An empirical study of ethnic linkages in Kenyan rural-urban migration

Regression analysis is used to explain rural-urban migration flows in Kenya as a function of economic incentives and the distribution of potential ethnic contacts linking urban and rural areas. These ethnic linkages not only have high explanatory power but also improve the performances of the other economic variables. The results indicate that migration is highly sensitive to the level of urban formal-sector wages but is not directed toward centres experiencing faster growths in formal-sector employment. It appears that when the urban labour- markets are expanding very slowly, ethnic contacts rather than urban jobs are a better indicator of the probability of obtaining urban employment

Some implications of increased cooperation in world oil conservation

Petroleum industry and trade

Some implications of increased cooperation in world oil conservation

In this article, Stephen Brown and Hillard Huntington combine recent studies of world oil markets and the nascent literature on damage estimates from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to derive cost and benefit curves for the reduction of these emissions through cooperative programs of oil conservation. Their analysis shows that the desirability of extending cooperation in global energy conservation policies is essentially an empirical issue rather than a conceptual one. The current evidence suggests that over the next two decades, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will have an incentive to reduce its oil consumption and the associated CO2 emissions by more than is optimal from a world perspective. During this period, extending cooperation to the oil-importing developing countries may push oil conservation too far.Petroleum industry and trade

Assessing the economic cost of unilateral oil conservation

Power resources ; Petroleum industry and trade

How Energy Prices Shape OECD Economic Growth: Panel Evidence from Multiple Decades

New fears about escalating fuel prices and accumulating inflation are raising concerns about the possible dimming of near-term prospects for world economic growth. The role of energy prices in shaping economic growth relates not only to geopolitical risks or environmental taxes but also to a range of strategies that place moratoria on primary energy sources like nuclear, coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Applying a new data set for country-level energy prices since 1960, this study evaluates the effects of energy prices on economic growth in 18 OECD countries by controlling for other important macroeconomic conditions that shape economic activity. Mean-group estimates that control for cross-country correlations are used to emphasize average responses across nations. Averaged across all nations, results suggest that a 10 percent increase in energy prices dampened economic growth by about 0.15 percent. Moreover, some evidence exists that this response may be larger for more energy-intensive economies

Model Evaluation for Policy Insights: Reflections on the Forum Process

Model evaluation is best considered as a process for communicating with the policymaking or policy-advising community. Six decades of energy modelling have witnessed increasing complexity in these systems, a situation that raises a number of important challenges in using them effectively in policymaking organizations. When used as a learning rather than forecasting tool, these systems can be evaluated individually one by one or through joint efforts to compare them in multi-model exercises. After summarizing the evolution of energy modelling and efforts to evaluate them since the first oil embargo, this essay provides a guide to future evaluation collaborations by highlighting a few challenges that would improve the value of these studies for the policymaking community. These challenges range broadly and cover topics such as enhancing the engagement of the model user, ventilating the models’ complexity with intuitive insights, using simple models to demonstrate key parameters or responses, applying judicious occasional meta-analysis when there is value added, reporting model responses and calibrating them for decisionmakers, considering retrospective evaluation for a past period (when possible), selecting standardized or modeler-choice baseline conditions, selectively developing policy or diagnostic alternative cases, and institutionalising the model evaluation process for a specific topic or region