Car Road Charging: Impact Assessment on German and Austrian Households

The authors apply a computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling framework to carry out a two-country comparison for Austria and Germany assessing the impact of road charging (RC). The pricing policy measure is introduced for the private motorized transport mode and applies to the overall road network. To derive and compare distributional effects of passenger car RC, the mode-specific travel demand of private households is integrated into the CGE model. Furthermore, the modeling framework accounts for different household categories with respect to disposable net income and the corresponding travel demand profiles introduced in terms of behavioral mobility parameters as well as household travel expenditures. Comparing the country-specific results, we find country-specific differences in the impact of RC on household categories, as well as similarities. The differences that we find indicate the importance of particular parameters for the evaluation of infrastructure pricing policy reforms. We can relate differences to prevalent country-specific differences in sociodemographic characteristics, land use structure, territorial population distribution, as well as macroeconomic indicators. To add substance to the two-country impact assessment, a sensitivity analysis is carried out, introducing different RC revenue use schemes. We find differences in distributional effects under equity concerns to be closely related to the revenue use pattern as well as to country- and household-specific travel demand profiles.Computable general equilibrium model, redistributive effects, road charging

Consistent economic cross-sectoral climate change impact scenario analysis: Method and application to Austria

AbstractClimate change triggers manifold impacts at the national to local level, which in turn have various economy-wide implications (e.g. on welfare, employment, or tax revenues). In its response, society needs to prioritize which of these impacts to address and what share of resources to spend on each respective adaptation. A prerequisite to achieving that end is an economic impact analysis that is consistent across sectors and acknowledges intersectoral and economy-wide feedback effects. Traditional Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are usually operating at a level too aggregated for this end, while bottom-up impact models most often are not fully comprehensive, focusing on only a subset of climate sensitive sectors and/or a subset of climate change impact chains. Thus, we develop here an approach which applies climate and socioeconomic scenario analysis, harmonized economic costing, and sector explicit bandwidth analysis in a coupled framework of eleven (bio)physical impact assessment models and a uniform multi-sectoral computable general equilibrium model. In applying this approach to the alpine country of Austria, we find that macroeconomic feedbacks can magnify sectoral climate damages up to fourfold, or that by mid-century costs of climate change clearly outweigh benefits, with net costs rising two- to fourfold above current damage cost levels. The resulting specific impact information – differentiated by climate and economic drivers – can support sector-specific adaptation as well as adaptive capacity building

Commissioning and performance of the CMS silicon strip tracker with cosmic ray muons

This is the Pre-print version of the Article. The official published version of the Paper can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 IOPDuring autumn 2008, the Silicon Strip Tracker was operated with the full CMS experiment in a comprehensive test, in the presence of the 3.8 T magnetic field produced by the CMS superconducting solenoid. Cosmic ray muons were detected in the muon chambers and used to trigger the readout of all CMS sub-detectors. About 15 million events with a muon in the tracker were collected. The efficiency of hit and track reconstruction were measured to be higher than 99% and consistent with expectations from Monte Carlo simulation. This article details the commissioning and performance of the Silicon Strip Tracker with cosmic ray muons.This work is supported by FMSR (Austria); FNRS and FWO (Belgium); CNPq, CAPES, FAPERJ, and FAPESP (Brazil); MES (Bulgaria); CERN; CAS, MoST, and NSFC (China); COLCIENCIAS (Colombia); MSES (Croatia); RPF (Cyprus); Academy of Sciences and NICPB (Estonia); Academy of Finland, ME, and HIP (Finland); CEA and CNRS/IN2P3 (France); BMBF, DFG, and HGF (Germany); GSRT (Greece); OTKA and NKTH (Hungary); DAE and DST (India); IPM (Iran); SFI (Ireland); INFN (Italy); NRF (Korea); LAS (Lithuania); CINVESTAV, CONACYT, SEP, and UASLP-FAI (Mexico); PAEC (Pakistan); SCSR (Poland); FCT (Portugal); JINR (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan); MST and MAE (Russia); MSTDS (Serbia); MICINN and CPAN (Spain); Swiss Funding Agencies (Switzerland); NSC (Taipei); TUBITAK and TAEK (Turkey); STFC (United Kingdom); DOE and NSF (USA)

Macroeconomic Effects of Climate Protection Measures within Domestic Environmental Subsidy Programmes

A focus of domestic environmental subsidies is the financial support of measures that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These have clearly gained in importance over the past decade: by 2004, more than 99 percent of subsidised measures were relevant for the climate.Umweltförderungsgesetz 1993 klimarelevante Maßnahmen

Entwicklung eines allgemeinen Gleichgewichtsmodells zur Analyse preispolitischer Maßnahmen im Verkehr

Different pricing policy measures exist to improve the environmental accounting of motorised transport modes as well as to finance road infrastructure investment. A CO2 related tax or road pricing are two examples of such measures. This article describes a computable general equilibrium model for Germany that has been developed specially to assess the impact of pricing policy measures introduced within the transportation sector. One outstanding characteristics of the model is the integrated demand for passenger travel differentiated by household types of equivalence-weighted income quartiles and land use characteristics of the residential location. The setup of the model allows the assessment of macroeconomic effects as well as welfare distributional impacts from the introduction of policy measures (e.g. car user road charges) and the subsequent use of the revenues. Zur Verbesserung der Umweltbilanz der Verkehrsträger oder auch zur Finanzierung von Straßeninfrastruktur werden verschiedene preispolitische Maßnahmen wie zum Beispiel die CO2-Steuer oder die Pkw-Maut diskutiert. Um ex-ante-Bewertung von Maßnahmen durchführen zu können, sind geeignete Instrumente der Wirkungsanalyse erforderlich. Gegenstand dieses Artikels ist die Beschreibung eines allgemeinen Gleichgewichtsmodells, das eigens für Deutschland zur Analyse preispolitischer Maßnahmen im Verkehr entwickelt wurde. Eine Besonderheit des Modells ist die integrierte Personenverkehrsnachfrage, differenziert nach Haushaltstypen in Abhängigkeit vom äquivalenzgewichteten Haushaltseinkommen sowie siedlungsstruktureller Wohnlage. Eine derartige Modellerweiterung erlaubt neben der Berechnung von makroökonomischen Folgen der Einführung preislicher Maßnahmen auch die Abschätzung von verteilungspolitischen Effekten der Allokation der im Rahmen der Maßnahme generierten Einnahmen, die zum Beispiel im Sinne einer Kompensation den privaten Haushalten zugeführt werden könnten.Computable general equilibrium model, Passenger road travel, Road charging

Distributional impacts of car road pricing: Settlement structures determine divergence across countries

Social questions of distribution and equity are of major importance for the political acceptance of car road pricing. The argument that kilometre-based private vehicle charging disadvantages the poor is often the core reason for opposing its introduction. An article in this journal [Steininger, K.W., Friedl, B., Gebetsroither, B., 2007. Sustainability impacts of car road pricing: a computable general equilibrium analysis for Austria. Ecological Economics 63, pp. 59-69] proved the opposite for one European country, i.e. that the rich bear most of the burden. In the present paper we use the very same model structure and apply it in a simulation to the data of another country. While macroeconomic and environmental conclusions are similar, we find a different distributional impact of car road pricing in our case. This issue is also of relevance in the analysis of the distributional implications concerning (recently significant) gasoline price increases.Equity Transport policy Distributional impacts