Global climate change is one of the most important and complex problem challenging the world community. The impact of the climate change on the nature and human kind will likely be destructive. Even though the international community is aware of consequences, there is still a lack of political...

The analysis has demonstrated the theoretical energy-production potential of biomass in the areas of fallow and waste land. Moreover, at this stage, the economic potential of bringing the land into cultivation also seems justifiable. However, there is a need to estimate the cost of processing...

The importance of manufacturing for industrialized countries has been reappraised, specifically in the wake of the financial crisis and of China's rise to world no 1 in manufacturing. A "new industrial policy" should bolster reindustrialization, different from the old selective and...

Chapter 1 of this report reviews a number of approaches to conceptualize and operationalize biophysical constraints for economic performance. The starting point is a scoping study by Cambridge Econometrics and Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI) that reviews a large number of...

Most economic models struggle to incorporate biophysical relationships between materials, energy and emissions, in order to appropriately deal with biophysical constraints of supply (and possibly also demand). After the incorporation of biophysical constraints, some functions produced surprising...

In den letzten drei Jahrhunderten ist die Wirtschaft in vielen Ländern - langfristig gesehen - dauernd gewachsen. Materieller Mangel ist in den entwickelten Ländern weitgehend verschwunden. Für die Erkenntnis der Leistungsfähigkeit der Marktwirtschaft wie der Defizite der sozialistischen...

The European Commission and the EU Member States, pushed by global realities, made an attempt in 2006 and 2007 to come up with a new, effective view of the energy sector in the context of the European Union and European integration. This attention was also supported by the increased interest of...

Major nuclear accidents as recently in Fukushima set nuclear power plant security at the top of the public agenda. Using data of the German Socio-Economic Panel we analyze the effects of the Fukushima accident and a subsequent government decision on nuclear power phase-out on several measures of...

Top-down computable general equilibrium (CGE) models are used extensively for analysis of energy and climate policies. Energy-intensive industries are usually represented in top-down economic models as abstract economic production functions, of the constant-elasticity-ofsubstitution (CES)...

Real option theory has remained a fringe field; practitioners believe it is not practically applicable in complex real world environments. We show that this view is mistaken. We apply real option theory to a highly complex energy problem with unhedgeable risk, time varying volatilities and...