Tax havens and their impacts on the non-haven countries

Tax havens have attracted increasing attention from the authorities of non-haven countries. The financial crisis exacerbates the negative attitude to tax havens. Offshore zones are now under strong pressure from the international, both financial and political institutions. Thus, the thesis will focus on the current problem of the modern economy, namely tax havens and their impact on the non-haven countries. This thesis will be based on the several articles, in particular “Tax Competition With Parasitic Tax Havens” by Joel Slemrod and John D. Wilson (University of Michigan, 2009) and “Do Havens Divert Economic Activity” by James R. Hines Jr., C. Fritz Foley and Mihir A. Desai (Ross School of Business, 2005). This paper provides two completely different and contradictory viewpoints on the problem of coexisting tax havens and non-haven countries. There are two models, examined in this work, present two important researches. The first one will be concentrated on the positive effect from tax havens whereas the last model will be focused on the completely negative effect from offshore jurisdictions. The first model gives us a good explanation and proof of its statement why tax havens can positively influence on nearby high-tax countries. It describes that the existence of offshore jurisdictions can stimulate the growth of operations and facilitates economic activity in non-haven countries. In contrast to above mentioned, the model with quite opposite view was presented. This economic model and its analysis confirms the undesirability of the existence of offshore areas. Taking into consideration, that the jurisdictions choose their optimal policy, the elimination of offshores will have positive impact on the rest of countries. The model proofs the statement that full or partial elimination of tax havens raises the equilibrium level of the public good and increases country welfare. According to the following study, it can be concluded that both of the models provide telling arguments to prove their assertions. Thereby both of these points of view have their right to exist. Nevertheless, the ongoing debate concerning this issue still will raise a lot of questions.

Energy efficiency in India: Assessing the policy regimes and their impacts

In the recent years. India has emerged as one of the fast growing economies of the world necessitating equally rapid increase in modern energy consumption. With an imminent global climate change threat, India will have difficulties in continuing with this rising energy use levels towards achieving high economic growth. It will have to follow an energy-efficient pathway in attaining this goal. In this context, an attempt is made to present India's achievements on the energy efficiency front by tracing the evolution of policies and their impacts. The results indicate that India has made substantial progress in improving energy efficiency which is evident from the reductions achieved in energy intensities of GDP to the tune of 88% during 1980-2007. Similar reductions have been observed both with respect to overall Indian economy and the major sectors of the economy. In terms of energy intensity of GDP, India occupies a relatively high position of nine among the top 30 energy consuming countries of the world. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Rapid recreation assessment: a tool to assess visitor use and associated impacts at coastal and marine protected areas

As more people discover coastal and marine protected areas as destinations for leisure-time pursuits, the task of managing coastal resources while providing opportunities for high quality visitor experiences becomes more challenging. Many human impacts occur at these sites; some are caused by recreation and leisure activities on-site, and others by activities such as agriculture, aquaculture, or residential and economic development in surrounding areas. Coastal management professionals are continually looking for effective ways to prevent or mitigate negative impacts of visitor use. (PDF contains 8 pages) Most coastal and marine protected area managers are challenged with balancing two competing goals—protection of natural and cultural resources and provision of opportunities for public use. In most cases, some level of compromise between the goals is necessary, where one goal constrains or “outweighs” the other. Often there is a lack of clear agreement about the priority of these competing goals. Consequently, while natural resource decisions should ultimately be science-based and objective, such decisions are frequently made under uncertainty, relying heavily upon professional judgment. These decisions are subject to a complex array of formal and informal drivers and constraints—data availability, timing, legal mandate, political will, diverse public opinion, and physical, human, and social capital. This paper highlights assessment, monitoring, and planning approaches useful to gauge existing resource and social conditions, determine feasibility of management actions, and record decision process steps to enhance defensibility. Examples are presented from pilot efforts conducted at the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) and Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in South Florida.

The economic importance of marine angler expenditures in the United States.

In 1998, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) began a series of marine angler expenditure surveys in the coastal regions of the United States (U.S.) to evaluate marine recreational fishing expenditures and the financial impacts of these expenditures in each region and the U.S. as a whole. In this report, we use the previously estimated expenditure estimates to assess the total financial impact of anglers’ saltwater expenditures. Estimates are provided for sales, income, employment, and tax impacts for each coastal state in the U.S. Aggregate estimates are also provided for the entire U.S., excluding Alaska, Hawaii, and Texas. Direct, indirect, and induced effects associated with resident and non-resident angler expenditures were estimated using a regional input-output modeling system called IMPLAN Pro. Nationwide, recreational saltwater fishing generated over $30.5 billion in sales in 2000, nearly $12.0 billion in income, and supported nearly 350,000 jobs. Approximately 89 cents of every dollar spent by saltwater anglers was estimated to remain within the U.S. economy. At the state level, many of the goods anglers purchased were imports, and, as such, as little as 44 cents of every dollar stayed in Rhode Island and as much as 80 cents of every dollar stayed in Georgia. In the Northeast, the highest impacts were generated in New Jersey, even though recreational fishing expenditures in Massachusetts and Maryland were considerably higher. In the Southeast, the highest impacts were generated in Florida, and on the Pacific Coast, the highest impacts were generated in California. Expenditures on boat maintenance/expenses generated more impacts than any other expenditure category in the U.S. Expenditures on rods and reels was the single most important expense category in terms of generating impacts in most of the Northeast states. Expenditures on boat expenses generated the highest in most Southeast states, and expenditures for boat accessories produced the highest impacts in most Pacific Coast states.(PDF file contains 184 pages.)

Coastal erosion as a natural resource management problem: An economic perspective

Unremitting waves and occasional storms bring dynamic forces to bear on the coast. Sediment flux results in various patterns of erosion and accretion, with an overwhelming majority (80 to 90 percent) of coastline in the eastern U.S. exhibiting net erosion in recent decades. Climate change threatens to increase the intensity of storms and raise sea level 18 to 59 centimeters over the next century. Following a lengthy tradition of economic models for natural resource management, this paper provides a dynamic optimization model for managing coastal erosion and explores the types of data necessary to employ the model for normative policy analysis. The model conceptualizes benefits of beach and dune sediments as service flows accruing to nearby residential property owners, local businesses, recreational beach users, and perhaps others. Benefits can also include improvements in habitat for beach- and dune-dependent plant and animal species. The costs of maintaining beach sediment in the presence of coastal erosion include expenditures on dredging, pumping, and placing sand on the beach to maintain width and height. Other costs can include negative impacts on the nearshore environment. Employing these constructs, an optimal control model is specified that provides a framework for identifying the conditions under which beach replenishment enhances economic welfare and an optimal schedule for replenishment can be derived under a constant sea level and erosion rate (short term) as well as an increasing sea level and erosion rate (long term). Under some simplifying assumptions, the conceptual framework can examine the time horizon of management responses under sea level rise, identifying the timing of shift to passive management (shoreline retreat) and exploring factors that influence this potential shift. (PDF contains 4 pages)

Integrating climate change impacts to improve understanding of coastal climate change: heavy rains, strong winds, and high seas in coastal Hawaii, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest

Coastal storms, and the strong winds, heavy rains, and high seas that accompany them pose a serious threat to the lives and livelihoods of the peoples of the Pacific basin, from the tropics to the high latitudes. To reduce their vulnerability to the economic, social, and environmental risks associated with these phenomena (and correspondingly enhance their resiliency), decision-makers in coastal communities require timely access to accurate information that affords them an opportunity to plan and respond accordingly. This includes information about the potential for coastal flooding, inundation and erosion at time scales ranging from hours to years, as well as the longterm climatological context of this information. The Pacific Storms Climatology Project (PSCP) was formed in 2006 with the intent of improving scientific understanding of patterns and trends of storm frequency and intensity - “storminess”- and related impacts of these extreme events. The project is currently developing a suite of integrated information products that can be used by emergency managers, mitigation planners, government agencies and decision-makers in key sectors, including: water and natural resource management, agriculture and fisheries, transportation and communication, and recreation and tourism. The PSCP is exploring how the climate-related processes that govern extreme storm events are expressed within and between three primary thematic areas: heavy rains, strong winds, and high seas. To address these thematic areas, PSCP has focused on developing analyses of historical climate records collected throughout the Pacific region, and the integration of these climatological analyses with near-real time observations to put recent weather and climate events into a longer-term perspective.(PDF contains 4 pages)

The Uniform World Model: A Methodology for Predicting the Health Impacts of Air Pollution

47 p.

The impact of economic crises on social inequalities in health: what do we know so far?

Since 2008, Western countries are going through a deep economic crisis whose health impacts seem to be fundamentally counter-cyclical: when economic conditions worsen, so does health, and mortality tends to rise. While a growing number of studies have presented evidence on the effect of crises on the average population health, a largely neglected aspect of research is the impact of crises and the related political responses on social inequalities in health, even if the negative consequences of the crises are primarily borne by the most disadvantaged populations. This commentary will reflect on the results of the studies that have analyzed the effect of economic crises on social inequalities in health up to 2013. With some exceptions, the studies show an increase in health inequalities during crises, especially during the Southeast Asian and Japanese crises and the Soviet Union crisis, although it is not always evident for both sexes or all health or socioeconomic variables. In the Nordic countries during the nineties, a clear worsening of health equity did not occur. Results about the impacts of the current economic recession on health equity are still inconsistent. Some of the factors that could explain this variability in results are the role of welfare state policies, the diversity of time periods used in the analyses, the heterogeneity of socioeconomic and health variables considered, the changes in the socioeconomic profile of the groups under comparison in times of crises, and the type of measures used to analyze the magnitude of social inequalities in health. Social epidemiology should further collaborate with other disciplines to help produce more accurate and useful evidence about the relationship between crises and health equity.

An Economic Analysis of Texas Shrimp Season Closures

Management of the Texas penaeid shrimp fishery is aimed at increasing revenue from brown shrimp, Penaeus aztecus, landings and decreasing the level of discards. Since 1960 Texas has closed its territorial sea for 45-60 days during peak migration of brown shrimp to the Gulf of Mexico. In 1981 the closure was extended to 200 miles to include the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone. Simulation modeling is used in this paper to estimate the changes in landings, revenue, costs, and economic rent attributable to the Texas closure. Four additional analyses were conducted to estimate the effects of closing the Gulf 1- to 4-fathom zone for 45 and 60 days, with and without effort redirected to inshore waters. Distributional impacts are analyzed in terms of costs, revenues, and rents, by vessel class, shrimp species, vessel owner, and crew.

Economic analysis of climate change adaptation strategies in selected coastal areas in Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam

This report is an account of a cross-country study that covered Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Covering four sites (one each in Indonesia and Vietnam) and two sites in the Philippines, the study documented the impacts of three climate hazards affecting coastal communities, namely typhoon/flooding, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion. It also analyzed planned adaptation options, which communities and local governments can implement, as well as autonomous responses of households to protect and insure themselves from these hazards. It employed a variety of techniques, ranging from participatory based approaches such as community hazard mapping and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) to regression techniques, to analyze the impact of climate change and the behavior of affected communities and households.

Economic analysis of climate change adaptation strategies in selected coastal areas in Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam

Climate change with its attendant geophysical hazards is well studied. A great deal of attention has gone into analyzing climate change impacts as well as searching out possible mitigating adaptive strategies. These matters are very real concerns, especially for coastal communities. Such communities are often the most vulnerable to climate change, since their citizens frequently live in abject poverty and have limited capacity to adapt to geophysical hazards. Their situation is further complicated by the prospect of dealing with a confluence of hazards in comparison with those in other ecosystems. Against this backdrop Worldfish and the Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA) collaborated to implement the cross-country study “Climate Change Impacts, Vulnerability Assessments, Economic and Policy Analysis of Adaptation Strategies in Selected Coastal Areas in Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam”. As its title suggests the study covered selected sites in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Employing a gamut of interdisciplinary methodologies -- ranging from community-based approaches such as community hazard mapping and focus group discussions (FGDs) to regression techniques -- the study documented the impacts from three climate hazards affecting coastal communities. These were typhoon/flooding, coastal erosion, and saltwater intrusion. The team also analyzed planned adaptation options suited to implementation by communities and local governments, augmenting autonomous responses of households to protect and insure themselves from these hazards.

Ecological and economic consequences of hypoxia: Topic 2 Report for the Integrated Assessment on Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico

In this report we have attempted to evaluate the ecological and economic consequences of hypoxia in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Although our initial approach was to rely on published accounts, we quickly realized that the body of published literature deahng with hypoxia was limited, and we would have to conduct our own exploratory analysis of existing Gulf data, or rely on published accounts from other systems to infer possible or potential effects of hypoxia. For the economic analysis, we developed a conceptual model of how hypoxia-related impacts could affect fisheries. Our model included both supply and demand components. The supply model had two components: (1) a physical production function for fish or shrimp, and (2) the cost of fishing. If hypoxia causes the cost of a unit of fishing effort to change, then this will result in a shift in supply. The demand model considered how hypoxia might affect the quality of landed fish or shrimp. In particular, the market value per pound is lower for small shrimp than for large shrimp. Given the limitations of the ecological assessment, the shallow continental shelf area affected by hypoxia does show signs of hypoxia-related stress. While current ecological conditions are a response to a variety of stressors, the effects of hypoxia are most obvious in the benthos that experience mortality, elimination of larger long-lived species, and a shifting of productivity to nonhypoxic periods (energy pulsing). What is not known is whether hypoxia leads to higher productivity during productive periods, or simply to a reduction of productivity during oxygen-stressed periods. The economic assessment based on fisheries data, however, failed to detect effects attributable to hypoxia. Overall, fisheries landings statistics for at least the last few decades have been relatively constant. The failure to identify clear hypoxic effects in the fisheries statistics does not necessarily mean that they are absent. There are several possibilities: (1) hypoxic effects are small relative to the overall variability in the data sets evaluated; (2) the data and the power of the analyses are not adequate; and (3) currently there are no hypoxic effects on fisheries. Lack of identified hypoxic effects in available fisheries data does not imply that effects would not occur should conditions worsen. Experience with other hypoxic zones around the globe shows that both ecological and fisheries effects become progressively more severe as hypoxia increases. Several large systems around the globe have suffered serious ecological and economic consequences from seasonal summertime hypoxia; most notable are the Kattegat and Black Sea. The consequences range from localized loss of catch and recruitment failure to complete system-wide loss of fishery species. If experiences in other systems are applicable to the Gulf of Mexico, then in the face of worsening hypoxic conditions, at some point fisheries and other species will decline, perhaps precipitously.

Forestry Impacts on Freshwater Habitat of Anadromous Salmonids in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska: requirements for protection and restoration

This synthesis presents a science overview of the major forest management Issues involved in the recovery of anadromous salmonids affected by timber harvest in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The issues involve the components of ecosystem-based watershed management and how best to implement them, including how to: Design buffer zones to protect fish habitat while enabling economic timber production; Implement effective Best Management Practices (BMPs) to prevent nonpoint-source pollution; Develop watershed-level procedures across property boundaries to prevent cumulative impacts; Develop restoration procedures to contribute to recovery of ecosystem processes; and Enlist support of private landowners in watershed planning, protection, and restoration. Buffer zones, BMPs, cumulative impact prevention, and restoration are essential elements of what must be a comprehensive approach to habitat protection and restoration applied at the watershed level within a larger context of resource concerns in the river basin, species status under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and regional environmental and economic issues (Fig. ES. 1). This synthesis 1) reviews salmonid habitat requirements and potential effects of logging; 2) describes the technical foundation of forest practices and restoration; 3) analyzes current federal and non-federal forest practices; and 4) recommends required elements of comprehensive watershed management for recovery of anadromous salmonids.

Economic losses/gains attributed to the water hyacinth

This is the report of a research study aimed at providing an understanding of the fishing communities and institutions about the water hyacinth problem and how it impacts on their activities. Its also provides strategies for sustainable control of the weed. The research reports are intended to disseminate the findings of the studies carried out under the Socio-economics Sub-component of LVEMP to a wide spectrum of users, including policy makers, stakeholders and researchers.

Resource productivity and economic performance of producing fish seeds in government and private fanns in Bangladesh

The effect of various factors on spawn and fingerlings production in government and private farms was measured in this study. Primary data were collected from 45 private and 11 government farms from 9 selected districts covering major fish seed producing areas of Bangladesh. Results from Cobb-Douglas production function analysis indicated that the included variables had some positive impacts on returns from spawn and fingerlings. No input was found to be over used and increasing returns to scale was observed. Tabular analysis indicated that higher amount of input use produced higher level of yield, gross return and net return. The government farms were under utilized. For increased supply of fish seeds in the country more amount of specified inputs (feed and fertilizer) should be used for producing spawn and fingerlings especially in government farms.