Search

This paper examines the effect of oil price on coal sector stock returns. A multifactor market model is used to estimate the expected excess returns to the coal sector. A 1% increase in oil price return has a statistically significant positive impact on coal sector returns of between 0.06% and 0.20%. A 1% increase in coal price raises the return of coal sector returns by between 0.22% and 0.30%. Increased volatility in oil price return significantly reduces coal sector return. Participants in energy markets may perceive oil price as being determined globally and as providing information on demand for energy overall. Understanding the variables that affect the behaviour of the stock prices in the coal is of importance to market participants and policy makers, and is helpful in developing efficient hedging policies to deal with changes in energy prices.

In many developing countries, natural resources such as oil and gas have had negative impact on economic development. There is a myriad of literature on “the resource curse” which shows an austere relationship: countries endowed with huge deposits of oil and gas usually experience lower economic growth than countries that do not have these resources. As a modern ‘frontier region’ Somalia is one of the most promising countries blessed with oil and gas in the Eastern part of Africa. However, it is faced with political upheavals, weak state structures, physical insecurity, and property rights full of ambiguities; this makes it a challenge to exploit the country of its hydrocarbons. In addition to the present tense conditions within the region, the question that lingers, is whether or not Somalia is set to struggle with the common effect of the ‘resource curse’ and paradox of plenty disorder? Somalia was selected because it provides an ideal laboratory to ascertain if she is predisposed to the ‘resources curse’ disease. To this end, the study examines and also outlines the primary themes that guide the work using the case of Somalia as an addition to the body of empirical knowledge. The study recommends that new governance structures should be built, existing ones should be built, local content and local participation should be enhanced and the security and judicial agencies should be supported.

In this article, we set ourselves a task of determining a potential of using credit for improving energy effi ciency in the economy of rent seeking. Based on cross-country analysis and using channels’ approach to estimation of institutions’ and market’s effi ciency we come to conclusion that persistently low energy effi ciency in East European countries may be a result of low quality market institutions. Testing a hypothesis of credit being the source of improving energy effi ciency (e.g., through introduction and granting energy effi cient loans) showed that the effect of credit channel is negative in case of low quality institutions in the economy and low elasticity of national markets. On opposite, credit is capable of breaking the energy curse, when successful institutional infrastructure is functioning, and competitive environment takes its place when geographical and spatial features are taken into account.

This paper examines the relationship between energy consumption and real economic growth in 17 Arab countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. It uses an Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to determine this econometric relationship using data during 1980-2011. After testing for unit root and cointegration, it identifies Granger causality between energy consumption and real economic growth. The analysis allowed for the verification of the four hypotheses that have been discussed widely in economic literature: Neutrality, Conservation, Growth, and Feedback hypotheses. Empirical findings support neutrality hypothesis in 16 out of 17 Arab countries. These findings, of no causality from economic growth to energy consumption and the other way round, imply that energy conservation will not have a significant impact on economic growth and economic growth will have insignificant effect on changes in energy consumption. They also suggest including other more important variables in the determination of economic growth, such as labor and capital.

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of energy consumption economic growth and especially trade openness on CO2 emissions. In this frame, determiners of the CO2 emissions are questioned by panel data cointegration analysis. In the scope of this study, 85 countries’data are contributed to the analysis for the period of 1990-2011. According to the results positive relationship is found between CO2 emissions and energy consumption, per capita income and trade openness. On the other hand, trade openness can reduce CO2 emissions in the long run. Findings indicate that in the short run unidirectional causality from CO2 emissions to trade openness(TRD). Also there is unidirectional causality from per capita income (GDP) to CO2 emissions and energy consumption(EN). Short run dynamics suggest bidirectional causality from GDP to TRD and TRD2. According to the coefficient on the lagged ECT, implying that there are two long-run panel causality links that run from LGDP, LTRD and LEN, to LCO2 and from LGDP, LTRD and LCO2 emissions to LEN.

The objective of this survey was to evaluate the energy consumption and the economic analysis of cotton production in Esfahan province of Iran. For this purpose, data were selected from 47 cotton growers using a face-to-face questionnaire. The results indicate that cotton production consumed a total energy of 52507.8 MJ ha-1. Among sources of input energy, the contribution of energy related to diesel fuel (47%) was highest, followed by chemical fertilizers (20%) and water for irrigation (12%). The shares of direct and non renewable energy were 68.3% and 77.7%, respectively. The impacts of indirect and non-renewable energy on cotton yield were higher than those of direct and renewable energy. Energy use efficiency, specific energy, energy productivity, energy intensiveness, and net energy were 0.7, 19.2 MJ-1 kg, 0.10 kg MJ-1, 27.2 MJ-1 $ -1, -15625.2 MJ-1 ha-1, respectively. Total cost of cotton production was 1927.9 $ ha-1 . About 67% of the cost of production was variable costs, while 33% was fixed costs. The benefit to cost ratio was estimated 1.22. It is suggested that efforts to increase energy efficiency of cotton production in the investigated area should primarily focus on proper use of fertilizers and irrigation systems and also on saving diesel fuel by improving machinery operating performance.

This paper is a comparative review of the renewable energy performance of Turkey and Greece. Both neighboring countries sharing the same energy hub with a large potential for renewable energy production. Albeit having strikingly similar energy objectives and hindrances, they are currently challenged by different contexts. Turkey, although not a European Union member, it spends efforts to tacitly comply with European Union legislation and sets ambitious renewable energy targets. Greece on the other hand is afflicted by an economic crisis that threatens to retard its renewable energy developments unless Greece uses renewable energy sources as a means to escape the crisis. This paper is useful for potential renewable energy investors in the area of Greece and Turkey.

Countries, both developed and developing, are called on to identify, through self assessments, their priority environmental issues such as mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, combating deforestation, promoting sustainable land and water management, and minimizing their vulnerabilities to the impact of climate change. Root cause analysis is conducted to determine the major barriers and institutional capacities. This papers presents capacity constraints in national priority issues typically encountered in developing or non-annex one nations, with the national capacity self assessment of Lebanon taken as a case study. The analysis of the information has identified a number of achievements and difficulties related to the fulfillment of the commitments under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The common priority issues are national action plan for GHG abatement, vulnerability and adaptation, research and systematic observation, technology transfer, and education and public awareness. Root cause analysis related to priority issues has been carried out during which the causes and impacts of the constraints have been identified. The corresponding assessment matrices are also presented. Lack of financial resources is found to be the constraint facing priority issues.

In this study we analyze the impact of a radical change in nuclear electricity costs on the optimal electricity generation technology mix (EGTM) and constrain the value of information (VOI) on future nuclear costs. We consider three nuclear cost events and four carbon emissions caps. We develop a two-stage framework for energy-economic model MARKAL to eliminate foresight of future nuclear cost movements. We examine how the EGTM responds to these movements under alternative caps and analyze how these movements affect the cost of each cap. We define the expected savings from perfect foresight (ESPF), an upper bound on the VOI. We found that with current technologies, carbon mitigation that does not rely heavily on nuclear electricity is economically insensible. The Strong Cap is extremely costly because it restricts flexibility to respond to cost signals in choosing among technologies. The ESPF is highest under the Medium Cap by a substantial margin.

In this study the aim was to investigate empirically the role of energy consumption ineconomic growth for the Turkish economy. The data used include annual energy consumption andeconomic growth series from 1960 to 2008. We used aggregate as well as various disaggregate data onenergy consumption, including, oil, electricity, coal and renewable energy. Our contribution is that wetake a structural breaks modeling approach in this paper. In the literature, the Kejriwal cointegrationtest has not been applied to date. The main conclusion of the study was that Turkey’s energyconsumption and economic growth has a positive relationship varying quantity with structural breaks

The development of the renewable energies, and especially of the wind power, in the last decades has stayed out of any discussion. The advantages associated with the energy of the odd wind have considered in occasions authentic information that they them should corroborate. For example, about the streghness of creating jobs, there do not exist official statistics that gather the dimension of the created employment, without forgetting that the field of the energy stands out for being intensive in the capital. In this paper, there is realized an analysis of the different bibliographical sources relative to the generation of employment in the wind sector in Spain, establishing a few margins of the creation of the same one for categories for the region of Galicia, in the period (1995-2010).

Energy plays a vital role in economic development. It performs a key for sustainable development. Hence, many studies have attempted to look for the direction of causality between energy consumption (EC), economic growth (GDP) and CO2 emissions. This paper, therefore, applies the panel unit root tests, panel cointegration methods and panel causality test to investigate the relationship between EC, GDP and CO2 emissions for 15 MENA countries covering the annual period 1973-2008. The finding of this study reveals that there is no causal link between GDP and EC; and between CO2 emissions and EC in the short run. However, in the long run, there is a unidirectional causality running from GDP and CO2 emissions to EC. In addition, to deal with the heterogeneity in countries and the endogeneity bias in regressors, this paper applies respectively the FMOLS and the DOLS approach to estimate the long-run relationship between these three factors.

This paper analyzes the factors explaining the aggregate fuel consumption for road transport in Spain in a dynamic panel data framework. Three features on this study are the use of a balanced panel using regional data, the distinction between gasoline and diesel and the specification of a dynamic panel data (DPD) model and estimate it by system Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM). Our results show that most explanatory variables are significant in explaining the evolution of gasoline consumption, while diesel consumption is found to be independent of most of these factors. The differences between the markets of the gasoline (most for passenger transport use) and the diesel (passenger and freight transport are important) could explain the results for the diesel model. Moreover, the intensive dieselization process that has taken place in Spain over the last decade, which has resulted in diesel consumption being exposed to factors - i.e., regulatory - which are not of a strictly economic nature. This finding highlights the need to consider different explanatory variables and models for gasoline and diesel consumption, and to go further in the research. Finally, we find that traditional estimation procedures, such as fixed and random effect estimators, produce important differences with respect to system-GMM, which may even change policy recommendations.

This study analysed the trend of energy consumption, real output, financial development, monetary policy rate and consumer prices and also examined the long-run relationship and direction of causality between energy consumption and economic growth with consideration for financial development, monetary policy rate and consumer prices. These were with a view to examining the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in Nigeria during the period 1971-2010. The result showed that all the variables used in the study are characterized by a positive trend. Also, it was found that variables followed a I(1) process. The study provides weak evidence in support of long-run relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. The study further revealed that energy consumption among other variables positively and significantly influenced output growth in the short-run. Using the first three lags, we found no causal evidence one way or two way between energy consumption and economic growth. The study concluded that energy consumption only has short-run positive impact on the economy but has not enhanced long-run economic growth in Nigeria during the period under investigation.