Population Externalities and Optimal Social Policy

If fertility is not chosen in a socially optimal way, and if policies to directly target fertility are ineffective or politically infeasible, then public policies that affect fertility could have important welfare consequences through the fertility channel. We refer to these effects as population externalities, and in this paper we focus on one important variable that may have a causal impact on fertility: the education of potential parents. If increased education causes families to have fewer children, then a government would want to increase college tuition subsidies in the presence of environmental externalities such as climate change, to indirectly discourage families from having children who will generate future environmental costs. Alternatively, if fertility is inefficiently low, due to imperfect parental altruism for example, governments will want to lower tuition subsidies to encourage child-bearing. We present a simple model of the college enrollment decision and its fertility impacts, and show that such population externalities are quantitatively important: the optimal subsidy increases by about $5000 per year with climate change, and decreases by over $7000 per year with imperfect parental altruism. Our paper demonstrates how public economics can incorporate population externalities, and that such externalities can have significant impacts on optimal policy.

Fits-and-Starts: The Changing Nature of the Material City

How and why does the material city in the late 20th and early 21st century change? This article examines one type of prominent urban change, which is “fits-and-starts” and represents change that is concentrated in space and time and that nonetheless has longer term repercussions with high economic and environmental costs. Through a review of the literature and an illuminating case study in Las Vegas, this article reveals how human perception and decision-making via two interrelated phenomena, future speculation and manufactured obsolescence, drive such change. The case study in Las Vegas is particularly fascinating because as a city of apparent extremes, it not only reveals in clear relief phenomena that are present in the capitalist city but it also offers insights into basic patterns of decision-making that actually shape—or design—the contemporary city. The article concludes with more general insights into the nature of this type of urban change and implications for alternative types of urban practices.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS AND CROP PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY IN CHINA AND ETHIOPIA: A REVIEW

The main challenge of agriculture is to ensure food security in line with yield increases and minimize environmental costs due to complex interactions between social, economic, and ecological factors. Here we review to identify the impacts of socio-economic factors on crop production efficiency between China and Ethiopia. To set the economic reform and improve the grain yields in rural China, a series of policies on land reforms from communal systems to tax cancelation and subsidies have been implemented. Similar to China, Ethiopia has also experienced different types of land reform from landlord and peasant structure to land as the common property of nations, nationalities, and peoples of Ethiopia. The Gross Domestic Products per capita trends which represent the mean standard of leaving of residents in a country show almost similar growth in the 1980s while later significant variation was achieved between the two countries. It is suggested that to meet food security and increase agricultural efficiency in Ethiopia better infrastructure development that meets socio-economic demands should be prioritized while in China policies to reduce fertilizer inputs are highly recommended to minimize the environmental costs due to high agricultural inputs for sustainable agriculture growth.

Integrating crop redistribution and improved managements could meet China’s food demand with lower environmental costs

Sustainably feeding the growing population in China attracts attention globally. Despite practices success, producing enough food to simultaneously address resource and pollution problems has been infeasible. To assess how to achieve this goal in 2035, we created a pathway that synergistic combining improved managements and cropland redistribution based on 11.1 million farmer surveys and 4,272 georeferenced field observations. Here, we firstly selected the practices of top 10% performers in crop yield and nitrogen (N) efficiency as crop-specific attainable improved managements at the county level. The optimized crop distribution within improved managements was then performed to minimize inputs (N and phosphorus fertilizer, irrigation water) or environmental impacts (reactive N [Nr] loss and greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions). We identified that combing improved managements and cropland redistribution could produce enough food demands in 2035, with 24% more production compared to 2012. It also reduced the inputs and environmental impacts in a range of 19%-35%, mainly sourced from the central and eastern coastal areas by improved productivity and diminished cropland of fruit and vegetables. These findings highlight the necessity for a synergistic combination of measures to sustainably feed the growing population and establish a more realistic and effective policy.

Who Wants an Automated Vehicle?

New advancements in vehicle automation, electrification, data connectivity, and digital methods of sharing—known collectively as New Mobility—are poised to revolutionize transportation as it is known today. Exactly what results this disruption will lead to, however, remains unknown, as indeed the technologies and their uses are still taking shape amidst myriad interests. The impacts of this shift to New Mobility could be enormous, shaping economies, cities, and the lives of people in them. It is therefore vitally important for public interests to play a strong role in the development and deployment of these technologies. With the current trajectory of these technologies warning of the potential for increased energy use, environmental costs, and social inequity, interests at the community level need to be included and influential as soon as possible.

Product Returns: An Opportunity to Shift towards an Access-Based Economy?

With the rise in online purchases, returns polices have become more lenient to maximise sales, leading to increased product returns. This results in considerable costs to businesses due to complex returns systems, and environmental costs due to unnecessary transportation and waste. Unsustainable consumption poses a threat to our environment, and access-based business models whereby products are borrowed/rented rather than purchased have been proposed as a way to align customer needs, business success, and sustainability. Product returns often constitute a form of informal or illegitimate borrowing, as goods are bought with the intention of being returned. In this discussion paper we propose that, instead of being viewed as a threat to business, issues with high product returns could be seen as an opportunity to switch to an access-based model. As product returns escalate, businesses will need to invest substantially in their reverse supply chains. We propose that a more strategic approach might be to leapfrog the costly stage of developing more efficient returns systems, and move straight to formalising product returns as the new normal for those goods that would best suit an access-based model, so that processes are streamlined around borrowing and returning rather than around sales.

The Right to Repair

In recent decades, companies around the world have deployed an arsenal of tools-including IP law, hardware design, software restrictions, pricing strategies, and marketing messages-to prevent consumers from fixing the things they own. While this strategy has enriched companies almost beyond measure, it has taken billions of dollars out of the pockets of consumers and imposed massive environmental costs on the planet. In The Right to Repair, Aaron Perzanowski analyzes the history of repair to show how we've arrived at this moment, when a battle over repair is being waged-largely unnoticed-in courtrooms, legislatures, and administrative agencies. With deft, lucid prose, Perzanowski explains the opaque and complex legal landscape that surrounds the right to repair and shows readers how to fight back.

Evaluation of Aviation Emissions and Environmental Costs in Europe Using OpenSky and OpenAP

In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach that estimates cruise-level flight emissions over Europe using OpenSky ADS-B data and OpenAP emission models. Flight information, including position, altitude, speed, and the vertical rate are obtained from the OpenSky historical database, gathered at a sample rate of 15 s. Emissions from each flight are estimated at a 30-s time interval. This study makes use of the first four months of flights in 2020 over the major part of Europe. The dataset covers the period before and at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aggregated results show cruise-level flight emissions by different airlines, geographic regions, altitudes, and timeframe (e.g., weeks). We also estimate environmental costs associated with aviation in Europe by using marginal cost values from the literature. Overall, we have demonstrated how open flight data from OpenSky can be employed to rapidly assess aviation emissions at varying spatio-temporal resolutions on a continental scale.