The final objective of the project is to provide an integrated vision of these four case studies in WP4. This deliverable will specifically analyze the conflicts and synergies between various sustainability issues that stem from these four cross sectors linkages under different visions of globalization and development pathways. The challenge is thus to integrate sector-based analysis in a common economic framework capturing the interplay between innovation, the evolution of life styles, macroeconomic constraints (investments, trade.) in a world experiencing strong economictransitions. This report will then develop a set of comprehensive scenarios at the World and European levels. These numerical experiments will aim at analyzing i) the mechanisms that explain the tensions and synergies between various sustainability issues (climate change, land availability, energy security) under various views of the future of economic globalization and ii) ways to mitigate these tensions within the framework of each scenario. We will specifically assess the implementation of climate policies. CO2 emissions have indeed continued to grow in the past decade even more rapidly than predicted (Peters et al., 2011; Raupach et al., 2007; IPCC, 2014). This context is the result of both the diffculty to decouple growth and carbon emissions in developed regions, where development styles cannot be changed overnight, and the rapid carbon-intensive growth patterns of emerging countries (IEA, 2012). It also highlights the necessity to implement ambitious measures to trigger a strong bifurcation away from carbon-intensive development paths (IPCC, 2007, 2014). Despite this scientific consensus, the implementation of ambitious global carbon emission reduction targets remains highly uncertain as shown by the difficulties to reach a global climate agreement under the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in particular since the failure of the Copenhagen Conference in 2009. This is essentially due to the concerns about (a) significant welfare and economic losses consecutive to carbon restrictions and (b) the interplay of climate measures with other sensitive political issues such as the financial crisis, poverty alleviation, job creation, energy and food security, or health and local environmental protection (e.g., see the dilemma of the climate development Gordian knot discussed in (Hourcade et al., 2008)). An integrated vision between sustainable development and the globalisation process can be a precondition to overcome this dilemma in view of post 2015 climate policies.
The final objective of the project is to provide an integrated vision of these four case studies in WP4. This deliverable will specifically analyze the conflicts and synergies between various sustainability issues that stem from these four cross sectors linkages under different visions of globalization and development pathways. The challenge is thus to integrate sector-based analysis in a common economic framework capturing the interplay between innovation, the evolution of life styles, macroeconomic constraints (investments, trade.) in a world experiencing strong economictransitions. This report will then develop a set of comprehensive scenarios at the World and European levels. These numerical experiments will aim at analyzing i) the mechanisms that explain the tensions and synergies between various sustainability issues (climate change, land availability, energy security) under various views of the future of economic globalization and ii) ways to mitigate these tensions within the framework of each scenario. We will specifically assess the implementation of climate policies. CO2 emissions have indeed continued to grow in the past decade even more rapidly than predicted (Peters et al., 2011; Raupach et al., 2007; IPCC, 2014). This context is the result of both the diffculty to decouple growth and carbon emissions in developed regions, where development styles cannot be changed overnight, and the rapid carbon-intensive growth patterns of emerging countries (IEA, 2012). It also highlights the necessity to implement ambitious measures to trigger a strong bifurcation away from carbon-intensive development paths (IPCC, 2007, 2014). Despite this scientific consensus, the implementation of ambitious global carbon emission reduction targets remains highly uncertain as shown by the difficulties to reach a global climate agreement under the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in particular since the failure of the Copenhagen Conference in 2009. This is essentially due to the concerns about (a) significant welfare and economic losses consecutive to carbon restrictions and (b) the interplay of climate measures with other sensitive political issues such as the financial crisis, poverty alleviation, job creation, energy and food security, or health and local environmental protection (e.g., see the dilemma of the climate development Gordian knot discussed in (Hourcade et al., 2008)). An integrated vision between sustainable development and the globalisation process can be a precondition to overcome this dilemma in view of post 2015 climate policies.
The final objective of the project is to provide an integrated vision of these four case studies in WP4. This deliverable will specifically analyze the conflicts and synergies between various sustainability issues that stem from these four cross sectors linkages under different visions of globalization and development pathways. The challenge is thus to integrate sector-based analysis in a common economic framework capturing the interplay between innovation, the evolution of life styles, macroeconomic constraints (investments, trade.) in a world experiencing strong economictransitions. This report will then develop a set of comprehensive scenarios at the World and European levels. These numerical experiments will aim at analyzing i) the mechanisms that explain the tensions and synergies between various sustainability issues (climate change, land availability, energy security) under various views of the future of economic globalization and ii) ways to mitigate these tensions within the framework of each scenario. We will specifically assess the implementation of climate policies. CO2 emissions have indeed continued to grow in the past decade even more rapidly than predicted (Peters et al., 2011; Raupach et al., 2007; IPCC, 2014). This context is the result of both the diffculty to decouple growth and carbon emissions in developed regions, where development styles cannot be changed overnight, and the rapid carbon-intensive growth patterns of emerging countries (IEA, 2012). It also highlights the necessity to implement ambitious measures to trigger a strong bifurcation away from carbon-intensive development paths (IPCC, 2007, 2014). Despite this scientific consensus, the implementation of ambitious global carbon emission reduction targets remains highly uncertain as shown by the difficulties to reach a global climate agreement under the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in particular since the failure of the Copenhagen Conference in 2009. This is essentially due to the concerns about (a) significant welfare and economic losses consecutive to carbon restrictions and (b) the interplay of climate measures with other sensitive political issues such as the financial crisis, poverty alleviation, job creation, energy and food security, or health and local environmental protection (e.g., see the dilemma of the climate development Gordian knot discussed in (Hourcade et al., 2008)). An integrated vision between sustainable development and the globalisation process can be a precondition to overcome this dilemma in view of post 2015 climate policies.
Die Verteilungswirkungen des Steuer- und Transfersystems in Deutschland werden in der politischen Debatte vermehrt diskutiert. Die Fragen, wer finanziert zu welchem Anteil staatliche Aufgaben und wer profitiert von der Umverteilung, sind entscheidend bei der Beurteilung von wirtschaftspolitischen Maßnahmen. Durch Nutzung verschiedener Datensätze und Methodiken, können Steuern, Sozialabgaben und monetäre Sozialleistungen zusammen betrachtet und auf ihre Verteilungswirkungen untersucht werden. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich, welche Bereiche der Einkommensverteilung zu welchem Anteil staatliche Aufgaben finanzieren und welche von der Umverteilung profitieren. Während die Einkommensteuer progressiv wirkt - also die durchschnittliche Belastung des Einkommens steigt mit der Höhe des Einkommens - haben indirekte Steuern wie die Mehrwertsteuer in der Regel eine regressive Wirkung, das heißt je geringer das Einkommen desto höher die durchschnittliche Belastung. Diese beiden Steuerarten haben also entgegengesetzte Effekte. Die Sozialbeiträge, denen zum Teil direkte Ansprüche an spätere Zahlungen vom Staat entgegenstehen (zum Beispiel an die Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung), haben die höchste Belastungswirkung im mittleren Bereich der Einkommensverteilung. Auf der anderen Seite stehen die vom Staat erhaltenen monetären Transferleistungen. Die Renten der Gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung sind vom Volumen ein wichtiger Teil des gesamten Bruttoeinkommens der privaten Haushalte. Während Renten in allen Abschnitten der Einkommensverteilung vorkommen, ist ihr Anteil am Einkommen mit fast 43 Prozent im 3. Dezil am höchsten. Anschließend nimmt die Bedeutung in den höheren Dezilen wieder ab. Die Pensionen sind hingegen eher in der oberen Hälfte der Verteilung zu finden und haben den höchsten Anteil im 9. Dezil. Das Arbeitslosengeld I (ALG I) ist recht breit verteilt mit einem Schwerpunkt in den mittleren Dezilen. Hingegen sind bedarfsgeprüfte Leistungen wie das ALG II und die Grundsicherung im Alter am unteren Rand der Verteilung wichtige Einkommensquellen. Die Ergebnisse der Nettobetrachtung aus gezahlten Steuern und Sozialabgaben und erhaltenen monetären Transferleistungen zeigen, dass das Leistungsfähigkeitsprinzip unter Einbeziehung sämtlicher Zahlungsströme gilt und die Umverteilung in Deutschland funktioniert. Die Haushalte in der unteren Hälfte der Verteilung erhalten im Durchschnitt höhere Zahlungen vom Staat als sie an diesen abführen. Mit zunehmendem Einkommen tragen die Haushalte netto mehr zur Finanzierung des Staats bei und die Belastungswirkung des Steuersystems bleibt progressiv. Zwar wirken die indirekten Steuern regressiv im Verhältnis zum Einkommen, jedoch werden diese bei Empfängern der Sozialleistungen implizit vom Staat übernommen. Lohnempfänger im unteren Bereich der Einkommensverteilung nehmen nicht immer ihre Leistungsansprüche wahr (beispielsweise das Wohngeld). Eine Erhöhung der Inanspruchnahme von Leistungsberechtigten könnte auch für diese Haushalte eine Entlastung bewirken. ; The distributional effects of the tax and benefit system in Germany are increasingly being discussed in the political debate. The questions of who bears the tax burden and finances government tasks to what extent and who benefits from redistribution are decisive in the assessment of economic policy measures. By using different data sets and methodologies, taxes, social security contributions and social benefits can be considered together and examined for their distributional effects. The results show which areas of income distribution finance government tasks and which benefit from redistribution. While income tax has a progressive effect - i.e. the average burden on income increases with higher income - indirect taxes such as the value-added tax generally have a regressive effect, i.e. the lower the income the higher the average burden. These two types of taxes therefore have opposite effects. Social security contributions, which are in parts direct claims on later payments from the government (e.g. to the statutory pension insurance), have the highest burdening effect in the middle range of the income distribution. On the other hand, there are public pensions and monetary social benefits, which are received by the private households. The pensions of the Statutory Pension Insurance Scheme are an important part of the total gross income of private households. While statutory pensions occur in all sections of the income distribution, their share of income is highest in the 3rd decile at almost 43 percent. Afterwards, the importance decreases again in the higher deciles. In contrast, pensions for civil servants tend to be found in the upper half of the distribution and have the highest share in the 9th decile. The unemployment benefit is distributed quite broadly with a focus in the middle deciles. In contrast, means-tested benefits such as the social welfare benefit (ALG II) and basic old-age provisions are important sources of income at the lower end of the distribution. The results of the net consideration of taxes and social security contributions on the one hand, and received monetary social benefits, on the other hand, show that the "ability-to-pay" principle of the German tax and benefit system applies and redistribution between the households clearly takes place. On average, households in the lower half of the distribution receive higher payments from the government than they pay to it. With increasing income, households contribute more net to the financing of government tasks and the burden of the tax system remains progressive. Although indirect taxes have a regressive effect in relation to income, they are implicitly borne by the government for recipients of social benefits. Wage earners at the lower end of the income distribution do not always exercise their benefit entitlements (e.g. housing benefit). An increase in the take-up of benefit entitlements could also provide relief for these households.
In view of rising concerns over increasing inequality in the European Union since the financial crisis, this study provides an inequality decomposition of the overall European income distribution by country. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions are our empirical basis. Inequality has risen moderately within the core Euro area, particularly in the last two years of the observation period (2010/11). Widening disparities between EU Member States are the driving force behind this trend, while inequalities within countries do not exhibit systematic changes. An analysis of binational distributions reveals that it is the countries hit worst by the crisis-Greece and Spain-for which the between-country disparities have changed most markedly.
In view of rising concerns over increasing inequality in the European Union since the financial crisis, this study provides an inequality decomposition of the overall European income distribution by country. The EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions are our empirical basis. Inequality has risen moderately within the core Euro area, particularly in the last two years of the observation period (2010/11). Widening disparities between EU Member States are the driving force behind this trend, while inequalities within countries do not exhibit systematic changes. An analysis of binational distributions reveals that it is the countries hit worst by the crisis - Greece and Spain - for which the between-country disparities have changed most markedly.
I undertake a political economy exercise of a type described in John Rawls' A Theory of Justice; namely, one in which economic institutions are judged by how well they match the key principles in theories of distributive justice. My main contention is that such an exercise is integrally related not only to economics in general but to empirical economics in particular. I argue that most standard theories of justice place a large weight on self and social respect and that such respect has alot to do with the position a person holds in the productive process - their wage and employment outcomes. That, in turn, means that assessments of justice in the real world hinge critically on how labour markets actually function in assigning wages and employment. The answers to these questions are ultimately empirical. I explore these ideas by examining one particular institution (the minimum wage) in relation to a set of the most prominent recent theories of distributive justice. This exercise leads to a different emphasis on what minimum wage related outcomes need study, and to a claim that minimum wage setting is related to standards of fairness defined relative to the location of the low skilled wage distribution.
This paper uses individual level data (the Japanese General Social Survey, 2001) to examine how government size influences generalized trust. After controlling for income inequality, population mobility, city size and various individual characteristics, I found: (1) Using all samples, government size is not associated with generalized trust, and (2) After splitting the sample into worker and non-worker samples, government size does not influence generalized trust for non-workers whereas it significantly reduces generalized trust for workers. This suggests that workers, through their work experience, might confront the greater bureaucratic red tape coming from "larger government", leading to negative externality effects on the trustful relationship in the labor market.
Kollektive Aktivitäten werden organisiert und damit Kooperationsrenten ermöglicht, indem unter anderem Produktions- und Verteilungsprozesse institutionalisiert werden. Die Kooperationsrente im weitesten Sinne - und damit die gemeinsame Erfolgsgröße - ist die Wertschöpfung. Über formelle und informelle Regeln können institutionelle Restriktionen etabliert werden, die einen Verteilungsvorteil für spezifische Anspruchsgruppen garantieren. Als zentrale Frage ergibt sich, welche Verteilung der Wertschöpfung aus einem nicht-kooperativen Verteilungsprozess innerhalb des Zusammenwirkens ökonomischer und politischer Prozesse und der doppelten Vertragsunvollständigkeit resultiert. Hierbei wird die Beziehung zwischen Verteilungskonflikten und Institutionen in Form der systematischen Korrelation von Verteilungsasymmetrien mit institutionell bedingten Verhandlungsasymmetrien herausgearbeitet.
This paper dissects distributional preferences with group identity in a modified dictator game. I estimate individual-level utility functions with two parameters that govern the trade-offs between equity and efficiency and giving to self and to other. Subjects put on average less weight on income of the out-group, but overall only a minority behaves completely selfishly. Giving to the out-group also renders subjects more accepting of inequality. However, the experiment also uncovers a large heterogeneity of preferences. It seems that those who are social become slightly less social in the presence of the out-group. The number of selfish individuals is instead hardly affected. Moreover, choices in both treatments overwhelmingly stem from well-behaved, yet systematically different underlying social preference functionals. Hence this experiment suggests that the rational choice approach, which is predominantly used in the literature, is a useful tool to understand the effect of group identity on social preferences. As a side result, I find that the weight on self, but not the individual equity-efficiency trade-off predicts political left-right self-assessment as more conservative voters are more selfish. I also document gender differences: females put less weight on self, are more inequality averse and react more strongly to the treatment.
The Maoist insurgency in Nepal is one of the highest intensity internal conflicts in recent times. Investigation into the causes of the conflict would suggest that grievance rather than greed is the main motivating force. The concept of horizontal or inter-group inequality, with both an ethnic and caste dimension, is highly relevant in explaining the Nepalese civil war. There is also a spatial aspect to the conflict, which is most intense in the most disadvantaged areas in terms of human development indicators and land holdings. Using the intensity of conflict (fatalities) as the dependent variable and HDI indicators and landlessness as explanatory variables, we find that the intensity of conflict across the districts of Nepal is significantly explained by the degree of inequalities. – Nepal ; Maoist insurgency ; spatial inequality ; horizontal inequality
If the poor are to benefit from economic growth, then they need the skills that are in growing demand, and the capacity to raise their productivity as smallholder farmers and micro-entrepreneurs. Yet, the poor seldom receive a satisfactory education. Too little is spent on primary education—the category of education of most direct benefit to the poor—while on average public subsidies to secondary education are roughly three times as high as subsidies to primary education, and subsidies to tertiary education are thirty times as high. In consequence, the higher income deciles benefit disproportionately from public spending on education—the share of the richest income quintile (28%) is roughly double that of poorest income quintile (13%) across countries. Why do such inequalities in public spending prevail? We argue that their wealth enables the affluent to buy favourable policies from politicians. In contrast, the poor lack the resources for lobbying and they face more severe collective action problems. We find strong empirical evidence for this interest group model of politics (as opposed to the median voter model which predicts a more redistributive pattern of public spending). We find that income inequality—which is a proxy for the political bargaining power of the rich versus the poor—is significant in explaining cross-country variance in the ratio of public spending on primary education to tertiary education. Holding everything else constant, a one standard deviation increase in the Gini coefficient would reduce the ratio of primary-school spending to tertiary spending by 0.20 percentage point. We also find that conflict is significant in skewing public spending away from primary education, and that increased ethnic diversity tends to reduce the relative share of public spending on primary schooling (although this effect may be mitigated if the political system is democratic rather than authoritarian). Our results raise some troubling issues for policy makers and aid donors. In particular, more attention must be given to reducing income inequality in order to reduce political constraints on pro-poor public expenditure reform (and on the effective implementation of the current wave of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers). And reducing the prevalence of conflict would facilitate resource shifts from military spending to primary schooling, thereby lessening the need to introduce higher levels of cost recovery in the secondary and tertiary education sectors to facilitate higher investment in primary education. – poverty ; income distribution ; education ; development
Political violence, coup d'état, civil wars and inter-state wars, all have fiscal dimensions (and sometimes fiscal causes). Who gets what—public employment and public spending—and who has to pay for it, are questions that raise fundamental issues about the distribution of society's resources. These can only be resolved peacefully by some form of social contract, resting on the foundation of effective fiscal institutions (systems of public spending and taxation). Accordingly, the paper contrasts the evolution of fiscal institutions in stable and unstable societies. The paper discusses the likelihood of a fiscal peace dividend, but notes that 'incomplete' peace—and therefore the continuation of high levels of military spending—limits the scale of the dividend in many cases. Broad reconstruction from war—which spreads its benefits widely so that poverty is reduced—is contrasted with narrow reconstruction, in which society's elite may consolidate their war-time gains, but in which the majority are left behind. Effective fiscal institutions are critical to determining whether broad or narrow reconstruction takes place. The paper concludes by emphasising the need to better understand the incentives of governments to improve fiscal institutions, and the role that conflict has in affecting their motivation. – conflict ; fiscal policy ; sub-Saharan Africa
