Documents French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists 4 results

"This paper addresses the issue of whether or not social capital explains per capita CO2 emissions dynamics in Swedish counties in an augmented environmental Kuznets curve framework. By accounting for issues of endogeneity in the presence of dynamic and spatial effects using geo-referenced emissions data, we show that per capita carbon emissions in a county matters for other counties and that net of economic, demographic and environmental factors, social capital has the potential to reduce carbon emissions in Sweden albeit less robustly. We test two different social capital constructs; trust in government and environmental engagement. Specifically, trust in the government inures to the reduction in CO2 emissions. Membership and engagement in environmental organisations reduces CO2 emissions only through its interaction with per capita income or trust. The implication of our estimates suggest that investment geared toward increasing the stock of social capital could inure to re ductions in CO2 emissions in addition to climate policy instruments in Sweden."

"This paper examines whether natural capital is a robust determinant of economic growth, distinguishing the contribution of direct and indirect effects in renewable and non-renewable natural capital. Our hypothesis is that renewable natural capital may have a rather indirect but more important impact on economic growth than non-renewable natural capital, particularly through human well-being. In contrast, non-renewable natural capital can be a source of immediate financial wealth, but can have adverse social and environmental effects. To test this hypothesis we use a data set on 83 countries for the period 1960-2009 to compare the relevance of proximate and fundamental theories to explain economic growth. We find some evidence of an indirect negative impact of renewable natural capital in wealth on economic growth through through human well-being and, more precisely, population growth rates and fertility. This is particularly the case for countries with higher levels of human development. In contrast, the share of non-renewable natural capital in wealth has a direct positive impact on economic growth in countries with lower income inequality and higher institutional quality. This finding reflects the effect of capital accumulation in the domestic economy, as capacity constraint are relaxed. Finally, countries with higher income per capita, higher human development and higher institutional quality have a higher share of higher renewable natural capital per capita, although they also have a lower share of lower renewable natural capital in wealth. Such result emphasises that renewable natural capital is very necessary for people (per capita), hence isa primary concern for empowered countries, although such capital contributes less to wealth, and economic growth, in these countries . Our results question the way "wealth" and economic growth are defined in economics when the effect of natural capital is examined."

"The growing recognition of social capital as an important parameter necessary for shaping pro-environmental behaviour and attitudes is well established in the literature and continues to engage the attention of policymakers, academics and citizens in many jurisdictions. In this paper, we contribute to this strand of literature by investigating the extent to which various elements of social capital influences Swedish public's tendency to contribute financially or through lifestyle changes in order to protect the environment. Using data from the latest wave of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) on the environment in 2010, we explore empirically the link between individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) and social capital influence using an ordered logistic model. The results show, that, individuals in Sweden are fairly willing to pay for the environment and that this decision is principally and significantly influenced by elements of social capital. In particular, we find quite robust results to show that social and institutional trust, environmental group membership among related civic participation activities and adherence to environmental norms significantly impacts the probability of individuals' decision to sacrifice toward environmental sustainability by paying higher environmental taxes, prices or through standard of living adjustments."

"The objective of this paper is to critically assess the use of simple rules for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that employ a rudimentary form of the Ramsey Rule. Two interrelated caveats apply. First, if climate change poses a serious problem, it is hard to justify an exogenous constant growth rate of consumption and GDP, as is done in several contributions by prominent scholars. Second, to derive the optimal SCC one needs full knowledge of the entire future, in spite of the use of popular ways to try to get around this. Moreover, it is shown that some simple rules suffer from inconsistencies in their derivation."