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WIFO-Publikationen (9 Treffer)

Bernhard Rengs (ÖAW und TU Wien), Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle (WU Wien), Ardjan Gazheli, Miklós Antal, Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh (UAB)
WWWforEurope: Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe, Februar 2015, 33 Seiten
Studie von: Projekt-Konsortium WWWforEurope
Online seit: 01.04.2015 0:00
Climate policy has been mainly studied with economic models that assume representative, rational agents. However, it aims at changing behaviour associated with carbon-intensive goods that is often subject to bounded rationality and social preferences, such as status and imitation. Here we use a macroeconomic multi-agent model with such features to test the effect of various policies on both environmental and economic performance. The model is particularly suitable to address distributional impacts of climate policies, not only because populations of many agents are included, but also as these are composed of different classes of households driven by specific motivations. We simulate various policy scenarios, combining in different ways a carbon tax, a reduction of labour taxes, subsidies for green innovation, a price subsidy to consumers for less carbon-intensive products, and green government procurement. The results show pronounced differences with those obtained by rational-agent model studies. It turns out that demand-oriented subsidies lead to lower unemployment and higher output, but perform less well in terms of carbon emissions. The supply-oriented subsidy for green innovation results in a significant reduction of carbon emissions with a slight reduction of unemployment.
WWWforEurope: Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe, März 2014, 19 Seiten
Mit finanzieller Unterstützung von: Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH – Österreichische Austauschdienst-GesmbH
Auftraggeber: Europäische Kommission
Studie von: Projekt-Konsortium WWWforEurope
Online seit: 26.03.2014 0:00
Proposed alternatives to GDP as a measure of social welfare or human progress are briefly evaluated. Four main categories are considered: ISEW and GPI based on corrections of GDP, sustainable or green(ed) GDP, genuine savings or investments and composite indexes. All these alternatives turn out to suffer from various shortcomings. Nevertheless, several of them represent a considerable improvement over GDP information in approximating social welfare. This gives support to the idea that we should not wait to give less importance and attention to GDP (per capita) information in public decision making until a perfect alternative indicator is available.
WIFO Working Papers, 2014, (464), 31 Seiten
Online seit: 18.02.2014 0:00
We raise fundamental questions about macroeconomics relevant to escaping the financial and economic crisis and shifting to a sustainable economy. First, the feasibility of decoupling environmental pressure from aggregate income is considered. Decoupling as a single environmental strategy is found to be very risky. Next, three main arguments for economic growth are examined: growth as progress, growth to avoid economic instability, and growth to offset unemployment due to labour productivity improvements. For each, we offer orthodox, heterodox and new responses. Attention is paid to progress indicators, feedback mechanisms affecting business cycles, and strategies to limit unemployment without the need for growth. Besides offering an economy-wide angle, we discuss the role of housing and mortgage markets in economic cyclicality. Finally, interactions between real economic and financial-monetary spheres are studied. This includes money creation, capital allocation and trade-offs between efficiency and operating costs of financial systems. Throughout, environmental and transition implications are outlined.
Miklós Antal, Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh
WIFO Working Papers, 2014, (463), 14 Seiten
Online seit: 18.02.2014 0:00
Energy conservation is widely accepted as an important strategy to combat climate change. It can, nevertheless, stimulate new energy uses that partly offset the original savings. This is known as rebound. One particular rebound mechanism is re-spending of money savings associated with energy savings on energy intensive goods or services. We calculate the average magnitude of this "re-spending rebound" for different fuels and countries. We find that emerging economies, neglected in past studies, typically have substantially larger rebounds than OECD countries. The effect is generally stronger for gasoline than for natural gas and electricity. Paradoxically, strengthening financial incentives to conserve energy tends to increase rebound. This is expected to gain importance with climate regulation and peak oil. We discuss the policy implications of our findings.
WWWforEurope: Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe, Februar 2014, 34 Seiten
Studie von: Projekt-Konsortium WWWforEurope
Mit finanzieller Unterstützung von: Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH – Österreichische Austauschdienst-GesmbH
Auftraggeber: Europäische Kommission
We raise fundamental questions about macroeconomics relevant to escaping the financial and economic crisis and shifting to a sustainable economy. First, the feasibility of decoupling environmental pressure from aggregate income is considered. Decoupling as a single environmental strategy is found to be very risky. Next, three main arguments for economic growth are examined: growth as progress, growth to avoid economic instability, and growth to offset unemployment due to labour productivity improvements. For each, we offer orthodox, heterodox and new responses. Attention is paid to progress indicators, feedback mechanisms affecting business cycles, and strategies to limit unemployment without the need for growth. Besides offering an economy-wide angle, we discuss the role of housing and mortgage markets in economic cyclicality. Finally, interactions between real economic and financial-monetary spheres are studied. This includes money creation, capital allocation and trade-offs between efficiency and operating costs of financial systems. Throughout, environmental and transition implications are outlined.
WWWforEurope: Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe, Februar 2014, 18 Seiten
Studie von: Projekt-Konsortium WWWforEurope
Mit finanzieller Unterstützung von: Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH – Österreichische Austauschdienst-GesmbH
Auftraggeber: Europäische Kommission
Energy conservation is widely accepted as an important strategy to combat climate change. It can, nevertheless, stimulate new energy uses that partly offset the original savings. This is known as rebound. One particular rebound mechanism is re-spending of money savings associated with energy savings on energy intensive goods or services. We calculate the average magnitude of this "re-spending rebound" for different fuels and countries. We find that emerging economies, neglected in past studies, typically have substantially larger rebounds than OECD countries. The effect is generally stronger for gasoline than for natural gas and electricity. Paradoxically, strengthening financial incentives to conserve energy tends to increase rebound. This is expected to gain importance with climate regulation and peak oil. In the last section of the paper, the policy implications of our findings are discussed.
Ardjan Gazheli, Miklós Antal (UAB), Ben Drake, Tim Jackson (University of Surrey), Sigrid Stagl (WU Wien), Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh (UAB), Manuel Wäckerle (WU Wien)
WWWforEurope: Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe, Dezember 2013, 28 Seiten
Auftraggeber: Europäische Kommission
Studie von: Projekt-Konsortium WWWforEurope
This short paper considers all possible stakeholders in different stages of a sustainability transition and matches their behavioural features and diversity to policies. This will involve an assessment of potential or expected responses of stakeholders to a range of policy instruments. Following the Multi-Level Perspective framework to conceptualise sustainability transitions, we classify the various transition policies at niche, regime and landscape levels. Next, we offer a complementary classification of policies based on a distinction between social preferences and bounded rationality. The paper identifies many barriers to making a sustainability transition and how to respond to them. In addition, lessons are drawn from the case of Denmark. The detailed framework and associated literature for the analysis was discussed in Milestone 31 of the WWWforEurope project.
WWWforEurope: Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe, Juli 2013, 13 Seiten
Auftraggeber: Europäische Kommission
Studie von: Projekt-Konsortium WWWforEurope
Traditional economic theory describes economic agents as being perfectly rational. According to this approach, agents possess all necessary information and have the ability to process this information to make the best decision for maximising their profit. However, in the real world this assumption does not hold for a number of reasons. First, economic agents are not in possession of all the information relevant to making decisions and furthermore, information is costly. Second, they do not have all the computational abilities needed to arrive at optimal decisions. Third, they are boundedly rational and have a number of other-regarding preferences which influence their choices. Here we provide a list with the most important behavioural biases of different stakeholders involved in a sustainability transition. This will allow us to improve macroeconomic models and associated analyses of transition policies.
Miklós Antal, Ardjan Gazheli, Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh (UAB)
WWWforEurope: Welfare, Wealth and Work for Europe, Dezember 2012, 33 Seiten
Studie von: Projekt-Konsortium WWWforEurope
Auftraggeber: Europäische Kommission
Writings on sustainability transitions generally do not say much about the particularities of the behavior of individuals and organisations. This is somewhat surprising since an important problem which transition management needs to tackle is inertia or resistance to change. Transition policy needs to account for the bounded rationality and social interaction of agents so as to arrive at a more realistic view of the limits and opportunities for realising a transition. System failures like lock-in, unpredictability and surprise in innovation systems, and network interaction between agents have received some attention, but their behavioural underpinnings can be improved. The identification of relevant stakeholders in transition processes and their unique behavioural features is crucial for understanding how to stimulate transitions. In this paper we investigate opportunities to integrate various theories and disciplinary views on behaviour into thinking about sustainability transitions with the aim to arrive at recommendations for more effective policies. For this purpose, we combine insights from the literature on agency in sustainability transitions, on environmental policy under bounded rationality and social interactions, and on behavioural foundations of learning and innovation.

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