U.S. Billion-ton Update: Biomass Supply for a Bioenergy and Bioproducts Industry

The Report, Biomass as Feedstock for a Bioenergy and Bioproducts Industry: The Technical Feasibility of a Billion-Ton Annual Supply (generally referred to as the Billion-Ton Study or 2005 BTS), was an estimate of “potential” biomass within the contiguous United States based on numerous assumptions about current and future inventory and production capacity, availability, and technology. In the 2005 BTS, a strategic analysis was undertaken to determine if U.S. agriculture and forest resources have the capability to potentially produce at least one billion dry tons of biomass annually, in a sustainable manner—enough to displace approximately 30% of the country’s present petroleum consumption. To ensure reasonable confidence in the study results, an effort was made to use relatively conservative assumptions. However, for both agriculture and forestry, the resource potential was not restricted by price. That is, all identified biomass was potentially available, even though some potential feedstock would more than likely be too expensive to actually be economically available. In addition to updating the 2005 study, this report attempts to address a number of its shortcoming

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

The monetisation of Japan's government debt

Japan's government debt is extremely high, especially considering the fact that the data exclude likely future liabilities stemming from an ageing population and possible requirements of the financial system. Nevertheless, an offsetting factor is the degree to which the Bank of Japan has already monetised the debt. The monetary expansion up to the end of 2003 has increased the net worth of the Bank of Japan, properly measured, to more than 17% of GDP, directly reducing the debt position of the consolidated government and central bank - the most relevant measure of the government's fiscal position. Furthermore, the consolidated debt ratio could fall further depending both on the degree to which the monetary expansion is reversed to prevent inflation from rising too much and on the response of nominal interest rates to any temporary inflation that does occur. Under reasonable scenarios, the consolidated government/central bank debt position could be noticeably lower than indicated by commonly cited debt statistics.monetisation, Japan, government debt

Recent fiscal policy in selected industrial countries

This paper summarises fiscal developments over the past 10 years in 16 industrial countries, based on OECD data and projections. Several countries that had substantial fiscal deficits early in the 1990s turned to surpluses by the year 2000, with some countries improving their fiscal balances by 5% of GDP or more, even abstracting from the effects of strong economic growth. But in many countries - especially the largest economies - this strong performance had given way to the reappearance of large fiscal deficits by 2003. Based on current fiscal legislation, the OECD expects to see no clear improvement in cyclically adjusted balances by 2005. All countries' fiscal positions in 2003 were worse than had been expected in late 2000, but after abstracting from the effects of a surprisingly weak economy, the negative surprise was largest for the United States, followed by the United Kingdom and Ireland. Sustainability calculations suggest that preventing rising net debt ratios requires a fiscal adjustment of some 7% of GDP in Japan, 2½ to 3% of GDP in the United States, 1½% of GDP in the United Kingdom, and about 1% of GDP in France and Germany. Italy's fiscal position is strong enough to stabilise the debt ratio at its current high level, but not strong enough to bring the debt ratio down appreciably.fiscal policy

Import Competition and Wages: The Roles of the Nontradable Goods Sector.

Several investigators have studied the role of import competition in explaining wage behavior, with apparently conflicting results: Some have found a significant effect of import competition on wages in manufacturing, while others have found no such effect in the aggregate. This paper highlights the role of the nontradable goods sector--not addressed in previous studies--to reconcile these results. The model demonstrates that a fall in the relative price of tradable goods has an ambiguous effect on aggregate real wages: while the lower price of tradable goods leads to lower labor demand in the tradable sector, it also leads to higher labor demand in the nontradable sector. Empirical results show considerable support for the model when tradable goods prices are measured by import or export prices, but not when they are measured by the real exchange rate. Copyright 1993 by MIT Press.