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This study aims at to make a heuristic analysis of energy efficiency performance of Indian paper industry in a non-parametric production theoretic approach. Using the data for 2004–05 to 2013–14, radial and non-radial variants of DEA were employed to estimate energy saving potential and identify the relative position of paper industry across the states. Preliminary analysis in terms of energy intensity scores showed declining trends of energy intensity over the period of analysis for most of the states except states like Assam, Chhattisgarh, Kerala and Punjab where it does not decline much. Assuming a variable returns to scale (VRS) technology under the conditions of inherent heterogeneity and market imperfection, the slack-based measure (SBM) reported a much higher energy saving potential than reported by other measures in the study. Further by taking scale efficiency into account, the study documented the higher contribution of pure energy inefficiency in explaining the total energy inefficiency within the paper industry relative to scale inefficiency. Finally, the study recommends the propagation of energy efficiency program through a market-based and regulatory mechanism along with consolidation and technological advancement of individual units, in order to tap vast energy saving potential and thereby ensure the growth and environmental sustainability.

Both trade and production of graphic paper have decreased over the last three decades. While this general decrease can partially be attributed to increased prominence of information technology, the overall figure is devoid of context and thus of most of its meaning to global economy. In this study we aim to break this trend down across the geographical and temporal scope, across its supply-chain commodities and to find out what drives the global trade patterns. Econometric trade models focus on the trading countries and direct exports or imports but fail to consider the structural and the indirect trade relations. We take the approach of network analysis, where the emphasis is on the structure of trade and not on country-level descriptors. We focus on 1995–2017 period as within it this decrease can be observed and assess the entire graphic paper and pulp supply chain, consisting out of printing and writing paper, mechanical wood pulp, chemical wood pulp, semichemical wood pulp, pulp made from fiber other than wood, recovered paper and paperboard. We employ descriptive statistical and network analysis, grouping and role analysis, and end with an inferential logistic regression quadratic assignment procedure model. Results show that newsprint trade decline is mirrored in printing and writing paper and mechanical wood pulp. The trade network densities have remained generally stable throughout the observed period, but the topological proprieties of the individual product groups vary greatly. Although no stabile grouping of countries throughout the assessed period could be observed, role analysis shows that countries tend to trade within their continent, that European countries are at the core of the trade network, and that the structural shift of decline of the trade value is followed by increasing prominence of several Asian countries, such as China and Indonesia. The most important finding of the study is that internal trade effects such as reciprocity and transitivity are much more explanatory than classical effects used in trade models such as GDP per capita, geographical distance or forest endowment.

This paper analyzes information opacity and systemic risk for the U.S. Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) in the context of the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) between 2001:Q2 and 2012:Q4. Banks which set up costly ABCP conduits might have benefited from the regulatory capital relief and from providing financing alternatives to their clients. However, BHCs faced costs in terms of the increase in information opacity through the provision of the credit enhancements and liquidity lines to their own and third-party sponsored ABCP conduits, which in turn increased BHCs’ systemic risk.

China’s paper industry consumes a lot of energy and emits huge amounts of pollutions. The Chinese government over the past decades has done a lot to promote energy efficiency of the industry. This paper studies the impact of industrial polices to improve energy efficiency. The energy efficiency change is firstly studied under a framework of total factor efficiency. On this basis, different econometric models are built to discuss the detailed energy efficiency characteristics of the paper industry. The main results are as follow: (i) ownership structure did influence the energy efficiency, but the influence is different in different conditions; (ii) energy efficiency of the paper industry can be improved by economies of scale; (iii) market competition can to some extent overcome the motivation and supervision problem that often occur in state-owned companies; (iv) energy price cannot play the role of resource allocation well in China. Finally, based on our findings, some suggestions are provided.

The current challenge facing the European pulp and paper industry is how to materialize the transformation to a bio-economy, as well as to realize the necessary new green innovations. The risks, costs and constraints of doing business will increase, thereby further intensifying competition, but at the same time new business opportunities will open up. This study adopts a three-round dissensus-based Delphi approach in order to explore our key research question of how the pulp and paper industry may change strategically, and what is the potential for value creation in the year 2030. According to our expert panel, the main drivers of competitiveness in 2030 will include energy and material efficiency, sustainability, as well as new innovations in products to serve customer needs better. According to the projected 2030 scenario, the pulp and paper industry will produce more diversified products, focus on higher value-added, and aim at consumer segments with higher environmental awareness. On average, 40 percent of the turnover will according to the panel come froth genuinely new products. Strategic cross-sectorial partnerships will have a key role in making this big leap, while simultaneously acknowledging the changing needs of sustainability-conscious customers and other stakeholders. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

In the August of 2007, banks faced a freeze in funding liquidity from the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market. We investigate how banks scrambled for liquidity in response to this freeze and its implications for the real economy. Commercial banks in the United States raised deposits and took advances from Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs). In contrast, foreign banks – with limited access to the deposit market and FHLB advances – lent less in the overnight interbank market and borrowed more from the Federal Reserve’s Term Auction Facility (TAF) auctions. Relative to banks in the United States, relative to before the ABCP freeze and relative to their non-US dollar lending (difference-in-differences), foreign banks with ABCP exposure charged higher interest rates on syndicated loan packages denominated in dollars. The results point to an important funding risk in global banking, manifesting as currency shortages for banks engaged in maturity transformation in foreign countries.

China's paper industry accounts for a larger proportion of the global paper industry and consumes large amounts of energy. Energy conservation and pollution reduction of the industry have become the focus of China's national development strategy. Energy efficiency is an important index which directly determines the amounts of energy consumption and pollution emissions. To understand the energy efficiency evolution of China's paper industry, this paper establishes an input-output data of the paper industry for 29 provinces in China and applies DEA method and econometric models to estimate and comprehensively discuss the energy efficiency issues based on the framework of total factor efficiency. Our results indicate that China's paper industry has a large energy saving potential even though its energy efficiency has improved during the period 1990–2013. The saving potential is about 65% under the meta-frontier and 44% under the group-frontier. Moreover, there are significant differences between different regions in production technology and energy efficiency. The performance of eastern China is better than other regions. But the technology gaps between the different regions are shrinking and converging over time. Finally, some policy recommendations are proposed to improve the energy efficiency of the industry.

This paper uses a dynamic land allocation model combined with the infinite rotation problem to determine theoretically, the recycling rate that maximizes the forest area and, thus, the number of trees under social management thereby integrating both positive externalities generated by the forest and social costs of not recycling. The results suggest that, when the recycling rate is low, increasing it to its optimal level will result in more land area being devoted to forestry and, thus, more trees. However, increasing it beyond its optimal level will reduce the number of trees in the long run. In addition, the recycling rate that maximizes the forest area is optimal in the sense that it also maximizes the social net benefit. An application shows that increasing the recycling rate up to its optimal level considerably increases the forest area. The increase in the social net benefit is very small.

This article reviews the divergence of environmental regulatory arrangements in the Swedish forestry sector in relation to the closely-linked Swedish pulp and paper industry. The study finds that w ...

China has become the world largest paper and paperboard producer. However, pulp and paper industry has involved high resource consumption and severe pollution especially for water. This research has assessed the eco-efficiency of China's pulp and paper industry at the national level and provincial level. An overview regarding the cleaner production of China's pulp and paper industry was presented to reveal the measures for reducing environmental impact in the last two decades. Slacks-based measure was used to analyze the efficiency levels of 16 provinces' pulp and paper industries. To uncover the underlying causes of eco-efficiency performance, Malmquist–Luenberger index was calculated to discover the drivers of productivity growth of pulp and paper industries. Our results showed that the pollution treatment of China's pulp and paper industry has made progress in terms of water consumption and water pollution, although the absolute amount of pollution discharge is still large. Chemical oxygen demand emissions are still the first critical influencing factor of pulp and paper industry's inefficiency. Furthermore, efficiency progress was the dominating contribution of the industry's productivity growth between 2010 and 2013. The policies for adjusting the industrial structure of pulp and paper industry have resulted in the scale effects through eliminating backward production capacity and accelerating merger and acquisitions. Moreover, the productivity of pulp and paper industry was underestimated when the undesirable outputs were ignored. It indicates that the stricter environmental regulations have positive effects on paper companies to internalize environmental pressures in the production activities through environmental management. In the future, pulp and paper companies should further internalize the cost of pollution treatment through scale effects and technology improvement.

The Natural Environment White Paper represents the most important conservation policy shift in the United Kingdom (UK) in twenty years. It formalises the ecosystem approach within national policy objectives and emphasises the economic value of ecosystem services. By analysing the use of various evidence sources, the involvement of science entrepreneurs, and the development of policy narratives, our goal was to understand factors that influenced adoption of an ecosystem service framework in the UK. We interviewed 48 policy actors and found that centrally-sponsored synthesis reports with entrepreneurial authors provided the most influential expert-based knowledge in the development of the White Paper. More recently published reports had greater influence, yet the window of opportunity for scientific evidence having policy impact was greater in the problem-setting stages of policy development. The interaction between teams preparing syntheses and expert entrepreneurs helped influence the construction of strategic policy narratives. Those narratives increased the impact of scientific evidence by communicating and framing key policy-salient messages, and brokering between broad ecosystem-based and environmental economics narratives. The combination of ecological and economics evidence was particularly salient in the UK case due to the context of continued biodiversity loss and the acceptability of valuation narratives within central government. Our findings suggest that evidence impact varies at different stages of the policy process, and that this is driven by the interplay of contextual factors like policy timing, personal influence, and the competition between different sets of actors and narratives.

The European Union has set a milestone for cutting its carbon emissions by 2030 to levels 40% below the levels of 1990 through domestic reductions, improved energy efficiency and the greater use of renewable energy sources. In parallel, the key challenge of the pulp and paper industry (PPI) is how to achieve a transformation towards a bioeconomy, as well as to realize the necessary new green innovations. Climate change, material resource scarcity and ecosystem decline are among the ten major sustainability megaforces identified by KPMG (2012), globally influencing business environments. However, the relative importance of these megaforces in the context of pulp and paper sector transformation is yet unknown. We therefore investigate the significance of these megaforces and their relation to the drivers of sustainability-related investments in the European pulp and paper sector, and identify threats and opportunities that these business environmental changes may bring about. Our results are based upon a three-round dissensus-based Delphi approach carried out with a sample of 30 high-level European PPI experts collected in 2014. The panelists identified a greater demand for energy, volatility in the fossil fuel markets and increasing material resource scarcity as the most significant sustainability megaforces shaping European PPI over the next 15 years. However, all the megaforces – except for global ecosystem decline and water scarcity – were perceived more as opportunities rather than threats to European PPI business, indicating that designed energy and environmental policies have the potential to advance a paradigm change towards a bioeconomy rather than curbing the future of the European PPI.

Introduction of the sulfur emissions reduction directive for maritime transport has become a heavily debated policy issue in Northern Europe from the perspective of the future competitiveness of transport-dependent industries. The scientific value of this study is in its contribution to the scarce literature on the future of pulp and paper industry competitiveness from the tightening environmental regulation perspective, highlighting the complementary role of law-abiding and voluntary regulations. Using a Delphi-foresight method, the study evaluates the effectiveness of environmental regulation by identifying its positive and negative aspects for the future success of the pulp and paper industry, and uses the reduction of sulfur emissions as an example. From a business perspective, the panelists saw tightening regulation as both a threat and an opportunity, and stressed the role of the policy implementation in achieving actual environmental improvement. The strict regulatory measures were generally perceived as environmentally advantageous and more effective in the long term, but a rather divided view was seen in the ability of the sulfur emissions directive to effectively govern environmental sustainability. In discussion, the role of more voluntary alternatives to implementing command-and-control type policy measures is emphasized in complementing government legislation, to gain market benefits from greening the entire pulp and paper supply chain. To conclude, the development of sustainable transportation strategies has the potential to contribute toward long-term competitiveness in the pulp and paper industry, especially if new strategic innovation-oriented cross-sector partnerships develop in the production and use of transportation biofuels.

Canadian pulp and paper companies have been experiencing hard times during the last decade. The rising Canadian dollar, low-cost competition and the decline in number of conventional markets have led to several restructuring projects and shutdowns among pulp and paper mills. Setting up a transformation strategy is considered vital for those companies to overcome the crisis and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Several transformation pathways could be undertaken, ranging from process modernisation to product portfolio and market diversification. The increasingly volatile business environment makes strategic decisions a tough task. Our objective is then to help decision makers, within the pulp and paper industry, identify profitable transformation strategies that would resist the major driving forces affecting the companies’ competitiveness. A scenario-based modelling approach is presented to evaluate a set of transformation strategies under different trend-based future scenarios and to identify the most robust strategic options, allowing a given pulp and paper company to meet the future challenges. A mathematical model is developed to evaluate the profitability of each transformation strategy under different plausible future scenarios. Investing in high-value bioproducts such as Bioethanol is suggested as a viable transformation pathway. Opting for innovative pulp and paper products such moulded fibre packaging would be a promising strategy to consider within a multi-product diversification pathway. Mixed strategies are also evaluated and it is found that investing in bioethanol while modernising the P&P assets would be the most profitable and the less risky strategy, but with the highest investment cost among all strategies.

Despite the growing interest in innovation in the pulp and paper industry (PPI) from strategic management and institutional standpoints, little empirical research exists on the role of firms' technological capabilities and institutions in shaping particular technological trajectories within the industry. The objective of this article is to examine the relationship among firms' technological capability-building process, indigenous institutions, and the evolution of a particular technological trajectory within the PPI. To meet this objective, this article draws on a case study design based on primary and long-term evidence gathered through extensive fieldwork in Brazil. This article shows that (1) Brazil's PPI began by developing technological capabilities in long-fiber technology led by global leaders; instead of moving on a subsequent path-following trajectory, these firms accumulated innovative capabilities that led to the development of the short-fiber trajectory; (2) these capabilities initially permitted the implementation of incremental changes in forestry and process technologies, which evolved into sophisticated RD and (3) indigenous institutions shaped this trajectory by providing firms with human capital and research support, funding for production and initial innovative capability development, and IPO and entry into export markets. These capabilities and institutions were effective in developing a technological trajectory that enabled Brazil's PPI to achieve an internationally leading position in this industry; however, new capabilities and institutional arrangements are needed to support Brazil's PPI firms' incipient diversification and to mitigate self-reinforcement. This article shows that innovative capability building combined with effective indigenous institutions enable firms—even those from a late-industrializing country—to create a new technological trajectory. Given the innovation opportunities in the PPI, managers and policy makers should not be satisfied with their achievements; rather, they should be alert to innovative new entrants and explore novel technologically advanced paths.

This paper proposes an agent-based simulation model to study and analyse the performance of various procurement and production policies in the recycled paper industry. The proposed model includes the recycled pulp production process, as well as the waste paper inventory and procurement processes. A detailed simulation model developed in partnership with a large recycled pulp producer in North America was developed in order to emulate the procurement manager's behaviour. Therefore, based on the observed behaviour of the procurement manager, a procurement behaviour model, which takes both market price and inventory requirement into account, is introduced. This paper also introduces a waste paper market model that simulates a market price and enables the control of price forecast accuracy. Two series of experiments were carried out in order to study the performance of procurement and production policies in several productions contexts. Results show that production Volume Flexibility has a negative impact on costs, inventory and quality. However, it is possible to partially reduce these issues with the introduction of contracts with Volume Flexibility, although only a limited effect has been observed in our experiments. A more significant strategy to improve costs consists in reducing production rate to the minimum level required to meet demand.

Different chroniclers of the history of the Byzantine Empire have noted various economic data gleamed from historical documents and accounts of the empire at different periods of time. Research for this paper has not uncovered any estimates of long term, annual macroeconomic data (gross domestic product (GDP), national income (NI), etc.) for the empire during its existence. Such data has been estimated to one extent or another for other nations and societies that have existed during the middle ages. This paper attempts to provide conjectures on approximate real GDP per capita trends for the empire over its existence from AD 300 to 1453. Finally, some hypotheses on factors that would have affected Byzantine economic performance are tested using climate/environmental factors. The results of this paper appear to confirm some findings on how the Byzantine economy might have been affected by periods of regional climate change. [enter Abstract Body]

This paper assesses the market power of pulpwood mills in different regions of the U.S. We estimated the conjectural elasticity, elasticities of substitution and price elasticities for the delivered price at the mill in Southeast and North U.S. and the stumpage in the Southeast. We assembled data composed of price and quantity of Labor, Energy, Chemical Products and Wood at firms' level from Q4/2016 to Q4/2017, and applied a variety of econometric models that measure the influence of firms and resource characteristics on market competition. The results indicate moderate levels of oligopsony power in all markets, with the highest effect at the mill in the North, and lowest in the stumpage market in the South. Market power in the pulpwood market is strongly driven by industry concentration and local company size, and decreases as the estimated wood procurement radius from a mill increases in size.

The objective of this paper is to estimate the energy saving potential in China's paper industry by determining energy intensity under different scenarios. Cointegration model and stability test are applied to formulate the equilibrium equation. Results show that energy price, industry structure, profit margin and technology have significant impact as they are negatively correlated to changes in energy intensity. Three scenarios (BAU (business as usual), intermediate and active) are designed to estimate the future trend of energy intensity in paper industry. In 2010, the energy intensity (energy consumption per unit of value added) was 4 tce/10,000 RMB, and by the scenarios it is expected to considerably decline. According to the BAU (business as usual) scenario, the energy intensity will decrease to 2.56, 1.43 and 0.70 tce/10,000 RMB by 2015, 2020 and 2025, respectively. With respect to the intermediate scenario it is expected to drop further to 0.44 tce/10,000 RMB. Yet by the active scenario, the energy intensity is expected to considerably decline to 0.36 tce/10,000 RMB by 2025. Using the BAU forecast as a baseline, the quantity of energy savings is estimated to be 185.6 billion tce by 2025. Considering this important potential, we also provided some policy suggestions.

Investment in capital, new technology, and agricultural techniques has not been considered an endeavor worthwhile in a medieval economy because of a lack of strong property rights and no incentive on the part of lords and barons to lend money to or grant rights to peasant farmers. Therefore, the medieval economy and standards of living at that time often have been characterized as non-dynamic and static due to insufficient investment in innovative techniques and technology. Paul Baran’s concept of the economic surplus is applied to investment patterns during the late medieval, mercantile, and early capitalist stages of economic growth in England and the UK. This paper uses Zhun Xu’s Baran Ratio concept to try to develop general trends to demonstrate and to reinforce other historical accounts of these times that a productive and sufficient level of public and private investment out of accumulated capital income, taxation, and rents does not have a real impact on economic per capita growth until around the 1600s in Britain. This would also be about the time of capitalism’s ascent as the dominant economic system in England. Even then, dramatic increases in investment and economic growth do not appear until the late 18th Century when investment more consistently becomes more than one hundred percent of the level of economic surplus and takes in government spending. The types of investment, threshold amounts of investment out of profits and rents along with government spending seem to matter when it comes to a growth path raising GDP per capita and national income per capita to higher levels. Although much of this knowledge perhaps is embodied in current historical accounts, the Baran Ratio nicely summarizes and illustrates the importance of levels of investment to economic growth.

New France, like most European colonies in the New World, suffered from a persistent shortage of metal coins. As Quebec could only legally import from France, their standards of living were constrained by their ability to export a few primary products (mostly fur, cod, timber and wheat). Mercantilist restrictions and underdeveloped financial markets limited the ability to use the capital account to import coins and tightened the balance of payments constraint. The introduction of playing card money in New France in 1685, the first use of paper money in the West, provided a means of relaxing this constraint. It produced a substitute domestic money which allowed scarce metal coins to be used to purchase imports. The balance-of-payments constrained growth models that grew out of Thirlwall’s Law is applied to this experience, with discussions of the export constraints of Quebec’s reliance on a few primary exports (with furs being the most dominant one) with inelastic demand and facing the vagaries of changing tastes in Europe.

This paper analyzes how risk premiums altered the use of commercial paper relative to bank loans during the recent financial crisis. Consistent with the theoretical and empirical literature on how surges in risk premiums can induce plunges in under-collateralized credit or credit funded with noninsured sources, results indicate that a spike in risk premiums induced a plunge in commercial paper use during the recent crisis. This paper also finds that Federal Reserve interventions in the money market helped prevent the commercial paper market from melting down to the extent seen during the early 1930s.

Evidence shows that the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is underutilized. WIC enrolls 52.7% of eligible persons and participants claim a fraction of available benefits. Researchers suggest that people underutilize WIC because of the time needed to enroll in and use WIC and because participants may believe that, if others notice them participating in WIC, community members will stigmatize them. Recently enacted policies may reduce both time costs and potential for stigma associated with WIC. Congress mandated that, by 2020, all states disburse WIC benefits through an Electronic Benefits Transfer (eWIC) system. Given that eWIC reduces the time required for each transaction and and makes it more difficult to identify beneficiaries, we expect WIC redemptions to increase. In addition, eWIC might also increase the chance WIC recipients choose non-WIC foods for redemption increasing non-WIC expenditures. To measure the impact of eWIC on WIC redemptions and non-WIC food expenditures we analyze data on grocery expenditures of 11,887 WIC-participating households in one state over the period it implemented eWIC. We find that, after beneficiaries began redeeming WIC benefits through eWIC, spending on non-WIC eligible foods did not change but redemptions of WIC benefits increased.

The European fisheries policy has undergone a substantial reform. The reform process was initiated by a Green Paper published by the European Commission in 2009. It was recently finalised with an agreement on a new Basic Regulation between the European Commission, the Council and the Parliament in October 2013. The reform of the Common Fisheries Policy will be an important step towards a more sustainable fisheries policy in Europe. The most important reform steps are the introduction of maximum sustainable yield as the new management target, a landing obligation for bycatch and a governance shift towards regions. Although the mentioned reform elements are in generally very promising, their concrete design does not always meet existing expectations.

Debt underpins the modern global economy. Debt is also intimately tied to the function and form of the modern state. As a form of capital, debt is a combination of several legal modules and legal qualities that allow holders of debt to secure a future pecuniary return. The development of these legal modules and legal qualities may be observed in the emerging commercial society of the United States of America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By tracing the transformation of debt over this time period in the USA, we may gain insight into how debt, the economy, and the state could be re-envisioned for the future.

The financial crisis of 2008-2009 demonstrated the need for a comprehensive approach to risk management of financial institutions and financial area as a whole. Since then, a large number of macroprudential policy studies are published each year. In this paper we provide an overview of the main findings of 19 research papers in 2019. This allows us to draw conclusions about the main directions of current studies and to outline directions for future research.

As a commentary paper to the FRL Article Collection on the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Financial Performance (CFP), the present essay addresses and investigates in depth the heterogeneity of results from existing empirical studies. After an historical excursus on the CSP-CFP link, it emphasizes the need to pay attention to theoretical inaccuracies, endogeneity, sample-selection and aggregation bias as well as to the risk of overinterpretation. Finally, it provides researchers with a documented statement to avoid the theoretical, methodological and technical flaws that have jeopardized antecedent works and shares a range of rationalized, valuable and practicable solutions.

Adoption of energy efficient technologies is considered a key sustainability strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in global industries. This article aims to assess costs of energy savings and carbon reduction from applying energy efficiency technologies in the US pulp and paper sector. Applicable efficiency measures were identified and their cost effectiveness was evaluated in two historical years – 1994 and 2006. Potential savings of final energy use resulting from applicable sustainability options were estimated as 707 PJ in 1994 and 1064 PJ in 2006, respectively, corresponding to approximately 32% of the sector's annual final energy use in 1994 and 62% in 2006. The associated carbon-emission reduction was 8.1 million ton of carbon (MtC) in 1994 and 11.8 MtC in 2006, corresponding to 26% and 45% of sector's total energy-related carbon emissions in 1994 and 2006, respectively. Using the concepts of cost of conserved energy and cost of carbon reduction, we estimated that cost effective sustainability options contributed to final energy savings in the range of 15–25% of the annual energy use, and carbon-emission reduction from 14% to 20% of annual carbon emissions from the sector.

This study was inspired by the literature of the hypothesis of the curse of natural resources, but particularly in authors such as Castelo-Branco (2010), Tiess (2011), Sigam and Garcia (2012), Obiri (2014), Halland et al. (2015) and Addison and Roe (2018).These authors deal with the issue of natural resources from the perspective of the extractive industry. So, the objective of this study was to estimate the impact of the extractive industry of natural resources on the economic growth of Mozambique in the context of the SADC countries. To carry out the study, an econometric model of economic growth based on panel data was estimated, more specifically the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) using data from 11 SADC countries between 1980 and 2017. The main results of the study indicate that, taking into account all 11 SADC countries, in the long-run the extractive industry rents have a negative and statistically significant impact on economic growth. In the short-run the extractive industry has no impact on the economic growth of the SADC countries. In the context of Mozambique, the results show that, in the short-run extractive industry rents has a negative but statistically insignificant effect, i.e. have no impact on Mozambique's economic growth. These results suggest that extractive industry rents in Mozambique and in SADC, in general, are not used as a factor of production applied in other sectors to directly raise the national product. It’s leased for the remuneration of production factor and/or for consumption. Thus, for the short run the study recommends policies for allocating the rents of extractive industries in productive and economically efficient investments in the detriment of political efficiency and the creation of sovereign wealth funds. For such policies to have results, in the short run, Mozambique must improve the quality of the institutions which at long run will be the antibiotics against the voracious and rentist effects of local elites and bureaucrats

At its simplest, ‘How to avoid borrowed plumes in academia’ by Margit Osterloh and Bruno Frey (Osterloh & Frey, 2020) is a paper about how using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) to judge academic papers and their authors is a bad idea; their suggestion of why people nevertheless persist in doing so; and what might be done to stop them. More broadly, it is a paper about heuristics (or rules-of-thumb) – why they are used; when they should not be used; and how to stop them being used in those contexts. I agree with Osterloh and Frey that JIF is a bad heuristic for judging research, but I find their arguments about why it is used and what might be done to stop people using it unconvincing and impractical. In this short Note, I argue that the use of heuristics is inevitable and, if effectively selected, they can improve decision-making. The challenge for an individual is to decide which heuristics are worth using. The policy challenge is to dissuade people from using inappropriate heuristics – and doing this requires good evidence on how and why the heuristics are being used, something that is missing from Osterloh and Frey’s paper.

Sustainability measurement in economics includes assessment of environmental and economic effects in an integrated manner. In this study, system level economic data are integrated with environmental impacts determined from a life cycle assessment (LCA) of a common product. We adopt a costing methodology that captures conventional costs, but additionally incorporates externality costs to present a convenient, easily interpretable metric. Green Net Value Added (GNVA) is a type of full cost accounting that incorporates total revenue, the cost of production, depreciation, and environmental externalities. We present externality costs disaggregated by upstream sectors, full cost of production, and GNVA to evaluate the relative sustainability of Bounty® paper towels manufactured at two production facilities. We found that the longer running, more established line had a higher GNVA. The predominant components contributing to externality costs come from the stationary sources in the supply chain: electricity generation (27–35%), refineries (20–21%), pulp and paper making (15–23%). Health-related externalities from Particulate Matter (PM2.5) and Carbon Dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions are to a great extent driven by electricity usage and emissions by the facilities, followed by pulp processing and transport. Supply chains for other facility purchases, product distribution, and end-of-life management contribute the least to the environmental health-related costs.

Increasing levels of variable renewable energy require additional flexible resources in the global energy system. In countries with energy-intensive industries, flexibility may be increased through industrial demand side management (IDSM). In most studies, the potential of IDSM is estimated from a technical or theoretical viewpoint. However, IDSM capacity is only utilized if the industry finds it profitable, and thus the economic potential should also be assessed. The focus of this paper is on the intra-day IDSM potential of a paper mill site that is active in the Nordic power market. An optimization model is built to estimate the costs that occur when the paper mill executes regulating power bids, if the original production schedule has been optimized against a spot price forecast. The costs are estimated for different sizes of bids and a marginal cost curve is provided for pricing them. Using this marginal cost curve, the market potential of the case mill site is assessed. It is found that this potential is greatly influenced by the costs of executing regulating power bids. The results indicate that transmission system operators and policy makers should account for economic factors when assessing the potential of market based IDSM.

An enormous gap exists between Africa's current electrification rate and the 2030 UN goal to ensure universal access to modern energy. A study by Sanoh et al. published in Renewable Energy in 2014 [1] is a rare example of finding a cost minimal solution for the Africa-wide generation and transmission network. Unfortunately, however, the paper exhibits a number of relatively serious flaws that demand attention given the alarming paucity of such research on Africa. Five issues of the study by Sanoh et al. are identified and discussed in this commentary paper. Specifically, the study does not account for capacity factors when deriving required capacity additions, misses transmission losses when sizing generation capacity, models country-level import constraints incorrectly, introduces a supply option redundancy, and reports optimisation results that can be shown to be mathematically sub-optimal. As a result of some of these issues, the Sanoh et al. significantly underreport the required capacity to meet additional African demand in 2025. In addition to discussing these flaws, this paper provides potential approaches to avoid each of the five issues.

Sir Ian Byatt was the first regulator of the water and wastewater industry in England and Wales (Director General of Water Service) from privatisation in 1989–2000. He examines the experience of a quarter of a century of the regulation of water companies, concentrating on what worked well and where further developments are needed to deal with changing circumstances. He concludes that while RPI-X regulation, combined with comparative competition, worked well with respect to operating expenditure, the regulation of capital expenditure needs enhancement to avoid overcharging of customers. He advocates the development of performance regulation, backed by project competition, where customers pay for quality enhancement only when they receive it.

The present pitch paper intends to pitch the research idea, its methodology, and possible outcomes by following Faff (2015) pitch my research template The rese

High-profile revelations of organizational malpractices in the last few years such as unethical business deals based on large-scale conflicts of interest, insider trading, overvaluation of housing mortgages, doctored inventories of inadequate capital holdings to raise finances, and manipulation of facts and figures have made transparency an important value in today’s organizational world. Stakeholders, whether internal or external, expect to have access to information and organizations have little choice but to open up in keeping with current trends (Christensen, 2002; Christensen & Langer, 2009). This paper offers a tentative examination of what we believe to be an original conceptual framework for a critical understanding of processes of and motivations for organizational transparency, including its paradoxes, by drawing on and combining theories of power, hegemony, legitimacy, and liquid modernity.

This paper is one of the first to quantify the welfare effects of proposed cash suppression policies. We work within the context of a general equilibrium framework in which households face an endogenous cash-in-advance constraint and firms use cash transactions to evade taxes. Eliminating currency increases transactions costs and raises effective tax rates by curbing tax evasion. Our quantitative experiments imply that a total cash ban improves steady-state welfare, but only if paired with a revenue-neutral decrease in the tax rate on capital. We show in an extension with heterogeneous agents that curtailing cash harms frequent-cash users more than others. Such distributional effects of cash suppression may be a concern for policymakers.

The Indian Economic Surveys 2018-19 and 2019-20 views the economy in either a virtuous or a vicious cycle of Savings, investment & export with investment and export as the key drivers of the cycles. The current paper focuses on the dilemma of choosing between the two alternatives, i.e., export led growth and investment led growth in light of the Indian Economic Surveys. A comparative study has been conducted to provide a guideline for choosing the optimal mix of growth models, its potential impact on variables of economic growth, choosing the appropriate sector for each model along with the rationale of framing monetary, fiscal and trade policies adopted at macroeconomic, sector and industry level that uses an admixture of the three-fold growth strategies. The current discourse concludes with a rationale of adopting a mixture of export led and investment led growth in the national growth model in the light of the facts and figures provided in the two Economic Surveys of 2018-19 and 2019-20.

The pulp and paper industry is the most important industrial sector for water pollution control in China. The current paper develops a technology-based model to assess alternative water pollution reduction policies in the pulp and paper industry up to 2020. Five policy scenarios are established to represent measures of raw material substitution, eliminating backward small-sized capacities, promoting cleaner technologies, advancing end-of-pipe treatment technologies and the integration of all these policies. Emission amounts of wastewater, chemical oxygen demand (COD), ammonia nitrogen (NH4-N) and absorbable organic halides (AOX) under different scenarios and corresponding economic costs are calculated. Among all individual policy measures, production capacity replacement has the best pollution reduction effect and the largest capital investment demand. Promoting cleaner technology can bring more economic benefits with less investment because of its by-effects of material and energy saving. Although raw material substitution is a basic strategy in China's paper industry, it does not show very significant pollution reduction effect on its own. Joint implementation of different policies is necessary in order to decrease gross emission amounts when total output keeps growing. The water pollution emission reduction target proposed in the development plan of China's paper industry, i.e. 10–12% reduction of COD and NH4-N in 2015 based on 2010 level, can be fulfilled through integrated policy measures.

The objective of this paper is to analyze electricity demand behaviour in the Swedish pulp and paper industry in the context of the increased interest in so-called voluntary energy efficiency programs. In these programs tax exemptions are granted if the participating firms carry out energy efficiency measures following an energy audit. We employ a panel data set of 19 pulp and paper firms, and estimate both the own- and cross-price elasticities of electricity demand as well as the impact of knowledge accumulation following private R&D on electricity use. The empirical results show that electricity use in the Swedish pulp and paper industry is relatively own-price insensitive, and the self-reported electricity savings following the voluntary so-called PFE program support the notion of important information asymmetries at the company level. However, the results display that already in a baseline setting pulp and paper firms tend to invest in private R&D that have electricity saving impacts, and our model simulations suggest that up to about one-third of the industry sector's self-reported electricity savings in PFE could be attributable to pure baseline effects. Future evaluations of voluntary energy efficiency programs must increasingly recognize the already existing incentives to reduce energy use in energy-intensive industries.

A transition to a carbon neutral society will require a shift from fossil to renewable resources. This will affect the conversion of biomass and related industries such as the pulp and paper industry. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to describe and analyse the transformation processes in the Swedish pulp and paper industry and the adoption of biorefinery options, and second, to demonstrate how conceptualisations from strategic management can be used to describe regime destabilisation. The industry's adoption of biorefinery options has been modest so far, but there is development along two trajectories. The first centres on gasification and the second on separation and refining. Such diverging strategies in response to external pressure can be explained by differences that exist between firms. Signs of increasing firm divergence, or ‘regime fragmentation’, might indicate the entry into a phase of regime destabilisation, and a critical point in a transition.

Long term annual electricity consumption forecasting is very important for country's energy planning. These forecasts are influenced by several factors (political, technological, social, environmental and economic), and brings with itself a high uncertainty degree in its results and difficulties in the evaluation of such factors over them. A methodology that eases to take into account these factors aiming improve the results and help understanding the electricity consumption annual trajectory till the forecast horizon is, therefore, very much useful and desired. So, we propose a modelling structure using the bottom-up approach to cope with these matters and to evaluate the trajectory of long term annual electricity consumption of a sector of the Brazilian industry up to 2050 considering energy efficiency (EE) scenarios. It is important to emphasize that Brazil is a developing country, and to build a bottom-up approach was a challenge, mainly due to the fact that this model is data intensive. In particular, this modelling was applied in the pulp and paper sector. The main goal was to consider technological diffusion scenarios in EE measures, and show the energy savings achieved. The results point an energy savings in the order of 25% when an actual scenario is considered.

Due to the global climate change discussion and drastic challenges within the external operational environment, many traditional pulp and paper industry (PPI) companies are forced to search for new value creating business opportunities. This paper discusses this development in the PPI and offers some illustrative examples to demonstrate the vital need for opening up new strategic options. To address these challenges, we launch a dynamic strategic framework for a PPI firm. This dynamic capabilities- and strategic options-based framework comprises of (i) sensing the weak signals of the operational environment, (ii) formulating them as strategic options in order to capture their upside potential, (iii) hedging against the downside risks of the options, (iv) exercising these options in often thin (i.e., imperfect) intangible knowledge assets markets, and (v) reconfiguring the existing knowledge base and capabilities to sustain competitive advantage obtained. The framework will be illustrated with strategic options possible for the PPI the main focus being on the interface between the PPI and energy industry by means of a forest biorefinery case.

The Swedish pulp and paper industry has gone through a strategic change in its approach to electricity production and consumption over the past decade. This paper documents this reorientation, which includes increased on-site electricity production, investments and investment plans for wind power, and new partnerships concerning investments in electricity production assets. We also assess the extent to which these changes can be attributed to key energy and climate policies. Our analysis shows that this strategic reorientation has been driven by changes in the underlying economic conditions for the pulp and paper industry, in particular increases in the price of electricity following the Swedish energy market reform in 1996, and the introduction of the EU ETS. The scheme for tradable renewable electricity certificates, on the other hand, has provided a new source of income. While these market-based signals and responses are the most dominant drivers of strategic change, cognitive changes in the pulp and paper industry have also played a role in the strategic reorientation. The cognitive changes concerning the functioning of the electricity market, i.e. the pricing of electricity and influence of the EU ETS, have been particularly important in this regard.

In July 2010, the new Coalition Government unveiled its plans to make major changes to the English National Health Service (NHS). This paper, which provides a commentary on the NHS White Paper, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, casts doubt upon the extent to which the proposals will bring about the fundamental reform that the Government intends, not least because both the British public and GP commissioners (who are expected to play a central role in transforming the NHS) appear to have a limited appetite for radical market reform. The paper also identifies a number of unintended risks, including the large transitional costs and organisational turbulence resulting from further NHS reorganisation; and the fact that key aspects of the White Paper proposals could result in significant financial instability. Given the real world limitations to translating a rhetoric of localism and democratic legitimacy into reality and a lack of hard evidence about the benefits of market reform, the Government would be well advised to take a more cautious approach to health policy formulation and implementation and to ensure that any further changes to the NHS are based on evidence, piloting and evaluation.

There has been much debate on the topic of whether stricter environmental regulations can promote environmental performance and economic performance at the same time. Different researchers have used different indicators to measure environmental performance and economic performance in their empirical studies. However, it is a surprise that few studies have checked the relationship between environmental regulation and eco-efficiency, as the latter is widely regarded as a quite powerful tool of considering ecology and economy together. In this study the background is the implementation in 2003 of the Stricter Discharge Standard (SDS) in Shandong Province's Pulp and Paper Industry (SPPI), compared to the national standards of China. The stricter regulations were intended to promote corporate change from passive management to active control and from end-of-pipe treatment to cleaner production. This study investigated the eco-efficiency trends of SPPI from 2001 to 2008 in three fields: water efficiency, energy efficiency and environment efficiency. A "de-linking" and "re-linking" tool was used to attain a further evaluation. The study showed that with the implementation of stricter regulation most of the efficiency indicators (except CO2 emission and energy consumption) had achieved significant improvements, and the overall environmental performance trends of SPPI showed it to be more sustainable. However, the study also found that it was not enough to address a single indicator in the environmental regulation of the pulp and paper industry. More holistic eco-efficiency indicators need to be further considered and introduced to the industry as the next step to create true sustainable development. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved, (Less)

For most materials used to provide buildings, infrastructure, equipment and products, global stocks are still sufficient to meet anticipated demand, but the environmental impacts of materials production and processing, particularly those related to energy, are rapidly becoming critical. These impacts can be ameliorated to some extent by the ongoing pursuit of efficiencies within existing processes, but demand is anticipated to double in the next 40 years, and this will lead to an unacceptable increase in overall impacts unless the total requirement for material production and processing is reduced. This is the goal of material efficiency, and this paper aims to stimulate interest in the area. Four major strategies for reducing material demand through material efficiency are discussed: longer-lasting products; modularisation and remanufacturing; component re-use; designing products with less material. In industrialised nations, these strategies have had little attention, because of economic, regulatory and social barriers, which are each examined. However, evidence from waste management and the pursuit of energy efficiency suggests that these barriers might be overcome, and an outline of potential mechanisms for change is given. In bringing together insights into material efficiency from a wide range of disciplines, the paper presents a set of 20 open questions for future work.

This paper tests the expectations hypothesis in the market for commercial paper. Our main dataset, which is new to the literature, consists of daily indexes constructed from the actual market yields for nearly all commercial paper issued by U.S. corporations between January 1998 and August 2003. We show that the term premia built into commercial paper yields rise dramatically at year-end, causing the expectations hypothesis to be rejected. However, once we control for these predictable year-end effects, we find the reverse--that commercial paper yields largely conform with the expectations hypothesis.

Winters [Winters, D. B. (October 2002) Commercial paper: A colossal market. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis-National Economic Trends, Cover Page], shows that the amount of non-financial commercial paper outstanding is positively correlated to the amount of total business inventory. In this paper, we extend his work by showing that total business inventory has a significant impact on the non-financial commercial paper yields. We use regression analysis for studying the relationship between inventories and their impact on the spread between commercial paper and Treasury bills. Our results have implications for money market arbitrage, monetary policy, working capital management for corporations and stock valuation.