It turns out that the poverty scorecard and the DHS asset index do not generally rank people the same, so estimates of consumptionbased poverty in the DHS should use the poverty scorecard, not the DHS asset index. The bias and precision of scorecard estimates compare well with that of other tools, suggesting that government could use it to track poverty in years between national household expenditure surveys.Keywords: Poverty measurement, asset index, poverty mapping, Africa, Ethiopia, health equit

Linked open government data: lessons from Data.gov.uk

The movement to publish government data is an opportunity to populate the linked data Web with data of good provenance. The benefits range from transparency to public service improvement, citizen engagement to the creation of social and economic value. There are many challenges to be met before the vision is implemented, and this paper describes the efforts of the EnAKTing project to extract value from data.gov.uk, through the stages of locating data sources, integrating data into the linked data Web, and browsing and querying it

Identifying the time profile of everyday activities in the home using smart meter data

Activities are a descriptive term for the common ways households spend their time. Examples include cooking, doing laundry, or socialising. Smart meter data can be used to generate time profiles of activities that are meaningful to households’ own lived experience. Activities are therefore a lens through which energy feedback to households can be made salient and understandable. This paper demonstrates a multi-step methodology for inferring hourly time profiles of ten household activities using smart meter data, supplemented by individual appliance plug monitors and environmental sensors. First, household interviews, video ethnography, and technology surveys are used to identify appliances and devices in the home, and their roles in specific activities. Second, ‘ontologies’ are developed to map out the relationships between activities and technologies in the home. One or more technologies may indicate the occurrence of certain activities. Third, data from smart meters, plug monitors and sensor data are collected. Smart meter data measuring aggregate electricity use are disaggregated and processed together with the plug monitor and sensor data to identify when and for how long different activities are occurring. Sensor data are particularly useful for activities that are not always associated with an energy-using device. Fourth, the ontologies are applied to the disaggregated data to make inferences on hourly time profiles of ten everyday activities. These include washing, doing laundry, watching TV (reliably inferred), and cleaning, socialising, working (inferred with uncertainties). Fifth, activity time diaries and structured interviews are used to validate both the ontologies and the inferred activity time profiles. Two case study homes are used to illustrate the methodology using data collected as part of a UK trial of smart home technologies. The methodology is demonstrated to produce reliable time profiles of a range of domestic activities that are meaningful to households. The methodology also emphasises the value of integrating coded interview and video ethnography data into both the development of the activity inference process

Linked randomised controlled trials of face-to-face and electronic brief intervention methods to prevent alcohol related harm in young people aged 14–17 years presenting to Emergency Departments (SIPS junior)

Background: Alcohol is a major global threat to public health. Although the main burden of chronic alcohol-related disease is in adults, its foundations often lie in adolescence. Alcohol consumption and related harm increase steeply from the age of 12 until 20 years. Several trials focusing upon young people have reported significant positive effects of brief interventions on a range of alcohol consumption outcomes. A recent review of reviews also suggests that electronic brief interventions (eBIs) using internet and smartphone technologies may markedly reduce alcohol consumption compared with minimal or no intervention controls. Interventions that target non-drinking youth are known to delay the onset of drinking behaviours. Web based alcohol interventions for adolescents also demonstrate significantly greater reductions in consumption and harm among ‘high-risk’ drinkers; however changes in risk status at follow-up for non-drinkers or low-risk drinkers have not been assessed in controlled trials of brief alcohol interventions

Digital competencies and capabilities. Pre-adolescents inside and outside school

The investment on key-competences in last years was one crucial European strategy to face the new challenges of the knowledge society and of the digital convergence and to guarantee the active citizenship and social inclusion. The first answer has been given in Lisbon 2000’s, when eight main objectives have been presented; they were focused on the improvement of basic and "soft" skills in educational paths of the main agencies (i.e. school and family). Hence, the digital competence, included in Lisbon strategies, can be interpreted in a double meaning: as basic skill (focused on the digital literacy) as soft skill (focused on the digital learning). Starting from here, this proposal will construct a theoretical description of the digital competence and its impact to cognitive processes of the children, considering the influence and the strategies applied by agencies of the social capital, especially the family. This issue will be analysed through the re-reading the capabilities approach by Sen and Nussbaum (2011), according two perspectives: 1. the first is psyco-cognitive connected to the development of digital competences during the learning process of children; 2. the second is focused on the relational and communicative styles of their socializing agencies. In the digital skills, the generation gap is more evident: the youngsters acquire the digital literacy through their experiences; however their digital knowledge is often technical and linguistic, while it isn’t a lot oriented to the metacognition of the digital media, such as the critical thinking or the creativity; on the other side, the educators don’t have the same familiarity with media and for this reason they not always understand needs, values and references of youngsters. The consumption styles of parents, their prejudices and their competences influence the relationship of children with media starting from their first digital experience, with social and cognitive consequences

Towards Sustainable Mobility Indicators: Application to the Lyons Conurbation

This paper applies the theme of sustainable development to the case of urban transport and daily mobility of the inhabitants of a city. A set of indicators which simultaneously takes the three dimensions of sustainability––environmental, economic, and social––into account is suggested. We present here the results of exploratory research funded by Renault Automobile Manufacturers, carried out to verify the feasibility and the usefulness of elaborating such sustainable mobility indicators. Values of the economics, environmental and social indicators are presented for the Lyons case. These estimations are mainly based on the household travel survey held in this city in 1994–1995. In the end, this set of indicators should allow the comparison of different urban transport strategies within an urban area, but also between different urban contexts, and through time. The conditions of generalization of these measurements of indicators are then discussed.Trip distance ; Daily mobility ; Sustainability indicators ; Household travel survey ; Methodology ; Pollutant emissions ; Expenditures ; Global costs

Some lessons from the financial crisis for the economic analysis

The economics profession in general, and economic forecasters in particular, have faced some understandable criticism for their failure to predict the timing and severity of the recent economic crisis. In this paper, we offer some assessment of the performance of the Economic Analysis conducted at the ECB both in the run up to and since the onset of the crisis. Drawing on this assessment, we then offer some indications of how the analysis of economic developments could be improved looking forward. The key priorities identifi ed include the need to: i) extend existing tools and/or develop new tools to account for important feedback mechanisms, for instance, improved real-fi nancial linkages and non-linear dynamics; ii) develop ways to handle the complexity arising from the presence of multiple models and alternative economic paradigms; and iii) given the limitations of point forecasts, to further develop risk and scenario analysis around baseline projections. JEL Classification: C43, D91, E31, E52, E58euro area, financial crisis, MACRO ECONOMIC FORECASTING