Environmental Economics and Policy Studies最新文献

While communication of business ethics has increased in importance, it is often understood as being more of immaterial than material value. However, recent studies have demonstrated that language and communication can have important social consequences, changing institutional logics and daily practices in economic fields. This conceptual paper explores how sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice can help us understand how market morality as a discursive practice for value formation is subject not only to linguistic exchange but also market positioning and economic value. The paper offers an inter-disciplinary view of business ethics in combination with socio-linguistics, contributing with propositions for how moral language serves as a currency for business ethics, providing implications for future studies of business ethics as a socio-economic practice.

The classical DICE model is a widely accepted integrated assessment model for the joint modeling of economic and climate systems, where all model state variables evolve over time deterministically. We reformulate and solve the DICE model as an optimal control dynamic programming problem with six state variables (related to the carbon concentration, temperature, and economic capital) evolving over time deterministically and affected by two controls (carbon emission mitigation rate and consumption). We then extend the model by adding a discrete stochastic shock variable to model the economy in the stressed and normal regimes as a jump process caused by events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These shocks reduce the world gross output leading to a reduction in both the world net output and carbon emission. The extended model is solved under several scenarios as an optimal stochastic control problem, assuming that the shock events occur randomly on average once every 100 years and last for 5 years. The results show that, if the world gross output recovers in full after each event, the impact of the COVID-19 events on the temperature and carbon concentration will be immaterial even in the case of a conservative 10% drop in the annual gross output over a 5-year period. The impact becomes noticeable, although still extremely small (long-term temperature drops by (0.1^circ mathrm {C})), in a presence of persistent shocks of a 5% output drop propagating to the subsequent time periods through the recursively reduced productivity. If the deterministic DICE model policy is applied in a presence of stochastic shocks (i.e., when this policy is suboptimal), then the drop in temperature is larger (approximately (0.25^circ mathrm {C})), that is, the lower economic activities owing to shocks imply that more ambitious mitigation targets are now feasible at lower costs.

Although stated-preference surveys take various forms, the use of either text or visuals to represent attributes is uncontroversial and remain commonly used. While prior research has investigated the impact of these formats in other disciplines, little is known about their effects in terms of relative importance in environmental economics. We conduct surveys on households’ preferences for water efficient technologies in South Africa, where we compare three presentation formats, namely text, visuals, and both text and visuals. Survey data collected from 894 households in the Gauteng Province are analysed using the mixed-logit model to test whether these three formats generate differences in estimated utilities and marginal willingness-to-pay (MWTP). This research sheds light on how to develop a valid presentation method for attribute levels in choice experiments, which is critical considering most environmental economics goods and services are not traded in the market. Our results obtained from the various presentation methods differ. There were also differences in MWTP estimates between the three groups. This suggests that the presentation format has significant impacts on choice. Thus, more research on presentation formats in environmental economics is warranted.

Assuming that consumption goods are differentiated in terms of environmental friendliness in a mixed duopolistic market, we present an analysis of public firm privatization effects on the environment and social welfare. The public firm maximizes the weighted average of its profit and social welfare. The private firm maximizes its profit. Consumers are aware of the environmental friendliness of goods. We demonstrate that an increase in the degree of public firm privatization lowers its environmental R&D investment and output. The decreased public firm’s R&D in turn lowers the private firm’s R&D investment through spillovers. The reduction of R&D investment by both firms decreases the environmental friendliness of these goods. Consumers consequently decrease their consumption of these goods. Therefore, if consumers exhibit environmental friendliness, then an increased degree of privatization might be socially undesirable.