- An animated chart of global marine fish stocks from The Economist HERE. Basically, while in 1950 roughly 90% of the fish stocks were in their natural state, in 2009 90% are either fully exploited, over-exploited or collapsed. From the FAO report The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2014: “Global fish production continues to outpace world population growth, and aquaculture remains one of the fastest-growing food producing sectors. In 2012, aquaculture set another all-time production high and now provides almost half of all fish for human food.” Though this seems to be good news, Katheline Schubert and Esther Regnier have a paper together on aquaculture where they show that aquaculture can, nevertheless, have negative consequences on fish stocks. Under some conditions, “Aquaculture worsens the pressure on the wild edible fish stock and leads to a decrease of total wild fish stocks in the long run.”
- Writing at the Energy Institute at Haas, Meredith Fowlie suggests that moral suasion is no substitute for getting the price right. Her comment is based on a paper by Koichiro Ito and co-authors, who find the following: “Firms and governments often use moral suasion and economic incentives to influence intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for various economic activities. To investigate the persistence of such interventions, we randomly assigned households to moral suasion and dynamic pricing that stimulate energy conservation during peak demand hours. Using household-level consumption data for 30-minute intervals, we find significant short-run effects of moral suasion, but the effects diminished quickly after repeated interventions. Economic incentives produced larger and persistent effects, which induced habit formation after the final interventions. While each policy produces substantial welfare gains, economic incentives provide particularly large gains when we consider persistence.” It would be interesting to also know whether moral suasion together with some peer pressure would not lead to more persistent results. Also, it is really surprising that price incentives would lead to long-run effects. While the authors forward habit formation as a possible argument, it would be interesting to know whether the price effects still linger on now (i.e. 1-2 year after).
- conference announcement: Les enjeux économiques de la conférence de Paris-climat 2015
check here: http://www.ut-capitole.fr/recherche/les-enjeux-economiques-de-la-conference-de-paris-climat-2015-520259.kjsp
and here: http://www.chaireeconomieduclimat.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/15-05-18-programme-4-juin-CEC-TSE.pdf
A l’approche de la conférence Paris-climat 2015, la chaire Economie du Climat (CEC) de Paris-Dauphine et de Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) lance une démarche commune de mobilisation d’économistes pour souligner le rôle des instruments économiques et de la tarification du carbone dans tout accord international. Cette initiative est soutenue par les pouvoirs publics français. La journée d’échanges et d’étude du 4 juin 2015 marque le lancement officiel de ce projet commun CEC/TSE.
- Thursday: Jeudi 21 mai 12:30-13:30 Emma Hooper (GREQAM, Aix-Marseille School of Economics) will present Sustainable growth and financial markets in a natural resource rich country, at PSE in Paris (see Environmental Economics Calendar).
