The past decade has witnessed increasingly diverging net foreign asset positions among major world economic areas and dramatically rising public deficit ratios in advanced economic areas. In view of these empirical observations this chapter reconsiders the role of the net foreign asset position and of capital income shares for the relationship among public debt, the terms of trade and welfare in a two-good, two-country OLG model. Our key result is that while the net foreign asset position does not influence the terms of trade effect of public debt shocks, it is highly relevant for intertemporal welfare. In particular, welfare of the debt expanding country can increase and that of the non-expanding country decrease if the more indebted country is a net creditor with a large capital income share, and if the world economy remains close to a Golden Rule situation.

aus der Zusammenfassung: Der vorliegende Bericht präsentiert Ergebnisse des zweiten Jahres des Global Change Projekts “Sustainable Food Consumption: Trends and Opportunities”. Ziel des Projekts ist es, zu einem nachhaltigeren Lebensmittelkonsum in Österreich über eine Analyse des Nahrungsmittelkonsums, seiner Trends und damit verbundener Umweltfolgen beizutragen. Aufbauend auf diesen Ergebnissen werden mögliche Politikoptionen zur Stärkung nachhaltigen Lebensmittelkonsums diskutiert. [...]

Nationwide car road pricing schemes are discussed across Europe. We analyse the impacts of such schemes with respect to environmental, economic and social indicators of sustainability, also quantifying the trade-offs among these three dimensions under different charging principles and revenue recycling options. In our analysis we employ a computable general equilibrium (CGE) approach, develop a modelling structure for private transport and provide detailed empirical analysis for the case of Austria. Regarding the social dimension, it has often been argued that poorer households (and commuters) would have to bear a disproportionate share of the road pricing burden. We find the contrary, i.e. a stronger negative policy impact on richer households, and on a small group of intensive car users. The choice of revenue recycling is able to ameliorate the negative social and economic effects of road pricing, without reversing the desired positive environmental effects. For political feasibility, questions of distributional impacts are most urgent and therefore we address them systematically within a quantitative framework.

Mountain regions represent about one fourth of the earth’s surface area and provide a significant share of goods and services to humanity. In this book, the authors demonstrate how alpine environments throughout the world are particularly vulnerable to global environmental change. Alpine populations will often be affected earliest and most significantly, for example through extreme weather systems, and their scope for adaptation is relatively limited. Drawing on the natural and social sciences, particularly economics, this book supplies a broad picture of the diverse issues involved.

The transition to an environmentally sustainable transport system involves a combination of technological and demand-side transport policies. Regulatory, educational and economic instruments can be used to enhance the development of cleaner transport technologies as well as the shift from road-based towards more environmentally benign modes of transport. This article provides estimates of overall economic impacts in the long term and describes the required change in the transport system. The article proceeds in three steps. First, this article reviews concepts of sustainability and applies them to transportation. Second, a small open economy computable general equilibrium model for Austria is developed to evaluate the long-term macroeconomic and sectoral impacts of a sustainable freight transport policy. Third, simulation results are discussed and conclusions drawn concerning the crucial features of a sustainable freight transport policy.Although the required transition within the transport system is substantial, the economic costs in terms of GDP are comparably low and employment is likely to increase slightly.

Human preferences are found to be characterized by a neglect of impacts occuring in the future or at a distance. Concerning the spatial dimension, diffusion of pollution may justify this reduced concern. There are many cases, however, where spatial discounting is not justified. Such cases increase in importance with eased world trade, when consumers become responsible for impact increasingly located at a distance. In this paper we analyze how consumers ́ spatial discounting influences the trade volume and the location of production. The analysis is both theoretical, introducing spatial discounting into the Dixit-Stiglitz model of imperfect competition, and empirical, relating revealed spatial discounting to transport costs. Spatial discounting is found to increase world transport volumes by increasing trade volumes and not unambiguously trade distances.

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A referral was made to our Cardiac Transplant Program for a patient who was in the New Jersey Prison System. The Medical Director of the New Jersey Department of Corrections called regarding a 39-year-old inmate who was being treated in a New Jersey hospital that has a unit for prisoners from a nearby cor- rectional facility. The referring physician described the patient to our Medical Director of heart transplantation as a “murderer” who had been incarcerated since 1987 and sentenced to prison for 30 years without eligibility for parole before completion of his 30-year sentence. The patient was being treated in the CCU of the facility and according to preliminary studies, was suffering from a possible dilated cardiomyopathy. There was evidence of a prior cerebrovascular accident (etiology unknown) with a dense hemiplegia of the left side. The patient was alert but unable to care for himself. There were a number of specific tests necessary to evaluate the patient's candidacy for heart transplantation before actually placing him-on a waiting list. However, the transplant director was uncertain about having the patient brought to our facility for further testing and called some members of the Transplant Selection Committee team to discuss the case.

Nationwide Car Road Pricing Schemes are discussed across Europe. This paper analyses the distributional impacts across income groups of such schemes. It has been argued that the poor households (and obviously the commuters) would have to take an unproportional share of the burden. The paper focuses on the CGE modelling structure of private transport and gives detailed empirical analysis for the case of Austria. The paper proceeds in four steps. First, the transport and consumption data bases are merged, second a Social Accounting matrix is constructed differentiating sufficiently the elements of private car transport and income groups, third a small open economy CGE model is developed and, finally, used for the simulation of nationwide car road pricing in five implementation schemes in order to conclude on the distributional impacts of this policy. Contrary to public discussion the paper finds a relatively stronger policy impact on rich households.

We develop a two-country overlapping generations model where emissions arise from production. Both countries, denoted by Home and Foreign, implement a na- tional emission permits system. If Home unilaterally reduces the emission permits level, Home's and Foreign's capital stocks fall while Home's terms of trade improve. Under dynamic efficiency and Home being a net debtor, Home's and Foreign's wel- fare is reduced and the welfare loss is larger in Home than in Foreign.

This paper investigates the potential of combining spatial planning and transport policy for more sustainable settlement structures, i.e. to counteract pollution due to urban sprawl and commuting. To this end, we develop a two- region general equilibrium model to study the interactions between agglomeration externalities and passenger transport-related pollution for an urban core and its hinterland. Building on elements of New Economic Geography, the settlement structure of commuting consumers is determined by the trade-off between the housing quality and transportation costs. The initial equilibrium of utility equality across consumers settling in the two regions, and working in either of the two, is shocked by an exogenous change in environmental preferences. As a first step, we do not allow for migration of households between the two regions. Then, in the longer run, changed preferences induce urban sprawl and affect housing structures via a circular linkage of spatial environmental quality and mobility patterns. The theoretical approach is illustrated by spatially disaggregated data for the NUTS III region Graz (Austria) and explains the need for a fundamental spatial restructuring of urban areas in order to change car-related pollution. The analysis indicates policy options suitable to overcome current trends, with instruments including the restructuring of home construction subsidies, cordon pricing, strict parking management or the improvement of public transport and cycling infrastructure.

This paper analyzes rigorously the existence and stability of station- ary states as well as the transitional dynamics of a renewable resource and manmade capital in an OLG model with physical harvest costs. It focuses on the characteristics of the harvest dynamics triggered off by shocks to the natural resource technology. While a harvest cost shock leads to an increase in the long run resource stock level and a decline in the long run harvest volume, biological shocks reduce both the stock and the harvest level in the long run. Utilizing the insights from the comparative stationary state analysis the authors explain why the resource harvest responding to a harvest cost shock overshoots its stationary state value, while there is no overshooting when the parame- ters of the regeneration function, i.e. the natural growth rate and the carrying capacity of the resource stock, change.

Nationwide car road pricing schemes are discussed across Europe, partly as extensions of the truck road pricing schemes already in existence. This paper analyses the economic and environmental feedbacks of such nationwide car road pricing schemes on gross production, sectoral structure, employment, consumption and CO2 emissions by means of a passenger transport demand oriented CGE model. As a main focus the distributional impacts across household income groups are explored. It has been argued that the poor households would have to take an unproportional share of the burden. We give a detailed analysis for the case of Austria and show that, while low income households do experience a reduction in welfare, road pricing does have a progressive effect, with a significantly stronger welfare reduction for high income households.