Capacity decisions with demand fluctuations and carbon leakage

For carbon-intensive, internationally-traded industrial goods, a unilateral increase in the domestic CO2 price may result in the reduction of the domestic production but an increase of imports. In such sectors as electricity, cement or steel, the trade ows result more from short-term regional disequilibria between supply and demand than from international competition. This paper formalizes this empirical observation and characterizes its impact on leakage. Domestic fi rms invest in home plants under uncertainty; then, as uncertainty unfolds, they may source the home market from their home plants or from imports. We prove that there would be no leakage in the short-term (without capacity adaptation) but there would be in the long-term (with capacity adaption). Furthermore, the larger the uncertainty the larger the leakage is. We also characterize the impacts of uncertainty on the (short-term and long-term) pass-through rates. In the concluding section we discuss the implications of these results for the evaluation of climate policies

Pour un financement conditionnel des projets risqués bas carbone

Une critique récurrente des subventions aux technologies propres (énergies renouvelables, solaire, mécanismes de développement propre, voiture électrique, …) est l’existence d’effets d’aubaine : des investissements bénéficient de subventions dont ils n’ont pas besoin pour être rentables. Cette note formalise ce type de situation comme la sélection d’un portefeuille de projets par l’Etat dans un contexte d’asymétrie d’information. Il montre qu’une forme de garantie du financement, avec remboursement en cas de succès, permet de limiter les effets d’aubaines et les dépenses publiques tout en maximisant le bénéfice social en termes de réduction des émissions. La pertinence du mécanisme proposé est illustrée dans le cadre de subventions pour le déploiement des infrastructures pour les véhicules à hydrogène

Capacity Investment under Demand Uncertainty: The Role of Imports in the U.S. Cement Industry

Demand uncertainty is thought to in uence irreversible capacity decisions. Suppose local demand can be sourced from domestic (rigid) production or from (fl exible) imports. This paper shows that the optimal domestic capacity is either increasing or decreasing with demand uncertainty depending on the relative level of the costs of domestic production and imports. This relationship is tested with data on the U.S. cement industry, where, because cement is costly to transport over land, the diff erence in marginal cost between domestic production and imports varies across local U.S. markets. Industry data for 1999 to 2010 are consistent with the predictions of the model. The introduction of two technologies to the production set one rigid and one exible is crucial in understanding the relationship between capacity choice and uncertainty in this industry because there is no relationship at the aggregated U.S. data. The analysis presented in the paper reveals that the relationship is negative for coastal districts, and signi cantly more positive in landlocked districts

Media, pedagogia e democracia

Na corrente da crítica generalizada de todas as formas de poder que exerceu a repressão após os acontecimentos de sessenta e oito, os media foram incriminados na sua forma, em virtude de induzirem uma relação social que implicasse uma separação entre o emissor e o recetor e a relação unilateral de transmissão de conteúdos com sentidos legíveis e unívocos. Na Bélgica, o encontro entre os militantes de certas televisões comunitárias (nomeadamente o canal «Canal emploi» de Liège) em busca de novas estratégias educativas destinadas ao grande público e Geneviève Jacquinot, esteve na origem de uma procura frutífera de transformação da forma da relação mediática. O trabalho teórico de Geneviève Jacquinot apresentava conceitos e ferramentas de análise que permitiam direcionar a linguagem audiovisual no sentido da abertura, da ambivalência e da negociação do sentido. Na sequência desta pesquisa, e de outras do mesmo género, pode afirmar-se que a problemática da produção de sentido na comunicação audiovisual compreende dois aspetos relevantes: a enunciação e a cognição. Do ponto de vista da enunciação, verifica-se abertura de sentido quando os recetores são colocados numa configuração relacional que torna possível um debate intersubjetivo. Do ponto de vista cognitivo, dá-se um processo educativo de produção de sentido quando os recetores desempenham um papel ativo na elaboração de sentido a partir das imagens observadas e das falas ouvidas. O grau de reflexão implicado nesta elaboração constitui um aspeto importante do processo cognitivo. Os procedimentos retóricos, abundantes nas produções audiovisuais, mostram uma grande variedade relativamente a este aspeto