Dynamic Modeling in Making Scientifically Grounded Business Decisions

The article considers the methods of dynamic modeling and features of their practical implementation for making scientifically sound business decisions. The article provides the classical theory of economic dynamics and forecasting, its development in the Ukrainian school of dynamic modeling with practical application in business management under certainty, risk, and uncertainty. The application of sequential analysis of variants, a new method of dynamic modeling, is substantiated. The authors suggest an original approach to forecast business development and optimize the investment allocation, logistical and human resources, the efficiency of calculations of production plans and programs, etc.

Environmental investment governance in Latvia: planning process and decision-making framework development

Applying governance process cycle steps model (5P model), the study focuses on the national environmental investment governance process by structuring and characterizing, particularly, investment planning process, including the integrative in-depth analysis of investment thematic content and framework (inextricably linked to the sectorial needs). Investment allocation is the governance instrument to be especially emphasized as being also necessary for the eventual implementation of all other governance instruments (such as infrastructure or communication ones), which all need financial support for their development, implementation or innovation. The study includes the investment instrument selection analysis at the policy planning stage for the most efficient investment and all sectorial policies implementation in order to reach the defined environmental governance goals. The study is practice-based research with elements of the participatory action research. Study is currently also topical since national investment planning process and final document is in the development process, detecting the main fields of investment in Latvia for the next 8 years. The structure and specifics of the planning stages of environmental investment governance process were identified along with related deficiencies and improvement needs, and, there were developed structured decision-making frame recommendation, based on the three main factors and subsequent set of complementary aspects identified as necessary required assistance to decide on the investment allocations.

Combining Investment and Tax Strategies for Optimizing Lifetime Solvency under Uncertain Returns and Mortality

This paper considers investors who are looking to maximize their probability of remaining solvent throughout their lifetime by using an algorithm that aims to optimize their investment allocation strategy and optimize their tax strategy for withdrawal allocations between tax deferred accounts (TDAs), Roth accounts, and taxable stock and bond accounts. This optimization works with stochastic investment returns and stochastic mortality, extending and combining different investment and tax-efficiency paradigms. We find that optimizing the investment strategy has a much larger impact on the investor remaining solvent than optimizing the tax strategy. This result is key to effectively optimizing both strategies simultaneously. This optimized investment strategy soundly beats a standard target date fund strategy, and the novel optimized tax strategy displays optimal desired properties suggested by non-stochastic tax optimization research.

Green Investment Changes in China: A Shift-Share Analysis

As China’s economic development has entered a new phase, China needs to seek a new path of green transformation development to coordinate the economic growth with environmental mitigation. From 2002 to 2017, green investment in China grew from 118.56 billion Chinese yuan to 950.86 billion Chinese yuan, increasing more than seven times. In this study, a homothetic shift-share analysis (HSSA) is used to understand how green investment changed and was used to decompose the change of provincial green investment in China from 2002 to 2017 into four driving factors: the national economic growth effect (NEG), national green investment structure effect (NIS), homothetic regional green investment competition effect (HRIC), and regional green investment allocation effect (RIA). The results indicate that these four factors had various regional and temporal characteristics, although green investment increased in all provinces during this period. More specifically, the NEG was more significant in the east than in other regions. The regional differences of NEG were relatively large in the first two periods (2002–2007 and 2007–2012) and began to shrink in the third period (2012–2017). The NIS shared the same characteristics as the NEG. In terms of HRIC, the central region was ahead of the eastern and western regions, and relatively many eastern provinces were with negative HRIC. The HRIC of most provinces showed a trend of “low/medium-medium/high-low”. The RIA inhibited green investment growth in most provinces and showed a “high-low-high” trend regarding the change from 2002 to 2017. Our study suggests that it is necessary to coordinate the growth of green investment across different regions and establish an ecological compensation mechanism.

Mortality Implications of Increased Active Mobility for a Proposed Regional Transportation Emission Cap-and-Invest Program

The transportation sector is now the primary contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the USA. The Transportation Climate Initiative (TCI), a partnership of 12 states and the District of Columbia currently under development, would implement a cap-and-invest program to reduce transportation sector emissions across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region, including substantial investment in cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. Using outputs from an investment scenario model and the World Health Organization Health Economic Assessment Tool methodology, we estimate the mortality implications of increased active mobility and their monetized value for three different investment allocation scenarios considered by TCI policymakers. We conduct these analyses for all 378 counties in the TCI region. We find that even for the scenario with the smallest investment in active mobility, when it is fully implemented, TCI would result in hundreds of fewer deaths per year across the region, with monetized benefits in the billions of dollars annually. Under all scenarios considered, the monetized benefits from deaths avoided substantially exceed the direct infrastructure costs of investment. We conclude that investing proceeds in active mobility infrastructure is a cost-effective way of reducing mortality, especially in urban areas, providing a strong motivation for investment in modernization of the transportation system and further evidence of the health co-benefits of climate action.