Les auteurs mènent une évaluation contingente sur un échantillon représentatif de la population pour estimer la disponibilité à payer (DAP) pour un programme de création de nouvelles réserves forestières en Suisse. Le scénario prévoit des restrictions d’accès aux zones forestières en question, raison pour laquelle l’analyse porte essentiellement sur les valeurs de non-usage, en particulier les valeurs d’existence. L’analyse paramétrique et non paramétrique des réponses au choix dichotomique (Single Bounded Dichotomous Choice) indique une DAP moyenne de 470 CHF à 500 CHF (entre 390 et 415 EUR environ) par année et par ménage. Les auteurs étudient le biais de sélection engendré par les réponses protestataires et constatent qu’il ne modifie pas statistiquement la DAP. L’analyse des déterminants de la DAP indique que l’effet de revenu est positif mais limité par un seuil et que les résidents urbains sont plus enclins à accepter de payer pour financer le programme.
Turning the Paris Agreement’s greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments. We address the question of the acceptability of cost-effective climate policy in a real-voting setting. First, we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes, rejected in Switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people. Energy taxes were aimed at completely replacing the current value-added tax. We examine the determinants of voting and find that distributional and competitiveness concerns reduced the acceptability of energy taxes, along with the perception of ineffectiveness. Most people would have preferred tax revenues to be allocated for environmental purposes. Second, at the same time of the ballot, we tested the acceptability of alternative designs of a carbon tax with a choice experiment survey on a representative sample of the Swiss population. Survey respondents are informed about environmental, distributional and competitiveness effects of each carbon tax design. These impacts are estimated with a computable general equilibrium model. This original setting generates a series of novel results. Providing information on the expected environmental effectiveness of carbon taxes reduces the demand for environmental earmarking. Making distributional effects salient generates an important demand for progressive designs, e.g. social cushioning or recycling via lump-sum transfers. The case of lump-sum recycling is particularly striking: it is sufficient to show its desirable distributional properties to make it one of the most preferred designs, which corresponds to a completely novel result in the literature.We show that providing detailed information on the functioning of environmental taxes may contribute to close both the gap between acceptability ex ante and ex post and the gap between economists’ prescriptions and the preferences of the general public.
Carbon pricing is a recurrent theme in debates on climate policy. Discarded at the 2009 COP in Copenhagen, it remained part of deliberations for a climate agreement in subsequent years. As there is still much misunderstanding about the many reasons to implement a global carbon price, ideological resistance against it prospers. Here, we present the main arguments for carbon pricing, to stimulate a fair and well-informed discussion about it. These include considerations that have received little attention so far. We stress that a main reason to use carbon pricing is environmental effectiveness at a relatively low cost, which in turn contributes to enhance social and political acceptability of climate policy. This includes the property that corrected prices stimulate rapid environmental innovations. These arguments are underappreciated in the public debate, where pricing is frequently downplayed and the erroneous view that innovation policies are sufficient is widespread. Carbon pricing and technology policies are, though, largely complementary and thus are both needed for effective climate policy. We also comment on the complementarity of other instruments to carbon pricing. We further discuss distributional consequences of carbon pricing and present suggestions on how to address these. Other political economy issues that receive attention are lobbying, co-benefits, international policy coordination, motivational crowding in/out, and long-term commitment. The overview ends with reflections on implementing a global carbon price, whether through a carbon tax or emissions trading. The discussion goes beyond traditional arguments from environmental economics by including relevant insights from energy research and innovation studies as well.
The current paper aims to develop an effective and integrated MCDM model for the evaluation of the sustainability practices in the banking services, employing a multi-stage, fuzzy MCDM model that integrates the Balanced Scorecard, fuzzy AHP and fuzzy TOPSIS. The approach aims to evaluate sustainability from the following four perspectives: financial stability, customer relationship management, internal business process and environment-friendly management system. A real implementation dealing with the six largest commercial banks in India is discussed. The results highlights the critical aspects of the evaluation criteria and the issues in improving sustainable banking performances. Regarding the sustainability issues, it is shown that the environment-friendly management system takes a back seat compared with the other criteria. Furthermore, the results show that there is a misunderstanding of the role that corporate social responsibility plays with respect to environmental issues. The developed evaluation model offers a valuable management tool for banks' administrators by assisting them in strategic choices in order to achieve their objective of sustainability and sustainable banking. Moreover, it offers a measuring tool with unique features that complements the emerging trend of integrated reporting considering uncertainty.
How established is the horizontal permeability between modes of vocational education and training (VET) in Switzerland? Formally encouraged by the Swiss law on VET, horizontal permeability refers to transitions across VET modes, i.e. between dual and school-based VET. This paper first discusses why horizontal permeability is indeed relevant and then empirically examines the horizontal permeability of the Swiss VET system for a given occupation – commercial VET. The latter is the largest VET domain in Switzerland and, importantly, a domain in which school-based VET is well established. The empirical analysis uses panel data following a cohort for over 10 years in the Canton of Geneva. Results show that going from school-based to dual VET within commercial VET increases chances to earn a qualification, however students changing modes lose half a year in the process. These findings suggest that, at least in commercial VET, horizontal permeability is only partial.
Le capital humain et les politiques visant à sa création et à sa préservation prennent de plus en plus d’importance dans les sociétés industrialisées. Cet article propose un survol de la littérature économique récente dans ce domaine. Le défi majeur qui occupe aujourd’hui le marché du travail est l’accélération du progrès technique, qui s’accompagne d’effets différenciés suivant le niveau de qualification des travailleurs. Deux théories sont évoquées pour analyser ces effets. D’une part, le progrès technique est vu comme biaisé en faveur des travailleurs qualifiés et défavorable aux moins qualifiés. D’autre part, et suite au phénomène de polarisation du marché du travail récemment observé, on peut cependant penser que la technologie est surtout substituable aux emplois du milieu de l’échelle. De ces constatations découlent plusieurs recommandations de politiques économiques, la principale étant de donner aux travailleurs les moyens d’être flexibles et polyvalents, ce qui passe par une éducation relativement générale plutôt que trop spécifique et cantonnée à un secteur ou une profession.
Background The 2009 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic generated additional data and triggered new studies that opened debate over the optimal strategy for handling a pandemic. The lessons-learned documents from the World Health Organization show the need for a cost estimation of the pandemic response during the risk-assessment phase. Several years after the crisis, what conclusions can we draw from this field of research? Objective The main objective of this article was to provide an analysis of the studies that present cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit analyses for A/H1N1 pandemic interventions since 2009 and to identify which measures seem most cost-effective. Methods We reviewed 18 academic articles that provide cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit analyses for A/H1N1 pandemic interventions since 2009. Our review converts the studies’ results into a cost-utility measure (cost per disability-adjusted life-year or quality-adjusted life-year) and presents the contexts of severity and fatality. Results The existing studies suggest that hospital quarantine, vaccination, and usage of the antiviral stockpile are highly cost-effective, even for mild pandemics. However, school closures, antiviral treatments, and social distancing may not qualify as efficient measures, for a virus like 2009’s H1N1 and a willingness-to-pay threshold of $45,000 per disability-adjusted life-year. Such interventions may become cost-effective for severe crises. Conclusions This study helps to shed light on the cost-utility of various interventions, and may support decision making, among other criteria, for future pandemics. Nonetheless, one should consider these results carefully, considering these may not apply to a specific crisis or country, and a dedicated cost-effectiveness assessment should be conducted at the time.
This paper analyzes the drivers of carbon taxes acceptability with survey data and a randomized labeling treatment. Based on a sample of more than 300 individuals, it assesses the effect on acceptability of specific policy designs and individuals’ perceptions of carbon taxes advantages and disadvantages. We find that the lack of perception of primary and ancillary benefits is one of the main barriers to the acceptability of carbon taxes. In addition, policy design matters for acceptability and in particular earmarking fiscal revenues for environmental purposes can lead to larger support. We also find an effect of labeling, comparing the wording ‘‘climate contribution’’ with ‘‘carbon tax’’. We argue that proper policy design coupled with effective communication on the effects of carbon taxes may lead to a substantial improvement in acceptability
Mathematical forecasting approaches can lead to reliable demand forecast in some environments by extrapolating regular patterns in time-series. However, unpredictable events that do not appear in historical data can reduce the usefulness of mathematical forecasts for demand planning purposes. Since forecasters have partial knowledge of the context and of future events, grouping and structuring the fragmented implicit knowledge, in order to be easily and fully integrated in final demand forecasts is the objective of this work. This paper presents a judgemental collaborative approach for demand forecasting in which the mathematical forecasts, considered as the basis, are adjusted by the structured and combined knowledge from different forecasters. The approach is based on the identification and classification of four types of particular events. Factors corresponding to these events are evaluated through a fuzzy inference system to ensure the coherence of the results. To validate the approach, two case studies were developed with forecasters from a plastic bag manufacturer and a distributor belonging to the food retailing industry. The results show that by structuring and combining the judgements of different forecasters to identify and assess future events, companies can experience a high improvement in demand forecast accuracy.
