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on Energy Economics |
| By: | Cuong Le Van (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne - Paris School of Economics); Katheline Schubert (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne - Paris School of Economics); Tu Anh Nguyen (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the optimal growth of a developing non-renewable natural resource producer, which extracts the resource from its soil and produces a single consumption good with man-made capital. Moreover, it can sell the extracted resource abroad and use the revenues to buy an imported good, which is a perfect substitute of the domestic consumption good. The domestic technology is convex-concave, so that the economy may be locked into a poverty trap. We study the optimal extraction and depletion of the exhaustible resource and the optimal paths of accumulation of capital and of domestic consumption. We show that the extent to which the country will optimally escape from the poverty trap and the exhaustible resource will be a blessing depends on the characteristics of its technology and of the revenues from the resource function, on its impatience, on the level of its initial stock of capital and on the abundance of the natural resource. If the marginal productivity of capital at the origin is greater than the sum of the social discount rate and the depreciation rate, the country will accumulate capital along the entire growth path and will escape from the poverty trap, whatever its initial stocks of capital and resource, and provided that the marginal revenue obtained from the exportation of the resource is finite at the origin. On the contrary, if the marginal productivity of capital is lower than the depreciation rate whatever the level of capital and if moreover the initial stock of capital is small, then the country will never accumulate ; it will consume the revenues obtained from selling abroad the extracted resource, until there is no resource left and the economy collapses. We also show that any optimal path may be decentralized in a competitive equilibrium by using a tax/subsidy scheme for firms. |
| Keywords: | Optimal growth, exhaustible resource, convex-concave technology, poverty trap, competitive equilibrium with tax/subsidy. |
| JEL: | Q32 C61 |
| Date: | 2007–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mse:cesdoc:v07075&r=ene |
| By: | Fagan, Stephen; Gencay, Ramazan |
| Abstract: | Futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange are the most liquid instruments for trading crude oil, which is the world’s most actively traded physical commodity. Under normal market conditions, traders can easily find counterparties for their trades, resulting in an efficient market with virtually no return predictability. Yet even this extremely liquid instrument suffers from liquidity shocks that induce periods of increased volatility and significant return predictability. This paper identifies an important and recurring cause of these shocks: the accumulation of extreme and opposing positions by the two main trader classes in the market, namely hedgers and speculators. As positions become extreme, approaching their historical limits, counterparties for trades become scarce and prices must adjust to induce trade. These liquidity-induced price adjustments are found to be driven by systematic speculative behavior and are determined to be significant. |
| Keywords: | Liquidity; Futures Markets; Return Predictability; Volatility; Trader Positions; Directional Realized Volatility; Hedgers; Speculators; Position Bounds |
| JEL: | G14 C53 G13 G10 C1 |
| Date: | 2008–01–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:6677&r=ene |
| By: | Razzak, W A |
| Abstract: | The paper asks two questions. One, what is the size of the effect of the increase in real oil price on competitiveness of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries –the real exchange rate is a measure of competitiveness – and two, given recent concerns about the sliding greenback and the consequent income and inflationary problems, would the GCC countries been “better off” had they pegged their currencies to the Euro dollar in 1991? To answer these questions we model and estimate the effect of oil prices on the competitiveness for the GCC then we provide a test statistic to test whether the conditional variance of the model has remained stable under the US dollar peg compared to a counterfactual scenario, where the GCC countries peg their currencies to the Euro dollar in 1991. We find the effect of the increase in the real price of oil on competitiveness of the GCC countries to be small, most of the domestic inflation is imported, and that there is a relatively large variation among the GCC economies with respect to the currency peg. The financial problems the GCC countries face today are not about which currency (or a basket of currencies) they should peg to, but rather about the choice of the monetary arrangement as a whole. |
| Keywords: | Real Exchange Rate; Oil Price Shocks; Sample Generalized Variance |
| JEL: | C13 P28 F31 |
| Date: | 2007–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:6591&r=ene |
| By: | Hattori, Keisuke |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the welfare effects of international transfers of environmental technologies in open economies with international oligopoly and transboundary pollution, and shows that policy differentiation between the donor and recipient countries and/or product differentiation between the donor and recipient firms play a critical role in obtaining a bilateral agreement on the transfer policy between nations. The results arise from the fact that policy differentiation weakens the strategic relationships in environmental policy setting between governments and that product differentiation weakens the strategic relationships in quantity choices between firms. |
| Keywords: | Technology Transfer; Environmental Tax; Oligopoly |
| JEL: | F18 H23 |
| Date: | 2007–09–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:6334&r=ene |
| By: | Stengos, T.; Kalaitzidakis,P.; Mamuneas, T. P. |
| Date: | 2008 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gue:guelph:2008-2&r=ene |
| By: | Minh Ha-Duong (CIRED - Centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement - CIRAD : UMR56 - CNRS : UMR8568 - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales - Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées - Ecole Nationale du Génie Rural des Eaux et des Forêts); Ana Sofia Campos (CIRED - Centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement - CIRAD : UMR56 - CNRS : UMR8568 - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales - Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées - Ecole Nationale du Génie Rural des Eaux et des Forêts); Alain Nadai (CIRED - Centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement - CIRAD : UMR56 - CNRS : UMR8568 - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales - Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées - Ecole Nationale du Génie Rural des Eaux et des Forêts) |
| Abstract: | An awareness and opinion survey on Carbon Capture and Storage was conducted on a representative sample of French aged 15 years and above. About 6\% of respondents were able to provide a satisfying definition of the technology. The key question about `approval of or opposition to' the use of CCS in France was asked twice, first after presenting the technology, then after exposing the potential adverse consequences. Approval rates, 59\% and 38\%, show that there is no a priori rejection of the technology, but public trust needs to be build. The sample was split in two to test for a semantic effect: questioning one half about `Stockage' (English: storage), the other about `Sequestration'. Manipulating the vocabulary had no statistically significant effect on approval rates. Stockage is more meaningful, but does not convey the idea of permanent monitoring. |
| Keywords: | Carbon capture and storage; public opinion |
| Date: | 2007–12–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:papers:halshs-00200894_v1&r=ene |