On 05 December 2010, the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) came into force in the EU. Member States are still working to fully transpose the Directive into national law and establish a framework for achieving their legally binding greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions. However, governments got...

During the last years, the renewable energy strategy of the European Union (EU) and the proposed policies and regulations, namely the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), have been heavily discussed among scientific circles and various interest groups. The sustainability of different biofuels and...

The European Union's (EU) Renewable Energy Directive (RED) continues to be the focus of much debate over the validity of biofuel sustainability. The debate is driven in part by ongoing concerns of transparency and regional variations of emissions from feedstock cultivation and processing. In a...

This paper analyses the role of palm oil and its sustainability from different perspectives. We consider the role of palm oil within the GHG context. We discuss the impact of palm oil on biodiversity and analyse how palm oil can contribute to economic growth and development in tropical...

The environmental discussion is increasingly extended to the question of how to preserve biodiversity. As sensible regulation of biodiversity utilization uses politically set incentive schemes, it is required to discus the monetary value of biodiversity. Consequently, the relation between...

The conventional lists of stylized facts are composed of sentences about the comovement of ordinary macroeconomic time-series and the business cycle. It is argued that these lists are incomplete because heterogeneous agent stylized facts are missing. But there is evidence about the heterogeneity...

An essential feature of Schumpeter’s business cycle theory is the attempt to explain the macrodynamics of an economy by means of innovative heterogeneous agents. It has been criticized for being theoretically inconsistent as well as for its lack of empirical confirmation. In particular, the...

The economic literature started to recognize the heterogeneity characterizing the nature of different technologies, introducing the concept of General Purpose Technologies. In this paper, we offer a "new view of General Purpose Technologies", building on the historical as well as on the recent...

In economic development, structural change among the three main sectors of an economy accompanies with aggregate economic growth. Nevertheless the question whether economic growth causes structural change or change in the economic structure causes aggregate growth is still unanswered. To shed...

Questioning the underlying assumptions of the process of creative destruction, we conceptualize an alternative process of creative construction that may characterize the dynamics between entrants and incumbents. We discuss the underlying mechanism of knowledge spillover strategic...