Introduction: exploring and explaining the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate

This introduction lays the groundwork for this Special Issue by providing an overview of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP), and by introducing three main analytical themes. The first theme concerns the emergence and continuation of the APP. The contributions show that the emergence of the APP can be attributed to international factors, including the United States' rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, and its search for an alternative arena for global climate governance, and other countries' wish to maintain good relations with the US; as well as domestic factors, such as the presence of bureaucratic actors in favour of the Partnership, alignment with domestic priorities, and the potential for reaping economic benefits through participation. The second theme examines the nature of the Partnership, concluding that it falls on the very soft side of the hard-soft law continuum and that while being branded as a public-private partnership, governments remain in charge. Under the third theme, the influence which the APP exerts on the post-2012 United Nations (UN) climate change negotiations is scrutinised. The contributions show that at the very least, the APP is exerting some cognitive influence on the UN discussions through its promotion of a sectoral approach. The introduction concludes with outlining areas for future research. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Path dependence in energy systems and economic development

Energy systems are subject to strong and long-lived path dependence, owing to technological, infrastructural, institutional and behavioural lock-ins. Yet, with the prospect of providing accessible cheap energy to stimulate economic development and reduce poverty, governments often invest in large engineering projects and subsidy policies. Here, I argue that while these may achieve their objectives, they risk locking their economies onto energy-intensive pathways. Thus, particularly when economies are industrializing, and their energy systems are being transformed and are not yet fully locked-in, policymakers should take care before directing their economies onto energy-intensive pathways that are likely to be detrimental to their long-run prosperity

International trade and net investment: theory and evidence

The theory of welfare accounting shows that comprehensive measures of net investment can be used to test whether an economy is following unsustainable paths of consumption. However, the notion of net investment used in most applied studies rules out technological progress and terms-of-trade gains from international trade. This paper considers an augmented expression of net investment derived from a dynamic growth model featuring international trade in different types of resource inputs, exogenous productivity growth in final sectors, and cost-reducing progress in resource extraction. Calculating augmented net investment for the world’s top twenty oil producers, we show that the difference with standard non-augmented measures can be large and may even revert some established conclusions regarding sustainability: prospects are more favorable than previously thought in oil-exporting countries endowed with large reserves like Angola, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In oil-importing economies, future consumption possibilities are limited by the lack of expected rental incomes from future resource exports

Genuine savings as a test of New Zealand weak sustainability

The key aims of this paper are to: (1) to extend the World Bank’s (WB) measure of genuine savings (GS) for New Zealand by using a longer time series of data, 1950–2015; (2) improve GS estimates for New Zealand by adding additional dimensions to GS, i.e. forestry; (3) investigate the relationship between several GS measures and the discounted values of GDP per capita and consumption per capita, used to proxy well-being; (4) test a series of hypotheses which relate GS to the change in future well-being using the framework proposed by Ferreira et al. (World Bank Econ Rev 22(2):233–248, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhn008) and (5) investigate the effects of a growing population on the availability of future capital stocks by considering the consequences of “wealth-dilution” as defined by Ferreira et al. (2008). The paper makes a contribution to the literature on GS, particularly in the context of New Zealand, by considering patterns of GS and well-being over a longer time span of data than have been previously used and add to a relatively small, but growing literature on tests of GS using long or relatively long time-series data [see, e.g. Greasley et al. (J Environ Econ Manag 67(2):171–188, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2013.12.001, Environ Dev Econ 22:674–98, 2017) and Hanley et al. (Enviro Resour Econ 63(2):313–338, (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-015-9928-7]. We conclude, based on the data used here, that New Zealand’s GS has been positive (i.e. weakly sustainable), since the start of our data series, even without allowing for the contribution of technological advancement. However, we also conclude that the effects of a growing population and a savings gap have led to a “wealth-dilution” effect needed to maintain real wealth per capita, as we estimate that there was an average savings gap (GS as a percentage of gross national savings) over the period 1955–2015 of 0.5% per annum

Empirical Testing of Genuine Savings as an Indicator of Weak Sustainability: A Three-Country Analysis of Long-Run Trends

© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Genuine Savings has emerged as a widely-used indicator of sustainable development. This approach to conceptualising what sustainability is about has strong links to work published by Anil Markandya and colleagues over 20 years ago. In this paper, we use long-term data stretching back to 1870 to undertake empirical tests of the relationship between Genuine Savings (GS) and future well-being for three countries: Britain, the USA and Germany. Our tests are based on an underlying theoretical relationship between GS and changes in the present value of future consumption. Based on both single country and panel results, we find evidence supporting the existence of a cointegrating (long run equilibrium) relationship between GS and future well-being, and fail to reject the basic theoretical result on the relationship between these two macroeconomic variables. This provides some support for the GS measure of weak sustainability