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Between 2008 and 2012, the delivered price of natural gas to the U.S. power sector fell 60 percent. This paper addresses, in theory and in practice, the effects of this negative price shock on electricity consumers and the environment. We demonstrate with a simple model that the larger the effects of gas prices on consumer welfare, the smaller the effects on pollution emissions and the smaller the increase in profits of existing natural gas-fired generators. Using detailed data on electricity prices, fuel consumption, and fuel prices from 2001 to 2012, we confirm this hypothesis. Regions that experience greater reductions in pollution emissions experience smaller reductions in electricity prices and consumer welfare.

Encouraging the use of public transit is key for developing more sustainable and resilient cities. However, transit users have to endure harsh and unpleasant conditions during their long waits for public transit. "More than Waiting for the Bus" is an ideas competition aimed at exploring ways to encourage citizens to use the bus all year long in Montreal and to make waiting for the bus more enjoyable by rethinking the sites surrounding various bus stops. This competition took place within "CoLLaboratoire", a broader interdisciplinary research project that can lead to scalable environmental solutions. More than 70 teams from about 20 countries participated in this competition. Additionally, the competition sought to constitute a “Best Practice Guide” that will include a synthesis of design principles submitted by each team. This paper aims to present the competition and its outcomes. It is focused on the design principles submitted which can help designers and planners of public transit systems, both locally and globally, to innovatively and practically improve the wait for transit and thus improving the quality of life of city dwellers on a daily basis. The design principles submitted by the competitors are presented, explored and analyzed according to categories, fitness and their frequency of occurrence.

More than40%of US grain is used for energy due to the Renewable Fuel Mandate (RFS). There are no studies of the global distributional consequences of this purely domestic policy. Using micro‐level survey data, we trace the effect of the RFS on world food prices and their impact on household level consumption and wage incomes in India. We first develop a partial equilibrium model to estimate the effect of the RFS on the price of selected food commodities—rice, wheat, corn, sugar, and meat and dairy, which together provide almost70%of Indian food calories. Our model predicts that world prices for these commodities rise by 8–16%due to the RFS. We estimate the price pass‐through to domestic Indian prices and the effect of the price shock on household welfare through consumption and wage incomes. Poor rural households suffer significant welfare losses due to higher prices of consumption goods, which are regressive. However, they benefit from a rise in wage incomes, mainly because most of them are employed in agriculture. Urban households also bear the higher cost of food, but do not see a concomitant rise in wages because only a small fraction of them work in food‐related industries. Welfare losses are greater among urban households. However, more poor people in India live in villages, so rural poverty impacts are larger in magnitude. We estimate that the mandate leads to about 25 million new poor: 21 million in rural and 4 million in the urban population.

AbstractDespite the growing number of empirical studies on foreign direct investment (FDI) and energy efficiency (EE) as they relate to green growth, there remains an empirical research gap with respect to whether EE can engender positive synergy with FDI to foster inclusive green growth (IGG) in Africa. Also, little has been done to show the IGG gains from improving EE in both the short and long terms. Thus, this paper aims to investigate whether there exists a relevant synergy between EE and FDI in fostering IGG in Africa by using macrodata for 23 countries from 2000 to 2020. According to our findings, which are based on dynamic GMM estimator, FDI hampers IGG in Africa, while EE fosters IGG. Notably, in the presence of EE, the environmental-quality-deterioration effect of FDI is reduced. Additional evidence by way of threshold analysis indicates that improving EE in Africa generates positive sustainable development gains in both the short and long terms. This study suggests that a country’s drive to attract FDI needs to be accompanied by appropriate policy options to promote energy efficiency.JEL Codes: F2; F21; O11; O44; O55; Q01; Q43; Q56

A living lab is a physical or virtual space in which to solve societal challenges, especially for urban areas, by bringing together various stakeholders for collaboration and collective ideation. Although the notion has received increasing attention from scholars, practitioners and policy makers, its essence remains unclear to many. We therefore performed a systematic literature review of a sample of 114 scholarly articles about living labs to understand the central facets discussed in the nascent literature. In particular, we explored the origin of the living lab concept and its key paradigms and characteristics, including stakeholder roles, contexts, challenges, main outcomes, and sustainability. While doing this, we discovered that the number of publications about living labs has increased significantly since 2015, and several journals are very active in publishing articles on the topic. The living lab is considered a multidisciplinary phenomenon and it encompasses various research domains despite typically being discussed under open and user innovation paradigms. What is more, the existing literature views living labs simultaneously as landscapes, real-life environments, and methodologies, and it suggests that they include heterogeneous stakeholders and apply various business models, methods, tools and approaches. Finally, living labs face some challenges, such as temporality, governance, efficiency, user recruitment, sustainability, scalability and unpredictable outcomes. In contrast, the benefits include tangible and intangible innovation and a broader diversity of innovation. Based on our analysis, we provide some implications and suggestions for future research.

To achieve sustainable economic growth, Saudi Vision 2030’s target is to improve Saudi Arabia’s ranking on the Global Competitiveness Index from 25 in 2015–2016 to within the top 10 by 2030. Saudi Arabia also aims to increase the share of non-oil exports in the non-oil GDP from 16% in 2016 to 50% by 2030. For policymakers to make informed decisions to achieve these goals, they need to understand the driving forces of Saudi Arabia’s competitiveness. To this end, we consider the real effective exchange rate (REER) as a measure of external price competitiveness, as it captures domestic and global price changes. We then examine the REER using a two-stage modeling framework. First, we estimate the REER equation, which allows us to assess the impacts of the determinants and evaluate currency misalignments as a competitiveness indicator. Second, we extend the KAPSARC Global Energy Macroeconometric Model (KGEMM) with the estimated equation, which provides a framework for simulating the competitiveness impacts of the theoretically formulated determinants and other variables relevant to policymakers. The framework also allows us to account for feedback loops. We conduct a policy scenario analysis to quantify the competitiveness effects of the Public Investment Fund’s (PIF) new strategy for 2021–2025. We derive the following policy insights. Authorities may wish to implement initiatives boosting future productivity and, thus, competitiveness, such as PIF investments. Policymakers should be regularly informed about currency misalignment. Government consumption and public investment projects should consider substituting imports with locally produced goods and services. Local content development would also help to diversify the Saudi economy. Finally, attracting more foreign investment and other assets from the rest of the world may lead to technological development and improvement in the economic, financial, and social infrastructure and business environment, all enhancing competitiveness.

Trade and trade policy are central to transforming our world, the objective of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Trade can make a crucial contribution to sustainable development objectives, including economic growth and poverty reduction, but requires a coherent policy framework that links helping businesses harness trading opportunities with managing the social, economic and environmental impacts of trade. Ensuring policy learning about how trade can contribute to the 2030 Agenda requires robust follow-up and review of the new global framework. The first aim of this paper is to map where trade-related elements are found in the 2030 Agenda. The second aim is to describe the architecture for follow-up and review that could support these commitments, and to map where it exists or could be built. The 2030 Agenda in itself will not cause anything to change, let alone ensure policy coherence, but the review process might.The contribution of trade to the 2030 Agenda is diffuse, which means follow-up and review will be a challenge, but it need not be overly burdensome, and it will be useful. This paper presents options for how progress towards these trade-related commitments could be reviewed in the years to 2030. The process would provide information on progress based on inputs from governments, civil society and international organisations. This information would be reviewed through self-assessment by states themselves, through peer learning by other governments at the regional level (for example in United Nations regional commissions), and at the global level in multilateral agencies and the High-Level Political Forum, the apex of the follow-up and review process. The point of these review processes is not ‘evaluation’, but the sharing of experiences as a way to facilitate learning and policy improvement.The paper identifies six clusters of trade-related elements in the 2030 Agenda. These elements range from improving access to trade finance to strengthening the multilateral trading system. They include commitments to the reform of perverse subsidies to agriculture, fisheries and fossil fuels, and to ensuring that regional trade and investment agreements are coherent with sustainable development. For each cluster, the paper identifies options for indicators, where the necessary data are already collected (if they are) and where progress against these political commitments could be reviewed. The analysis does not pretend to be exhaustive, but to provide a starting point for further discussion. The paper then presents the information from another perspective, focusing on the potential roles of the various peer review mechanisms, summarised in Box 2. These mechanisms range from multilateral reviews like the Trade Policy Review Mechanism of the World Trade Organization and UNCTAD’s voluntary policy peer reviews to regional mechanisms that could review groups of states, like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or regional economic integration organisations like Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. The last part of the paper explains how the various reports could be brought together. Given the profusion of options for review mechanisms, an inter-agency task force on trade could provide an analytical synthesis of reporting and reviews useful for discussions at national, regional and global levels on the interrelated effects and trade-offs between goals.

This paper estimates the returns from increased access to electricity in rural India on household income. We examine the eect of connecting a household to the grid (the extensive margin) and the quality of electricity, in terms of daily hours of supply (the intensive margin). The analysis is based on two rounds of a representative panel of more than 10,000 households. We use the district-level variation in land elevation and the district-level density of transmission cables as instruments for the electrification status of the household. We find that a grid connection increases nonagricultural incomes of rural households by about 20-30 percent during the study period (1994-2005). However, a grid connection and a higher quality of electricity (in terms of fewer outages and more hours per day) increases non-agricultural incomes by about 85 percent in the same period. This is equivalent to an income growth of about 8 percent per year. Moreover, marginal returns from average daily hours of supply are highest at very low and very high levels of daily supply, not over a wide range in-between.