https://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/about/director/pubs/EuroEconReview2001.pdf

The curse of natural resources

This paper presents the overview of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and their energy, land use, and emissions implications. The SSPs are part of a new scenario framework, established by the climate change research community in order to facilitate the integrated analysis of future climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation. The pathways were developed over the last years as a joint community effort and describe plausible major global developments that together would lead in the future to different challenges for mitigation and adaptation to climate change. The SSPs are based on five narratives describing alternative socio-economic developments, including sustainable development, regional rivalry, inequality, fossil-fueled development, and middle-of-the-road development. The long-term demographic and economic projections of the SSPs depict a wide uncertainty range consistent with the scenario literature. A multi-model approach was used for the elaboration of the energy, land-use and the emissions trajectories of SSP-based scenarios. The baseline scenarios lead to global energy consumption of 400–1200 EJ in 2100, and feature vastly different land-use dynamics, ranging from a possible reduction in cropland area up to a massive expansion by more than 700 million hectares by 2100. The associated annual CO 2 emissions of the baseline scenarios range from about 25 GtCO 2 to more than 120 GtCO 2 per year by 2100. With respect to mitigation, we find that associated costs strongly depend on three factors: (1) the policy assumptions, (2) the socio-economic narrative, and (3) the stringency of the target. The carbon price for reaching the target of 2.6 W/m 2 that is consistent with a temperature change limit of 2 °C, differs in our analysis thus by about a factor of three across the SSP marker scenarios. Moreover, many models could not reach this target from the SSPs with high mitigation challenges. While the SSPs were designed to represent different mitigation and adaptation challenges, the resulting narratives and quantifications span a wide range of different futures broadly representative of the current literature. This allows their subsequent use and development in new assessments and research projects. Critical next steps for the community scenario process will, among others, involve regional and sectoral extensions, further elaboration of the adaptation and impacts dimension, as well as employing the SSP scenarios with the new generation of earth system models as part of the 6th climate model intercomparison project (CMIP6).

/pdf/the-shared-socioeconomic-pathways-and-their-energy-land-use-atxud52ccd.pdf

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and their energy, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: An overview

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on the role of school quality and quantity. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population – rather than mere school attainment – are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empirical results show the importance of both minimal and high level skills, the complementarity of skills and quality of economic institutions, and robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing countries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The magnitude of change needed makes clear that closing the economic gap with developed countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions.

The role of cognitive skills in economic development

This paper examines the robustness of explanatory variables in cross-country economic growth regressions. It employs a novel approach, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE), which constructs estimates as a weighted average of OLS estimates for every possible combination of included variables. The weights applied to individual regressions are justified on Bayesian grounds in a way similar to the well-known Schwarz criterion. Of 32 explanatory variables we find 11 to be robustly partially correlated with long-term growth and another five variables to be marginally related. Of all the variables considered, the strongest evidence is for the initial level of real GDP per capita.

/pdf/determinants-of-long-term-growth-a-bayesian-averaging-of-11038vhl4y.pdf

Determinants of Long-Term Growth: A Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) Approach

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w8245/w8245.pdf

Does Financial Liberalization Spur Growth

Determinants of Long-Term Growth: A Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (Bace) Approach

Crespo Cuaresma J., Doppelhofer G. and Feldkircher M. The determinants of economic growth in European regions, Regional Studies. This paper uses Bayesian model averaging (BMA) to find robust determinants of economic growth between 1995 and 2005 in a new data set of 255 European regions. It finds that income convergence between countries is dominated by the catching-up of regions in new member states in Central and Eastern Europe, whereas convergence within countries is driven by regions in old European Union member states. Regions containing capital cities are growing faster, particularly in Central and Eastern European countries, as do regions with a large share of workers with a higher education. The results are robust when allowing for spatial spillovers among European regions.

/pdf/the-determinants-of-economic-growth-in-european-regions-30bljjnrpw.pdf

The determinants of economic growth in European regions

This paper introduces a new measure of dependence or jointness among explanatory variables. Jointness is based on the joint posterior distribution of variables over the model space, thereby taking model uncertainty into account. By looking beyond marginal measures of variable importance, jointness reveals generally unknown forms of dependence. Positive jointness implies that regressors are complements, representing distinct, but mutually reinforcing effects. Negative jointness implies that explanatory variables are substitutes and capture similar underlying effects. In a cross-country dataset we show that jointness among 67 determinants of growth is important, affecting inference and informing economic policy.

Jointness of Growth Determinants

This paper examines the robustness of explanatory variables in cross-country economic growth regressions. It employs a novel approach, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE), which constructs estimates as a weighted average of OLS estimates for every possible combination of included variables. The weights applied to individual regressions are justified on Bayesian grounds in a way similar to the well-known Schwarz criterion. Of 32 explanatory variables we find 11 to be robustly partially correlated with long-term growth and another five variables to be marginally related. Of all the variables considered, the strongest evidence is for the initial level of real GDP per capita ...

/pdf/determinants-of-long-term-growth-3cruquiv2m.pdf

Gernot Doppelhofer

Papers

Determinants of Long-Term Growth: A Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (Bace) Approach

Determinants of Long-Term Growth: A Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) Approach

The determinants of economic growth in European regions

Jointness of Growth Determinants

Determinants of Long-Term Growth