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The paper examine the causative relationship between oil resource rent and economic growth. We use the Autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) and Toda-Yamamoto approach as estimation strategy. Contrary to the widespread belief that natural resource extraction (oil resource rent specifically) spurs economic growth, we find that oil resource rent has an insignificant positive effect on economic growth. We also find a unidirectional causative relation between oil resource rent and economic growth, flowing from economic growth to gas resource rent without any feedback effect. Our findings implies that as the Ghanaian economy grows and expands in term of economic activities, the demand for gas increases which is likely to be imported from the rest of the world. Hence, it will be beneficial for government draw short and long term plans concerning gas production in Ghana. The short-term plan should aim at expanding the existing gas producing/extracting firms while the long-term plan should target setting up a new gas firms in Ghana. This will contribute to economic growth of Ghana. Similar conclusions can be drawn for developing countries with similar socioeconomic and demographic setting like Ghana. Hence, our empirical findings/results are relevant beyond Ghana’s boundary.

Abstract Italy will phase out electricity retail price regulation by July 1st, 2020. Until then, residential customers and small businesses who do not choose their supplier are served under a regulated tariff named “maggior tutela” (greater protection), supplied by the local distributor at a price set by the regulator. We review the literature on electricity retail competition – with particular regard to its expected effects on prices, innovation, and customer engagement – and the conditions under which competition is expected to deliver benefits. We perform a Structure-Conduct-Performance analysis of Italy's retail electricity market for residential customers, finding two issues potentially problematic: excessive market concentration and low customer engagement. We propose a phase-out mechanism that relies on graduality, asymmetric regulation, and a mandatory, opt-out collective switching exercise. The mechanism aims to rapidly reduce market concentration by leveraging behavioral incentives to customers to switch to the cheapest supplier.

AbstractWe analyze whether lower rents for energy-inefficient apartments reflect tenants’ willingness to pay due to a higher green awareness, purchasing power, or energy consumption costs. Based on a German rental apartment dataset from Q1 2007 to Q1 2019, we use interaction terms for socioeconomic characteristics in a hedonic regression model. We find that rents are lower for apartments with higher energy consumption, even in neighborhoods with lower levels of green awareness. This relationship is stronger in neighborhoods with higher purchasing power, such that communities with low levels of green awareness and high purchasing power show the steepest negative slope for increasing energy consumption (−8.6% from the highest to lowest rating). Thus, the rent-decreasing effect of purchasing power is higher than that of green awareness. Splitting the entire period into smaller windows, we find that the interaction effect of green awareness has emerged in the most recent years (2017–2019). This may be driven by changes in regulation, which have made it easier for tenants to assess the energy consumption before they rent, or by a general increase in green awareness over this period.

Building owners and governments face constraints in financing the transformation and development of low-carbon buildings and cities. Banks and other finance providers are often risk averse and unwilling to provide funds for such development and transformation. For some time now, governments and non-governmental organisations have experimented with novel forms of financing for low-carbon developments and transformations – often referred to as ‘eco-financing’. This article studies six such governance instruments from Australia, the Netherlands and the USA to better understand their value and limits.

This paper analyzes the determinants of alternative automobile fuel regulation and development support with a particular focus on methanol fuel. We find that embedded interests, bureaucratic reforms, and political circumstances in the Chinese national, provincial, and municipal governments have all shaped policy outcomes in this area. The paper seeks to explain why at, the national level, support for alternative fuels has waned and finds that the concerns of state oil majors and disorganization during the process of national bureaucratic restructuring have been the deciding factors. Interestingly, at the sub-national level promotion of methanol continues unabated in some places. At the local level, business relationships as well as the embedded economic and personal interests of local leaders help to explain managerial local government behavior and sheds light on why government officials actively create and manage methanol fuel business opportunities through local standardization, subsidies, and hands-on management of SOE opposition. The switch towards methanol fuel was more successful in localities where individuals, either government officials or enterprise managers, formed an alliance and made this their ‘pet projects’. The analysis draws on 55 interviews conducted between June and October 2010 in Shanxi, a major coal-producing province which has supported methanol fuel-switching programs for over ten years. The findings contribute to debates about the condition of the local state in China. The argument put forward in this paper is that because of limited state capacity at the central level and insufficient concerns for the development of alternative fuels in the short-term, some sub-national governments with strong embedded interests promote certain alternative fuels by taking on active managerial roles, adopting creative and ad-hoc strategies to fill in the national level policy gap at the local level.

This paper examines the causal relationship between real GDP and energy consumption for 23 OECD countries from 1971 to 2009. Using recently developed panel econometric techniques the present paper takes into account structural breaks and cross-section dependence when analyzing the energy consumption-growth nexus. The empirical results of this study indicate that there exists a long-run equilibrium relationship between real GDP and energy consumption, and the impact of real GDP on energy consumption is larger than vice versa. Furthermore, the empirical evidence of a dynamic panel error-correction model reveals a bidirectional causal relationship between economic growth and energy consumption in both the short and long run.

The relationship between industrial structure (IS) and eco-efficiency (EE) is intricate with mutual influence and constraint. Exploring the coordinated relationship between IS and EE is beneficial to the sustainable development of ecologically fragile areas. This paper estimates and analyses the levels of EE and IS in 39 prefecture-level cities of the Loess Plateau, discussing the comprehensive and coordinated development levels between industrial structure rationalization (ISR) and EE, industrial structure advancement (ISA) and EE based on the coupling coordination degree model (CCDM). The results showed that the comprehensive development of the Loess Plateau has rough and imbalanced issues. The EE and IS are developing at a relatively low level, and the spatial distribution shows the development trend of high in the east and down in the west. The CCD of ISA and EE performs better than that of ISR and EE, but neither has reached the collaborative coupling state. The poor CCD score in the Loess Plateau is primarily attributable to its relatively backward degree of integrated EE and IS. The results are expected to provide decision-making support for EE improvement and industrial restructuring in the Loess Plateau and other ecologically fragile areas.