The Asymmetric Effects of Changes in Price and Income on Energy and Oil Demand

This paper estimates the effects on energy and oil demand of changes in income and oil prices, for 96 of the world's largest countries, in per-capita terms. We examine three important issues: the asymmetric effects on demand of increases and decreases in oil prices; the asymmetric effects on demand of increases and decreases in income; and the different speeds of demand adjustment to changes in price and in income. Its main conclusions are the following: (1) OECD demand responds much more to increases in oil prices than to decreases; ignoring this asymmetric price response will bias downward the estimated income elasticity; (2) demand's response to income decreases in many non-OECD countries is not necessarily symmetric to its response to income increases; ignoring this asymmetric income response will bias the estimated income elasticity; (3) the speed of demand adjustment is faster to changes in income than to changes in price; ignoring this difference will bias upward the estimated response to income changes. Using correctly specified equations for energy and oil demand, the long-run elasticity for increases in income is about 0.55 for OECD energy and oil, and 1.0 or higher for Non-OECD Oil Exporters, Income Growers and perhaps all Non-OECD countries. These income elasticity estimates are significantly higher than current estimates used by the US Department of Energy. Our estimates for the OECD countries are also higher than those estimated recently by Schmalensee-Stoker-Judson (1998) and Holtz-Eakin and Selden (1995), who ignore the asymmetric effects of prices on demand. Higher income elasticities, of course, will increase projections of energy and oil demand, and of carbon dioxide emissions.ENERGY DEMAND; OIL DEMAND; ASYMMETRY; IRREVERSIBILITY; INCOME ELASTICITY

‘Savage times come again’ : Morel, Wells, and the African Soldier, c.1885-1920

The African soldier trained in western combat was a figure of fear and revulsion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My article examines representations of African soldiers in nonfictional writings by E.D. Morel about the Congo Free State (1885-1908), the same author’s reportage on African troops in post-First World War Germany, and H.G. Wells’s speculative fiction When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, 1910). In each text racist and anti-colonialist discourses converge in representing the African soldier as the henchman of corrupt imperialism. His alleged propensity for taboo crimes of cannibalism and rape are conceived as threats to white safety and indeed supremacy. By tracing Wells’s connections to the Congo reform campaign and situating his novel between two phases of Morel’s writing career, I interpret When the Sleeper Wakes as neither simply a reflection of past events in Africa or as a prediction of future ones in Europe. It is rather a transcultural text which reveals the impact of European culture upon the ‘Congo atrocities’, and the inscription of this controversy upon European popular cultural forms and social debates

North American natural gas and energy markets in transition: insights from global models

This modeling comparison exercise looks at the global consequences of increased shale gas production in the U.S. and increased gas demand from Asia. We find that differences in models' theoretical construct and assumptions can lead to divergences in their predictions about the consequences of U.S. shale gas boom. In general, models find that U.S. High Shale Gas scenario leads to increased U.S. production, lower global gas prices, and lower gas production in non-U.S. regions. Gas demand in Asia alone has little effects on U.S. production; but together with the shale gas boom, the U.S. can have a large export advantage. Overall, models find U.S. exports level range from 0.06 to 13.7 trillion cubic feet (TCF) in 2040. The comparison of supply, demand, and price changes in response to shocks reveals important differences among models. First is how the demand shocks were implemented and how the model responds to shocks: static and elastic within each time period vs. endogenous to the long-term gross domestic product (GDP) growth. Second is how the supply response is expressed through fuel/technology substitutions, particularly the flexibility of cross-fuel substitution in the power sector. Identifying these differences is important in understanding the model's insights and policy recommendations

A New Method for Crude Oil Price Forecasting Based on Support Vector Machines

Abstract. This paper proposes a new method for crude oil price forecasting based on support vector machine (SVM). The procedure of developing a sup-port vector machine model for time series forecasting involves data sampling, sample preprocessing, training & learning and out-of-sample forecasting. To evaluate the forecasting ability of SVM, we compare its performance with those of ARIMA and BPNN. The experiment results show that SVM outper-forms the other two methods and is a fairly good candidate for the crude oil price prediction.