1,720,978 research outputs found
Are we in deep water? Water scarcity and its limits to economic growth
No full text© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Water is an important factor of production contributing both directly and indirectly to economic activity across all sectors and regions of the global economy. Water scarcity may therefore go beyond having important consequences for people, society and ecological systems but may also pose a threat to economic growth. Using the latest IPCC RCP projections and the OECD Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs) for population growth and economic output, we develop a multi-regional input-output model to estimate future demand for water resources across different countries and sectors of the global economy. Model results show that most countries will experience declining water availability, particularly those countries that experience a confluence of factors including low fresh water availability, high climate change impacts, and growing consumption patterns. We show that virtual water trade and improved water efficiency has potential to alleviate the worst effects of water scarcity for wealthy countries but may have limited effect on poorer countries. The analysis concludes that the most important driver of future water scarcity is economic growth, which overwhelms any realistic savings that can be made from increased technological progress and improvements to water efficiency. Population growth and climate change are also shown to be important drivers of future water scarcity, particularly over the long-run
Systemic risk in the global water input-output network
Full text linkThe issue of water access and security has been emphasized in the recent policy debate on sustainable development (Sustainable Development Goal No. 6) and adaptation to climate change (CoP21 in Paris, 2015). This study provides new evidence about the Blue Virtual Water Input-Output Network. The main novelty of our approach is the combination of Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA) with Network Theory. SDA reveals that size-related, technological and structural components have contributed substantially to changes in virtual water use. Network analysis offers new insights about the vulnerability of the system to shocks through trade links across country-sector pairs. Our analysis highlights a possible trade-off in the increasing importance of virtual water trade: the efficiency improvement in granting access to virtual water might come at the cost of increasing systemic vulnerability. Overall, the great unbalance between water availability and usage combined with rigidity of global consumption and production networks and the risk of cascade effects imply increasing vulnerability of the virtual water network to shocks propagation
Tools for reconstructing the bilateral trade network: a critical assessment
Full text linkThis study critically assesses the performances of the Gravity Model (GM) and of the RAS algorithm for the bilateral flow intensity estimations and link prediction. The main novelty is the application of these methodologies to reconstruct the network topology with a minimum amount of information. Moreover, we implement a multi-layer analysis to provide a comprehensive and robust framework, by testing several food commodities, over the period 1986–2013. The main outcomes suggest that the RAS algorithm outperforms the Gravity Model in the estimations of the bilateral trade flows, importantly guaranteeing the balance constraints (i.e. global import equals global export), while GM generates lower relative errors, but it underestimates total global flows. Both RAS and GM can be applied to accurately recover the network architecture. The implications of our study encompass a wide range of applications: systemic-risk assessment, creation of new databases, and scenario analyses to support policy decisions
Spatial Distribution of the International Food Prices: Unexpected Heterogeneity and Randomness
Full text linkGlobalfoodpricesaretypicallyanalysedinatime-seriesframework.Wecomplementthisapproachbyfocusingonthespatialpricedispersionofthecountry-pairbilateraltradeintheinternationalfoodtradenetwork(IFTN),fortenrelevantcommodities.ThemainpurposesaretoverifyiftheLawofOnePrice(LOP)holdsandtoinvestigatetheemergenceofrandomnessintheprice-formationmechanism.Wedistinguishbetweenthe“internal”variance,whichindicatesthemagnitudeofpricediscrimination,andthe“external”variance,thatisameasureofpricedispersion.Wefindthat,forsomecommodities,spatialpricedispersionisremarkableandpersistentovertime(i.e.,failureoftheLOP)andthatthereexistsastrictcorrelationbetweenpricespikesandpeaksinspatialpricevariability.We test whether the price distribution can be replicated through a stochastic process of extraction.Surprisingly, the actual distribution of prices, for several commodities, is well described by a random dis-tribution.Then,theprocessofdataaggregationisnotneutralbecausetheinformationatthemicro-levelscalemightbelostatthemacro-scale,duetothecomplexityoftheIFTN.Finally,wediscusssomepossibleeconomicexplanationsoftheseoutcomesandthemainmethodological,environmental,andpolicyconsequences.1. IntroductionTheendofhungerandtheachievementoffoodsecurityareglobalkey issues explicitly included in the Sustainable Development Goalsagenda (UN, 2015). The interest of the international community isjustifiedbyacknowledgingthecomplexandinterrelatedenvironmentalandsocialdimensionslinkedtofoodmanagement,suchaswaterre-sources(Generoso,2015;DistefanoandKelly,2017;Distefanoetal.,2018b), energy and pollution (Carlsson-Kanyama et al., 2003;D’Odoricoetal.,2018),landuseanddeforestation(OdegardandVanderVoet,2014),andsocialsecurityandhealth(Bellemare,2015;Bush,2010).Thus,abetterunderstandingoffoodmarkets,especiallyinaneraofglobalisation(Duarteetal.,2014;Biewaldetal.,2014;Suweisetal.,2015),iscrucialtoprovidesolidbasesforfoodpoliciesandre-source management (Wang et al., 2016). This interest has been re-inforcedrecently–afterthetwowavesofworldfoodpricecrises(2008and2011)–whereeconomistsanalysedtheaftermathsofprice‘spikes'to assess the short-run effects (Piesse and Thirtle, 2009; Bellemare,2015)andthemaincausesoftemporalfoodpricevolatility(seeDíaz-Bonilla,2016,foradiscussion).Acommonassumptionbehindthesestudies,andusualamongagriculturaleconomists,istheso-calledLawofOnePrice(henceforthLOP):oncepricesareconvertedtoacommoncurrency (including transaction and transport costs), homogeneousgoods should be sold for the same price in different countries(Miljkovic,1999).1TheLOPshouldholdwhengoodsarehighlytraded,at least in spatially separated international markets (Baffes, 1991;GoldbergandVerboven,2005).Onthecontrary,pricedispersion–namely,ahomogeneousproductbeingsoldatdifferentpricesbydifferentexporters–canemerge,forseveralreasons,suchasentrybarriersandgeographicalseparationofmarkets(Krugman,1991;Yangetal.,2017),differentmarginalcosts(Crucini and Yilmazkuday, 2014; Yilmazkuday, 2016), variations inconsumer preferences (Grebitus et al., 2013), and monetary illusion(FehrandTyran,2001).2Followingthisbranchofliterature,weaimattestingthepresenceornotofLOPintheinternationalfoodtradenet-work(IFTN),extendingtheanalysistotheprice-formationmechanism.Theexistentliteratureempiricallyanalysedspatialfood-pricedisper-siononlyattheretaillevel(e.g.,AnaniaandNisticò,2014)but,toourhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.01.010Received30January2018;Receivedinrevisedform5November2018;Accepted8January2019*Correspondingauthor.E-mailaddress:[email protected](T.Distefano).1Ancillaryhypothesesarethoseconcerningperfectcompetition:agentsareprice-takers,perfectinformation,nofrictionsonfactormobility,individualrationality,andsoon.2Monetaryillusionindicatesthepsychologicaleffectofmakingmistakesduetotheuseofdifferentcurrencies.Ecological Economics 159 (2019) 122–132Available online 28 January 20190921-8009/ © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY-NC-ND/4.0/).
Coupling environmental transition and social prosperity: a scenario-analysis of the Italian case
No full textThis paper investigates to what extent green growth is able to promote social equity and which social policies can complement environmental policies to achieve social prosperity and sustainability. We develop a dynamic macrosimulation model to explore the social and structural effects of the Italian national energy and climate plan. We show that green growth alone will not result in better societal conditions and needs to be compensated with social policies that directly tackle inequality. Consequently, we select two social policies that are expected to improve income distribution, namely a basic income programme and working time reduction. Our scenario analysis shows that working time reduction leads to an increase in employment and a parallel decrease in aggregate demand that causes a reduction in emissions and inequality. The basic income programme reduces inequality by sustaining aggregate demand which, in turn, partially offsets the positive environmental effects of the energy plan
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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