Do the sovereign wealth funds of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan promote the sustainable use of government oil revenues? We review the operational rules and performance of the two funds and compare them to Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global. The key challenges are to stabilize government...

This paper presents a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for the analysis of environmental policies towards mining activities, and shows for the case of South Africa how it can be implemented numerically. The CGE model belongs to the class of static, trade-focussed models along the lines...

In the presence of rising carbon concentrations more attention should be given to the role of the oceans as a sink for atmospheric carbon. We do so by setting up a simple dynamic global carbon cycle model with two reservoirs containing atmosphere and two ocean layers. The net flux between these...

Quantitative models for climate policy modeling differ in the production structure used and in the sizes of the elasticities of substitution. The empirical foundation for both is generally lacking. This paper estimates the parameters of two-level CES production functions with capital, labour and...

This study attempts a numerical simulation of potential CCS (carbon dioxide capture and storage) use by using a modified version of the DICE (Dynamic Integrated model on Climate and Economy) model (Nordhaus, 1994; Nordhaus and Boyer, 2000). In DICE, CO2 emissions are controlled to the extent in...

Genetic resources are living organisms that contain genetic information which is of importance for biotechnological research and development. Facing an accelerated worldwide loss in species diversity, the question is whether commercial trade with genetic resources can generate sufficient...

This paper compares the depth of the Recent Crisis and the Great Depression. We use a new data set to compare the drop in activity in the industrialized countries for seven activity indicators. This is done under the assumption that the Recent Crisis leveled off in mid-2009 for production and...

This paper analyzes if unemployment can be reduced through labor tax cuts that are financed in a revenue neutral way through energy tax increases. In contrast to other papers on this topic we consider investment behavior of firms in energy saving technologies, irreversibilities, embodied...

This paper evaluates the implications for employment, productivity and wages of allowing for more flexibility in weekly hours worked introduced in the recent Spanish labour market reform (the 2012 reform). A crucial aspect of the model will be the extent to which firms will be able to choose the...

This paper explores the role of pooled-producer, e.g. private label, trade intermediation in shaping the range and diversity of exports. Direct sales maintain a firm's unique product characteristics (`brand equity'), whereas trade through an intermediary can take two forms — either a...