Accounting and Measuring Well-being

The recent literature on the measurement of sustainable income has developed in two important ways for accounting of contribution of natural resource stocks. One set of studies directly addresses the problem of measuring genuine savings or extended wealth formation including changes in human resource capital and natural capital. The second set of studies uses the extended conventional national income accounting methods for accounting of changes in natural resource stocks and environmental extensions of input-output tables. This chapter describes the methodology of measuring genuine savings for a country and reviews the estimates available for different countries. It also suggests a way forward for measuring genuine saving for India

Measuring Environmental Efficiency of Industry: A Case Study of Thermal Power Generation in India

Technical and environmental efficiency of some coal-fired thermal power plants in India is estimated using a methodology that accounts for firm’s efforts to increase the production of good output and reduce pollution with the given resources and technology. The methodology used is directional output distance function. Estimates of firm-specific shadow prices of pollutants (bad outputs), and elasticity of substitution between good and bad outputs are also obtained. The technical and environmental inefficiency of a representative firm is estimated as 0.10 implying that the thermal power generating industry in Andhra Pradesh state of India could increase production of electricity by 10 per cent while decreasing generation of pollution by 10 percent. This result shows that there are incentives or win-win opportunities for the firms to voluntarily comply with the environmental regulation. It is found that there is a significant variation in marginal cost of pollution abatement or shadow prices of bad outputs across the firms and an increasing marginal cost of pollution abatement with respect to pollution reduction by the firms. The variation in marginal cost of pollution abatement and compliance to regulation across firms could be reduced by having economic instruments like emission tax.environmental and technical efficiency; shadow prices of bad outputs; air pollution

Euler–Lehmer constants and a conjecture of Erdös

AbstractThe Euler–Lehmer constants γ(a,q) are defined as the limitslimx→∞(∑n⩽xn≡a(modq)1n−logxq). We show that at most one number in the infinite listγ(a,q),1⩽a<q,q⩾2, is an algebraic number. The methods used to prove this theorem can also be applied to study the following question of Erdös. If f:Z/qZ→Q is such that f(a)=±1 and f(q)=0, then Erdös conjectured that∑n=1∞f(n)n≠0. If q≡3(mod4), we show that the Erdös conjecture is true