Shaping Digital Ecosystems for Sustainable Production: Assessing the Policy Impact of the 2030 Vision for Industrie 4.0

How can we effectively shape digital ecosystems for sustainable production in line with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations? The German Plattform Industrie 4.0 has developed a vision for 2030 entitled “Shaping Digital Ecosystems Globally” with sustainability as one of three key pillars. Based on this vision, three development paths towards a digital, networked and sustainable manufacturing industry of the future were identified and further concretized with corresponding scenarios and business use cases. This article assesses this participatory approach of jointly thinking and shaping futures, with a particular focus on outcomes and policy impacts. A specific focus is placed on the involved and addressed public and private stakeholders, industry and policy sectors, and governance levels. The study shows that the 2030 Vision for Industrie 4.0 is a good example of how broad policy impacts can be achieved by taking a multi-actor, multi-sector and multi-level approach. Based on some practical implications for designing collaborative manufacturing networks in digital ecosystems, the article concludes with a call for collective action towards the Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by the year 2030.

Estimating heterogeneous policy impacts using causal machine learning: a case study of health insurance reform in Indonesia

Policymakers seeking to target health policies efficiently towards specific population groups need to know which individuals stand to benefit the most from each of these policies. While traditional approaches for subgroup analyses are constrained to only consider a small number of pre-defined subgroups, recently proposed causal machine learning (CML) approaches help explore treatment-effect heterogeneity in a more flexible yet principled way. Causal forests use a generalisation of the random forest algorithm to estimate heterogenous treatment effects both at the individual and the subgroup level. Our paper aims to explore this approach in the setting of health policy evaluation with strong observed confounding, applied specifically to the context of mothers’ health insurance enrolment in Indonesia. Comparing two health insurance schemes (subsidised and contributory) against no insurance, we find beneficial average impacts of enrolment in contributory health insurance on maternal health care utilisation and infant mortality, but no impact of subsidised health insurance. The causal forest algorithm identified significant heterogeneity in the impacts of contributory insurance, not just along socioeconomic variables that we pre-specified (indicating higher benefits for poorer, less educated, and rural women), but also according to some other characteristics not foreseen prior to the analysis, suggesting in particular important geographical impact heterogeneity. Our study demonstrates the power of CML approaches to uncover unexpected heterogeneity in policy impacts. The findings from our evaluation of past health insurance expansions can potentially guide the re-design of the eligibility criteria for subsidised health insurance in Indonesia.

What Are the Policy Impacts on Renewable Jet Fuel in Sweden?

The aviation industry contributes to more than 2% of global human-induced CO2-emissions, and it is expected to increase to 3% by 2050 as demand for aviation grows. As the industry is still dependent on conventional jet fuel, an essential component for a carbon-neutral growth is low-carbon, sustainable aviation fuels, for example alternative drop-in fuels with biobased components. An optimization model was developed for the case of Sweden to examine the impacts of carbon price, blending mandates and penalty fee (for not reaching the blending mandate) on the production of renewable jet fuel (RJF). The model included biomass gasification-based Fischer–Tropsch (FT) jet fuel, Power-to-Liquid (PTL) jet fuel through the FT route and Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL)-based jet fuel. Thus, this study aims at answering how combining different policies for the aviation sector can support the production of RJF in Sweden while reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The results demonstrate the importance of implementing policy instruments to promote the production of RJF in Sweden. The blending mandate is an effective policy to both promote RJF production while reducing emissions. The current level of the penalty fee is not sufficient to support the fuel switch to RJF. A higher blending mandate and carbon price will accelerate the transition towards renewable and sustainable fuels for the aviation industry.

Twelve EU Countries on the Eastern Flank of NATO: What about Ukraine?

The Trimarium Initiative (TI) is a platform for co-operation of twelve central and eastern European (CEE) countries of the eastern flank of the European Union (EU), introduced by Poland and Croatia in 2015. The TI is based on member co-operation in the development of transport and communication, energy, raw materials (gas and oil) transfer infrastructure, and digitization. The region is an important and rapidly growing market, and the TI goal is to boost economic co-operation among these twelve countries. Ukraine is not an EU member state, so it cannot be a full member of the TI; however, several TI infrastructural projects are open to Ukrainian companies. As Russia’s aggressive energy policy impacts Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Scandinavia, and Slovakia, the TI has a potential to meet this challenge. Transport and communication and energy transit infrastructure are promising areas of co-operation among TI countries and Ukraine. U.S. support has added optimism and prestige to the initiative.

Are agricultural support policies harmful to the environment? Evidence from Japanese farm-level policy simulation

This study presents the environmental impacts of agricultural policy instruments as evidence from an ex-ante farm-level policy simulation model in Japan. Simulations did indicate that all types of agri-environmental payments achieved the environmental benefit for the land studied. Conversely, market price support does not inevitably increase nitrogen runoff or greenhouse gas emissions at any time since paddy fields themselves have the function of purifying water pollution and work as a biodiversity nursery. The direction and magnitude of the policy impacts are an empirical matter that should be considered carefully at a local level.