Environmental Kuznets Curve on Country Level: Evidence from China

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis proposes that there is an inverse-U-shape relationship between environmental degradation and per capita income. This evidence has been manifested to be existed in most air pollutants and several water pollutants by estimating on cross-country data. Different from most earlier empirical studies, this paper uses the cross-province panel data of seven pollutants from China to investigate whether the EKC hypothesis may even exist on a country level. The estimated results find out that the EKC hypothesis exists in five of these pollutants, while the other two show a N-shape relationship between pollutant emission and per capita income. Moreover, this paper suggests some problems of this regression as being remained for future study.Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), pollution emission, economic growth, GDP per capita

Structural Changes of Industry and Employment in Japan

The Japanese industry is in a huge whirlpool. Various common senses and conventions have been seriously doubted. Nevertheless, Japan cannot yet find any exit. Even if finding it, she has spent only a time in vain without doing any effectives measure, because most of those are conflict with vested interests or conventional practices. In this paper, I will make a positive analysis of changing industry in Japan after the babble boom crash in 1991 by using Firms and Establishments Census Data and others. Then, I will make it clear that the cause of failure to buoy up her economy consists in a fact that shortage of investment opportunities in her economy has been misunderstood simply as shortage of macro effective demand. Then, comparing the structural adjustment in the first half of the 1990s with one in the second half of the 1970s, I will clarify that the most serious weak point of Japanese-styled management, which has virtually excluded rights of shareholders from their decisions, have got revealed as her economy matures. I will also say that improvement of profitability by making employment fluid is not only effective as a counter-policy to the prolonged structural depression in the open economy but also inescapable in the "affiuent" economy driven by the service industry. Lastly, in place of a conclusion, I will remind a brief summary and lessons of the US and the UK policy experiences after the 1970s

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF ASEAN FREE TRADE AREA; BY A COUNTRY PANEL DATA

This paper is an attempt to use the Hausman-Taylor (HT) estimation to examine the determinants of trade flows of Asean Free Trade Area (AFTA). Based on the two-way error component form of the gravity model, we employ the HT technique to estimate export flows by a country panel data of 39 countries for the period 1988-2002. The estimations have shown the following important results. Firstly, export flows among two countries increase more proportionately with GDPs. More interestingly, trade is higher between countries of identical preferences than those of different ones. Secondly, the most crucial result is that AFTA has only produced the trade creation among its members. Finally, this study suggests the importance of trade facilitation policy to support the targets of FTA.AFTA, gravity models, panel data, trade.

Is Individual Environmental Consciousness One of the Determinants in Transport Mode Choice?

This paper models a transport negative impact on environment as one of attributes of the transport mode. By this modeling, we are able to examine whether individual environmental consciousness has a significant effect on his/her choice of transport mode. A survey data from Saito and Onohara Area in Northern Osaka of Japan is used to estimate the model specified by Heteroscedastic Extreme Value (HEV). Both of the estimated and simulated results imply that individual environmental consciousness does influence his/her decision on transport mode choice. Furthermore, the likelihood ratio tests suggest that both the utility and scale parameters are not equal across sub-samples of university commuters, research-facility commuters, and residents. The details of the comparison across sub-samples suggest that we may learn more from subdividing a whole sample into several sub-samples if we could select them based on their characteristics.Environmental consciousness; Transport mode choice; Stated choice experiment; Heteroscedastic Extreme Value (HEV) model; Value of time saving (VOTS)