Characterizing the energy use of disabled people in the European Union towards inclusion in the energy transition

Designing environmental policy to take account of social difference is increasingly recognized as essential to address both effectiveness and justice concerns. So far there is limited research on the experiences of disabled people in the environmental literature, amounting to a failure to recognize this substantial constituency. Here we compare disabled households’ embodied energy use, income, risk of poverty and energy poverty, and other socio-demographics with other households in the European Union. We find that households including an economically inactive disabled person earn less and consume 10% less energy than other households, and are more likely to experience energy poverty. Disabled households have lower consumption than other households in most categories, with the exception of basic consumption such as food, energy at home (gas and electricity), water and waste services: in effect they have less—and sometimes inadequate—access to resources. We conclude that more attention should be paid to disabled households needs to ensure a just energy transition.

Hedging Effectiveness of Commodity Futures Contracts to Minimize Price Risk: Empirical Evidence from the Italian Field Crop Sector

Over the last years, farmers have been increasingly exposed to income risk due to the volatility of the commodities prices. Among others, hedging in futures markets (i.e., financial markets) represents an available strategy for producers to cope with income risks at farm level. To better understand the advantages of such promising tools, this paper aims at analyzing the hedging effectiveness for soybean, corn and milling wheat producers in Italy. Following the literature, three different methodologies (i.e., naïve, OLS, GARCH) are applied for the estimation of the hedge portfolio, then compared to an unhedged portfolio for assessing the income risk reduction. Findings confirm the hedging effectiveness of futures contracts for all the considered commodities, showing also that this effect increases with longer hedge horizons, and also showing better performances for the European exchange market (i.e., Euronext), compared to the North American counterpart.

Labor market policies, informality and misallocation

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand labor market regulations and their consequences for the allocation of resources. Design/methodology/approach This paper constructs a theoretical model to study labor market regulations in developing countries and how it affects the allocation of resources between the less productive informal activities and more productive formal activities. It also provides empirical support for some theoretical results using cross-country data. Findings When workers are risk-averse and the market for insurance against labor income risk is missing, regulations that provide insurance to workers (such as severance payments) reduce misallocation. However, regulations that simply create barriers to the dismissal of workers increase misallocation and end up reducing the welfare of workers. This study also provides some empirical evidence broadly consistent with the theoretical results using cross-country data. While dismissal regulations increase the share of informal employment, severance payments to workers do not. Research limitations/implications The empirical exercise is constrained by the lack of availability of good data on the informal sector. Originality/value The analysis of the alternative labor market regulations analyzed in this paper in the presence of risk-averse workers is an original contribution to the literature.

Macroeconomic Implications of Inequality and Income Risk

We explore the long-run relationship between income risk, inequality, and the macroeconomy in an overlapping-generations model in which households face uncertain streams of labor income and returns on their savings. To manage those risks, households can apportion their savings to a bond, whose return is safe and identical across households, and a productive asset, whose return is uncertain and can differ persistently across households. We find that greater polarization in households’ labor income and returns on their savings generally accentuates households’ demand for risk-free assets and the compensation they require for bearing risk, leading to higher measured income and wealth inequality, a lower risk-free real interest rate, and higher risk premiums. These findings suggest that the factors behind the observed rise in inequality over the past few decades might have contributed to the observed fall in the risk-free real interest rate and widening gap between the risk-free real interest rate and the rate of return on capital. We also find that the magnitude of the decline in the risk-free real interest rate and offsetting rise in risk premiums depend importantly on the source of income polarization, with the effects being especially large when greater inequality is caused by increased dispersion in returns on risky assets. Thus, the macroeconomic implications not only depend on the amount of inequality, but also the source of this inequality.

THE ROLE OF CAP RISK MANAGEMENT IN INCOME STABILISATION: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE OF IST IN SLOVAKIA

In the European Commission (EC) proposals for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post2020 is emphasized the aim to better support the resilience of agricultural systems in the European Union (EU). This resilience is based on the concern that the agricultural sector should be supported in responding to current and future economic, societal, and environmental challenges and risks. Managing risk in farming includes number of activities and strong effort of farms and policy makers. One part of risk management refers to income stabilisation, aimed at decreasing the unstable financial situation and high level of income volatility in European agriculture. In the EU, every year at least 20% of farmers experience an income loss of more than 30% compared with their average income in the three previous years. The public instruments to mitigate the income risk of farmers included under the Pillar II (insurance premiums, mutual funds, and the Income stabilisation tool) have been implemented only by very low number of EU countries. In the paper, we analyze the ability to decrease the instability of Slovak farmers with the use of Income stabilisation tool of CAP. The Income stabilisation tool (IST) can be used to indemnify the farmers, who experienced a “severe drop” in income, reflecting the income loss of more than 20% or 30% compared to the 3-years average annual income, or the 5-years average annual income, excluding highest and lowest entry (Olympic average). The IST has not been used in the Slovakia, or any other European country operationally so far.

EFISIENSI TEKNIS DAN PENDAPATAN USAHA TANI BAWANG MERAH DI KECAMATAN KOTA GAJAH KABUPATEN LAMPUNG TENGAH

This study mainly purposes to analyze revenue, risk, relationship between revenue with risk, technical efficiency, and factors that affecting technical efficiency of shallot farming. The research location is located in Kota Gajah Sub District, Central Lampung Regency with and the data was collected in July - August 2019 using census method. The number of respondents are 40 farmers members of three farmer groups who have planted shallots. The data are analyzed using revenue analysis, coefficient of variaton, Pearson Correlation Analysis, technical efficiency using Frontier Function, and multiple linear regression. The study shows that shallot farming income from cash costs and total costs Rp15.142.901,83/hectare and Rp4.002.020,84/hectare, respectively. Therefore coefficient of variation of income risk is 1,02 indicating that the risk of farming is very high. The relationship between revenue risk and revenue level is quite close. The shallot farming is technically efficient yet. The factors that significantly affecting technical efficiency are farming costs, revenue, and revenue risk.Key words: efficiency, farmers, revenue, risk, shallot.