Measuring Market Damage of Automobile Related Carbon Tax by Dynamic Computable General Equilibrium model

This paper provides the political evaluation of automobile related carbon tax to control CO2 emissions caused by automobiles. In Japan, the Ministry of Transport presented the target to bring the increasing rate of the CO2 emissions in the transport sector fewer than 17% from 1990 level. We computed the carbon tax needed to accomplish its target by the dynamic computable general equilibrium (DCGE) model. In the DCGE model, the economic activities of households or industries are formulated by mathematical economic model, so we are able to grasp market disbenefits generated from the change of economic activities as well as the regulated volume of the CO2 emissions. The market disbenefits are called by deadweight loss, and we computed those value amounts by the concept of equivalent variation. The CGE approaches have been developed to evaluate economic impacts of the change of taxation or international trade policy, which are surveyed by Shoven and Whalley (1984). Recently, the CGE models to compute general equilibrium effects of environmental policies have been proposed by Jorgenson and Wilcoxen (1990), Bergman (1991), Ballard and Medema (1993) and Zhang (1998), and so on. And the CGE approaches have been extended to the dynamic analysis, in order to measure the environmental effects or economic influences in the point of long-term for environmental problems. The DCGE model, built in this research, follows those previous CGE approaches in principle. We modeled, however, the automobile related industrial or transport sector?s behavior and household travel behavior in full. Especially, the travel behavior for private tips of household is formulated by the probability choice paradigm shown by McFadden. By using this DCGE model, we simulated the automobile related carbon tax needed to accomplish the target in the transport sector. At this simulation, we afraid that the fuel price elasticity might give a lot of impacts to the simulation results. So we executed the sensitivity analysis by giving the fuel price elasticity of two patterns. At the case of fuel price elasticity 0.1, the automobile related carbon tax is calculated by 0.11[million yen/tC] and the market disbenefit is evaluated by 0.16[billion yen/year]. Next, at the case of fuel price elasticity 0.3, the carbon tax is 0.114[million yen/tC] and the market disbenefit is 0.2[billion yen/year].

A Planning Model for Industrial Development by Using Integer Programming

We propose one static and two dynamic industrial developmental planning models for choosing the strategic areas and for determining the associated scale of development over a multiperiod planning horizon. The criterion of those models is to minimize the present worth of the total cost required for a series of developmental programs, which must satisfy the given demand for development in the regions as a whole with respect to each planning period. We assume that the total cost function can be well specified as a step function of the scale. This way of treatment can be justified by taking account of the data availability and the existence of thresholds. Emphasis of this study is put on the formulation of three various models in the form of O-1 Integer Programming, referring to their methods for solution and their sensitivity analysis. In most cases where we can break down the project into several parts and fulfill them in a series of stages, some additional cost accrues as compared with their joint fulfillment. The second model applies to the case where this additional cost, which we call “Set-up cost”, is so small as to be negligible. The third model is devised for cases where the set-up cost stemming from the atagewise fulfillment will not be negligible. Thus the third model is the most general model among the proposed three models in this paper

Role of poly(ADP-ribose) polymerases in the regulation of inflammatory processes

AbstractPARP enzymes influence the immune system at several key points and thus modulate inflammatory diseases. PARP enzymes affect immune cell maturation and differentiation and regulate the expression of inflammatory mediators such as cytokines, chemokines, inducible nitric oxide synthase and adhesion molecules. Moreover, PARP enzymes are key regulators of cell death during inflammation-related oxidative and nitrosative stress. Here we provide an overview of the different inflammatory diseases regulated by PARP enzymes