World fossil fuel subsidies and global carbon emissions in a model with interfuel substitution

The author presents a simple empirical framework for estimating the level of world fossil fuel subsidies and analyzing their implications for carbon dioxide emissions. The author extends Larsen and Shah (1992) by applying a simple model with interfuel substitution, using a more detailed sectoral data set that includes energy prices and consumption for an expanded sample of countries. The author concludes that substantial fossil fuel subsidies prevail in a handful of large carbon-emitting countries. The fiscal implications for some countries are significant - as much as 10 percent of GDP in some countries. World subsidies are estimated to be more than $210 billion, or 20 to 25 percent of the value of world fossil fuel consumption at world prices. Removing such subsidies, the author estimates, would reduce national carbon emissions by more than 20 percent relative to baseline emissions in some countries. It would reduce global carbon emissions by 7 percent.Energy and Environment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Transport and Environment,Urban Environment,Carbon Policy and Trading

Global tradable carbon permits, participation incentives, and transfers

Most OECD countries have committed themselves to stabilizing their carbon emission at 1990 levels by the year 2000, and some to reducing emissions to 80-90 percent of 1990 levels by the years 2005 and 2010. Most non-OECD countries are reluctant to reduce emissions to combat global climate change. They argue that such policies would forestall their development, that the stock of greenhouse gases in the air is primarily from historical emissions from OECD countries and the former Soviet Union, and that those countries should be made to bear the cost of such abatement policies. The authors evaluate alternative permit allocations for a global tradeable permit regime designed to minimize the cost of stabilizing world carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion at 1987 levels by the year 2000. They find that an important cross-section of countries would have little incentive to participate in a treaty based on such widely discussed forms of permit allocations as permit allocations by Gross Domestic Product, by population, or by some combination of the two. To encourage participation, it is proposed that each non-OECD country be allocated permits equivalent to its projected baseline emissions - and that OECD countries be allocated permits equivalent to the world emissions target minus the permit allocation to the non-OECD countries. Such a scheme recognizes that OECD countries have a higher willingness to pay for increasing reduction and that non-OECD countries have a smaller historical"global emissions debt."Under the proposed regime, the authors find that the cost of emissions reduction for OECD countries would be about 50 percent lower than unilateral reductions would be, and that non-OECD countries would also realize substantial net gains from participating in such a global treaty. Moreover, that global treaty would be 68 percent less costly worldwide than would realizing the same target through unilateral reductions by the OECD countries.Carbon Policy and Trading,Environmental Economics&Policies,Energy and Environment,Climate Change,Montreal Protocol

Carbon taxes, the greenhouse effect, and developing countries

The authors evaluate the case for carbon taxes in terms of national interests. They reach the following conclusions. (A) A global carbon tax involves issues of international resource transfers and would be difficult to administer and enforce. It is thus unlikely to be implemented in the near future. (b) National carbon taxes can raise significant revenues cost-effectively in developing countries and are not likely to be as regressive in their impact as commonly perceived. Such taxes can also enhance economic efficiency if introduced as a revenue-neutral partial replacement for corporate income taxes or in cases where subsidies are prevalent. The welfare costs of carbon taxes generally vary directly with the existing level of energy taxes, so a carbon tax should be an instrument of choice for countries such as India and Indonesia, which have few or no energy taxes. A carbon tax can significantly reduce local pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. Cost-benefit analysis shows countries with few or no energy taxes substantially gaining from carbon taxes in terms of an improved local environment. A carbon tax of $10 a ton produces very small output losses for Pakistani industries analyzed in this paper, and the output losses are fully offset by health benefits from reduced emissions of local pollutants - even ignoring the global implications of a reduced greenhouse effect. Tradable permits are preferable to carbon taxes where the critical threshold of the stock of carbon emission beyond which temperatures would rise exponentially is known. Given our current ignorance on the costs of reducing carbon emissions and the threshold effect, a carbon tax appears to be a better and more flexible instrument for avoiding large unexpected costs.Environmental Economics&Policies,Energy and Environment,Montreal Protocol,Carbon Policy and Trading,Public Sector Economics&Finance

World fossil fuel subsidies and global carbon emissions

Larsen and Shah present evidence on the level of fossil fuel subsidies and their implications for carbon dioxide emissions. They conclude that substantial fossil fuel subsidies prevail in a handful of large, carbon-emitting countries. Removing such subsidies could substantially reduce national carbon emissions in some countries. Global carbon emissions could be reduced by 9 percent, assuming no change in world fossil fuel prices, and by 5 percent when accounting for estimated changes in world prices. Larsen and Shah estimate world energy subsidies to be more than US$230 billion. The welfare costs of these subsidies are more than US$20 billion, not including the cost of greenhouse gas and local pollution from fossil fuel consumption. Net fossil fuel importers in Japan, the United States, and Western Europe are estimated to experience welfare gains of about US$14 billion, while welfare effects would be negative in exporting countries in the event of a dampening effect on world fossil fuel prices associated with the removal of subsidies. Eliminating these subsidies would translate into an average 21 percent reduction in carbon emissions in the subsidizing countries, or 20 percent of OECD emissions. To achieve an equivalent reduction in tons of emissions in the OECD countries would require imposing a carbon tax of$60-$70 per ton of carbon, even when accounting for estimated changes in world fossil fuel prices.Environmental Economics&Policies,Carbon Policy and Trading,Energy and Environment,Economic Theory&Research,Access to Markets

How trade and economic policies affect agriculture : a framework for analysis applied to Tanzania and Malawi

The authors provide a general equilibrium model for analyzing the mechanisms by which macroeconomic, trade, price, and exchange rate policies affect agricultural export sectors. They estimate the model empirically for Tanzania and Malawi to measure the supply responses of agricultural exportables. They find that: agricultural exports are highly responsive to price incentives; the most effective policy instruments for promoting the expansion of agricultural exports are direct export incentives and devaluation of the exchange rate; and fiscal policies are not neutral with respect to the structure of agricultural production.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems

Grid-enabling FIRST: Speeding up simulation applications using WinGrid

The vision of grid computing is to make computational power, storage capacity, data and applications available to users as readily as electricity and other utilities. Grid infrastructures and applications have traditionally been geared towards dedicated, centralized, high performance clusters running on UNIX flavour operating systems (commonly referred to as cluster-based grid computing). This can be contrasted with desktop-based grid computing which refers to the aggregation of non-dedicated, de-centralized, commodity PCs connected through a network and running (mostly) the Microsoft Windowstrade operating system. Large scale adoption of such Windowstrade-based grid infrastructure may be facilitated via grid-enabling existing Windows applications. This paper presents the WinGridtrade approach to grid enabling existing Windowstrade based commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs). Through the use of a case study developed in conjunction with Ford Motor Company, the paper demonstrates how experimentation with the CSP Witnesstrade and FIRST can achieve a linear speedup when WinGridtrade is used to harness idle PC computing resources. This, combined with the lessons learned from the case study, has encouraged us to develop the Web service extensions to WinGridtrade. It is hoped that this would facilitate wider acceptance of WinGridtrade among enterprises having stringent security policies in place

Secure and efficient application monitoring and replication

Memory corruption vulnerabilities remain a grave threat to systems software written in C/C++. Current best practices dictate compiling programs with exploit mitigations such as stack canaries, address space layout randomization, and control-flow integrity. However, adversaries quickly find ways to circumvent such mitigations, sometimes even before these mitigations are widely deployed. In this paper, we focus on an "orthogonal" defense that amplifies the effectiveness of traditional exploit mitigations. The key idea is to create multiple diversified replicas of a vulnerable program and then execute these replicas in lockstep on identical inputs while simultaneously monitoring their behavior. A malicious input that causes the diversified replicas to diverge in their behavior will be detected by the monitor; this allows discovery of previously unknown attacks such as zero-day exploits. So far, such multi-variant execution environments (MVEEs) have been held back by substantial runtime overheads. This paper presents a new design, ReMon, that is non-intrusive, secure, and highly efficient. Whereas previous schemes either monitor every system call or none at all, our system enforces cross-checking only for security critical system calls while supporting more relaxed monitoring policies for system calls that are not security critical. We achieve this by splitting the monitoring and replication logic into an in-process component and a cross-process component. Our evaluation shows that ReMon offers same level of security as conservative MVEEs and run realistic server benchmarks at near-native speeds

The role of Integrated spatial planning in restructuring Cape Town : the redevelopment of Wingfield

Includes bibliographical references.Many South African cities, including Cape Town, have inherited an skewed urban form which is intensified by the current high levels of in-migration and urbanization which cause great socio-economic and spatial structural urban problems. In a response to these urban issues, this dissertation argues for strategic integrated infill developments on well located, vacant land parcels which are believed to serve as the restructuring mechanisms and urban management tools for reversing Cape Town’s inefficient urban form. This dissertation presents a spatial framework for the Wingfield site that will include a dense, integrated infill development proposal which potentially will pave the way for similar future integrated development proposals. Collectively, these infill-pockets of developments will shape the Cape Town Metropolitan Area (CTMA) into a positive and integrated urban environment that is ecologically sustainable, economically durable and socially just

The Economics of Regional Poverty-Environment Programs: An Application for Lao People's Democratic Republic

Program administrators are often faced with the difficult problem of allocating scarce resources among regions in a country when interventions are aimed at addressing multiple objectives. One main concern is the tradeoff between poverty reduction and improvement of environmental quality. To provide a framework for analysis, the authors develop a model of optimal budget allocation that allows for variations in three factors: administrators'valuation of objectives; their willingness to accept tradeoffs among objectives and regional allotments; and regional administrative costs. The results from an application of this model using information for Lao People's Democratic Republic show that simple poverty indicators alone do not provide consistent guidelines for policy. However, when different poverty indicators are embedded in an optimizing model that incorporates preferences and costs, the resulting provincial allocations are very similar. This suggests that adoption of a formal analytical approach to resource allocation can help promote the harmonization of regional policy guidelines.Poverty Reduction Strategies,Public Health Promotion,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Assessment,Poverty Reduction Strategies,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Health Economics&Finance