Article
From Rio to Paris: Achievements, problems, and prospects in the struggle against climate change
The newsbreak for writing this article was a kind of jubilee: 25 years ago, in 1992, a conference in Rio de Janeiro adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This event became the first in a series of follow-up conferences and documents aimed primarily at limiting carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere to counter global warming. The author is an active advocate of the concept of the anthropogenic impact on climate as a leading factor in climate change. He stresses the positive potential of international agreements in this field and a new energy-environmental paradigm, which implies the development of low-carbon industry and transition to renewable energy sources and the “green” economy.
This paper studies structural transformation and its implications for productivity growth in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) from the 1980s onwards. Based on a critical assessment of the reliability and consistency of various primary data sources, we bring together a new database that provides trends in value added and employment at a detailed 35-sector level. Structural decomposition analysis suggests that for China, India and Russia reallocation of labour across sectors is contributing to aggregate productivity growth, whereas in Brazil it is not. This confirms and strengthens the findings of McMillan and Rodrik [NBER working paper 17143, 2011]. However, this result is overturned when a distinction is made between formal and informal activities within sectors. Increasing formalization of the Brazilian economy since 2000 appears to be growth-enhancing, while in India the increase in informality after the reforms is growth-reducing.
The first World Climate Conference, which was sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization in Genève in 1979, triggered an international dialogue on global warming. From the 1997 United Nations-sponsored conference-during which the Kyoto Protocol was signed-through meetings in Copenhagen, Cancún, Durban, and most recently Doha (2012) and Warsaw (2013), worldwide attention to the issue of global warming and its impact on the world's economy has rapidly increased in intensity. The consensus of these debates and discussions, however, is less than clear. Optimistically, many geoscience researchers and members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have supported CO2 emission reduction pledges while maintaining that a 2°C limit in increased temperature by the year 2100 is achievable through international coordination. Other observers postulate that established CO2 reduction commitments such as those agreed to at the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference (2009) are insufficient and cannot hold the global warming increase below 2°C. As experts theorize on precisely what impact global warming will have, developing nations have become particularly alarmed. The developed world will use energy to mitigate global warming effects, but developing countries are more exposed by geography and poverty to the most dangerous consequences of a global temperature rise and lack the economic means to adapt. The complex dynamics that result from this confluence of science and geopolitics gives rise to even more complicated issues for economists, financial planners, business leaders, and policy-makers. The Oxford Handbook of the Macroeconomics of Global Warming analyzes the economic impact of issues related to and resulting from global warming, specifically the implications of possible preventative measures, various policy changes, and adaptation efforts as well as the different consequences climate change will have on both developing and developed nations. This multi-disciplinary approach, which touches on issues of growth, employment, and development, elucidates for readers state-of-the-art research on the complex and far-reaching problem of global warming.
Global warming is arguably the most critical and controversial issue facing the world in the twenty-first century, one that will affect every living creature on the planet. It is also an extraordinarily complex problem, which everyone needs to understand as clearly and completely as possible. This book provides a concise and accessible explanation of the key aspects of global warming. It discusses how and why changes are occurring, sets current warming trends in the context of past climate change, examines the predicted impact of global warming, as well as the political controversies of recent years and the many proposed solutions.
We expect economic growth to remain strong in Poland and Latvia in 2016. Despite this robust growth, the new Polish government is likely to soften monetary and fiscal policies to further stimulate the economy, in our view. In 2015, the Latvian economy demonstrated strong resilience to external shocks.
The fundamental idea underpinning spatial econometric models of economic growth is as follows: regional growth is determined not only by social, economic, geographic traits of a region but also by spillovers from other regions, most importantly adjacent ones. If one region starts booming, it can left neighbors unaffected (neutral mechanism), spur their growth (cooperation mechanism) or slow their growth by pulling resources over (competition mechanism). What mechanism and to which extent occurs in practice matters for designing balanced economic policy and evaluating efficiency of regional policy investment. Classic spatial econometric models make strong although simplifying assumption that the same mechanism matters for all regions in the same manner, and there is no variation in spillovers intensity across regions. This assumption seems plausible for relatively small and homogenous regions of European countries, but it looks excessively strong for large and diverse Russian regions. In this paper we attempt to relax this assumption and propose a new model, fitting better in Russian conditions and bringing only slight sophistication from the estimation point of view. We introduce sensitivity parameter governing regional exposure to externalities. We assume this parameter to be a linear function of region-level observables, like area, population density or urbanization rate. These hypotheses have been confirmed at least partially. We found that dense and urbanized regions were more sensitive to spillovers. In other words, a region surrounded by the fast-growing areas, will grow the more intense, the more its population density and the higher the level of urbanization.
The purpose of the work is to model disproportions in development of regional economy of Russia and to determine perspectives and recommendations for overcoming them and achieving the balance of the economy. The applied methods are based on Popkova's methodology of calculation of “underdevelopment whirlpools,” which allows conducting dynamic modeling of disproportions in development of regional economy. The research is performed in three consecutive stages. At the first stage, the dynamic model of development of the Russia's regional economy is compiled with the help of the methodology of “underdevelopment whirlpools” in federal districts of the Russian Federation based on GDP per capita. At the second stage, the key factors of emergence of disproportions in development of the Russia's regional economy are determined and models of multiple regression of development of the Russia's regional economy are compiled. At the third stage, target parameters of the determined factors are set for reducing the “underdevelopment whirlpools” in the Russia's regional economy by automatized solution of the optimization task with application of the simplex method and recommendations for overcoming the disproportions in development of the Russia's regional economy are compiled. As a result, it is concluded that regional economy of Russia is not well-balanced, as it has deep structural disproportions. These disproportions are caused by insufficient attention to peculiarities of regional economic systems during development and implementation of regional strategies of state management of economy. For more precise accounting of the influence of the key factors of appearance of disproportions and highly-effective management of them for overcoming the “underdevelopment whirlpools,” the algorithm of overcoming the disproportions in development of the Russia's regional economy is developed by the authors, which envisages various managerial measures depending on peculiarities of each Russian region.
The application of mathematical modeling methods (with subsequent computer sales) to determine the parameters of accuracy geometry bands obtained with the new equipment and process the step deformation bands of hard alloys based on copper